Bendable Blog

I haven’t made a new post in exactly a month, partly due to the influx of spam I’ve had to moderate through.  I don’t know enough about the running of the blog software to find an automated way around this, and it’s very annoying.

So recently I’ve been very upset about how low my pay is in comparison to national average and the average of other developers at the same level as I am.  I don’t get paid the least, but only a few thousand more than a junior developer, which is nearly an insult.

I’ve spent a lot of time becomming accustomed to the custom built software and API’s, I’m basically a go-to-guy and I get along well with everyone;  This would seem a huge boon to an office.  The problem is that I started when I was out of work and accepted a junior pay which hasn’t had much opportunity for large jumps.  To be clear I feel I should be making at least 10k (maybe 15k) more than I currently am, which would be no simple raise.

To this end I spoke with my manager today, but I feel since he is less than a month in the job that he doesn’t want to make too many waves.  I may end up with a decent increase and title if I can make it to my annual review in January, but that is 4 months away and I have other companies calling me willing to give me it now.  Why are people so stingy with their most important asset (people not money)?  If I were them I’d be throwing as much money as I could reasonably afford to good developers so that I didn’t have to continually hire new people who don’t understand the software and don’t get along with anyone every month.  In the last year and a half (nearly) I’ve worked there, we have gone through something like 14 staff.  They leave and go someplace else for more money and/or less late nights.  I feel taken advantage of in this regard, like “Oh this project requires 2 weeks?  Give it to Glen and tell him we only have a week, he’ll work extra hours for nothing”.

Why can’t this be simple?

This year I participated in the Big Game, which is basically getting as many people as possible to run around in a forest with paintball markers. This is Canada’s biggest big game, last year they had 1,500 people and this year it was over 2,200.

I think there are some people in the military that go to this, and some people who just take it way too seriously. I was in the 1% that didn’t wear camouflage, and some people’s camo was 3D so it was designed to look like a pile of leaves. There was at least one person who showed up in a Ghillie Suit, which he apparently had to remove due to the heat. There were a lot of fancy lightweight markers, some of which looked like military replicas, I had to use a rental which was made of steel and was about 15 kg. I noticed a lot of teams from all over the country with their names stitched on their backs and they had radios, which actually would have been handy since I kept losing track of the people I went with.

The worst part about the whole experience was that shortly after I left the house, I noticed the rubber sole of my work boots were deteriorating, but I didn’t realize how badly until I got to the event and saw that I had no sole left at all on my boots; It was clean to the metal. The metal tang was of course slipping on everything so I decided to pull them off, hoping there was at least a thin layer of rubber underneath. No such luck, it was the fabric bottom of the insole showing. Unfortunately I had not brought any backup shoes and wore the boots anyway all day long, feeling every small pebble I stepped on and at the end of the day when I ended up in mud about 5 cm deep it all got inside. By the end of the day the top was nearly coming off and the toe had split like some old cartoon, so I just decided to drive all the way home in sock feet.

When I got home I couldn’t get the lock to unlock. While I was waiting for the super, I noticed scuffs all around my lock, and my peep hole was knocked out.

I’m guessing they came around during the day, knocked to see if anyone was home, then busted out the peep hole to see if there was anything worth stealing. From the door you can see my Wii and Xbox, so then they tried to force the door. They busted the lock which just meant no one could get in.

Long story short, deadbolts are great security.

The Bendable Blog is finally back up since it was previously being hosted at my friend’s house and that server was shut down.

I’m just setting things up, so I’ll make a proper post later.