MBAs were orginally created for engineers who did not understand business who wanted to manage other engineers.
Hiring former programmers who have degrees in business or have MBA's would be my bet. Also perhaps an MBA is not needed more than a solid track record of a true geek rather than a technologist who just happened to get his or her MBA and has not written much code besides a hello world app in VB for college.
Japanese always work in groups. The boss is the coach who negotiates with the team and goes over the business requirements. The team is rewarded or penalized based on results. The coach minimally is but not to the crazy extend as it is in American culture where the CEO gets credit for everything.
Engineers need to make technical decisions and work together in a high performance work group and leaders for different things in the code base will alternate on their own depending on respect and who knows more in each area. The coach just makes sure the business processes are in properly and perhaps gives customer feedback.
Many companies like HP already do this and this is why Japanese cars are so reliable. Engineers make the decisions and not cost saving accountants (with the exception of now Nissan who has American management). If only health insurance companies followed this mantra when accountants make critical medical decisions for the doctors and then the prices skyrocket as a result of mistakes.
Paired programming is annoying but having the geeks hammer it out and do their thing works and the business analysts who has more limited power can make sure it does what it needs to do.
The worse I.T. performs the stronger the case to outsource as its now viewed as an entity that sucks up money and adds no value.
What is the future? 15 years from now I see everything done via www.salesforce.com and Google Docs or similiar kinds of hosted apps in China and India.
Servers are out and internet replacements are in. I.T. is a sinking ship. I hate to say this but its true. The cost savings for outsourcing to internet apps like salesforce are HUGE and where are the system administrators and programmers going to fit in? They don't. The hosted internet app houses will have them. You don't need architects designing your office buildings on staff do you? Rather you rent out.
Once data is stored overseas it will create lock in making it impossible to leave.
Time to learn more skills as computer techs and cisco engineers are going to be all that is left in about a decade when everyone switches.
Hr seems to do a great job with other aspects of the business like creating high performance work groups, japanese stlye management, and making sure the right people are hired who understand business proceses.
For some reason I.T. is viewed as a cost center who add no value other than someone who comes in with a screw driver to open a desktop and fix it.. aka help desk. Gee people in India can do that job for alot less over the phone for half the cases.
Anyway I.T. needs to be treated like engineering or product development specialists. Engineers are quized whether they know business processes. Why can't I.T.? I think they assume we just drink redbull and play around with html all day and do any *real* work.
fortunately we have the China problem and they will fiercely defend its fellow communist neighbor. they have nuclear weapons and could cripple the us economy since we buy everything from there today.
The kernel by itself doesn't do anything and a distribution with the latest software is a major release just like Vista is windows even though it comes with more than just a kernel.
I.T. is no longer a real career like it once was. Off shoring Jax apps like www.salesforce.com and Google docs will eliminate a lot of programming and system administration jobs.
I would recommend a change in careers such as marketing and sales which can't be outsourced.
The problem is two-fold. My wife is a teacher and is highly opinionated on this matter.
Teachers unions are keeping bad teachers and firing good teachers who are new and un-tenured (like my wife)to protect the tenured senior teachers.
They should get rid of tenure and I agree. The problem then is the administrators and trust me they care a lot less about student performance than the teachers.
Administrators are judged by the state on keeping costs down and not on student test scores. They would love to fire every teacher and hire unqualified interns and students for 20k a year each and then cry to the government they can't find qualified teachers. In Florida they have an H1B1 Visa program to have foreign interns teach for dirt cheap. Without tenure all the teachers will be fired by the administrators to pinch a few pennies and a few pay raises for them. New teachers are being laid off and fired and in California its a normal practice to lay off a teacher and rehire him or her year after year to prevent them from being tenured. The problem with this is you can't get a loan from the bank if you can't hold a job for more than a year even if you are re-hired. Many quite and do other things and then for some dumb reason the districts are shocked that all the qualified teachers leave and cry there is not enough qualified teachers.
Every teacher would be fired if they got rid of the tenure system. Reasons being is that NCLB (no child left behind) benchmarks are not scientifically based. The benchmarks and language of NCLB were created to say a 4th grade student now must perform at a 6th grade level... make it happen!!
Every single school in the nation is failing the standard because its too high. Kids in 3rd grade are learning pre-algebra and are being rushed to the point without gym, art classes, and music all so they can spend a year learning how to take a test originally made for 5th grade at a break neck pace whether all the kids understand the concepts or not. This makes some students who are behind unable to catch up. NCLB likes having district standardized pacing so the teacher is unable to help any students who are behind.
This would mean every teacher would be fired as its nearly impossible to obtain the results. Special ed kids and teachers in Hispanic schools with immigrants would lose their job for the Mexicans not performing English at grade level etc.
Also its a media myth are schools are failing. Special ed kids and illegals are tested in the United States while they do not test such children in different countries. In China they put kids to work by 8th grade if their grades are not good. Of course their scores will be higher if that is the case.
Administrators need to be fired first and No Child Left Behind needs to be reformed and scientifically and statistically be competitive and accurate for student and teacher performance. If only legal Americans are tested who are not in special ed then the test scores would show we are really quite competitive.
My kids are 8 and 10 and they go on an old laptop to play flash games and watch youtube videos.
Whenver something pops up they always click ok and then wonder why the computer is slow. Computer is full of viruses click for Antivirus 2009? Wow daddy said viruses are bad I better click this... etc.
As a result the system is sloowww and the restore cd is long gone and its impossible to get rid of anti virus 2009... not to be confused with Nortan Anti virus 2008.
Anyway with UAC on my vista desktop my kids stop and ask me to click ok or cancel. In essence it works.
Its immoral to focus on anything but the bottom line as you are robbing shareholders money.
The point of a public corporation is to raise its stock price and nothing more. Its finance 101 at any college.
While its true wha tyou say about Wal-mart my view changed when I had credit card debt because my wife was laid off. I need to pay for my kids college and walmart is not bad. I made shit pay for minimum wage for years and its something everyone has to go through sometime in their lives whether they are a walmart worker or not.
In this day and age a huge increase in prices would cause a much more severe economic recession than the one we are in now.
People only care about themselves when push comes to shove and this is how economics works unfortunately. You can't change the nature of human beings wanting to outdo one another and saving the most money and getting the most indulgences. These same people are the shareholders for Microsoft/Dell/Walmart.
Great now you should pay for those taxes since we will be now 1 trillion in debt. After all they should not pay taxes and you all love a free ride with an educated work force, infrastructure, security by the US military, free trade, roads, and schools for your children so lets have the average joe pay for things that benefit companies so the fat cats can get another 100 million dollar bonus.
I worked for a company that did this and we used different computers so we could have different ip addresses. It was pretty funny but our competitors did this as well and were stealing our marketshare.
... and make patent reform and drugs and medical equipment. If you really want we should lower the standards of becoming a doctor or nurse to increase the supply which would lower their demand.
Problem sovled....oh wait that is socialism. Sigh.
Some businesses are in favor of universal health care for this reason. They can save a bundle but many employees who have true ppo (not hmos) will throw a fit and vote people out of office!
In economics the term is called diminishing return. It begins to happen at 35 hours a week. By 60 you hit negative return and it backfires and adds more costs.
This is college economics 101. The manager is an idiot for not seeing this. It could be in the states that health care costs are so expensive that many employers would rather eat the negative productivity so they do not have to hire as many workers. But still capping hours at 60 is wise.
Still sucks and you have to work 9 straight days. Does not sound that much better... it maybe worse.
Any manager considering this is not worth his salt. Hire more people or stop bending over backwards for ridiculous requirements. Do you think any other profession would tolerate this? People would say no and quit.
I prefer to keep my marriage and family intact and not so my company can exploit me and get a 2 -1 in keeping costs down.
9/80 is 11 hours a day and this assumes no days off. Now you get only every other friday off??
This kind of reminds me of the movie Little SHop of Horrors where Seamore claims he gets every other Sunday off as a joke.
All the studies show that after 50 hours a week productivity goes down and at 60 a week you get negative return. SO how much time do the programmers now have to do to correct the mistakes they made during their last 13 hour day? Yeah real productive use of time there, not to mention the senior level developers will probably jump ship if this is considered the norm leaving the least producitive workers.
Go get some balls guys and tell management to screw themselves. Do you see any other department putting in those hours? Are you appreciated at all?
Were not plumbers. If we can't email the business is toast. IT is like electricity. Yes none of these employees you menioned are cost centers as they provide a service to society and the companies they serve. The concept of cost centers today is retarded and is based off of accountants looking for inefficiencies within an organization. Originally an inefficiency where no money or value is retained by hiring certain kinds of employees.
Also in larger companies integrated I.T. with ERP CRM and MRP systems and database powered inventory management systems can bring great value to a company. The support tech might as well be a plumber but thats not all what I.T. is and every employee is not a cost center. If they were then they need to be fired as an employee supposed to save or create revenue for the company. Go back to typewritters and see how competitive your business remains?
Its related to people who can't sell themselves or hold accountable people who slash their budgets so much that they lose money. If someone at work fired all their lawyers and a big sexual harrasement suit happened a few months later the person laying them off would lose their job. Same should happen when a company loses a major client due to an IT related issue that could have been prevented if it were not because of the bean counters.
Many computer and technical professionals are so egotistical in that they put themselves and their little area of expertise ahead of the organization. I am better look what I know!
They are clueless about the needs of business or costs and care only about how stupid users are. Not hmmm the business can be more efficient if we did x with our ERP program.
The ego problem is very irritating when upper management and rockstar CEO's have this its all about me and win at all costs attitude. However, many geeks who complain and laugh about them have the same egos.
Yes I am about to get my MBA to become the abhorrent PHB but it is a real problem. At the end of the day management does not care about Linux vs Windows in the server room. Only about does employee X bring money or save money for the company.
If the network or all the computers are down then people can not get their work doen and big $$$ are lost very quickly. Deadlines can not be changed nor can customers waiting for their services or products.
I.T. needs to sell themselves more and put stability as a #1 priority. Alot of times employers are cheap or expect everything to be always perfect.
Ask them how much money do they lose if they can't complete something for a customer because they didn't want to pay for a redundant server?
People are clueless but other professions can convince more people about their importance and role within hte organization.
Assembly is bad which is the point of using a higher level language. Assembly should be avoided as well which is why you microkernels are the most stable.
Today's computers have tens and sometimes hundreds of services or processes running and a single program that uses direct memory access with a pointer can cause a GP fault and bring it down. I remember the days of Windows 3.1 and having to hit the reset button.
Csharp and Java provide access to pointers indirectly through their apis so they are managed. Goto statements make spaghetti code and makes debugging hard. You only found one professor who uses them. Pointers also cause memory leaks in programs and other errors that can be avoided by calling by value or using an api which manages the pointers indirectly.
Computer science books and even my highschool basic programming class mentioned its not proper programming to use a GOTO. Is there any computer science professor that supports GOTO statements in programs?
Not every programmer is good and a good programmer will refrain from making the program harder to read or more difficult to debug when jr programmers modify it later.
GOTOs by their very nature encourage bad programming as much as pointers do.
Slashdot Mirror
MBAs were orginally created for engineers who did not understand business who wanted to manage other engineers.
Hiring former programmers who have degrees in business or have MBA's would be my bet. Also perhaps an MBA is not needed more than a solid track record of a true geek rather than a technologist who just happened to get his or her MBA and has not written much code besides a hello world app in VB for college.
Japanese always work in groups. The boss is the coach who negotiates with the team and goes over the business requirements. The team is rewarded or penalized based on results. The coach minimally is but not to the crazy extend as it is in American culture where the CEO gets credit for everything.
Engineers need to make technical decisions and work together in a high performance work group and leaders for different things in the code base will alternate on their own depending on respect and who knows more in each area. The coach just makes sure the business processes are in properly and perhaps gives customer feedback.
Many companies like HP already do this and this is why Japanese cars are so reliable. Engineers make the decisions and not cost saving accountants (with the exception of now Nissan who has American management). If only health insurance companies followed this mantra when accountants make critical medical decisions for the doctors and then the prices skyrocket as a result of mistakes.
Paired programming is annoying but having the geeks hammer it out and do their thing works and the business analysts who has more limited power can make sure it does what it needs to do.
The worse I.T. performs the stronger the case to outsource as its now viewed as an entity that sucks up money and adds no value.
What is the future? 15 years from now I see everything done via www.salesforce.com and Google Docs or similiar kinds of hosted apps in China and India.
Servers are out and internet replacements are in. I.T. is a sinking ship. I hate to say this but its true. The cost savings for outsourcing to internet apps like salesforce are HUGE and where are the system administrators and programmers going to fit in? They don't. The hosted internet app houses will have them. You don't need architects designing your office buildings on staff do you? Rather you rent out.
Once data is stored overseas it will create lock in making it impossible to leave.
Time to learn more skills as computer techs and cisco engineers are going to be all that is left in about a decade when everyone switches.
Hr seems to do a great job with other aspects of the business like creating high performance work groups, japanese stlye management, and making sure the right people are hired who understand business proceses.
For some reason I.T. is viewed as a cost center who add no value other than someone who comes in with a screw driver to open a desktop and fix it .. aka help desk. Gee people in India can do that job for alot less over the phone for half the cases.
Anyway I.T. needs to be treated like engineering or product development specialists. Engineers are quized whether they know business processes. Why can't I.T.? I think they assume we just drink redbull and play around with html all day and do any *real* work.
Which is percisely wow Kim wants nuclear weapons. No one will fuck with it afterwards.
fortunately we have the China problem and they will fiercely defend its fellow communist neighbor. they have nuclear weapons and could cripple the us economy since we buy everything from there today.
It certainly is a Linux release.
The kernel by itself doesn't do anything and a distribution with the latest software is a major release just like Vista is windows even though it comes with more than just a kernel.
I.T. is no longer a real career like it once was. Off shoring Jax apps like www.salesforce.com and Google docs will eliminate a lot of programming and system administration jobs.
I would recommend a change in careers such as marketing and sales which can't be outsourced.
The problem is two-fold. My wife is a teacher and is highly opinionated on this matter.
Teachers unions are keeping bad teachers and firing good teachers who are new and un-tenured (like my wife)to protect the tenured senior teachers.
They should get rid of tenure and I agree. The problem then is the administrators and trust me they care a lot less about student performance than the teachers.
Administrators are judged by the state on keeping costs down and not on student test scores. They would love to fire every teacher and hire unqualified interns and students for 20k a year each and then cry to the government they can't find qualified teachers. In Florida they have an H1B1 Visa program to have foreign interns teach for dirt cheap. Without tenure all the teachers will be fired by the administrators to pinch a few pennies and a few pay raises for them. New teachers are being laid off and fired and in California its a normal practice to lay off a teacher and rehire him or her year after year to prevent them from being tenured. The problem with this is you can't get a loan from the bank if you can't hold a job for more than a year even if you are re-hired. Many quite and do other things and then for some dumb reason the districts are shocked that all the qualified teachers leave and cry there is not enough qualified teachers.
Every teacher would be fired if they got rid of the tenure system. Reasons being is that NCLB (no child left behind) benchmarks are not scientifically based. The benchmarks and language of NCLB were created to say a 4th grade student now must perform at a 6th grade level ... make it happen!!
Every single school in the nation is failing the standard because its too high. Kids in 3rd grade are learning pre-algebra and are being rushed to the point without gym, art classes, and music all so they can spend a year learning how to take a test originally made for 5th grade at a break neck pace whether all the kids understand the concepts or not. This makes some students who are behind unable to catch up. NCLB likes having district standardized pacing so the teacher is unable to help any students who are behind.
This would mean every teacher would be fired as its nearly impossible to obtain the results. Special ed kids and teachers in Hispanic schools with immigrants would lose their job for the Mexicans not performing English at grade level etc.
Also its a media myth are schools are failing. Special ed kids and illegals are tested in the United States while they do not test such children in different countries. In China they put kids to work by 8th grade if their grades are not good. Of course their scores will be higher if that is the case.
Administrators need to be fired first and No Child Left Behind needs to be reformed and scientifically and statistically be competitive and accurate for student and teacher performance. If only legal Americans are tested who are not in special ed then the test scores would show we are really quite competitive.
This is usefull for those with kids.
My kids are 8 and 10 and they go on an old laptop to play flash games and watch youtube videos.
Whenver something pops up they always click ok and then wonder why the computer is slow. Computer is full of viruses click for Antivirus 2009? Wow daddy said viruses are bad I better click this ... etc.
As a result the system is sloowww and the restore cd is long gone and its impossible to get rid of anti virus 2009 ... not to be confused with Nortan Anti virus 2008.
Anyway with UAC on my vista desktop my kids stop and ask me to click ok or cancel. In essence it works.
Why basu UAC if Ubuntu and MacOSX have Sudo?
"The more languages, the more of a pain for support, debugging, and dev hand-off."
You forgot to add job security to that. :-)
Its immoral to focus on anything but the bottom line as you are robbing shareholders money.
The point of a public corporation is to raise its stock price and nothing more. Its finance 101 at any college.
While its true wha tyou say about Wal-mart my view changed when I had credit card debt because my wife was laid off. I need to pay for my kids college and walmart is not bad. I made shit pay for minimum wage for years and its something everyone has to go through sometime in their lives whether they are a walmart worker or not.
In this day and age a huge increase in prices would cause a much more severe economic recession than the one we are in now.
People only care about themselves when push comes to shove and this is how economics works unfortunately. You can't change the nature of human beings wanting to outdo one another and saving the most money and getting the most indulgences. These same people are the shareholders for Microsoft/Dell/Walmart.
Great now you should pay for those taxes since we will be now 1 trillion in debt. After all they should not pay taxes and you all love a free ride with an educated work force, infrastructure, security by the US military, free trade, roads, and schools for your children so lets have the average joe pay for things that benefit companies so the fat cats can get another 100 million dollar bonus.
I suppose you expect all of this for free?
I worked for a company that did this and we used different computers so we could have different ip addresses. It was pretty funny but our competitors did this as well and were stealing our marketshare.
... and make patent reform and drugs and medical equipment. If you really want we should lower the standards of becoming a doctor or nurse to increase the supply which would lower their demand.
Problem sovled. ...oh wait that is socialism. Sigh.
Some businesses are in favor of universal health care for this reason. They can save a bundle but many employees who have true ppo (not hmos) will throw a fit and vote people out of office!
In economics the term is called diminishing return. It begins to happen at 35 hours a week. By 60 you hit negative return and it backfires and adds more costs.
This is college economics 101. The manager is an idiot for not seeing this. It could be in the states that health care costs are so expensive that many employers would rather eat the negative productivity so they do not have to hire as many workers. But still capping hours at 60 is wise.
The way he says it is sarcastic. In these wonderful times = bad economy.
Unfortunately you have to put up with it for a few more years until more jobs are available to jump ship.
9/80 = 11 hour days.
Still sucks and you have to work 9 straight days. Does not sound that much better ... it maybe worse.
Any manager considering this is not worth his salt. Hire more people or stop bending over backwards for ridiculous requirements. Do you think any other profession would tolerate this? People would say no and quit.
I prefer to keep my marriage and family intact and not so my company can exploit me and get a 2 -1 in keeping costs down.
9/80 is 11 hours a day and this assumes no days off. Now you get only every other friday off??
This kind of reminds me of the movie Little SHop of Horrors where Seamore claims he gets every other Sunday off as a joke.
All the studies show that after 50 hours a week productivity goes down and at 60 a week you get negative return. SO how much time do the programmers now have to do to correct the mistakes they made during their last 13 hour day? Yeah real productive use of time there, not to mention the senior level developers will probably jump ship if this is considered the norm leaving the least producitive workers.
Go get some balls guys and tell management to screw themselves. Do you see any other department putting in those hours? Are you appreciated at all?
Were not plumbers. If we can't email the business is toast. IT is like electricity. Yes none of these employees you menioned are cost centers as they provide a service to society and the companies they serve. The concept of cost centers today is retarded and is based off of accountants looking for inefficiencies within an organization. Originally an inefficiency where no money or value is retained by hiring certain kinds of employees.
Also in larger companies integrated I.T. with ERP CRM and MRP systems and database powered inventory management systems can bring great value to a company. The support tech might as well be a plumber but thats not all what I.T. is and every employee is not a cost center. If they were then they need to be fired as an employee supposed to save or create revenue for the company. Go back to typewritters and see how competitive your business remains?
Its related to people who can't sell themselves or hold accountable people who slash their budgets so much that they lose money. If someone at work fired all their lawyers and a big sexual harrasement suit happened a few months later the person laying them off would lose their job. Same should happen when a company loses a major client due to an IT related issue that could have been prevented if it were not because of the bean counters.
I see the attitude in the workplace.
Many computer and technical professionals are so egotistical in that they put themselves and their little area of expertise ahead of the organization. I am better look what I know!
They are clueless about the needs of business or costs and care only about how stupid users are. Not hmmm the business can be more efficient if we did x with our ERP program.
The ego problem is very irritating when upper management and rockstar CEO's have this its all about me and win at all costs attitude. However, many geeks who complain and laugh about them have the same egos.
Yes I am about to get my MBA to become the abhorrent PHB but it is a real problem. At the end of the day management does not care about Linux vs Windows in the server room. Only about does employee X bring money or save money for the company.
If the network or all the computers are down then people can not get their work doen and big $$$ are lost very quickly. Deadlines can not be changed nor can customers waiting for their services or products.
I.T. needs to sell themselves more and put stability as a #1 priority. Alot of times employers are cheap or expect everything to be always perfect.
Ask them how much money do they lose if they can't complete something for a customer because they didn't want to pay for a redundant server?
People are clueless but other professions can convince more people about their importance and role within hte organization.
Assembly is bad which is the point of using a higher level language. Assembly should be avoided as well which is why you microkernels are the most stable.
Today's computers have tens and sometimes hundreds of services or processes running and a single program that uses direct memory access with a pointer can cause a GP fault and bring it down. I remember the days of Windows 3.1 and having to hit the reset button.
Csharp and Java provide access to pointers indirectly through their apis so they are managed. Goto statements make spaghetti code and makes debugging hard. You only found one professor who uses them. Pointers also cause memory leaks in programs and other errors that can be avoided by calling by value or using an api which manages the pointers indirectly.
But why use it you do not have too?
Computer science books and even my highschool basic programming class mentioned its not proper programming to use a GOTO. Is there any computer science professor that supports GOTO statements in programs?
Not every programmer is good and a good programmer will refrain from making the program harder to read or more difficult to debug when jr programmers modify it later.
GOTOs by their very nature encourage bad programming as much as pointers do.
SQL Server is used heavily because its bundled with visual studio. Part of the $$$ price of visual studio goes to the sql server development team.
Microsoft makes their money from expensive per seat licensing.
A few billion computers running Windows is alot of money even if they are the only true things set in stone.