Just finished a small AR side project with a friend who's an industrial designer (he did the 3d models). I now own a one year subscription for the Unity engine and a one year Apple Dev account. Pretty frustrating as it wasn't really programming but mostly fixing stuff in Unity and relying on additional third party libraries.

Looking for interesting stuff to do in Unity now

Anyone use Bootstrap or React-Bootstrap with React? It is proving to be a complete pita for me. When I use Bootstrap just straight up half the things I style have no effect unless I put !important next to it. But apparently you shouldn't use Bootstrap with React because of magical virtual dom reasons.

Then with React Bootstrap stuff just plain doesn't work. It would be easy they said. Putting <Table striped> would make the table striped they said. Lol nope! No effect.


The annoying thing is what I am trying to do in Bootstrap I can do in vanilla css easily. Either I am dumb or trying to use a css framework with a front end framework is a recipe for sad times.

Not by me he wasn't

But also isn't the $65/hour job for a "senior" software engineer? I haven't billed for less than $100/hour basically since about 1999 that I can think of, and with inflation that should probably be $130 today. I currently live in an above-average COL city but mostly I've lived in average ones. I remember I did one contract job for $100/hour for a university in about 2003. It was through a department a friend of mine worked in. When they were ready for the 2nd project he told me I needed to bid higher, because they didn't think a serious professional person would bid so low. I did that project for them for $10,000 - replacing a team that had failed to do it over the course of 1 year and 2 million dollars. I left so much money on the table that it was literally crazy.

Employers will pay much more per hour than you think. A full time employee at a tech firm can easily cost 100% more than their salary to the company.

On top of that, hourly employees go into a different column for accounting purposes. Salaried employees are fixed costs, but hourly employees are variable cost. If you want to show investors your burn rate, it is way easier to wave away variable costs than fixed ones. At the manager level it's the same way - managers have some discretion over so-called "one time" costs but not as much over base salary. That's one of the reason they use bonus as a tool (among other reasons)

Not to be a dick but it doesn't sound like you get the basics of CSS specificity. React shouldn't affect styles really at all other than "is this component rendered or not". Are you using "class" instead of "className"?

Basically everything that follows in this discussion by candybar is on point. You are incorrect in that you are a contractor. You're an at will employee.

In fact, I would argue this is always the case until companies can realize efficiencies of scale in training, management, HR, equipment, tools, etc. at which point you can bring the cost of an employee down to probably 125-140% of their salary.

This is easy if you only take contract jobs that come through your network and have a full-time job to fall back on. But if you can keep yourself occupied full-time with contracts that pay over 50% of your full-time rate, you need to reconsider your career.

This is because you're competing against vendors. Vendors don't bill top flight engineers who can deliver projects single-handedly for $100 an hour, regardless of what they pay those guys.

I think you're forgetting to realize that the average contractor is more likely to be on a team that failed to deliver on a 2 million dollar project than be someone that can deliver it for $10,000. It's also quite possible that the failure made them more reasonable on scope and other things though gross incompetence is kind of the norm in this industry. I feel like I've seen you do this before but you probably don't want to use anecdotes where you seem exceptional to drive the narrative about how it should be for other people.

But most contractors also cost way more than their pay. This is where the distinction between a contractor that takes responsibility on a full project and a contractor who's just a part-time employee comes into play. Contractors can very often be harder or more expensive to manage.

No reasonable investor will be fooled - burn rate is burn rate and startups don't have enough other costs to hide something this glaring - and there's no way a startup hugely concerned with their burn rate is better off, reality-wise or perception-wise, hiring full-time contractors at exorbitant rates over hiring full-time employees below market rates with lure of equity. Where startups do this, it's entirely about time to market, not burn-rate. Where you're more correct on is for more dysfunctional Fortune 500 types where budgets and standards for full-time hires are centralized and have to go through a lot of red tape but contractors go through vendor management which is more based on ROI.

Maybe sign-on bonus because that actually is one-time but other than that, most companies have wised up on this issue as well.

All I have to offer is my own experience and people that I know. It's possible that I don't know very many people who are average or below average. But most people I know I think could bill themselves out at way over their hourly rate and their full time job.

I've seen more of this contractor padding bull**** at larger more established companies than at small startups. And all other kinds of cost and revenue shifting. As a contractor I was once asked to really **** up their code base and interface in order to do a one-time revenue shift of 1 month, in order to meet their current quarter's goals.

Regarding bonus, *almost* every place I've ever interviewed has had a huge latitude with bonus, and not that much on salary - or at least, so they claim. I actually don't know if this is for accounting purposes, or I suppose, because it's easier to take bonus away in the future. So the guy thinks he's being hired for 180k (say, 150k + 30k bonus) but they really only plan on paying him 15k bonus on average so he's really gonna make 165k.

I don't know if I could keep myself occupied with contract jobs or not. I only really took one stab at it, and I hated it. I had a partner who handled most of the **** I *really* hated (invoicing, interfacing with the customer, drumming up business) but I still had to deal with more stupid bull**** than I liked. It ended when I decided to move to another city.

FWIW - my current job, which was awesome until 6 months ago and pays very well relative to market, started as a $65/hour contractor job in 2010. I had been playing poker for 2 years so I was willing to take whatever I could get.

No worries I don't get offended easily I Solved at least my second problem. Apparently to use React Bootstrap you need Bootstrap as well. I was using className. I have a hunch that I may have put my stylesheet in the wrong place, so it was coming before bootstrap rather than after and all the bootstrap classes were just overriding all of my classes.

Everyone can bill themselves out at way over their hourly rate but you have to net out the costs. You can't compare the one where you're paid the net after someone else does all the leg work with the one where you're paid the gross but have to pay someone else to deal with doing the leg work. I'm sure some of the bs you had to deal with also doesn't come into play in situations where you're subcontracting. I was asking if you can bill 40 hours evey week consistently at whatever hourly rate you think is appropriate without paying someone or spending significant amounts of time well over what would be involved in responding to job ads.

This has been going away at better-run places but the actual reason for this is so that they can keep underpaying some people. Pretty much any big organization has to maintain some kind of salary band for people at the same level because otherwise it's hard to manage expectations and it's easy for pay distribution to become extremely political. The problem is that this often gets out of whack with respect to the market, especially senior people whom they'd rather start at a lower level because newcomers often don't know enough about the company to function well at a higher level. This gets doubly worse because at a lot of places, they want to promote people who are doing well internally, but they don't want to give big raises to them on top of this because 1) promotions have some tangible value; 2) they are probably not gonna leave; 3) their achievements and increasing familiarity with the company's internal stuff probably haven't increased their market value by as much. So you have this dynamic where you want to pay people you have promoted from within less than people you're bringing in, even though the former outrank the latter in terms of titles/ladder. Bonuses can be the answer. But at decently-run places it's unlikely that managers a lot of power here - what's most likely going on is that there's a limit/guideline and any appearance of flexibility comes from the fact that they routinely start the negotiation from way below that limit.

You are probably right.

My current job took an approach that I really liked, which had a lot to do with why I took the job.

They don't pay bonus. So I accepted a base salary that is on par with what my salary + bonus "should" be at the job I was at before. So I'm missing out on the occasional windfall, but aside from my stint at a high frequency trading company, every place I've worked has had semi-annual all-hands meetings to explain why they're screwing us out of our bonus THIS time.

They do some stuff I don't like, like... unlimited vacation time! Which is code for "no one ever takes all their vacation and if we have a fixed vacation policy we'd have to pay you for days you don't take, but now we don't!"

I think both are to make their books appear lighter than they actually are. I know that the company that I work for has "unlimited" vacation in order to keep vacation pay off the books.

I think it actually does save them money. I've had 3-4 weeks at my last few jobs and rarely used more than 2. So they would owe me 1-2 weeks of money every year and when I left my most recent job they owed me like 2.5 weeks worth. If I had "unlimited" vacation, they ain't owe me ****. If I don't use the max vacation they would "allow" me to, I cost myself money instead.

Trust me you are much better off. I get 22% of my salary in bonus around March 1st every year. There's about a 3 month window where I can comfortably leave my job w/o leaving a crapton of money on the table. At this point 6 months away I'm cemented. Even if I quit March 1 I still lose 2 months of bonus. It sucks.

Apparently there are some US companies (according to El Diablo) which have unlimited vacation and people actually take like 6 weeks off - Euro style. I am skeptical that it's not a scam most of the time.

I think my company is switching from a policy where you roll over your entire vacation balance every year (which I thought was CA law) to one where you use it or lose it (for all but a week or something). The nice thing for me is I get paid for the part of my balance they chop off (4-5 weeks) at the end of this year. Needless to say I won't be taking much vacation the rest of the year.

Yeah I know. My last job was one big bonus. Except, it was less than half of what it was supposed to be. So I hung around waiting for that just to get ****ed. I actually got an offer during that period - I was real close to the bonus payout but I didn't actually know exactly when it would happen - some time in the next 5 weeks. I told the guy I wasn't going to quit until the check hit my account. He got real mad about how people need to make sacrifices. He told me to "contact him when I was ready to work there" but that was mostly a joke. He just gave me another lecture and told him they didn't need me. OK dude, calm down.

Youtube video manager is so freaking confusing. Somehow all the videos I uploaded are on one channel with username suzzer99, which apparently is connected to a google+ account, whereas when I log on I always see account suzzer99, which is connected to a google (not plus) account. Or something. Both have the same damn email address. But it was driving me crazy wondering where my 5 videos I ever uploaded are.

Through some really confusing process I think I have managed to link them up now. But there are hamburgers on the left, icons on the right, and still you'd think the one thing you might want to do often - change permissions on a video - wouldn't be buried deep in some side screen somewhere. No first you have to click the pencil. Duh. Then you have to realize that this dropdown, which is pretty much floating out in space, means sharing.



God forbid we put a ****ing label on it. That wouldn't be hipster at all. Labels are so 2013 man. I literally had to google how to change permissions. Oh yeah also if you uploaded a video but it's not public, it won't show up under uploads. You have to click Video Manager. Had to google that one too. I'm really feeling the pure google ****tard koolaid drinking coming through in this UI. Some UIs are built with love. This one is built with indifferent condescension.

And at some point I wandered over to google+. OMG what a nightmare of profiles and stupid ****. At one point you click settings and then there's another tab on the side that takes you to a settings within settings. But still no way to even think about changing your email address, which I was thinking might help link my accounts.

Speaking of vacation, I may have mentioned back when I started my job 11 months ago that I was going to be taking an unpaid vacation early on (which I had asked for before starting). When push came to shove though they really wanted me to just go into the PTO hole...my issue with that was that I didn't want to feel I had to "catch up" this year and have like only 9 vacation days all year. My manager assured me they didn't care if I was always in the hole (basically be -6 days at all times), but I was concerned about potentially having different managers in the future.

I have had two different managers now and indeed the first new one was a little less enthusiastic about remaining in the hole (I doubt I ever would have had strong pushback though if I wanted it).

Long story short it turns out I don't care; I like the job a lot, have barely taken any days off this calendar year (I have worked from home a number of days when traveling to family) and am essentially all caught up. I think I might only wind up taking 5 all year.

Sorry for low content.

I have one gmail account and 3 youtube accounts somehow. :shrug:

What a ****ing dick, posting a low content post in the low content thread

If not for bike riding, and occasional foreign travel, I would probably take zero days a year. I haven't taken an extended bike vacation in years (I used to take a week off to ride from Houston to New Orleans)

That might change now... my dad moved to East Texas so it now is not gonna be possible to (easily) see all my family on holidays. I guess we'll see. I really ought to take a few days soon just randomly, because I will probably get burnt out otherwise. I'm finding stuff in this job pretty engaging (there is a lot of work to be done...) so I've been putting in hours after work and on weekends some

RustyBrooks,

have you hung out with DaveT, and if not, why not?

No. And I don't know.

You still here dave? I don't actually know if you, like, live here or are just passing through or what.

we should do an Austin meet up

I'm still in Austin, but living in the south now.

Honestly, the thought of meeting fellow 2+2'ers never passes my mind, and I seldom start PM conversations. I've only purposely met two people from this site. I met quite a few at Commerce and Bike in LA, though I wouldn't know their handles.

Publicly asking "why not?" is putting him on the spot, though I'd hardly get offended if he said I was an egoistical and zealous troll, lol.

There's a wonderful beauty of using Clojure: you find everyone that is using it is, for the most part, incredibly desperate to find talent. I question the wisdom of any company that chooses to use it if they are not in a tech hub. There are about 50 people who's done anything worthwhile with that language in the US, and none of us would like to live in middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania or...

This whole past week, I've been getting contacted by metric ton of recruiters for some job up in salt lake city. It's gotten absurd. I wake up to one email, then get a call from some recruiting company in Texas, then about 20 minutes later, I get an email from a recruiting company located in India. Later that day, another email from someone in Virginia, then today, a firm in Florida.

I tell each of them I have zero desire to live in Salt Lake City. How do these recruiting firms work? Are they just scanning Indeed for "clojure anywhere USA" then searching linkedin for every profile that included clojure? Are companies really contacting 12 recruiting companies with the command: "find me clojure."