He hated documentation, had worked there for 12 years, and had everything in his head.
Auuugh! I hate that!
Seriously people, document as you go.
Let me tell you why: Accidents happen.
Do you know what happens to all that lovely detail data that you keep in your head after a concussion? Yeah, it's has gaping holes, or is completely gone.
I hate to think of how many projects and departments get derailed by auto wrecks ands major illnesses.
I'm still cleaning up stuff left half completed by a guy who went on medical leave a year ago.
Computer hobbies? Did all their education provide access to different computer topics?
IOTW, discriminate against people who taught themselves on crappy equipment, only hire people with fancy degrees who know nothing except how entitled they are.
Don't hire the applicant who did not have access to new and expensive computers over the years.
Translation: Discriminate against poor people and people with cheap parents.
Seriously, when I was in high school, the AppleII had just come out. I asked for a computer for Christmas. I got some half-baked mechanical boolean logic "game". I was teaching myself to program on the TTY at school because there wasn't room in the programming class. It was real obvious that I wasn't going to get anywhere with computers at that point. I kept it as a hobby that I would try to do, but didn't try to work with computers again until the 90s, after the PC came out and was affordable.
Stack ranking automatically penalizes people who aren't present to be "seen" and play politics. If you mentor others but don't self promote and kiss ass, the people you help will keep their jobs and you won't.
Stack ranking is evil, and destructive to real collaboration and teamwork, regardless of how densely you pack them in and how much you micromanage sprints.
I wouldn't. Open plan and hot desking are demeaning hell.
I've literally left jobs that moved me to open plan from cubes, I hate it that much. I tried it for over six months each time. So no, give me a cube, or better yet, and office.
No, Yahoo ended remote work because their managers were not capable of managing remote workers, and were getting scammed. So they punished the whole company because a few managers couldn't tell that their people weren't really working.
Seriously, one remote guy left because of it, and those of us who took over his job wondered what the fuck he did all day, because stuff was so fucked up and incomplete that it was obvious he was not producing any real results and only doing part-time work for his full-time pay. This was purely his manager's fault for not establishing goals and results, and not keeping track. (In the manager's defense, he had a double-sized team, mostly in office.)
But many of Yahoo's middle managers spent more time kissing ass and playing politics than actually managing.
Agreed. I figure he is one of those jerks that make open plan such a hell for any deep thinker. He just wants his coworkers around so he can talk at them.
First off, that whole 15 minutes thing is absolute bullshit. Maybe its a worst case if you were in truly deep thought over one of the hardest problems of the year. But most of the time you aren't, and it will be a few minutes Like around 1.
Obviously you don't think deeply about much of anything. It's often at least 15 minutes.
Secondly- your productivity doesn't matter. The team's does. Those interruptions- it means a team member needs help. They're blocked. Their productivity is at or near 0 until unblocked. If interrupting you costs 15 minutes from you but saves an hour for him, that interruption is worth it for the team. There are almost 0 of those interruptions that aren't a net gain. Now if you have a problem with particular people being too disruptive, that's a management/personnel issue you should bring up to your manager.
Guess again. Your review is based on YOUR productivity, not your team. Therefore it is what matters. I have been in jobs where I mentored juniors (answering questions takes waaaay more than 15 minutes), then got crucified on my review for spending too much time on "other stuff", and not doing my tasks. I got no "credit" for helping, "unblocking", mentoring or being an information source. None.
Also, your coworker who is so "blocked"? Has a question that they should either a) figure out for themselves without you holding their hand all damn day, b) do some searching on Google and or your internal wiki, or c) write on the group Slack so it is well formulated and able to be answered by anyone who is available.
Thirdly- not everyone works well in remote situations. Especially not long term (working remote for a day while you wait for a package/your maid/etc is a different matter). Very few people actually end up working as well as they do in an office- there are MORE distractions at home. And communications do not work as well- video conferences do not work as well as talking to someone in person. Even if you're one of those who do work well from home, you won't be as efficient as you would sitting near the rest of the team.
True. Some people can't manage themselves well at home. They have to have the conversations that make them feel important. They have to have their managers watch over them to keep them on task, and not bugging everyone else. They need to smell the farts of their coworkers, and get every illness so that they really feel like they are part of something. I for one find those people to be the biggest impediment to productivity.
Face to face conversations are waaay overrated, and for people who never learned to communicate via the written word. These are the same types of chumps who refuse to comment their code.
I am far, far more efficient working from home, or alone in an office after hours, than I am with everyone and their siblings, cousins and significant others interrupting me all goddamn day with stupid questions that can be answer by reading the goddamn wiki or doing a Google search and applying their fucking brain!
Scrum is the devil. Agile development "methodologies" are just thinly veiled excuses for total command and control over every bit of minutia on a project, plus a forced speedup and a series of two-week death marches with demands for fast "productivity" at the expense of quality and sanity.
... People who think they're really good communicators are often the ones who wander around the office or shout over cubicle walls, disturbing everyone within earshot.
This.
I hate noisy offices. I can't hear myself think, and answering stupid questions that can be looked up on google demolishes my productivity for the day.
The worst is open plan noise pits and "benching". It reminds me of the photos we see coming out of third world sweatshops, with monitors and keyboards instead of piecework on the tables.
I often communicate better over IRC/Jabber/Slack because I can actually type stuff out, and don't have to struggle to understand 50 different accents.
Terrible management if that happens. No doubt that's the case here.
Any big network has a dedicated monitoring system with all sorts of plug-ins. Certificate monitoring is just another plug-in. You (if competent) write the plug-in once, and the notification is just the normal for the whole system. You (if good) write a system to auto-renew all your certs based on these scans and notifications, and alarm if the auto-renew fails for long enough..
We had a team that did that where I work. It was particularly amusing when that team's certs all expired - they had chosen to leave themselves out of their own system, for some reason.
I've written plugins like that.
What gets bad is the alert goes off, and says you have 90 days to renew. Having no power to spend money, you dutifully route a request for a renewal to be paid for. It goes back and forth to accounting for a couple months asking for justifications for the (trivial) expense because no one will give the operations people a p-card or budget. Finally, if you are lucky, a P.O. is issued (for a trivial amount), and you can buy a new certificate before the old one expires. If not, it expires, everyone bitches and calls you incompetent, and all you can do is point to the three month old purchase request and say "We tried to do the needful". Then you are first in the next round of layoffs because of "incompetence" and having embarrassed the bean counters.
The contract to support the network is sent out for rebid and the winning contractor sees the position responsible for managing certificates as a cost-savings "opportunity" and eliminates the position or combines it with another task and now no one is responsible for the task or the guy that knew how/when the certificates needed to be renewed got too expensive so the position was filled with a newbie with no experience.
Yep. That happens all too often in accountant managed companies.
Half of the real reason that tech outfit like to hire young RCGs and recent immigrants is that they cost much less than anyone with even 5 years of experience, much less 25 years. This is why most software sucks.
On the systems I administer, we have an alert that checks the certificate expiration once a day, and alerts it plenty of time to get it renewed.
But a lot of people don't do that, they just mark it on a calendar somewhere, or expect the certificate issuer to notify them. For the latter, often the contact email is to a person no longer with the organization, or in a different role, so it is ignored. That's why my current $Employer insists that certificate emails go to an email list for a group, rather than just to one person.
It wouldn't be quite as funny if it wasn't so very common.
... Trump's mistake was in retroactively invalidating visas and green cards which had already been approved. If he had limited it to freezing new applications like Obama's "ban" did (to use what the media's terminology), then I think the judges would be deciding in his favor.
Actually, if he had just frozen new applications, I would have shrugged. So would most of the people who protested, IMO.
But we do have a principal of fairness in this country of not suddenly denying what had previously been granted.
"Hey, you can come work here! We have a job for you! H1b!" Person sells stuff, quits current job, moves out of apartment, boards airplane "Oh, no, we changed our minds. Psych! Go home!" head|desk
Person comes here, has job, home, pets, etc. Lives and works here for years. Gets green card, is no longer indentured to a company. Goes to for a visit to family in former country. Tries to come back. "Oh, no, your kind aren't allowed here. Go home" "But my apartment and job are here in the US! I have a green card" "Nope. Go away. You lose everything."
I have no love for the H1b visa program, it screws both US workers and the indentured foreigners who labor under it.
But I am not interested in screwing people already here out of everything they have worked for.
... And yet here we are, two weeks in, and it's just been one mismanaged episode after another. Someone in the White House is leaking transcripts, Trump won't stop tweeting, Conway and Spicer just go from one absurdity to another,...
(Emphasis mine)
I remember when they told Obama that he had to give up his Blackberry and hand over his twitter account to official press people. It was not secure and trackable, IIRC. He was an adult and gave up tweeting for himself for the duration.
Trump tweets when he should be sleeping. It's either insomnia or sleep tweeting. My guess is the latter.
Google and other "top tier" companies are not hiring only PhD RCGs. They are hiring bodies from places like Tata with BS resumes as well.
The *average* is $81K, not $130K. He didn't say "average for PhDs", he just said "average". So it includes people with bogus degrees and crap certificates.
I've worked with H1b's - Some are brilliant, most are below average.
The ones hired through body shops are the worst. They drill them on buzzwords to pass the interviews, and they have no ability to learn on their own - you have to spoon feed them everything. They can't read simple documentation, much less an actual man page.
Example: A network "engineer" should know WTF "traceroute" is. But I encountered one that honestly didn't, but who bragged about how he was a senior engineer.
The US government needs to issue green cards on a fast track to technically skilled people, who then compete fairly in the market with other residents and citizens. Eliminate the incentive for companies to abuse their H1-B indentured servants, and then use that abuse to force citizens and green card holders to work under equally crappy conditions.
A fast track green card program for technically skilled people would provide the ability for those people to become fully invested in American society sooner. Plus, it would really prove how much of the 'skilled labor shortage' is real, and how much is really just a 'cheap skilled labor shortage'.
Most companies I've worked for paid H1-Bs less, usually by giving them a lower title for the same qualifications and not giving them raises during their visa.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because you manage people by expecting them to be adults, and they step up and do the work.
He hated documentation, had worked there for 12 years, and had everything in his head.
Auuugh! I hate that!
Seriously people, document as you go.
Let me tell you why: Accidents happen.
Do you know what happens to all that lovely detail data that you keep in your head after a concussion? Yeah, it's has gaping holes, or is completely gone.
I hate to think of how many projects and departments get derailed by auto wrecks ands major illnesses.
I'm still cleaning up stuff left half completed by a guy who went on medical leave a year ago.
Computer hobbies? Did all their education provide access to different computer topics?
IOTW, discriminate against people who taught themselves on crappy equipment, only hire people with fancy degrees who know nothing except how entitled they are.
Don't hire the applicant who did not have access to new and expensive computers over the years.
Translation: Discriminate against poor people and people with cheap parents.
Seriously, when I was in high school, the AppleII had just come out. I asked for a computer for Christmas. I got some half-baked mechanical boolean logic "game". I was teaching myself to program on the TTY at school because there wasn't room in the programming class. It was real obvious that I wasn't going to get anywhere with computers at that point. I kept it as a hobby that I would try to do, but didn't try to work with computers again until the 90s, after the PC came out and was affordable.
Yep.
Stack ranking automatically penalizes people who aren't present to be "seen" and play politics. If you mentor others but don't self promote and kiss ass, the people you help will keep their jobs and you won't.
Stack ranking is evil, and destructive to real collaboration and teamwork, regardless of how densely you pack them in and how much you micromanage sprints.
Amen.
Also, daily scrums are a way for managers/PMs to micromanage the team down to every little task.
Headphones are not a solution, IMO. They give me headaches and ear infections. Bleah.
I wouldn't. Open plan and hot desking are demeaning hell.
I've literally left jobs that moved me to open plan from cubes, I hate it that much. I tried it for over six months each time. So no, give me a cube, or better yet, and office.
Ugh!
No, Yahoo ended remote work because their managers were not capable of managing remote workers, and were getting scammed. So they punished the whole company because a few managers couldn't tell that their people weren't really working.
Seriously, one remote guy left because of it, and those of us who took over his job wondered what the fuck he did all day, because stuff was so fucked up and incomplete that it was obvious he was not producing any real results and only doing part-time work for his full-time pay. This was purely his manager's fault for not establishing goals and results, and not keeping track. (In the manager's defense, he had a double-sized team, mostly in office.)
But many of Yahoo's middle managers spent more time kissing ass and playing politics than actually managing.
When there aren't co-workers around to call into meetings on their f'n speakerphones.
You left off a zero.... ;)
But amen!
Agreed. I figure he is one of those jerks that make open plan such a hell for any deep thinker. He just wants his coworkers around so he can talk at them.
First off, that whole 15 minutes thing is absolute bullshit. Maybe its a worst case if you were in truly deep thought over one of the hardest problems of the year. But most of the time you aren't, and it will be a few minutes Like around 1.
Obviously you don't think deeply about much of anything. It's often at least 15 minutes.
Secondly- your productivity doesn't matter. The team's does. Those interruptions- it means a team member needs help. They're blocked. Their productivity is at or near 0 until unblocked. If interrupting you costs 15 minutes from you but saves an hour for him, that interruption is worth it for the team. There are almost 0 of those interruptions that aren't a net gain. Now if you have a problem with particular people being too disruptive, that's a management/personnel issue you should bring up to your manager.
Guess again. Your review is based on YOUR productivity, not your team. Therefore it is what matters. I have been in jobs where I mentored juniors (answering questions takes waaaay more than 15 minutes), then got crucified on my review for spending too much time on "other stuff", and not doing my tasks. I got no "credit" for helping, "unblocking", mentoring or being an information source. None.
Also, your coworker who is so "blocked"? Has a question that they should either a) figure out for themselves without you holding their hand all damn day, b) do some searching on Google and or your internal wiki, or c) write on the group Slack so it is well formulated and able to be answered by anyone who is available.
Thirdly- not everyone works well in remote situations. Especially not long term (working remote for a day while you wait for a package/your maid/etc is a different matter). Very few people actually end up working as well as they do in an office- there are MORE distractions at home. And communications do not work as well- video conferences do not work as well as talking to someone in person. Even if you're one of those who do work well from home, you won't be as efficient as you would sitting near the rest of the team.
True. Some people can't manage themselves well at home. They have to have the conversations that make them feel important. They have to have their managers watch over them to keep them on task, and not bugging everyone else. They need to smell the farts of their coworkers, and get every illness so that they really feel like they are part of something. I for one find those people to be the biggest impediment to productivity.
Face to face conversations are waaay overrated, and for people who never learned to communicate via the written word. These are the same types of chumps who refuse to comment their code.
I am far, far more efficient working from home, or alone in an office after hours, than I am with everyone and their siblings, cousins and significant others interrupting me all goddamn day with stupid questions that can be answer by reading the goddamn wiki or doing a Google search and applying their fucking brain!
Scrum is the devil. Agile development "methodologies" are just thinly veiled excuses for total command and control over every bit of minutia on a project, plus a forced speedup and a series of two-week death marches with demands for fast "productivity" at the expense of quality and sanity.
... People who think they're really good communicators are often the ones who wander around the office or shout over cubicle walls, disturbing everyone within earshot.
This.
I hate noisy offices. I can't hear myself think, and answering stupid questions that can be looked up on google demolishes my productivity for the day.
The worst is open plan noise pits and "benching". It reminds me of the photos we see coming out of third world sweatshops, with monitors and keyboards instead of piecework on the tables.
I often communicate better over IRC/Jabber/Slack because I can actually type stuff out, and don't have to struggle to understand 50 different accents.
Give me a door or let me work from home
Link or it is just more right wing fake news
Terrible management if that happens. No doubt that's the case here.
Any big network has a dedicated monitoring system with all sorts of plug-ins. Certificate monitoring is just another plug-in. You (if competent) write the plug-in once, and the notification is just the normal for the whole system. You (if good) write a system to auto-renew all your certs based on these scans and notifications, and alarm if the auto-renew fails for long enough..
We had a team that did that where I work. It was particularly amusing when that team's certs all expired - they had chosen to leave themselves out of their own system, for some reason.
I've written plugins like that.
What gets bad is the alert goes off, and says you have 90 days to renew. Having no power to spend money, you dutifully route a request for a renewal to be paid for. It goes back and forth to accounting for a couple months asking for justifications for the (trivial) expense because no one will give the operations people a p-card or budget. Finally, if you are lucky, a P.O. is issued (for a trivial amount), and you can buy a new certificate before the old one expires. If not, it expires, everyone bitches and calls you incompetent, and all you can do is point to the three month old purchase request and say "We tried to do the needful". Then you are first in the next round of layoffs because of "incompetence" and having embarrassed the bean counters.
The contract to support the network is sent out for rebid and the winning contractor sees the position responsible for managing certificates as a cost-savings "opportunity" and eliminates the position or combines it with another task and now no one is responsible for the task or the guy that knew how/when the certificates needed to be renewed got too expensive so the position was filled with a newbie with no experience.
Yep. That happens all too often in accountant managed companies.
Half of the real reason that tech outfit like to hire young RCGs and recent immigrants is that they cost much less than anyone with even 5 years of experience, much less 25 years. This is why most software sucks.
On the systems I administer, we have an alert that checks the certificate expiration once a day, and alerts it plenty of time to get it renewed.
But a lot of people don't do that, they just mark it on a calendar somewhere, or expect the certificate issuer to notify them. For the latter, often the contact email is to a person no longer with the organization, or in a different role, so it is ignored. That's why my current $Employer insists that certificate emails go to an email list for a group, rather than just to one person.
It wouldn't be quite as funny if it wasn't so very common.
... Trump's mistake was in retroactively invalidating visas and green cards which had already been approved. If he had limited it to freezing new applications like Obama's "ban" did (to use what the media's terminology), then I think the judges would be deciding in his favor.
Actually, if he had just frozen new applications, I would have shrugged. So would most of the people who protested, IMO.
But we do have a principal of fairness in this country of not suddenly denying what had previously been granted.
"Hey, you can come work here! We have a job for you! H1b!"
Person sells stuff, quits current job, moves out of apartment, boards airplane
"Oh, no, we changed our minds. Psych! Go home!"
head|desk
Person comes here, has job, home, pets, etc. Lives and works here for years.
Gets green card, is no longer indentured to a company.
Goes to for a visit to family in former country. Tries to come back.
"Oh, no, your kind aren't allowed here. Go home"
"But my apartment and job are here in the US! I have a green card"
"Nope. Go away. You lose everything."
I have no love for the H1b visa program, it screws both US workers and the indentured foreigners who labor under it.
But I am not interested in screwing people already here out of everything they have worked for.
... And yet here we are, two weeks in, and it's just been one mismanaged episode after another. Someone in the White House is leaking transcripts, Trump won't stop tweeting, Conway and Spicer just go from one absurdity to another,...
(Emphasis mine)
I remember when they told Obama that he had to give up his Blackberry and hand over his twitter account to official press people. It was not secure and trackable, IIRC. He was an adult and gave up tweeting for himself for the duration.
Trump tweets when he should be sleeping. It's either insomnia or sleep tweeting. My guess is the latter.
Google and other "top tier" companies are not hiring only PhD RCGs. They are hiring bodies from places like Tata with BS resumes as well.
The *average* is $81K, not $130K. He didn't say "average for PhDs", he just said "average". So it includes people with bogus degrees and crap certificates.
I've worked with H1b's - Some are brilliant, most are below average.
The ones hired through body shops are the worst. They drill them on buzzwords to pass the interviews, and they have no ability to learn on their own - you have to spoon feed them everything. They can't read simple documentation, much less an actual man page.
Example: A network "engineer" should know WTF "traceroute" is. But I encountered one that honestly didn't, but who bragged about how he was a senior engineer.
I wish I could get one of those jobs. I guess I'm not enough of a sociopath.
Agreed. I've been in the first wave too many times to not know it for truth. I still haven't learned how to kiss ass.
I agree with this, and I'm a US citizen.
The US government needs to issue green cards on a fast track to technically skilled people, who then compete fairly in the market with other residents and citizens. Eliminate the incentive for companies to abuse their H1-B indentured servants, and then use that abuse to force citizens and green card holders to work under equally crappy conditions.
A fast track green card program for technically skilled people would provide the ability for those people to become fully invested in American society sooner. Plus, it would really prove how much of the 'skilled labor shortage' is real, and how much is really just a 'cheap skilled labor shortage'.
Most companies I've worked for paid H1-Bs less, usually by giving them a lower title for the same qualifications and not giving them raises during their visa.