By left, I assume you mean left the job completely?
As interesting as a story this is, is it really the only reason you chose to leave? Did you enjoy the work and did you try and negotiate at all? I don't mean to criticize your prioritization but the decision seems a little impulsive given how you described it. As you mentioned you gave your priorities a lot of thought, but what about the decision itself?
I worked at a small startup like this once. The boss/founder came from a non-software background, so he was used to expecting everyone in the office by 8 am. The way I explained it to him was "You pay me to think about the software, and solve the problems. I do this not only in the office, I do this in the shower, I do this on the way home, I do this on the way to work. Now, is it more important for me to be thinking about the performance issues we are having while I am drinking my coffee and walking to work, or do you want me to be preoccupied and stressing about being 5 minutes late so you do not yell at me?"
I work at what the owners call a "15-year old startup" and they're very strict about being on time for the office hours. And the reasons you cite (in the shower, while commuting) are among the reasons they pay us salary. We're expected to work a small amount in the evenings and weekends as well as our 40 hours during the week. Our management uses the excuse "Well, it's the tech industry, we all work extra."
Wow that is somewhat surprising. I work at hedge fund, what one might consider a fairly stogy industry, and nobody cares when I come in to work, which is 9 or 10 usually.
There are many jobs (though largely not office jobs) where you HAVE to be on time, where not being on time seriously throws a lot of scheduled things out of whack. It is not unreasonable at all in these professions to expect someone to always be on time, and get rid of them and find someone more responsible if they cannot be. One good example would be all of the elementary school teachers I've ever known; they NEED to be at work at their start time because that's when they get a roomful of children handed over to them. Being habitually tardy or unreliable in any way is completely unacceptable.
The friction here is probably from someone used to working in one of the job fields like this coming into an office environment where your hours aren't as relevant as the quality and volume of your work.
I will say though, I was a lead developer at my last job and I had some issues with an employee (with two young kids) not putting in forty hours a week, and he wasn't otherwise making up for it either. He'd be the last one in and the first one out, and it was problematic because he was supposedly the senior developer on the team but he was not meriting his higher salary. In the end I suppose you could say the real problem was with his output, not his hours, but they did seem like interrelated issues.
I would argue in this case that people simply need to plan a bit more around the inherent frailty of humans.
You can have supply teachers on call. Or you can pay them a bit extra to arrive early and mark work in that time. (e.g. make the actual working day 5-6 hours; other hours used for marking, planning, etc). There are other solutions.
One that sticks out in my mind is that when I used to work retail, our hourly pay stopped when the store closed. Obviously you don't and can't leave then. The last customer is slow, you might need to lock up, etc.
In most cases, all you need is for management to actually think about these issues and to not allow the quest for margins to result in abusive practices.
When you're a contractor then yes, you are The One, you have chosen and need to be reliable. When you are part of a massive organization with profit in the billions (e.g. a supermarket), it really is a deliberate choice they are making which results in stress being loaded on you.
Did he do architecture? Design? Mentoring? Its not all about the hours. A manager, for instance, was probably paid higher than anyone in the group and didn't do any code.
It's not that they think work is more important than your private life. They want you to think that work is more important. This peculiar brand of totalitarianism is popular in startup-land, hence the beer outings every damn Friday.
Does he know that's why I'm coming in 5 minutes late? Maybe he just thinks I'm a slacker who doesn't want to get out of the bed in the morning. I think I'd rather try and explain to him the situation I'm in before walking out. He's probably doing it out of ignorance, not out of malign. You can talk to him about it and explain your side and maybe understand his.
Right now you're making the same kind of judgements of the boss as he is making of you.
- every now and then I'll edit a photo, upload it somewhere, and then get very confused about why it looks so weird when showing it to somebody on my phone -- it would be great if f.lux shut off when certain user-configurable applications are in focus
It's a good project; thankfully there is still the BeOS book within it so you can write applications on it using the tidy BeOS API. I think there are GCC 2 and GCC 4 compatibility issues (attempting to maintain binary compatibility won't work with GCC 4), and they have got a package management system which some feel was too Linux-like, but it's an interesting project and can breathe life into an old computer somewhere.
Might have something to do with the scrolling: the video at the top autoplays if it's visible and pauses if you scroll past it. If you've already paused it and you scroll past it makes the audio cut in and cut out for a second (at least on my machine). Scrolling back up causes it to autoplay again even though I already paused it.
As someone who thinks Lisp is pretty cool and uses Emacs to study it and is about 100 pages into SICP: I still don't get it. Common Lisp macros went entirely over my head too. A programmable programming language? Aren't all languages like that? I've only been programming for a couple years so I'm afraid I might not recognize the value of Lisp until I use more of the "less powerful" alternatives.
The principal data structure of Lisp is a list which is written like this: (a b c d). Like the article mentions, when you see Lisp code you're in fact reading the same list syntax, only that, when the list itself is not quoted, the "a" is evaluated as a function, which is why (+ 1 2) behaves the way it does. If you quote the list by saying "'(a b c d)" then it is a list of symbols, so "'(+ 1 2)" does nothing.
Hence, Lisp code is made of nested lists. When you think further about it, it means that Lisp metaprogramming facilities may do things just with plain list manipulation functions! So it's not about metaprogramming itself, it's that it's incredibly easy. This is what people refer as "code as data" and "homoiconicity" and so on.
Lisp "advocacy" often touts the power of macros in an abstract and unconvincing way. Persuasion by explanation isn't very effective. I'm not very interested in persuading others that Lisp macros are necessary, and there are many languages I like to use that don't have macros. However!
Yes, all programming languages are programmable. But Lisp tends to be unlimited in its programmability, in almost the same way that Unix is: if you have root, you can change anything. I'm pretty sure that in most Common Lisp systems, you can redefine large parts of the compiler at runtime. And so on.
Syntactic macros are just one part. They can be extremely handy. Lots of Lisp systems use them well. Random examples: the DEFSYSTEM macro of ASDF; the DEFINE-EASY-HANDLER macro of Hunchentoot (a Common Lisp web server); the (controversial) LOOP and ITERATE macros; etc.
Another somewhat random example: Movitz was (is?) a project to write an x86 kernel in Common Lisp. It actually included its own compiler. It defines a lot of macros for instruction definition [0] and uses them in code that I don't understand anything of [1] but is probably very clear to someone versed in assembly.
Recently I've been trying to add some nice logging to a JavaScript program, and it's a typical scenario where the normal syntax is just annoying enough to make the code ugly and hard to scan—if I had macros, I could invent some other syntax.
How to use macros is a tradeoff that I guess comes with Lisp experience, but they can be a powerful escape when the standard syntax is annoying, and a way to define your own DSLs without restriction.
> A programmable programming language? Aren't all languages like that?
How would you write a program to write a program? How can you use this generated program in your other code? It's really hard to do with a lot of programming languages, even those that have eval like JavaScript, so it never occurs to people that something like a template system or a code translator/DSL should be trivially easy to write.
I found the "Little Schemer" an enjoyable tour on exorcizing the power of lisp. Depending on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go there are a plethora of information in various AI memos as well as the READscheme web resource with the original LAMBDA papers (readscheme.org) which most certainly worth PRINTing if anything to get primed for SiCP.
Funny I should see this. Just today I finished section 1-3-3 in the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) which dealt with continued fractions. I threw my answers up on Pastebin if someone wants to take a look, it's exercises 1.37 through 1.39 [0].
As interesting as a story this is, is it really the only reason you chose to leave? Did you enjoy the work and did you try and negotiate at all? I don't mean to criticize your prioritization but the decision seems a little impulsive given how you described it. As you mentioned you gave your priorities a lot of thought, but what about the decision itself?