the "no good Perl jobs"/"no good Perl programmers" myth

[Uri Guttman]

>>>>> "NC" == Nicholas Clark <nick at ccl4.org> writes:

  NC> On Sun, Aug 06, 2006 at 02:24:02PM +0100, Dirk Koopman wrote:
  >> And then there are the hours...
  >> 
  >> At some point, I suspect, someone will sue one of the banks for breaking
  >> the EU working time directives - something rather more obviously
  >> demonstrable than the "bullying" and "harassment" alleged by that lady
  >> that won £800,000 damages the other day.

  NC> I doubt this is possible if the staff have opted out of the directive.
  NC> And while you can opt back in to it, that might have the side effect that
  NC> you don't perform as well as your colleagues who did not, so might hamper
  NC> your prospects.

  NC> Given the stakes involved, I'm told that banks are very very
  NC> careful not to be discriminatory. Yes, they make mistakes - there
  NC> are humans involved, after all. I suspect that their mistakes gain
  NC> far more publicity partly because of the figures involved (more
  NC> press-worthy) and partly because the sums involved make lawyers
  NC> more interested to take them up.

of course it helps if you are contracting and paid by the hour. US
startups are notorious for expecting 80 hour weeks even from regular
employees (not just founders). i was in one 15 years ago (as third
founder) where the prez (sales type, non-tech) required us to work
saturdays for a year. the software dev team of 3 (which i led) came in
but we didn't do anything. sometimes some beer would show up too. of
course the prez never came in saturdays. we weren't even behind any sort
of schedule or anything. in fact we went live with the service a year
later due to politics and stuff like that and never due to technical
delays. but he was a jerk and a lousy prez and we failed due to him
rather than any technical stuff.

but i do object to salaried employees being forced/coerced to work long
hours with no extra benefits (comp/vacation/over time). the gaming
industry is extremely bad about that since they are very market and
schedule driven and seem to burn out coders as fast as they can hire
them. plenty of horror stories in that field on the web.

uri

-- 
Uri Guttman  ------  uri at stemsystems.com  -------- http://www.stemsystems.com
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