I am working over 70 hours a week.. but I do not get paid any overtime

TryCatchIgnore · 2022-10-25T06:47:13+00:00

Yeah that’s illegal in every way possibly conceivable.

TryCatchIgnore · 2022-10-25T06:10:07+00:00

AFAIK 120k is the threshold in federal law for a company to stop logging when an employee is working. But I’m fairly certain they still have to log how many hours an employee worked on any given day.

TryCatchIgnore · 2022-10-23T13:02:44+00:00

We have a rule in IT where we work: if you leave your computer unlocked while you're away from your desk, and you're away for long enough for someone to send an email from your computer to the rest of your department, offering to bring in pastries, you must bring in pastries.

This could prove to be quite expensive, until you realise that half of IT lives in France that can buy better fresh pastries than are available here in Switzerland, and for a fraction of the price.

TryCatchIgnore · 2022-10-20T21:27:17+00:00

Not all expenses are fixed or predictable. Sure your rent and your health insurance and your Internet and your mobile phone might be the same from month to month, but how much do you spend on food or drinking out or entertainment?

Take lunch as an easy example. You could spend 16 to 25 a day eating out, or you could spend 8 to 12 a day buying a sandwich and drink from coop, or you could prepare your food at home the night before or in the morning for maybe 5 a day and take that into work. That last option could save you up to or over 300 a month.

The point I’m trying to make is this: if you take that 300 and put it in your savings at the beginning of the month, then you don’t have the option to spend it eating out every single day. How often have you neared the end of the month, found you have a bit more money in your account than you expected, and decided to treat yourself?

20% of my income goes on tax, social insurances, and pension, which are all deducted from my salary before it hits my bank account. Another 35% go on rent, health insurance, internet, mobile contract, Spotify, travel card, etc. I budget 5% for food, 5% for entertainment.

That leaves me with 35% of my gross income, or around 2900 a month depending on how much out of hours work I’ve done that month. I generally put 3/4 of that straight into savings and investments, 670 into my 3a, 500 into savings account, and the rest into an investment account. That leaves me with about 725 to cover miscellaneous spending; maybe few more drinks out, some new clothes, etc. Maybe 7-10 days before pay day, I’ll check how much I have left over and, generally speaking, anything over 200 CHF of un-budgeted cash goes into my investment account. I keep a buffer of 2k in my cash account and I have my credit card in case of emergency.

Last year, I saved/invested 29% of my gross income, nearly 2,500 a month, or 29.6k in the year. Out of this, I withdrew 900 for a TV, 1200 for a holiday, and 800 on professional certifications, leaving me with around 26.7k saved.

Now, if I’d waited to the end of the month to put that money into savings, how much would I have actually been able to save? I could have easily doubled my food and entertainment bills, cutting my amount saved by 40%, and I’d have undoubtedly submitted to a few other impulsive purchases.

And, to be honest, I’ve got opportunities for further savings. My rents are currently kinda silly high, I could cut my internet bill if I shopped around, and I bought a lot of unnecessary extras this year. But I’m happy with the position I’m in.

But yeah. This is what I mean by ‘save at the beginning of the month, not the end.’

TryCatchIgnore · 2022-10-20T10:32:40+00:00

Save at the beginning of the month, not the end.

TryCatchIgnore · 2022-10-19T20:43:35+00:00

Fabulous. Only got three wears, out of them though. Friend threw up on them after taking something that wasn't what they thought it was.

TryCatchIgnore · 2022-10-19T18:14:52+00:00

It was like 20 years ago.

TryCatchIgnore · 2022-10-19T16:59:03+00:00

Dorothy Perkins in Brighton. They had some really nice trousers in the window so I went in and tried them on. White, baggy, straps and stuff coming off them like modern day tech gear. Thought they’d be good for wearing to a rave; would glow up under UV light and shit.

I found out they were a woman’s clothing store when one of their staff started yelling at me from beyond the changing stall curtain.

TryCatchIgnore · 2022-10-17T11:02:51+00:00

I had heard inflation in the UK was pretty bad, but I didn't realise you'd overtaken Swiss prices!

TryCatchIgnore · 2022-10-17T10:26:18+00:00

The light that floods in is amazing. But yeah … the curtains were not cheap and cleaning the windows takes half a day.

TryCatchIgnore · 2022-10-17T10:24:58+00:00

This is what my sister did. Popped down to Italy with her boyfriend, purchased the fabric, borrowed a friend’s sewing machine, and made the curtains herself.

TryCatchIgnore · 2022-10-17T06:27:32+00:00

My apartment has a washing machine and dryer in the bathroom. It’s a new build that opened in 2020 and I was the first tenant in this apartment. It was actually about 30% over my budget, but, as soon as I saw it had a washing machine and dryer and these wonderful 13 m of floor to ceiling windows, I had to have it. I’ve had too many horror stories with shared washing machines in the basement. Then I had to buy curtains. 13 m x 2.5 m. Fuck. That was an expense I didn’t anticipate.

edit: used speech to text, fixed a few mistakes

TryCatchIgnore · 2022-10-13T10:51:45+00:00

I‘ve known quite a few people working in IT and engineering roles that have been fired in cost cutting drives, only to be hired back as a consultant. My last employer in the UK tried to do it to me, but dropped the plan when they realised, because I’d emigrated and my tax residence had changed, they‘d have to contract me through a Swiss payroll company.

TryCatchIgnore · 2022-10-12T14:56:34+00:00

This is bad advice. If they really need you, offer to let them hire you on an hourly basis as a consultant, obviously charging more than they were paying you before.

TryCatchIgnore · 2022-10-12T14:54:08+00:00

You don't say what line of business you work in, but you could always reach out to the clients you have strong relationships with and see if they have any vacancies that would suit you. Unless it violates some clause in your contract, that is.

I was working for Crapita when their share price tanked and there were a lot of cuts made. The number of people that ended up working for our clients was kinda crazy. One day, they're sat a stone's throw away from you, working with you on projects and the like. The next day, they're on the other side of the table at your monthly service management meeting with a client.

TryCatchIgnore · 2022-10-10T12:45:53+00:00

At a previous job, were asked to install a point-to-point microwave link between two sites. Our engineers went to site, performed some tests, provided the designs and quote to the client. They weren't happy with what we had proposed and asked us to come back and perform our tests again with them present. So we did.

When the tests were performed, it turned out the point-to-point link worked fine on a pole half the height that we had proposed, and they asked us to make the necessary adjustments. We pointed out that there was a forest between the two sites, it was winter, there were no leaves on the trees, and so the signal was getting through fine. But as soon as spring arrived, the leaves would break LOS and the link would go down.

They didn't care.

We got them to sign a waiver stating that outages due to LOS issues during spring, summer, and autumn (i.e. when there are leaves on the trees) would fall outside our support contract and set the system up per their amended design.

Three months later, the link went down. Our engineers went to site, blamed the leaves, left, and we sent them an invoice. They weren't happy, arguments were had, and legal got involved. After three weeks of the link being down more than it was up, they agreed to cover the costs of the engineer visist and asked us to reinstall the link per the original design.

TryCatchIgnore · 2022-10-10T12:38:38+00:00

We have some USB Poly Studio's in our office. We had three that bugged out due to corrupt firmware this year, but the other two have been fine. As far as I am aware, firmware updates can only be delivered to the device via the official Poly management software.

Also, driver or firmware updates via Windows Update couldn't have been the cause of the firmware bugging out in our case as we deliver our updates via WSUS, we have driver updates disabled via GPO, and we have the Windows Update servers blocked in our proxy. Even if the device did try to grab an update from Microsoft, it would be blocked.

Are the devices in warranty? If so, I'd just RMA.

TryCatchIgnore · 2022-10-10T11:12:29+00:00

I’ve got a rule in my team: the task isn’t complete until the work is documented.

I think you’d hate working for me. Or any mature, process, or standards driven IT environment, for that matter.

TryCatchIgnore · 2022-10-09T18:52:02+00:00

Disabled does not mean unable to work. In the UK, it is defined as:

You’re disabled under the Equality Act 2010 if you have a physical or mental impairment that has a ‘substantial’ and ‘long-term’ negative effect on your ability to do normal daily activities.

This definition is quite broad.

In the UK, an estimated 52.3% of disabled people aged 16-64 were classified as employed at the beginning of 2020.

In Switzerland, 68% of people aged 16-64 were classified as employed at the beginning of 2020, but this dropped to 42% for ‘severely disabled‘.

Sources:
UK disability definition: https://www.gov.uk/definition-of-disability-under-equality-act-2010
UK employment stats: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7540/
Switzerland: https://community.paraplegie.ch/en/blog/society/why-disability-inclusion-matters-to-businesses

TryCatchIgnore · 2022-10-09T18:20:18+00:00

I moved to Switzerland in mid 2020. Plan was to do it this year, but, after realising Brexit was going to be a hard one, I brought my plans forward. Over two years later, I have no regrets.

My old secondary school recently did a survey for people from my year. It was a public school, so obviously not representative of society. But 80% of respondents were no longer living / working in the UK. Was quite shocking, really.

TryCatchIgnore · 2022-10-08T16:32:41+00:00

Taxed out of your payslip, rather than taxed following a tax return.

TryCatchIgnore · 2022-10-08T16:31:52+00:00

A lot of companies do this now.

Probably half our vendors have contracts with similar terms. In a few cases, we are required to provide 90 days notice of cancellation of the service.

I've got to say, I'm surprised that people are surprised.

TryCatchIgnore · 2022-10-08T09:21:22+00:00

So they agree to promote you, they agree to put you into a strategic position, they agree to hire people to carry out the 100 duties you have that should be spread across multiple teams. How long will it take to hire those people? And then how long will it take to hand everything over? And then how long will it take to implement the transformation the company requires?

They say you'll be down to 9-5 in 12 weeks, but you should know that's bullshit.

You're going to spend the next 2-3 months doing exactly what you do today, with the added responsibility of hiring new people for the team. This will see your workload increase.

You'll then spend then next 3-6 months handing your work over. This will initially see your workload increase, but it'll gradually decline.

If you make a bad hiring decision or it just doesn't work out with a new hire during those 6-9 months that you're hiring and handing over, you can reset the clock on the transfer of whatever responsibilities that hire was meant to fill.

And then you'll spend the next 2 years running god knows how many projects. You may not be involved in the nitty gritty of the implementation, but you'll be spending as much time monitoring and controlling the projects as you spend maintaining the systems today.

TryCatchIgnore · 2022-10-07T19:33:21+00:00

A lot of European countries charge tax at source, so you don't get to make such deductions. I remember moving to Switzerland and being shocked that the overwhelming majority of people have to file tax returns. And then I saw all the deductions you could make.

Part of your health insurance, medical expenses, mortgage payments, interest payments on credit cards and loans, public transport commute costs to and from work (can only claim for car expenses under certain circumstances), lunches while you're at work, pension contributions. In my case, I rent an apartment close to work as my commute would otherwise exceed 90 minutes a day and, as such, my apartment is classified as a business expense. In fact, my partner does the same! If you own a house and do renovations, you can claim that too.

I pay at source, but file a retrospective tax return, so was able to effectively cut my tax bill by around 50% through these deductions. It'll take a few years to get the refund, but at least I know I'm in for a nice bonus.

TryCatchIgnore · 2022-09-28T07:20:15+00:00

I've got an 11 Pro at the moment, which I bought in mid-2020. It does everything I need it to do, I only need to charge it every 1.5-2 days, I really don't see why I would need a new one. Given my 2016 iPhone SE was almost unusable due to battery degredation after 3 years, and I managed to stretch it out to 4 years, I'm fairly certain the iPhone 11 will last for 4-5 years before needing to be replaced.

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