They drop the check out of courtesy.
On occasion—if I've been in a hurry, for example—I've gotten my card out once done eating and had it ready to hand to the server when they bring the check.
543 karma · joined December 16, 2014
On occasion—if I've been in a hurry, for example—I've gotten my card out once done eating and had it ready to hand to the server when they bring the check.
Which either demonstrates everything that is right or everything that is wrong with the world's leading free-market capitalist economy...
Assuming you were living in an ostensibly "first world" society, I'd guess most people are unsettled by the sense that your experience was both sadly typical and economically inexcusable, which is the likely context for many criticisms of the article's subject.
However, I've also been to some that are run quite well, with clear & focused topics, and where I have learned something practical or gained insight into a particular subject from a speaker's unique perspective/experience.
And, yes, many of these events have a strong element of networking which is clearly helpful given the job offerings and job seekers routinely in attendance. Though I've no first-hand experience in the matter, seems like a good starting point for a match between people who are being proactive in their professional development and employers who value that.
"Some common characteristics of programming meet-ups" really should be restated as "Reasons I stopped going to programming meet-ups". These would be an excellent checklist for perhaps starting one that addresses these issues since there are many who would agree and appreciate if someone (else) did it right. You don't even need to be the permanent organizer, just an initial facilitator or catalyst to get one off the ground.
Just thinking about the psychology of it... the manipulative nature of it all: haggling for your income; the hidden inequality between coworkers of roughly equivalent skillsets and effectiveness; the idea that you & your potential employer are going to start your professional relationship in such a way.
Sadly, it's far too similar an experience to traditional (American) car buying, another demoralizing dinosaur of a process whose extinction is long overdue.
1) The most zealous and persistent phishing awareness campaigns/training I've encountered has been at large corporations. I can imagine a series of articles, if not an entire career, that is based on exploring the psychology of employees in varying organization sizes being influenced by their perceptions of the stake they feel they hold in the performance of the organization (i.e., their "ownership") and how much their actions, positive and negative, might bear notable influence.
Not confident I made my point clear, but the idea being I'm going to think differently about jumping up and down on a cruise ship vs. a row boat...
2) Putting aside the questionable application of it in this specific case, "cybercriminal" is an outmoded term that I believe actually undermines the mundane and routine nature of these crimes. Regardless of magnitude, it imbues the perpetrator and their activities with some 90s-era aura of mystery and preternatural skill—an exceptional event executed by exceptional individuals under exceptional circumstances.
The contrast against much of the writing found online in the past few years is striking—and refreshing.
A better, if flawed, comparison to Lily might be the Apple I: entering an established, growing market with a product which lowers the threshold for adoption in very specific ways. (I'll defer to more informed, educated, and insightful individuals to carry this comparative analysis any further...)
I'm not suggesting this is the sole root of the problem, just that it could be a factor when you have a city flush with a demographic that is probably the least likely, after teenagers, to want to stand out for the "wrong" reasons. Who wants to be "those people" at the trendy restaurant?
That certainly dampened my enthusiasm when I realized it had long since become more like commercial real estate investment than the American West land rush.
Similarly illuminating was working at a regional bank and learning how much of their growth was based on investing in a patch of dirt as it was in the operation of the branch location that sat on that dirt.
Made me realize how uninformed I was about business in general.
Personally, I have zero degrees and no formal education in ANYTHING, not to mention a general distaste for traditional classroom training in general, yet starting with a graphic design job that fell in my lap in 1998 (it's who you know...), I've simply developed my skills "organically" (?) and parlayed each position into the next, having worked as a web developer (at loosely-run non-profits and for very traditionally-structured government contractors), UX architect (at a very well-known company/domain name provider), UI developer (financial institution), and now as software engineer building web apps for a very narrow vertical market.
While my first "real" office job was Southern California (in an inland bedroom community 1 hour north of San Diego), the bulk of my career has spanned 2 geographic areas: Phoenix and Denver (mostly the suburbs, at that.) Relocating to both did entail factoring in the availability of relevant jobs but was more about what I wanted for my life at the time the decision was made.
It's highly unlikely I'd ever be a strong candidate for a Silicon Valley-type company or a startup, which is fine wth me since I'm a work-to-live type temperament and have never been the "work hard, play hard" type. But I also have a seemingly natural desire to be a good employee & coworker and like to be proud of the quality of work I do. Some of that might be a result of the "leadership development" that was unofficially required in my first job.
The foundations for my career are only based in teenage dabbling in software (coding BASIC on a TRS-80 in the early 90s, reverse engineering the HTML in webpages to build my own in the mid-90s) and a general technical bent overlaid with creative tendencies. Having a nearly insatiable thirst for knowledge probably helps too...
But as a 2 year old article on this very topic put it: "The decision shows that communities ultimately are the property of the companies that run them, not the members who supply their content." - 'Panoramio founders try persuading Google not to kill site', CNET, 24 Sep 2014 (https://www.cnet.com/news/panoramio-founders-try-persuading-...)
However, given enough time, any indefinitely scheduled meeting* too often tends to resort to filler when there is nothing to report, since anyone who's job routinely involves setting up meetings probably has some metric attached to such activities, whether explicitly or implied (this typically being a people-herding/middle management/non-production role.) The result being the value proposition of such a meeting plummets and even when the meetings would be necessary, the attendees have already disengaged due to prior experience.
*exclusions might be short, focused events with a well-defined goal inside a specific context such as Agile-style daily standup which incorporate reporting, course-correction, and ad-hoc resource management in a very brief timeframe (<15 minutes)
It featured prominently at the beginning of the video stream.
I suppose it should not be entirely a surprise for a half billion user, Facebook-owned service to take the throw-feature-at-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks approach.
Regardless, it appears to be unobtrusive (though it seems odd to bury ephemeral content creation/consumption...)
One of the products I was assigned was the interface for customers to configure those sites that are intended to monetize a domain with filler content meant to fool a visitor just enough to milk them for a few cents with seemingly legitimate articles/posts and an e-commerce feature that was essentially a storefront built entirely from affiliate links.
Unlike the individual in the story, it was immediately clear what my task was: make spamming the Internet as user-friendly as possible. Unfortunately there was no mental gymnastics I could do to reconcile that.
Especially since the second product I had was domain auctions, which alone is nothing more than virtual real estate, but together with the first product is the makings of a thinly-veiled means to skim money off the top of online purchases made by ignorant users AND to fool people into believing they could profit from otherwise idle domains (by first paying the company for the monetizing product first, of course.)
And a tiny fraction of our customers did make a good income with those 2 offerings but the significant majority would never net a dime.
Aside from the pay and perks, the only professional payoff was also having the company's support site in my charge. I was proud of the work I did on that and it was a feature of my portfolio. But it wasn't enough and I was too disillusioned and discouraged overall by the day to day work. It wasn't long before I let it get to me, my performance began to suffer, and I needed to get out of there. (Admittedly, the nature of the job wasn't well-suited to my strengths either so it was probably fortunate I lasted as long as I did...)
I was able to cash in quite nicely on the experience gained there with a good offer on an out-of-state position with a generous relocation package. So, no, it wasn't all bad and, like the person in the story, the coworkers were largely really great (some going to work for large, well-known tech companies) and though I value the experience overall, it revealed just how much money can be made if you're willing to profit from people's ignorance and greed, just by framing your product or service in a particular way.
The issue in both cases is, understandably, labor costs. But couldn't the data be interpreted as indicating that labor cost savings are realized by lowering quality of care?
I mean employee health and well-being may not be the concern of the organization but clearly they could be connected directly to the bottom line. Burning through employees entails not-insignificant costs even in industries composed primarily of un-/low-skilled labor, does it not?
For context, I drive an old Jeep that has various modifications (AKA lifted, with various accommodations due to that fact) and I've given little thought to any legal ramifications. That said, I do live in state (Colorado) that, legally, has little to nothing to say regarding such modifications, or only addresses them broadly. In contrast, Utah has a number of very specific regulations on such modifications.
Just the lazy way.