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Managing Your Company To Death
puppetman writes "This weeks I, Cringely is a frightening monologue on the plight of over-managed companies: VC's and professional managers who are looking to make a quick buck, even if it consigns the company to the rubbish heap. He praises companies like Oracle and Sun because the founder still runs the company, and is in touch with the core of the buisiness. He also makes an interesting aside about the founders of the Canadian company, Research in Motion (makers of the Blackberry) and their personal contribution of $120 million for research into particle physics, to illustrate what happens when technical expertise and business success can lead to."
He praises companies like Oracle and Sun because the founder still runs the company
The founder's presence is not a guarantee at all for the flourishing of a company - how many companies (ok, most of them are the usual derelict dotcoms) have evaporated into thin air in the last two years despite the founder still leading the company ?
And what about cases like CMGI, where it would've probably a better idea to get rid of the founder (David Wetherell) a long time ago ?
Just my $0.02...
Money is, and always will be a bargaining point. If the benefits are not highllighted properly, research centers are borne to get their funds taken away, or worse, closed down.
"Do something man. Right now."
>He praises companies like Oracle and Sun because >the founder still runs the company, and is in >touch with the core of the buisiness.
Anybody forgot to mention Microsoft?
Who is going to do that? The companies? Or perhaps, the goverment will enforce the use of such contracts? Keep in mind that during the months before the telecoms crash, most goverments in Europe actively encouraged common people to go out and buy stock and they used the short-term, noisy, biased indicator that the stock-market is as proof that the country economy was stable, improving, etc.
The truth is, stockmarkets don't work - not in the way I'd like them to anyway - they're just a big bazaar, where wize-guys can go and con other people of their money. So, if a company decides to go for an initial public offering - and thus enter the pit - they'll be getting what they deserve.
I miss my rubber keyboard.(Homepage)
Sometimes I have the feeling that the modern American workplace has regressed into a sort of feudal structure, where management is the aristocracy. The MBA is like a patent of nobility, and once you've got it, you're of the blood, and must never again really worry about your existence. If you toady to higher ranking nobility, you'll get a fief (management job) of your own complete with productive serfs (programmers, etc). If your fief is big enough, you can parcel out sub fiefs (lower tier management) to lower nobles (your business school/ frat chums) and be a liege lord.
And just like back in the day during feuds and other conflicts nobles who lost were almost always treated well by the victors and often were offered chances to switch allegience, today you can easily climb into a good job even if your company tanks (lacking a distinct skill set, managers are fungible; just look at the utterly disparate types of businesses that many CEOs have managed in their careers) and if that fails, there's always the golden parachute.
Back in the day, there were rarely serious consequences to the behavior of nobility as long as it didn't involve treachery towards those above you, and today this seems to be so with our manager class, at least as far as business decisions go. Being noble was enough.
I know this because Tyler knows this.
People will mod me down, reply that I'm an idiot but the fact is still that people who actually know how to make business and sell services and products are vital to any company!
Take a look at the last couple of years pathetic business-models and how many technology companies have been run and have tried to sell stuff.
A couple of examples:
* We are going to expand. No matter if we have customers or not, we are going to expand. DON'T EXPAND JUST BECAUSE ITS FUN! Expandations should in most cases be organic, in small companies it should more or less ALWAYS be organic.
* We are going to spend thousands of man hours (=gigantic cost) and then give our products away for free. Dot-coms and open source development companies are examples of this. FREE DO NOT PAY THE BILLS! Nothing will ever change this fact. And just forget about charging in a later stage. Have you got customers used to the idea of not paying it's extremely hard to change that later.
* We are going to give away this huge product and
sell this tiny thing thats optional. If you do this you have just teached your customers that a huge product doesn't cost anything, and then it doesn't make any sense to pay for a tiny part. This is how peoples minds work. Any business-oriented person knows this but tech-people apperently does not.
* We are going to sell product X or service Y for this cheap stuff. Why do you think people pay so much for support for enterprise server software or enterprise databases? Because the products are expensive, that makes it possible to charge much for support or other third-party products. When the products becomes cheap no one pays as much anymore, it indicate low value. You wouldn't pay $5000 for a car stereo in you fiat, right? Any business or sale-oriented person knows this but most tech-people don't.
"But most just felt an increasing ache as their company slowly changed into something they no longer liked."
This is why I left Intel. Plain and simple. When I suddenly became a mini-manager [not by choice, I assure you] and still had 3 managers immediately above me (who had, in turn, 4 or 5 more above them) I knew it was time to stop drinking the Kool-Aid and get the fuck out. I took a nice separation package and hauled ass without looking back.
Of course... now I've said it out loud and the Blue Men will come hunt me down or something...
- I am made of meat.
Why do "the analysts" feel it's imperative and so ungoldy urgent that a company like Intel must grow ALL THE TIME?
SCENARIO: Me alone in a room with a freaking-out analyst.
A:"Oh no! They only made $6.2 billion this quarter! That's no more than thet made last quarter! ZERO GROWTH!"
M:"Yes, but they sold a shitload of parts. They make parts. They sold a shitload. That's good. They sold a shitload the quarter before that. See a trend?"
A:"Zero growth!!! De-Value them! Down-rate the stock!"
M: *punches analyst in the groin*
This is my dream. Then I force him to buy all my worthless stock.
- I am made of meat.
...But I'm not going to hold my breath...
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
To be fair to managers, not all of them are complete gits. To for a technology company to suceed it is not enaugh for it to be run by a 24 carat geek with a high as it gets IQ and who loves to hakck code etc... I have seen a number of companies end up living of 2-3 projects, often all of these projects are financed by the same sposor and when that sponsor needs to downsize... Well what you get then is what the Germans are getting now, as Siemens, BMW, MBB and others cancel projects and we see 45000 bankrupcys happen in one year, which in Germany is a post WWII record. What is really needed is a bunch of geeks, marketing people and managers working together. Then and only then will a company do well. If you take a look at alot of those companies he cites as examples of companies who have not been managed to death it is either because their leadersip is well balaced in these three departments or because they happen to have a leader who has a flair for more than just the tecchnical side but also marketing and management.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
I was confused about "Borland" being in Cringely's "effectively dead" list as well. Borland has bounced back _amazingly_ over the past couple years under Dale Fuller's leadership. Borland is profitable and has hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank. Delphi 7 is a great release and JBuilder continues to _rule_ the Java tool market. Borland has even recently acquired Starbase and BoldSoft--two very fine software companies that are great complements to Borland's business.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Why? Stock ownership on the stock market more closely resembles the activity of a sports betting syndicate than actually owning a company; most stock trading is not driven by an individual interested in a company but institutions interested in maximising return.
The people who actually care about companies are referred to as stakeholders these days - non-C*O level employees, customers, and the communities in which those companies do business. They all have an interest in the long term value of the company (much as sports fans care about thier favourite teams and the quality of the game). Stockholders don't.
The two problems with executives incentives are these:
1/ Anyone smart/devious/whatever enough to end up the CEO of a company like Tyco will likely understand very well how to screw the company (and owners, and stakeholders) for all they're worth. If you've hired someone who has a good understanding of the complexities of modern multinaitonal businesses and who is ruthless enough to, eg, fire thousands of people on your behalf, why would you assume that they won't look after number one? It's the rational thing to do.
2/ GTHe stockholder problem I alluded to above. Funds managers and VCs don't actually give a fuck if the company succeeds, nor do many investors. They care about maximising return, and if that means raping the company into oblivion, screwing staff, communities, and customers, they won't care - because they'll just shift their money elsewhere to someone who is doing it on their behalf.
Markets have become so efficient and rational in the short term, they're incapable of protecting the long term. And investors have gotten very good at socialising risks (bankruptcy, layoffs, etc) and keeping profits.
Pardon the tangential subject as we wander from over-managment to bad business models. Really, no amount of good management can fix a broken business model. Good management might rewrite a broken business plan and fix an ailing company, but so might bad management rewrite a perfectly function business plan. But back to the point.
Open source development frequently comes down to an issue of profit through service rather than the product itself. In the case of one kinda big company, they're spending some large money developing and integrating open source solutions to phase out some of their products. Sometimes it works better providing services rather than constantly maintaining one's own proprietary software, or at least it may become easier to maintain when your customers sometimes volunteer improvements.
The same give-away-the-product, sell-the-support system works for some smaller companies who sell to home users. Good tech support is certainly worth plenty, especially when even mature software can sometimes be confusing.
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
I usually think Cringely does good research and has clear insights. This week, I believe he's got it wrong.
:-)
Companies do not exist to make traditions. Companies do not exist in order to secure basic technological research. Companies do not exist in order to provide decade long careers.
Companies exist because you can create more value by putting a number of people under one umbrella than by having everyone in the world make a freelance living. It's simple Adam Smithian division of labour, no more and no less.
It is always temptimg to decry 'short-term'policies. But the fact remains none of us has a long term crystal ball. Five year plans never happen. Short term thinking is absolutely rational.
I'm sure it's the case that many 'professional management' teams do a bad job. It may even be the case that they do a worse job than founders motivated by enthusiasm might have done. But there's no inherent caasal factor there. It may well be that Cringeley's unsubstantiated charge of cronyism creates worse teams than some more meritocratic proces might. But he does not demonstrate that.
Prodcutisng industries all work like Hollywood - one success pays for multiple failures. No-one really understands what will create success. All we are seeing is that in a tight economy people tolerate fewer failures before they become risk averse. That's natural, and rational. It'll swing back again.
And I am not an MBA
I disagree with his assertions that maximizing shareholder wealth at the expense of employee satisfaction is regarded as a good thing in business schools. It is obvious that Cringely has never attended a business school. I am working on an MBA and this is simply not the case. Employee satisfaction and well-being is consistently associated with success.
Yes, maximizing shareholder wealth should be a goal. Shareholders are the owners of the company. If they aren't satisfied with the direction of the business, then you've got problems. Your board and management team don't mean anything if the shareholders decide to dump them.
Cringely overestimates managerial influence on the companies that he mentions, but disregards other factors such as economic conditions and competition. Most of those companies simply could not compete with industry leaders.
Of course, I never take Cringely seriously...
Management folks can readily see the problems that arise when techies fall so in love with their technologies that they stop thinking about what the customers want, or whether their latest interests advance the needs of the company. In fact, many consider such narrow-mindedness to be a feature of all engineers. Alas, I rarely encounter managers who see as clearly what happens when managers fall in love with their own special areas of interest and ignore everything else necessary to make the company succeed. It's really no different in principle from the other kind of short-sightedness except that it's usually tied up with a lot more ego, more VAST heaps of useless activity, and more blatant mind-numbing stupidity than just about any other idea in the world (except perhaps the "We are from the government and we are here to help you." thing). Since managers generally hire and fire, they are usually better at getting power and wiping out anyone who doesn't share their narrow-minded views. That makes this syndrome the single biggest company killer I have ever seen, yet it seems that the schools that hand out MBAs don't bother to make it the number one lesson for up and coming manager types.
Perhaps they should have to read every Dilbert cartoon ever penned before they are allowed to get their precious MBAs. The problem in companies being killed by this syndrome is not that there's "too much management". It's that the managers are committed to a horribly distorted view of what they are supposed to be doing.
In my experience, Wall Street tends to reward all the wrong things. Hell, 2 out of the 3 companies you mentioned (Microsoft and GE) are damn near downright evil cancers on this society's existence. I don't need to defend that statement in regards to Microsoft here on Slashdot, but GE makes nuclear reactors, WMD components, guns (I have a t-shirt with a picture of a GAU-8A cannon from an A-10 Warthog on it with the tag line - "GE We Bring Good Things To Life"). GE is the poster child for the multinational conglomerate.
I mean, don't you think that there is something funky going on when a company provides both health care and manufacturers guns and nuclear reactors?
Of course, to Wall Street, that doesn't matter one iota. They make money, lots of it, world be dammed, and that's all the stock market cares about.
I like companies like Apple, BMW and Bang & Olufsen because they are small companies that have a laser focus on making great products, they treat their customers/employees well and operate very responsibly in an economic environment were making profits at all costs is all the rage. Their secret is quite simple: focus on the higher end of the market, stay small and be happy as a profitable nitch player.
150 years ago, companies like those would be par for the course, but today, I am an arrogant prick because I purchase their products.
How did that happen? Several factors: first, the third-generation family owners preferred to kick back and party rather than concentrate on the business. Even during the 1970s, the signs were showing. For a long time, they produced a line of lightweight, high-quality bikes in their Chicago plant, along with their heavier, mass-produced cousins like the Varsity. However, the utterly failed to promote them, and they were easily mistaken for the low-end bikes.
Meanwhile, out in California, people were taking old heavyweight cruiser bikes and fitting them with derailleur gears, and the mountain bike was born. Schwinn basically ignored this trend until it was too late.
Also, labor strife reared its ugly head. The Chicago factory was unionized, and the United Auto Workers decided that Schwinn workers should be paid on the same scale as GM, Ford, and Chrysler workers. Management's response was to build a plant in Mississippi, which turned into a complete boondoggle. Production eventually was shifted over to the Far East.
Schwinn eventually went bankrupt, and the pieces were picked up by vulture capitalist Sam Zell. Eventually, the Zell-operated version of Schwinn went bankrupt again.
It was picked up by GT, went on for a few more years, and went Tango Uniform yet again.
Now it is in the hands of Pacific Cycle, a mass-marketer whose products grace the shelves of department stores.
The only member of the Schwinn family who is still in the bike business is Richard Schwinn, who owns Waterford, an ultra-high-end manufacturer located in Waterford, Wisconsin. The factory, once upon a time, built Schwinn's high-end Paramount line. What a pity he didn't have the resources to buy back the name.
Every time I see a "Schwinn" in Wal-Mart, it sets my teeth on edge.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
'phenomenae'.
Do Doooo de do do.
'phenomenae'.
Do Do Di Do.
Wow, I'm pretty thankful I can't add any tales of Managers managing my company to death....
cuz that'd require something resembling management...
I suppose that it should be comforting to know that this a common occurrance, and that I am not the only entrepreneur to have been shagged by VC 'professional management', but it's not! After ten years of being modestly profitable ... oh, we had made some mistakes - like going public way too soon (or at all, in my opinion), but we were surving.
... we, as the founders knew that at a some point other folks would be needed to grow the company.
... what came next very much followed the narrative in Cringley's article. Fifteen months later, the new management had run the company into the ground and disappeared; the VC firm has taken possession of the intellectual property; and the original shareowners (many of them employees) were left with nothing! Now everytime I run into one of my former employees, I am struck with the guilt of having allowed this to happen to them.
... even, then I would seriously consider selling to the employees first.
However, we were missing the dot.com boom and the board decided that additional management and new financing were just what was needed to grow the company. Initially the idea seemed like it may be a good thing: it would raise additional financing, which would allow us to accelerate the development of our product
In hind-sight this turned out to be a bad move
Lessons learned: next time keep the 'professional managers' out until you are ready to detach and walk away
Natty
Maybe the rain Isn't really to blame. So I'll remove the cause, But not the symptom!
This happened to me. What I would recommend anybody in a similar situation is to read Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince. The book is advice to Princes of small states in Italy in how they should keep control of their states. It was written 500 years ago - but equally applies to Software Start-ups. It is most famous for the quote the "The end justifies the means".
......... they keep no faith with men; and your downfall is deferred only so long as the attack is deferred; and in peace you are plundered by them, in war by your enemies."
Any venture capital company should read the chapter "On Troops and Mercenaries" - substitute - Mercenary for Hired Gun Management. Machiavelli say's "Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous" - further on he says "they [Mercenaries] are brave among friends [read the board and head-hunters]; among enemies they are cowards
Basically what Machiavelli goes on to say is that troops don't really fight for money, but for vision and belief in the Prince. If an employee does not believe that the CEO is in for the long haul why should he be?
I did OK money wise, but this did not stop me going into massive depression for about a year after I was replaced. It feels like somebody messing up your toys....
When a friend of mine quit his last job, the reason he gave in his notice was "because Dilbert isn't funny anymore." In his exit interview, he was asked what he meant by that.
Unfortunately, the "ideal" model for companies today seems to be one where only managers are employed, everything else is outsourced.
Much of the management behaviors decried in Cringley's article are due to the way the Stock Market works today.
The original idea behind stock was as a way for the company to get money to grow. The stock buyer was counting on getting an annuity - the dividends of the stock. As a result, the upper bound on the current value of the stock was set by the interest rate and the dividends the company paid out - if the interest rate was 10%, and the stock paid $1 in dividends per year, then if the stock cost less than $10/share it was undervalued. If the stock cost more than $10/share, you would do better to invest your money in a bank.
Thus, stock holders were looking at the long term - what is the company doing to increase the dividends?
But then people noticed that if they could make a short-term change in the expected return on the stock, the current value would move. Thus, they began to change the short-term operations of the company, to change the estimated dividends (and thus the current price of the stock), then SELL and move on.
Thus stocks became trading cards, and the current era began. Buy into a company, manipulate the stock price, sell, repeat. (OK, PROFIT! there, I said it, you don't have to.)
Now, consider this - What if the capital gains tax worked like this:
If the gain is realized in less than 6 months, then the gain is taxed at 90%.
If the gain is realized in 6 months to 1 year, then the gain is taxed at 75%.
If the gain is realized in 1 year to 5 years, then the gain is taxed at 50%.
If the gain is realized in more than 5 years, then the gain is taxed at 0% (i.e. not taxed).
Now, consider these scenarios:
You buy into an IPO, sell when the stock peaks a month later, sell. You get nailed for 90%. Since that is the case, there would be MUCH less demand for the stock, and it wouldn't shoot up so much.
You buy into a company, manipulate the stock price by gutting it, and pop that golden parachute a year and a day later. You get nailed to the tune of 50%. You are STILL discouraged from these games.
You buy a house. Five years later, you move from Silly-con Valley to Wyoming, and from a $500,000 house to a $250,000 ranch. You pocket the $250,000, since it isn't taxed.
I was watching a show several years ago on PBS, wherein a representative of the Federal Reserve was debating a person who's position was "The Fed should just leave the damn interest rates alone and let the market correct itself." The Fed guy said "But we have all this information, and it would be wrong for us not to provide feedback to the system".
When he said "feedback to the system" I had an epiphany - I am an electrial engineer, control systems are something I've studied at length. Unlike an economist, engineers are trained in mathematical tools to examine systems for stability. One of the things that will make a system unstable is too much lag from stimulus to feedback response - it's called "phase margin". The economy has a very LARGE phase lag - making a change to interest rates today will not take effect tomorrow. Also, there is "gain margin" or frequency response - the higher the frequency response the faster the system will react, but too much will cause oscillation. Systems with a large phase lag need to have a very low bandwidth, or they will oscillate. What my proposed cap gains tax would do is reduce the bandwidth of the system by reducing the gain at high frequencies.
Now, you can apply a simple check to my proposal - who will it piss off? The Republicans won't like it, since it prevents the very sort of short-term market manipulation that makes money for fatcats. The Democrats won't like it, because it allows middle-class folks to make money long term (so they can retire without relying on the government for assistance).
And I assert that anything that pisses off both the Republicans and Democrats cannot be a bad thing.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Then we went public, lots of money burned, but the product didn't fly high, and the grey-haired managers showed up. The VCs & large institutional investors that now controlled the company brought in management to wring as much money out of the company as possible. Since we weren't a high flyer the large investors didn't care about keeping us alive anymore, they just wanted as much money as possible extracted from it.
By this point I had bailed, I didn't like the way things were going. As fate would have it, I jumped from the frying pan into the fire, but that's another story.
It survived for a few more years. Pieces of the company were spun off & sold off. The large investors had gotten a sweet deal on stock, but had to hold it for a several years. A few months after they could legally sell it I noticed the company's stock skyrocket -- then drop .... for 3 days it rachetted up on low volume then dropped on high volume. Several times the outstanding share volume changed hands over those few days.
By the end of that year the company was dissolved
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
I've been in company after company where the founder has a great idea, gets the company started, then can't manage or build the company for beans. They all wound up in the scrapheap.
A sign of a good company is one where the founder(s) realize they can't do any more good for the company and step down in favor of someone with real business sense who can grow the company from there. A better sign is when the founder(s) stay either on the board or as CTO/corporate visionary.
Sun and Oracle's success are probably flukes. Two success stories does not prove anything. Not when I have 4 stories that prove otherwise.
Since most MBAs lack domain expertise and since the much of the behaviour taught in business school is geared towards stripping a company of assets, I'd have to guess that you're better off without them.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Granted, there are plenty of examples of companies which went to pot because the founders were replaced by management-types. There are also plenty of examples of companies that made it because the founders were replaced by management-types.
It is obvious that you can't run a technology company if you don't understand technology, just as you cannot run Walmart if you don't have a clue what a department store is.
(Disclosure, I am an MBA.)
I have been providing services to high-tech companies for a decade, and my business has outlived those of most of my clients, and from my experience, the #1 failing point of companies is developing technology that is really cool but nobody wants, or developing technology that is really useful and not knowing how to make it into a real product. I can't tell you the number of companies I've worked for who have either never heard of a version freeze, or who freeze a version every month only to defrost it a day later.
Case in point, a good friend called me to ask me in what cases you should translate the user manuals to a different language, for example Portugese. He works for a small hw developer with real international sales. I said "well, you know how much you sell in Brazil, and your salespeople tell you how much more they might sell if people could actually use the product, and you can figure the cost yourself" (this is a system that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars; read, even one extra sale would justify the cost). I continued "You know, just like you figure out whether to add a feature to the product -- you figure out how much it costs to develop the feature, and how many extra sales it will make you over the competition, and then you know if it is worth it, right??" and he was like, "Uh, well, that is a different way of thinking about it. We kind of have a meeting and discuss what to put in the product and usually we are right." Yeah, but it turns out that they don't document the new feature and nobody uses it unless they call the help desk. Etc., etc. This is a company that has been in business 15 years and has had sales for more than 10 of those years and they just went through a first round of layoffs. The obvious only reason they are laying people off is because of poor management by the founders. They should be profitable by now but they are still living off of venture capital.
You talk about the dotcom boom as if it were some kind of freak accident, but it wasn't. The eager engineers who founded all these companies really truly believed that their ideas and products had added value. And it wasn't only dotcoms -- look at all the telecom and wireless stuff. The dotcom bust was what happens when all those tecchies working out of their garages get a hold of real money. Now they are back working out of their garages, and 1% of them will emerge with something that makes money. Why 1%? Because that is the percentage of leaders out there who can be geeks and managers and marketeers, or who have the common sense to get someone to fill the gaps they don't do themselves. If you are the kind of founder who can't give real power to people who make up for your shortcomings, your company will go belly-up even quicker than the companies with managers who don't understand technology but can at least doctor the numbers.
I'm a Gen-X Slacker, but I forgot I was one for almost 6 years. I worked my ass off for this company or that, trusting their management until I got my ass canned, when I'd get another gig paying twice as much. Well, last year the gigs ran out. If you're a Unix admin, you better damn well have at least a Masters in a technology field, 'cuz nobody's gonna look twice at you otherwise. Recruiters tell me there are 150-200 resumes submitted for every open position, and everyday a new tech company folds, or goes through a round of layoffs. While I'm in the top 10% based on my skillset and experience that means there's 15 to 20 people who are in line ahead of me. Some schmoe who spent the last six years figuring out Tetris was N-P for a sheepskin is gonna get the nod because all I ever did was flunk out of art school.
/., and drinking. So! Cram a little code, email the hell out of reviewers and tech news blogs, set up a website with credit card ordering information, et voila! Software company. There's probably an open source way to scam money from people with big iron and deep pockets, but I'm too lazy to think of it. Go think of it yourself.
In short, I trusted that someone knew what they were doing in the big corner office, and now I'm fucked. And it's all my own damn fault, because I forgot the work ethics that brought me into computers and technology in the first place. Time for some of that olde timey religion:
1) SLACK! The world does owe you a living.
Screw 80+ hour workweeks for fat checks. I want 10 hour workweeks for fat checks, and a reasonable assumption that the fat checks will keep rolling in with minimal effort. I don't mind hellacious effort up front... being a lazy sysadmin, I know ten hours of scripting and testing can lead to a hundred hours or more of prime goof-off time. (Or, as the case was, time to write more scripts and to string more cable for my corporate overlords.)
So, by putting in a lot of work that's actually just fucking around with the computer up front, I can spend more time reading comics, posting trolls to
2) If it's worth doing, it's worth DIY.
The suit-wearing weasels sold me out. I'll never trust another. "Professional Management" means "porfessional backstabber." Screw 'em. I will learn the fundamentals of business management from one of the many excellent books at my local library, used book store or web bookseller.
I will learn how to market what I make, and how to balance the books. I will learn how to grow a company. I will never hire employees, but I will pay co-conspirators, and I will figure out a way to make this legal. I will figure out how to run a health insurance/HMO co-op with local small businesses. I will do all this with the meager funds from my teensy, just-above-minimum-wage non-computer job, and I will make any interested Venture Capitalists drink a bottle of robitussin, and I will laugh at them as they hallucnate and tell them to get the hell out. MY company, damnit!
Because if it's worth doing, it's worth doing my own damn self.
But first! I will learn Java and low-level C programming, for the things I am now interested in require that knowlege. I'll fake the rest as I need to. In a year, I'll come back to let you know how well I've succeeded. (I can't fail, as I'm already at baseline failure state right now. Any change is an improvement.)
Slack!
SoupIsGood Food
Then i quit.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
That's true, but it's always nice to get into a field on the ground floor. See, one of the problems with professionalism (in the sense of a field's "going professional" and creating, for instance, professional managers) is that it raises the bar for entry, sometimes far too high.
For instance, I'm pretty sure it was a lot easier to get started in business 100 years or so ago -- you had a trade, and you did it, and "managing" wasn't something that you did as a career, it was something that you did to enable yourself to do all that other stuff you wanted to do (say, in Walt Disney's case, making cartoons).
Now, with so many fields professionalizing so rapidly, it's very hard to get into them at all unless you've got the appropriate professional credentials and/or (usually and) experience. (Oh, yeah, having friends in high places helps too.) Woe betide you if you don't have these things, because you will suddenly find yourself having to be twice as good as the existing competition to even get into the field, which can be tough when you're competing against people with 20 years' experience.
And sometimes having your field taken over by august sages and avocationists is not a good thing, either. To use an example I'm most familiar with, look at how dynamic, prolific and vibrant SF publishing was in the 1960s and 1970s. Now that it's been professionalized and commoditized so much, all that dynamism, exuberance (and not necessarily even youthful exuberance), and prolificness (prolixity? although not in the strictest literary sense) has gone out, and it's damn near impossible for a newcomer (of any age) to get published.
All fields need newcomers, beginners, and dabblers, so professionalism is not necessarily a good thing 100% of the time, especially since the trend lately in technology (and other fields) has been to refine, as opposed to innovate. Where are the innovators going to come from, if we don't encourage people to start doing something? You'd be surprised what novel approaches the "beginner mind" can come up with. Ask me about it sometime...
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.