Larry is being too kind to me.

For those who'd wonder, he is one of the nicest people you'd ever have the chance to meet. His whole team was a bunch of nice people, skewering whatever cliche you may have heard of Boston and PWC types.

Infinitely grateful for the offer and thought, but it was what it was and I hardly feel sore about it.

That's a pretty good counter perspective. I have PWC filed away as the evil dudes that bug everyone at the end of university.
I have a mixture CS/MBA type degree with good grades and they were pretty annoying.

Also heard some stories that they are not great to work for (sweatshoppy compared to their competition). Always good to hear ex-PWC guys can turn into decent human beings ;P

One of my friends once took a course in game development in C++. I don't know what it entailed, but I think mostly copy / paste. He's kind of one of those that has a bunch of grand ideas about computers...

Almost in tears at "used an emac", and I have never used an emac

sounds like a cheap ripoff of imac

The stories he has are great. Coming into a project 2 months in and finding a Requirements Spec that has 1 page completed on it, with a consultant taking 2 hour lunches who would never get fired because this person was considered a lawsuit risk.

Getting put on a massive contract based on unique qualifications in some obscure technology... the qualifications on someone's resume who once worked in some obscure part of PWC that no one has ever spoken to, so having to become the new expert on this technology.. in weeks.

Yeah, while not totally standard, that sounds familiar.

I had a brief stint at a medium sized consultancy after being headhunted away from my first post-uni job.
While the company itself may have not been evil, the people it tended to attract made me feel very uncomfortable to be associated with them.

What bugged me the most was that the majority of consultants were almost exclusively focused on their personal bonus goals instead of what had to be done to bring the current clients' project to a successful conclusion.

And then you got the types who would max out every single (very generous) daily food and travel allowance to get that billed. Again, obviously to the detriment of the client.
One guy in particular stood out in his efforts. He would seriously take a taxi from the hotel to the client site which was a 3 minute walk away. Just to get the max amount of claims racked up.

Those things and the tendency of many "colleagues" to be big-hat-no-cattle types drove me out of that space pretty darn fast.

Do they use their allotment just to be dicks, or because it makes them look like they're more valuable to come with a higher price tag?

Programming on a laptop on the couch, yea or nay?

If yea, what laptop tray?

Mine has really firm wrist support that I don't really like.

I loved programming from a couch. I didn't use a tray just the MacBook Pro.

But it ****s my wrists up pretty good.

I have this thing - it's pretty good. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...ilpage_o02_s00

Macbook Pro to left of me, sitting on mattress with monitor plugged in, sitting on table that is also to left, is ultimate experience; while laying in bed programming at night.

Owning good headphones with amplifier + dac = a plus for reading through articles on hacker news or just the web in general.

You can basically add anything to that and you will have a good time lol.

I help your back, you help my wrists. Fair trade.

Ordered.

Has anyone messed around with web components? One of our prototypers is using them. Seems a lot like angular.

Not sure. I think it's more a "coz I'm entitled to it" thing.

It's difficult to describe what it is like to work for an incredibly toxic company. In general, you start there thinking all is pretty okay, then after about 2 weeks, you are thinking about finding a new job, but realize you can't do that, so you figure put in 6 months to a year and start looking elsewhere.

After a few months of failing to find a job, probably because you have a dark cloud hanging over your head at every interview and your throat locks because you can't answer "why do you want to quit your current job" without breaking the golden rule of "don't ever speak bad of your current employer," you become stuck in your current position and employer. A raise comes, but you don't care because the company is still earning 40,000% off your work and you know said raise implies you don't get to leave any of your current work, but you have more and more responsibility. Sadly, they won't fire you, but you get so damn irritated with the bull****, you start doing things that any sane company would fire you over, and then you start doing more and more just because you think is strange and somehow amusing.

I'm an optimist and feel that most people are good well-intended people. A toxic company is toxic due to mistakes of management or just a result of the higher ups being a bunch of privileged *******s, which, unfortunately, the ******* trickles down and the privileges don't. The people aren't bad people, they are just jaded, IMO.

I've seen it: great, happy people becoming ultra surly jerks within a few months. No less productive, to be certain, but just absolutely miserable. What was once a joking guy or girl becomes an angry hermit. It says a lot when coworkers quit to work as a commission only salesperson for AFLAC because they felt it would be a step up in life. It says a lot when your manager pays good money he can't afford for counseling to cope with the stress and learn how to accept the job and pretend to enjoy it, pretend he is important.

I don't think the guys billing to the max and taking taxis are entitled. I think they are otherwise good people gone sour. Of course they know it is wrong, and I suspect they are acting this way just to show the absurdity of the company policies.

see, i don't know if i believe this. I work with a guy who's one of the laziest people I know, aggressive and confrontational with coworkers, does everything possible to avoid doing any actual work (accomplishes maybe 30 minutes of work per 8 hours - not hyperbole, sadly), and yet this person says they think they're trying to hard and need to care less because no one else there cares.

people are really ****ing deluded when it comes to themselves.

Caveat being that 95% know it is wrong. I think that, in most normal places, you'll get a small number of idiots, but a toxic place is more like the allegory of the crazy well, a South African allegory that Google fails to find for me.

A king and queen were ruling a land. In the middle of the land was a well with toxic water that, whoever drank it, went instantly insane. The lordship, of course, forbade drinking from the well.

After a few years, a fourth of the people in the town were insane, but the lordship was still able to rule. A few years later, half the people were insane and it became more difficult to rule since they were still able to talk to half the people who were sane, but this was a tipping point. A month later, everyone was insane, and the lordship was no longer able to rule their land.

After a few years of mayhem and their inability to rule the land, the lordship went against the grain of their beliefs, conquered their fears, and drank from the well. The lordship, though absolutely insane, was once again able to communicate with their people and rule the land.

Billing within limits certainly is not wrong. Otherwise the limits would have been changed. I don't see that as a moral issue, but do interpret personal flaws into people doing that "just because".

The most rational explanation I could come up with was something similar to how some government (or business) departments would spend every last cent in their budget on anything even if not needed for fear that said budget may be reduced in future rounds if they do not use all of it.

I guess my take on life collides with that. I'm not driven by feelings of scarcity. Instead, I truly believe there is/are more than enough resources/opportunities/money/whatever to be better than just ok at any point in time and, therefore, do not see the point of maxing out whatever you can lay your hands on right now. In fact, I believe that is wasteful, selfish behavior.

I rather feed back resources to the company or client I am working for if I can't use those to benefit them. They'll find a better use for it I'm sure.

All of that does not make me a shining knight of valor.
It simply means my core value system collides with those around me and eventually leads to me not wanting to be perceived as one of "them."

Well it looks like my work fully blocks 2p2 now. Anyone know an easy way to spoof/proxy one site through another? Anything like tor is completely out as they check our machines for that stuff.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/...ate-http-proxy

All you need is an ssh client and some remote machine with an ssh server.

For the client, yes, but for the company, who is possibly taking a little extra off each dollar you spend, no. They wouldn't get the money either way. Also, psychologically, people feel better spending a lot of money, which is there hang up, but that needs to be considered.

I can't justify taking the taxi, but I can't justify handing it back to the company who I am working for. That taxi is a rounding error at best, and they aren't going to award me for being efficient. I'm only pointing out the attitude that seeps into a toxic company. I know I'm guilty for doing a lot of things I wouldn't do at a normal company. Moral corruption begets moral corruption, but at least I never did, nor did I defend, anything outright illegal.

Personally, I would rather have the opportunity of spending a tiny bit of company wealth to taxi driver.
Seems better than walking 3 minutes; where i'm not walking in a beautiful area and most likely a stranger to the location.

I've been surprised by people before, that I would have thought, just spend for the sake of burning money.

What the heck, I thought the internet was supposed to be getting easier to use for the lay person. I need to make a squeeze page for someone and it now appears that all the simple services that just used to be cgi forms are now $30/month services that generate a single page to collect an email address. There are no free options that work that I've found. Being able to collect someones email on a front page something that was solved like two decades ago, what kind of absurd regression is this.

Thanks! Btw what are your thoughts on web components?