Something Awful and Friends - The roller-coaster train-wreck embarrassing downfall of a Web 1.0 giant and its tick offspring like from Cloverfield

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Ghostse said:
Speaking in generalities:
If he is not an independent contractor employed directly by the business, his contracting firm SHOULD have a "Stand-by" rate. Especially if this is this a routine furlowing on the contract, they should have some money set aside to give them a check during the furlow, but not as big as a normal check. Even if he is an independent contractor contracting directly with the business, unless ZDR is contracting for ScroogeCorp™ (which is unlikely if the place shuts down for two weeks on christmas) he probably gets some sort of "sorry you aren't getting paid" bonus check that's a portion of what he'd normally be getting, Its just not enough to cover his complete failure at budgeting.

But the fucker had a sick wife and chose the high-deductible plan, and continues to devote hours to volunteering at SA; so it seems like good life choices are not be ZDR's forte, so the odds that he selected a shittiest consultancy to work for are very high.

I can only hope the fucker failed to factor in the ruinous levels of taxes that are levied on e-begging dollars*, but that's probably what the $500 increase to $2000 was.


Since I have self respect, I've never actually dealt with e-begging dollars, and since this isn't his job its likely this will just be reported as ordinary income. So GoFundMe's cut + Normal Income Tax - Medical deduction (provided he actually has a sick wife and not just a shelf that needs filling with Funko Pops).
Anyone with actual GoFundMe experience, please chime in about how that shit went come tax time.
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You're correct about that if he is working for a contracting firm; but considering he's making $52,000 a year it's incredibly unlikely that he's working for a contracting firm and is instead working for a temp agency.

When you work for a temp agency the following is typically true.
- You are only paid for hours worked, you get no PTO.
- If the company you are working for has paid holidays and is closed, you will not work and will not be paid for it.
- If the company you are working for closes for an emergency (blizzard, fire, etc) you will not work and will not be paid for it.
- You can be fired from the company at any time and will not work until the agency is able to place you again. You will not be paid in the interim.
- If the company you are working for is laying staff of for a season and you are not terminated; you will not be paid for your Voluntary Time Off.
- You (typically) cannot be hired directly by the company until you've worked 90 days of hours and it isn't guaranteed.

Temps are usually hired for unskilled positions (call centers, specialized retail, etc) but hiring temps for low level IT isn't uncommon either; espically when you need an extra boost for grunt projects like running cable, large equipment moves or installs, or an annual inventory. The fact that he hasn't been hired after a few years speaks volumes to either the agency he works for or the quality of his work (one or both of them being very bad).

A contracting firm is more where you'd find a very highly skilled person for a temporary project; like getting a VOIP expert to roll out an entirely new phone system across an enterprise or a networking person to build out a whole new datacenter for a remote location. These guys (depending on what they do) clear $100,000/year; sometimes very easily. You'd never find one of them e-begging on SA because they have two weeks off, they'd be trying to find places to spend all of their cash.
 
That's a lot just to say that goons don't make the best decisions regarding literally anything, most of all being their choices in employment.
 
Tanner Glass said:
You're correct about that if he is working for a contracting firm; but considering he's making $52,000 a year it's incredibly unlikely that he's working for a contracting firm and is instead working for a temp agency.

When you work for a temp agency the following is typically true.
- You are only paid for hours worked, you get no PTO.
- If the company you are working for has paid holidays and is closed, you will not work and will not be paid for it.
- If the company you are working for closes for an emergency (blizzard, fire, etc) you will not work and will not be paid for it.
- You can be fired from the company at any time and will not work until the agency is able to place you again. You will not be paid in the interim.
- If the company you are working for is laying staff of for a season and you are not terminated; you will not be paid for your Voluntary Time Off.
- You (typically) cannot be hired directly by the company until you've worked 90 days of hours and it isn't guaranteed.

Temps are usually hired for unskilled positions (call centers, specialized retail, etc) but hiring temps for low level IT isn't uncommon either; espically when you need an extra boost for grunt projects like running cable, large equipment moves or installs, or an annual inventory. The fact that he hasn't been hired after a few years speaks volumes to either the agency he works for or the quality of his work (one or both of them being very bad).

A contracting firm is more where you'd find a very highly skilled person for a temporary project; like getting a VOIP expert to roll out an entirely new phone system across an enterprise or a networking person to build out a whole new datacenter for a remote location. These guys (depending on what they do) clear $100,000/year; sometimes very easily. You'd never find one of them e-begging on SA because they have two weeks off, they'd be trying to find places to spend all of their cash.
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We're estimating that his request is reflecting his actual salary when in reality its probably much less.
I don't want to get too far into the :autism: hole of trying to figure out ZDR's computer janitor salary, but the assumption being made is he is reporting a number based on reality. Even $1,000/week is based on reality, its possible it reflects:
- His post tax salary.
- He is getting a furlow rate, "conveniently" leaves that out of his sob story, and that is the difference between his furlow and full-time rate
- Roughly what he owes on bills that are due by the end of the month, and is completely independent of his paycheck.
- He makes even less and just figured "Fuck, if Doobie can get 14K for a vent hood in an alabama hotdog shack, I bet I get a few bucks"

Also in parts of the mid-west $52,000/year is "low but not criminally low" for a mid-tier IT generalist.

tl;dr its fine for making fun of ZDR for being a low-paid IT gimp, but we shouldn't be taking ZDR's self-reported income as any sort of gospel.
 
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Holocaust Mansplainer said:
Goons are such easy marks. No wonder lowtax treats them like paypigs, if he didn't someone else would.
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I mean if you have access to a group of people who are willing to pay you real money to consistently access a dead, shitty forum I'd say it's your God-given right to scam them as much as you can get away with.
 
Ghostse said:
We're estimating that his request is reflecting his actual salary when in reality its probably much less.
I don't want to get too far into the :autism: hole of trying to figure out ZDR's computer janitor salary, but the assumption being made is he is reporting a number based on reality. Its is very possible that $1,000/week is based on reality, it reflects:
- His post tax salary.
- He is getting a furlow rate and that is the difference between his furlow and full-time rate

Also in parts of the mid-west $52,000/year is "low but not criminally low" for a mid-tier IT generalist.

tl;dr its fine for making fun of ZDR for being a low-paid IT gimp, but we shouldn't be taking ZDR's self-reported income as any sort of gospel.
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I mean, you're right; but making fun of ZDR for being shitty at a shitty job is fun to me. The only reason I think he's a computer janitor is that an actual contractor worth any kind of money would have a lot more to show for having worked on SA for as long as he has, even as a "in my free time" side project.

We have a kiwi farmer here that has developed tools for the ResetERA forums literally to make it easier to laugh at them, it tracks and extracts all kinds of data points but ZDR can't keep a search bar or archives working in however long he's been there.

EDIT - I meant literally if Lowtax gave Null or Crunklord420 admin rights on SA and they could be bothered to give a shit, they'd have it working and maybe even add some new things and it wouldn't take 14 years to do.
 
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That's some top-quality work right there.

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Tanner Glass said:
I mean, you're right; but making fun of ZDR for being shitty at a shitty job is fun to me. The only reason I think he's a computer janitor is that an actual contractor worth any kind of money would have a lot more to show for having worked on SA for as long as he has, even as a "in my free time" side project.

We have a kiwi farmer here that has developed tools for the ResetERA forums literally to make it easier to laugh at them, it tracks and extracts all kinds of data points but ZDR can't keep a search bar or archives working in however long he's been there.
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I don't think ZDR being shitty at his job is in dispute; see @plattschwanz post above. Any decent contractor would know when they were in over their head and to stop digging. Hell any decent contractor would insist on being being paid in more than just the ability to keep people you disagree with from posting on a dead gay forum. Just saying using his ebegging amount to estimate his income is bad practice.

edit: actually any decent contractor would have a decent budget and wouldn't be sweating what sounds like a routine furlow. Hell any decent non-independent contractor would probably be found some sort of job he could do for two weeks, especially if he went to his management chain with Cancer Wife sob story.
 
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plattschwanz said:
The other few posts from him are great as well, it's basically Killhour throwing him one bone after another with ZDR then being too inept to comprehend.

View attachment 618396
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Ya I read through that thread yesterday and saw all this shit. It not a mystery why SA code is so fucked. It goes from one inept volunteer programmer to the next with no accountability and no one checking their work.

What a shithole.
 
Mr. Professional said:
Ya I read through that thread yesterday and saw all this shit. It not a mystery why SA code is so fucked. It goes from one inept volunteer programmer to the next with no accountability and no one checking their work.

What a shithole.
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The last major programmer; Radium, while inept was not a volunteer. He was paid $42,000/year and had no deliverables or oversight for a remarkably long period of time.
 
Ghostse said:
Still a better hire than Shmorky.
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I'm not sure, Shmorky at least provided the content that he was paid to provide (videos and otherwise).

Now if you want to say he's a better person than Shmorky, sure. But that's only because we aren't sure he is an abuser and wants to fuck kids. Considering it's SA there's no being 100% sure.
 
Shmorky was a fucked up asshole and would deserve to be put down. He did produce content though which SA lacks. Hell, I'm even gonna give Shmorky that if he didn't have the mountains of skeletons in his closet and wasn't generally a touched in the head fellow, he did had enough talent to land a good job in that animation industry, which is not easy. It's a pity it got squandered on drawing pictures of furries in diapers.

ZDR seems to have a very shitty workflow, normally the tools (whichever it is he uses) are supposed to pick up on some of those errors automatically and at least warn you. Especially with this interpreted shit it's relatively easy and you could write some kind of linter yourself if you were so inclined, but hell I'm also sure there are so many solutions already pre-made that I couldn't possibly list them here. Either that or he's incredibly sloppy which both aren't good traits for a code monkey. This is assuming he knows what he is actually doing and these errors aren't from a sheer lack of knowledge. Not sure though, such people usually rely heavily on some IDE to basically code the project for them and then such errors don't happen. (People working on SA do have a history of having egos that their skills can't match, though)
 
AmpleApricots said:
Shmorky was a fucked up asshole and would deserve to be put down. He did produce content though which SA lacks. Hell, I'm even gonna give Shmorky that if he didn't have the mountains of skeletons in his closet and wasn't generally a touched in the head fellow, he did had enough talent to land a good job in that animation industry, which is not easy. It's a pity it got squandered on drawing pictures of furries in diapers.

ZDR seems to have a very shitty workflow, normally the tools (whichever it is he uses) are supposed to pick up on some of those errors automatically and at least warn you. Especially with this interpreted shit it's relatively easy and you could write some kind of linter yourself if you were so inclined, but hell I'm also sure there are so many solutions already pre-made that I couldn't possibly list them here. Either that or he's incredibly sloppy which both aren't good traits for a code monkey. This is assuming he knows what he is actually doing and these errors aren't from a sheer lack of knowledge. Not sure though, such people usually rely heavily on some IDE to basically code the project for them and then such errors don't happen. (People working on SA do have a history of having egos that their skills can't match, though)
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I think most people suspect ZDR treats his admin position as a "Super-Moderator" instead of an actual system administrator. He spends a lot of time posting and probing/banning/approving bans which doesn't leave a lot of time for actual admin work.

Even if he's unskilled, he's had a huge amount of time to work on it. Even if you've never done anything like it before, most people who give a shit will become proficient within two years.

It isn't just ZDR in that regard, either. Lowtax has made his money owning a message board but never in ~20 years did he ever think it was a good idea if he himself learned how they operate and learned how to code around them. If Lowtax knew what he was doing he could have saved himself at least ten years of Sys Admin salary (which for SA was ~$42,000) which comes to $420,000, before any other compensation he gave people in tech support for his forums. Even if he didn't know what he was doing; if he stuck with it he could have ~20 years experience that he could put on a resume instead of "I sometimes wrote articles on the front page and/or Let's Played". Hell, if he sets his sights high enough he could have had a working search function or working archives.
 
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