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Just to give a window into what it's like from the other side, when I was managing a company with 60 employees, we had to fire one of them. He was head of his department and we were pretty sure he was embezzling (his replacement eventually confirmed this when he went through a half year of purchase orders and compared to what was in inventory). About a month later I got a phone call from the company he'd applied for a job at - he had given me as a reference.

I wasn't sure what I was allowed to say so gave the excuse that I was way too busy and could they please call back the next day. We had unlimited phone access to employment lawyers as part of our employment liability insurance, so I called them up and explained the situation. They told me flat out that unless we had rock-solid proof he was embezzling, under no circumstances should I state that as the reason we had let him go. I couldn't mention any of our suspicions or circumstantial evidence either. We couldn't (or shouldn't) mention any negatives in his reference unless we had documentation on file to back it up (like signed formal reprimands - I had always wondered why we had to have 2 other people in the room with the employee when we gave a reprimand, and why the employee was required to sign them).

The next day when they called back I had to water down our experience with him as "he didn't fit well with the company." I stammered and hesitated while saying it, and I think I succeeded in getting the message across that there was a lot more to it than that but I wasn't legally allowed to say it. I understand now why there's an art to double entendres and backhanded compliments when it comes to job references.

So the distinguishing factor isn't low-level vs high-level employee. It's "differences" when it's on the record and the company doesn't have rock-solid proof (i.e. they could be sued for libel or slander). It's "burning bridges" when it's off the record or the company has rock-solid proof. High-level employees just get the "differences" explanation more often because they're better at covering their butts than low-level employees.

.

Hey, folks, I can keep this up all day.
http://www.netjeff.com/humor/item.cgi?file=PentiumJokes

Is this the same one about a plane?

No, that one has already been done.

Windows Airline: The airport terminal is nice and colorful, with friendly stewards and stewardesses, easy access to the plane, an uneventful takeoff...then the plane blows up without any warning whatsoever.

Make sure to read Orson Scott Card's How Software Companies Die (commonly known as "Programmers and Bees"). This sort of over-refinement of estimation is not only pointless (in that it presumes far greater association between the past and the future than is likely to exist), it's destructive to the goal of making good software in a reasonable time-frame (if that is still the goal).

Some element of the planning and development process has to bake down to trust and awareness. If a dev says that something will take an unreasonable amount of time, a good project manager should be able to smell the BS and, more importantly, recognize that the dev might be sand-bagging a feature he/she hates. That dev might, in turn, actually take that long to do it. If you have cultural and motivational problems, no amount of process refinement is going to help. It's just going to drive the competent developers away and leave you with a slow death-spiral of longer estimates and crappier software.

High, low, medium risk? When I hear people baking things into categories, that's fine. When I see them plan schedules from the information reduced into categories (instead of cycling back and asking devs), the bozo-bit gets flipped. Aggregability is NP-hard, and it's important to remember that you're not going to be able to bake something as complex as software down into a weekend management seminar. If I could give one piece of advice to managers and devs looking to get better estimates, I'd say: "Go with your gut. As you get better at it, and your team gets better at working together, your intuitive estimates will get an order-of-magnitude better than the estimates that would have been derived from an over-simplified system. If you try to commoditize software, you get whatever the market will bear."

You mean, we're supposed to talk to meat?!?

In the chip..

He used a Pentium computer. Running Windows.

http://www.netjeff.com/humor/item.cgi?file=PentiumJokes

What? This?

The phone rings at KGB headquarters.

"Hello?"

"Hello, is this KGB?"

"Yes. What do you want?"

"I'm calling to report my neighbor Yankel Rabinovitz as an enemy of the
State. He is hiding undeclared diamonds in his firewood."

"This will be noted."

Next day, the KGB goons come over to Rabinovitz's house. They search
the shed where the firewood is kept, break every piece of wood, find no
diamonds, swear at Yankel Rabinovitz and leave.

The phone rings at Rabinovitz's house.

"Hello, Yankel! Did the KGB come?"

"Yes."

"Did they chop your firewood?"

"Yes, they did."

"Okay, now it's your turn to call. I need my vegetable patch plowed."

http://www.netjeff.com/humor/item.cgi?file=kgb.txt (and found at http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=194175&cid= 15918611)

http://www.netjeff.com/humor/item.cgi?file=kgb.txt

The phone rings at KGB headquarters.

"Hello?"

"Hello, is this KGB?"

"Yes. What do you want?"

"I'm calling to report my neighbor Yankel Rabinovitz as an enemy of the
State. He is hiding undeclared diamonds in his firewood."

"This will be noted."

Next day, the KGB goons come over to Rabinovitz's house. They search
the shed where the firewood is kept, break every piece of wood, find no
diamonds, swear at Yankel Rabinovitz and leave.

The phone rings at Rabinovitz's house.

"Hello, Yankel! Did the KGB come?"

"Yes."

"Did they chop your firewood?"

"Yes, they did."

"Okay, now it's your turn to call. I need my vegetable patch plowed."

Managerium

You mean there might actually be water on Mars, meaning that there's oxygen, that we could extract and breathe?

If only someone had mentioned this possibility before.

we should probably update this classic guide to state that SCO has staked a claim to certain undisclosed, yet crucial parts of the Unix gun. Recently leaked reports indicate it to be the "load bullet in first hole" algorithm, which has actually been around since BSD muskets.

All attempts to fire the gun will now incur a $700 license fee, though there are no restrictions on where you can subsequently fire it.

... it does seem that whenever they talk about space they compare things to Volkwagens.

Not that it really matters, but Wyden is the Senior Senator in Oregon. Wyden defeated Smith in 1996 running for Bob Packwood's vacated Senate seat.