My Anova convection oven and my HP inkjet (since recycled) both begged to connect to the Internet, and I firmly declined. I didn't want some nerd in Omaha or Beijing decide to brick my device because of some clever lucky magic rules that I didn't read in the 3 page User Agreement.

"But the app will let you know when the oven's ready to cook, or when the timer's done!" Yeah, that's not really a big deal for me. I do have other timers, like .. right there on my phone. And I have one on the stove and on the microwave. "But we can send you recipes!" Thanks, I have recipes.

Hard pass.

I believe this interpretation is correct (IANAL).

- Offer of $2,500
- Proposal of $50,000 (implies refusal of the $2,500 offer)
- Proposal acceptance

Sure, there are terms to be worked out, but the price has now been fixed, and there's a contract. This would be an interesting discussion to read about.

Our CEO made the announcement in about September 2020 -- "We're now a fully remote company."

No, it's not ideal, not having to deal with a pandemic would be ideal, but failing that, I don't miss the 90 minutes of commuting I'm no longer doing daily, and I also don't mind being able to make my own lunch instead of paying for lunch or bring some leftovers. Also, at 530pm, I can get up from my desk, go into the kitchen and immediately have a beer. It's OK.

I would enjoy meeting up perhaps every 2-4 weeks for half a day of meetings and/or demos, but apart from that, WFH is great. Strangely enough, a developer on another team missed going into the office so much that they left the company to work somewhere that they could actually go work in an office. I don't get it.

Our CEO announced six months into the pandemic that we were now fully remote. I'm OK with that .. although I wouldn't mind the occasional f2f meeting with the team, say once every 2-4 weeks. in Toronto, Canada.

I've been on the receiving end of resumes, and it surprised me that when we asked for developers with Pascal and C experience (because we used both in our codebase), I still received resumes missing one of the languages. No it's not a deal breaker, but there were enough applicants who had both languages that it meant we could filter out 75% of the applicants. There was also someone who was a greeter at a restaurant, with their Grade 10 in Piano. Impressive, but not *really* applicable to a software development job.

I get backend jobs recommended to me (that's nice), but then discover they're looking for Python, cool cool, but did you miss the part of my background where I talk about having twenty years of Perl experience, and no Python? Sure, I could learn the language, but that's not really the point of this exercise. Networking is still your friend if you're looking for a job .. bypass all of the hilarious HR filters and get directly to the job that you want.

This. Call her in to a meeting at 2pm (say), and as the meeting starts, have IT revoke her access at that time. By 230pm she's been terminated, and all of her credentials (badge, VPN, E-Mail) should be deactivated.

A Credit Union should be big enough that this kind of procedure is a no-brainer.

This. Is the whole bizarre process worth the cost of firing someone, and then finding, vetting, hiring and training someone new?

Sure, if the company's business shrinks by 50%, fine, but if this is an annual thing, just because some exec thought it was a cool idea, it's really, really short-sighted.

You also need to think about what it does for morale. A the toxic place I worked, people would just 'disappear' without any announcement. You'd go to talk to them, and their desk would be completely empty. "Where's Joe?" "He was let go a week ago." (Stunned silence.)

Yeah, thanks for that. I was the target of a Fire The Bottom 20% strategy after getting bonuses for great work the two previous years.

Trust me, people know who the duds are in an organization, and I was not a dud. I was buoyed by the fact that when my termination became known, there were quite a few people who got in touch to ask, "What happened?" Stacked Ranking is what happened.

Rankings are subjective anyway -- a skip-level takes a dislike to you, your ranking dips down, and three months later, you're gone. Then HR is surprised that it's so hard to hire .. really, genius? Really?

In my team, they had someone lined up for my spot .. then a month later my Team Lead quit, and month later another guy left .. and suddenly they were down to two experienced people on the team, and they were frantically trying to hang on to the last guy.

Well, I'm just happy I'm not there anymore -- it quickly went from a fun place to work to a very toxic workplace.

I set up an NFS server running OpenSolaris with a RAID-1 setup (two identical 300G drives -- about ten years ago), and it worked beautifully. It worked so well that it wasn't until about six months after one of the drives died that I happened to check the system's health, and discovered that the files I'd been casually been copying over were now saved on just a single drive. I just preferred the software solution because it was simpler to set up. I imagine a hardware solution might require a software cost, perhaps some sort of software subscription -- I'm not really sure.

I also didn't explore expanding my setup any further -- it was really just a technology experiment for a couple of hundred dollars, but if you're considering expanding it, that would be something to look into for both software and hardware solutions. Good luck!