From: Derek Geldard 
Newsgroups: uk.legal uk.finance
Subject: Re: O/T: Advice on negotiating salaries & IP exclusivity
Date: Thu, 06 Sep 2007 19:20:09 +0100
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On Thu, 06 Sep 2007 12:06:02 +0100, Cynic 
wrote:

>>I guess you don't want to pay the going rate !
>
>I *was* paying the going rate.  Plus some relaxed conditions of
>employment (flexi-time, the employee chooses their own "space").  The
>graduate thought she was worth far more.  She also decided on day 1
>that we were doing it all wrong and she would therefore do things
>*her* way instead of how she was asked to do things.

Ahh, you said you'd employed a graduate, you didn't say you say you'd
employed an opinionated woman. There's your problem.

>I'm always
>willing to learn from new ideas, and let her do it her way for 3
>months to see whether she might have a point.  Lots of activity, lots
>of paperwork generated, but not a single thing that helped in any way
>to get the job done, despite friendly advice regarding commercial
>needs,

My company is ISO 9,000 quality assured, we paid a consultant in to
come in and do all the above for us.  :-)

>and eventually a warning regarding non-progress.
>
>The task she had been given was eventually taken over by myself, and I
>completed in from scratch in 3 days.
>
>Tell me, if you pay the "going rate" for someone to clean your car,
>and after 5 hours of faffing around carrying out peripheral activities
>that you don't want them to do, your car is just as dirty as when you
>hired them, would *you* be happy to pay more money for all the work
>they have done?
>

No. She was a bad choice. -period.

I think the problem lies in Degree quaifications for generalists, I'm
less happy about defending those, although the country appears to be
run by people who trained to be artists, lawyers or historians.

>>>I once interviewed a person for a junior position in a computer
>>>programming role.  The person had a very high opinion of his computer
>>>skills, and insisted on telling me how he had achieved the maximum
>>>score in this game, and the top level on that game, and had extensive
>>>experience on various different games consoles.  He certainly believed
>>>that he was the bees' knees.
>>
>>WTF are you fart-arseing around interviewing tossers like that?
>
>Sent by an agency.  It was the last time I used an agency.
>
>>Why do you choose to bracket types like that in amongst people who
>>have chosen to study their chosen subject (engineering for instance)
>>for 3 years at a proper University to Degree Level ?
>
>Simply to illustrate that just because a person thinks they are good,
>doesn't mean that they will be the slightest use whatsoever.

Oh, Like Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Hazel Blears, John Prescot USW. ...

ISWYM

But let's not confuse them with people like Schockley, Bell, Crick,
Watson, Renold, and Whittle et al, and more humble people who never
the less actually know what they are doing because they have been
trained to do it.

In 1968 I worked in a large worsted mill making mens suitings doing
stocktaking during the Christmas break from doing electronics at Uni.
The general attitude was "We make us cloth by pulling the 'andle on
the malingerin' machine, always 'ave done always will".

I didn't stick my oar in in any way because obviously I wouldn't have
been able to change the whole mill in 3 weeks. However, they were
wrong, the mill went bust within  5 years because the manufacturing
process was too slow and expensive using 80 year old looms.

A visitor from Swtzerland has just told me that the textile
manufacturers there are still in business (paying Swiss wages = 2x UK
wages) and have achieved speeds of > 700m/s (Ca. 300 mph) getting the
weft across a loom using air jets or water jets..

DG