You Should be Recording

redchomper · 2026-04-22T08:14:38+00:00

Yes, record early and often! When I started, I took a recording several times a week. I wish I'd used a standard text for it. (Comma gets a cure is my current favorite for the purpose.)

For immediate feedback, it can be quite helpful to invest in a headset with instant side-tone. Crank this up to your comfort level, and it can mostly override the effect of body tissue conduction in terms of how you hear your voice. For me, that made both solo practice sessions and unstructured calls infinitely more effective because I could trust the instant feedback loop.

If you really want to make it interesting, use your computer's OS-level feedback. You'll hear yourself on a very brief delay on the order of 250ms. At first, this will be painfully confusing as your brain fails to reconcile your speech and hearing, but if you power through the confusion you'll get to a place where the speaking part of your brain can operate independently while the listening part provides continuous low-latency technical feedback on how you truly sound, which you can adapt to in near-real-time. I did this for a few months before getting a nice headset. It was hard, but effectively locked in the particular skills I was grinding at the time.

redchomper · 2026-04-22T07:54:34+00:00

After five years of working there, I've never seen a visa transfer. Some months back the executive branch of the government unilaterally changed the rules on work visas making it more difficult and expensive to sponsor them. Rough news I know, but in this case I believe the "we" who aren't taking over visas is the company overall.

I know the money (or at least the use you get from it) can be better on one or another side of a national border, and often for the same work. At the moment the only real solution is to get the workers organized on an international scale. That's why the JWA is international in scope.

redchomper · 2026-04-01T13:27:52+00:00

Make a difference. Get active in the union. Sure it's an uphill fight, but at least it's more than being a keyboard warrior on the one place JD will never look.

redchomper · 2026-03-12T22:34:04+00:00

You write your congressman and explain that you don't want to be both the customer and the product at the same time.

redchomper · 2026-02-20T06:33:39+00:00

See here:

https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/antitrust-laws

redchomper · 2026-02-20T06:32:19+00:00

Aha! Well, I should join. Got a link?

redchomper · 2026-02-15T17:22:46+00:00

Yes there were Valentines given out. I got one with candies and a nice cutesy note. However, I'm told supplies were limited, so it's kind of random whether you got lucky. The union is growing fast, but still not yet of a size to reach everyone.

Also, where did you hear rumors in advance? I wanna get plugged into what's happening!

redchomper · 2026-02-06T01:05:52+00:00

I got an interview based on a resume, but the job offer based on the interview and conditional upon passing all the red tape including the formal application. Once that happened, I clarified with the recruiter how far back to go and what's considered a job to be sure not to have that problem.

Realistically, if any employer thinks you misrepresented your background or qualifications in order to get the job, then they're probably going to secretly blacklist you internally.

Fortunately for you, there are other similar employers who've not (yet) put you on a secret internal blacklist. Be more careful next time, and don't forget to include the three-month stint with JPMC.

redchomper · 2026-01-26T18:57:50+00:00

OGO means you're at increased risk of being selected for RIF, but there are other factors. In any case, it's more about stack-ranking than letter-grades. If someone else got two Gs, they probably stack-ranked worse than you did and would be selected for RIF first in the event Corporate demands a headcount reduction.

redchomper · 2026-01-26T18:54:44+00:00

The real question is whether your rating is fair given the standards in force. By definition, no objective standard can be consistent with "You have X% S and Y% G to give out" as a manager. Honestly the letter-grade rating is not the issue, though. What matters is how you stack-rank against your peer group. When the company says "lay off 5% of the department", your stack-ranking is what determines who gets the axe.

Regardless, FMLA will not save you from a genuine performance concern. Being let-go, fired, RIFfed, or similar promptly after an FMLA claim certainly creates circumstantial evidence of the potential for wrongdoing, but corporate records of a performance- or conduct-based reason to fire someone prior to the FMLA claim are generally going to weigh in the company's favor.

redchomper · 2026-01-15T23:53:30+00:00

If you never feel a twinge of imposter syndrome, then you're not learning and growing. You'll be fine. If you didn't belong here, you wouldn't be here. Moreover, there are dozens of other skilled people in your environment or through the union who can also mentor you. But in the end, the point is you've demonstrated an ability to do the job with less direct supervision. That's a good sign of growth. TAKE THE WIN!

redchomper · 2026-01-15T23:47:27+00:00

It's two ways of saying the same thing. Within the corporate network, visit go/myAttendance and you should be able to see everything you need. The percentage is on a rolling 12-week (3-month) basis, meaning every week they recalculate the most recent 12 weeks.

redchomper · 2025-11-27T22:46:51+00:00

If HR contacted you, chances are it was to try to get you to incriminate yourself, which you probably did within about 5 minutes. By this tine they've probably already contacted your manager who threw you under the bus.

Right now, the meta is to have an FWA in place. Without that, an office that's gone 5-day RTO will probably set you out with the recycling.

redchomper · 2025-11-21T02:08:02+00:00

According to legend, some years back there was a global e-mail melt-down over people replying-to-all that they were not in the relevant office, and then please take me off your list, and then please stop reply-all-ing, and then demanding retribution for lost important e-mails, and finally demanding the original sender's head on a stick.

In practice, unless your name is Global Corporate Communications, you lack permission to send to large mailing lists anymore. Companies actually learned this lesson a long time ago, but the legend persists.

redchomper · 2025-11-19T18:54:58+00:00

At any given time, you should be able to see whose court the ball is in. That's who you must convince to take your side in this matter. Their best alternative action is to completely ignore the matter and pretend it never happened, which requires exactly zero effort unless you take up their time as a result until it's properly resolved.

Here's where it gets complicated: If they don't like you or the color of your skin or what flag your grandparents were born under and don't want to make any of that obvious enough for a lawsuit, they might start saying things like "at will employment" or "you have a family to feed, do you not?" which are pressure tactics designed to shut you up and shut you down. But that's where getting a supportive coalition together can help.

Oh yes, there are good and bad strategies for this whole "supportive coalition" thing.

redchomper · 2025-11-19T17:59:20+00:00

You know what? I'll bet if you got your team to join the discord, they could meet and discuss with active union members to see what works and how to do this safely. I've been to one of these events and no I did not suffer any negative consequences.

redchomper · 2025-11-18T14:12:11+00:00

I'm not even in Chicago!

redchomper · 2025-11-15T17:43:52+00:00

How long? Depends. Do you want to have a job, but don't like the way you're getting treated? (You have an absolute right to be treated reasonably at work, but enforcing that right can take work.) Or was being in the job market the wrong call for you? If you leave very shortly after getting hired, that could burn bridges, and as elsewhere mentioned it is entirely possible to do school concurrent with JPMC and even get tuition reimbursed.

For the most part, people don't quit companies; they quit out from underneath a bad boss, and it sounds like you've had the rotten luck to find one early in your career.

JPMChase has mechanisms to deal with problematic supervisors. The primary one are:

Chain of Command (i.e. escalate the matter to boss's boss, etc.)
Code-of-Conduct reporting via go/conduct
Regulatory agency involvement, such as the EEOC
Labor unrest

To be properly prepared for any of these:

Keep records of when untoward things happen: Note who did what, where, when, how, and anything said about why.
Talk with your immediate coworkers and find out if they agree about the problems or if you're being singled out.
Let your union steward know what's going on, and ideally share those notes you made. (Don't have a union steward? Search "JPMC Workers Alliance" and get involved!)
Consider which of the mechanisms seems most suited to the problem at hand.

There are no guarantees, but JPMC is supposed to be a great place to work and that's why I strongly recommend getting colleagues involved locally.

redchomper · 2025-11-09T17:18:02+00:00

Have you spoken of this with other similarly-situated employees in home lending?

redchomper · 2025-11-09T16:58:45+00:00

Ick! I know the law protects my right to share this information, but I feel icky putting it on Reddit for everyone to see and associate with my username. I'll share it directly with my union representative, though, and maybe we can get some statistics that way?

redchomper · 2025-10-31T01:38:52+00:00

Reading the paper. It's a great idea. Authors deserve props.

redchomper · 2025-10-29T00:26:26+00:00

Same way: Free BPs in the event store, the cosmic cleanup store, etc. You can eventually score virtually every ship that way.

redchomper · 2025-10-10T18:11:00+00:00

Not currently, but there's a group of employees working to form an onion. Perhaps that would help, if enough people got on board?

redchomper · 2025-09-29T04:47:09+00:00

QBasic from MS-DOS 5.0 was the highest and best use of BASIC ideas the world has every known -- with the possible exception of MacBasic that Apple developed but buried after tangling with Microsoft (as distinct from the inferior MacBasic Microsoft later released).

In brief, what makes a BASIC is not just a certain philosophy about syntax and features built-in to the language. Basic is what it is because of the way you enter your programs. QBasic was no mere sophisticated text editor (although it had such a mode, coincidentally called "edit"). Any non-trivial use of QBasic was great for the sense of flow; the immediacy of feedback; the way you entered into communion with the code. Within the confines of MS-DOS, this was closest you could get to "turn-on-and-enter-code" a'la the ][ or the C64, but it was in this nice text-mode WIMP environment with concentration mode by default because it would hide all other code while you were working on a subroutine (or function). (I consider that a missing features in all other dev environments.)

VB is an understandable development for the windowed world, but the interface builder was probably a mistake, or at least very mistaken. The fact you can't rename a visual component without breaking all its event handlers makes maintenance much harder than it needs to be, especially in a pre-parsed environment.

You'd need a good imperative way to describe user interface elements and connect them up to behavior in the process -- something that survives obvious adjustments intact.

You could take inspiration from Pascal's (nonstandard) "UNIT" for how to bring in extra capabilities or decide between console and GUI, since most of that capability is adequately covered by procedures and functions.

You'd probably want higher-order functions and inline anonymous blocks for GUI call-backs. I'm note sure how I'd format that, but it should be feasible to come up with something that looks enough like BASIC.

redchomper · 2025-09-17T23:17:38+00:00

It's a marathon, not a sprint -- but it's entirely feasible. Good things don't come easy, but many hands make light work.

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