Ugh...

Fast & Furious did about as much to enhance the image of automotive culture in general as Sex Trek and Sex Trek II: The Search for Sperm did for the image of sci-fi-themed porno films.

Link plz...for science.

Are you that goddamn lazy?

To be perfectly clear, in case anyone here is too fucking stupid to infer this from context: THE FOLLOWING LINKS ARE EXTREMELY NWS, AND I HAVE OBSCURED THE URLS USING TINYURL BECAUSE EVEN THEY CONTAIN SHIT THAT WILL TRIGGER THE CONTENT FILTER OF WHATEVER CORPORATION'S TIME YOU ARE WASTING RIGHT NOW WHEN YOU SHOULD BE WORKING, AND ALSO PROBABLY GET US KICKED OFF OF ADSENSE.

Review and screenshots

T0rr3nt link

IMDB entry

IMDB entry 2

How in the world is this legal? Yes, it belongs in the other thread.

OHP Uses New Device To Seize Money During Traffic Stops - News9.com - Oklahoma City, OK - News, Weather, Video and Sports |

Yesterday while I was eating dinner with my family, 3 patrol cars pulled up in front of my house and stopped for 5 or 6 minutes. I had no reason to believe anyone in my house was in trouble -- I had a normal day at work, came home and was eating dinner with my wife and child, I hadn't even done any weird google searches.

And yet, I had a fleeting moment where I thought, "Well, shit. Braineack's going to be posting a story about this in his police thread in a couple weeks."

Joe P already posted it last week and our Gov has already signed an injunction against allowing them to continue it's use.

Yes, Joe. Yes he is.

No word yet on the offer...waiting sucks.

I did have an interesting conversation with my boss though -- a conversation I kind of knew was coming. He asked me to think about doing some contract work for them if/when I leave. They can hire employees but there are 3 or 4 systems that will either come to a crashing halt or will eat up so many hours of labor from people inexperienced with it that it would make more sense for them to pay me a consulting fee occasionally to keep things working. I'm completely open to this idea because I still like the company (and my boss), and I have a hard time passing up more money for something I know how to do.

So -- how do you calculate a consulting fee? I did my googling but I'm seeing a lot of "So you're an entrepreneur!" kind of articles, not actual practical advice about the calculation. A few questions that popped into my head:

* Do I start the calculation from the salary I was making when I left this company, or the salary I make at the new company? I know the new salary would be advantageous to me, but I'm not sure if it's relevant -- my current salary (plus a bit more, since they are offering me more to stay) is what I'm worth to my current company.

* How much of a buffer do I need to cover taxes? 30%? 40%?

* Is it worth registering a corporation? I know you can consult as an individual but what are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

* If you calculate a consulting fee based on normal full-time rate (whether that's the current company or new company), do you add any buffer for the loss of benefits? It seems a little petty, but then they were always proud to remind me of what my benefits cost and how it was part of my total compensation.

As I said, I still like this company, so I'm not looking to soak them for every penny. And realistically, the "negotiation" will probably come down to them offering a fee and me either agreeing or passing. But I'd at least like to know that I'm in the ballpark.

Thoughts?

Take whatever you are making now add 15-45% to get what you're actually costing the company (15% being a "no benefits" package, and 45% being a very comfortable benefits package), and then mulitply that number by 3-5 times.

Seriously.

You will only be "consulted with" on the systems that the company deems "most difficult to work with", therefore your average hour of work will be of far greater significance to them. You won't be asked to spend a % of your hours doing mundane crap work that an entry level can accomplish. If you set your consulting fees too low, then you will continue to be a bitch boy to them - possibly at a cost savings to them and a financial loss to you. If you agree on too high a fee, they'll still pay it; they'll simply put more effort into finding/training a suitable replacement in the meantime. Really the hourly fee should be "how much should i charge per hour to make me not want to go on a killing spree when I'm in the middle of hour 3 of fixing someone's virused-as-fuck-and-not-enough-ram computer?"

If you were making $50k/year before, than $100/hr for consulting is probably very reasonable.

$100/hour sounds low to me, but then I live in the bay area, so... :)

--Ian

Thanks, that's helpful.

I'm sitting in on the interviews for my (kind of) replacement. Just had a guy with a degree in Information Systems with an emphasis in Networking who couldn't explain what a subnet mask was. Didn't even try, just said, "I know it's normally 255 something."

:facepalm:

Was he not able to explain the concept of a subnet mask or was that just his straight answer?

Verbatim:

Interviewer -- How deep is your networking knowledge? For example, what is a subnet mask?

Interviewee -- Ah...I mean, I know it's normally 255.something but...I'm sorry...

Interviewer -- That's okay, I know I'm putting you on the spot. Can you explain what the subnet mask does?

Interviewee -- No, sorry, I'm just drawing a blank.

I mean I have seen people do worse. I honestly could not dive to deep into it right now myself, but that mostly because I have been away from the networking side of things for a good while now. We have an office IT guy that handles all the networking so I barely have to touch it. I spend most of my days buried in Linux CLI's and playing around with AWS.

Then again if I was going for a job interview it is one of the spots I would spend an hour reading up on to get all my knowledge back.

New kid, straight out of school? first interview? nervous as hell?

RE: Consulting rate...what everyone else said. what you were paid broken down to per hour, then like 8x that.

Nope, 40+ year old, worked 10+ years in ATT's DSL dept, went back to school after ATT merged his dept and eliminated his position.

What the hell is a subnet mask?

I mean, what were you reasonably expecting as an answer?

I would expect something super generic like "a subnet mask helps the TCP protocol determine if a host is on the local or a remote subnet" but no way would I expect anyone to sit down and start breaking out the binary.

Are you serious?



I had a similar encounter while interviewing people for a maintenance engineer position at the TV station. Kid is maybe 30, describes himself as computer-savy. This position involves being "the guy" who provides rapid-response support for the newscast outside of regular office hours, either from 3am - 11am, or from 3pm - 11pm. So he's gotta be pretty self-sufficient when it comes to problem-solving.

Asked the guy "So if you need to set a static IP address on a machine, how do you do that?"

Deer in headlights.

The correct answer is "what OS am I working with?", though I'd have accepted an explanation of how to do it in Windows, since that's >75% of the machines here. But not even having a clue...

We didn't hire him.

I would expect a guy with a degree in networking to be relatively familiar with the network ID, host ID, and how that's configured. It's not like we asked him to actually do any subnetting -- just say some words that indicate you are familiar with it.