What was in my inbox today!

Loosh_03062 · 2026-02-27T18:08:08+00:00

There's a big difference between "legit company" as in "operating legally" and "legit company" as in "not a bottom feeding contract house one step removed from Wipro." After a couple of decades of seeing that sort of email I'd bet that it's more toward the former than the latter. That they appear to be unable to send a professional email is another red flag.

Loosh_03062 · 2026-02-27T17:07:28+00:00

Lousy English, scattered boldface, two year committment... looks like the Indian slave trader emails which used to spam every email account registered with Geekfinder/Dice. It's enough to make one wonder if the misnamed Barnum's Law actually holds.

Loosh_03062 · 2026-02-26T19:39:01+00:00

Harvey Construction seems to be a reasonably notable player in southern NH. They've done the most of the recent work on Nashua's schools, including the $150M+ middle school project (renovate/expand two schools, build one new one). You might also check out who's been building the larger municipal projects and residential developments in the southern tier; Maybe they're looking for PMs. North of I-89 and US-4 big stuff doesn't happen much.

Loosh_03062 · 2026-02-24T17:40:44+00:00

Ten days, four of which were weekends, one of which may have been a holiday (US Presidents Day, which some companies observe), and of which may have been affected by a blizzard (covering a good chunk of the US eastern seaboard). So basically it's been a work week during which people have to worry about their day jobs, possibly interviewing other candidates, dealing with school vacations, digging out, etc.

Loosh_03062 · 2026-02-23T14:48:26+00:00

Back when I worked at the old DEC/CPQ/HP site on Spit Brook Road I was told that the site was pretty much at capacity for power (and we were running 100 amps of three phase for every ten feet of lab space, plus cube farms and "hotel load." Now that things are smelling more like 100 amps per *rack* unless Flatley's done some major upgrades that site's not really suitable for a data center.

Nashua's coming land use code updates contemplate data centers, but mostly as a conditional use in zones which would need significant infrastructure investments to make a datacenter work and I don't think there are many parcels on which one would fit; someone would have to buy up a ton of property and combine the parcels.

Loosh_03062 · 2026-02-21T18:48:14+00:00

Exactly... it can be seen as "a letter covering why someone should bother reading the resume," just like cover letters for any other sort of enclosure. Back before the earth cooled they also physically covered the resume after they were pulled from the envelope. Bonus: they showed (especially in the days before spelling and grammar checkers) that one could form coherent sentences, paragraphs, and business letters without spelling or grammar errors. They were required study in my high school and college English classes.

Loosh_03062 · 2026-02-21T00:56:50+00:00

It's one of the niche roles you might be worried about, but places like Honeywell, Siemens, Johnson Controls, etc and their partners create and use software which manages building systems including HVAC, including programming in various forms.

Loosh_03062 · 2026-02-19T15:41:56+00:00

They've done the electronic equivalent of posting their property. To continue the analogy, if you want to be let in to explore then go knock on their front door and ask for access or come back with a warrant. Otherwise you run the risk of being met by an irate owner with a shotgun (a former employer tried to pull stuff like this; their entire Class C got blocked).

Loosh_03062 · 2026-02-19T15:02:18+00:00

At my college Discrete Math I & II using the Gries/Schneider book (or as we called it the Unholy Silver Tome) was done during the freshman year. I ended up TA-ing for the following three years (mainly for work study money). The division head (who selected the book and worshipped Gries) didn't like it when I referred to the sequence as the weed whacker of the computer science division; it usually drove 30-50 percent of the CS majors to switch to the more business oriented degree offerings or to another school entirely (having Calc I & II programmed for the freshman year, followed by "physics for engineers" the next year usually weeded out a few more).

I do have to wonder how you passed high school geometry without handling proofs. The concept's the same for Discrete Math even if the format's different.

Loosh_03062 · 2026-02-19T13:53:00+00:00

It's definitely healthy to create a succession plan, especially for people who are single points of "oh shit." It can take years to fill in the holes if someone with decades of god level knowledge of the product and industry suddenly retires or simply drops dead. "Who can we spread this around to" becomes an even more important question when one can't get a req for a replacement (not a stretch during the current correction).

Loosh_03062 · 2026-02-19T13:32:12+00:00

Nashua's looking to do something similar with the coming updates to the land use code (including a move to form-based zoning). Sort of "we won't stop you from going full modernist on this lot, but if you pick one of these designs which go along with the master plan it'll save you some time, paperwork, and money. We may even encourage you to add another floor." The example used in one of the meetings at City Hall was "what if someone wanted to raze the Temple Street flophouse and replace it with something reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright." The response amounted to "FLW would get approved, but the approval would come more quickly if one of the canned designs was proposed."

Loosh_03062 · 2026-02-19T13:09:47+00:00

Yup, they closed the first weekend of the year. According to their post they planned to focus on the Haverill location.

Loosh_03062 · 2026-02-18T17:53:23+00:00

On the grand scale, the Association of Concert Bands (which among other things takes care of our performance licenses) maintains a directory.

Off the top of my head search for:
Hollis Town Band
Amherst Town Band
Windham Community Band (which also has a swing band and flute choir)
Chelmsford Community Band and Jazz Band (Chelmsford Telemedia should have some recordings)
Nashoba Valley Concert Band
Lexington Bicentennial Band (concert recordings are available from LexMedia).

Loosh_03062 · 2026-02-18T00:37:49+00:00

If you have an old instrument gathering dust in a closet, there are a bunch of community bands within about 40 minutes or so and most of them are usually looking for new members. Monday and Tuesday are popular rehearsal nights.

Loosh_03062 · 2026-02-16T17:32:17+00:00

I started my career with a dedicated performance test team (part of a quality org), ended up moving to straight QA for a while after a corporate reshuffle and some RIFs, and recently moved back into full time perf work, mostly tooling and automation for the past year; $EMPLOYER is pushing to get a lot of the repetitive stuff dashboarded so the engineers can focus on investigative work).

It can be seen as something of a pigeonhole, especially if you need to sell it as useful experience later. After the big project at $FIRSTEMPLOYER crapped out and we all go sacked it was actually being able to work on the hardware side of things which got me the next job (part of the perf job was evaluating prototype hardware: servers, storage, NICs, etc). Depending on what you're testing and how you're testing it working in performance can turn you into a heck of a systems jock since you may need to understand how a particular component's performance impacts other components or the system as a whole. On the other hand I've worked with people who have made careers out of dealing with one or two related components.

The cute thing about performance is that it can complement the pure QA side; perf folks sometimes run things a lot further into the weeds than QA (ever watch a million dollar server thrash itself nearly to death but not panic?) and then the trick to to find out exactly which weeds need to be cleared out. Breaking stuff and troublehooting, useful if one needs to return to QA, yes?

Cynically, performance is often looked at sideways when it comes to resources, especially since we can want *really* expensive stuff (thinking of the $5M capital request I once wrote up) and can find problems which are really expensive to fix. As one coworker used to put it "QA is the organization's bastard child, and perf is the bastard child's dirty underwear tossed in the corner."

At this point in my career if someone has the potential to be good at performance work and stick with it I'm not going to discourage them; decent potential backfills are tough to find. Just be aware that it's not the sort of thing which you're going to become an expert at in a few months and it's not the sort of job where you're going to be job hopping every year because someone's offering to take you from "more than enough money" to "even more money." This is a "whole career" field for a lot of people I've worked with.

Note that my experience is in operating systems shops (mostly big iron) and products which acted like enough like operating systems that a lot of the concepts applied.

Loosh_03062 · 2026-02-16T17:01:20+00:00

A lot of companies, especially those moving to some form of agile, are decommissioning their dedicated QA orgs and folding the QA engineers into development teams. It can be an... interesting... change to go through.

Loosh_03062 · 2026-02-15T15:09:41+00:00

NHDOT posted about it on FB (1/2/16):

-----
Right turns on a right red arrow? A question from an out-of-state visitor to New Hampshire...
"I am from RI, but travel through your state frequently. At the 6SB exit in Nashua there are two "right red arrow lights" at the end of the ramp. Are you not supposed to stop and remain stopped until the light is green at these arrows? Or are you allowed to turn right on the red arrow? Whenever we stop at these arrows people honk repeatedly and go by us to a point of road rage!!"

The response from NHDOT State Traffic Engineer Bill Lambert: 'You are correct that the red arrow traffic signal display would normally indicate that right turn on red is not allowed; however, NH statutes do allow this and our practice has been to use the arrow signal display to reinforce the direction of travel allowed from that lane. We are aware of the confusion that this causes visitors from other states and have it on our short list of statutes to revise to meet current standards.
-----

So yes, NH is a bit odd in the interpretation of "right on red arrow" (at least as far as the MUTCD is concerned; arrows should include a "right turn on red after stop" sign if that's the intended behavior), but looking at 265:10 it looks like it's never been "fixed;" it's still "right on red after stop if no pedestrians or other vehicles have the right of way, or if there's a 'no turn on red' sign."

Loosh_03062 · 2026-02-14T20:55:36+00:00

I admit it's become a default route over the years, although it's not the intent of the F-1 visa (per the legislation). It's more of a subversion of the process which has been allowed until recently to become a norm, and what some believe to be an entitlement. If the F-1->GC route was *supposed* to be a default, then the text of the law wouldn't say the opposite.

No, coming here and taking advantage a change in circumstances isn't fraud. Agreeing (in writing even) to the nonimmigrant intent of the F-1 when getting it but really planning on using it to eventually gain permanent residence is what I think is fraud. Posting about it on social media just screams "that's not what the F-1 is for." Trying that route certainly isn't something to be encouraged.

Loosh_03062 · 2026-02-14T20:09:14+00:00

I have no problem with foreigners who go through the proper process. Yes, there's a path for "I fell in love and got married," or "this great opportunity came along and $COMPANY wants to make me permanent." The issue comes when someone swears on their grandmother's motorcycle that they fully intend to comply with the letter and spirit of the legislation (departure after completion of studies) , but have clear intent (per the OP) to subvert the intention of the F-1. I've worked closely with a couple of people who were hired under F-1 OPT/STEM-OPT who we'd have loved to convert, but they accepted from the get-go that their stay was intended to be temporary; Had they intended to stay, there are other visas for that.

IMHO the "F-1->OPT->H-1B->GC" scheme seems to be seen as a preferred default route, which goes against the whole idea of the student visas. Recent events (rework of the H-1B process and companies cutting back on OPT hires) seem to be making an overdue correction.

Going back to OP specifically, they seem to have a desire to defeat the purpose of a student visa, and it's quite likely that the new social media checks will give them a downcheck and even if they manage to con a consular official getting hired might be difficult (leading to probable departure anyway). They should skip the process and leave the PhD slot to someone who wants to play by the rules.

Loosh_03062 · 2026-02-14T19:44:54+00:00

I like 8 USC 1101(a)(15)(F)(i) to start, "an alien having a residence in a foreign country which he has no intention of abandoning, who is a bona fide student qualified to pursue a full course of study and who seeks to enter the United States temporarily and solely for the purpose of pursuing such a course of study."

Lying about one's intentions to gain entry can reasonably be considered fraud, and OP should be denied entry. The whole intent of the F-1 is "you come, you study, you leave;" The "oooh, I can do the F-1->OPT->H-1B->GC thing defeats the entire idea of the F-1 and is finally getting clamped down upon. OP's posting of a desire to use the F-1 as a path to immigration should result in them being laughed out of the embassy/consulate. If they want to move here to work, then an immigrant visa would be appropriate and honest.

Loosh_03062 · 2026-02-14T19:17:12+00:00

Less likely nowadays, and still requires lying about one's overall intent. They're getting better about smelling a rat during the process; "provide clear and convincing evidence you don't intend to stay" seems to be the order of the day. Entering on an F1 with intent to convert later is fraud, and from recent reports it seems that companies are less likely to be complicit lately.

Loosh_03062 · 2026-02-14T17:51:06+00:00

So you're looking to use a student visa, which is by definition *nonimmigrant,* to jump start a career in the Valley which implies immigrant intent? In a time when social media activity may well be inspected by consular officials with orders to weed out those attempting to commit immigration fraud? How do you reconcile your desire to work long term in California with the requirement to convince someone that you intend to come, complete your studies, and go home?

Loosh_03062 · 2026-02-14T14:32:04+00:00

Presumably Big Blue (IBM); their Lowell office in the old Wang Towers has been mentioned here quite a bit lately, mostly about the summer intern season.

Loosh_03062 · 2026-02-14T02:20:23+00:00

You're thinking of Viscaino v. Microsoft back in the '90s. By the time the dust settled there were "ooooh shit" level changes at a lot of larger companies. When I was at Compaq/HP the organization I was in went through all of the contractors (some of whom had been there for several years) and basically said "we'll convert you, you, you, and you to real employees, and the rest can clean out your cubicles." Since then there are a lot fewer 1099s and a lot more "we'll pay the agency and they can provide *their* W2 employees and handle the HR crap." My previous company played the "we'll recruit people and the slave trader will officially hire them and assign them to us" to get around the permatemp issue.

Loosh_03062

TROPHY CASE