Some meetings seem like college classes where everyone is copying down pages of notes about what is being displayed instead of listening to what is being said or actually trying to comprehend the subject matter.
Also, know your audience should be on that list. I've seen way too many presentations where someone is going into painful implementation details with management people who don't understand the implementation, don't understand the details, and only want to distill a 10 second sound bite out of the whole presentation.
The way the request is written, there could be some non-killing applications for these kinds of robots. Search and rescue operations frequently require getting into small spaces to find out what's going on. Collecting information from an unaccessible location has many practical applications. If the espionage applications are the ones that will pay for the research, so be it. The majority of research funding goes into finding new and creative ways to eradicate the human race, but this one could also have up sides.
The timelines are consistent with current project management methodologies - if you have no intention of completing the project, you may as well fail on an aggressive timeline. At least they haven't yet reached the point where the start date is expected to be after the completion date.
I'm going to start a charity to collect these DST impaired clocks. You can ship me your clocks and I will distribute them to chronometer-impaired individuals throughout the non-DST observing state of Arizona.
We should take it one step further and use UTC for everything. That would make it easier to figure out when international conference calls are happening and you wouldn't have to change your watch when you move.
You must work for a small company that takes part in reality if you already did the patching. There was no compelling business justification for patching the systems, so failing to get rid of the change means it remains on the eternal todo list, right next to backups. The joys of administering systems for a large bank.
Paper Cartridge LOAD LETTER sized paper, you retarded git you can't figure out what the error message means that always occurs when you run out of paper.
I'm positive that if you read the documentation, it would say exactly that. =)
The best part is that someone modded this Insightful as well. I've successfully blurred the line between humor, sarcasm, and insight. I think I am now qualified for senior management at a large corporation. Except I don't understand yet how running a company into the ground makes me more money, so I'm only VP material, not CEO yet.
Diebold could easily secure their position in the voting machine market by simply promising to change the outcome of the election in favor of the party that purchases the machines. It's really not that hard, but they lack the dedication to do what it takes to make the sale.
It's about time some benevolent large corporation stood up to their customers. Customers left to their own decisions will frequently buy the wrong products. The manufacturer obviously knows far more about their product than the customer, so they are the only ones in a position to make a sensible decision about what other people should use.
Clearly the best product for any situation is the one that the biggest company is pushing. It's not like companies get to be big in the first place by overcharging for their products and using the courts to keep competition down.
No, that doesn't make any sense at all. The purpose of a project plan is to provide a plausible set of lies that one level of management can use to mislead another level of management.
Though, I suspect that it's often the goal to have some projects fail. If you provide success after success, people will expect you to keep doing that, while slashing the budget because you would have failed if it wasn't enough. High profile failures provide an opportunity to request a bigger budget.
No matter whether you're blaming the technology, people, or phase of the moon, it's all part of the same plan - make stuff up and say it with a striaght face. Being able to keep a straight face is the difference between senior management and the guy emptying the trash.
It's actually a pretty decent plan if it's phrased right. Someone with a background in technology looking to get an entry level technology job is going to expect a lower salary than a college graduate, increasing the probability of finding a job. Someone just out of high school would not be disserved by getting some real world experience to see if they really enjoy the field before committing to spending 20+ years working in it, or even going to college for 4+ years to get a degree.
Someone going to a community college part time while trying to learn on the job would probably be in the best position to try this. How many employers are going to consider working your way through school to be a bad thing? That's basically what I did, but I didn't end up finishing college. Not having a degree may have closed off some options for me, but since I started working as a programmer in high school, a lot of professional experience is compelling to those who want to see a degree. At this point, I don't find anyone asking me why I don't go back and get my degree to supplement my 19 years of professional experience.
That's probably the most common problem - a mismatch between employee and employer. Where I work, everyone is interviewed to gauge their "fit" for the team. Basically, they want to hire round pegs to fit into the square holes the organization provides. I think the idea is that if we get a critical mass of round pegs, the organization may provide some round holes. Of course, the philosophy of any large organization is to pound the round peg into the square hole until it fits or shoots out the window.
That's what works for you in your job. The old school suits didn't get where they are through results, they got there through face time. If you don't produce results, you're no longer needed. What you see as a goal, they see as a minimum level of performance.
For someone who doesn't understand your job, whether you did a great job getting 100% of the job done well or the most visible 10% barely functional, the result is the same to them. The difference is that when you do the 10% and ask for time for the 90% still left to be done, they dismiss you as not understanding the business needs.
Since they don't care if your results are wonderful or mediocre (they're the same thing to them), they rely on what they know. If face time is their measure, you'll be gauged on that regardless of anything else you do.
It's not a good system, but it's one that's quite common. Your options are to find a job where they genuinely care about results, be a consultant where results are exactly what the customer is paying for, or learn to live with it. Learning to accept that things don't work the way they should is a decent tactic until you get one of the more desireable positions.
The fortune at the bottom of the page when I read this review was "Deliver yesterday, code today, think tomorrow." This seems to be the IT management strategy employed in many companies these days. I wonder if this $50 book covers this subject as well as the fortune cookie. =)
Are you under the mistaken impression that there are senior leaders of large corporations who are concerned with anything other than money? The idea of turning people in presumes there's someone who cares. My theory is that these people do not exist, but people feel better if they believe there is someone who will smite thy enemies.
The laws requiring everything to be done by the book are made under the mistaken assumption that one-size-fits-all is not an insane approach to running any organization.
What would happen to a bank if the financial transactions were all jumbled around because they handled the data haphazardly? That would probably be bad, and it makes sense to avoid the obvious bad situation.
What about if their marketing group was all screwed up and they didn't have lists of victims for telemarketers to call in the middle of dinner? What if you didn't receive a piece of junk mail? I think those kinds of problems, if they happened frequently enough, would make the world a better place.
The way the laws are written, these wildly different situations are expected to be handled in a comparable manner. Any large organization is going to have many smaller organizations, some of which are more critical than others to the health of the company. The amount of effort invested in each group should be relative to the overall importance of the group.
Is that any different than the US? Everything I've seen about Sarbox is so vague that anyone can claim compliance if they have paid consultants enough money. The large bank I work for has a bunch of people who try to ensure that we're doing everything by the book, while management considers violating all of the rules to be a sport. It's always fun to have a large group of people telling you that you can be fired for failing to do things right when your management lets you know that if you do things by the book, you'll fail to meet your goals and will be fired. It's a life sized Dilbert cartoon. =)
How is this different from practically every other software company? Sure, it would be nice if users weren't the beta testers, but this isn't exactly a new tactic. This has been going on for at least 20 years. I just can't attest to having direct professional experience with the tactic prior to that.
Hitting aggressive(unrealistic) deadlines has always taken priority over testing or finishing products prior to the release.
All large organizations work that way. There is no way to have a cohesive vision for so many people. No one really knows where the gold is either. Anyone who has one good cash cow can spend a lot of time and money trying to find the next one. Having 99 out of 100 projects completely fail is perfectly acceptable if the 1 that works makes enough money to cover all of the failures. Small companies try to find the next big thing, but need a high success rate or they go out of business. Large companies are no better at finding the next big thing, but they are better at sticking through the multitudes of failures that it takes to get something right that pays off to make it worthwhile.
Businesses don't need to be innovative. They just need to keep money coming in. It doesn't really matter if you try to do one thing well or if you exploit your market position to get away with doing something barely good enough. In either situation, you get the money and that's all the business cares about. Doing something better than your competetor is good enough to bring the money in.
There are no silver bullet strategies. Delegation should be taught as part of the MBA program. I mean delegating responsibility and authority, not the common approach of delegating the responsibility and micromanaging the authority. Delegate the creation and maintenance of the computer systems to people who have expertise in that field and have familiarity with the business's needs and priorities. The people who are in the best position to understand the long term maintenance issues are the people who are maintaining existing systems and creating new ones.
I can't imagine any situation where a company that wants people to work for free would want to pay for a legal defense when they can just say that the person was acting without the explicit approval of Wired management. Realistically, would you want to spend 10's if not 100's of thousands of dollars defending someone whose only value to you is free labor? When the person isn't an employee, it makes the company even less liable for any problems that arise.
I would expect most topics to attract people who have an axe to grind on each side of the issue. Is this really any worse than people who are paid to fake expertise in the subject of the story they were told to write?
So basically they want to get people to work for free? This sounds like a new management trend in the making. What better way to improve profits than to drive resource costs to zero? It's even better than slave labor - it's sucker labor! =)
It's just a question of scale. Some programming is a natural extension of system administration. It's just a question of where you draw the line. Do you automate tasks to make the sysadmin work easier? If people keep asking you the same inane questions, do you set up Apache and some scripts to generate reports so they can look it up online and stop asking you the same question about the systems over and over? Do you store historical information information on the systems? This is all a natural extension of sysadmin tasks that I would normally do. It's also all the background you need to be able to develop other web based database applications.
While there are many different disciplines one can get into from an interest in CS, software and programming are a big part of that. The off the shelf hardware gives you capabilities. The useful functionality comes from how the hardware is configured to meet the need. At the end of the day, people who do CS professionally have to serve some business goal to justify their ongoing expense to the company. While being a nose to the grindstone code monkey writing code for commercial applications is a narrow part of that, a lot of programming is done for the sake of some other purpose. The usefulness of a programming background in whatever CS/IT related field you're interested in is what makes a lot of people equate CS with programming.
Slashdot Mirror
7) Send out the presentation ahead of time.
Some meetings seem like college classes where everyone is copying down pages of notes about what is being displayed instead of listening to what is being said or actually trying to comprehend the subject matter.
Also, know your audience should be on that list. I've seen way too many presentations where someone is going into painful implementation details with management people who don't understand the implementation, don't understand the details, and only want to distill a 10 second sound bite out of the whole presentation.
The way the request is written, there could be some non-killing applications for these kinds of robots. Search and rescue operations frequently require getting into small spaces to find out what's going on. Collecting information from an unaccessible location has many practical applications. If the espionage applications are the ones that will pay for the research, so be it. The majority of research funding goes into finding new and creative ways to eradicate the human race, but this one could also have up sides.
The timelines are consistent with current project management methodologies - if you have no intention of completing the project, you may as well fail on an aggressive timeline. At least they haven't yet reached the point where the start date is expected to be after the completion date.
I'm going to start a charity to collect these DST impaired clocks. You can ship me your clocks and I will distribute them to chronometer-impaired individuals throughout the non-DST observing state of Arizona.
We should take it one step further and use UTC for everything. That would make it easier to figure out when international conference calls are happening and you wouldn't have to change your watch when you move.
You must work for a small company that takes part in reality if you already did the patching. There was no compelling business justification for patching the systems, so failing to get rid of the change means it remains on the eternal todo list, right next to backups. The joys of administering systems for a large bank.
It stands for:
Paper Cartridge LOAD LETTER sized paper, you retarded git you can't figure out what the error message means that always occurs when you run out of paper.
I'm positive that if you read the documentation, it would say exactly that. =)
The best part is that someone modded this Insightful as well. I've successfully blurred the line between humor, sarcasm, and insight. I think I am now qualified for senior management at a large corporation. Except I don't understand yet how running a company into the ground makes me more money, so I'm only VP material, not CEO yet.
Diebold could easily secure their position in the voting machine market by simply promising to change the outcome of the election in favor of the party that purchases the machines. It's really not that hard, but they lack the dedication to do what it takes to make the sale.
It's about time some benevolent large corporation stood up to their customers. Customers left to their own decisions will frequently buy the wrong products. The manufacturer obviously knows far more about their product than the customer, so they are the only ones in a position to make a sensible decision about what other people should use.
Clearly the best product for any situation is the one that the biggest company is pushing. It's not like companies get to be big in the first place by overcharging for their products and using the courts to keep competition down.
No, that doesn't make any sense at all. The purpose of a project plan is to provide a plausible set of lies that one level of management can use to mislead another level of management.
Though, I suspect that it's often the goal to have some projects fail. If you provide success after success, people will expect you to keep doing that, while slashing the budget because you would have failed if it wasn't enough. High profile failures provide an opportunity to request a bigger budget.
No matter whether you're blaming the technology, people, or phase of the moon, it's all part of the same plan - make stuff up and say it with a striaght face. Being able to keep a straight face is the difference between senior management and the guy emptying the trash.
It's actually a pretty decent plan if it's phrased right. Someone with a background in technology looking to get an entry level technology job is going to expect a lower salary than a college graduate, increasing the probability of finding a job. Someone just out of high school would not be disserved by getting some real world experience to see if they really enjoy the field before committing to spending 20+ years working in it, or even going to college for 4+ years to get a degree.
Someone going to a community college part time while trying to learn on the job would probably be in the best position to try this. How many employers are going to consider working your way through school to be a bad thing? That's basically what I did, but I didn't end up finishing college. Not having a degree may have closed off some options for me, but since I started working as a programmer in high school, a lot of professional experience is compelling to those who want to see a degree. At this point, I don't find anyone asking me why I don't go back and get my degree to supplement my 19 years of professional experience.
That's probably the most common problem - a mismatch between employee and employer. Where I work, everyone is interviewed to gauge their "fit" for the team. Basically, they want to hire round pegs to fit into the square holes the organization provides. I think the idea is that if we get a critical mass of round pegs, the organization may provide some round holes. Of course, the philosophy of any large organization is to pound the round peg into the square hole until it fits or shoots out the window.
Only honest people consider it lying. They really have no place in our legal system anyway. =)
That's what works for you in your job. The old school suits didn't get where they are through results, they got there through face time. If you don't produce results, you're no longer needed. What you see as a goal, they see as a minimum level of performance.
For someone who doesn't understand your job, whether you did a great job getting 100% of the job done well or the most visible 10% barely functional, the result is the same to them. The difference is that when you do the 10% and ask for time for the 90% still left to be done, they dismiss you as not understanding the business needs.
Since they don't care if your results are wonderful or mediocre (they're the same thing to them), they rely on what they know. If face time is their measure, you'll be gauged on that regardless of anything else you do.
It's not a good system, but it's one that's quite common. Your options are to find a job where they genuinely care about results, be a consultant where results are exactly what the customer is paying for, or learn to live with it. Learning to accept that things don't work the way they should is a decent tactic until you get one of the more desireable positions.
Correction:
2. those above you are probably sociopaths
This means that a good IT manager should be a autistic sociopath. At least that's my theory. I'll let you know how it works out. =)
The fortune at the bottom of the page when I read this review was "Deliver yesterday, code today, think tomorrow." This seems to be the IT management strategy employed in many companies these days. I wonder if this $50 book covers this subject as well as the fortune cookie. =)
Are you under the mistaken impression that there are senior leaders of large corporations who are concerned with anything other than money? The idea of turning people in presumes there's someone who cares. My theory is that these people do not exist, but people feel better if they believe there is someone who will smite thy enemies.
The laws requiring everything to be done by the book are made under the mistaken assumption that one-size-fits-all is not an insane approach to running any organization.
What would happen to a bank if the financial transactions were all jumbled around because they handled the data haphazardly? That would probably be bad, and it makes sense to avoid the obvious bad situation.
What about if their marketing group was all screwed up and they didn't have lists of victims for telemarketers to call in the middle of dinner? What if you didn't receive a piece of junk mail? I think those kinds of problems, if they happened frequently enough, would make the world a better place.
The way the laws are written, these wildly different situations are expected to be handled in a comparable manner. Any large organization is going to have many smaller organizations, some of which are more critical than others to the health of the company. The amount of effort invested in each group should be relative to the overall importance of the group.
Is that any different than the US? Everything I've seen about Sarbox is so vague that anyone can claim compliance if they have paid consultants enough money. The large bank I work for has a bunch of people who try to ensure that we're doing everything by the book, while management considers violating all of the rules to be a sport. It's always fun to have a large group of people telling you that you can be fired for failing to do things right when your management lets you know that if you do things by the book, you'll fail to meet your goals and will be fired. It's a life sized Dilbert cartoon. =)
How is this different from practically every other software company? Sure, it would be nice if users weren't the beta testers, but this isn't exactly a new tactic. This has been going on for at least 20 years. I just can't attest to having direct professional experience with the tactic prior to that.
Hitting aggressive(unrealistic) deadlines has always taken priority over testing or finishing products prior to the release.
All large organizations work that way. There is no way to have a cohesive vision for so many people. No one really knows where the gold is either. Anyone who has one good cash cow can spend a lot of time and money trying to find the next one. Having 99 out of 100 projects completely fail is perfectly acceptable if the 1 that works makes enough money to cover all of the failures. Small companies try to find the next big thing, but need a high success rate or they go out of business. Large companies are no better at finding the next big thing, but they are better at sticking through the multitudes of failures that it takes to get something right that pays off to make it worthwhile.
Businesses don't need to be innovative. They just need to keep money coming in. It doesn't really matter if you try to do one thing well or if you exploit your market position to get away with doing something barely good enough. In either situation, you get the money and that's all the business cares about. Doing something better than your competetor is good enough to bring the money in.
There are no silver bullet strategies. Delegation should be taught as part of the MBA program. I mean delegating responsibility and authority, not the common approach of delegating the responsibility and micromanaging the authority. Delegate the creation and maintenance of the computer systems to people who have expertise in that field and have familiarity with the business's needs and priorities. The people who are in the best position to understand the long term maintenance issues are the people who are maintaining existing systems and creating new ones.
I can't imagine any situation where a company that wants people to work for free would want to pay for a legal defense when they can just say that the person was acting without the explicit approval of Wired management. Realistically, would you want to spend 10's if not 100's of thousands of dollars defending someone whose only value to you is free labor? When the person isn't an employee, it makes the company even less liable for any problems that arise.
I would expect most topics to attract people who have an axe to grind on each side of the issue. Is this really any worse than people who are paid to fake expertise in the subject of the story they were told to write?
So basically they want to get people to work for free? This sounds like a new management trend in the making. What better way to improve profits than to drive resource costs to zero? It's even better than slave labor - it's sucker labor! =)
Fedora Core is free, Redhat ENTERPRISE Linux is aimed at companies who want to pay for it.
It's just a question of scale. Some programming is a natural extension of system administration. It's just a question of where you draw the line. Do you automate tasks to make the sysadmin work easier? If people keep asking you the same inane questions, do you set up Apache and some scripts to generate reports so they can look it up online and stop asking you the same question about the systems over and over? Do you store historical information information on the systems? This is all a natural extension of sysadmin tasks that I would normally do. It's also all the background you need to be able to develop other web based database applications.
While there are many different disciplines one can get into from an interest in CS, software and programming are a big part of that. The off the shelf hardware gives you capabilities. The useful functionality comes from how the hardware is configured to meet the need. At the end of the day, people who do CS professionally have to serve some business goal to justify their ongoing expense to the company. While being a nose to the grindstone code monkey writing code for commercial applications is a narrow part of that, a lot of programming is done for the sake of some other purpose. The usefulness of a programming background in whatever CS/IT related field you're interested in is what makes a lot of people equate CS with programming.