Did we read the same article? "After calling their support twice, explaining the situation and asking for a reason, we have received nothing but “the decision is final, and we will not provide more information”."
in european you can report them if they won't give a good reason, for canceling your contract.
You can even complain at your national bank authority. https://eba.europa.eu/consumer-corner/how-to-complain
since they are a official bank in europe they would need to give correct info.
That brings back bad memories of my first day at a new job. We had discussed in the interview that they were flexible with the time I got there. On the first day, one of the first questions I was asked:
New Boss: "So, what time will you be here every day?"
Me: "I thought we had discussed that being flexible as traffic can be unpredictable?"
New Boss: "We are flexible on the time, but you have to be here by that time every day."
This was the policy I implemented with my team and everyone thought it was pretty reasonable. It's basically pick your schedule, but stick to it. Otherwise scheduling meetings becomes unmanageable. That being said, I was also very clear about the policy during the interview process.
That makes sense. Employers save themselves a lot of employee dissatisfaction through honesty and transparency during the hiring process. If they misrepresent themselves, they end up with employees who aren't a good match as a result of decisions made on bad information, and who feel cheated to boot.
Edit: Some companies misrepresent their cultures because they know their actual behavior is unattractive to workers. Bolstering Glassdoor reviews by encouraging unusually satisfied (or otherwise motivated) employees is just another form of this. The strategy is successful at tricking employees into accepting poor working conditions while also demonstrating that the employer isn't worth trusting.
Core hours worked well for me, until one office decided that their core hours would change due to high traffic. Suddenly an office that was only an hour earlier than mine was now leaving just after lunch. I had an office that was 11.5hrs off and we had a great setup where I would do night meetings one week and they would the other. The office an hour off of mine could never get their shit together to schedule meetings.
I agree. The worst part was one boss was in my office while the other was in the "one hour off" office. The local boss would get annoyed because I'd have to schedule something with the other boss who was already home when I'd get back from lunch. To "fix" the problem I moved my lunch back an hour but eventually that conflicted with local employees' lunch and meetings.
The way the place was run I was expecting one of them to suggest I just skip lunch.
I can't even remember the last time I had a productive meeting for work.
Everything that meetings at the places I've worked at, my entire life, should have been sent out in advance in /some/ format (today it'd be email) for review.
When you do that, you can also have a deadline for rounds of comments... 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc, up to a decision deadline where whomever's allowed to make the decision can make their choice with all the views and objections/opinions laid out.
There's literally no reason to ever /actually/ have a meeting of the kind that I've been a part of.
I'm pretty happy with this as well. I work 7-3, but I work those hours every day. I've walked out of meetings that have gone past 3 and no one has complained. It's been a great experience
Same here. What I did was creating an out-of-office calendar event for every day which basically blocks others from inviting me to late meetings. I stick very tightly to my schedule usually just +/- 5 minutes.
Can people just log into meetings remotely? This seems to work fine for us, in any given meeting we have people physically in the office, WFH, working remotely, calling in from the road, etc.
In my previous agency life, this was something that I experienced as well. A short lived product that was due in less time than any sane dev would estimate. We all knew that we "should" write tests, but there just wasn't time. And in 6 weeks the project would be relegated to living in source control because the campaign was over.
It made hiring devs fun. Trying to explain to people why it was that way, and their insistence that software development doesn't work that way.
> A short lived product that was due in less time than any sane dev would estimate.
> And in 6 weeks the project would be relegated to living in source control because the campaign was over.
That is exactly it for 90% of agency projects. Underquoted to get the deal, a rapid development cycle that leaves the devs feeling dead, and then once that first release is out, you have maybe 1 or 2 small updates and the project is never touched again, or at least not for a year or two.
There is no world where it makes sense to write tests for these projects.
Advertising agency, marketing agencies where technology takes a back seat to marketing/promotions etc. Places where projects number in the thousands on websites, apps, games, many systems clients, new technologies etc.
Every developer/engineer should work in an agency for a while because of the amount of sheer work and lifeline of said work is short, projects are primarily promotions and one and dones in many cases.
What we did at the agency I worked at was try to harvest systems from common work. Landing page systems that then had base code that was testable and common across all, create a content management system that supports agency specifics. Promotions/instant win systems that had common code across all and could live longer than the 3 week promotion, create a prize/promotions system that ran all future promotions and improved AFTER most promotions due to time constraints. Game systems for promotional games / advergaming, after new games and types became common or re-usable etc.
Many times, you have to take an after the ship approach and harvest systems that make sense from the sheer amount of work you are going across hundreds of projects. Where good engineering really comes along on subsequent systems where promotions, projects or games/apps were initially made and proved a need or prototype for how to do future projects quicker and with more robust systems.
Testing and doing code specifically for that campaign may be usable or not, but later you can harvest the good ideas and try to formulate a time saving system for the next, including better testing and backbone/baseline libs/tools/tests etc.
I have worked in agencies 5+ years and game studios 5+ years and both are extremely fast paced, usually the harvesting approach is the one that is workable in very pressurized project environments like that. Initial projects/games/apps etc are harvested for good ideas and the first one might even be more prototype like where testing/continuous integration might not fit in the schedule the first time around, or might not even be clear what to standardize and test until multiple types of those projects it out. Starting out with verbose development on new systems/prototypes/promotions/campaigns/games might not be budget capable or time allowed to do so on the first versions as they might be throwaway after just a few weeks or months. There is a delicate balance in agencies/game studios like that where the product and shipping on time is more important on the first go around as the project timeline and lifeline may be short. Subsequent projects that fit that form are where improvements can be made.
Just seeing the picture of the machine brings back the melted plastic smell. I remember trying to collect each one at the Milwaukee zoo, and inevitably breaking the head off of them before long.
