During the early days of LinkedIn, when the company was only 10 or 20 people, people would leave work at 5pm. Start ups don't have to be this arbitrary 24/7 grind.
You know how LinkedIn worked in that manner? They focused on work COMPLETELY for those 8 hours and were able to get shit done.
I'm sure you'd agree that they've built a very successful company.
If the guy did try to contribute to work during his paternity leave, I'd respect that. But he didn't. He just kicked back and read "Lean In" in his spare time. His coworkers probably didn't even have the luxury of having enough spare time to read that book.
You honestly think employees at a company that offers 4 months paternity leave don't have enough free time to read a single book? I am struggling to understand if you're trolling, or really don't understand long term productivity and business as much as it seems...
I have two immediate thoughts. Forming a company and then taking time off of work to raise a child for 4 month is indicative of non-ideal planning, more than anything. That said, in this case the gentleman in question is an employee of an established company, not the cofounder to a startup.
Additionally, leaving work at 5pm every day sounds great and, I suspect, may actually result in a more productive work week with happier employees. All parties win in such instances.
And you've never been a co-founder of any real startup, have you? I mean, I can't imagine anyone who has raised money and hired people and had gone that route to really pose this type of question, especially in this context.
You should take a step back, leave the office, and think about why so many people are telling you that you are flat out wrong.
That you had 9 months notice and you're only telling me now? ;)
Seriously: I've met a minuscule number of people that can produce genuinely useful stuff when really working more than 8 hours in a stretch. I've met several orders of magnitude more people who think they can. I'm happy existing outside of both groups, and working with similar modest souls.
Also: I'd suggest getting up earlier and finishing at 4.
I had at least 3 'postgres can do that?!' quickly followed by 'and I can do it with Django!?' when reading that. Brilliantly informative. Worth it just for the filtering on hstores - thank you!
My Yorkshire village has a playground. They installed CCTV last month. More people complain about the main road changing from a 40mph to 30mph. I don't care if the 'they' is government or centralised or whatever. The numbness to surveillance unsettles me greatly.
They're almost certainly recording to a VHS tape, which cycles every couple of days.
IF some crime or vandalism happens on the playground, they will then grab the tapes, and check them. The chances of a conviction will be far higher with video evidence.
It's not "numbness to surveillance", because it's not really surveillance.
If you want to be free to take videos and photos of random places/things without being arrested, you should also allow that same freedom to owners of property who want to reduce crime.
I think an important realization is that the public is not generally okay with CCTV installations when they find out they are the recycling VHS type. They are okay with them by default, and don't even bother asking.
I suspect that if you stop random people on the street, point to a camera, and ask them "What kind of camera is that?" the most common response will be along the lines of "I don't know, who cares?" These would presumably be the same people who don't pay CCTV cameras any mind in their day to day lives.
It is not that people don't mind because they are recycling VHS cameras placed by private citizens, but rather that they just don't care regardless. The fact that there is a widespread myth that all the cameras are government installed and networked actually drives home this point. People incorrectly think this and they still don't really care.
That's right. Because the number of instances of "My life was ruined by the state who monitored my every move", or "My love life was ruined when my wife was able to bribe the CCTV operator to find out about my affair"... they don't happen do they.
If CCTV was a problem for people, we'd hear about it. But it's not, so we don't.
The fact I visited a certain shop is on record for 2 days on a crappy VHS tape.... why do I care?
Some tourist probably also took my photograph, but I'm not going to stress about that either.
Nobody, as I read it, is suggesting that the current CCTV installations, or even the imagined CCTV installations, present a threat themselves.
The damage being done, in my opinion, is a shifting of the Overton window. It changes our perception of normal so that other hypothetical, actually dangerous or sinister, developments will not seem as unusual or outside the norm.
There is not a massive tracking network of CCTV cameras today, but people seem to have the idea that such a thing exists.. and they don't care. Give it a few more years and you could probably actually install such a system and the only people who said anything would be considered weirdos for caring, just like you find it weird that people are bothered by the current system.
I should emphasis that I do not think the UK is going to turn into East Germany in any foreseeable future.
As I say, we've had widespread CCTV in shops in the UK since the 80s. In the last 30 years nothing has particularly changed.
I take your point, in theory an evil genius prime minister could install some mass surveillance system. But what the hell would be the point? And the chance of him not getting found out and called out by the media is negligable. Add to that the utter incompetence of government to do anything IT related, and I think we're pretty safe.
Your point is not academic... there is this new thing called WalMart, er, Asda. Ever hear about it? Cheap stuff for people with bad taste. Oh, and with a side of live-video-surveillance-with-active-facial-recognition feeding a worldwide db which has implicit (subpoena or court order... or not in cases of foreign nationals) access by the NSA / FBI / CIA. Um, and people are cool with it why? Because its all on VHS and has been going on since the 80's. I believe that is what you were saying...
> They are okay with them by default, and don't even bother asking.
I think it's even stronger.
I for one am not ok with lack of CCTV installations as in:
"They (stole my bike/slashed my tires/robbed my office) and (there was not a single camera to record this/image from only available camera was so crappy that it doesn't help)."
Coincidence, but I was from Yorkshire and the village I grew up in put a CCTV camera on the community hall to view the playground as it had gotten to the point that a couple days couldn't go by without someone finding a dirty needle. Once that camera went up, the junkies didn't go there anymore.
A camera is far more cost effective to the parish council than sending someone to search for health hazards every morning.
Looks great! I'd been bemoaning the lack of local sweet shops with family over the weekend and then clicked through to find you're only a few miles away! (I'm in North Leeds)
A couple of thoughts on the site:
- I'd rather see how many pink shrimps, or fried eggs I'm getting, rather than '20g'. Even if it's just approximate.
- A more 'see through' bag would be good. I realise I could click to see the contents, but I kept getting carried away and adding too much.
- The £2.50 delivery was initially off putting, and then I realised you do local for £1 and larger orders for free.
I think having good HTML/JS/CSS support is a general trait of all of the JetBrains IDEs, in case you are curious if the one for your language has it too.
Indeed! It was a pleasant surprise, to me at least. I didn't immediately associate a Py IDE with JS dev (I'm a relative late comer to Django and still don't instinctively connect Python to webdev), but since they're my two languages of choice right now, it's ideal.
(and the sass syntax highlighting was also a 'ooh!', as was the automagical git support, as was JetBrains' helpful personal email reply to my filled in questionnaire, as was... well, you get the idea. I'm a happy customer!)
How about Knockout? So it's not a 'full' RIA JS framework, but in my mind, that's no bad thing:
http://knockoutjs.com/
It feels like a nice fit to MVC/MS stuff (there's certainly plenty of examples of this, and Steve Sanderson now works for MS). And it's easy to bind whatever UI you want to your view models.
Personally I now use KO for even the smallest of JS/HTML 'apps'. It's lovely :)
I still get milk and eggs (and sometimes some pretty bad knock-off Irn Bru) from ours. We're in the semi-countryside just outside of Leeds, and it's not at all unusual around here. Wonderful service!
