Why would any company keep around worthless talent or "unemployable people" to begin with?

If we drag these ideas to their farthest extremes, it seems there are some logical issues.
If every company decided to not promote within the ranks. AND if every company only hired people who have been in that position in other companies. AND only that position in other companies in different sorts of fields. Then we are starting with a talent pool that came from nowhere and is going nowhere.

How did they get those positions if not by promotion? How did they get their first job if they didn't already work it in another company?

Perhaps some of this is politics, but some is moral, to a degree. Companies should, to some degree, help bring up talent, and not simply play these numbers games in such a way where no new people can enter the market at all.
Somebody has to take the risk of hiring somebody where it's their first time in the position.
Somebody has to take the risk of molding good upper management.

People in these positions don't just appear in a basket by a stork! So where does "best hiring practices" give way to politics or to moral goodness? How do new people get into these jobs?

@Dashrender said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

That situation you're talking about might be a one off, so they MIGHT need that. But most SMBs don't. Most SMBs aren't based in tech, they need email, some data storage for spreadsheets/documents, etc and a CRM. Those things don't require the services of AWS or Azure in most cases.
You can't look at a single case and suddenly assume that's the norm.

Of course.

Company I work for still doesn't have CRM. I've never been able to figure out how to properly integrate it to all our relevant services. In the end, CRM would just mean a ton of manual labor updating records with no real automation.

@Minion-Queen
I see what happened. It seems that all my notebooks went in to my personal hotmail account instead of the 365 account.
MS is a little goofy when it comes to trying to mix-n-match what is my personal acct versus the 365 one.

How about unschooling?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling

Also lets not take potshots at the religious as if they only homeschool in order to indoctrinate, and we need the mighty seculars to save our children.
Let's not forget it was religion and its ideas and beliefs that created schools and hospitals and much of science to begin with. They elevated the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom, not destroyed it.

In my experience, people homeschool mostly due to poor performance or safety of local schools, that's about it. And also the complete overreach of schools that seem to take over the role the parents are supposed to play. And thirdly, because they simply witness the little horrors that are being created from factory schools. Kids with no sense of direction, no respect for authority, no honor or decency or sense of responsibility.
This is not even to mention the complete lack of any sort of training in actual useful topics. No real world skills, no homemaking skills, no mechanical or handyman skills, no finance or business or investing skills. No understanding of government or economics. Instead, they come out entitled little America-hating socialists who want to play video games all day and live off the government while hating all rich people, religions, hard working business people, and capitalism.

I would rather my kid have a solid education and be a decent, respectful, hard working person but also have been taught young earth creationism, than to come out an entitled little disrespectful socialist brat who thinks the world revolves around him and owes him a beautiful life, but not have any real world skills and thinks all businesses are greedy while enjoying his daily Starbucks and iPhone.

I would trust ML to not run ads for "Curtis IT Services" just because he paid a lot.

There are only two options then.

Option 1) ML knows something about technology and to some degree would not run ads that promote known-bad products.

Option 2) ML knows something about technology and shows ads for crap stuff on purpose for the money.

Either way, option 1 I can reasonably trust the ads here show decent tech products. Option 2 hurts ML's very reputation as a knowledgeable tech community.

Desktop apps have their place, this is silly.
A native desktop app can better utilize hardware, take advantage of native OS abilities that chromeless frameworks can't.

Native apps can be built in lower-level languages and be built to be much more solid, speedy, use fewer resources, take less RAM without all the middlemen fluff.

I'm all for web apps, they are cool and all, but they depend on a browser and a tab being open. They have limited abilities, they can't even put an icon in the system tray, or startup with Windows. They are not as easy to control via OS security policies.

Maybe I just have bad luck, but I ALWAYS try to find services that give native desktop apps. If not native, then at least full featured frameworks that can use native OS features.
I rarely touch Office online because it's just slow, herky jerky, buggy, crashy. I absolutely hate interfaces that aren't very responsive.

I agree with Scott that IF the app can be a web app, go for it. But there are also times when you might want native OS features, lower level language that compiles with fewer dependencies, smaller size, greater efficiency, and so forth.

Apps can be built to self-update, most desktop apps do. I've never had to do anything fancy to get Slack to update, it just updates itself. Slack isn't native, it's a framework, just using it as an example.

I think when the OP talked about Windows apps being "buttons and boxes" or whatever, he probably just means that there is a drag-n-drop interface for common .NET form controls. You just place all the controls where you want and program from there. Things like minimize/max/close, resize-able borders and control menus are all sort of automatic.
But with web apps, form libraries are not as popular, and there aren't any really good drag-n-drop designers for creating UI FROM such things anyway.
Much time has to be spent designing the UI, even if you do use a library (you have to learn the library!), or even a CSS framework like Bootstrap or Foundation, you still have to code and try to keep straight the rows and columns and how you want things to respond and slide around responsively.

In any case. Desktop apps definitely have their place. I use desktop email, desktop photo editing, desktop file and information management tools, chat, backup apps, file sync, document readers, DB management tools, remote control tools, FTP, text editors/IDEs, and 3 dozen others that are just way more better suited to native.
Native apps always have the option of avoiding updates. Or lets say an update ruins things, you can usually reinstall a previous good version. With web apps, if they screw up and something breaks, you have no options but complete down time waiting for fixes or trying to fix it yourself depending on where the problem lies.
And of course, browser tabs are, for the most part, sandboxed, so there are already limitations regarding file system. Try auto-connecting to files over the local network from a web app. Web apps don't have unlimited power, if they did, we would be right back to having huge malware issues. Malware has made web apps more limited and locked down. Native apps are still the way to go if you need power and greater control of OS abilities and features.

This web versus native argument can go forever, but just like most things in life, you pick the best tool for the job. If a web app will do it, always go web app. They are typically easy to set up and maintain. If you want native OS features or require to greatest efficiency, security, or OS-level features, then obviously native.
If you want to do both, as is popular these days, look into crossover frameworks like Meteor, Electron, or Cordova for mobile as well.

I believe cross-platform frameworks are going to be huge for some time to come, but there will always be a special place in my heart for a native app that can fully utilize system tray, startup, notifications, file system, and full system power.
Yes frameworks can do some of this, but they have to come with a lot of middlemen architecture, bloating the apps RAM use probably 3 to 5 times more than would be necessary with native programming.

Anyway, I've rambled on long enough.

*looking at pictures for any sticky notes with passwords on them*

That wasn't the best thread title, but here is the story anyway.

I work full time, but am transitioning to run my own local business. I have another thread related to this here: https://mangolassi.it/topic/10510/home-business-ideas-for-transition-out-of-9-5/637

Anyway, I've talked to my boss and we are agreed that I can pull back my hours. This was a big stress relief for me. If they refused to cut my hours, they would probably just let me go, which I'm not ready for yet.

I currently am W-2 and there are no benefits except for vacation time, sick time, major holidays, and a cell phone stipend. Nothing like investments or insurance, etc.

If I pull back my hours by 15 or 20, I will likely go 1099 and work as a contractor but lose any benefits. I make a little over $20/hr now but I'd be able to raise my rate as a self-employed contractor. So that is my first big decision:

1. How can I calculate a contract rate, taking in to account lost benefits and other things? How much am I worth to make my part time hours a better option than hiring another full time tech? I don't want to charge so much that I cost just as much as a part time contractor as I did as a full time employee, so there is a fine balance here to make it worth it for both myself and the company. It needs to save them money, but also be worth for me to take half my time as self-employed.

My second question, which is the thread title, is how to set things up so I can do as much work from home, and manage and monitor things, and be available and track work etc etc.

I want to move myself into almost more of a service provider for them. I want to automate things so they don't need a full time tech. It's crazy that any small business should need full time IT staff with so much of operations being able to be automated and easy to use! I just don't know where to start.

One thing is system management. It would be nice to have monitoring tools to warn me of simple things like drive space filling up, or backups that didn't run, or new software that is installed.
Remote control for when I need to get in.
Software tools to do things like keep the computers clean and updated and running smooth.
Cloud software that works (Box is a disappointment for us)
Managing appropriate services in the cloud versus in house. In other words, if our databases and how-tos and WIKI and project management and ticketing and everything else is a cloud tool, I can work with those from anywhere.

Anyway, what I'm asking (for you services providers especially), what are the top services and tools you implement with a client first thing to help things run smooth? Cause the main benefit of me being here is just that I'm immediately available for stupid little things. "My icon moved, the file isn't updated in Box, my printer printed really small, I swear I sent this email, how do I make a copy on the copier again?..." etc.
I don't know if there is any way fix that stuff, lol

In a sense, they've grown too accustomed to having a tech in the next office, yelling my name at the first sign of trouble, not even attempting a quick program restart or a full system restart first. They are too lazy and not learning how to use their own equipment, just calling me for every little thing. I don't like that! But at the same time, i want tools that freaking WORK and aren't giving us the fits every day.
One example of this is that they hired a person who isn't that computer literate, but their job requires using a couple software tools. The boss literally suggested I learn their job and software more so when the person has questions, I can help them! Really? I need to learn other people's jobs and software so that when they don't know what they are doing, I can do it for them? That's too much dependence on me!

I've rambled on long enough.

So what advice do you have for moving full time W-2 to part time 1099? How should I think about that and calculate my fee? And further, what are the most important sorts of tools or things to think about if I put myself into more of a service provider role?

I am not an MSP nor do I currently do contracts for maintenance or anything like that.
When I get called, it's usually onsite. I don't leave remote control software permanently installed or anything like that.
(I want to do these things in the future, but don't now)

I'm wondering what the best method is to be able to remote control a system but in a way where it requires user interaction and control. I don't want apps on my computers or phone or anything and create an liabilities.

For example a small business has a Zen server with one VM. I'm not sure I want access via iDRAC, but maybe I do? Maybe I want access to Zen, maybe not? Maybe I just want access to the VM itself, but only when needed?

Is there an acceptable method for break/fix scenarios where I can just have them do this or that or run something and THEN I get the control I need?
Or is it better that I set this up so I can gain control even without their interaction? This seems like something of a liability if we don't have a contract of sorts. They may tell me it's ok to have this access, but that doesn't mean I want to.

Do I leave some kind of program on there dormant in case I need to tell them to open it? Do I leave myself a user account? Even that seems iffy to me.

I'm wondering what is not only a good practice, but is legally sound and what tools this would use. As an example, their external IP could change, so if I'm not running some tool to reveal the IP to me, this already means I need to get info from the client before I could get in.

I was just trying to get to the bottom of this friggin thread, 27,229!!!!

When I click the double-down arrow it looks like it's trying to zip down then just gives up about 20 pages later.

Finally after clicking the double-down arrow about 10 times in a row it finally figured out how to take me to the end.

But besides that, I came here to create a thread and whine about Microsoft for a while.

I haven't updated this in a while, this is a fat thread!

I've stuck with freelancing so far, got some good regular clients, working much less in my day job, hopefully will be leaving some time this year for good.

Also, it appears since my last post, I had another baby, lol. This complicates things even more. But also, I noticed after having a 3rd kid, the family needs me as much as the day job does. So many times I have to come home, illnesses, hospital visits, whatever. Working from home would be a huge plus at this point in my life. I need to be more available and set my own schedule more.

The challenging part now is organizing my little business, it's still just me doing everything, and this is already hurting as it pertains to savings and record keeping and taxes and all the junk I have to do that is unpaid time. I know, there are personal assistants that can do this stuff, but I have no extra cash for paying anybody anything yet, not even a tax man. We got hit with over $3000 in taxes due. On one hand this is good cause it shows I had a lot more freelance income this year, but I never tried to calculate for any pretax payments or whatever. There is SO much stuff to keep track of and balance and prepare for.

What I have to do is reverse engineer our income needs and then figure out how to make that. At this point, if I'm charging, say, $65/hr for freelance work, I would have to be billing 6 or 7 hours each weekday to get the income where it needs to be. But I find this goal not very tenable. Freelancing is really hit and miss as far as when there is work to do, and I can only attempt balancing so many active clients.
With 10 clients there can still be two weeks with nothing to do. But if 2 clients have heavy projects and tight deadlines, I'm suddenly swamped. It's very stressful sometimes, there is really no way to just have a nice constant flow of work for a clean 6 hours of billable daily time. Everything is random.

Also, this income will top out eventually. I mean, even if I can bill $65/hr and get 8 hour days, this limits the top end of my income, so I have to scale somehow. I can charge more, which might make finding clients harder. Or I can try to find some flat rate work at much higher amounts. A single $10k job that takes me a month is nice, but can I get one of those a month consistently? Doubtful.

A huge job for $20-$30k without a tight deadline is something I can trickle out over 6 months or the whole year, but where would I find that work if I'm not at the top of my field? These types of clients aren't typically looking for small town freelancers. That isn't really my market.

So basically my challenges are:

1. Consistent clients/work and/or finding large cost jobs that even out my income over time.
2. Streamline and make very efficient the record keeping and billing/taxes/receipts crap that wastes my time.
3. Expand marketing to find clients from more networks (currently still on Upwork and word-of-mouth only). I'd like clients to find me and reach out to me, versus me spending lots of time trying to find them and sending proposals that take a lot of time to write.
4. Figure out how to scale income to get past natural limits of hourly-labor work.
5. Still need to quit the day job. It's still a surprisingly stressful and big decision when I've got 4 people depending on me. If I leave that job, I would not be able to find another in this town with decent wages in any decent amount of time, we'd be screwed. I have to make freelancing work, period! But on the other hand, this last billing cycle I only made from them about $330 a week, which is like nothing for having to show up there three times in those weeks.
6. Education is always on the list. I have like 200 books on subjects relating to my craft and skills and business and marketing and all things between. Plus I'm registered in about 30 online courses with similar subjects from programming to web design to graphics and marketing and business management. Nobody pays me to take my course and read, so they don't get high priority. Making money always gets priority, and everything else starts falling apart.

So goes the journey!

I was pricing out Glacier recently. Surprised to learn it really doesn't pan out after about 1TB.
After that, you may as well just buy Dropbox or any other cloud service, you'll get way more features for the same dollar.
Glacier does really well under 1TB because you can store 10s or 100s of megs on the cheap, only paying for what you use.

I've always thought BackBlaze was a great offering. The only other offering I can think of is CrashPlan actually, which may have unlimited plan options. It even has software for Linux.

@scottalanmiller said in Weekend Plans:

In Romania, it's all like that. We get our eggs from the neighbour.

In America, you can't fart in public without some government oversight group creating rules and regulations and taxes. And some bottom feeder who can figure out how to sue you for doing it, and win.

@jaredbusch said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

$65/hr

Just no.

The billed rate for our part time (primarily helpdesk) person at the lowest rate for any client is $80-$85. Forget their exact rate.

Help for what?

There is a difference between charging $80/hr for 20 minute calls, versus $65/hr working 4 to 7 hours strait.

There are certainly web devs that charge up to $100/hr. And programmers are typically $80 to $200/hr depending on the languages and project.

An agency I work for does charge $100/hr but they get their work by being seen as an agency. So as a simple freelancer, I either need to be a household name in web dev, top of my game, or appear bigger than I am, or something else.
Keep in mind that in the web dev space, I compete with 3rd world countries who charge $10/hr and claim to do all the same stuff.

Heck I'm not saying I'm not worth more. I only started freelancing 2 years ago and started at $40/hr, so I do plan on getting higher, but hourly rates do top out eventually. I have to scale in other ways too. And small towns just don't charge as much as "big city" agencies and corporations.

@scottalanmiller said in BackBlaze B2 competitors:

hat happen

You just pay per GB forever. It's a linear curve strait up.

At 1TB it's about at the $10/m mark which is more or less than almost every service out there for getting the same 1TB.

I wanted to store about 1.8TB. Glacier was $0.011/gb so about $20 we'll say. Dropbox Business is $12.50/m and just says "as much space as needed", whatever that means.

Or BackBlaze Business at $50/year ($4.17/m-ish) with "unlimited" data.

I get that Glacier is long-term archival, but it's not like any other cloud service is bound to drop all your data by accident or something.

SpiderOak would be half the price of Glacier at the 5TB mark.

On the flip side, if you just want to stick, say, 140GB in the cloud, which is much more than any free cloud service, and would cost at least $5 to $10 a month for most cloud services to bump up the package, Glacier would be $1.54.

So I figured, Glacier ok under 1TB, but above 1TB I might look to fuller-featured cloud services that can beat the price curve. Maybe after dozens of terabytes, Glacier becomes the only option again, I don't know.

Found Alan Walker just recently. This song has become my 1yr old son's favorite. As soon as the music kicks in he's dancing and staring at it.

Youtube Video

@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

And do you realize that general developers can be found on Craigslist for $10/hr? You can definitely penny-pinch in this game if you wanted!

You really can't. Someone listing themselves as a developer and being one isn't the same. I work in development (not as a developer) and hiring at $100K salary in low cost areas is a struggle. Real developers with skills and some experience are in super high demand.

Logically, no one is offering $10/hr on Craigslist when there are $100K positions with benefits that can't even get reasonable interviews. Development is definitely anything but a penny pinching game.

Sure, developers struggle to compete with offshore work. But to get any quality offshore work you can't pay by the hour, you are hiring for years on salary. You can get lower hourly rates that way, but you can't do it hour to hour.

I would probably kill both my neighbors for a chance at one of these hard-to-get-interviews-positions.

Maybe you're talking about tech towns, Silicon Valley, NY, L.A., but in small town USA Bill Gates couldn't get a job here for more than $30/hr.

I do love where I live and want to work remotely but I guess it's like I said, I'm just not rubbing shoulders with the kinds of people who fill these sorts of positions. But then again I'm not a top tier programmer, I'm a web dev, I know a couple languages but I couldn't program a new MS Windows if you follow.

Where I live with a family of 5, take home pay of anything near $100k would be quite comfortable. And here I am pannicky over leaving my job for 3 or 4 hundred a week. It's pathetic.

@scottalanmiller said in Web Application VS Windows Application:

@guyinpv said in Web Application VS Windows Application:

I don't tend to see UI issues in a solid desktop app. They are typically built on standard UI libraries from the OS, where all the rendering and sizing and refreshing are pretty locked in.

Canvas is to. If either has issues with that, it's not the language or approach that is the problem. That's an artifact of the developers not making something that looks good. That's a separate issue.

I think this conversation is beginning to turn in to "which programming language is better" at this point.
The "native vs. web" idea is lost. What does "web" even mean then? Almost all native apps are connected to the web too. So we're really talking about "web languages" rather than internet-enabled.

That means we're talking about JS versus C#, Visual C++, VB etc. Or even further, JIT versus compiled. Or further, higher level versus lower level.

What difference does it make at this point? I appreciate that lower level "native" apps tend to be better tested, require fewer dependencies, are more stable and faster. I also appreciate web-language containerized quazi-desktop cross-compiled apps can be easier to design and distribute and work across platforms. It also offers traditional "web devs" a means to crossover into desktop development.

You said Office has been "web" for two generations. Not sure what you mean here. Yes they have "web versions" that can run in a browser, but they still have their C++ native Windows apps, or Objective C for Mac version. It ain't written in JS in a container!
I've used Word and Excel in the browser, as well as the desktop apps, and FAR prefer the desktop apps still. The web version has crashed on me more times in a year than my desktop Office has ever crashed in my lifetime.
Web is convenient and pretty dang cool, but still has its drawbacks.

@wirestyle22 said in Gaming - What's everyone playing / hosting / looking to play:

@guyinpv said in Gaming - What's everyone playing / hosting / looking to play:

I recently started Guild Wars.

I was a Lineage player before that but all my clan went to GW. I'm trying to get used to it.

Guild Wars 1 had the best pvp I've ever taken part in. I did not enjoy Guild Wars 2 as much.

I never liked pvp in the first place, so GW lets me avoid it. I just wanted a more casual game to run around and goof for a while here and there when family/work lets me.

Somebody piss off Trump?