>Is this the payroll department, keeping track of hours and salaries and vacation days and benefits? Not needed here. We have a "take what you need" vacation policy that people use appropriately. We cover all health/vision/dental insurance that falls in our plans. Being generous means we don't have to waste time and resources tracking this, which IMO saves us money in the end. >Is this the person/team responsible for hiring new team members, or at least dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's filing the necessary paperwork? Hiring is done by me right now - and most of the paperwork is clearly documented so my admin can get it done quickly. >Is this the person/team that handles disputes between staff members or handling discipline issues when somebody crosses a line? I'm fine handling most disputes, but discipline issues are a concern, especially in our current age of litigious retribution. >Knowing precisely what you need will direct you accordingly; just keep in mind that always, always, HR exists to protect the company from its employees. A major item for me personally is that if an employee does fall off the rails (has happened a couple times in 16 years), it is helpful to have someone other than the BOSS to talk that employee through their issues and to come to a resolution is just not THE BOSS SAYS SO. :)

"Qulatiy is Job #1"

Wouldn't that make him a MEME?

"Qulatiy is Job #1"

Since we actually have built a "All you need to know before you start to work for us" book (100+ pages now), including things like coding standards, how to deal with customers, marketing, etc., - having this clearly written down is a great suggestion!

"Qulatiy is Job #1"

I talk to my entire team (devs+sales+marketing+admin) before making any decision that will affect everyone! :) My goal is really to find someone who will make sure we don't miss the compliance things we could eventually be tagged with, much less dealing with people.

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>I would strongly recommend looking for a competent outsource organisation which can help you with compliance and processes at arms length. This is the part I wanted to get help with, so I don't have to deal with all the California regulation stuff. I'm sure we've missed some required training or posting in the office of business laws. But beyond the first post linking to the Inc. article, no one has yet had a suggestion of an external HR system they think does great work for them.

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>I don't think your candidates will have a much different experience. Some nice thoughts here. I actually don't mind my being the boss and the HR person as well - there are even advantages. Just yesterday, because I addressed an issue head on, it took what could have been a contentious issue, de-escalated things and got everyone to a place where they understood the company position and came to a solid mutual understanding. An agency would not have been able to help with this and would have drawn the pain out and perhaps not gotten it to a solution.

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>To the OP my recommendation is to keep things simple, and have someone you know and trust handle this for you. My wife? :) Sounds like another vote against an agency....

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This is a funny place to be asking this, but I assume there are a fair number of business folks in the Lounge, so perhaps I'll find a gem of an answer here. We are a 25 person development company. We have always had a very flat structure with me as the CEO/founder being the de-facto HR manager. Now, I am thinking it is time to hire an HR group to be a repository to answer all HR questions. 1. Does anyone have a suggestion for a solid outsourced HR group to help manage this for their company? 2. What pitfalls should I look out for using an outsourced HR group? 3. Would I be better to hire an individual for this specifically? Thanks in advance! David

"Qulatiy is Job #1"

I don't use one myself and I have a mess of wires on my desk and I have a basic chair and desk that don't collapse..... BUT! I have bought the "WorkFit-Z Mini Sit-Stand Desk" for three of my employees. Each of them really likes it, it is easy to raise and lower, and when it is down, it doesn't impinge much on the desk working space. I will likely eventually get one for myself. The additional benefit is that it is a lot less effort to try out than some of the pneumatic tables!

"Qulatiy is Job #1"

Long ago, I used AltaVista desktop search which did this - it was great. Unfortunately, it disappeared along with the rest of AltaVista. I currently use everything (from voidtools - great app) - if your application could filter by file name, file type, and content, I could see myself using it.

"Qulatiy is Job #1"

We renamed our John, Jim, so we can honestly say we visit the Jim daily.

"Qulatiy is Job #1"

I spent a week building out a fairly small Forms application in .NET core (in VB no less!). While I was able to make it work, I decided after the first week to transition back to Framework for the following reasons: 1. Speed of design - I'm not sure why, but the GUI design is dog-slow for CORE - probably 4x faster in Framework. 2. Build was much slower 3. I could never get my.settings variables to work correctly (seemed to be a known issue) 4. An unreasonable number of IDE crashes or freezes 5. LOTS of little things that just didn't work as expected. My suggestion is to stick with Framework for at least another year. Let people with lots of free time and patience deal with Microsoft bugs.

"Qulatiy is Job #1"

Hello Friends, I'm looking to sign a message in Dot.Net with an OpenSSL Library. I've found a couple different options, but thought it worthwhile to ask if anyone has experience with RSA crypto from Dot.Net on Win10 before I dive into evaluating different packages. I'm not adverse to purchasing a good library. Thanks! David

"Qulatiy is Job #1"

Probably a benefit of having a CEO who started the company as the primary developer. IMO, hardware expenditures, even extravagant ones, are so miniscule compared to the employee salary, I generally don't dicker when an employee needs better hardware, whatever it might be, computer, RAM, SSD, monitors, software, etc. It makes the employee happy and usually more productive, far outweighing the costs. Even when some of your dev team is in relatively cheap places like India or Bangladesh!

"Qulatiy is Job #1"

Curious to know what portable USB type monitors you prefer.

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Funny - it was only a couple weeks ago I found out that none of my remote team in India and Bangladesh were using dual displays, so I had them all go out and buy large monitors so they could have two monitors - their laptop screen and their external monitor. Then, 2 days ago, I was on a remote session with one of my guys and it looked like he was using only his laptop screen. He assured me that he was using his beautiful large monitor (32 inches), but the resolution looked terrible. But it was clear that he was using only one monitor. Turned out, he dutifully plugged in his monitor and then closed his laptop, using an external mouse and keyboard, forcing the external monitor to the same crummy resolution of the laptop. We went through the steps to show him how to use both simultaneously, which tripled his working desktop space - double resolution on the external monitor and then the original laptop. We put the debug window on the laptop, ran his program, and instantly found that his web system was making an extra extraneous SQL call for every action and a separate bug where a server call was being made when the data was already in memory. I cannot overstate the benefit of being able to have a live console output/debug log for applications, especially web apps. And for me, using double/triple monitors for years, don't care what the outputs are. VGA, DVI, HDMI, Display port - my primary tasks are writing and coding, so speed has very little concern for me. Once I needed a dual DVI cable to get a better resolution on my ultra-high res monitor, but that was it.

"Qulatiy is Job #1"

But what are your tools? :)

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Plus one for this choice: Kernighan & Ritchie's The C Programming Language I taught myself C by reading and re-reading the second edition and everything was approachable, right through the end. "Qulatiy is Job #1"

I found Code to be amazing for the first half of the book, but it lost clarity for me in the second half. It just seemed that he lost the desire to make his more advanced information approachable. "Qulatiy is Job #1"

Its a legit site and a valuable resource for those looking to hire extra resources. I'm not sure how valuable it is for US based resources b/c of the rates we like to command. I've used Upwork at my business to find temporary contractors for many years. My experience is that the majority of the technical contractors are from low income engineering countries, such as India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Eastern Europe, Vietnam, Indonesia, and some South American countries. I have never hired a rate above $40 per hour - I have never needed to. The majority of rates I have hired are $25 and below and I have found great resources for: - Dot Net - WPF - Laravel/PHP - Electron - Book Transcription - Web Page Development - Javascript Web App Development - Ruby on Rails resources I use it often for quick prototypes, where I don't want to distract my US based engineering team. There are lots of agencies contracting on the site which means you have layers of management that often distract from getting the right work out. But if I were looking for work, Upwork would probably NOT be the place I would go. I couldn't feed my family on the rates I would have to compete against.

"Qulatiy is Job #1"