The Water Cooler

7:36 AM

recommended reading: Open letter to students with homework problems — gnat 21 secs ago

A: How to politely communicate that I really can learn well only if I do it myself?

8:05 AM

free not an answer flags:

-1

Can't comment, so: "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." -- Confucius. (Yes, really. It's the one legitimate K'ung Fu-tzu quote I know.) It's true for everyone. It's not true for everyone. Different people learn in different ways.

and if 15-20ker stumbles upon this question, consider protecting it: besides above crap it managed to collect two answers scored -4 and one at -5, that's a bit too much garbage (thanks to hot list)

A: Is it appropriate for an employer to ask skilled professionals to do manual labor?

12:22 PM

-1

What a hot question! I cant stop myself from answering it. I would notice that for me as for your HR-manager or your director your behavior and your reactions are signals of what type of worker you are. Can I rely at you? Are you a good team-player? But at the same time if I knew you can say ...

yeah hot question. Can't stop myself from. blah blah. Sounds painfully familiar...

...And fun starts. Amount of views and contribution of newcomers from other sites / tags much increases, along with the risk of things getting out of control.

You know, everyone would want to answer a question, but for community regulars, this natural desire is balanced by established norms. Regulars understand what kind answers are good and likely to bring upvotes and they avoid posting garbage that usually gets downvoted: this sort of sets the quality norm.

But wait, the question is now on top, it attracts a lot of visitors whose desire to answer is not balanced by local community norms…

Q: Giving more than the required notice

0

I have one months notice period stated in my contract. If I handed my notice in with a 3 month notice, would they be able to refuse and hold me to a one month notice period?

contracts notice-period

i thought we had this q before

but all i can find is

0

Q: Should I give additional notice period?

I'm a consultant who's in the middle of a very significant project that would be nearly impossible to handover to another team member without putting the deadline at significant risk. On Monday, I"m resigning. I'm in a position where I can provide extra notice period to my employer to allow the ...

professionalism resignation notice-period

@enderland oh, while you're her, could you please protect this question from lemming answerers? "What a hot question! I cant stop myself from answering it..."

12:39 PM

@jmort253 No, meme generator!

Good morning folks!

Battlecruiser is operational

@HugoRocha operation center to battleship: upvote cannons at this target: stackoverflow.com/questions/22240396/logic-to-test-for-3-of-4 - to relieve our ships from lemmings attack!

"What a hot question! I cant stop myself from answering it."

2

zooms in my face

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

I spent a long time last night looking at WWII ship pictures. battleships are cool but CVs and CVEs are where it's at!

warbirdinformationexchange.org/phpBB3/…

@gnat I try to wait to protect until there are at least two answers going on the downvote/deletion train and this one only has one so far. I should create a meta proposal about this, i've downvoted/protected so many questions recently

@enderland Ten-Four! I do agree... but that was a quote from starcraft :P

@enderland please do '-'

@HugoRocha lol, I konw. hahaha

12:50 PM

I know you know. I just said the word in case someone who liked it... will probably want to reinstall it! :D

A trap just like saying "Deus Ex" to me

So much lemmings, btw

@enderland I see, that's understandable

@gnat Projectiles go booom

@enderland in some of those pictures the planes look outright scared. Huddled together at the end of the runway

1:39 PM

@CMW many of them were either staging for takeoff (when rest of flight deck was clear) or they were just being transported

doesn't make it less funny to look at :)

1:50 PM

this tea is good!

And this one:

lol :P

hahhaha

you're making me.... envy. :\

2:10 PM

That's how germans tea

2:47 PM

@jmac Yeah I had a few friends with 4 digits and one that had a 3 digit number. But they were devs with ICQ. One of them made alot of money when it sold to AOL

That message was very old :p Not sure how I even saw it

@HugoRocha Onward my lemmings our goal is just over that cliff!

@Chad Lemmings, lemmings...

why not send them to the toilet, I wonder?

they could clean it up for us!

@CMW The force is strong on this one.

@enderland I would be there but I have 14k downvotes :p

@Chad you only have 1,341

@enderland I know it was a joke

I'm still 500 behind you

sad

2:54 PM

Sadly I was 800 at the start of the year i think

Keep in mind that this is not necessarily any different than most situations for most at-will employees, at least in the USA. Though you're going to run into a complicated situation of "are you being fired?" types of things too and things may get more complicated. — enderland 2 hours ago

that's true, right? no one has contested it

@enderland I think so but there is so little context in that question that it is really hard to answer

yeah...

@gnat I don't want to lose this ability at all, I want to alwyas have a "this is why I protected the question" response - always. having multiple delete vote worthy answers from low rep users nearly guarantees this

we are currently renting with literally no lease

this is weird

3:39 PM

@enderland yup, until there's an official blessing or at least confirmation that it's not an abuse, playing it safe makes good sense...

9

As Anna Lear points out in another question, proactively protecting questions is generally a bad idea. I generally keep an eye on Hacker News and other programmer sites for when our questions hit the front page. We as moderators try to keep an eye on these questions and actively moderate the bad...

Feb 28 at 6:36, by gnat

whenever I read what these guys write it just screams: educate me

@gnat Well hopefully with SO and MSO becoming their own beast we will get more focus on the issue that affect everyone else

Or the situation could be improved by giving us a few extra mods until we get to 20+ @20k users

2

only 5.5k rep to go!

4:11 PM

@enderland Probably closer to 6 when you figure in downvotes

4:25 PM

Where's the watter cooler?

*water

this is it

It was a poor trial to made a poor joke

Now it sounds even poorer

You're welcome, I think...

SO

Is everybody alright?

I can't decide if I think it's friday or tuesday or saturday right now

which is... probably something which should concern me :)

4:40 PM

It's FriTuesTurDay.

@dylanribb yeah something like that. I was talking to a coworker, I think I'll fully realize it's Friday when it's like 10pm tonight and I realize I don't have to set an alarm for tomorrow - "oh I guess it's Friday!"

@enderland: I always know it's Friday at my job because other people seem to think that, because they don't feel like getting work done, they should prevent me from getting work done.

"It's friday, friday..."

a;lkjasdkl;gjkla!!

@enderland what you do for a living?

4:45 PM

Someone just posted that song to my Facebook timeline.

Now it's going to be in my head all day.

@TiagoCésarOliveira I guess I'm technically a manufacturing engineer but I'm doing software dev types of projectwork. I'm more of a developer than manufacturing engineer, that's for sure

@enderland cool, we developers use to have no weekend as we usually are involved with freelance work apart from our "official" work :)

yeah I try to avoid that sort of stuff for that reason haha. I could get so consumed in doing coding projects :(

Me too. I'm declining freelance works latelly to focus on projects of my own

That's a way to get pleasure from coding again. This shit gets hard after 10 years doing the same everyday

Its Friday! And I get to go to a rabbit show tommorrow morning :)

5:04 PM

@Chad don't you think about eating one now

I eat rabbit

Just not ones I ahve named

How can you...

magic, obviously - rabbit --> delicious dinner?!

Does anyone thinked ever on an over in the shape of a topper?

Over = oven, OMG IDK what is happening with my fingers today

That's probably because "It's friday, friday..."

my team is getting a free pizza lunch in like an hour. it's really the little things...

5:10 PM

11:11 AM yet? 2:11 PM here...

yeah it's only 11:11 where I'm at

fffffffffff I can't concentrate at all today

support graduation moderation moderators elections

4

Q: When are Elections?

We graduated on February 20th which was two weeks ago. And that is awesome. But due to the loss of privilege, we are working the moderators to the bones with our flags and general cleanup. While we all know that our moderators can clear Not An Answer flags with a single click, we may want to thi...

@TiagoCésarOliveira Its a lop tooo :)

@Chad indeed, because "It's friday, friday..."

Okay, last time, I promise.

Which is almost as good as SUNDAY! Sunday! sunday...

5:27 PM

I'm always depressive on sundays...

MONSTERS

Those are our baby Teddy Cavies had them last night

They are maybe an hour or 2 old there

"What a hot question! I cant stop myself from answering it..." All right, I think I'll drop my answer there too, let's party. Just need some time to polish a draft, find and fill in the references...

I think part of the other problem we have is that 2 or our current 4 20k users are not very active in the community moderation. Though most of our 10-20k are

We just need to get more rep :p

5:36 PM

I think time is a crucial factor on SE. That stops me to providing elaborate answers sometimes

@Chad are those rabbits?

@TiagoCésarOliveira No Guinea pigs

@TiagoCésarOliveira Same here I could answer more but I am only willing to provide quality answers and those take time

@Chad it's just frustrating to provide an elaborate answer and see a 2 line answer being picked by OP just because it was made first

3

Even if this 2 line answer is inaccurate

Or provide a well though and balanced answer just to watch the short little yeah you are right answer with no solution shoot to the top

@Chad my 10K experience at Programmers is that when there are mods around, cleanup goes fairly smooth. Being able to see deleted posts, available delete votes and grayed out 20K-grade votes in mod tools equips one for a pretty efficient flagging...

@gnat You going to run?

5:44 PM

@Chad for elections? no

@gnat And if I nominate you anyway?

@Chad won't work. I gave it a lot of thought (this idea was raised since last mod elections at Programmers, more than a year ago, and we chatted it several times at Whiteboard). As of now, I'm rather firmly convinced I'll be of more help to community as a regular user / flagger than as a moderator

if memory serves turning point was when Manishearth mentioned how it was at Physics.SE, they've got two most active flaggers to moderators and net result turned out not very positive

not that there was much harm, but there was less clanup

I am the most active flagger though

workplace.stackexchange.com/help/badges/76/marshal

Though it looks like JCMeloni might actually be eclisping me

@Chad then you better consider abstaining of nominating. Moderators mostly act on others flags. When someone else does that, there's two serving community: you and moderator. When you're the mod, there's one... less than one actually since part of the time you invested into flagging before, will be wasted on handling others flags

in The Whiteboard, Feb 21 at 22:36, by gnat

moderators are merely sock puppets in the hands of experienced flaggers :) — gnat 5 hours ago

in The Whiteboard, Feb 21 at 22:37, by gnat

comment upvoted twice, likely by mods tired of handling flags

@gnat Yeah I doubt I could get elected anyway... I tend to rub some people the wrong way

But I get what you are saying

6:09 PM

Flow (psychology)

Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by complete absorption in what one does. Proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, this positive psychology concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields. According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate experience in harnessing the emotions in the service of perform...

6:31 PM

@Chad I'm thinking make rhys and jmac mods

@enderland I dont think Jmac wants it

I agree with rhys

Then I would resign

A: Dealing with a manager who won't let go of being a developer

What?

removing stuffs?

-6

You should listen to your boss, because you're not paid to tell the boss what to do. Just make sure that every one knows what your feelings/advice is before starting to work on it, so your colleges wont blame you for anything if something goes wrong. Can you imagine if the people responsible fo...

I edited this, but I still want to frag/frak this answer

I can't think on a edit that could make this salvagable

and this kind of things makes my justice sensor goes crazy

6:52 PM

I've downvoted a ton of stuff recently

7:05 PM

Bah ebay once again foils my plan to become a supervillan

arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/03/…

I blame ars for foiling my plot to aquire a superlair

A: How should I approach interviewing through an interpreter?

7:59 PM

-2

I read ur views its very useful for us..thanks to suggest main points and thnks to share ur experience ....i will focus on ur points . Thank

9:22 PM

Hi San, welcome to The Workplace. I modified your question slightly to make it more of a workplace/interview question and a bit less "what should I do!" — enderland 39 secs ago

I think I edited this question enough to be on topic, thoughts?

9:43 PM

@enderland looks good to me