i can't let this one go by

[rone]

I'm guessing you're "stealth" because you don't have the stones to face the brunt of ridicule over your outrageously low offer of $55k for someone to do *everything* for your office.  You're detailing work that will take, at a minimum, 14 hours a day.  No one person is going to be able to work that much and do a GOOD job at it.

Get a goddamned clue.  Hell, get a six-pack of clues.  Hire enough people for the job and PAY THEM WHAT THEY'RE WORTH.  You need two people: an IT guru and an office manager.  You are NOT going to get anyone worth more than shit for $55k, in either job, let alone both.  Your company is in a crucial stage, and getting an idiot or an incompetent now is going to hamstring your company.  You will regret it, guaranteed.  You should be looking at about $70k for the office manager and $85k for the IT person, MINIMUM.  Don't fucking argue with me!  Just fucking do it.

A dog walker?  You people are fucking insane.  It's not 1998 anymore.  You aren't going to get naïve chumps who will work for stock options.  Get real!

rone

Comments

[also-huey.livejournal.com]

That'd be an ideal job for my cousin (he's 25) if it was outside of Detroit. In San Francisco? ...eh, maybe if it was paying twice what they're offering. But do you really want to be paying your dog-walker $50+/hr? Doesn't seem efficient.

You're numbers are close, but I'd fudge 'em some. I think they could probably get away with a $55K office manager, but they're probably looking at a $100K IT jockey. "can figure out how to setup any type of technology, are a master at a Linux command-line, can setup an Exchange server, know how to configure a VPN firewall while allowing SIP packets to properly navigate NAT" is $75K right there, and when you add in "don’t mind being the guy called for that emergency. Yeah, at 3AM. For real.", I add in at least another $20K.

"We're outrageously smart, meta-cognitive renegade thinkers"? I read that as "Our business model is 'sound crazy long enough to attract VC, then issue press releases just long enough to get bought out'."

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

2wanda was an office manager throughout her dotcom years, and she made more than $55k then, and for the work she did, she was definitely underpaid.

I think $20k for being on call, even 24/7, is way too much. You aren't going to have that many damn emergencies when there's less than 15 people in the company, assuming you're not an idiot setting stuff up with beige shitboxes and Fedora. Then again, they should probably be shooting for a do-all genius instead of an IT guy. But i think we've already established that they don't have the right idea for getting their business off the ground. I give them 10 months before they burn through their money on foosball tables, sushi lunches, and executive seminars.

Meta-cognitive... the fuck does that mean? Shit, now i'm wishing i'd've been less helpful and more abusive. Fucking idiots. They aren't going to be bought; they're going to crash and burn and picked apart for spare parts. It's all they deserve.

[haineux.livejournal.com]

"Meta-Cognitive" literally means "thinking about thinking."

It is a term used by behavioral psychologists to refer to an activity people rarely do. For instance, if you ask someone "how did you come up with that answer," >90% of the time, the person will make up an explanation that has little to do with how they actually did it. The remaining 1-10% of the time, the thoughtful ones will actually think about how they thought up the idea.

The other common use of the term was in the Artificial Intelligence fad a while back. AI researchers would often say they were thinking about thinking. Of course, they were not. They were making up stories about how they imagine thinking happens, and then pretending that their super-wonderful program would magically figure it out even if they couldn't themselves.

(OK, there were a few exceptions, but I personally do not think Doug Hofstadter was one of them. He was writing funny essays and books where this meta-cognition was supposedly taking place. Goedel Escher Bach is a good book full of entertaining stories, and it's reall ygood at explaining the Incompleteness Theorem.)

In this case here, I suspect the term is being conflated with "Meta-cranial inversion" -- ie these people, if they bit down hard, would bite their own necks off because that's JUST HOW FAR they've got their heads up their asses....

I actually can think of a couple of people I know who would take this job for $55K per year -- as long as one of the slyly-hinted "non-standard perks" is all the FDA-certified drug-grade cocaine and meth-amphetamine they could consume.

On the other hand, knowing these pals of mine, as soon as the company slipped them some of that baby-laxitive-cut shit, they'd go get a machete and carve up the company dog, starting at the foot pads and working up, as a gentle reminder that their employment was not "at will" of the employer.

Seriously, I wish you would find out who these people are, and change their craigslist ad to mention their address, phone, and emails. These employers are REALLY in need of a learning experience.

Also, I think I'll use "Do you LIKE to be woken up at 3 AM to fix an emergency?" as an interview question. Anyone who says "yes" gets 15 seconds to convince me that they were lying through their teeth or I call security and have them escort this trespasser the hell off company property.

[velvet-wood.livejournal.com]

They won't get an IT guy _alone_ for that. And any IT guy who can _do_ everything they want _may_ be willing to do it for $54K (but not in freaking SanFrancisco where it can cost $1500 a month for an efficiency apartment!) but they sure as hell aren't going to be walking the damned dog and assembling furniture. Frankly, my male could do all they want IT wise and more, and I'd rather pick up cans on the side of the street than let him take such a position... that's a career killer, right there, and rather degrading to boot. Anyone who would do that for that isn't worth that.

Plus, it's just stupid. IT guys are high-paid for a reason. No one else in the place, frequently, can do what they do. Whereas you can hire someone to come in and clean and empty the trashcans and stuff for a tiny fraction of what the hourly pay for the techy is. And in that kind of environment, the tech is _always_ going to have more of his own work to do than he can possibly finish, so every hour he spends wasting time on crap like picking up coffee and emptying the trash costs you time he'd be spending on important things, and therefore costs you money... especially if he's ethical and putting in overtime to try to get _everything_ done. He spends an hour doing untrained labor, then an hour later on doing what he should have been doing at, let's say, $20/hour (cheap as hell, especially there, but let's say he's desperate) so that's $40 the company spent. Hire someone at min. wage and let him do his job, and you've spent $26 instead. Thus these people prove that they are total idiots, doomed to failure, and have no basis for their arrogance and so are likely completely intolerable to work with or for. Ugh.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

Just because I thought I recognized the name, I skipped over to your journal, and I see your husband is a denizen of the Monastery.

Nice Frys rant BTW.

For me, it's the "we're science fiction fans" ...

[mouseworks.livejournal.com]

People can be s.f. fans without putting it in a job spec. Once they put it in the job spec., you know they're going to expect non-stop jabber about libertarian politics and new age economic theories, low pay because working for them is just so cool, requests for bringing them stuff at 9 p.m. at night while you're at work, without a car, which means that two employees have to leave work to make sure your whims are met. You'll collect everyone who couldn't get a job at Google or, here, Comcast, and the Feds will nail you for not paying unemployment compensation taxes when you finally sell the money-losing company to someone who lays off half your staff before it goes bankrupt for stupidly acquiring money losing companies -- and some actually intelligent Southerners from Charlotte, NC, figure out how to actually manage the company and make money with it by not putting any of the original crew on their board of directors.

Bet they'll find someone who's bipolar or who will steal every machine that's not actively in the network, or someone who is capable of faking experience, or someone who's so obscessive about work that he sleeps in the NOC so he can have his fatal heart attack without going home.

That explains it all.

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

They think Bruce Sterling's "Ivory Tower (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v434/n7034/pdf/434806.pdf)" is reality and utopia.

Re: That explains it all.

[mouseworks.livejournal.com]

That was really my experience working for a science fiction fan whose grannie gave him $2 million to start an ISP. When the kid was stealing the various bits that weren't nailed down, nobody said anything to then post-s.f. fan management. They fired him for leaving a picture of a handgun in a printer.

I had to drag a Swiss Army knife across Philadelphia to a science fiction meeting because my boss thought having a published writer run errands for him was just so cool, especially in front of other s.f. fans. Since I didn't have a car and public trans didn't connect up very well to where he was from where I was, the head engineer who dropped dead later at work drove me (and was the one who insisted that I had to do this)

And yes, they didn't pay the unemployment tax and pretended it was the fault of the clerical worker who'd been told to use this software to become artificially competant.

When I read this, I wondered if my ex-boss had moved to SF as he's into karate now and would probably describe himself as an athlete.

[joepro.livejournal.com]

I just think it's cool that you guys just type craigslist.org, and the sfbay area comes up by default. Did you ever realize how lucky you are? Also, you have probably been using this awesome website for years, I just discovered it and am addicted. It's funny how everything sounds so great on craigslist, even a glorified dog-walking job. Very funny stuff.