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1:13 AM
@jmac: Good point.
 
 
1 hour later…
BVR
2:28 AM
Hi All
23 hours ago, by BVR
How to from trust on my management and Organization?

I am from India and I am working in USA on H1B VISA. I have recently joined in Consulting firm. And I was placed at client location. Every thing is going to fine so far now. The below are the few important points which are very much required to understand my question

(1) I got heard many negative things, shady practices and fishy things that consulting firms do
(2) After I have been selected in their Interview they didn’t send offer letter directly. They placed me across their client interviews and once I got selected then only they Con
Related to above question. Is that fine to post in WPSE(Workplace Stack Exchange)? I hope I won't get surprising down votes and close votes and delete votes? I am intended to post constructive questions. Please help me
 
 
4 hours later…
6:52 AM
@BVR anything is fine to post, but chances are it will get downvotes and close votes because it doesn't "ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face" as explained in our [help/dont-ask]. You are worried you are getting taken advantage of, and want to create a good impression. We don't know the people and can't tell you if they are taking advantage of you, or how to gain their trust.
If you think what they are doing is illegal, contact an attorney. If you think it's okay, then move forward with it. Asking us how to build trust has nothing to do with the status of your company, nor does it clearly connect to what you want to accomplish through building trust.
Changing jobs, especially when it impacts your legal status in a country is serious business and you shouldn't rely on asking questions here to hope that it all works out okay.
 
 
2 hours later…
CMW
8:33 AM
So... ethics is generally off-topic? Because meta paints an unclear picture on the issue
 
@CMW "Is it ethical for a company to pay below market salary?" is off-topic. "How do I negotiate a raise from a company that pays under market salary?" is not.
Questions specifically asking solely about ethics are primarily opinion-based, because they are asking, "Do you think this is okay?" and aren't addressing a practical answerable question faced in the workplace.
Even simpler, asking whether or not something is right doesn't help. If the question is being asked, it's more likely because the person feels it is wrong and wants to correct it. So almost any ethical question can be rephrased from asking about the ethics of the situation to how to deal with the problem you're actually facing.
As stated in our [help center](http://workplace.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask): *"You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.

...

If your motivation for asking the question is “I would like to participate in a discussion about ______”, then you should not be asking here. However, if your motivation is “I would like others to explain ______ to me”, then you are probably OK. (Discussions are of course welcome in our real time web cha
 
CMW
8:53 AM
I see. I thought in business contexts in particular, ethics was no opinion-based topic anymore but there were normative dimensions to it
 
9:28 AM
@CMW What jmort said in his answer was basically, "Usually it's not only about ethics, and has a practical workplace-related component to it. As long as it's not just a question about if something is ethical, it can get good answers and be on-topic."
We want good questions. There is no clear line where we can specifically say, "This is what you can ask, and this is what you can't". If we try to write specific rules, people will still ask a bad type of question while following the rules, and then argue that it is allowed because it follows those rules.
For instance, if we say, "Questions asking about whether something is ethical are not allowed" and make that a close reason, people won't ask "Is it ethical?" they will ask "Is it okay?" which is the same thing. We don't want people coming here for validation of their beliefs, we want to tackle problems faced in the workplace.
 
CMW
@jmac That's why I was wondering about comments I read saying 'Questions about ethics are off-topic'
 
If a question asking about what you should do isn't necessarily about whether or not it is right to do it, but which is the better choice based on a stated objective, then we can answer it. The example jmort gave was this question
The question the person is asking isn't "Is it ethical to not tell my employer about school?" it is "I don't want to jeopardize my chances of getting a promotion, and I am worried that my employer will pass me over if they find out I'm in school. Are there consequences to hiding that information?" and that is a very practical problem.
2
 
 
2 hours later…
11:28 AM
Good morning folks!
GTV Judge is online and ready for deployment!
oh, i see good discussions are arising here! :)
I have been absent in the last days at the workplace, too much work to do. I'll be back in 2 weeks or so!
:D
 
@jmac hmm you are right, though that is default across all sites i think, wonder if that one can be changed
@HugoRocha Morning
 
Morning :)
 
hows things?
 
Good! Next week there's going to be campus party here
one of the people who will talk on it is the dragon hinself
And with that, i mean Bruce Dickinson.
A lot of workshops too on robotics, and .net and js development
Also, kinect! My dearest kinect :D
So I am kinda excited. As you have noted... i am kinda of energic
 
oh cool! sounds like lots of fun
not something i think i would get a chance to go to i dont think
so enjoy it as much as you can!
 
11:42 AM
Thank you! I'll be sure to take some pics and share with you guys later!
;D
My company is interested in me participating for this events. So much things that we can learn there! :D
 
Thats awesome, not a lot of places i have heard of do that kind of thing
 
CMW
@HugoRocha Campus party is awesome. I camped at the one in 2012 in berlin
 
I never had a campus
so no parties on campus either :L
 
"What a shame." - Denton, JC
 
CMW
:)
Campus party berlin was in an old airport
 
11:51 AM
with old planes? :D
 
Did you pilot one?
 
CMW
neither
we put up our tents in the hangars, though
or rather O2 did
sponsored the tents
 
=O
i see
cool!
got any pics?
THAT I CAN'T SEE T_T
 
CMW
:D
Yes, let me not load from my old hard drive which I don't have with me
 
Then let us delight this moment
sad song
I can't see the images, you can't load then from your hardrive that you don't have
:D
 
CMW
11:58 AM
seems to align perfectly
 
Yes. Fancy some tea?
 
aww i feel left out because i can see the images :/
 
Ha!
Haha!
ha...
I'll go back to my chair...
 
CMW
lol
 
Keep the place clean while I am out!
Well, now seriously, i have to make a navigation class now. I'll drop by later. Good morning to you all!
 
CMW
12:04 PM
you too. enjoy
 
Well, now seriously, i have to make a navigation class now. I'll drop by later. Good morning to you all!
 
 
2 hours later…
1:59 PM
this question at SO will likely get hot, looks like a lot of stuff worth voting up there...
7
Q: Need an array-like structure in PHP with minimal memory usage

Alexander Tobias HeinrichIn my PHP script I need to create an array of >600k integers. Unfortunately my webservers memory_limit is set to 32M so when initializing the array the script aborts with message Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 71 bytes) in /home/www/myaccount/...

:)
 
 
1 hour later…
3:25 PM
@gnat You are really good at finding questions I feel I should upvote, if only we could have someone like you redesign the hot list feature
4
 
@RhysW See this answer: "As far as editing, the "take the tour" button goes to the old /about page, and it seems mods are able to do some minor editing there (site intro, example question, ask about/don't ask about). Aside from that, the only section we can edit is the on- and off-topic page."
 
3:42 PM
Yeah just went and checked too, cant change that one :/
@jmac Looks like ill be writing a meta post later then :D
 
I have no idea what I'm doing here
but hi
 
Hey there!
 
hey, you're from gd.se
neat
 
As are you :P I'm in a lot of places
So how're things going?
 
I dropped by this site when a question I answered got migrated from programmers.se
I find that a lot of questions here actually make sense to me and I could definitely attempt to answer them
 
3:47 PM
Ahh, which one was that?
 
so I decided to hang around a bit
the place seems nice
10
A: Do you keep gray-zone material on or off a resume?

Alex M.I say you should emphasize the technical achievements when writing down your resume. Don't mention exact names, use cases and so on, if you believe they may raise eyebrows. In the case of an interview, a discussion with the employer based on what you have written will probably ensue, and you can ...

 
Cool, nice answer! Well I hope you do decide to stick around, we do like new faces!
@AlexM. Your willingness to help and your programmer background might make you well equipped to tackle this question if you get the time / desire :)
 
Did somebody say
GD?
 
0
Q: Convincing my manager to let me work from home

David KerninMy manager wants to hire me for a full-time position in a big IT company. My job is mostly programming / fixing bugs / developing features.. software engineering to cut to the cheese. During the last months I noticed that this job can successfully accomplished at home by working remotely with a ...

 
:)
Hello Alex
 
3:51 PM
hiya
I'll take a look at the question asap
 
Awesome, no rush then!
 
4:14 PM
@RhysW thanks for your warm words! It feels great to see that my passion is shared. :) While we're at it, here's yet another recent SO question that has good chances to become popular. It is interesting, has intriguing title and high traffic tags (.net and regex), isn't it great! People seem to rush to share their explanations in answers there...
8
Q: Bug in .net Regex.Replace?

Sandeep DattaThe following code... using System; using System.Text.RegularExpressions; public class Program { public static void Main() { var r = new Regex("(.*)"); var c = "XYZ"; var uc = r.Replace(c, "A $1 B"); Console.WriteLine(uc); } } .Net Fiddle Link pro...

 
4:25 PM
@gnat Wonder how long it will take before they start changing things, wonder if thats why SO the main site is getting such voteable content lately :P
2
 
nom nom nom
 
hey E!
 
lol were you in the programmers chat the other day?
 
Me? Not recently, i dont think
 
@RhysW well that's hard to tell. My plan is based on a worst case scenario anyway, ie assuming that SE team won't make any moves in coming 2-3 months at least. Education still remains my top priority...
Oct 1 '13 at 17:19, by gnat
As of now, I am focusing more on educating MSO audience about involved issues than on pushing for specific change; from this perspective status-declined is not very significant. the more people learn about it, the better chance for someone to come with a killer idea that would push it through
 
4:29 PM
@gnat That seems like a really good way of tackling it, they didnt like your suggestion, but you admit there is still a problem so have started a quest to find the Hero that will walk into Mordor and throw the ring into the SE Headquaters. You are essentially Gandalf
 
in The Whiteboard, 19 hours ago, by enderland
maybe I'll go with just "E" - that is one damn fine looking ship
 
haha, nope! Once someone climbs high enough on my correspondance list i refer to them with only the first letter of their name
 
@RhysW that sounds quite an accurate description :)
 
Plus now you can tell people that you are Gandalf
 
@RhysW that's slippery, some may say I'm more like Sauron then
 
4:36 PM
Still, either way you get to play a big part :P
 
4:48 PM
Lol
 
BVR
5:39 PM
@Jmac: Thanks for your reply. However it is not my intention to get answer for this specific situation for this specific employer. My Intention is generic for any given Employer. I have added these details in response to the Hugo Rocha previous comments
Jan 17 at 11:52, by Hugo Rocha
@BVR I bet it will! :D
My original intention is for a given Employer, Manager or management How to find how much trustworthy they are and how to trust them for the trust they deserve?
I hope this is fairly reasonable question and reasonable concern also. Please let me know if not
 
Hello BVR :D
0
Q: Are zero-salary, large-incentives possible

Florian MertensI am about to start a business, and I have literally no funds to fund another person. I am a developer, and the business is about designing and developing websites, which I am great at doing. I want to get someone in to make the sales and marketing for me. Normally, I am expected to find the sal...

Is it possible by law, here in the United Kingdom, not to pay an employee a salary, but to provide them with large incentives (eg. 30% of the sale)?
Is it possible by law, here in the United Kingdom, not to pay an employee a salary, but to provide them with large incentives (eg. 30% of the sale)?
Is it possible by law, here in the United Kingdom, not to pay an employee a salary, but to provide them with large incentives (eg. 30% of the sale)?
 
6:19 PM
@HugoRocha what are you getting at? questions involving the law are not automatically asking for legal advice
It is asking for facts about the law not how the law applies to him.
Its off topic but not because of the legal advice aspect
 
I didn't said so. It's just because i like the law word.
:)
but i can't answer so cause I do not know anything on topic
 
7
A: Question closed because yes/no answer

ServyWhen asking a yes/no question there are one of two possibilities: You really want a yes/no answer. If this is the case, and you don't need anything else to answer your question then it means the answers will be inherently low quality. An answer that only says "Yes" or "No" (in addition to not...

 
6:42 PM
a popular question at SO. Five answers in an hour, wow - almost as active as at Workplace, only short of upvotes...
9
Q: Generic method arguments - Java

decent guyI have two almost identical methods, but I'm trying to avoid code duplication. Each of them takes a unique object as arguments and finds out the highest value from it. Here's an example: public Integer getHighestIndexValue(List<ObjectA> list) { int highestValue; List<Integer> indexes ...

 
7:09 PM
@gnat A yes/no answer could theoretically be given with a nice explanation and backups.
But I'd delete "yes..........." or "yesssssssssss!" in a heartbeat :D
 
7:25 PM
There have been a few questions I've seen lately that have been automatically converted to CW due to them being "hot" and going over the 15 question threshold.
I'm thinking we should use that as a sign we need to clean things up a bit.
2
@bobobobo - There's a safeguard in place that limits answers to 15. Anything beyond that suggests there's a problem with the post, so it gets automatically converted to wiki. If you have a good argument for un-wikifying it beyond just the rep, please feel free to create a wiki discussion encouraging others to a) clean up the question and answers, and b) flag anything that doesn't meet the back it up rule requirements and that can't be edited. Before unwikifying, the posts should be high quality. Please see CW Threshold. Hope this helps! — jmort253 1 min ago
 
@jmort253 thing is yes/no leaves gray area too wide for answerers. Blatant yesssss would be removed even by thick skin SO mod (I hope:) but what about yes <hard to decipher meh handwaving>? not every mod will drill into deep details of question and answer to hit delete. Questions that narrow the scope of valid answers, forcing these to provide explanation and backup won't be yes/no anymore, I like the way how this is laid out in the MSO answer I quoted above
> You don't actually want a yes/no answer, in which case your real question is not actually a yes/no question, and you're hoping that people will determine what your real question is. For example, someone might ask, "Can I do [...]?" when what they really meant to ask was, "How can I do [...]?"
> Almost all yes/no questions I've seen fall into case 2; they should be edited into a question that isn't really asking for just a yes/no, it should be asking to explain something. (Even if it has a yes/no in there somewhere.) Note that just adding "Explain" at the end isn't really a good way to go about this; you should refactor the question on a more fundamental level...
 
@gnat Ah, I get it. You're saying that there's a better question in there somewhere, with some clarifying comments and/or editing. :)
 
@jmort253 exactly so. Problem is, when there's yes/no, it poisons things - leaving a wide open door for lazy answerers to push through their yes-with-handwaving and pretend that oh but that answers the question asked...
> you need basic handwaving skills - just enough blah blah to make sure answer isn't flaggable plus make it read sufficiently smoothly to avoid triggering vote-to-delete in case if 20Ker skims through it...
 
7:51 PM
@jmort253 hey J havent seen you in a while
 
Yeh, the holidays are always a distraction....
 
@RhysW you've not been around as much either ;)
 
That's what i meant! Wasn't trying to blame J! oops
 
What do y'all think about our growth lately?
654
The Workplaceworkplace.stackexchange.com

Beta Q&A site for members of the workforce navigating the professional setting.

Currently in public beta.

We're over 16,000 visits per day now.
 
Oh nice, its a good sign thats for sure
 
7:56 PM
hah 16k is over 10x what is "good"
 
hmm
 
2
A: Can we track the positive effects of a popular question?

jmort253Ever heard the phrase "a flash in the pan"? According to my mom, my grandfather and grandmother allegedly used this phrase to talk about Elvis Presley when he made his first break. The idea was that he would have a brief "flash" of popularity and then evaporate into nothingness; he wouldn't even...

see who wrote that :)
 
@enderland Oh nice, its a good good good good good good good good good good good good good good good good good sign thats for sure. there 17x happy now? :P
 
ha
hey I'm close to 20k rep, sweet
 
@gnat The growth is over time.
If you adjust t he time period between those spikes, you can see the curve.
It just gets subdued due to those outliers....
 
7:58 PM
@jmort253 oh I see! that's a whole different thing. Good thing
 
We have had a lot of hot questions though this month.
2
 
Lots more than usual it seems
 
But I wonder, are they hot because the questions themselves were popular, or were they hot because the site is becoming popular?
 
@jmort253 chicken or the egg?
 
This might be something for @jmac to put some stats together on.
@enderland Absolutely....
 
8:06 PM
M$ access is stupid
 
agreed
 
my stupid query works fine on sql server if I copy it verbatim
but fails when I run it through access :P
 
oh :P seems like a PEBCAK
 
no pretty sure it's M$ access
 
8:41 PM
so, what do people usually talk about here?
 
@AlexM. all sorts of stuff. we'd be lucky if 50% of the content is actually related to Workplace.SE :)
 
sounds like a chatroom to me, haha
 
yeah basically. We give @RhysW a hard time about wanting to go to space
 
Pip
8:57 PM
hey @RhysW!
Why no GD SE anymore?
 
Pip, how did you get here
 
Pip
through your profile
why?
 
was curious
 
invasion!
 
Pip
!
 
9:15 PM
41
Q: Prevent specific sites from being overrepresented in the hot questions list

Mad ScientistSome sites appear far more often in the hot questions list than other sites. I don't have any hard data on that, as that kind of data is just not publicly available, but I'm pretty sure my subjective impression on that is reasonably accurate. Those sites don't appear more often because they are ...

by the way, @RhysW I just figured that MadScientist is more of a Gandalf in this hot story. :) My research started independently, but I pretty soon discovered that I am mostly walking on his traces
 
Pip
cool
 
9:59 PM
@gnat you did the loose vs lose typo!
7
Q: One user seem to be posting from (at least) four accounts, please help to sort it out

gnatIt looks like an (unexperienced?) user creates new account each time they loose prior one. Accounts that seem to be their are: http://workplace.stackexchange.com/users/13670/newboss http://workplace.stackexchange.com/users/14140/newboss http://workplace.stackexchange.com/users/14197/newboss htt...

 
Pip
10:50 PM
wow....
 

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