• 23 Posts
  • 292 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Depending on overheads, your time has to be worth between 1.8 - 2.2x your compensation. For the company to make money and stay in business, it has to charge above this amount.

    But if your company is charging you out at 4x your compensation, they are making a massive amount off your time. A reasonable amount would be aroung 2.1 - 2.5x your compensation.

    As an anecdote, my little brother finished his architecture degree after being a builder for years. He had both the practical skill from building and the eye of an artist. He got a job at a very prestigious firm. It wasn’t long before they saw how good he was, even though he was a grad his charge out rate was $180/hr. I asked how much of his time was billable, it was not as you would expect for a grad, his time was 100% billable work, he was being paid $25/hr. I was shocked, after trying to negotiate with the firm for a year he got a pay rise to $30/hr. It was only a month later he quit and started his own business, he charges much less than previously for the same work and he makes significantly more.




  • Climate change.

    In the mid 90’s when the data was becoming more mainstream, I felt that there wasn’t enough info to make a decision on it, looking back from now there was but the O&G lobby was muddying the waters as much as possible.

    A few years later, ~97/98; I had read enough studies and seen enough data to accept that, yes; we were changing the climate, and yes; we need to do something about it.

    It has shaped a lot of the decisions I have made in the last 25+ years.

    BTW electric power tools kick arse.



  • I once long ago worked in the incoming mail department for are insurance company. It was basically data entry.

    Thing was, there wasn’t enough work.

    There were two teams of five, plus a supervisor for each team, and a manager above them.

    So what would happen was, we would arrive in and go to our spots, a few minutes later the main would arrive. Most days there was 100 pieces of mail to process, a really busy day may have twice this amount.

    Even the most complex items would take me 10 minutes to process. The bulk was around 3 minutes, given the above, could personally have processed all the mail on an average day, with 3hrs to spare for complications.

    On an average day, I got in the order of 30-40 minutes of work.

    On slow days, it was more like 20.

    I started coming in late, sleeping at my desk. Wandering around, going up to the upper management offices and the roof.

    I eventually got fired, after months of this behaviour. Not because I was underperforming, no! I got fired, because I was “effecting the moral of the team”

    I can see the point of why I was fired. I was an arse, I wasn’t suitable for the role.


  • This fucks me off sooooooooo much; in NZ there are a lot of (a fuck of a lot) of roads that don’t have overtaking zones for a long way.

    Getting an opportunity to overtake the slow prick you have been following for 20 minutes, just to have them speed up…forcing me to go faster than I’m comfortable with, then being in front and have them sitting on your arse for the next 10km, even though you are going faster than before you overtook them…FUCK OFF!!!