Hey,

  So last Wednesday, my company laid off a huge swath of its employees.  I was one of them.
  
  It was a bit sudden but the company had been having trouble over the past year so I wasn't surprised that it happened, just the timing.

  I'm still trying to right the ship a bit and get on the job hunt.

  If you're curious, I do software programming, mostly on the Microsoft stack, with a couple of different Java frameworks under my belt.  We can certainly talk if you think there's a position I might be a good fit for.

later
Tom

We're only in the office two days a week. Face time is valuable.

A four and a half hour meeting doesn't get a lot accomplished.

On the upside, 20 minutes after the meeting, I was able to talk to one of the other devs and we worked out a thorny customer issue.
Tom

Hey,

So my boss is stepping down as project manager and going back to being a senior developer (going back? no, let's say following his bliss instead). There are various reasons but I think most of them will be good for him and I'm glad he's still with the company because he knows where most of the skeletons in the code are.

But this means we're on the hunt for a new manager. I'm hoping that we, the employees, get a chance to talk to candidates and that brings up my question:

I've got a slate of technical questions and "show me how you think" problems that I've been whipping out for our development candidates. But what kinds of questions do you ask a manager type? While having some technical expertise is important, it's not what we're hiring the person for.

I've found the "solve this problem" for me questions are really great at helping expose how developers work their way through a problem. But good management is much more nebulous a process. Ideally, I'd like to have them conduct a meeting in an extended role-play setting, but that'd take a lot of work for me to write-up (assuming I knew what was generally important) and it'd probably be too involved for most interviews.

Any thoughts in LJ-land about what to ask/look for?

later
Tom

Hey,

So I just got my first bonus at work.

They just sent me a Sacajawea Dollar Coin in celebration of St. Patrick's Day.

See, it's a gold coin just like you'd find in a leprechaun's pot o'....yeah, no I don't get it either.

But hey, free dollar coin
Tom

...but I'm doing my "small victories happy dance" right now. I might finally be ready to do productive work before the end of the week.

Also, I gave my first job interview today -- I mean, I was asking the questions to a candidate not being the candidate. It was...odd. Plus, I'm only a couple weeks away from being in their shoes so I was all "it's ok, let me ask some easy questions".

later
Tom

Hey,

So my company does a lot of work from home situations. They've got a VPN client to connect you to their network and then you remote desktop to the virtual machine on your at-work server and just work out of that.

I don't have a PC at home and while I suppose I could put a Windows VM on my Mac, I feel like it might be less hassle to just pick up a mid-range PC Laptop and use that (possibly also picking up a flat-screen monitor/keyboard/mouse so it's less laptoppy).

Do people have suggestiosn for a make/model of laptop? Becuase I'm really working out of my machine at work it doesn't have to be a super-beefy machine (although something mid-range would be nice). The big thing for me is that it doesn't come with a ton of crap pre-installed (I'm looking at you HP).

So if you have any suggestions, please toss them my way.

Thanks
Tom

Hey,

So I've been too busy with the new job to announce the fact that...I got a new job. Day 2 and I'm blazing a trail for the new hires by wrestling with configuration and setup for new servers.

later
Tom

[ETA -- I'm working for a company in Burlington called Silkroad that does HR software.]

Hey,

So earlier this week my dad went into surgery to get a tumor removed.

The surgery went really well and there's hope that a mis-diagnosis means the tumor is actually benign (we'll know more tomorrow). Even if it's not, the prognosis is much, much better than initial reports would've suggested.

So things are looking up.

Today I got laid off from my job.

so...yeah...
Tom

Oh...

Hooray! I survived an unexpected round of layoffs at work!

If you're at Diesel tonight, pet me. Thanks.

Tom

Hey,

Does anyone out there on my f-list (or the f-list of my f-list) know Flex? Specifically Actionscript 3.0 and how the security model works for it? Especially with regard to socket connections?

I ask because I have a burning need to know some stuff and the books and examples just aren't cutting it. Plus, the latest version of the flash player seems to have suddenly become more stringent on the security and it's really screwing me over.

Cripes
Tom

[UPDATE: Oh hey! According to random whitepaper, Adobe became super-strict about socket security...starting with the newest version of the flash player that they released at the start of the month. Which might explain why people wipe out even when they download the latest version of the player. Cripes.]