Yes you're right - it does. Time had dulled my memory on the events of Enron but you're absolutely correct. To be honest, the rebranding was probably a good move on their part. The more they can distance themselves from that steaming pile the better.
But as often happens, one player gets targeted (Enron) and others are allowed to remain in business. Arthur Andersen, as you might recall, was subsequently found guilty of obstruction of justice for its part in the Enron scandal. They shredded and otherwise destroyed thousands of documents pertaining to Enron and were fully complicit in the whole mess.
So Andersen dissolves and Accenture rises from the ashes with many of the same key executives in place. And the Federal Government hires these clowns to build what is arguably the largest and more important IT project in the last 25 years. What is most shocking to me is not that Accenture won the bid - it's that they are even allowed to bid in the first place.
If Zuckerberg is publically acknowledging 10% then you can be sure it's a lot higher than that. I'd peg it at closer to 25%. But that's not the real issue. The real issue is that, due to FB's policies, legitimate users feel compelled to put in fake names, birthdates, locations, schools, employers, etc. Why? Because of FB's continued and well documented history of deceptive security practices. You cannot trust them and it's one of the main reasons I don't use facebook.
In short, the users don't want to give up their accounts entirely (although I'm sure many have) but remain there with a fake identity. So the question then becomes: for a company like FB where almost 100% of their revenue comes from advertising how effective is it when you are advertising to zombie accounts?
that the government keeps hiring firms like Accenture. This is not the first time they have been involved in failed government IT projects. Here is just one of many examples: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
Accenture has learned how to game the system. A system that, for large scale government projects, is very difficult to break into. The contract language makes it very difficult, or impossible, to bid on if you are a small company.
Both the Democrats and the Republicans know that the procurement system is broken and yet neither one of them have offered any concrete solutions.
The failure of Healthcare.gov is not news. It's business as usual. The difference is that healthcare.gov affects many people more directly so it has higher visibility. Many of the other failed projects do not have the same direct impact so they appear in the news for a little while and are then swept under the rug.
Anyone that does programming long enough will find themselves in this situation. The trick is how to get out of it (relatively) unscathed. If you decide you're going to run from it then do it now...not next week...now. If you're going to stick it out then roll up your sleeves and get to it.
One of the things I discovered in these types of situations is that, often, bad code is the result of bad decisions not bad programmers. So keep that in mind before you start bashing the previous programmer. Do an honest assessment of where the code is now and what it will take to get it right. Document it and bring it to your manager with a plan on how you're going to fix it and how long it will take. If your manager refuses to go along with your estimates then the time to bail is now. You know where the problem lies and if you stick around you will be the scapegoat.
If, on the other hand, your manager understands the situation and goes along with it then you have won the first battle. Make sure and build in some generous time estimates. After all, you didn't build it so you very well might encounter unforeseen issues along the way. The key thing is that once you have made a commitment to a timeline make sure you can deliver on it. Trust me, management will hold you to it.
Set some milestones along the way where you can measure progress. If there is any slippage your manager will want to know sooner than later. Sooner means you have time to come up with a contingency plan. Later means you're screwed. Send regular status reports to your manager and other key people on the project. It keeps them in the loop and it covers your ass.
Conduct some conference room pilots along the way. It gives them a chance to see what you have done and, importantly, it shows progress. As a contractor it is vital that you show progress each and every week. The moment that management senses that you are spinning your wheels your ass is grass and they will bring someone else in.
One last thing - and I can't stress this enough - document, document, document. Keep all your emails, conversations, memos. If there is a change in scope then get it in writing. If that change is going to impact your timeline then tell them - in writing.
If you do all that you should be fine. All you can do is your best. Not every project is going to succeed. Work hard, be professional and you'll be ok in the end.
Going by the summary of what this tool is supposed to do (and without the benefit of having used it) I can only deduct that it's worthless. Let's take the example of how often people speak up in meetings. The implication is that the more you speak up the more you are contributing. In other words, the extrovert is more valuable than the introvert. Nothing could be further from the truth. Is it more valuable to make one good comment in a meeting or ten useless comments? It's like judging a programmer on how many lines of code per hour they produce. Is it not better to judge the programmer on the quality rather than the quantity of the code?
If I'm doing programming I prefer to be in an office with a door that I can close if I need to concentrate. If I find myself in a cube then I'll just use headphones for such occasions. Like when an impromptu meeting starts right beside your desk while you're trying to work on something that requires focus.
If I'm doing management tasks I also prefer an office to a cube. Why? It gives me a place that I can conduct confidential conversations. Also, your computer screen is more visible in a cube than an office and it might be showing something that not everyone is supposed to see.
Sadly, to many an office is just seen as another management perk. Like the reserved parking spot and the conferences. It's the same reason that "the bosses" tend to get the best computers and the biggest screens. Not because they need them to do their jobs more effectively but because they are "the boss" and they control the budget that pays for that stuff. And the best chairs. Despite the fact that they spend most of the day sitting in other chairs - at various meetings - leaving their expensive office chair unused for most of the day while the staff sit all day on a chair with the comfort equivalent of an orange crate.
It's the "tax man" mentality (that's one for you, nineteen for me). Many of the management people I have worked with see this kind of entitlement behavior as a reward for their hard work. They deserve a better chair than you because they worked hard to get to where they are. Ego, in other words.
Whenever I take a test the first thing I do is look for the questions that I absolutely know the answer to and tackle them first. This accomplishes two things: it builds confidence for tackling the tougher questions and it ensures that you won't run out of time by missing out on easy questions. As others have mentioned, the key thing is to understand the material rather than trying to memorize it. When your brain understands something conceptually it will create little hooks to retrieve the trivia bits that are often asked on tests.
Although my school days are long behind me I find that these techniques still work for me when I'm learning new concepts today. Take a bubble sort for example. In my view, it's more important to understand how and why it works rather than the syntax to accomplish it. Syntax you can look up. Understanding the concept is the key thing.
Exactly. Oracle is in business to make money. They are a publicly traded company, after all. I remember back when they bought PeopleSoft and all sorts of rumors were circulating that Oracle was going to kill it off. Until Oracle realized that it was a big money maker for them. Then they invested heavily in it and now it's a far better product than the one they originally bought.
OpenOffice is a nice product but you can't make any money off it. Oracle's customer base is the enterprise. Enterprise customers use MS Office, almost without exception. Oracle is going to spend money on integrating their products with MS Office, not OO.
Same goes for MySQL. Great product but it competes directly with Oracle's own database. Oracle as a company might be a lot of things but stupid ain't one of them.
we see money as the cure for everything. Education system not performing well? No problem...just throw more money at it. Social programs not lifting enough people out of poverty? Throw more money at it. Other countries that are outperforming us in education (Singapore, Norway, Canada) are spending far less per student than we are. Same goes for medical care.
The problem is multifaceted. We spend too much on sports for one thing. Too much of the money is spent outside the classroom. I look at my property tax bill and I see that close to 80% of it goes to schools. And yet all we hear is that there isn't enough money for this, not enough for that. It's not the amount of money, it's how it's used.
would it be unfair to limit the types of foods that one could buy with food stamps? For example, no cigarettes, no booze, no "junk food" (certainly a broad category but it's at start). I'm not suggesting this to be mean spirited. I'm suggesting this to promote healthy eating. Healthy eating is better for them and better for society in general. Healthy food does not necessarily cost more than junk food. It's a matter of education and making good choices.
Further...if I were the boss I would not want to know the passwords of anyone that reports to me. If one of those employees turns out to be a rogue employee that has done some sort of damage I would become a suspect if it is discovered that I also knew the password.
As others have mentioned, the boss should only have the power to change a password. And if I did have to change the password for some reason you can be sure that I will have the proper authorizations (including folks in the HR department) before proceeding. Just proper auditing procedures is all it is.
we can't get competent people to run for public office in this country. Over the years I have worked many times with local, state and federal government agencies. Almost universally, the experience Gates had has mirrored my own. Incompetent management, grandstanding, petty interdepartmental feuds, smothering regulations and endless meetings.
If I could sum up the entire experience in a single word it would be this: frustration.
Is it any wonder that we can't get talented people to run for public office? High achievers are used to getting things done. Some of them come to Washington thinking that they can cut through the rubbish that slows everyone else down. Good luck with that.
I'm sure that many in the press will paint Gates as some sort of grumpy malcontent. But he's actually doing us a favor.
The Kodak reference really hit home for me. My father was an immigrant and came to America with little in the way of marketable skills or education. But he worked at Kodak his whole career and made a good salary. They treated him well and even gave him a pension for all his years of hard work. My aunt - his sister - also worked there. You know what her job was? She stuffed little tins of film into little boxes on an assembly line. Not a very exciting job I'm sure but it afforded her a decent middle class lifestyle.
Those jobs are largely gone today, and with it, the opportunity for many people to reach up and join the middle class. Those of us in IT are fortunate to be on the right side of the digital divide. Not everyone is cut out to be a software engineer or a doctor or a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Who speaks for them?
It used to be only assembly line jobs that were being replaced by cheap overseas labor. Now it's moving up the chain and we're seeing IT jobs being moved to cheaper markets. We've seen it disrupt the careers of Travel Agents, Real Estate Agents and people that sell cars. I think the medical field is next. It won't be long before your annual checkup is done by a Doctor in India via Skype. All in the name of progress....and profits.
I'm closer to retirement than college now so I don't worry about me. I worry about the younger generation and what kind of world we are leaving for them.
Right. And that's exactly why I have a hard time taking people like this seriously. What do they expect to accomplish, other than making a bunch of Facebook engineers late for work and snarling up traffic for a while? Perhaps their energy would be better spent trying to improve their own lives rather than trying to take down others that have done well in life.
what exactly would the protesters like done about it? Should the government force Google and the like to put caps on salaries so that their engineers don't make so much money? Should the government enforce some arbitrary ceiling on the price of housing? Raise the minimum wage perhaps?
I'm not trying to be a smart ass...I'm just wondering what the end game is. Sure it's a problem but how do you fix it?
It does no good to whine to your manager about being short-staffed/overloaded/burned out. You need to provide evidence...metrics in other words...to support your case.
Think you've got too many IT helpdesk cases open? Fine. Start tracking how long it takes between the time the case is reported until it gets resolved. If you don't have some sort of automated system to track help desk tickets then chances are that it's getting buried in email messages. Let's say that the average time to close is 8 hours.
Now you've got something concrete that you manager can understand:
1) We need a system to properly track help desk tickets and somewhere to put the solutions so that we're not reinventing the wheel every time an issue comes up. Do a little research on what's out there and make some recommendations. 2) You've established that it takes 8 hours to close a ticket. Is that level of lost productivity acceptable to your manager? What are the impacts? What can be done from an organizational standpoint to improve response times?
As others have mentioned, don't go to your boss with problems. Go with solutions to problems. Help your boss to decide which is the best solution and why. Then go out and implement it and come back later and show him/her the results. Having measurable improvements will make your boss look good to his boss. And it will make you look good to your boss.
It's all about building a case for what you want. If you just go and say "we need more people" the answer will probably be no. But if you identify the problem and come equipped with some potential solutions you have a much better chance of success.
Keep in mind that sometimes just adding more people will not solve the problem. It can even make it worse. Start by taking a look at the process and see if you can find a better way to do things. Would it help, for example, to ditch Exchange and go with Google Apps for your email and scheduling? That's one less thing to manage and it allows you more time to work on other tasks.
Tablets and phones are great for some tasks...reading email, checking your Facebook page, games, Skype. Not so great for others...anything where you have to type a lot, anything where the precision of a mouse is needed, anything where you need a big screen to function properly.
Personally, I use my phone almost exclusively for personal email. Most of it does not require a response (bill due, etc.) so the phone is the perfect form factor for that. The tablet seems to be good for book reading or watching Netflix. But when I have to get any real work done I want a desktop with two giant monitors attached to it. When it comes to multi tasking, nothing beats the desktop, keyboard and mouse combination.
For some people, a tablet and phone are just fine. Maybe even just a phone. Or just a tablet. Or just a laptop. It just depends on what you need to get done and how important mobility is to you. Pick the right tool for the job. After all, a hammer is great at what it does but it makes a lousy screwdriver;-)
this sort of thing happens all the time. Customer hires Vendor...vendor does what customer asks...something goes wrong and customer gets pissed off and sues vendor. Say what you want about Oracle...or Larry Ellison for that matter...but the software works. Oracle has thousands of customers using their products and the stuff works.
Where it gets tricky with these big complex software systems is that many, many decisions have to be made with respect to how the software is configured before you can even begin using it. It can takes months, or longer, to get through all of this. Making the right decisions takes skill - both on the vendor side and on the customer side. It's a team effort. This is what customers often fail to remember, especially when things to south.
This is one of the reasons for so many meetings and documentation in these large software implementations. Partly, it's to protect the vendor in the event of a lawsuit.
Customer: "You screwed up this project" Vendor: "Can you be more specific?" Customer: "You advised us specifically not to use Option B for setting up our Chart of Accounts and now our whole Financials system is a mess." Vendor: "Umm...actually we DID advise you to use Option B. Here are the meeting minutes from back in August. And this document contains both of our signatures approving the decision against Option B. Any further questions?"
Now I don't know all the specifics of this case but the fact that it's a State Government tends to make me believe that what I outlined above is what happened. I have worked with State Governments...trust me.
is that the barrier to entry is money, not driving skill. Any bozo with enough money and a driver's license can buy one of these cars. This is the kind of car that very few people would have the skill to drive properly, let alone afford the thing in the first place.
So what's the solution? Well, making the car or the insurance more expensive won't help. Remember, these guys (mostly) have lots of money to begin with. Banning the cars completely? No, that won't help either. Are we going to ban bridges too because someone might jump off one?
How about making the safety equipment (stability control, traction control, etc.) mandatory at the factory? I'm ok with that as long as you have the ability to turn it off when you need to. And would that extra feeling of safety encourage them to drive even faster? Maybe.
It's a difficult question to answer. At what point does your right to enjoyment infringe upon the rights of others?
it seems that most of the money is made on preventing people from dying, not making them better. This is hardly surprising, given that medicine in the USA is a for profit business. Every facet of it...hospitals, labs, big pharma...all of it. It seems that many of the medical developments are geared towards "maintenance" rather than "cure". Why? Because maintenance makes more money for whomever develops it. Think Lipitor. Once you get on that shit you're never getting off it. And if you do, your cholesterol goes right back up to where it was when you started. Even if you've been taking it for 10 years.
Study and after study shows that the US spends far more per patient on medical care and yet we don't necessarily have better outcomes than other industrialized countries. Much of this is due to keeping patients in a suspended state with the aid of machines. Long after any semblance of a normal, productive, dignified life have passed them by. The victims,,,err patients...suffer daily. The families are forced to watch their loved ones die a slow, painful, humiliating death.
And what have they got to look forward to? Their loved one will eventually die and they will be stuck with an often enormous medical bill. Great.
I was shopping for a new phone when I spotted the G2. The display is the best I've even seen on a (relatively) small screen. Having 32GB of onboard storage makes up for the fact that I can't put an SD card in it (booooo!!!!). That snapdragon processor is very snappy indeed. Animations are very fluid and it seems to handle multitasking quite well. At first I wasn't that impressed with the battery life until I put Juice Defender on it. Now I'm getting a solid 2 days between charges. That's pretty good in my books, considering the drive-in movie size screen on the thing.
Call quality is very good - better than on my old Samsung Galaxy SII. It even picks up 4G LTE signals better than the SII.
At first I was a bit intimidated by the size of it. With a cover on it, it's approaching bulky. But it still fits in my pocket and I kind of like the extra screen real estate. Compared to the iPhone 5S, it's enormous. I compared it side by side to the Galaxy S3 and the G2 seemed better to me in nearly every way. It's a real sleeper this G2. I'm very happy with it so far.
This has happened to me only twice in my career. I was brought in to fix code that someone else wrote. The documentation was somewhere between poor and non existent. In both cases I spend literally weeks poring over the code trying to figure out what the hell this person was trying to accomplish. In the end I was forced to confront the client and admit to them that I couldn't make heads or tails out of it. My recommendation to them was to scrap this spaghetti code and rewrite it in a form that was maintainable.
Interestingly, in both cases, they chose to bring back the spaghetti coder and have him finish the work. I told them they were throwing good money after bad. Fell on deaf ears. I told them that by the time he was done they would have an even bigger mess on their hands. Not only that, this person would have them by the short hairs until the end of time because he is the only person on earth that could possible make any sense of the mess he created. Crickets. In the end I figured they were a perfect match for one another, wished him luck, and moved on.
In my experience the most difficult thing to do is to deal with people that have no idea about programming. Many of these so called "business users" are constantly changing their minds. The functional design documents (the documents that describe what the business need is for the program you are being asked to write) are almost universally incomplete. As I read through them I am forced to go back for clarification. The missing details are often critical to the programming approach taken so they must be resolved, otherwise I will have to rewrite sections later on.
I used to think these business people were just stupid. Now I think they are just lazy. They don't do the necessary research and just kick the can down the road to the developer. Unfortunately, these people are often in charge so it becomes a fact of life.
Those are your words not mine. I'm not trying to suggest that bullying is on par with those things. Clearly, they are much bigger problems. If enormous is greater than huge then I would put those items in the enormous problems bucket.
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Yes you're right - it does. Time had dulled my memory on the events of Enron but you're absolutely correct. To be honest, the rebranding was probably a good move on their part. The more they can distance themselves from that steaming pile the better.
But as often happens, one player gets targeted (Enron) and others are allowed to remain in business. Arthur Andersen, as you might recall, was subsequently found guilty of obstruction of justice for its part in the Enron scandal. They shredded and otherwise destroyed thousands of documents pertaining to Enron and were fully complicit in the whole mess.
So Andersen dissolves and Accenture rises from the ashes with many of the same key executives in place. And the Federal Government hires these clowns to build what is arguably the largest and more important IT project in the last 25 years. What is most shocking to me is not that Accenture won the bid - it's that they are even allowed to bid in the first place.
Accenture used to go by the name Andersen Consulting. Not sure if the name change had anything to do with what you mentioned above.
If Zuckerberg is publically acknowledging 10% then you can be sure it's a lot higher than that. I'd peg it at closer to 25%. But that's not the real issue. The real issue is that, due to FB's policies, legitimate users feel compelled to put in fake names, birthdates, locations, schools, employers, etc. Why? Because of FB's continued and well documented history of deceptive security practices. You cannot trust them and it's one of the main reasons I don't use facebook.
In short, the users don't want to give up their accounts entirely (although I'm sure many have) but remain there with a fake identity. So the question then becomes: for a company like FB where almost 100% of their revenue comes from advertising how effective is it when you are advertising to zombie accounts?
that the government keeps hiring firms like Accenture. This is not the first time they have been involved in failed government IT projects. Here is just one of many examples: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
Accenture has learned how to game the system. A system that, for large scale government projects, is very difficult to break into. The contract language makes it very difficult, or impossible, to bid on if you are a small company.
Both the Democrats and the Republicans know that the procurement system is broken and yet neither one of them have offered any concrete solutions.
The failure of Healthcare.gov is not news. It's business as usual. The difference is that healthcare.gov affects many people more directly so it has higher visibility. Many of the other failed projects do not have the same direct impact so they appear in the news for a little while and are then swept under the rug.
Anyone that does programming long enough will find themselves in this situation. The trick is how to get out of it (relatively) unscathed. If you decide you're going to run from it then do it now...not next week...now. If you're going to stick it out then roll up your sleeves and get to it.
One of the things I discovered in these types of situations is that, often, bad code is the result of bad decisions not bad programmers. So keep that in mind before you start bashing the previous programmer. Do an honest assessment of where the code is now and what it will take to get it right. Document it and bring it to your manager with a plan on how you're going to fix it and how long it will take. If your manager refuses to go along with your estimates then the time to bail is now. You know where the problem lies and if you stick around you will be the scapegoat.
If, on the other hand, your manager understands the situation and goes along with it then you have won the first battle. Make sure and build in some generous time estimates. After all, you didn't build it so you very well might encounter unforeseen issues along the way. The key thing is that once you have made a commitment to a timeline make sure you can deliver on it. Trust me, management will hold you to it.
Set some milestones along the way where you can measure progress. If there is any slippage your manager will want to know sooner than later. Sooner means you have time to come up with a contingency plan. Later means you're screwed. Send regular status reports to your manager and other key people on the project. It keeps them in the loop and it covers your ass.
Conduct some conference room pilots along the way. It gives them a chance to see what you have done and, importantly, it shows progress. As a contractor it is vital that you show progress each and every week. The moment that management senses that you are spinning your wheels your ass is grass and they will bring someone else in.
One last thing - and I can't stress this enough - document, document, document. Keep all your emails, conversations, memos. If there is a change in scope then get it in writing. If that change is going to impact your timeline then tell them - in writing.
If you do all that you should be fine. All you can do is your best. Not every project is going to succeed. Work hard, be professional and you'll be ok in the end.
Going by the summary of what this tool is supposed to do (and without the benefit of having used it) I can only deduct that it's worthless. Let's take the example of how often people speak up in meetings. The implication is that the more you speak up the more you are contributing. In other words, the extrovert is more valuable than the introvert. Nothing could be further from the truth. Is it more valuable to make one good comment in a meeting or ten useless comments? It's like judging a programmer on how many lines of code per hour they produce. Is it not better to judge the programmer on the quality rather than the quantity of the code?
If I'm doing programming I prefer to be in an office with a door that I can close if I need to concentrate. If I find myself in a cube then I'll just use headphones for such occasions. Like when an impromptu meeting starts right beside your desk while you're trying to work on something that requires focus.
If I'm doing management tasks I also prefer an office to a cube. Why? It gives me a place that I can conduct confidential conversations. Also, your computer screen is more visible in a cube than an office and it might be showing something that not everyone is supposed to see.
Sadly, to many an office is just seen as another management perk. Like the reserved parking spot and the conferences. It's the same reason that "the bosses" tend to get the best computers and the biggest screens. Not because they need them to do their jobs more effectively but because they are "the boss" and they control the budget that pays for that stuff. And the best chairs. Despite the fact that they spend most of the day sitting in other chairs - at various meetings - leaving their expensive office chair unused for most of the day while the staff sit all day on a chair with the comfort equivalent of an orange crate.
It's the "tax man" mentality (that's one for you, nineteen for me). Many of the management people I have worked with see this kind of entitlement behavior as a reward for their hard work. They deserve a better chair than you because they worked hard to get to where they are. Ego, in other words.
Whenever I take a test the first thing I do is look for the questions that I absolutely know the answer to and tackle them first. This accomplishes two things: it builds confidence for tackling the tougher questions and it ensures that you won't run out of time by missing out on easy questions. As others have mentioned, the key thing is to understand the material rather than trying to memorize it. When your brain understands something conceptually it will create little hooks to retrieve the trivia bits that are often asked on tests.
Although my school days are long behind me I find that these techniques still work for me when I'm learning new concepts today. Take a bubble sort for example. In my view, it's more important to understand how and why it works rather than the syntax to accomplish it. Syntax you can look up. Understanding the concept is the key thing.
Exactly. Oracle is in business to make money. They are a publicly traded company, after all. I remember back when they bought PeopleSoft and all sorts of rumors were circulating that Oracle was going to kill it off. Until Oracle realized that it was a big money maker for them. Then they invested heavily in it and now it's a far better product than the one they originally bought. OpenOffice is a nice product but you can't make any money off it. Oracle's customer base is the enterprise. Enterprise customers use MS Office, almost without exception. Oracle is going to spend money on integrating their products with MS Office, not OO. Same goes for MySQL. Great product but it competes directly with Oracle's own database. Oracle as a company might be a lot of things but stupid ain't one of them.
we see money as the cure for everything. Education system not performing well? No problem...just throw more money at it. Social programs not lifting enough people out of poverty? Throw more money at it. Other countries that are outperforming us in education (Singapore, Norway, Canada) are spending far less per student than we are. Same goes for medical care. The problem is multifaceted. We spend too much on sports for one thing. Too much of the money is spent outside the classroom. I look at my property tax bill and I see that close to 80% of it goes to schools. And yet all we hear is that there isn't enough money for this, not enough for that. It's not the amount of money, it's how it's used.
would it be unfair to limit the types of foods that one could buy with food stamps? For example, no cigarettes, no booze, no "junk food" (certainly a broad category but it's at start). I'm not suggesting this to be mean spirited. I'm suggesting this to promote healthy eating. Healthy eating is better for them and better for society in general. Healthy food does not necessarily cost more than junk food. It's a matter of education and making good choices.
Further...if I were the boss I would not want to know the passwords of anyone that reports to me. If one of those employees turns out to be a rogue employee that has done some sort of damage I would become a suspect if it is discovered that I also knew the password. As others have mentioned, the boss should only have the power to change a password. And if I did have to change the password for some reason you can be sure that I will have the proper authorizations (including folks in the HR department) before proceeding. Just proper auditing procedures is all it is.
we can't get competent people to run for public office in this country. Over the years I have worked many times with local, state and federal government agencies. Almost universally, the experience Gates had has mirrored my own. Incompetent management, grandstanding, petty interdepartmental feuds, smothering regulations and endless meetings. If I could sum up the entire experience in a single word it would be this: frustration. Is it any wonder that we can't get talented people to run for public office? High achievers are used to getting things done. Some of them come to Washington thinking that they can cut through the rubbish that slows everyone else down. Good luck with that. I'm sure that many in the press will paint Gates as some sort of grumpy malcontent. But he's actually doing us a favor.
The Kodak reference really hit home for me. My father was an immigrant and came to America with little in the way of marketable skills or education. But he worked at Kodak his whole career and made a good salary. They treated him well and even gave him a pension for all his years of hard work. My aunt - his sister - also worked there. You know what her job was? She stuffed little tins of film into little boxes on an assembly line. Not a very exciting job I'm sure but it afforded her a decent middle class lifestyle.
Those jobs are largely gone today, and with it, the opportunity for many people to reach up and join the middle class. Those of us in IT are fortunate to be on the right side of the digital divide. Not everyone is cut out to be a software engineer or a doctor or a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Who speaks for them?
It used to be only assembly line jobs that were being replaced by cheap overseas labor. Now it's moving up the chain and we're seeing IT jobs being moved to cheaper markets. We've seen it disrupt the careers of Travel Agents, Real Estate Agents and people that sell cars. I think the medical field is next. It won't be long before your annual checkup is done by a Doctor in India via Skype. All in the name of progress....and profits.
I'm closer to retirement than college now so I don't worry about me. I worry about the younger generation and what kind of world we are leaving for them.
Right. And that's exactly why I have a hard time taking people like this seriously. What do they expect to accomplish, other than making a bunch of Facebook engineers late for work and snarling up traffic for a while? Perhaps their energy would be better spent trying to improve their own lives rather than trying to take down others that have done well in life.
what exactly would the protesters like done about it? Should the government force Google and the like to put caps on salaries so that their engineers don't make so much money? Should the government enforce some arbitrary ceiling on the price of housing? Raise the minimum wage perhaps?
I'm not trying to be a smart ass...I'm just wondering what the end game is. Sure it's a problem but how do you fix it?
It does no good to whine to your manager about being short-staffed/overloaded/burned out. You need to provide evidence...metrics in other words...to support your case.
Think you've got too many IT helpdesk cases open? Fine. Start tracking how long it takes between the time the case is reported until it gets resolved. If you don't have some sort of automated system to track help desk tickets then chances are that it's getting buried in email messages. Let's say that the average time to close is 8 hours.
Now you've got something concrete that you manager can understand:
1) We need a system to properly track help desk tickets and somewhere to put the solutions so that we're not reinventing the wheel every time an issue comes up. Do a little research on what's out there and make some recommendations.
2) You've established that it takes 8 hours to close a ticket. Is that level of lost productivity acceptable to your manager? What are the impacts? What can be done from an organizational standpoint to improve response times?
As others have mentioned, don't go to your boss with problems. Go with solutions to problems. Help your boss to decide which is the best solution and why. Then go out and implement it and come back later and show him/her the results. Having measurable improvements will make your boss look good to his boss. And it will make you look good to your boss.
It's all about building a case for what you want. If you just go and say "we need more people" the answer will probably be no. But if you identify the problem and come equipped with some potential solutions you have a much better chance of success.
Keep in mind that sometimes just adding more people will not solve the problem. It can even make it worse. Start by taking a look at the process and see if you can find a better way to do things. Would it help, for example, to ditch Exchange and go with Google Apps for your email and scheduling? That's one less thing to manage and it allows you more time to work on other tasks.
Tablets and phones are great for some tasks...reading email, checking your Facebook page, games, Skype. Not so great for others...anything where you have to type a lot, anything where the precision of a mouse is needed, anything where you need a big screen to function properly.
Personally, I use my phone almost exclusively for personal email. Most of it does not require a response (bill due, etc.) so the phone is the perfect form factor for that. The tablet seems to be good for book reading or watching Netflix. But when I have to get any real work done I want a desktop with two giant monitors attached to it. When it comes to multi tasking, nothing beats the desktop, keyboard and mouse combination.
For some people, a tablet and phone are just fine. Maybe even just a phone. Or just a tablet. Or just a laptop. It just depends on what you need to get done and how important mobility is to you. Pick the right tool for the job. After all, a hammer is great at what it does but it makes a lousy screwdriver ;-)
this sort of thing happens all the time. Customer hires Vendor...vendor does what customer asks...something goes wrong and customer gets pissed off and sues vendor. Say what you want about Oracle...or Larry Ellison for that matter...but the software works. Oracle has thousands of customers using their products and the stuff works.
Where it gets tricky with these big complex software systems is that many, many decisions have to be made with respect to how the software is configured before you can even begin using it. It can takes months, or longer, to get through all of this. Making the right decisions takes skill - both on the vendor side and on the customer side. It's a team effort. This is what customers often fail to remember, especially when things to south.
This is one of the reasons for so many meetings and documentation in these large software implementations. Partly, it's to protect the vendor in the event of a lawsuit.
Customer: "You screwed up this project"
Vendor: "Can you be more specific?"
Customer: "You advised us specifically not to use Option B for setting up our Chart of Accounts and now our whole Financials system is a mess."
Vendor: "Umm...actually we DID advise you to use Option B. Here are the meeting minutes from back in August. And this document contains both of our signatures approving the decision against Option B. Any further questions?"
Now I don't know all the specifics of this case but the fact that it's a State Government tends to make me believe that what I outlined above is what happened. I have worked with State Governments...trust me.
is that the barrier to entry is money, not driving skill. Any bozo with enough money and a driver's license can buy one of these cars. This is the kind of car that very few people would have the skill to drive properly, let alone afford the thing in the first place.
So what's the solution? Well, making the car or the insurance more expensive won't help. Remember, these guys (mostly) have lots of money to begin with. Banning the cars completely? No, that won't help either. Are we going to ban bridges too because someone might jump off one?
How about making the safety equipment (stability control, traction control, etc.) mandatory at the factory? I'm ok with that as long as you have the ability to turn it off when you need to. And would that extra feeling of safety encourage them to drive even faster? Maybe.
It's a difficult question to answer. At what point does your right to enjoyment infringe upon the rights of others?
it seems that most of the money is made on preventing people from dying, not making them better. This is hardly surprising, given that medicine in the USA is a for profit business. Every facet of it...hospitals, labs, big pharma...all of it. It seems that many of the medical developments are geared towards "maintenance" rather than "cure". Why? Because maintenance makes more money for whomever develops it. Think Lipitor. Once you get on that shit you're never getting off it. And if you do, your cholesterol goes right back up to where it was when you started. Even if you've been taking it for 10 years.
Study and after study shows that the US spends far more per patient on medical care and yet we don't necessarily have better outcomes than other industrialized countries. Much of this is due to keeping patients in a suspended state with the aid of machines. Long after any semblance of a normal, productive, dignified life have passed them by. The victims,,,err patients...suffer daily. The families are forced to watch their loved ones die a slow, painful, humiliating death.
And what have they got to look forward to? Their loved one will eventually die and they will be stuck with an often enormous medical bill. Great.
No wonder Adams is so bitter. How would you feel?
I was shopping for a new phone when I spotted the G2. The display is the best I've even seen on a (relatively) small screen. Having 32GB of onboard storage makes up for the fact that I can't put an SD card in it (booooo!!!!). That snapdragon processor is very snappy indeed. Animations are very fluid and it seems to handle multitasking quite well. At first I wasn't that impressed with the battery life until I put Juice Defender on it. Now I'm getting a solid 2 days between charges. That's pretty good in my books, considering the drive-in movie size screen on the thing.
Call quality is very good - better than on my old Samsung Galaxy SII. It even picks up 4G LTE signals better than the SII.
At first I was a bit intimidated by the size of it. With a cover on it, it's approaching bulky. But it still fits in my pocket and I kind of like the extra screen real estate. Compared to the iPhone 5S, it's enormous. I compared it side by side to the Galaxy S3 and the G2 seemed better to me in nearly every way. It's a real sleeper this G2. I'm very happy with it so far.
This has happened to me only twice in my career. I was brought in to fix code that someone else wrote. The documentation was somewhere between poor and non existent. In both cases I spend literally weeks poring over the code trying to figure out what the hell this person was trying to accomplish. In the end I was forced to confront the client and admit to them that I couldn't make heads or tails out of it. My recommendation to them was to scrap this spaghetti code and rewrite it in a form that was maintainable.
Interestingly, in both cases, they chose to bring back the spaghetti coder and have him finish the work. I told them they were throwing good money after bad. Fell on deaf ears. I told them that by the time he was done they would have an even bigger mess on their hands. Not only that, this person would have them by the short hairs until the end of time because he is the only person on earth that could possible make any sense of the mess he created. Crickets. In the end I figured they were a perfect match for one another, wished him luck, and moved on.
In my experience the most difficult thing to do is to deal with people that have no idea about programming. Many of these so called "business users" are constantly changing their minds. The functional design documents (the documents that describe what the business need is for the program you are being asked to write) are almost universally incomplete. As I read through them I am forced to go back for clarification. The missing details are often critical to the programming approach taken so they must be resolved, otherwise I will have to rewrite sections later on.
I used to think these business people were just stupid. Now I think they are just lazy. They don't do the necessary research and just kick the can down the road to the developer. Unfortunately, these people are often in charge so it becomes a fact of life.
Those are your words not mine. I'm not trying to suggest that bullying is on par with those things. Clearly, they are much bigger problems. If enormous is greater than huge then I would put those items in the enormous problems bucket.