OT: Neutering pets

[rbowman]

Schadenfreude.

[Commander Kinsey]

Commute.

[Commander Kinsey]

Which almost everyone has.

[rbowman]

A cousin who worked in the heart of Manhattan chose to live in southern New Jersey where his kids could have a normal life. He commuted -- two or three hours a day on a bus.

[Ed Pawlowski]

There are a lot of commuters from Philadelphia too. Most take the train. Often the incentive is 2X to 3X the salary compared to local.

At one time, there was a sea plane that took off from the Delaware River in Philly to the Hudson in NYC.

[Tekkie©]

On Wed, 21 Jul 2021 22:27:18 -0400, Ed Pawlowski posted for all of us to digest...

NE PA is ripe with NY people, especially the Poconos.

[Commander Kinsey]

This is the 21st century, I would never commute in anything but a car.

[rbowman]

Obviously you've never driven in New York City. In truth the driving isn't that bad. Parking, if you happen to want to get out of the car, is something else again. Anywhere from $4 to $7.50 an hour if you can find a spot, or $500+ monthly in a private lot.

[Ed Pawlowski]

You can always buy a spot How much does it cost to buy a parking spot in NYC? Indoors in places like Williamsburg will be, on average, $80,000. Spots in brownstone Brooklyn will be, on average, about $100,000, and in Manhattan you can see prices as high as $200,000." The rates can be even higher for new developments downtown.

What is the most expensive parking spot in NYC? Now, it may also have what might be the world's priciest place to park your car. A single, 134.5 square foot parking spot at a 73-storey office tower in the glitzy financial district has sold for $969,000, according to local media reports. That works out to just over $7,200 per square foot.

[rbowman]

I worked for a company on Memorial Drive in Cambridge MA. When I was getting restless we had the 'what will it take to get you to stay?' talk. My answer was a keycard for the underground parking lot. The company had an outside parking area down the street where I'd leave the car during the week but when you drive a Firebird in Boston it's always a pleasant surprise when you go back and the car is still there.

I stayed for another project before leaving. Between the parking space and a new project I was content for another year.

That also illustrates the disconnect between HR and technical people. HR thinks in terms of raises, nerds think in terms of challenges.

[Tekkie©]

On Sat, 24 Jul 2021 11:26:27 -0600, rbowman posted for all of us to digest...

It's a challenge to get a raise!

[NY]

I've always worked for companies that had an fairly private car park that is probably patrolled by security guards or CCTV.

However one company decided to use the large aircraft-hanger size computer hall (largely empty once they got rid of mainframe computers) to stage a computer "fair". They asked for volunteers to park off-site fr a couple of weeks, in another car-park about 15 minutes' walk away, to leave space for the visitors' cars. Anyone who did this would have their names entered in a raffle to win a bottle of champagne. It was highly suspicious that all the people who won the bottles of bubbly worked in finance, HR or one of the other ancillary departments, and that none of the software developers or testers (who were by far the majority) won a bottle. I suspect a fix :-)

I've never had the luxury of a 'what will it take to get you to stay?' response from HR. I've only left one company out of choice, and they were in dire financial straits after merging with a US company which it was later discovered had severe financial irregularities for which my company had to carry the can; I believe the MD of the US company disappeared and has never been seen again. The other two times I left a company it was through redundancy on both occasions - one time whole departments were "disposed of" which is tough but not personal; the other time they chose isolated people from all departments, so it was a case of everyone waiting at home to see if they got a "congratulations, you have been specially selected for our big prize - redundancy" phone call. I remember that the understanding was that you waited at home until 8:30 and then assumed you were safe and set off for work; my phone call came though at 8:29:30, so I thought I was safe...

[invalid unparseable]

Tekkie© [e-mail] wrote

Only for useless bums like you.

[Ralph Mowery]

I would probably have worked for a longer period of time if I could have just worked on what I wanted to. There was one aspect of the job that I purely hated. It was not like that for the first 15 years. Due to the reduction in manning we had to work in areas other than the ones I liked for 6 months out of every few years and my next term was comming up.

[NY]

There is also the other difference: techies get job satisfaction out of an interesting technical challenge with furthers their or the department's knowledge, irrespective of whether it will profit the company; non-techies get job satisfaction of doing something which will make or save money for the company. Techies bore the pants off everyone with technical jargon appropriate to their area of expertise; HR, finance etc bore the pants off everyone with management jargon: blue-sky thinking, thinking out of the box, op-ex and rat-ex, leveraging (always pronounced the American way "levveraging" even by British people who would say "leeveraging" in any other context) and other such meaningless bullshit.

[Ralph Mowery]

Where I worked one year there was a big purge of supervisors. They were told if they were still there at quiting time, they would have a job. One said that he hid so they could not find him.

[rbowman]

I'm getting old and slow so I've been with the same company for over 20 years. When I was younger I was always looking for new horizons. The second company I worked for did go t*ts up after the oil embargo but several of us formed a new company and took off in a new direction.

I guess that was technically the third company. I'd worked a month for the Penn Central as it was spiraling down the toilet. If you cashed your check at your bank you had to have the funds to cover it in case it bounced.

[rbowman]

I'm fortunate to be left to pursue my own projects. Some of them are actual contract items others are skunk works. More than once I've responded to the question 'how long would it take to do ...' with 'I did that last year. I just need to tweak it a little'

[Commander Kinsey]

There are countless TV shows and Youtube channels based on this.

[Commander Kinsey]

If I can't get there in a car I don't go there. I will not f*ck about trying to work out which train and bus to get where, when to be there, and sit around for hours because there wasn't one when I needed it.