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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 18th, 2023

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  • Every year, we do an employee survey to see how management is doing; like a report card for management. In the last 3 years, mine has come back with the highest company scores for employee engagement, job satisfaction, and project completion rate. I was asked to give a presentation to the other officers and managers about things I do to get those scores.

    The presentation was basically one slide that I expanded to 10. It came down to creating the expectation, for the folks who report to me, that a work week is 37.5 hours (our full-time week) and no more. I make it clear that if my team is working overtime, I’ve failed. If that happens, together we look at their project commitments and reduce the workload, or get training, or whatever is needed.

    Working folks to the point of burnout is NEVER a valid solution. Respecting personal time pays dividends to everyone. It’s amazing how treating people like adults makes them happier and more productive. It’s such a low bar and yet seems so foreign to people.

    After my presentation, multiple execs argued thar I’d get more done if I pushed my team harder. Our company President pulled up all of our project completion rates, and asked them to explain the discrepancy. The three who complained the most about my approach were in the bottom five.

    Data continually shows people are happy when they have a solid, predictable, work life balance. Happy people are more productive and are willing to do more in the long run. And they stick around, so you don’t have to keep looking for new employees. Everyone wins. Yet, there is such a resistance to it by certain people, and I don’t understand why.

    Tldr: Expecting your people to give up their personal life for work, it’s a clear sign that you are a terrible leader.





  • “Without sacraficing university values,” implies the university values never included integrity, morality, or common fucking sense. Brown keeps their academic independence… as long as they do what they are told.

    And this is how rights are stripped away. One at a time. This time, it’s about archaic definitions of “male” and “female.” What’s next? Sexuality, right? No gays allowed, or you’ll lose funding. Followed by people of color? Then women? It will be one concession after another. And Brown just said, they are not only fine with it, they’ll pay $50m for the privilege.

    Doesn’t sound like a school that has their students in mind.



  • I’d fit in this category. I’m a company executive and I have a voice that carries. I tend to be the quiet person in the room until I need to speak up. When I do, a mix of my position, and the whole quiet-person-speaking-forcefully thing tends to make others listen.

    In general, I don’t mind being in front of a room, giving a presentation to 2000 strangers. The faces blur together and it’s like being alone. Because I’m willing to do this, many people think I’m an extrovert. On the other hand, I don’t like being in a room with 4 strangers. I can do it, and I’ll interact with everyone, but it is freaking exhausting.

    Anytime I’m with people for a decent length of time, I need time alone to recover. A large part of my job is managing or dealing with people for one thing or another. It’s become a habit that when I get home from work, my family leaves me alone for an hour so that I can decompress and recharge.


  • My guess, and it is just a guess… it’s a storm water control system being used as a basement drain, possibly flowing into the sewer line.

    I’ve seen older houses where someone cut into the basmeny floor directly into a sewer line to put in a basement drain.

    Based on you saying water was in there when it was raining, someone might have cut into the storm water mitigation line for a basement drain. Then someone tiled the floor and put a vent over the hole because that’s what they found that fits.

    With older houses, a lot of times, the storm water system was tied directly into the main sewer. If that’s what this is, I’d be concerned about sewer gasses coming up from it.

    Again, with only seeing one picture, it’s just a guess.

    Edit: It could also just be a cleanout for the storm water drain too.






  • Ran into a couple small bugs on xbox.

    When making a potion the game crashed. After repeating it multiple times, I figured out that it only happened when mixing a stolen and non stollen ingredient. I have not retested since the last update.

    Prior to the update, I could not create an enchanted item with a static effect at frostcrag spire. For example, a ring with nighteye. I could create one with detect life because it was a magnitude selector. This bug went away after the update.


  • “The government” is multiple agencies and departments. There is no single computer system, database, mainframe, or file store that the entire US goverment uses. There is no standard programming language used. There is no standard server configuration. Each agency is different. Each software project is different.

    When someone says the government doesn’t use sql, they don’t know what they are talking about. It could be refering to the fact that many government systems are ancient mainframe applications that store everything in vsam. But it is patently false that the government doesn’t use sql. I’ve been on a number of government contracts over the years, spanning multiple agencies. MsSQL was used in all but one.

    Furthermore, some people share SSNs, they are not unique. It’s a common misconception that they are, but anyone working on a government software learns this pretty quickly. The fact that it seems to be a big shock goes to show that he doesn’t know what he is doing and neither do the people reporting to him.

    Not only is he failing to understand the technology, he is failing to understand the underlying data he is looking at.