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Fire Your IT Boss
theodp writes "Instead of laying off techies who directly help users, Robert X. Cringely argues that the best place to cut IT organizations is at the top. One of the great problems in IT management, Cringely says, is that the big bosses typically haven't a clue what is happening, what needs to happen, and what it all should cost. He issues the following challenge: 'If you are managing an IT shop and can't write the code to render "hello world" in C, HTML, PHP, and pull "hello world" from a MySQL database using a perl script, then you are in the wrong job.' Even with help from Google, Cringely believes many technical managers would fail this test and should get the boot as a result — you can't manage what you don't understand."
How much you wanna bet a bunch of CEOs are going to RTA and fire all the COMPETENT bosses and keep the PHB's?
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A programmer doesn't write HTML/PHP [ducks]
Perhaps it would be best illustrated by this 20 year old joke:
The Americans and the Japanese decided to engage in a competitive boat race.
The Americans and the Japanese decided to engage in a competitive boat race. Both teams practiced hard and long to reach their peak performance. On the big day the Japanese won by a mile.
The American team was discouraged by the loss. Morale sagged. Corporate management decided that the reason for the crushing defeat had to be found, so a consulting firm was hired to investigate the problem and recommend corrective action.
The consultant's finding: The Japanese team had eight people rowing and one person steering; the American team had one person rowing and eight people steering. After a year of study and millions spent analyzing the problem, the American team's management structure was completely reorganized. The new structure: four steering managers, three area steering managers, and a new performance review system for the person rowing the boat to provide work incentive.
The next year, the Japanese won by two miles!
Humiliated, the American corporation laid off the rower for poor performance and gave the managers a bonus for discovering the problem.
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Snitches get stitches.
Carburetors were eliminated on US cars sometime before 1990, old dude.
Yes. You are.
Where do you work? Do you have any positions open? ;)
My blog
It's a trap! You don't want to work for a boss that reads /.! They'll know you're jagging off on here calling them a jerk all day!
Oooh.. so I'm not goofing off, I'm just thinking.
The onion had a relevant article to this topic this week.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
that's right, all those goddamned monkeys running fortune 500 companies are all a bunch of goddamned imbeciles. And do you know why? 'Cuz they don't know what Linux is. What little they do know they read in CIO magazine. So in other words, what they do know is a bunch of goddamned bullshit. Srsly folks, wake up! We're all being controlled by a cabal of practically sub-human mongoloids.
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
Henry Ford and Enzo Ferrari did pretty well at it. So did Ferdinand Porsche, Frederick Royce, Karl Benz, and Walter Bentley.
Don't forget Robert Landrover and Fred Jeep.