Enginero.com `en-jin-neer-o`

Did you hear? Get hired at Zappos and quit a week later for a nice $1,000 bonus. It may seem crazy, but I think it’s actually a great way to help ensure that your company is hiring and training people who really want to be there. This is just one of the many new ideas that I like to hear companies doing to obtain and retain quality employees. Check out the video from Harvard Business Publishing’s Blog:

Think Zappos is nuts? What would you do to keep quality personel in your company?

As you may recall, I recently received an automatic promotion because my colleague left the company. Since we are a department of only 2 people, I was told that I will be promoted to Lead. Well, that’s great and all, but here it is almost 3 weeks later and the approval for my raise and formal promotion are still on hold.

I know the reasons why it is on hold and they are valid. However, it doesn’t change the fact that I have been actively managing my new role and I have no idea if I will be given retroactive pay. If I don’t receive retroactive pay when the raise/promotion finally comes through or the raise is less than I consider fair, I am considering treating it like a normal job offer and letting them know that I would be inclined to “persue other opportunities”.

The reason I am inclined to do this is because I know approximately how much the company is saving by my colleague departing. I also know that they will not be hiring a replacement for him, so my position will stay at its’ current level of demand. It would be difficult for me to not consider it a slap in the face if they only offer a piddly little raise considering they know that I am essentially being asked to assume the role of what 2 people handled prior.

What do you think I should do? Have you dealt with a similar situation before?

As you have already read, I recently received an automatic promotion. Part of the process of moving on involves updating all of the passwords that the former employee could have known or stored. None of the other people in our department feel like he would actually do anything malicious, but it is corporate policy, so it had to be done. The added stressor was that we have to be PCI Compliant, so the faster we cut off the former employee’s access, the better off we are.

I have done many password updates over the years and never had a problem before, until Monday afternoon. Once I had all of the people who would be affected by the password change notified, I wrote a quick program to handle updating/deleting all of the applicable users and passwords. The script took literally milliseconds to run, but when it was done, no one could connect to the database. Of course, I was crapping bricks and what’s worse, I had no answers.
Fortunately, after running around (the internet) frantically for about 15 minutes I found the problem.

We have a dedicated database server that our users access from other machines. Most of these users have the database client that was designed for MySQL 4.x and our database server is now running 5.x. So, the fix was in the password algorithm function. I had created the new passwords using the current PASSWORD() function and I needed to use the bugfix function OLD_PASSWORD(). Once I made the necessary changes to my program and reran it, everything was fine.

If you got to this page by searching for an answer to this problem, more information about this issue can be found in the MySQL docs.

This conversation happens to me quite a bit at work. I am a bigtime “frugal luncher”. I honestly have a hard time bringing myself to buying lunch when I’m at work. I will actually end up doing the calculation of how much the lunch just cost me and how long I had to work to “earn” the meal. Silly, yes… Completely me, also yes…

On the contrary, tons and tons of people where I work eat lunch out regularly. This includes the bulk of the people in my department. I work at a rather large company, but in a very small department and I can realistically say that I am the only one who rarely goes out to lunch. It doesn’t stop the offers though, so I thought I would share some ways that have worked for me when trying to safely to handle the conversation that I started in the topic. Since this type of conversation can very easily turn into a situation where the person asking misconstrues your motivation, it’s important to handle it sincerely and with great caution:

Colleague: Hey, want to go to lunch?
Me/You Sorry, I brought mine…

• … and I’m so busy that I’m not even sure if I’m going to have time to eat it. Thank you very much for the offer though.
• … and it’s leftovers from about a week ago that are at their “eat them now or throw them out stage”. Thank you very much for the offer though.
• … because I’m already over my miscellaneous spending budget for the week and I’m trying to save some money right now. Thank you very much for the offer though.
• … because I needed to spend my lunch break today making a few personal calls. Thank you very much for the offer though.

These 4 “excuses” are really meant to do one thing and one thing only and that’s make it totally justifiable that your reasoning for not going out to lunch is based entirely on you and not “who asked”. If your decision to not go out and eat is based on the cost, focusing too much on that as a reason can make the person asking self-conscious about their own financial state. That scenario can get very awkward very quickly.

For those of you reading this who typically do the asking:

Please try to keep in mind that the fact that you are asking them means that you feel like you have enough of a connection with that person to enjoy their company during the meal. By the same token, they probably would feel the same way about going to lunch with you. So, if you get turned down for any of the reasons I mentioned above, please don’t spend the next 10 minutes trying to “talk the person into it”. It could just be that you’ll be asking someone like me, who might end up giving in and then spending the rest of the day kicking themselves for spending the money they had no intention of spending that day.

Have you ever dealt with a work related frugality issue? How did it turn out?