Back in the 90s, with my name being Stuart McSomethingOrOther and the CFO of the company I worked at being Stewart McSomethingElse our company email addresses were StuartMcG@companyName and StewartMcG@companyName. Guess who regularly received the most interesting and juicy financial details about the company from the Lawyers ?
Sadly Stewart didn't find the occasional mis-directed discussion on software devt anywhere near as interesting.
Hallelujah and Amen brother!!!
As a Solution Architect "within spitting distance of 50" You've just described why I get out of bed in the morning. Last week some of the 24yo college newbies finally worked out that they weren't even born when I started my first programming job; and that they were still mewling and puking in nurses arms, when I was making the stupid mistakes that I'm trying to prevent them from making.
I would bet anything that she succeeded not just because of her people skills but because she was a quick study and learned what it took to be a good engineer.
More learnt to recognise what made a good engineer, than learn to be a good engineer. Her standard intro to new staff who asked what her tech experience was went something like this: "I was a trainee programmer once....I totally sucked at it."
The only guy who tried the "If you've never been a programmer how will you understand the skill and quality of our work?" BS got the following answer: "I press the buttons and it works, you're a genius, I press the buttons and it doesn't work you're an arsehole - there's nothing in between." He lasted 3 months.
That said, it seems like the easy solution would be to down-promote this person one final time after reviewing their performance...
Now let's talk about this fabled review of performance: You're the newly promoted manager, and unfortunately you're crap at your new job. I'm the manager that promoted you into that new job - so by definition I'm crap at my job - and I'm doing the performance review.
The great conspiracy of mediocrity means that the unspoken sub-text of the performance review is: "We both know in our heart of hearts that we're crap at our jobs and if we could have our druthers, we would both like to go back to what we were really good at. But we're both trapped, we can't publicly admit we're crap, so we'll just continue to mosey along being mediocre at our respective jobs. Be a good chap and don't rock the boat, and who knows, hopefully there's another mediocre uber-manager who will promote both of us one last time"
Gosh the box of dangerous generalisations must have been on special this week in your part of the world. While many non-technical managers "will have no idea what their people are doing" that doesn't have to be so.
In my 25 year career I've had the pleasure of having two non-technical managers who were far and away the best managers I've ever seen in action. They used their non-techiness to their advantage and built high performing teams that would walk over coals for them. It's called trust.... "I know you are all supremely clever, and know stuff that I don't.... that's why you're the engineers. My job is to trust you all to do your jobs well, make sure nothing gets in the way of you doing your job well, and by the way you lot being a bunch of arrogant techie dicks, and ignoring me as a "non-techie girl" counts as "getting in the way of you doing your jobs well" "
And to the point of the original article - Two of the absolutely worst managers I've had were promoted engineers who weren't good enough to make it into the ranks of "chief engineer / consulting architect / great poo bah of technicality" and felt their only scope for promotion was to take on management. To the credit of one of them, he realised he was totally crap at this management lark, and re-trained. Over time he actually became quite a good manager - not great but pretty good.
The other doofus left in a hail of "thank god he's gone" and continued to wreck havoc wherever he went.
We the management don't want critical thinking in our employees. We want skilled coders who will shut up and do as they're told.
No critical thinking. No analysis of the content of the latest bunch of lies (ulp, I mean management team talk to the staff). and certainly no telling us we're full of shit when we are.
...and as we testified to an adjudicator in a wrongful dismissal case a few years ago:
Jack's argument is that we didn't offer him enough of the right training to become a better programmer.
Our argument is that we gave the same training that 80 other programmers got...programming is like Opera Singing, if you don't have the talent no amount of training is going to make you good at it. Unfortuntely Jack made a mistake when he thought he'd go into programming as a career.
On the other hand teaching all kids to at least write a little programme, may help identify those with the talent early enough to get them trained into great programmers.
Both my grandfathers worked (early to mid 20th Century) in skilled manual labour for 44 hours a week (8hrs Mon-Fri and another 4 on Sat mornings), and both grandmothers did part-time work to make ends meet.
My Father worked in skilled labour (late 20th Century) for 40 hours a week (8 hours Mon-Fri) - mother stayed at home. Things were tight, but they raised 3 teenage sons on one mid-level govt salary.
Now in the 21st Century - I could live the way my parents did on 25-30 hours a week - unfortunately my boss wants me here for 40. So I have a much higher standard of living than my parents. Govt workers only do 37.5 hours a week now.
The number of hours per week worked per person is trending downwards. Our grandkids will be working 20-25 hour weeks; and will stare in wonder at us old farts that worked 40 hours a week. We need to confront the problem of what all our grandchildren are going to do with their the extra free-time.
80386 for a POS Puuuuleeeeeeeeeaaasssseee - that's an extravagance I only dreamed of. We did POS with 80186 (and it was way before Linus had even heard of Minix).
....and it's still being used 20 some years later at numerous gas stations all over NZ and AU
The Short Version: President of France rang up Prime Minister of New Zealand and said (roughly) "Let my two spies go or you'll never sell another pound of butter in Europe again"
NZ was broke and economics always wins over principles.
The most telling comment from the actual orginal post reads:
"Ten providers also seems to be the threshold below which one finds significant additional risks from infrastructure sharing — there may be a single cable, or a single physical-layer provider who actually owns most of the infrastructure on which the various providers offer their services."
How many of the 61 at "severe risk" countries are micro-states in the middle of the ocean with a single cable connecting them to the internet? More than half; so nothing too sinister about the size of the "severe risk" category.
Oh - it's nice to see that New Zealand has cemented its place in the list of nice countries who are "extremely resistant" by having more than 40 ISPs - unfortunately there's only one organisation that controls the two connections out of NZ on the Southern Cross Cable So the home of that fiendish master-criminal Mr K. Dot Com should rightly be lumped in with Syria, Libya & that famous hot bed of international crime, The Cook Islands.
Dear Apple,
I paid a bucket of money for my hearing aids - in excess of NZ$7000 - please leave the damn things alone. If I need to tune them with wizzy settings, I will let the professionals who know what they're doing do it.
PS. If I want to join a social network for sharing hearing aid settings - I'll join the 'Patents Killed by Prior Art network' on facebook.
It's much more likely that there's no conspiracy and it's just fuck ups all the way down.
The hard drives in question, that have been cloned and spirited away to the US, are the ones in Mr dotcom's house not the megaupload ones.
The most interesting ones, are of course the drives from the CCTV system, that show how many FBI tourists were waving what sort of armament around as they assisted the NZ cops with smashing down Mr dotcom's front door.
In actual extradition case news: The crown has complained that the court mandated 21 days to provide the defense with all evidence to be used in the extradition case is too short a time, and they can't provide copies in time -
"So, your honour, why don't we just skip that bit of the legal process and put them on a plane to the US this afternoon?"
Slashdot Mirror
...a CSI:Cyber episode soon.
Subliminal advertising is complete bollox http://www.snopes.com/business...
Some fool is bound to write a virtualization system in Javascript one of these days.....
A determined fellow did (well nearly, it's a PC emulator in JS - that runs Linux)
Back in the 90s, with my name being Stuart McSomethingOrOther and the CFO of the company I worked at being Stewart McSomethingElse our company email addresses were StuartMcG@companyName and StewartMcG@companyName. Guess who regularly received the most interesting and juicy financial details about the company from the Lawyers ? Sadly Stewart didn't find the occasional mis-directed discussion on software devt anywhere near as interesting.
Hallelujah and Amen brother!!! As a Solution Architect "within spitting distance of 50" You've just described why I get out of bed in the morning. Last week some of the 24yo college newbies finally worked out that they weren't even born when I started my first programming job; and that they were still mewling and puking in nurses arms, when I was making the stupid mistakes that I'm trying to prevent them from making.
I would bet anything that she succeeded not just because of her people skills but because she was a quick study and learned what it took to be a good engineer.
More learnt to recognise what made a good engineer, than learn to be a good engineer. Her standard intro to new staff who asked what her tech experience was went something like this: "I was a trainee programmer once....I totally sucked at it."
The only guy who tried the "If you've never been a programmer how will you understand the skill and quality of our work?" BS got the following answer: "I press the buttons and it works, you're a genius, I press the buttons and it doesn't work you're an arsehole - there's nothing in between." He lasted 3 months.
That said, it seems like the easy solution would be to down-promote this person one final time after reviewing their performance...
Now let's talk about this fabled review of performance: You're the newly promoted manager, and unfortunately you're crap at your new job. I'm the manager that promoted you into that new job - so by definition I'm crap at my job - and I'm doing the performance review.
The great conspiracy of mediocrity means that the unspoken sub-text of the performance review is: "We both know in our heart of hearts that we're crap at our jobs and if we could have our druthers, we would both like to go back to what we were really good at. But we're both trapped, we can't publicly admit we're crap, so we'll just continue to mosey along being mediocre at our respective jobs. Be a good chap and don't rock the boat, and who knows, hopefully there's another mediocre uber-manager who will promote both of us one last time"
Gosh the box of dangerous generalisations must have been on special this week in your part of the world. While many non-technical managers "will have no idea what their people are doing" that doesn't have to be so.
In my 25 year career I've had the pleasure of having two non-technical managers who were far and away the best managers I've ever seen in action. They used their non-techiness to their advantage and built high performing teams that would walk over coals for them. It's called trust.... "I know you are all supremely clever, and know stuff that I don't.... that's why you're the engineers. My job is to trust you all to do your jobs well, make sure nothing gets in the way of you doing your job well, and by the way you lot being a bunch of arrogant techie dicks, and ignoring me as a "non-techie girl" counts as "getting in the way of you doing your jobs well" "
And to the point of the original article - Two of the absolutely worst managers I've had were promoted engineers who weren't good enough to make it into the ranks of "chief engineer / consulting architect / great poo bah of technicality" and felt their only scope for promotion was to take on management. To the credit of one of them, he realised he was totally crap at this management lark, and re-trained. Over time he actually became quite a good manager - not great but pretty good.
The other doofus left in a hail of "thank god he's gone" and continued to wreck havoc wherever he went.
....don't forget the mumbo jumbo. :-)
and its speedo is calibrated in MegaFurlongs per KiloFortnight?
Not all people with diabetes have Type 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabetes_mellitus_type_1
No! No! No!
We the management don't want critical thinking in our employees. We want skilled coders who will shut up and do as they're told.
No critical thinking. No analysis of the content of the latest bunch of lies (ulp, I mean management team talk to the staff). and certainly no telling us we're full of shit when we are.
...and as we testified to an adjudicator in a wrongful dismissal case a few years ago:
Jack's argument is that we didn't offer him enough of the right training to become a better programmer.
Our argument is that we gave the same training that 80 other programmers got...programming is like Opera Singing, if you don't have the talent no amount of training is going to make you good at it. Unfortuntely Jack made a mistake when he thought he'd go into programming as a career.
On the other hand teaching all kids to at least write a little programme, may help identify those with the talent early enough to get them trained into great programmers.
too right !!!
Both my grandfathers worked (early to mid 20th Century) in skilled manual labour for 44 hours a week (8hrs Mon-Fri and another 4 on Sat mornings), and both grandmothers did part-time work to make ends meet.
My Father worked in skilled labour (late 20th Century) for 40 hours a week (8 hours Mon-Fri) - mother stayed at home. Things were tight, but they raised 3 teenage sons on one mid-level govt salary.
Now in the 21st Century - I could live the way my parents did on 25-30 hours a week - unfortunately my boss wants me here for 40. So I have a much higher standard of living than my parents. Govt workers only do 37.5 hours a week now.
The number of hours per week worked per person is trending downwards. Our grandkids will be working 20-25 hour weeks; and will stare in wonder at us old farts that worked 40 hours a week. We need to confront the problem of what all our grandchildren are going to do with their the extra free-time.
80386 for a POS Puuuuleeeeeeeeeaaasssseee - that's an extravagance I only dreamed of. We did POS with 80186 (and it was way before Linus had even heard of Minix).
....and it's still being used 20 some years later at numerous gas stations all over NZ and AU
So get off my lawn.
Or if Cygwin is too much work.....try installing FireSSH
The Short Version: President of France rang up Prime Minister of New Zealand and said (roughly) "Let my two spies go or you'll never sell another pound of butter in Europe again"
NZ was broke and economics always wins over principles.
The most telling comment from the actual orginal post reads:
"Ten providers also seems to be the threshold below which one finds significant additional risks from infrastructure sharing — there may be a single cable, or a single physical-layer provider who actually owns most of the infrastructure on which the various providers offer their services."
How many of the 61 at "severe risk" countries are micro-states in the middle of the ocean with a single cable connecting them to the internet? More than half; so nothing too sinister about the size of the "severe risk" category.
Oh - it's nice to see that New Zealand has cemented its place in the list of nice countries who are "extremely resistant" by having more than 40 ISPs - unfortunately there's only one organisation that controls the two connections out of NZ on the Southern Cross Cable So the home of that fiendish master-criminal Mr K. Dot Com should rightly be lumped in with Syria, Libya & that famous hot bed of international crime, The Cook Islands.
Switzerland, like the rest of western europe has not had 500 years of democracy and peace. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland_in_the_Napoleonic_era
According to http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/7338332/File-sharing-has-dropped-researcher-says/ today, Waikato university academic has actually measured difference in traffic levels pre- and post- implementation of the 'SkyNet' law.
Dear Apple, I paid a bucket of money for my hearing aids - in excess of NZ$7000 - please leave the damn things alone. If I need to tune them with wizzy settings, I will let the professionals who know what they're doing do it. PS. If I want to join a social network for sharing hearing aid settings - I'll join the 'Patents Killed by Prior Art network' on facebook.
The hard drives in question, that have been cloned and spirited away to the US, are the ones in Mr dotcom's house not the megaupload ones.
The most interesting ones, are of course the drives from the CCTV system, that show how many FBI tourists were waving what sort of armament around as they assisted the NZ cops with smashing down Mr dotcom's front door.
In actual extradition case news: The crown has complained that the court mandated 21 days to provide the defense with all evidence to be used in the extradition case is too short a time, and they can't provide copies in time -
"So, your honour, why don't we just skip that bit of the legal process and put them on a plane to the US this afternoon?"