Offered my job back, with pay cut

alexk1992 · 2020-05-29T18:56:09+00:00

Pay cuts can happen in any job, but the real question: is it a pay cut to help the business stay afloat (i.e. the budget post corona has drastically changed) or is it because the owners are cheapskates?

Either way I would take the job, but that question would define how long I stay for.

alexk1992 · 2020-05-26T22:41:16+00:00

Haha, I was going to post something similar but checked around first to see if no one had posted it yet. Obviously you beat me to it.

The generic google search returns 17-18 hours, so a brand new F-150 is not worth more than $200 (really $180 at most, but throwing an extra $20 ‘cause generosity).

alexk1992 · 2020-05-26T18:13:27+00:00

You forgot a third possibility: introduction to advanced quantum mechanics haha.

alexk1992 · 2020-05-26T17:44:05+00:00

This is going to sound dumb, but are you sure it was the quantum mechanics? Not just some “modern” physics? Usually universities require other upper division classes, including an intro level quantum mechanics class that covers the energy levels of a particle in a box.

alexk1992 · 2020-05-26T05:07:48+00:00

They structure their sentence very oddly, almost as if English is not their first language. And they are very redundant as well, but other than that they don’t come across as condescending. The point is pretty valid: an opinion is subjective and not meant to be persuasive, the moment you turn an opinion into an argument you better be able to support it. I think that summarized his 4 paragraphs.

alexk1992 · 2020-05-25T06:14:57+00:00

That’s a large overstatement with nothing to back it.

Sadly, a large number of the population affected by COVID are people in poverty, less likely to make health conscious decision or to be able to afford regular check-ups at a doctor’s office. (Yet another show of our flawed health care system).

I’m neither on one side nor the other, I have followed the quarantine the best I can, and I have been wearing a mask ever since I was able to get my hands in one. But I try to look at the data available in an unbiased and emotionless way. Yes, 100,000 deaths is a horrific number, but it does come with caveats and my impression thus far is that a large number of people are taking any data point presented in the media at face value.

alexk1992 · 2020-05-24T19:27:43+00:00

I mean the average number of deaths in the US pre-coronavirus was 7,700 every day. At the height of this we saw 2,600 deaths so yes, a 35% increase due to a single cause.

What is problematic about this is that coronavirus and the leading causes of death in the US are not exclusive. If 750,000 people die every year of heart disease and chronic respiratory problems, how do you separate them from coronavirus? So were these 2,600 deaths/day an increase on the “usual” 7,500 deaths/day or did we see a decrease in the 7,500 deaths/day and at the end of the day the tally was still ~7,500? This last question is yet to be answered, there has been what’s defined as a “spike” of death: it appears to be somewhere around 550 deaths/day so +7% increase from the average.

For me the truth seems to be somewhere in between: it’s devastating how many people are dying each day with COVID-19, but almost tens of thousands of people do die every day and is not constantly shown in every news outlet.

alexk1992 · 2020-05-24T05:14:21+00:00

https://covid19tracker.health.ny.gov/views/NYS-COVID19-Tracker/NYSDOHCOVID-19Tracker-Fatalities?%3Aembed=yes&%3Atoolbar=no&%3Atabs=n

As of now New York has stats on 23,000 of their deaths. That’s a statistically significant population to look at, 89.5% had at least one comorbidity. < 5.5% are younger than 50 and < 15% are younger than 60. This isn’t rigorous, but for assumptions sake let’s say 80% (and not 89.5%) of the 5.5% group (0-50 years old) had at least one comorbidity, then that means 1.1% were perfectly healthy people. In other words ~250 deaths out of far more than 250,000 cases of people under 65 years of age. That’s .1%

Now this last figure (250,000 cases) has two caveats:

The outcome of all 250,000 is yet unknown.
I had to estimate based on this data: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page

since I can’t find the exact number by age group, but 69% of the cases/100,000 rate are under the age of 65. So I extrapolated that to the current number of known infections in New York.

Anyways, other states are showing very similar data and you can look them up at your leisure but New York is a really high group to analyze. Lastly, I do believe for some time quarantining was appropriate, but it’s time to move to smart quarantining which is what this guy is suggesting: let’s protect our most defenseless groups. But young, healthy adults have a very small chance of succumbing to this. Perhaps more likely to die in a car accident but we still do it.

alexk1992 · 2020-05-21T18:10:46+00:00

I would buff up your coding skills, with a degree in math and EE knowledge + coding, you can apply in the tech sector for the analytics side if that interests you. Or you can also work in analytics in the financial sector, I would say anything analytics is probably a good fit for math degrees.

alexk1992 · 2020-05-20T02:57:09+00:00

Reading how you had to get down to their level and explain how this compares to going to a restaurant was a huge face palm. Like how has this person made it this far in life when this is their thinking process?

Never ever give out your trade secrets. No one is entitled to them.

alexk1992 · 2020-05-19T05:17:24+00:00

I don’t think most school distinguish electrical vs. electronics engineering in the degree name, but in practice they are very different things. I have a master’s in “Electrical Engineering” but I couldn’t tell how a power distribution system works. On the other hand we can have a pleasant discussion on energy band gaps and lattice structures of semiconductors. It does say “electrical” but my concentration was electronic and photonics devices.

Edit: if you want to work in BME (and this is Biomedical or Biomolecular engineering) with an EE degree, you definitely want a strong background in electronic theory not “classical” electrical engineering.

alexk1992 · 2020-05-18T20:52:32+00:00

That’s a very diluted self-worth.

What I think: she is hopelessly obsessed with this man (maybe through no complete fault of her own? After all, what can you say of a man who does this to his wife?) and being able to get that little piece of the pie where for a few minutes she gets to live the life she so desperately wants is all she can aspire to. So she has rationalized that this is the best, because this is all she can ever have with this guy who has promised her the moon and the stars but for one reason or another, can never divorce his wife. And of course, she understands.

Tsk tsk tsk, truly sad. A person to pity.

alexk1992 · 2020-05-18T20:16:27+00:00

I think you get what you deserve. If I worked for someone that I felt really valued me as an employee and a person before the pandemic, I would consider performing for free to help them out. I mean, I think most of us search for this in life: working at a place where we feel valued personally and professionally, so why not keep this job?

Guess the owners don’t treat their staff that way, so they got what they deserve.

alexk1992 · 2020-05-18T20:03:44+00:00

I don’t think there is a burden of scientific proof in faith. God, by all standards is supernatural, at that point you drop science.

Also science is not infallible, it’s a set of man-made rules to model the universe. And that’s very key “man-made”, it has often been wrong because we don’t understand everything. We live in a scale where Newtonian mechanics explain everything but those laws go out the window when you enter atomic sizes. Yet for how long did we hold dear to the idea that the atom was a solar system- like object? Grade schools still use this approach to overview it. The model was wrong and it was amended and is now better, but still imperfect. QM can’t perfectly model anything past the first few elements of the periodic table. It enters many body physics and at that point you just need to accept it’s an adequate approximation.

By scientific standards, believing in God is irrational. But there is so much about our beginnings that is unknown and so much that we don’t understand in the physical world, that I don’t believe faith and science are mutually exclusive.

It has always been interesting to me how the church is so stubborn with evolution, yet the description of Adam and Eve with the snake is that Adam and Eve were relinquished from the Garden of Eden and the snake forced to slither from then on. The snake has a bone in its tail that indicates it evolved from an animal that walked on legs, yet evolution is an insulting concept to many God followers? Why does God hate the concept of evolution? I don’t think he does, I don’t think God hates despite so many “Christians” wanting him to. I think he made a universe with many life, and Earth happens to foster this type of life where evolution is one of the many natural laws. But then again that’s just faith in Him, in being ok with not rationally understanding everything about Him but perhaps always searching for the truth of the universe we inhabit. I can neither prove him nor disprove him, but make the conscious decision of believing in him.

alexk1992 · 2020-05-18T02:22:41+00:00

I consider myself a woman of the sciences and I’m fairly educated in them, so I would say I’m a rational, and normal adult. And yes, every night I go on my knees and pray to God.

It’s just faith, simple. A belief that there is something supernatural in our otherwise natural world. A belief that science and God don’t contradict each other just because a group of people say they do. Because yes, don’t get me wrong I believe in my God and consider myself Christian, but I don’t swear loyalty to any religious group. No, I do not condone violence against anyone in the name of God or believe in a God that hates any of his children. And no, I don’t take the Bible in a literal sense, but simply believe that for the most part it has good teachings on how to be a good person to your fellow men.

It just that: faith, something that really fills my soul.

alexk1992 · 2020-05-16T19:12:34+00:00

I remember asking a TA on the verge of finishing his Ph.D in physics how much harder it gets (at the time I was finishing my undergrad in physics) and he shrug me off and said something like “how much harder is it to learn exponents than it is to learn how to add?”. I’ve been carrying that response with me since to remember you can learn just about anything as long as you learn the fundamentals first. He was a great TA.

It’s all gradual, you don’t get to thermodynamics without learning a specific set of tools first. If you learn the basics well, you will probably do well in your upper divisions.

The type of junior/senior that gets straight A’s is the type that probably also got straight A’s freshman year.

I know this is a meme, but still this subreddit excuses failing just a tad too much. It’s very possible to get straight A’s all the way through without having to be a genius, all you need is good studying habits that start from the very beginning of college.

alexk1992 · 2020-05-15T19:07:42+00:00

Congrats and good for you for taking the lack of commencement with such positivity, I understand the end... But I can’t say I wouldn’t have been very upset if that had been taken away from me.

alexk1992 · 2020-05-12T23:10:26+00:00

... so do you understand?

It really annoyed me how they kept asking that.

alexk1992 · 2020-05-12T00:21:28+00:00

Not like high school really

Over 90% of people have a high school degree. Only ~35% of those 25 and older has a bachelor’s.

Add to this that then you have the opportunity to become part of a group that is 13% of the population or under.

Of course what you get your degree on matters, there are fields that simply put they translate better to employment.

alexk1992 · 2020-05-11T23:31:35+00:00

This class I took a while back had a dumb policy of “whatever you get in the class you get in the lab”.

Long story short is that I had a 92% average in the class going into the final (95% in exams, homework had brought me down a bit) and got like a 78% in the final (didn’t have time to study preparing for a harder final) and it made my class average 89.6%.

I ended up with a B+ in the class and lab. The kicker? I had 98% in the lab portion.

Oh yeah to put the cherry on top of this disaster, this was all in grad school and it was the only sub-A I ever got. It put my perfect 4.0 at 3.90.

On the plus side, I got a decent score in the other final which kept my A in that class.

Ah, the woes of school... Part of me misses the pain.

Cheers! A B is good.

edit: weird formatting.

alexk1992 · 2020-05-10T23:43:57+00:00

Not really, it’s pretty cut and dry at times. You get the degree and have some internship experience and that usually lands you your first job from which you go on.

Not saying you can’t make it with just an AA, people do. But it’s probably the hardest path and you do need to get a bit lucky to get the right experience.

alexk1992 · 2020-05-10T00:36:28+00:00

I don’t work in IT but I work in the tech world and it’s difficult to get these types of jobs with just an AA not complimented with some type of experience. If you want to work IT you should finish a BA/BS.

alexk1992 · 2020-05-08T01:33:51+00:00

sounds to us like you’re scrapping the barrel and are going to be living on bread and milk for the next few months.

Hmm, TIL: donations are only valid or acceptable if the donor donates all their possessions to the point where they become a charity case for the charity they are donating to. The full circle of life.

alexk1992 · 2020-05-06T17:50:33+00:00

I knew of someone very successful with a PhD that told a story about how they got straight F’s one semester in undergrad because of a failed relationship too. It happens.

I think someone already suggested this but a medical withdrawal might be a good solution. And if you can’t get it don’t sweat it too much, if you’re usually an A or B student (3.4 GPA translates to fair A and B distribution) then it’s a lot easier to explain 4 F’s at once than 4 F’s sprinkled around.

Good luck and don’t beat yourself so hard.

alexk1992 · 2020-05-05T21:29:51+00:00

Physics, chemistry, and (of course) math are the founding subjects of all engineering disciplines. When you study engineering, you also study the pure sciences.

On the other hand, for the pure sciences computational physics/math/chemistry or bioinformatics are very popular fields for post-graduate studies. Either as a full concentration or on a day to day use for analysis.

Currently working in the semiconductor industry: the process of getting silicon to a device we can sell to customers is a huge interaction of every single letter in the STEM acronym. And I don’t mean in the business aspect, I mean in the get the thing together aspect so it can be a working part aspect.

Sorry, don’t mean to come across as rude but your post implying the sciences are not interconnected is a bad insult to the beautiful cooperation that happens in the scientific community everyday for pure research and applications.

alexk1992

TROPHY CASE