This advice works in other scenarios where companies string you along hoping you will give up and disappear.
Once my car was badly damaged by someone who ran a stop sign. It was clearly the other driver's fault. Her insurance was Allstate. They strung me along for more than a month "investigating" this obvious situation.
My car was an older one that was worth about the cost of the repairs, and they probably thought I would just give it up. But it was my only transportation and I needed it for work.
I did some research on California's insurance regulations and discovered their requirement that claims be settled within 40 days. After 40 days passed, I wrote a email similar to the letter examples in this article, giving then five days before I reported them to California's insurance department.
It was astonishing to see the immediate change in their behavior. The adjustor who had been playing telephone tag for weeks called me within an hour and arranged for a body shop near my home to start work immediately.
They laugh at angry bluster, but will move mountains to appease a focused person who can bring a regulatory agency down on them.
I greatly enjoyed this comment and the subthread it inspired.
For the peanut gallery: never give anyone in an extension in writing; your ask should be for immediate performance.
Why? Well, there are a lot of varieties of "performance" which aren't happy outcomes for you. Should you give someone an extension to their deadline and have them perform in a way which is displeasing to you, the default is they do not have a regulatory infraction if you complain [0]. Should someone blow their deadline and then perform and then have you complain to the regulator, they basically always have a regulatory infraction regardless of whether their performance is satisfactory, so their incentive is do whatever possible to prevent the complaint.
[0] Situation dependent, obviously, but lots of regulatory regimes will have an escape hatch like "unless agreed to by the customer" or "unless agreed to by the counterparty in writing."
My wife cut her foot on some broken glass on a cruise ship and it required a visit to the onboard doctor's office for stitches. We talked with Guest Services about not being charged for this, since the glass had likely been broken for quite some time, and was a hazard since many people wear open-toed shoes on the ship. We walked off the boat without paying for the medical care, assuming Guest Services took care of it.
About three months later, we received a letter from the cruise line stating we hadn't paid our bill and owed the a few hundred dollars, I believe it was around $200 or $300. My wife is an attorney and sent them a registered letter discussing follow-up care for the cut after we left the ship, duties breached, etc. to the corporate office and CC'd to general council. A week later we received a letter saying we didn't owe them any money, along with a $500 voucher for a future trip. Their reply also included specific denials on the legal complaints, which means someone in the GC office had to deal with it. That part I found particularly satisfying.
Similar experience with a telco in my state. As soon as I called the state regulator about being strung along over a bait and switch, the telco bent over backwards to clear up the issue.
There was also the time I took an airline to small claims court after repeated customer service calls and a demand notice failed to get their attention; the airline's chief counsel called me up at work after they received the notice from the court. They still failed to resolve the problem and also didn't show up for the hearing, so it was a summary judgement in my favor with damages multiplied x3.
Tip if you do escalate to a court or state regulator: Keep copies of everything including postage receipts with tracking info and records of phone calls (screenshots of call logs, notes about each call, etc.)
I would bet that if one is unsavvy about it one gets paid out about as quickly as they pay vendors (which can be glacial) but that a demand letter to the general counsel with a judgement attached results in a check getting cut no later than the business day after the day the letter is opened.
>They laugh at angry bluster, but will move mountains to appease a focused person who can bring a regulatory agency down on them.
Yuuup. I got this from Kaiser, whose ADHD screening policy would blow through mandatory timely access to care deadlines. Calmly stating mandatory timelines, taking notes, and asking Kaiser to fulfill them got me much more responsive and timely care when getting treatment for ADHD.
If you're not getting what you want, you 100% want your case handled by someone responsible for not having regulatory incidents.
I once did some work at an insurance company and they had some systems problems slowing down payouts etc. There was a room full of people specifically tasked with fobbing off clients. The magic words were, "I want to make an official complaint." They now had 48 hours to fix the problem or they had to register the complaint with the regulator... and they didn't want that to happen. If that happened you were passed to a professional complaint handler who would move heaven and earth to get things settled before then.
I have since managed to change the tone of several conversations to regulated industries with that phrase!
Now make a GDPR request at the same time... that seems to get you answers too
I was strung along by a telco; told several times that the issue was fixed only to discover on the next bill it wasn't.
On my third (and what ended up being my last call to them), I told them I had the FTC's online complaint form open on my computer and was in the process of filling it out.
I was immediately transfered to someone who said they will fix my problem and call me back in 10 minutes when it was done. They called back in 15 minutes, and I never had a problem after that.
I would have catalogued my attempts to resolve the issue, and then filed all of it in an official complaint with the regulators after 40 days. By giving them extra time to comply with the regulations, it simply validates their strategy of wasting people's time and hoping they give up doesn't result in negative consequence for them, but instead that is the optimal strategy for them.
That's unfortunate, hopefully when the are caught, the punitive damages are sufficient to force a change in their cost benefit calculations towards doing what's right. I wouldn't hold my breath though.
I had a similar problem, with a much gnarlier insurer than Allstate, and the answer turned out to be to contact my own insurer (Progressive) and ask to have the claim subrogated --- Progressive paid for my damages, and then went after the liable insurer themselves.
That works only when you have comprehensive coverage, but then it works really well, also because you'll avail yourself of the rental reimbursement that you have on your policy. But the OP wrote he drove an old beater car and most likely carried only liability coverage. They'll defend against claims from other parties then but won't assist you with your own claims.
Actually, nobody interviews carpenters. You either:
A. Call the carpenters' union and take whoever they send over.
B. Ask some carpenters you trust if they know any decent carpenters who are looking for work, and when they show up at the job site sober with appropriate tools, you put them to work.
It's a slightly different process than programming.
However every so often we do have to advertise for a position, and then the process of weeding through the applications probably isn't so different from what everyone else has to do.
At this point in my career I can say that it's quite easy to spot a skilled carpenter if I spend a few hours with them. I imagine an experienced programmer could do the same. The problem is getting to that point.
> At this point in my career I can say that it's quite easy to spot a skilled carpenter if I spend a few hours with them. I imagine an experienced programmer could do the same. The problem is getting to that point.
Well, that why's it says "IF" they hired carpenters the way we hire programmers... The key word here is IF. It shows how nit picky one can be while choosing programmers.
Q: So, your resume says you've been a systems administrator for 10 years. Have you worked much with Linux?
A: Sure, almost all my experience has been with Linux.
Q: How much experience do you have with Red Hat. That is what we use here.
A: Hmmm. Red Hat. Most of the servers I've worked on are Debian based. But I worked a lot with Fedora in college.
Q: But not Red Hat?
A: Well I have some Red Hat experience. I had a temp job where I was setting up Red Hat servers back in 2008.
Q: How long was that.
A: About six months.
Q: Well, perfect! We have an internship available to someone with six months of Red Hat experience! But wait a minute... What version of Red Hat was that?
I'm definitely not as beautiful as I think. In my mind, I'm still a dashing handsome 25-year old. But the stupid mirror keeps insisting that I'm in my fifties with the wrinkles and sags to prove it.
I'm not so sure, in the EU they have already had a little bit of pressure[1] but we have seen them change, 3 years ago, if you put in TSLA.US a finance.google.com result would have been the top link.
But it works the other way around too. If the system is gameable, the system will only be successful until the gamers change.
That's Google's problem in the eternal arms race of search. Google identifies a property that good content has (inbound links, keywords in the url, age of domain), which improves the rankings for a while until the spammers figure it out and morph their content to match. And then we're left in the wasteland that everybody has to do SEO just to keep up with the junk peddlers.
I think the OP is right. His dad was a surrogate for his own fears. It's easy to put parents up on a pedestal and see them as the voice from above, but in reality the only difference between parents and children is age. A different life stage might bring a different attitude about security and such, but that doesn't mean forgetting about what it means to be young. The OP's dad himself had the pioneering urge and acted on it. He understands.
I'm in my fifties and recently back to the security of regular employment after quitting my good job 12 years ago to start my own business. It was a long, hard time, without much to show for it, but I don't regret any of it, and my three kids turned out fine.
As another dad to the OP: I wish you the best of luck. I'm sure you'll do great.
How about the fourth kind of lazyness--not knowing what the hell to do out of the many choices available, so you sit around hoping the right choice will make itself obvious. It can turn into a very long wait.
"If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice". That Rush quote seemed relevant.
I do this often myself. I try to make educated decisions which means researching all my options. Eventually you end up with "analysis paralysis". Being overwhelmed with all the choices and variables and the "right choice" isn't always clear.
I blame this somewhat on tv and movies that always have the epiphanic moment where the right choice becomes clear and the protagonist knows what to do. We usually don't get those in real life.
While the sentiment is possibly there, I haven't encountered Ayn Rand using those words specifically and I've read a fair amount of her work. Can you give a more specific citation? Otherwise I'm fairly certain it was an original lyric.
I think you are in reality dealing with fear. I think the answer is to realize that you won't move forward if you don't do anything. Simply being scared that you will make, or made, the wrong choice is akin to a deer frozen in headlights.
"Alas", said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into."
"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.
I interviewed for a job with them (Nintendo of America), and also did some freelance work over the past couple of years, and I got the feeling whatever they may have been in the past, they currently run on a fairly bureaucratic model, and are not the kind of place that inspires or rewards innovation and creativity.
They had video games in the lobby, but the recruiter warned me "Don't play them!" She told me a previous candidate she took there got a job, but was later fired for playing a video game on company time.
> I got the feeling whatever they may have been in the past, they currently run on a fairly bureaucratic model, and are not the kind of place that inspires or rewards innovation and creativity.
You could say exactly this about most Japanese companies these days. Now what's interesting is that change may be in the air. The current prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has managed to line up the incentives correctly in the Japanese government's notoriously intransigent bureaucracy and started massive economic reform (often referred to as "Abenomics"), a topic that is the cover story of this week's issue of The Economist[0,1].
What Abe has done so far cannot create permanent change by itself, but if he is able to follow through on his other goals and make lasting structural reforms to the Japanese economy and society, then we may see an economic resurgence in Japan. That's something that the West should be looking forward to and supporting, given the need for a stronger counterweight in the Asia-Pacific region to China. It was previously believed that India would take this role, but things haven't progressed there as fast as people had hoped a decade ago[2].
The problem is that the structural reforms are the one thing that actually would make a difference, and they're also the one thing that not only hasn't happened but hasn't even seen a plan put forward.
'Abenomics' is forced inflation (which is drawing more and more concern from the G8 since it's going to become a problem for the rest of the world soon) accompanied by massive public works spending (which was a failed previous LDP platform that they can't seem to get past) that provide absolutely no change, and only work in the short-term, if you can even consider this "working," as it's creating no lasting change.
i understand that structural reform is the 3rd phase in the "3 arrows" agenda.
printing money / pork is obviously easier politically. if there is to be any significant reforms, my guess is it will not kick in until well after the upper house elections.
edit: worryingly the gov appears far more interested in nationalism then economic reforms... so my hopes are not high.
Exactly my point. Structural reform is a nigh-impossible problem, upper house elections or not, in any country, and Japan has a well-established and deeply-rooted history of "change is bad."
In that culture of consensus, change simply has no chance. I have many friends in Japan, and my fear for them is that their government is even more obstinate than others, despite their situation being even worse. The thing that makes this problem intractable, though, is that their people are the same as people everywhere: They'll swallow the propaganda, they'll believe in the radical, just as long as the radical doesn't require they change their lives.
No one wants to change, and the current administration in Japan knows that. They're playing on it, just as the last administration did, and as the next one will. No one will do anything until it's too late; change is too hard, too expensive, too invasive, too inconvenient.
I hope things work out for Japan. I just really, really worry that if the current political movements go through and amend the constitution in the ways proposed, Japan will go from a traditional and slightly stilted democracy to an oligarchy in all but title, run by reactionary nationalists without their people's interests at heart.
[edit: This is a problem that's playing out in many industrialized nations and will play out in many more; Japan is just seeing more and different parts of it more quickly due to its unique situation.]
A cow-orker of mine interviewed there a couple of years ago. He said it was pretty bad, too.
One of his standard questions (he's kind of a snarky guy:) "How many of your co-workers should be fired?" He generally gets answers in the range of ten percent. At Nintendo, they were saying "fifty percent."
Damn, even when Atari was screwed up, it wasn't frowned upon to play games. That's /really/ bad.
> Damn, even when Atari was screwed up, it wasn't frowned upon to play games. That's /really/ bad.
I dunno. The issue here seems more one of culture-shock than right- or wrong-styles.
I think the problem is that people see "game company" and they think "wacky-and-crazy-everybody-chillin'-in-t-shirts-and-playing-foosball-while-shooting-nerf-guns-at-the-boss-woohoo-caffeine!" American-style game company.
Nintendo isn't like that, and never has been. They're a large Japanese company, and one which has always been sort of conservative and traditional (even by comparison with other Japanese companies).
If you want to work for a wacky-foosball company, then I suppose Nintendo probably isn't for you, but it's pretty clear that good games can be made under either model. Whatever the opinion of some EA dev on the wii-u, and regardless of how "good" the wii-u is, Nintendo has had more influence on the gaming world than EA ever will.
Even the accusation of "bureaucracy" in the original post, which while certainly true—Nintendo is a large company, and large companies tend towards the bureaucratic—seems a bit off the mark. I don't think it's an issue of bureaucracy, I think it's an issue of culture.
I also think first impressions can be somewhat deceiving. I work for a very large Japanese company, which is crazy bureaucratic, and while this can be very annoying, there's also a lot of loyalty and flexibility at the small team level. That sort of thing is hard to see from outside.
This is ridiculous. Any company that expects to turn a profit can't have employees spending significant amounts of time playing video games when they're supposed to be working.
This is why the "hey, come work here, we have XBoxes and Playstations" model is crap: You don't get a job to play video games, and people don't hire you do play video games (unless you're a playtester, then you'll play them til you hate them, if you can really call that playing).
I bet those guys at Mojang and Valve never, ever, play video games. I know this because their profit per employee is so high. I is clear and a logical conclusion.
/sarcasm
If I had a game company and I had an employee that was not spending at least 25% of their time playing our game and other games and telling me how to make our games better, I'd fire them.
