Happy Birthday

[howeird]

to the US Peace Corps. The program was established by Executive Order 10924, issued by President John F. Kennedy on March 1, 1961.

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Today is also the day most of my friends born on 2/29 celebrate their birthdays

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And as it is the first of the month, I like to call it March Fools' Day

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Spook slept on the bed until about 6, but was gone before my first pit stop. I had to work hard to not wake up till the 7:30 alarm, partly I went to bed early and partly anticipation for the job interview.

Looking at Google maps, I expected the drive to take 45 minutes, and they said to get there 15 minutes early. Somehow I got that math wrong and for a 10:45 appointment I left at 9:30, got there at a little before 10. Valet parking was easy, the display in the lobby was boring - it just had a map of the world showing where Tesla cars were, and now and then brought up stats for a particular city. Signing in was a crock - ipad on its side scans the bar code/qcode and takes a picture of me.

HR rep who sent the email (not the one who contacted me originally) came out to grab me a little early, up steep stairs to the open plan (yuk!) office space, and into a small conference room. We chatted until the first manager arrived. He is way up there, had a lot of questions, most of them the usual ones, some geared toward A/V testing. Half an hour, and the next manager came in he is one notch above the person who would be my manager, and is in charge of automation. Good questions from him too, but I kept wandering off topic. Turns out most of the testing is done in the cars which are parked out back, using laptops. Hmmm.

HR rep came to walk me out, said Monday she would chat with the two interviewers and would let me know by the middle of next week.

I have no idea how it went. No real rapport with either manager. HR person clicked, but that's her job. :-)

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Grocery Outlet to charge the car, it did not take a full charge, as usual. I bought some meatballs and marinara, also bananas since I was out.

Home, park magazine in the slot. Nothing delivered and only junk mail. Took the two diuretics.

Slow rest of the day. Watched some streams, played on FB, made a late lunch of spaghetti & meatballs. Learning I am more of a macaroni guy. Maybe tomorrow lunch will be macaroni with cream of mushroom soup sauce & Swiss.

Hosted a game of marbles, but only 3 people showed up to play.

The weather was okay - it drizzled a little on the ride to and from Tesla, but not much. I really should have taken advantage of being in Palo Alto for lunch. And maybe the large GO on the way.

Watched PTI and The Orville. Second of a 2-part episode, and it was pretty good. They stuck to being a spin-off of Star Trek. Maybe a bit too long on the CGI space battle. The parody comes in by them naming the Bad Guy race The Krill (why not the plankton?) a race who worships the god Avis. That Hertz.

No real dinner. Some PNB. An ice cream sandwich. I loved those as a kid, I would hold them tight so there would be chocolate stuff to lick off my fingers. The last three Thai tea mini mochi.

Plans for tomorrow:
Community First Saturday party (blue-eyed girl may be there)
Storms expected - storm chasers may be online for a change.
5 pm Peet's chat with Janice. I'd rather go to a Starbucks, but she is helping a friend who lives down the block.

Comments

[msconduct.livejournal.com]

Commiserations on the Tesla gig. Sounds like it would have been a bit of a nightmare in any case. I don't really get the they want Tesla owners thing. Surely Tesla owners are people who've cashed out their Valley stock and are now in venture capital firms trying to find things to spend their cash on. (Warning: may have watched too much Silicon Valley.)

[howeird]

They want people who have experience using the equipment they will be testing. You're right about the nightmare gig. They are in panic mode because they are OCD about testing, it's stupid for a car company to not have enough parking for its employees, and the open plan upstairs engineering warehouse is stupid. So is doing all the testing in actual cars. But you're wrong about the cash - the average engineer relies on his $120,000/yr salary, not on stock. Those days are long gone.

[msconduct.livejournal.com]

Huh, interesting. I read an article on The Verge last week that compared what content moderators make as outsourced contract labour for Facebook (around $29,000) to the median Facebook compensation ($240,000 all up which includes stock options, according to them). Maybe Facebook are now an outlier.

[howeird]

Those numbers are wrong. I was actually offered a content moderator job at Facebook and the contract paid $19.93 an hour. 41,454.40/year. I have never met a Facebook employee who made more than $120k a year, stock options are options you pay for the stock it's not a gift. If you're lucky you get 5% off the listed price.

[msconduct.livejournal.com]

The content moderator number referred to what was paid by the outsourcer, Cognizant, rather than by Facebook directly. Can't say I would take that one no matter how much they paid. I'd gladly clean toilets (I've done it before) rather than do that job. As for your Facebook figure, I don't doubt it. The average is apparently around $117,000 (rather than the median which is the $240,000 figure). I'm a bit surprised by that: clearly, as you say, the days of retiring in your twenties are long over now that these businesses are no longer startups. My impression was that engineer jobs in the Valley are hotly sought after, but the pay isn't any more than you can make here. Probably good for the resume though.

[filkferengi]

I'm not a big fan of spaghetti with meatballs, preferring the steady consistency of meat sauce, but, rather than regular spaghetti, I enjoy the sauce with elbow mac.

[howeird]

Me too, but some impulse told me it had been too long since I'd make pisketti.