Category: Odds and Ends

How do you answer this interview question, “what do you make in your current job?”

A couple of months ago, a former co-worker called me and asked if I would provide a reference for her in a job search (which I readily agreed to). Then she went on to ask me this, “This company wants to make me an offer and they called and asked me what I currently make, and asked for a copy of a paystub. What should I do?”

Personally, I find this question stupid. I’ve been asked it many times (including quite recently) and in all instances I’ve been surprised by it (doh!) and I’ve answered in what I now consider to be the wrong way.

Every hiring manager has a range of salaries that they are willing to pay for a position, and they have a range of bonuses, a range of stock options and other incentives. And then there’s the common incentives that everyone gets (401(k), vacation, …). So why even ask the question? Why not make an offer that makes sense and be done with it?

If you are a hiring manager / HR person on the hiring side, do you ask this question?

If you are a candidate, how do you handle this question?

In any event, here’s what I recommended to my friend, answer the question along these lines.

  • I’m sure you are asking me this so you can make me a competitive offer that I’ll accept
  • I’m also sure that you have a range for all the components of the offer that you intend to make to me; base pay, bonus, stock options, …
  • So what I’ll tell you is what I am looking for in an offer and I’ll leave it to you to make me an offer based on the standard ranges that you have
  • I am looking for a take-home pay of $ _____ each month
  • Since you offer a 401(k) plan which I intend to contribute $ _____ to, that means I am looking for a total base pay of $ ______ per year.
  • I am looking for a total annual compensation of $ ______ including bonuses
  • In addition, I am looking for ______ days of vacation each year.

That’s it. When asked for a copy of current pay-stub or anything like that, I recommend that you simply decline to provide it and make it clear that this is not any of their business.

Now, whether one can get away with this answer or not depends on how strong your position is for the opening in question. Some companies have a ‘policy’ that they need this paystub/W-2 stuff.

Not providing last pay information and following their ‘process’ could make the crabby HR person label you ‘not a team player’ or some such bogus thing and put your resume in the ‘special inbox’ which is marked ‘Basura’.

In any event, this all was fine and my friend told me  that she was given a good offer which she accepted.

How do you approach this question?

Blockchain is an over hyped technology solution looking for a problem

The article makes a very simple argument for something that I have felt for a while, block chain is a cool technology but the majority of the use cases people talk about are just bull shit.

http://www.coindesk.com/blockchain-intermediaries-hype/

Stratoscale acquires Tesora

Yesterday it was announced that Tesora had been acquired by Stratoscale, here are some of the articles that were published about this.

and this official announcement by Stratoscale

Thanks to all of you who emailed, texted, tweeted, called, and pinged me on IRC 🙂 I’m overwhelmed by the volume and all the good wishes. I’ll reply to each of you individually, sorry it may take a couple of days for me to do that.

To all of our investors and advisors, first in ParElastic and later in Tesora, thank you all for your help and support. To everyone at Tesora who is moving to Stratoscale, all the very best to you. It has truly been a wonderful six years working with you and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Doug: It’s been especially awesome working with you these past six years. You are a great leader of people, and you have built and managed a truly exceptional team. People in your team like you, respect you, are comfortable approaching you with the strangest questions, and are willing to work with you over and over again. Not an easy thing to pull off over the extraordinarily long period that you’ve been able to do this. You were clearly not an easy taskmaster and your team consistently delivered miracles. But along the way you managed to ensure that everyone was having a good time.

Ken: No entrepreneur can have hoped for a better partner than you. It has been an extraordinary ride and it has been truly my honor and privilege to have taken this ride along with you. I think you were instrumental in building a company which was a very special place to work, where we built some excellent technology, got some marquee customers, and had a lot of fun doing it. I’ve learned a lot, about startups, about technology, about business, and about myself; thank you very much for this awesome experience.

Several of you have asked me “what’s next for Amrith”. I don’t know yet, I’m trying to figure that out (thanks to all of you who have offered to help me figure this out, I will certainly take you up on that).

In the short term, I’m going to continue to work on Trove, finish up my term as the PTL for Ocata and continue to work on the project as we begin the Pike cycle.

What comes later, I have no idea but if you have ideas, I’m all ears.

The Acurite SmartHub and monitoring solution

I purchased an Acurite 10 sensor indoor humidity and temperature monitoring system and am surprisingly happy with it. I was expecting a generally crappy experience but I have to say I was wrong, and it wasn’t that I’d set my expectations so low; the system is truly quite good.

The system I purchased is this one.

You get a smartHub and 10 sensors. Pictured below is the hub and a sensor.

06044-800x800_2_2 09150rm-phone-800x800_7

The setup: smartHub

The smartHub comes with a little power adapter and an ethernet cable. Stick it into a wall outlet and connect the ethernet cable to your router and DHCP does its thing and the smartHub gets online.

It initiates a series of accesses to some locations and downloads firmware and the like. (I’ve captured network traces, if I find anything interesting, I’ll blog about that). In a couple of minutes the lights stabilize and you have to press a button that says “Activate”.

The setup: online

Then you create an online account at the Acruite site and once you are logged in, you associate your account with the device. You identify it by the number on the bottom (spoiler alert, the number is the MAC address of the device).

Within about a minute, the device shows up and you are good to go for the next step.

The setup: sensors

Each sensor takes two AAA batteries, pop them in and within a minute the web portal shows a new device which you can rename and mount wherever you want it. Very slick and easy.

Within about 15 minutes I had 10 sensors online and reporting.

I was so happy with this that I’ve purchased another smartHub and 10 more indoor/outdoor sensors; they don’t have the LCD display.

Enough of the happy talk

OK, so what did I not like?

  1. It has been years (literally, years and years) since I’ve purchased a gadget that requires batteries, and the batteries are not included. It’s a good thing that I purchase AAA’s in packs of 50. Like every other commodity piece of electronics these days, these sensors are made in China, so just stick two AAA’s in the box please.
  2. Once you power up a sensor, it takes under a minute to initialize and register with the smartHub. But, if you stick batteries in two of them in quick succession, there’s no way to tell (on the Web UI) which is which. There’s no number on the sensor, nothing which you can associate with what you see on the screen; just “Temperature and Humidity Sensor – NN” where NN is a number incrementing from 1 to 10.
  3. Once you get sensors on the Web UI, there is no way to re-order them. The will forever remain in the same order. So if you decide to move a device from one location to another, and you want to group your devices based on location, you are not able to do that.
  4. Wired ethernet, really? I’m sure the stupid cable they have to give you will cost about as much as it would to get wireless setup. But it would make the setup just a bit harder.
  5. The web app is just about OK. Fine, it sucks. It allows you to add alerts for each device. By default, low battery and loss of signal rules are added for each device. But, I want to add temperature rules for different devices. Yes, you can do that but you get to do it one device at a time. No copy/paste available.
  6. They claim to have an android application but it won’t work on a tablet; instead they expect you to use a full blown web app for the tablet. The android app won’t install on my android phone; lots of others seem to be complaining about this as well.

Closing thoughts

Acurite strikes me as a company that makes fine hardware and they appear to have done an absolutely bang up job on the initial setup and “getting started” part of the experience.

They are not a software company. The software part of the “after setup” experience is kind of horrible.

They offer no easy API based mechanism to retrieve your sensor data. Yes, on the web app, you can click a couple of buttons and play with date controls and get a link to some AWS S3 bucket mailed to you with your data as a CSV but really, advertise an API, get someone to write an IFTTT channel, then you’ll be cooking with gas.

Next post will be a deconstruction of the protocol, what you get when you point your web browser at the smartHub’s IP address, and those kinds of fun things.

One more thing

The people at Acurite Support are wonderful. I have (in the past three days) spoken with two of them, and interacted with one via email. The people I spoke with were knowledgeable, and very helpful.

The wait times on hold are quite bad. I waited 25 minutes and 15 minutes respectively on hold. There is the usual boring elevator music while you stay in line with an announcement every minute that you are “XX in line”. No indication of how long your wait will be but you are offered the option of getting a callback.

An odd thing though is that while I was in line and I heard the message “you are second in line” a couple of times, I suddenly ended up being “third in line”. How someone got ahead of me in line, I know not.

But, their support is great. 5 stars for that!

Amazon’s demented plans for its warehouse blimp with drone fleet 

Amazon’s demented plans for its warehouse blimp with drone fleet http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/12/amazons-demented-plans-for-its-warehouse-blimp-with-drone-fleet/?amp=1

Shit like this is what gives patents a bad name!