I don't know Java either, but I think your statement is approximately right. I find it shocking that I couldn't find any before / after Java code during my quick search.

I'm sorry, did you say you are entirely used to car / cdr. What about caddaddaaar?

I still don't understand why they can't pay it up in cash and tell the accountant. Basically, I send and email and they say "I'll talk to X" and then I wait some more. Even if they are being 100% honest, this isn't a good situation to put a new employee in.

I'm touching up my resume. I guess I can put this place down as an internship, but it feels a bit silly to do so. I'm leaning heavily against going back to work with them. If I don't have something in my hands by Friday, it really is game over.

This isn't realistic. The reality is that there are controls for the money that any company is going to have to follow for a bunch of different reasons. Just one of which is that if you get paid in cash there's no way to verify that you were actually paid.

I was in this position once and I ended up just sending an email that said I needed the money and that if I wasn't paid in one week I was going to stop working for them and start looking for other positions in order to support myself. I was pretty positive about it and I said that after I stopped working for them I would be happy to come back to work for them if I was still available and they paid me in full.

It's a bit of a tough balancing act. You absolutely need to protect yourself (and that should be your first priority) but you also don't want to appear too difficult and poison your future working relationship if this just is an exceptional payment glitch.

If you're using a laptop or other portable equipment I'd keep it until you get paid. I wouldn't take something like a desktop. Taking portable stuff home can be defended as you just assuming they were going to get the payments figured out and so you were continuing on as usual.

If you're thinking about legal proceedings down the road (who knows if its worth it) I wouldn't mention it until much later if they still haven't paid you in 3 or 4 weeks.

I'm a pretty reasonable person in real life. Unfortunately, I am living in Los Angeles, where non-payment is a serious issue. I'm not lying when I say that every person I've known out here has had employers skip out on their pay. It also doesn't help that I am working for an industry that is especially notorious for non-payment. Not programming, but the specific industry I'm working in. The most notorious is restaurants, but I'm not working in restaurants.

Things that I've personally experienced include bounced checks, stop-payments on checks, flat-out refusal to pay, and under-payment. In fact, my last job bounced two checks. The "job" I had before that under-paid on the bs grounds of under-performance and some accusation about me being dishonest. The ultimate lesson is that once a check is in hand, bee-line to the issuing bank and cash that check ASAP, lest you want to get burned.

So, I am working in a city where burning on pay seems to be common practice, for an industry that is more shady than the average, for a company that, by all appearances, doesn't even exist yet. I was supposed to sign an NDA, but that simple sheet of paper has not been handed to me yet. I was supposed to sign the employment forms, but nada on that as well.

Of course they can pay in cash, or at least a personal / company check. There is nothing that stops them from having me sign a sheet of paper, which seems to be de rigour out here and apparently legally binding in CA (this certainly doesn't stop the IRS from finding out about the payment). Hell, I'll even finger-print it if they need that.

Despite learning extra precautions over the years and building up excessive paranoia, I still find that no matter how sophisticated I become in protecting myself, someone out there will figure out a more sophisticated angle. I don't think that accepting late payment and then continuing to work for this company is a good protection strategy for me. It's not like the backing company doesn't exist yet, and vacation + new bank = late payment appears all too convenient.

Even the despite the facts above, I still come here seeking advice on how to deal with start ups because I am willing to suspend my belief just enough to figure out if this is a common practice in the ecosystem. While I am willing to accept some late payment, I'm not willing to offer my services back to them if they are too late in paying me and I feel there is no good reason to give them a warning. That is equivalent to painting "Sucker" on my face, and I don't think any reasonable prospective employer would think I'm an idiot for this.

For the cash stuff, all I can say is that I would never do it with my company. And if I were an investor and saw cash payments had been allowed I'd be a little worried about investing.

As for the other stuff, my point was more about how valuable the experience has been for you. **** does happen. There are sometimes snags. If you've been enjoying the experience and finding it valuable its just a judgement call on your part for what you're getting out of it against the risk you'll get stiffed in the future. And if you think you might want to keep working with them there's no need to unnecessarily burn bridges with the way you stop working until you're paid.

I'm sure investers would prefer to see a non payment complaint filed with the state. Not saying that is my immediate plan, but some employees may well do that. As far as I am concerned, a company obligated to pay its employees. Besides, you seem to dismiss the fact that some companies prefer to work under 1099s, which I may very well be.

As for risk, the risk is not eating, paying rent, or even having transportation to get to work. It doesn't matter what the intangible value is. I don't accept that there are zero opportunities left.

daveT - you seem upset enough about this that I don't think you're actually getting what I'm saying. So cool.

Honestly, given how upset you seem I'm not even sure why you're still there now.

I wouldn't casually mention/threaten legal proceedings. If you want to get legal, get a lawyer to write a letter to them along those lines.

Cash payment > late payment if I'm an investor. If you can't even pay your employees you pretty much suck at running a company which is not where I'd want my money invested. If you think it's ok to skip a couple of days and "what's the big fuzz" you'll also take liberties with customer satisfaction, product releases and the like.

If however you see that for some reason you can't pay on time and instead find another way i.e. cash payment that shows that you care and that you're also likely to go the extra mile for customers.

imo

I look at it from the point of view of "what if I were a customer".

If I were a customer and some guys said they were going to do work but they didn't do it until 3 weeks after they said and during those 3 weeks my life was on hold I would be pretty mad and would never do business with them again.

You're kind of a customer to your boss. I wouldn't insta quit but it's not even close to reasonable behavior to be paid potentially a month or more later than when they said.

I'm not threatening legal proceedings. Besides, in CA, you don't even need a lawyer to go through all that jazz. You can simply fill out a form online and the state lays the hammer + fines on the company for you. Sort of shows how common this problem is out here.

I wouldn't accept a wad of cash. I know three people who worked in this industry. The common reason for them all to quit was non-payment. Actually, two of them were paid, but the counterfeit money was so poorly made that the bills split in half across the seams.

I personally don't blame people for running straight to court for non-payment, and I think it is an incredibly stupid move on a company to take the risk of not paying their employees.

I put a lot of thought into this, and the more I think about it, the less I have faith that I will get paid any time soon. So far, nothing that was said was to be done has been done. I understand there are birthing pains, but that shouldn't be my problem. I didn't sign up to be a partner of the company and I'm not receiving equity or anything else. If they can't or won't pay, they are free to put up an ad for a free intern. I don't buy into the "I'll quit until you have money" game. That is utter bunk, and it accomplishes nothing but show them they are more than welcome to step on you when it is convenient to do so, and yes, they will step on you again. At least, this is my experience and observation.

I don't have any of their equipment. A free laptop? Yeah right. I have nothing more than my word that I won't speak about the stuff that is implied by an invisible NDA, which I'll honor because I just so happen to be a nice person.

Perhaps in a week or two, I'll file a report.

You seem to be handling this pretty well actually. Let it rest for awhile to clear your head.

I've been working in IT since '99 and in Theater for 10 or so years before that and have never heard of someone getting stiffed on their pay. It's not that common.

Debian

As long as you don't piss off the lighting crew, you're in okay shape, I guess.

****

I've pretty much decided that this company isn't worth the risk. Every angle I view it, there is another red flag. There's some other possibly bad signs I didn't mention here. I'm trying to think of one single comfort point and I'm catching air. I can't afford to take a chance on this.

Meh I'd rather go with Ubuntu than with pure Debian. It's basically the mainstream so maximizes chances of matching the little keywords people love.
I'd say the best choices are Ubuntu or Fedora.

Either way, just check
http://distrowatch.com/

And pick one that seems cool.

You can use either as a pure desktop OS without the need to use the command line. Unless you have exotic hardware they work really well out of the box these days, too.

You'll start using the command line pretty soon anyways...don't worry

I'm suffering something driving me beserk on Windows at the moment. I ctrl+c and ctrl+v a lot during the day.

Sometimes it works fine, other times not. When it doesn't work it will either hang for 1/2 a second and paste nothing, or paste nothing instantly, or move the cursor down several lines randomly and paste nothing. Seems to be a problem common amongst lots of programs (rdp etc) and not just VS.

Windows 7, VS 2010. This small problem is driving me about as far as I can go with frustration! Anyone else suffer this? Anyone know if it can be fixed?

Ubuntu is obv fine for a complete noob but it comes with a ton of bloat ware and I'm not really a fan of unity. Debian is prob the most stable distro. I would not use another distro for a serious work/dev machine.

Dave,
From a learning/experience POV it doesn't matter all that much. Most Unix admins still use the command line and scripting to do any real work. Debian/Ubuntu use the same deb package management system, where as Fedora uses the red hat package system. But that is not a big difference and shouldn't sway your decision.

TheMetetrown is Dave, too?

I use Arch w/ LXDE desktop.

I tried Ubuntu and I can't say enough bad things about it. In summary, I was deeply offended by the Amazon Adware and I really don't like the package manager. I don't like having a bunch of pre-installed software, fonts, etc. I figured I would spend weeks to push Ubuntu to a place where I would enjoy using it. Gnome or whatever the default desktop was far too slow as well, so I uninstalled it and switched to LXDE, got irritated and deleted Ubuntu off the VM.

I also tried the Enlightenment desktop. I didn't like it too much either, but apparently many people love it to bits. To be fair, Enlightenment is a beautiful desktop to look at, but there were issues with it.

Arch has a reputation for being an "advanced" distro. I think this is an unfair description of the distro. It is pure awesome and, at least after the 3 hours* or so it takes to set up, very very easy to use.

*Ubuntu took 3 hours to install + extra time of data-throttling and eye-glazing slowness to uninstall Gnome, etc.

Installed Linux Mint 15 Cinnamon and can't really complain so far. Took some time to get a few things working the way I want, but at this point there is nothing I can do in Windows that I can't do in Linux. So much quicker than Windows 7 too.

Used the command line a little bit to get some things done. It's good to start getting familiar with the commands and how things work.

From a programming perspective, I assume I'm going to want to keep Windows around right? Or can I do pretty much everything from Linux?

The big issue with Mint according to some folks I trust is that upgrades between versions tend to break stuff. That info is a couple of month old now otherwise Mint would probably be my #1 choice.

But yeah I'll just stick with what I have Xubuntu because I can't really complain

re: Debian...for a dev machine I always need some uptodate stuff and both testing and unstable have caused me issues (stable is super out of date quickly) in the past. I love Debian though at least it still installs on my PPC laptop

Unless you want to do Windows programming (or .net stuff I'd rather do it natively than with mono) you don't need Windows. For poker/games and the like you might still want it. Just set up VirtualBox with a Win7 and you're good to go imo. I mostly need it for poker (wine would probably work never tried it) and converting the odd document that looks funny in Libre Offic (using MS Office).

If you're considering dual-booting and this is your main machine, I'd leave windows on there for awhile but try not to use it. If you're a total linux newbie, you never know when you need to get something done in like the next 5 minutes and don't necessarily want to go hunting for tutorials on how to do it. When you don't need Windows anymore, you'll know.

Yeah right now I'm dual booting. There were a few specialized things I originally thought I was going to need Windows for, but after some searching I was able either able to find a way to get them to work with Wine or found an (often better) Linux alternative.

I'll keep Windows for now, but I get the feeling it is going to be used rather infrequently.

Since we're talking about linux,

How do I make a startup script for ubuntu 12.04? I remapped the caps lock and escape keys for vim purposes and got it working but I need to type a command in the terminal everytime at startup to make it work. I made a .xinitrc file in my home directory (the vim wiki suggested this) with the command in it but it doesn't work. Thanks

http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Map_caps_l...pe_in_XWindows

^this is what I did