A Commerce degree is the honours program in a school of business (university). The program usually last 4-5 years and has high grade point requirements.
BTW: when you go to your manager to "communicate" I suggest you refrain from using the words fuck, shit, loser, crackhead, etc. Just a thought, but it might prevent you from getting what you need.
Here's the root problem and solution
on
Do You Like Your Job?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Boy am I glad this topic came up. This post might start a flame war, but I am sick and tired of this happening - poor management.
First, I would like to congratulate the poster for most eliquently describing a situation that is occuring everywhere in our culture.
Now, here is why this is happening: Engineers are not supposed to manage people, nor do they have the proper education to do so. Libral Arts graduates are not supposed to manage people, nor do they have the proper education to do so. Computer Science graduates are not supposed to manage people, nor do they have the proper education to do so. History graduates are not supposed to manage people, nor do they have the proper education to do so.
Are we getting somewhere? So, you might now ask, who are supposed to manage the employees? Commerce Graduates. NOT MBAs. Very few MBA graduates have the required theory and experience to properly manage people. As a commerce graduate we have a clear understanding of what people need. We know how to motivate them. We can identify conflicting personallities quickly and know how to resolve them. We go through hundreds of case studies that cover many classical scenrios that come up in product development, manufacturing, HR, etc.
We are educated to manage people (4-5 years of education). Just because you have a degree saying you can code linux in your sleep or build a bridge over a mile-wide river does not mean you can manage people.
Now, there are some great exceptions. Many great managers are not Commerce grads at all. What they are able to do is respect their employees and identify their needs. By seeing what the employees need, they are now able to motivate them properly but fullfuling them to the best of there abilities. Everyone has needs. Fullfilling these needs leads them to happiness. Anyone can be placed in a management role, but very few have the patience (or are able) to identify the needs of their employees.
There are surveys that state needs on a general level. Many are inaccurate because the needs of an individual vary from nation to nation, city to city, job to job, or from time to time.
So, how do identify their needs? You communicate. Yes it is that easy. Few people are now thinking, "This is common sense." But what we learn in Commerce is that common sense is not so common.
Even communication needs to be defined. You have a sender who sends the message. There is the ether where the message travels and noise is added. The noise could be physical barriers, language, culture, speech dialec, idioms, preconceived notions, physical distance, non-verbal gestures etc. Then you have the receiver to whom the message is directed. But that's not it. You see, the biggest problem in commmunication is all that noise. How do you resolve that? Well, part of the communication model has a wonderful little component. It's called feedback.
So, poster, I again congratulate you for addressing this all important topic. But here is what you MUST do. 1) Go to you manager that is ineffective. 2) Communicate your needs clearly. 3) Listen carefully at the feedback you will receive. 4) Repeat steps 1 - 3 until you are satisfied.
Now, I am a geek like you. I just happen to have a Commerce degree. So I ask all geeks to never be afraid to communicate their needs. If you must, be careful when you do, try to assist you manager in clearly understanding what you need, and what the project needs for success. Now there are many times where they will not do what you want them to do. The reasons here are many: 1) The company is under tight constraints and needs to cut corners to get the project out the door and make some (any) money. The manager can't communicate this to you due to confidentiality.
2) The manager is not a good listener - these are the worst types of managers and they are very difficult to change. Some people actually have to LEARN to actively listen. There are many very good courses for these types of people. Check with your local colleges.
3)The mansger does not respect your judgement, advice, etc. In this situation to need to carefully analyse what caused it. Always look at your past actions first, then the manager, then external factors.
4) The manager is having problems balancing the needs of their employees vs. the needs of the organization. The best they can do here, is communicate what these barriers are to their employees. Remember the communication model here.
There are other reasons why they can't do what you want but these are some of the main ones I came accross so far. But always, always make sure they know and understand what you need to make you happy. Then you have done your job as an employee.
But here is what I don't like about this particular instance:
"We advocate two basic principles in our ISOS design: a minimal core operating system and control by central servers."
It continues to say: "Centralization runs against the egalitarian approach popular in some peer-to-peer systems, but central servers are needed to ensure privacy of sensitive data, such as accounting data and other information about the resource hosts. "
These guys have obviously not been following any of the recent Napster cases to see the flaws of a "centralized system" paradigm. Privacy can be easily implemented in a P2P system. Look at Freenet. (dude, it called PKI) These guys want to have a central system from some other alterior motives - resource hogging, political advanatage, profits all come to mind
I like the vision of my buying a $500 PC and having over 20 pentabytes of storage available as soon as I plug it into the net. But no one - NOT even any government should have any control over such a system. There is just way too much chance to abuse that power.
Is it just me, or did you just feel a HUGE wight lifted off your shoulders?
Click to agree? Yes/No
(By clicking you are abidding by the following license: The clicking action does not guarantee the quality of the opinion of the user nor the author of the message. The user takes full liability for any negative outcomes of posting their optinions on a website. The user gives up their rights to own the speech of their opinion. By clicking the user hereby gives permission to all who read the opinion to have full access to their harddrives with and without any prior notice.)
After researching DRM last semester, I have come to the conclusion that it is not all that bad...
Only when it is implemented by adding value to the USER not the record label. The following criteria must exists for DRM to become marketable:
- cheaper/faster content access
- Access to new content along with vast library of everything that has ever been created. All available instantly.
- higher quality content than currently available in consumer market
- user choice in usage of content (rights specification)
- highly secure to user privacy - total commitment required by company
- easy to use (invisible to user)
- transparancy in rules/policies
- high quality products with vast 3rd party developer support
- market company's trust and dedication to user's needs - NOT company's needs
These are only some... but as you can see, there is failure from the beginning in DRM. In its current state DRM is a tool for corporations, not customers. That is why it WILL fail. (Divx anyone).
Here in Canada the MIS degree I am finishing had plenty of programming. It is nearly impossible to finish the "Commerce with Honours in Management Information System" degree in 4 years.
It has the full compliment of Commerce courses, and with, what I would consider, 40% of the CSI courses. Some of the languages we learn are:
C++
Scheme
Lisp
Prolog
Pascal
Java
VB (yes but this is in a business course on CS)
Database Courses (PL SQL, etc)
We have to take all the advance calculus and algebra courses. We do not go into "discrete" math.
I feel confident that I can go into a any software company and start working on any of their code with some simple intros of the project.
The highly respect the MIS degree. Hell, during many of the CS labs, I was the one helping out the CS students create collections in java, and use recursion in Scheme, and inherited classes in C++
BTW: I am not done the degree yet... there is still a micro circuit/logic course and a few more Project Managment courses.
Again, it is a very well-rounded degree. You get from it what you wish to take from it.
I see your point. But I believe the tech will have both push-pull technologies.
Imagine shutting off all the push (Forcing your phone to ring for that sale at the nearest store) and just using the pull technologies to get info you want.
In the car, you would use a combination of the two to filter out information which is only relevant to the highway you are driving on, accidents, etc. That way the only pushed information you will receive will be accident related on the current highway. Of course, the UI of such a system will have to be very well refined. There aren't many users I know who know how do create multiple criteria queries while they are driving.
So, by selectively tuning your PDA/cell, you can pull information which is relevant ("What is the special in that restaurant?"), and have the cell ignore the other crap. It also might come down to spam-filtering on the cell... but hey we already live with it now....
In a bar/pub, I always wanted take my iPaq PDA to be able to pull in all the information of the single ladies.... now that would be good use of technology!
This reminds me of the RIAA bitchin about piracy affecting profits when they are now making more revenue and net income than they have in their entire history.
Let's have a look at the poor poor drug companies... They make you think a little charity would kill them.
Roche
In the first half of 2001 the Roche Group achieved consolidated results of 14,5 billion Swiss francs. This represents a growth on an adjusted basis of 6% in both Swiss francs and local currencies.
Group operating profit and net income were stable at 2,4 billion Swiss francs and at 3,0 billion Swiss francs respectively. As expected the EBITDA margin and the operating profit margin decreased slightly.
PFIZER INC = $256.4 Billion
Pfizer Inc. is a global pharmaceutical and consumer products company which discovers, develops, manufactures and markets innovative medicines for humans and animals. For the six months ended 6/30/01, total revenues rose 8% to $15.33 billion. Net income from continuing operations totaled $3.72 billion, up from $945 million. Results reflect increased sales of Lipitor, Neurontin, Zyrtec and Norvasc and a $1.79 billion reduction in costs related to the merger with Warner-Lambert.
Merck = $159.3 Billion
Merck and Co., Inc. is a pharmaceutical company that discovers, develops, produces and markets human/animal health products and services. Merck also provides pharmaceutical benefit services. For the six months ended 6/30/01, sales rose 27% to $23.24 billion. Net income rose 8% to $3.47 billion. Results reflect strong growth in worldwide human health sales, and other newer and established products, partially offset by higher materials and production costs.
(I got these mostly from their websites and quote.yahoo.com)
So these three alone have over $10 billion in PROFITS. That's after all their research into drug development has been paid. And they want more. Now, I can understand that if they were running at a loss...fine - raise the price of drugs in rich contries to pay of the R&D and give the drugs (AT COST) to poorer nations to improve their goodwill.
"This falls perfectly into the government's propoganda that only criminals use encryption"
And the government is right. The RIAA, MPAA, and Adobe are all using encryption.
It's an interesting dycotomy: on one hand you have the government saying breaking encryption is illegal (DMCA). On the other you have them saying "using encryption" should be controlled or illegal.
I am wondering do different parts of the US government ever speak to each other?
I know most of these planets are Juipter sized. But what if life could live on them? Would the exrtreme gravity make life extremely small and resrict it to bacteria and fungus? Or just really tiny bi-pedal species?
"He says that the first trials, on individual patients, might start in the next six months.The company plans to seek partners among the big drug and biotech companies to develop the business. The invention is patented. " ------
Yup, only the rich will live forever...
(hint: start saving NOW!)
Don't tell anyone!!! Come on, this always happens. A wicked hack to do some real cool stuff gets out and the RIAA / MPAA / DMCA find out about it... let's keep the lid on this one for a while.
Why can't all geeks just have a *private* network so that only we know about this stuff... well at least until it's WAY to late to do anything.
Check out these guys!
http://www.platforms-intl.com/
They are already doing it in Brazil!
They have tested their "plane" system and it worked, now they have gone into stationary blimps. I can't wait until the FCC/FAA allows them to use this tech in the states! (much cheaper that 12 million). Their "arc" system is about 5 million for a city-covered installation. What local government wouldn't want to be the first city with permanent free wireless internet! ($5 million a pop is NOTHING!)
Hell, I am Canadian and I am more worried about the US elections than our own Federal government elections coming up in late November (Canadian Alliance vs Liberals - can't trust either one!)
I many ways I like Gore, and Bush sometimes seems more sincere (or he is an incredible actor).
But I know that the US elections matter more to us Canadian than our own... in the long-run, it's the US that influences the Canadian government. Hell... even Greenspan has control over CANADIAN interest rates! (with a bit of lag of course)
This is why ALL americans should vote. You must realize that your vote not only affects you locally but the world in general. The more diverse the voting population, the more accurate the outcome (or so the theory goes).
Slashdot Mirror
>>what the fuck is a commerce graduate?
A Commerce degree is the honours program in a school of business (university). The program usually last 4-5 years and has high grade point requirements.
BTW: when you go to your manager to "communicate" I suggest you refrain from using the words fuck, shit, loser, crackhead, etc.
Just a thought, but it might prevent you from getting what you need.
Boy am I glad this topic came up. This post might start a flame war, but I am sick and tired of this happening - poor management.
First, I would like to congratulate the poster for most eliquently describing a situation that is occuring everywhere in our culture.
Now, here is why this is happening:
Engineers are not supposed to manage people, nor do they have the proper education to do so.
Libral Arts graduates are not supposed to manage people, nor do they have the proper education to do so.
Computer Science graduates are not supposed to manage people, nor do they have the proper education to do so.
History graduates are not supposed to manage people, nor do they have the proper education to do so.
Are we getting somewhere? So, you might now ask, who are supposed to manage the employees? Commerce Graduates. NOT MBAs. Very few MBA graduates have the required theory and experience to properly manage people. As a commerce graduate we have a clear understanding of what people need. We know how to motivate them. We can identify conflicting personallities quickly and know how to resolve them. We go through hundreds of case studies that cover many classical scenrios that come up in product development, manufacturing, HR, etc.
We are educated to manage people (4-5 years of education). Just because you have a degree saying you can code linux in your sleep or build a bridge over a mile-wide river does not mean you can manage people.
Now, there are some great exceptions. Many great managers are not Commerce grads at all. What they are able to do is respect their employees and identify their needs. By seeing what the employees need, they are now able to motivate them properly but fullfuling them to the best of there abilities. Everyone has needs. Fullfilling these needs leads them to happiness. Anyone can be placed in a management role, but very few have the patience (or are able) to identify the needs of their employees.
There are surveys that state needs on a general level. Many are inaccurate because the needs of an individual vary from nation to nation, city to city, job to job, or from time to time.
So, how do identify their needs? You communicate. Yes it is that easy. Few people are now thinking, "This is common sense." But what we learn in Commerce is that common sense is not so common.
Even communication needs to be defined. You have a sender who sends the message. There is the ether where the message travels and noise is added. The noise could be physical barriers, language, culture, speech dialec, idioms, preconceived notions, physical distance, non-verbal gestures etc. Then you have the receiver to whom the message is directed. But that's not it. You see, the biggest problem in commmunication is all that noise. How do you resolve that? Well, part of the communication model has a wonderful little component. It's called feedback.
So, poster, I again congratulate you for addressing this all important topic. But here is what you MUST do.
1) Go to you manager that is ineffective.
2) Communicate your needs clearly.
3) Listen carefully at the feedback you will receive.
4) Repeat steps 1 - 3 until you are satisfied.
Now, I am a geek like you. I just happen to have a Commerce degree. So I ask all geeks to never be afraid to communicate their needs. If you must, be careful when you do, try to assist you manager in clearly understanding what you need, and what the project needs for success. Now there are many times where they will not do what you want them to do. The reasons here are many:
1) The company is under tight constraints and needs to cut corners to get the project out the door and make some (any) money. The manager can't communicate this to you due to confidentiality.
2) The manager is not a good listener - these are the worst types of managers and they are very difficult to change. Some people actually have to LEARN to actively listen. There are many very good courses for these types of people. Check with your local colleges.
3)The mansger does not respect your judgement, advice, etc. In this situation to need to carefully analyse what caused it. Always look at your past actions first, then the manager, then external factors.
4) The manager is having problems balancing the needs of their employees vs. the needs of the organization. The best they can do here, is communicate what these barriers are to their employees. Remember the communication model here.
There are other reasons why they can't do what you want but these are some of the main ones I came accross so far. But always, always make sure they know and understand what you need to make you happy. Then you have done your job as an employee.
----
Dude. MS Sold their shares of Corel stock long ago. They were being pressured to sell them soon after they were acquired due to the anti-trust trial.
What banner ad? sorry guys, I haven't been able to view ads for a long time now.
I suggest you use: Adshield
Go to: www.adshield.org
It's free, and very easy to use!
But here is what I don't like about this particular instance:
"We advocate two basic principles in our ISOS design: a minimal core operating system and control by central servers."
It continues to say: "Centralization runs against the egalitarian approach popular in some peer-to-peer systems, but central servers are needed to ensure privacy of sensitive data, such as accounting data and other information about the resource hosts. "
These guys have obviously not been following any of the recent Napster cases to see the flaws of a "centralized system" paradigm. Privacy can be easily implemented in a P2P system. Look at Freenet. (dude, it called PKI) These guys want to have a central system from some other alterior motives - resource hogging, political advanatage, profits all come to mind
I like the vision of my buying a $500 PC and having over 20 pentabytes of storage available as soon as I plug it into the net. But no one - NOT even any government should have any control over such a system. There is just way too much chance to abuse that power.
Is it just me, or did you just feel a HUGE wight lifted off your shoulders?
Click to agree? Yes/No
(By clicking you are abidding by the following license: The clicking action does not guarantee the quality of the opinion of the user nor the author of the message. The user takes full liability for any negative outcomes of posting their optinions on a website. The user gives up their rights to own the speech of their opinion. By clicking the user hereby gives permission to all who read the opinion to have full access to their harddrives with and without any prior notice.)
After researching DRM last semester, I have come to the conclusion that it is not all that bad...
Only when it is implemented by adding value to the USER not the record label. The following criteria must exists for DRM to become marketable:
- cheaper/faster content access
- Access to new content along with vast library of everything that has ever been created. All available instantly.
- higher quality content than currently available in consumer market
- user choice in usage of content (rights specification)
- highly secure to user privacy - total commitment required by company
- easy to use (invisible to user)
- transparancy in rules/policies
- high quality products with vast 3rd party developer support
- market company's trust and dedication to user's needs - NOT company's needs
These are only some... but as you can see, there is failure from the beginning in DRM. In its current state DRM is a tool for corporations, not customers. That is why it WILL fail. (Divx anyone).
Frank
Has anyone successfully had TIVO working in Canada with the proper listing for their Canadian cable service?
They are missing a large market of early adopter here.
---
Here in Canada the MIS degree I am finishing had plenty of programming. It is nearly impossible to finish the "Commerce with Honours in Management Information System" degree in 4 years.
It has the full compliment of Commerce courses, and with, what I would consider, 40% of the CSI courses. Some of the languages we learn are:
C++
Scheme
Lisp
Prolog
Pascal
Java
VB (yes but this is in a business course on CS)
Database Courses (PL SQL, etc)
We have to take all the advance calculus and algebra courses. We do not go into "discrete" math.
I feel confident that I can go into a any software company and start working on any of their code with some simple intros of the project.
The highly respect the MIS degree. Hell, during many of the CS labs, I was the one helping out the CS students create collections in java, and use recursion in Scheme, and inherited classes in C++
BTW: I am not done the degree yet... there is still a micro circuit/logic course and a few more Project Managment courses.
Again, it is a very well-rounded degree. You get from it what you wish to take from it.
Frank
I see your point. But I believe the tech will have both push-pull technologies.
Imagine shutting off all the push (Forcing your phone to ring for that sale at the nearest store) and just using the pull technologies to get info you want.
In the car, you would use a combination of the two to filter out information which is only relevant to the highway you are driving on, accidents, etc. That way the only pushed information you will receive will be accident related on the current highway. Of course, the UI of such a system will have to be very well refined. There aren't many users I know who know how do create multiple criteria queries while they are driving.
So, by selectively tuning your PDA/cell, you can pull information which is relevant ("What is the special in that restaurant?"), and have the cell ignore the other crap. It also might come down to spam-filtering on the cell... but hey we already live with it now....
In a bar/pub, I always wanted take my iPaq PDA to be able to pull in all the information of the single ladies.... now that would be good use of technology!
The internet was created to be able to withstand a nuclear hit, yet some drop-out geek can take it down with his little monopoly.
This reminds me of the RIAA bitchin about piracy affecting profits when they are now making more revenue and net income than they have in their entire history.
Let's have a look at the poor poor drug companies... They make you think a little charity would kill them.
Roche
In the first half of 2001 the Roche Group achieved consolidated results of 14,5 billion Swiss francs. This represents a growth on an adjusted basis of 6% in both Swiss francs and local currencies.
Group operating profit and net income were stable at 2,4 billion Swiss francs and at 3,0 billion Swiss francs respectively. As expected the EBITDA margin and the operating profit margin decreased slightly.
PFIZER INC = $256.4 Billion
Pfizer Inc. is a global pharmaceutical and consumer products company which discovers, develops, manufactures and markets innovative medicines for humans and animals. For the six months ended 6/30/01, total revenues rose 8% to $15.33 billion. Net income from continuing operations totaled $3.72 billion, up from $945 million. Results reflect increased sales of Lipitor, Neurontin, Zyrtec and Norvasc and a $1.79 billion reduction in costs related to the merger with Warner-Lambert.
Merck = $159.3 Billion
Merck and Co., Inc. is a pharmaceutical company that discovers, develops, produces and markets human/animal health products and services. Merck also provides pharmaceutical benefit services. For the six months ended 6/30/01, sales rose 27% to $23.24 billion. Net income rose 8% to $3.47 billion. Results reflect strong growth in worldwide human health sales, and other newer and established products, partially offset by higher materials and production costs.
(I got these mostly from their websites and quote.yahoo.com)
So these three alone have over $10 billion in PROFITS. That's after all their research into drug development has been paid. And they want more. Now, I can understand that if they were running at a loss...fine - raise the price of drugs in rich contries to pay of the R&D and give the drugs (AT COST) to poorer nations to improve their goodwill.
---
"This falls perfectly into the government's propoganda that only criminals use encryption"
And the government is right. The RIAA, MPAA, and Adobe are all using encryption.
It's an interesting dycotomy: on one hand you have the government saying breaking encryption is illegal (DMCA). On the other you have them saying "using encryption" should be controlled or illegal.
I am wondering do different parts of the US government ever speak to each other?
I know most of these planets are Juipter sized. But what if life could live on them? Would the exrtreme gravity make life extremely small and resrict it to bacteria and fungus? Or just really tiny bi-pedal species?
Something to think about.
Cd
"We found oil!" Boooooooom!
"He says that the first trials, on individual patients, might start in the next six months.The company plans to seek partners among the big drug and biotech companies to develop the business. The invention is patented. " ------
Yup, only the rich will live forever...
(hint: start saving NOW!)
Anyone get it up here in Canada? We have a Sci-Fi channel, but I don't recall seeing any ads for the Dune series.
Hopefully the series will come out on tape.
Literary porn. A story of a couple in a secluded place engaged in a 'nooner' must have been some hard-core stuff back then.
In all seriousness, I am constantly amazed by the power of people's curiosity!
Congrats! (although a month late)
I really enjoyed your commentary about the election. It is sad that you recorded on Sunday and *very little* has changed.
I have a suggestion for Geeks in Space... how about a live show with call in by either by phone, email, IRC, ICQ, or any other communication methods.
Keep up the good work!
iMesh (http://www.imesh.com) is still up and running... a bit buggy (but much improved since the early days!)
Have fun!
Don't tell anyone!!! Come on, this always happens. A wicked hack to do some real cool stuff gets out and the RIAA / MPAA / DMCA find out about it... let's keep the lid on this one for a while.
Why can't all geeks just have a *private* network so that only we know about this stuff... well at least until it's WAY to late to do anything.
Check out these guys!
http://www.platforms-intl.com/
They are already doing it in Brazil!
They have tested their "plane" system and it worked, now they have gone into stationary blimps. I can't wait until the FCC/FAA allows them to use this tech in the states! (much cheaper that 12 million). Their "arc" system is about 5 million for a city-covered installation. What local government wouldn't want to be the first city with permanent free wireless internet! ($5 million a pop is NOTHING!)
Cd
--
I thought it was because we were always looking for some hot chicks! Well, maybe I'm wrong...
Cd
---
Hell, I am Canadian and I am more worried about the US elections than our own Federal government elections coming up in late November (Canadian Alliance vs Liberals - can't trust either one!)
I many ways I like Gore, and Bush sometimes seems more sincere (or he is an incredible actor).
But I know that the US elections matter more to us Canadian than our own... in the long-run, it's the US that influences the Canadian government. Hell... even Greenspan has control over CANADIAN interest rates! (with a bit of lag of course)
This is why ALL americans should vote. You must realize that your vote not only affects you locally but the world in general. The more diverse the voting population, the more accurate the outcome (or so the theory goes).
Vote early, vote offen!
Cd
---
Is that "FREE" or "OPEN-SOURCE"?