What are your working arrangements?

[Humous]

soho setup

Just rented a 2 bedroom flat, 2nd room will be my office/study.

I'm currently getting along fine with no TV or broadband, obviously I can't work though which is a little irritating as I have 3 websites to build and can't do squat but think about it. (they're only little sites, couple of pages at the most).

Oh, and I really miss my online poker.

When my ISP quoted 2 weeks to get broadband moved I started sobbing really badly so they said they would try to get it done in 5 days (which is tomorrow, fingers crossed).

Humous.

 

[temi]

Did you post this from a cybe cafe then ?

 

[Humous]

Did you post this from a cybe cafe then ?

Alas no, I'm at work...

About the only advantage of working for a company with no management structure is I can do a few things here and there, like forums (ok this is my only one, not counting the odd Google group post) and playing with servers, I just set up a Wiki (mediawiki - MediaWiki - MediaWiki) server, which was suprisingly easy, basically just unpack and copy files into a web readable folder.

I've never actually been to a CyberCafe, I've thought about opening one though.

Humous.

 

[Humous]

Well there's something nice about getting home and finding your internet connection working a day early!!

I can't stop smiling I didn't think I missed it that much.

Humous

 

[temi]

Congratulations on that

 

[bochgoch]

About the only advantage of working for a company with no management structure...

Sounds like the perfect employer to me

 

[Humous]

Sounds like the perfect employer to me

I've been asked to produce quite a few projects where they supply some critera, I spend absolutly ages developing something to then be told they want to change the criteria in some way which means starting over again, I don't mind this too much as I usually design something in principle first so not too much work. But to then be told to go ahead then it not be used.... That irritates me.

I still get asked to reformat word documents (news articles) into basic HTML, which is basically a case of adding a few <br>'s, a couple of <b> tags and lots of <a href>'s, where I've developed something similar to this (the message submit box I'm now writing in) which ok doesn't do the bold or link tags, I did get it to convert \n into <br> though. Again it gets harder to spot links when the text is in French, German or Czech (of which I deal with all).

I got 99% of a complete customer support portal developed, including desinging my own security (although now I know how to use htaccess, it would have been a lot easier). Which also included a Helpdesk system, again I coded from scratch as I couldn't find a GNU one I liked (I hate spending money on something I can do myself with a little time) I even developed an email response system, so customer could email in, engineers could just reply to the email and it would automatically add it to the database, keeping complete records of everything. I was planning to design a knowledge base style system to sit along side it. But we bought Sugar CRM, which is pretty good, but what a waste. Maybe one day I'll put the code up on here, not that it's good coding, but I was proud of it.

The biggest problem I have is that I care about what I do, very few other people here seem to and no one takes responsibility for anything, the MD is actually a sales guy and refuses to act like an MD, the deputy manager basically acts as the company accountant but thinks that if something costs less then it's cheaper than something that costs more (in the long run), which as I'm sure yuo all know isn't always the case.

Oh and when something goes wrong they don't know who was supposed to be doing what so just blame whomever was actually doing something about whatever it was that went wrong.

I'm sure you all get the same thing though.

But on the flip side, like I said, I can do the odd few things which no other company would let me do, I have a decent workstation, a server and a spare desktop at my finger tips, access to any kit I need for what ever. And enough time left over to write REALLY long messages on forums.

The problem is, I don't want to stay and I don't want to leave.

Humous.

 

[bochgoch]

The problem is, I don't want to stay and I don't want to leave.

It sounds like you have a degree of control over what you do, so make sure that you do things that you enjoy and that develop the skills you want to develop. Get on with your own thing, keep your employer happy and take things as they come. A lot of people get too worked up by their day job and fail to grasp the opportunities that they present.

Having a real job and working on the web for yourself are far from mutually exclusive as I'm sure you've realised...

 

[Humous]

I've done quite well with training where I am now, as well as developing my own skills. I'm getting comfortable with php and am hoping to take on Flash in the near future.

I've got a couple of sites which I am now working on, which hopefully they'll ok the design in the next week or so then I can sort out their domain names etc.

Bochgoch, thank you for the comments. I think I'll stay here until somthing changes, I can brood all I like but I can't leave until I'm more confident about web design (confident enough to pay the rent anyway). Though I'm sure paying customers could be far more demanding than an employer.

Humous.

ps My BB dropped out again yesterday, turns out they (at least my ISP) allow a grace period when you move, which means I actually had a connection the whole time but didn't realise so all I had to do was update my details. Worth finding out if you ever move.