pythonistic

A very strong magnetic field has bad health (neurological and intracellular) consequences. I can't find a good citation, but this blog post should help explain the risks.

https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2015/01/12/how-strong...

Ignoring that the article ends with a sales pitch . . .

Caveat: I'm a Zappos.com employee and former IBMer and Amazonian.

The point of the Zappos model is to capture and grow ideas from anywhere inside the organization. As the story goes, in a traditional organization, if you have a great idea for a new product, expansion of business, or whatnot, your manager or his manager can kill the idea. In a self-organized company (like Valve or Zappos) you can sell other people on the idea, form a team, and build it. The top-level circle in a Holacracy is there to allocate budget to the team, at least long enough to determine if it provides value.

The year-over-year continued growth of Valve and Zappos show that this can work, but only when control is granted to every team, circle, and employee, and if there's a strong business model in place to afford to experiment.

I don't have numbers in my user or installation manuals, but the previous model year supposedly used 11.7 US gal per load, or under 4 per fill. Living in the desert, I feel good about my choice of washing machine ($22-29 monthly water bill).

Regardless, it's less than the top-load I replaced. Front-load washers are supposed to be more efficient and use less water.

I bought a Speed Queen front-loader a few months ago. Although I can't say anything about the longevity, I was very impressed with the quality of the machine, going so far as to take pictures of the underside of the drum, drain plug, electronics package, and braces when setting it up. It's heavier -- about 250 pounds -- and quieter than the top-loader I replaced.

I worry a little about the electronic control panel, the same one pictured in the review you linked, but I have hope it'll last more than a decade. The warranty is exemplary, even though I haven't had to use it yet so I can't attest to how well it's fulfilled. And it's made in Wisconsin: it's not just another rebranded Electrolux or Whirlpool.

At my company, everyone is required to work customer service. Over the holidays, everyone from the CEO down to the newest tech or marketing hire will do 10 hours of "Holiday Help" on the phones on our busiest days. And, as part of training, I spent over 20 hours on the phones as a customer service representative. My real job is a software architect.

With the focus on customer service, most of the team building and special events are oriented toward the people on the phones (and chat and email). Quality of life perks are available to everyone (free and discounted snacks, meals,and drinks, free downtown parking, 100% paid employee health and life insurance, etc.) and customer service representatives are hired with the intention of retaining them for years, with promotion and new role opportunities available. The goal of every customer contact is to resolve any problems and make them happy enough to buy from us again, even if we lose money on that individual sale, and regardless of the time it takes on the call. Metrics are based on customer happiness rather than contacts per hour.

Ex-IBMer here: until 2015, Macs weren't an option for people upgrading their PCs. They're deploying new Apples as laptops age out, and employees will then have a choice of a MacBook/MacBook Pro (depending on job role), a Lenovo laptop (configured for job role), or for the special snowflakes with sufficient budget, some custom configuration. BYOD is alive, well, and encouraged at IBM.

Most IBMers with Macs were using their personally owned hardware (as was the rare IBMer using a Microsoft Surface). Early adopters (before the end of 2014) were supported internally through the community, and starting in 2015 we were required to install a configuration program that would add an IBM app store and configure the machine so it complied with the internal security rules. Many of the day-to-day headaches on the Windows machines (e.g., printing) were eliminated with the IBM development Mac tools, but other things were impossible or required a VM to do, like using an IBM internal SOCKS proxy application to connect to customer sites.

IBM has a very active and dedicated Linux community as well. I can't speak to support numbers, but the tooling was more mature and more tools were available on the RHEL distribution.

If you're using a text editor, your IDE is likely the CLI.

The retention rate was widely discussed in the groups I was in. It was especially low in Retail Customer Experience (RCX).

In my teams, representing less than 20 people in total, firings were far more common that people leaving. Two business people (marketing focused) left, two developers transferred to other areas (early AWS), while four developers and one business person were fired over the four years (fulfilling the "making hard choices" performance review requirement).

They're up to 1.1 years now? Wow! They were at six months for developers for most of the time I was working there (2006-2010). At three years, I was in the top 25% of seniority ("old farts").

By comparison, Overstock.com averaged five years for developers between 2010-2013.

TekSystems gave me an exploding offer, probably to discourage me from looking into other opportunities. The employment agreement was so bad (and violated state labor laws) that I walked away from that one quickly. On the other hand, my next employer, where I'm starting late next month, wanted to give me all the time I needed to consider the position: it requires self-management (rather than s boss telling you what to do) and a 2000 mile relocation.

Exploding offers are a bad "job smell."

Stross is a well-known and popular science fiction author and former system administrator. Pundits and SF authors don't need to be accurate to project what may happen in the future (e.g., Clarke assumed we'd have manned communications space stations in geosynchronous orbit rather than automated robots).

IBM does six hours of meetings, two hours of CRUD, and then four more hours in the evening fixing a problem the offshore dev team delivered without testing.

I had to backport a fix for a similar vulnerability in a Seam installation three years ago. The solution at the time was to limit the directories and sources from which serialized object representations could be read.

I worked for a company (Overstock.com) that on more than one occasion, during company-wide townhalls, requested that employees use Glassdoor to review the company. The feedback was reviewed by senior management to look for places to improve.

I have a Lenovo T530 from work and personally owned 2013 Retina MacBook Pro. The things I don't like about the T530 are: * I miss keystrokes on the keyboard when typing and the quality is low. The laptop, cushioned in a bag, rolled from a chair onto the floor and the H key broke off: I superglued it back into place. * With my glasses prescription, the screen is difficult to read (chromatic abberation). A co-worker with the same model laptop experiences the same problem, and my manager also dislikes the screen on her T530. * Unlike ASUS and MSI laptops, there's no default keyboard option to disable the trackpad. I'll regularly and unexpectedly move the cursor or pointer when typing.

Otherwise, the hardware was well supported in Linux (RHEL 6.5, company standard, with NVidia drivers) and even with an older Linux, the battery life is reasonable. For software development I use an external 26" monitor and a mechnical keyboard to get around my gripes. I much prefer the keyboard and screen on my three year-old T420s, and do much of my daily non-development work and all my personal programming on the MacBook.