No. Lead is a noun, and you should not eat it or club people to death with it. Hmm? Oh, you mean you correctly interpreted the proper meaning of the word, even with a small typo, too? I see; you're pointing out a typo that every single Slashdot reader that read the summary also saw, to be an asshole. Gotcha.
So after 5 years during which I have seen a 5% salary increase once, whereas the currency parity between my local currency and the EUR fell 40%, I stopped giving a fuck about the appraisals.
He's still on the payroll, accruing value year by year. Someday he'll be a top-tier asset. It's only "former employer" because he no longer does work for them; just collects a paycheck. Go tenure!!
The problem is not the 1-5 scale, but the way your management utilizes it. Rest assured: your boss is the type that will try to find ways to not give you a raise every year, no matter what evaluation scale he uses.
The basic reality is simple, regardless of what type of scale is used. Evaluations cannot pit people against each other; this creates stagnation, not stellar performance. You also must evaluate fairly, and pit the employee's personal performance against what the company requires from the employee's position.
The best evaluations I was ever involved in came in the form of a 1-5 scale self-evaluation and a corresponding manager evaluation, and then discussing the discrepancies, if any. Following this, a brief discussion on what the employee has learned in the last year, whether the employee's direction at the company was still on the right trajectory, and finally any issues that the employee wanted to bring to the manager's attention. Raises would be discussed in a very brief meeting one week after the evaluation to give the employee time to put any applicable after-evaluation changes in place, and to allow the manager to secure and plan out his budget.
One of the worst evaluation setups I was involved in was when my eval outcome was decided prior to even meeting with me, and all I was handed was a document to sign. Before I even went to my evaluation meeting, I knew it was gonna be a 3-4 average, and I knew I was getting my standard 3% raise and production bonus. Not great; but not bad. Still, it didn't cause me to want to excel much. I needed a venue to discuss career path, satisfaction, hurdles, etc instead of being told "Here. Now get out."
As a former project manager at a mid-size production facility, I think what should have happened is YOU should have been given the temporary title "Lead Dev / Release Manager for Project X" and this jackass should have sat the bench; or given you an assist. It's obvious you knew more about the project lifecycle and requirements than he did.
Project management is actually a very welcome management position if filled with the right person; your story could have been about ANY management position filled by a power-hungry jerk. I found PM to be, easily, the most valuable way for me to "manage". It was my job to keep track of the details the production folk didn't need on their shoulders, and it was my job to keep sales off of production's back. I got to set original expected timelines based on every other team manager's input and requirements, and then help them achieve these goals. I technically managed the production team, but I rarely had to do any more than direct my production managers, or fill in at another part of the team if we had a crunch time situation. Because I started in production, I could perform every task the production team did, albeit a little rusty, so it was easy to fill gaps in coverage when appropriate.
Sure, a whole lot of that is "facilitating", but that is what ALL management should be. A major reason management exists is there's a spot where the "project facilitator" (or any other manager) has to be able to pull rank. Sometimes, for business reasons, product features simply must be left out, or a new one patched in, and you need someone who can cause change without debate. A good PM isn't any happier than you are about it, and will have fought tooth and nail to keep to the planned schedule, but this is the perfect role to filter these types of mandatory changes through, rather than interrupt a production team's job: production.
Of course, whenever any manager pulls rank, it must be for a very, very good reason. I think it should be a requirement to briefly state why you're pulling rank to change the entire projected timeline, mothballing a project, or putting folks on an entirely new project. Details are optional, but a clear, solid reason behind the change is not. Unless you're getting shot at, putting out fires, or running an ER triage, there's always time to take 5 minutes to explain why your team's job just changed.
Yes, but when a new contact got passed to me in the form of a new business friend request while I was out and about, it was very convenient to sync the data that was already in Facebook, and then add it to a local address book when I got back to my accounting PC. Things like full name, e-mail, phone number, address, etc were all super useful for initial invoicing and contact records; all I had to ask was "is all your contact info on your Facebook page? Ok sweet, I'll sync my phone, enter the data into the office accounting books, and ship your project and an invoice upon completion."
While it's not difficult to ask for this info explicitly for Quickbooks, it was really convenient for me, at one point. Not to rely on dirty FB data, but to use it when it was known to be good. Now my phone contradicts my Quickbooks data, and I've lost all of this previously useful convenience. The worst part is almost none of my customers know their own profiles have changed until I speak to them.
In any case; I'm not arguing the reliability of Facebook's data; I'm arguing the usefulness of syncing a phone to FB contact details. The convenience is no longer worth the potential unreliability, and that sucks, at least for me.
I'm the decision maker. My shop consists of 3 people - me, my girlfriend, and my daughter.:) My advertising budget allows for a website, a few banners, some local on-line newspaper ads, and word-of-mouth. Facebook's been instrumental in this last one. I have a TON of contacts via Facebook, but I've converted them all into a local address book. My point is simply that syncing my phone to new Facebook contacts used to be marginally useful, at least on initial contact via Facebook. Now it isn't, at all, and I'm probably lucky they didn't overwrite phone numbers or first names, too. I guess I was prepared for any eventuality; I didn't lose any data, but I lost a lot of convenience. It was an annoying surprise to see @facebook.com all up in my phone.
That I agree with entirely, and it's why I protected myself. I was just rebutting the idea that there's no reason for syncing FB data to a mobile phone. That said, it was surprising that they did this, and the fact that they are "fixing the problem" shows FB recognizes it as a serious problem. Stupid, anticipated, egregious, malicious; it *could* be any or all of those, but it's definitely an admitted problem, from all accounts.
Actually, when running these types of checks, you can set things up to inherently fail toward false positives, or inherently fail toward false negatives (which typically aren't reported by virtue of "passing" the test). Of course, this requires knowledge of how reliable your test mechanism is.
As an extreme simplification: If I'm testing for vehicles that are breaking the 25 mph speed limit in my neighborhood, but my radar gun is only accurate within 5 miles per hour, I can a) only mark cars going 30+ miles per hour (which generates only false negatives), b) mark cars going 25+ mph (which generates equal probability of false and positive negatives), or c) mark cars going 20+ mph (which generates only false positives). If I wanted to ensure every "violator" really did violate the speed limit, it would seem "best" to go with option a), but if we're talking about a zero-tolerance alcohol-scanning ignition interlock device, perhaps going with b) or even the draconian c) may be "safest". It depends partly on how reliable the testing mechanism is, and partly whether having a false positive or false negative result is the preferable failure to deal with.
I haven't coded or managed a QA team in quite a while, but for me, an off-the-cuff mechanism to scan D3 clients and minimize or (hopefully) eliminate false positives would be to put in a series of markers that indicate a suspected violation, set a threshold for how many of these marker checks need to be failed to guarantee a violation, and then poll the client at periodic intervals. I'd have the polls increase the marker checks based on a "Suspected Account" weight system, and once the suspicion level reaches 100%, I'd flag the account as in violation, for review by a human overseer, complete with very basic summary of each and every recorded violation that occurred within the suspected period. I would then set up test cases to see if I could replicate these failures based on the hardware and software specifications supplied from the system setup, and if I couldn't replicate the results without cheating, I'd ban the account.
Obviously we cannot know if Blizzard is going to those lengths. I, however, would do exactly what Blizzard has done if I was absolutely certain a flagged account truly was in violation and not simply a false positive. I'd ban the account with no recourse or warning, for there is no reason to start a back-and-forth dialogue or issue warnings (in truth, a warning would simply tell a violator it was time to funnel ill-gotten gains to another account). I might, however, provide the details on why I'm certain the ban necessary, but only if I was also certain it wouldn't tip my violation scanning mechanism's hand to allow that info into the wild.
Regardless, if Blizz really did screw up and allow invalid perma-bans through, they're risking a LOT by publicly stating their certainty level is 100%. If enough of these account owners band together and show that there's even the slightest doubt they were in violation, this could be a class-action suit; though perhaps there's not enough Linux/Wine/D3 players to make a tort case worthwhile.
This actually brings up a good question. I remember when Myspace was pretty popular (not to this level, but still pretty popular). What caused their users to leave in droves so effectively, and what can be done to make this happen to Facebook?
I will never see anything sent to me if it's not from someone I don't aleady know, which defeats the whole purpose of listing an email addess.
That's not necessarily true. Assuming the address actually works, I can see some of my acquaintances or former customers forgetting my e-mail address, and then hitting my contact info for my Facebook e-mail address. I'd prefer they use my hotmail account if they are unable to use my business account, but this would work, too, in a pinch.
All that said, I'd have preferred them to just let people post offline messages in facebook chat, to be delivered when I next log into it. Of course, I use my FB accounts for (small) business as often as personal stuff, so I actually WANT to be contacted out of the blue on one of em.
Hmm. I dunno about that. I sync gmail to my phone. My company uses a gmail document repository, too, which I also sync. I sync to my phone's backup server. And I sync to my business Facebook account, too, to see posts, read Facebook chats, etc without having to whip out a laptop or bring up my phone's browser. I also have some apps that interact with Facebook for various reasons.
I feel I have some pretty good reasons to sync my phone to quite a few web services, including Facebook. I don't trust Facebook at all in my personal life, but deleting data from my business phone's contacts is a major, major screw-up, and nobody would have expected even Facebook to fail this hard. That said, anybody I knew outside of Facebook has a separate contact in my phone, anyway, but had I not taken that precaution, who knows how bad it could have been.
EFF was actually involved in the lawsuit; the article above is far and away more informative and really puts bnetd and battlenet in the proper light; it might even make Blizzard look WORSE than the EFF site. Blizz fully endorsed an emulator named Kali, but quickly rescinded their position once Battle.net was released.
The more likely scenario is that the accounts that were banned violated the game's terms of service, and Blizzard took action accordingly. Since there are still people who are playing the game using Wine on a Linux platform, Blizzard posted an official response on what happened, and (most importantly) explicitly stated it's ok to play the game with Linux (sans support if you run into problems), it's pretty clear that Blizzard banned the accounts for reasons other than simply using Wine.
Lots of people were not happy with Cataclysm, and D3 offered Blizzard an additional way to maintain those WoW subscriptions in the face of that dissatisfaction while waiting for the release of Mists of Pandaria.
The other thing they did with this, and it was a brilliant stroke, is avoid one of their games competing with another. They had much, much more to gain from 12 months of WoW subscriptions than a single $60 purchase, but they also had a lot to gain from a wide D3 player base on launch day. With the D3 lock-in, they guaranteed 1) wide acceptance of D3 for a large initial player base (with the side-effect of "record launch day sales zomg!") and 2) guaranteed subscriptions for WoW, even if the player is choosing to play D3.
I know a bunch of people that picked up D3 after the "annual pass" thing expired, simply because their WoW friends were playing it.
I didn't say they shouldn't improve their product. I said their business model for all items makes a 6 month old product obsolete, and they were genius (haha) in convincing people that every new release is groundbreaking.
That's not a game I'm playing anymore, and now I'm avoiding Apple products entirely because: no, I *don't* need their new products, the ones I already have work fine, and I'm not the only one who's doing this. I'm sorry I insulted the great and powerful Apple; since this comment is now 11 days old, modded insightful by those who agree with me, and now completely over and done with, let's just drop the whole thing. Mmmkay?
They'll pin a pin menu at the factory, but not allow you to pin things to the pin menu lest it revert to a start menu; rather the pin menu lets you pin pins to the pin bar on the task bar. See? That's not so hard.
Or, perhaps, Microsoft could have made it an actual study, with an actual termination date, with an actual description of why the study was taking place, with an actual metric score of efficiency that the participants could see. You know, to give you a chance to know what you're voting for instead of never knowing exactly why MCEIP is sending yet another round of the same data it sent yesterday.
What if, when a new user is trained on their machine, instead of showing them how to pin programs to the task bar, you showed them how to use the start menu?
I think you've set up a self-fulfilling prophecy here.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Worse is when you can't get the fuse to light, no matter how hot and sweaty the crowd is with anticipation. Much, much worse.
No. Lead is a noun, and you should not eat it or club people to death with it. Hmm? Oh, you mean you correctly interpreted the proper meaning of the word, even with a small typo, too? I see; you're pointing out a typo that every single Slashdot reader that read the summary also saw, to be an asshole. Gotcha.
Led the way, good sir, us shall followed you.
McDonald's already has this patent. :(
So after 5 years during which I have seen a 5% salary increase once, whereas the currency parity between my local currency and the EUR fell 40%, I stopped giving a fuck about the appraisals.
I'd have stopped giving a fuck, period.
He's still on the payroll, accruing value year by year. Someday he'll be a top-tier asset. It's only "former employer" because he no longer does work for them; just collects a paycheck. Go tenure!!
The problem is not the 1-5 scale, but the way your management utilizes it. Rest assured: your boss is the type that will try to find ways to not give you a raise every year, no matter what evaluation scale he uses.
The basic reality is simple, regardless of what type of scale is used. Evaluations cannot pit people against each other; this creates stagnation, not stellar performance. You also must evaluate fairly, and pit the employee's personal performance against what the company requires from the employee's position.
The best evaluations I was ever involved in came in the form of a 1-5 scale self-evaluation and a corresponding manager evaluation, and then discussing the discrepancies, if any. Following this, a brief discussion on what the employee has learned in the last year, whether the employee's direction at the company was still on the right trajectory, and finally any issues that the employee wanted to bring to the manager's attention. Raises would be discussed in a very brief meeting one week after the evaluation to give the employee time to put any applicable after-evaluation changes in place, and to allow the manager to secure and plan out his budget.
One of the worst evaluation setups I was involved in was when my eval outcome was decided prior to even meeting with me, and all I was handed was a document to sign. Before I even went to my evaluation meeting, I knew it was gonna be a 3-4 average, and I knew I was getting my standard 3% raise and production bonus. Not great; but not bad. Still, it didn't cause me to want to excel much. I needed a venue to discuss career path, satisfaction, hurdles, etc instead of being told "Here. Now get out."
As a former project manager at a mid-size production facility, I think what should have happened is YOU should have been given the temporary title "Lead Dev / Release Manager for Project X" and this jackass should have sat the bench; or given you an assist. It's obvious you knew more about the project lifecycle and requirements than he did.
Project management is actually a very welcome management position if filled with the right person; your story could have been about ANY management position filled by a power-hungry jerk. I found PM to be, easily, the most valuable way for me to "manage". It was my job to keep track of the details the production folk didn't need on their shoulders, and it was my job to keep sales off of production's back. I got to set original expected timelines based on every other team manager's input and requirements, and then help them achieve these goals. I technically managed the production team, but I rarely had to do any more than direct my production managers, or fill in at another part of the team if we had a crunch time situation. Because I started in production, I could perform every task the production team did, albeit a little rusty, so it was easy to fill gaps in coverage when appropriate.
Sure, a whole lot of that is "facilitating", but that is what ALL management should be. A major reason management exists is there's a spot where the "project facilitator" (or any other manager) has to be able to pull rank. Sometimes, for business reasons, product features simply must be left out, or a new one patched in, and you need someone who can cause change without debate. A good PM isn't any happier than you are about it, and will have fought tooth and nail to keep to the planned schedule, but this is the perfect role to filter these types of mandatory changes through, rather than interrupt a production team's job: production.
Of course, whenever any manager pulls rank, it must be for a very, very good reason. I think it should be a requirement to briefly state why you're pulling rank to change the entire projected timeline, mothballing a project, or putting folks on an entirely new project. Details are optional, but a clear, solid reason behind the change is not. Unless you're getting shot at, putting out fires, or running an ER triage, there's always time to take 5 minutes to explain why your team's job just changed.
Yes, but when a new contact got passed to me in the form of a new business friend request while I was out and about, it was very convenient to sync the data that was already in Facebook, and then add it to a local address book when I got back to my accounting PC. Things like full name, e-mail, phone number, address, etc were all super useful for initial invoicing and contact records; all I had to ask was "is all your contact info on your Facebook page? Ok sweet, I'll sync my phone, enter the data into the office accounting books, and ship your project and an invoice upon completion."
While it's not difficult to ask for this info explicitly for Quickbooks, it was really convenient for me, at one point. Not to rely on dirty FB data, but to use it when it was known to be good. Now my phone contradicts my Quickbooks data, and I've lost all of this previously useful convenience. The worst part is almost none of my customers know their own profiles have changed until I speak to them.
In any case; I'm not arguing the reliability of Facebook's data; I'm arguing the usefulness of syncing a phone to FB contact details. The convenience is no longer worth the potential unreliability, and that sucks, at least for me.
I'm the decision maker. My shop consists of 3 people - me, my girlfriend, and my daughter. :) My advertising budget allows for a website, a few banners, some local on-line newspaper ads, and word-of-mouth. Facebook's been instrumental in this last one. I have a TON of contacts via Facebook, but I've converted them all into a local address book. My point is simply that syncing my phone to new Facebook contacts used to be marginally useful, at least on initial contact via Facebook. Now it isn't, at all, and I'm probably lucky they didn't overwrite phone numbers or first names, too. I guess I was prepared for any eventuality; I didn't lose any data, but I lost a lot of convenience. It was an annoying surprise to see @facebook.com all up in my phone.
That I agree with entirely, and it's why I protected myself. I was just rebutting the idea that there's no reason for syncing FB data to a mobile phone. That said, it was surprising that they did this, and the fact that they are "fixing the problem" shows FB recognizes it as a serious problem. Stupid, anticipated, egregious, malicious; it *could* be any or all of those, but it's definitely an admitted problem, from all accounts.
That's exactly what it's for. I run a small print shop, and fully half my business comes through word of mouth on the site's FB account.
Actually, when running these types of checks, you can set things up to inherently fail toward false positives, or inherently fail toward false negatives (which typically aren't reported by virtue of "passing" the test). Of course, this requires knowledge of how reliable your test mechanism is.
As an extreme simplification: If I'm testing for vehicles that are breaking the 25 mph speed limit in my neighborhood, but my radar gun is only accurate within 5 miles per hour, I can a) only mark cars going 30+ miles per hour (which generates only false negatives), b) mark cars going 25+ mph (which generates equal probability of false and positive negatives), or c) mark cars going 20+ mph (which generates only false positives). If I wanted to ensure every "violator" really did violate the speed limit, it would seem "best" to go with option a), but if we're talking about a zero-tolerance alcohol-scanning ignition interlock device, perhaps going with b) or even the draconian c) may be "safest". It depends partly on how reliable the testing mechanism is, and partly whether having a false positive or false negative result is the preferable failure to deal with.
I haven't coded or managed a QA team in quite a while, but for me, an off-the-cuff mechanism to scan D3 clients and minimize or (hopefully) eliminate false positives would be to put in a series of markers that indicate a suspected violation, set a threshold for how many of these marker checks need to be failed to guarantee a violation, and then poll the client at periodic intervals. I'd have the polls increase the marker checks based on a "Suspected Account" weight system, and once the suspicion level reaches 100%, I'd flag the account as in violation, for review by a human overseer, complete with very basic summary of each and every recorded violation that occurred within the suspected period. I would then set up test cases to see if I could replicate these failures based on the hardware and software specifications supplied from the system setup, and if I couldn't replicate the results without cheating, I'd ban the account.
Obviously we cannot know if Blizzard is going to those lengths. I, however, would do exactly what Blizzard has done if I was absolutely certain a flagged account truly was in violation and not simply a false positive. I'd ban the account with no recourse or warning, for there is no reason to start a back-and-forth dialogue or issue warnings (in truth, a warning would simply tell a violator it was time to funnel ill-gotten gains to another account). I might, however, provide the details on why I'm certain the ban necessary, but only if I was also certain it wouldn't tip my violation scanning mechanism's hand to allow that info into the wild.
Regardless, if Blizz really did screw up and allow invalid perma-bans through, they're risking a LOT by publicly stating their certainty level is 100%. If enough of these account owners band together and show that there's even the slightest doubt they were in violation, this could be a class-action suit; though perhaps there's not enough Linux/Wine/D3 players to make a tort case worthwhile.
This actually brings up a good question. I remember when Myspace was pretty popular (not to this level, but still pretty popular). What caused their users to leave in droves so effectively, and what can be done to make this happen to Facebook?
I will never see anything sent to me if it's not from someone I don't aleady know, which defeats the whole purpose of listing an email addess.
That's not necessarily true. Assuming the address actually works, I can see some of my acquaintances or former customers forgetting my e-mail address, and then hitting my contact info for my Facebook e-mail address. I'd prefer they use my hotmail account if they are unable to use my business account, but this would work, too, in a pinch.
All that said, I'd have preferred them to just let people post offline messages in facebook chat, to be delivered when I next log into it. Of course, I use my FB accounts for (small) business as often as personal stuff, so I actually WANT to be contacted out of the blue on one of em.
Hmm. I dunno about that. I sync gmail to my phone. My company uses a gmail document repository, too, which I also sync. I sync to my phone's backup server. And I sync to my business Facebook account, too, to see posts, read Facebook chats, etc without having to whip out a laptop or bring up my phone's browser. I also have some apps that interact with Facebook for various reasons.
I feel I have some pretty good reasons to sync my phone to quite a few web services, including Facebook. I don't trust Facebook at all in my personal life, but deleting data from my business phone's contacts is a major, major screw-up, and nobody would have expected even Facebook to fail this hard. That said, anybody I knew outside of Facebook has a separate contact in my phone, anyway, but had I not taken that precaution, who knows how bad it could have been.
Ah. I had pegged all 3 its as Warden, which made my brain divide by zero. Thank you for parsing that sentence for me.
For a neutral and detailed history of this issue: http://lawmeme.research.yale.edu/modules.php?name=News%2526file=article%2526sid=149
EFF was actually involved in the lawsuit; the article above is far and away more informative and really puts bnetd and battlenet in the proper light; it might even make Blizzard look WORSE than the EFF site. Blizz fully endorsed an emulator named Kali, but quickly rescinded their position once Battle.net was released.
No, it's bad to assume anything.
The more likely scenario is that the accounts that were banned violated the game's terms of service, and Blizzard took action accordingly. Since there are still people who are playing the game using Wine on a Linux platform, Blizzard posted an official response on what happened, and (most importantly) explicitly stated it's ok to play the game with Linux (sans support if you run into problems), it's pretty clear that Blizzard banned the accounts for reasons other than simply using Wine.
Only if you don't get the latest firmware. I don't remember which point version did it, but Sony completely back-pedaled on the home brew OS show.
Lots of people were not happy with Cataclysm, and D3 offered Blizzard an additional way to maintain those WoW subscriptions in the face of that dissatisfaction while waiting for the release of Mists of Pandaria.
The other thing they did with this, and it was a brilliant stroke, is avoid one of their games competing with another. They had much, much more to gain from 12 months of WoW subscriptions than a single $60 purchase, but they also had a lot to gain from a wide D3 player base on launch day. With the D3 lock-in, they guaranteed 1) wide acceptance of D3 for a large initial player base (with the side-effect of "record launch day sales zomg!") and 2) guaranteed subscriptions for WoW, even if the player is choosing to play D3.
I know a bunch of people that picked up D3 after the "annual pass" thing expired, simply because their WoW friends were playing it.
I dont think Warden works properly on Linux, but then it didnt for WoW either, and that didnt stop it from working flawlessly.
Huh?
I didn't say they shouldn't improve their product. I said their business model for all items makes a 6 month old product obsolete, and they were genius (haha) in convincing people that every new release is groundbreaking.
That's not a game I'm playing anymore, and now I'm avoiding Apple products entirely because: no, I *don't* need their new products, the ones I already have work fine, and I'm not the only one who's doing this. I'm sorry I insulted the great and powerful Apple; since this comment is now 11 days old, modded insightful by those who agree with me, and now completely over and done with, let's just drop the whole thing. Mmmkay?
They'll pin a pin menu at the factory, but not allow you to pin things to the pin menu lest it revert to a start menu; rather the pin menu lets you pin pins to the pin bar on the task bar. See? That's not so hard.
Or, perhaps, Microsoft could have made it an actual study, with an actual termination date, with an actual description of why the study was taking place, with an actual metric score of efficiency that the participants could see. You know, to give you a chance to know what you're voting for instead of never knowing exactly why MCEIP is sending yet another round of the same data it sent yesterday.
What if, when a new user is trained on their machine, instead of showing them how to pin programs to the task bar, you showed them how to use the start menu?
:)
I think you've set up a self-fulfilling prophecy here.