I know many of you do independent freelance work of one kind or another, and I'm curious about how you get paid for it. (Not, "how do you decide what is a fair price for your services?" or "how do you sell a service when similar-looking services are often given away?" though those are also interesting questions.) I mean, how do you get a client to ( Read more... )

Last year, I was talking to a QC specialist about the two products she works with. I understood they were made from somewhat different raw materials, but I wanted to know if they ended up with similar physical properties, if that was something she could talk about ( Read more... )

Socks.
Dry socks.
Nobody will care what color, this is academia.
It's 35 degrees, they do need to be dry.
If you want to call yourself an engineering consultant, they probably ought to be the same color as each other, even for academia.

I didn't post about this when I thought I might do contract work for this staffing agency, but the company turned me down. The hourly rate they offered was just under half what I earned last year. From the job description I read at first, it looked like a much less complicated job...but at the interview, it turned out that they also needed more ( Read more... )

Back when I was working in a manufacturing environment, and there was a radio playing in the background, I remember being surprised by the prevailing narrative I was hearing over the radio (in country music, in talky ads.) It's been too long for me to remember exact wording; I just remember being surprised by the overall sense of union=menace. ( ( Read more... )

and move like lightning. I zoomed down to NYC Friday morning, to go to Redbird's family seder Friday afternoon. (It is their family custom that "the first night of Passover" lasts until the second night begins, allowing a 24 hour interval in which to schedule each seder. As one of the aunts lives in a distant suburb and does not drive at night, ( Read more... )

On Friday, I had the best job loss experience of my career. It followed 3 months of my boss and colleagues being nice to me. (Sometimes they showed disturbingly bad judgment, but they were consistently nice to me.) The company's finances depend on selling stuff to big US auto manufacturers. So this is a hard time for them, generally. My boss, ( Read more... )

A recruiter called me this morning to say the company was hiring somebody else for the temporary technician job (that would be a long commute for me.) It wasn't clear if my commitment to stay for a 6-month contract was not convincing, or of they wanted somebody who wasn't so overqualified, that might be willing to stay with that level of job, ( Read more... )

(LJ asks about adult content these days, but they don't have a setting for juice boxes and chocolate milk ( Read more... )

Before I started working, I was worried about the commute. The distance is scary. Being so unfamiliar with the area (geographically, and in terms of not knowing anybody locally to ask for help) is scary. Long hours are scary. Unspecified long hours where I am susceptible to being pressured because I am trying so hard to prove myself in a new ( Read more... )