Access Code seems like a perfect program for someone in your situation (basically a 9-month coding bootcamp for folks from underserved groups - it's in Queens, NY - I'm not sure whether you have to be from NYC to apply) http://www.c4q.nyc/accesscode
Does anyone know of any similar programs elsewhere in the country? (Looks like the OP is in Georgia)
Access Code looks pretty interesting. I'm going to see if I can find some similar programs offered that I'm qualified for. Some require funding that I do not have, however, so I don't know I would do that. I would need to do some sort of Kickstarter or take out a loan.
It kind of threw me that he used the word 'semi-colon' in his defense about not having too many extraneous hyphens - apparently that is an acceptable variant, but the most common spelling I've seen has always been 'semicolon'. Is this a British thing? Or does he just really like his hyphens?
Battlecode (https://www.battlecode.org/) is a programming competition run by MIT every January for programming an AI to compete in a game (the exact nature of the game changes every year. It's vaguely Starcraft-like, except completely played by AIs)
It's open to non-MIT students, as well.
They also offer lectures in January which will be streamed on twich.tv - these may be of some interest to you, even if you decide not to compete.
Maybe find an open source project to contribute to that interests you? I'm not active in the open source community myself, so I don't have any great suggestions - but maybe someone on here can suggest some projects with a good community that could use someone w/ your skillset?
Honestly curious, what is the alternative to PTO? I don't see why this is such a bad thing - you get X days off, you can use them for whatever reason you want - sick or vacation - as long as X is a reasonable number, what's the issue here?
Having people's sick days deduct from their vacation is an incentive to go to work when you're sick, jeopardizing the health (and productivity) of the team.
A much better solution is vacation days and unlimited sick days, as well as generous work-from-home opportunities for days when you're under the weather but not too sick to work.
The supposition here is that it's very unfair to impose a professional cost on getting sick. I don't see it that way. I see people getting sick because they take lousy care of themselves. They're fat and eat lousy food. Also, they make various idiotic stressful choices like having a 1hr commute, or putting a kid in some germ infested day care.
People who do not make such choices rarely get sick for more than the odd few of days a year. Why should they subsidize poor choices? Not being sick a lot is a reasonable and sensible professional expectation.
I'm not sure it's "very unfair to impose a professional cost on getting sick" but we don't have a way to measure whether people are sick other than self reporting until they are way past infectious, so you're not punishing getting sick but rather reporting that you are sick, and thus encouraging under reporting, which leads to everyone getting sick more.
Not only do you still have the few odd suck days but you might also have Kids that get sick. If you use up all your vacation time then you can't take any sick days
It's fine if that combined PTO is a healthy number like 25 days. It's sleazy if a company promises three weeks vacation trying to look generous when that three weeks is really combined vacation+sick+personal.
If you have days "Specific" for being sick--that you can't take to "hang out" then you are likely to take them when you get a mild cold-- benefit to the company is you recover faster and you don't spread your germ. However if it's just "PTO" you are likely to not "Waste" your PTO on a mild cold... thus infecting everyone and making you sick and less productive for longer...
1. Companies implement those policies to inflate their vacation policies. In the negotiation phase, candidates don't ask, "do you mean 15 days of vacation, or is it that shitty thing where sick days are pooled with vacation?"
2. It gives people an incentive to come into the office sick. The result is that half the office is ill (but showing up!) all winter. It's pretty disgusting.
If you're trying to build a polar vortex of disease, then implement a pooled PTO system. If you're trying to build a company, then don't. It's that simple. What are you trying to build?
Here's how I would set it up:
* Three weeks minimum vacation. (Investment banks have mandatory vacation and it's not a bad policy.) In tech, that wouldn't be a hard-and-set rule, but taking little vacation should be the choice that needs to be justified. Five weeks paid, anything beyond that is unpaid leave which can be taken without stigma.
* Don't come in if you're sick. It happens to all of us. If you're going to lose more than 10 days per year to health issues, talk to HR about accommodation and we'll try to make something work. If it's less than 10 days (e.g. colds and flus and stomach bugs) then just stay home.
* Don't worry about emergent personal issues. Let people know where you're going, then go. Come to work when you're ready to concentrate on work, not when you have nonsense hanging over your head.
In case any of you have a business w/ a physical location, yext.com sells a service that lets you manage these details (business hours, location, phone #, etc) across several different sites (Bing, Mapquest, Yahoo, etc + ~50 others), rather than handling them all individually.
(Disclaimer: my partner works there - but I don't get a commission or anything :-) Just seemed relevant to the discussion)
They can lock down the listing so that only you can edit them with their partner sites. But it wouldn't work in this case since they are not partnered with Google. We just had a presentation from them at my work a few weeks ago.
http://grammar.yourdictionary.com/style-and-usage/affect-eff...
Also, http://www.gingersoftware.com/english-online/spelling-book/c...