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[theinevitable]

Hey, the new web app is cool, but it seems like people will want to see stuff for the whole city and not just individual neighborhoods
"No, that isn't what the app is for. It's for _____ dataset, not for the whole city."
Ok, but isn't it intuitive that if people can click any part of the city and get data for it, they'll eventually want to see the whole city? There isn't anywhere on the app where it says "for small areas only"
That isn't what the app is for, that data is different, the (statistical stuff about why the datasets are different that I am perfectly aware of)
But do our users know that?
No, but they should.
Can we put something explaining it?
No they wouldn't understand it.
Uh, so how are people supposed to get information about the whole city?
They can download excel files from our website.
...Can we link to those from the app?
No. That's not what the app is for.

Sorry for all the job stuff lately. But jesus christ these people.

[AugustWest]

Sorry for all the job stuff lately. But jesus christ these people.

Welcome to government work.

[theinevitable]

Applied to a job at a tech startup today. Maybe I can get hired and deal with a whole opposite type of frustration.

[pmcd9]

Applied to a job at a tech startup today. Maybe I can get hired and deal with a whole opposite type of frustration.

And more money?

[theinevitable]

Yeah it's an entry level tech job so it pays... 20k more than my city job. I think.

[theinevitable]

Both members of The Couple having "wait am I in the wrong career" meltdowns is resulting in a lot of "what if we just move to a cabin in the woods" conversations. Are there downsides I'm not thinking of yet? Hm.

[miles]

Downsides to moving to a cabin in the woods? Bears maybe.

[theinevitable]

Two interview this coming week! Nice.

Also: was doing a super frustrating data thing with the Bad Boss and ... damn... for a smart guy he sure doesn't know how to read or listen. I kept explaining that the dataset he told me to look at was only for people born in 1980 and he kept sending feedback like "only look at the current data" and "the 1980 data is not relevant do not include it."

Eventually I threw my findings on a map, and APPARENTLY all he wanted for the last 2 years is for me to make pretty maps. I just did the basics (put the numbers on a map, color code with pretty colors, add a title and legend) and he was astonished. The first time in 2 years of work that he's responded to something I did entirely positively instead of nitpicking it. Maybe he didn't know I could make maps? I have definitely made them for him before...

[pmcd9]

Downsides to moving to a cabin in the woods? Bears maybe.

How is that a downside? Bears are awesome!

[theinevitable]

Go Ash! You’ve got the spurs on and they’re all saddled up.


Got rejected from the high-paying tech job after a pretty rude interview.

I have a second interview soon for an unpaid coding thing. It’s 3 months and then they help you find a job— they make money by charging recruiters a fee to recruit their alumni. It is not a school, it’s more like a writer’s retreat for coders... people work on projects together, learn stuff together, focus. A backup plan.

Today we had an agency-wide meeting and it made me wanna puke. I can’t believe all the self-congratulation. Our projects in the past 3 years created over 6000 units of affordable housing.
Congrats, that is enough affordable housing for ... 0.07% of New Yorkers. People asked pointed questions about how low our pay is compared to other city agencies and the private sector, and they talked about how satisfying and innovative our work is. Maybe I just haven’t gotten a glimpse of the innovative part.

I submitted an anonymous question about my civil service issue (theoretically a lot of people are in the same boat) and they talked about potential “problems” as a far off thing and not a short deadline like my immediate supervisors said. I think they’re just trying to get rid of me.

[theinevitable]

Whoa. I finally used my small programming abilities to make a thing I can actually use.

The NYC Jobs website is an abomination of web design. It's one of those sites where if you click back or refresh everything disappears, you can't open things in new tabs, and there's no way to save a job you like. I spent the evening figuring out how the website works, how it requests the job data from the server, and how to use the python modules for downloading things from the internet. A few hours later, I now have a script that will download all the data, find the agency, department, job title, and job listing ID, which it then uses to generate the permanent link (I figured out the permalink is a bunch of boilerplate and then the job listing ID). It saves them all to a text file with a link to the posting.

Next steps: 1. Set it up to run every day and 2. Figure out how to automatically throw the listings up on a really simple website.

I could probably have found them all on Indeed.com... but then I wouldn't be able to say I know how to scrape data from a website.

[Carlos del Vaca]

This times working theory: give precedence to all candidates younger than me, and of a different gender or race or creed.

I know, man. Every time I read something that's like "Women/people of color want to take over from white men!" I'm like "Good, about freakin' time." We haven't done such a great job.

[Carlos del Vaca]

Two amusing things from the band's winery gig yesterday.
1. "Wagon Wheel" is in our repertoire, but like a lot of musicians we are kind of sick of it and everybody plays it so why bother. We hadn't done it at the last few gigs. But yesterday during our last set, I called an audible and said "We're doing this, suck it up." And the group of young women in the back, who generally seemed to be enjoying themselves but hadn't interacted much with the music all afternoon, got up and danced. After I turned to my dudes and said "THAT is why we do that song."
2. A middle aged couple straight up made out like ten feet from us for extended periods during our show. I had to turn myself so I wasn't looking straight at them. I'm glad they found our music so romantic.

[theinevitable]

Wagon Wheel is the only song that i've experienced the way people used to experience real folk songs. That is, I heard it a bunch of times played by my friends around drunken campfires, and grew to love it very much.

And then one day I heard the real version. Damn, they ruined it.
(the guys who wrote it)


Today the bad bosses came through. I had not been keeping them up to date on my job search (because one of them was super discouraging about the first thing I applied to) but today I had a question about a specific department. They grilled me about where the position is, who it reports to, etc. It turned out the Better boss knows the Assistant Commissioner of [whatever] who is in charge of that office. So some words have been put in.

(Damn, it's a cool job. Doing data analysis to target abusive landlords for bureaucratic hell to rain down upon them.)

(...that pays the same as what I started at at my current job, two cost-of-living-raises ago. But learning stuff and room to grow is a raise on its own.)

[Carlos del Vaca]

Wagon Wheel is the only song that i've experienced the way people used to experience real folk songs. That is, I heard it a bunch of times played by my friends around drunken campfires, and grew to love it very much.

And then one day I heard the real version. Damn, they ruined it.
(the guys who wrote it)

HARSH, dude. I saw OCMS at Mason's arena a few years ago (they were opening for the Avett Brothers), and honestly when they did Wagon Wheel it was one of the best concert moments of my life. All 10,000 people singing along, it was beautiful.