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Hi All,
Some of you may remember I am in a state of Contract/semi-contract with a company. The question I would like to ask is do you think it's reasonable to continue on with this project (it is quite interesting...) and talk to them about specs, rate of pay, tax, National Insurance stamp. The Spec I was given was to 'automate the test', this while vague spec is something I have worked to before so had a rough plan in mind... When he saw today's update 'well not much has changed' I have had a mare due to GDI shapes getters & setters and the like, which got sorted on Saturday by my flatmate as we were waiting for another friend to celebrate his birthday (or 41st trip around the Sun, as he called it!  ). True the south west of the UK has low salaries but I was working on a low contract rate per hour  . This role would seem to be a little odd... mind you I was not expecting much more.
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Do you have a contract with these people or are you working ad-hoc without pay until they decide you are worth paying to keep? I seem to recall you were asked to do some free work to prove your worth? Is that the case?
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Well, no I don't have a written contract but they have paid me once, so I believe that makes me a contractor under UK tax law. Mind you the thing I thought was funny I keep hearing about how they were surprised at my electronics knowledge when I said I measured the output of one of the boards I was working with to find the output voltage to see if it was open collector outputs. <'moan'> I was supposed to know this from the circuit diagram which I did not have to hand, the voltage to switch was applied to the 'Clamp' input of the board <\'moan'>.
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It's more than twenty years ago that I worked with electronics but I really thought open collectors was something of the past.
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I must admit it is a bit old school, things have changed a bit.
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It's cheap, not terribly susceptible to ESD, for slower speeds it works fine. If it ain't broke...
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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Cheap, yes, ESD, depends on the device family but generally safe, Slower speed, get left in a cloud dust by passing tortoises. If it ain't broke...don't bother fixing it!
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Jörgen Andersson wrote: but I really thought open collectors was something of the past
It is the simplest method to pass digital signals to circuits running at a different voltage level.
Status output lines of intergrated circuits are often OC. So there is no current draw when unused and they can drive higher currents than a normal output (e.g. for a LED).
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Good point! 
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A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it is written on...
You have nothing except a tax bill to pay...
My advice (as someone who contracted for over 20 years in the UK) is to not let people take the piss - as long as you volunteer your time, they'll keep stealing it.
If I have misunderstood your situation, I apologise but my strong advice is to stay away form non-paying gigs unless you don't need the money or it after paying work and you want the experience.
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True. Very true, but the issue I was having was nothing to do. The thing that got to me was being told 'someone' (I think I know who it was!) wrote an application that did what he wanted (not the task I was given) in four hours. He could ask what was wanted.  . Sorry I wanted a winge!!
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Having also contracted in the UK, I would have thought there were enough Agencies around to find the job you want and like. (Mind you, I have been retired for the last 5 years.) Have you tried them?
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Oh yes, there are. However the jobs are all over the country, I grabbed this role as it seemed local and very convenient. Also the agencies you speak of are staff by a mix of trolls and insurance sales people...
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A while back, I saw prompt for CP for best-practice articles.
I put together a small article on PMDs.
It shows only 3 people rated it. It says it has 1.8k views. (not sure I believe that).
Project Post Mortems[^]
I am interested in feedback from others who have used them. Others who might want to but were not sure where to start. Personally we find them invaluable with new teams, etc. We have one scheduled for this Friday for a project that went live last week.
Thoughts? Flame?
Thanks!
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Do you want to delete this second post - they both ended up in the moderation queue and now you have double posted
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Oops.
Already cleaned up the other one...
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Thank you.
Did not realize I posted twice. Sorry.
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Basically, your first post was spotted by the automated spam detector which shunted it to a queue for a human decision. Since it didn't appear, you posted it again - and that went to moderation as well.
Chill had to let both copies through, or you would have been tagged as a spammer - and it takes yet more human intervention to clear up afterwards! 
Just be a little patient - it's worth the occasional inconvenience of a "false positive" to prevent the spam floods we used to have before the detector was added, trust me!
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Isn't it frowned upon for authors to promote their articles via Lounge threads?
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Generally, yes.
But I can understand it - it's his first, and 1.8K views with 3 votes is kinda depressing when you put a lot of work into it... but I've got one with 33,794 views for just 1 vote!
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Yeah, up-votes need to be encouraged - maybe increase the rep score gain 10x on up-votes - what do you think?
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Maybe if you got rep for upvoting instead of increasing the rep you got for being upvoted?
Or perhaps not - it'd be a quick way to get a high rep, just upvoting your own sock puppets...and they would get better quicker too. On reflection, not a good idea at all!
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Yeah I mean, the up-voter gets points, so more people will up-vote. Sock puppets are usually easy to detect.
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Perhaps just have a limit on the number of daily upvotes you can cast that grant rep, and scale it based on current rep. The higher your rep, the more trustworthy you should be (less likely to abuse sock-puppets) and the more votes you get.
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I appreciate realy your work/obligation. But please do not take the votes so tragic and be happy about the 1.8K views.
BTW, also be happy: Many times and article of this scale will only be accepted as a tip.
modified 19-Jan-21 21:04pm.
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