Unfortunately, puritanical countries such as the US - which has the UK's classist legacy, compounded over the last 35 years by the neoliberal disease - views management as "wealth creators" and workers as "in their place". This has coincided with the decline of US economic supremacy.
If you think "puritans" are classicists, try to get a job on Portuguese colonized country.
Seriously, "doing work" here is demerit. The ones that get promoted are the ones that avoid working themselves.
No, I think that being an effective *filter* is the main task of a manager. Communicate and prioritize the requirements from above that make sense; but block ones that are stupid or not worth it
As soon as the manager starts to filter information, it starts to take decisions indirectly about the project. If the guy knows the matter, it does it right. However, if the guy knows enough to know what to filter, the guy should not be being wasted on communications - the guy should be in a active hole on development.
Managers should manage. And nothing more.
Communicate the needs of the team up to management (again, ones that make sense) and make sure they get addressed. And, most of all, block the constant stream of questions and requests from sales/marketing/support, and force them to all pass through you. That way you (a) will soon recognize who brings reasonable requests, and who does not; (b) get to know which areas of the product get the most questions, and so may need work; and (c) allow your team to work mostly uninterrupted.
You're right that under-communication is an evil sin; but so is over-communication.
So in the bottom like, I got it right from the start. I said that Managers should communicate.:-)
And there's no such thing as "over-communication". What exists is communication to the wrong audience.
Communication is the main task (and, IMHO, should be the sole one) of managers.
Get rid of that wave of mongols that call themselves "Managers", give the task to someone that can understand both sides, and you will see things going better.
"First is highly specialized knowledge..." Explain then why people with exactly that kind of knowledge can't get their information through page sitting editors.
It's exactly what i was going to post.
I'm in a group of retrocomputing enthusiasts. We dig, bid, pursue and beyond for pisces of history of he computer industry - mainly from my own country. Problem is, n this process, we find out facts and curiosities that we just can't publish on Wikipedia.
That would be alright - except that someone else had published facts and misinformation that we know for sure about the veracity - as we own the product, the official advertising material (sometimes even the original piece) and the official manuals.
So, the current status quo is that some SOB gets there first, publish anything he thinks it's right and make a hell of a fuss against every single further contribution, no matter the source. Once I saw one editor making a insane broad interpretation for what's a "blog", to justify ignoring a technical article printed in a online service. By that interpretation, the very damned Wikipedia is a blog, god damnit.
I don't know the extension of such bigotry, but it's for sure plays a significant (even if not deterministic) hole on the problem - I just quit trying to contributing to Wikipedia, and speaking frankly, even reduced the use of it for articles on my own tongue where the problem appears to be worst. I know english (kind of, at least), so I don't need to rely on half baked articles, I can go directly to the original article - where, at least apparently, such bigotry don't affects too much the quality of the material.
Not necessarily. In my hands, I guarantee you that Agile can deliver Quality.
However, I had worked in a Quality Control team before, and after, in a Quality Assurance one. So I know what must be done and why, so I know when some tests can be postponed, and what tests would be useless in a given moment.
The fallacy on the Agile movement is believing that all you need is coders. Worst, they think that TWO Quality ignorant developers together will compensate for the lack of formal testing. You can't give what you don't own - you need Quality Assurance and Control aware guys in your team.
Two pregnant women don't deliver a baby each six months - and you will need a father to raise the child after. But yet, it's common sense in Agile that you can lock up two women in a room and expect two childs a year - and nobody cares about the kids after they are born.
Makes me wonder then why every developer I met so far (about 100) is fatally allergic to bug fixing. They rather fake their own death than fix bugs that they put into the code. Commonly, they just state "This is not a bug!" or "This was never requested!" effectively dismissing QA having any clue or say in the matter. QA is not the bad guys, QA is a mirror that developers can stand to look into....entirely self-inflicted!
You need new friends, i mean, developers.
You get what you promotes. If you promotes bad developers, you will get bad developments.
Yes, please, write bad code if that helps you learn, but then, please, fix it once you know better and don't give me all that BS. And stop discussing and triaging bug reports, go and fix the issues. Takes typically way less time than the discussion aimed at convincing everyone not to do anything.
And by all means, fire the fscking bastards that don't fix their mess. You get what you promotes.
In civil engineering the problems and needs are well understood, you also either build something or you don't.
Being the reason I don't think that Management is the key problem on I.T.
In IT the problems and needs are NOT well understood. Even when you do a ton of requirements gathering there will pop up edge cases or the legislative requirements change and you need to change your scope.
Yes. Somehow, some guys decided that it would be a good idea to start Projects without a well bounded requirements set in advance. And then the very same guys insisted in using management practices that works only on projects where that requirements set is well known, bounded and established.
You get what you design.
We are wrapping up a 4 year health records system implementation (successfully, not my credit though, I was just a SME on it) and we have the big brown paper sheets the original workflow and process needs were mapped out on, they are laughably out of date. A big part of the success is the platform we are using is custom but its a framework so some areas were able to be their own subprojects.
Good design.
Most of the big failed projects that I have seen the common complaint is the scope creep and changing scope made it impossible to actually deliver. Coders can only code what they are asked to, yes there may be bad code in there along with the good code but that code does not matter if the scope changed and its no longer valid.
Agreed. And the most successful projects I have seen are the ones that can be break in small enough parts where the developers can have a word on the design and implementation. Not necessarily the final word, as the parts should connects each other and what can be the best solution for a component, can kill the other.
Management has a very small role on this process (what's different from saying that Management has no role on the process).
You underestimate the importance of good coders. Or perhaps, overestimate the importance of managers.
Good developers can delivery a viable product besides bad management. But the best management of the World can't deliver a viable product without a minimum threshold of good code!
I agree and understand the problematic of big projects, I had my share of it too. But when the worst happens, and it eventually happens (more than once I saw a project being trashed by external causes, as a legislation that was changed without notice that fsck up our funding) it was always possible to salvage something from the mess, specially good and well written artifacts that were reused on other projects. Bad code is always trashed.
However, it is clear that the failure rate in large IT projects is higher than in projects, for example, from Civil Engineering. The Project Management Theory is essentially the same for all areas, so I have serious reservations to believe that this apparent crisis in IT is merely managerial.
Assange is offically not wanted by the US, and he already have the right to be in EU. Snowden needs an Asylum to protect him from being extradicted, and to be allowed to stay in EU in the first place.
Humm... Do you realize that Assange is the one in confinement inside the Ecuador's Embassy IN LONDON in order to avoid extradition, don't you?
The EU were a willing party in the campaign to spy on citizens of the world. They are only a bit pissed when it turned out senior government figures were being spied on too.
Exact. They want to spy citizens of the world, they don't want the world spying THEIR citizens.
Being the reason I stated " *their* privacy concernings", not mine of yours.;-)
On the other hand, it would be a good idea to people stop harassing open source projects when serious and/or old bugs are discovered *and* fixed.
Nasty 7 years old bug discovered? Bad indeed.
Nasty 7 years old bug *FIXED*? Good, very very good.
Once you decide not to throw everything through the Windows, I mean, window every year ("fixing" old bugs with new bugs), you must expect that old flaws will one day be discovered. And fixed.
There're too many criticizers nowadays - but almost none of them got his hands dirty to know what they are criticizing.
This seems entirely contradictory to their stance on Assange. I wonder why.
It's a wild guess, but perhaps Snowden being a whistle blower that helped (indirectly) the EU in their privacy concernings, in contrast with Assange, that is a whistle blower that fsckd up every single Country in the World, can be a reason.
Are you sending your bank account number, your social security number, and your personal phone number in plaintext email messages..?
You have that information? No? It's because I didn't sent to you.
But how I can prevent someone else to send you such information using non secure channels?
The only possible way is never give such information to anyone. But that would render you useless on society - try to get paid without an bank account, or try to get medical care without your social security number.
Once you give this information to anyone, you can't control it anymore.
All you can do is to prevent that yourself would be the leaking vector. But that's all.
My son's phone number, that is not Android and I don't want nobody out of the family to know. Just for starters.
They knew his phone number the moment one of your family or his friends added it to their android contact book.
If and only if they also adds the custom email I made to him to play on the Social Networks - what don't happens. The email account he's allowed to give away is another one.
Without a direct connection, the info is useless for them. Some social engineering can be used to infer that that phone number can be related to my son, as it's added to my sister's phonebook that is registered using an email account that was used to register an G+ account where it's said she is my syster. But what would be the value of such non-confirmable information for them? Too much hassle for such valueless information.
Only thing he does not mention and I suspect is, he's behind a residential DSL/cable line and that is problematic nowadays. My server is at a VPS provider. Those do cost little and work acceptably well.
*Excellent point*. I didn't thought of that.
Home Internet provider's IP are probably blacklisted by default.
I've done this before, and this server was configured perfectly: not on any blacklists, reverse DNS set up, SPF, DKIM and DMARC policies in place, etcetera. (Side note: mail-tester.com and Port25 are great for checking your setup.)
The tech info you provide is solid and good, but your logic is flawed - you assume the author don't know that he is doing, while in the text he says de does (and hints some third party services to validate his claims).
Do you have some reserves with mail-tester and Port25?
Fighting SPAM was easy since the beginning. In the early 2k years, most of the SPAM fighting techniques was already somewhat prototyped on the mailing lists I was following,
Now, 15 years later, I think I know why nobody did anything for a decade and a half - control. Now it's God Damn easy to drop someone from the mail system - you can render a company inoperative if it dare to run his own mail system.
And so, for "safety", you need to pay for some bug corporation to run it for you - while harvesting you mail on the process.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, puritanical countries such as the US - which has the UK's classist legacy, compounded over the last 35 years by the neoliberal disease - views management as "wealth creators" and workers as "in their place". This has coincided with the decline of US economic supremacy.
If you think "puritans" are classicists, try to get a job on Portuguese colonized country.
Seriously, "doing work" here is demerit. The ones that get promoted are the ones that avoid working themselves.
No, I think that being an effective *filter* is the main task of a manager. Communicate and prioritize the requirements from above that make sense; but block ones that are stupid or not worth it
As soon as the manager starts to filter information, it starts to take decisions indirectly about the project. If the guy knows the matter, it does it right. However, if the guy knows enough to know what to filter, the guy should not be being wasted on communications - the guy should be in a active hole on development.
Managers should manage. And nothing more.
Communicate the needs of the team up to management (again, ones that make sense) and make sure they get addressed. And, most of all, block the constant stream of questions and requests from sales/marketing/support, and force them to all pass through you. That way you (a) will soon recognize who brings reasonable requests, and who does not; (b) get to know which areas of the product get the most questions, and so may need work; and (c) allow your team to work mostly uninterrupted.
You're right that under-communication is an evil sin; but so is over-communication.
So in the bottom like, I got it right from the start. I said that Managers should communicate. :-)
And there's no such thing as "over-communication". What exists is communication to the wrong audience.
Communication is the main task (and, IMHO, should be the sole one) of managers.
Get rid of that wave of mongols that call themselves "Managers", give the task to someone that can understand both sides, and you will see things going better.
"First is highly specialized knowledge..." Explain then why people with exactly that kind of knowledge can't get their information through page sitting editors.
It's exactly what i was going to post.
I'm in a group of retrocomputing enthusiasts. We dig, bid, pursue and beyond for pisces of history of he computer industry - mainly from my own country. Problem is, n this process, we find out facts and curiosities that we just can't publish on Wikipedia.
That would be alright - except that someone else had published facts and misinformation that we know for sure about the veracity - as we own the product, the official advertising material (sometimes even the original piece) and the official manuals.
So, the current status quo is that some SOB gets there first, publish anything he thinks it's right and make a hell of a fuss against every single further contribution, no matter the source. Once I saw one editor making a insane broad interpretation for what's a "blog", to justify ignoring a technical article printed in a online service. By that interpretation, the very damned Wikipedia is a blog, god damnit.
I don't know the extension of such bigotry, but it's for sure plays a significant (even if not deterministic) hole on the problem - I just quit trying to contributing to Wikipedia, and speaking frankly, even reduced the use of it for articles on my own tongue where the problem appears to be worst. I know english (kind of, at least), so I don't need to rely on half baked articles, I can go directly to the original article - where, at least apparently, such bigotry don't affects too much the quality of the material.
As long as it pisses off Larry Ellison, it's worth it.
I wish I had mod points :-)
Industry lobbyists often make the 1-for-1 false assumption in loss claims. I don't know whether its ignorance or spin, but suspect the second.
Good was the times in which lobbyists knew they're lying.
I'm afraid that nowadays they believe in this bullshit.
Agile is the death of quality!
Not necessarily. In my hands, I guarantee you that Agile can deliver Quality.
However, I had worked in a Quality Control team before, and after, in a Quality Assurance one. So I know what must be done and why, so I know when some tests can be postponed, and what tests would be useless in a given moment.
The fallacy on the Agile movement is believing that all you need is coders. Worst, they think that TWO Quality ignorant developers together will compensate for the lack of formal testing. You can't give what you don't own - you need Quality Assurance and Control aware guys in your team.
Two pregnant women don't deliver a baby each six months - and you will need a father to raise the child after. But yet, it's common sense in Agile that you can lock up two women in a room and expect two childs a year - and nobody cares about the kids after they are born.
Makes me wonder then why every developer I met so far (about 100) is fatally allergic to bug fixing. They rather fake their own death than fix bugs that they put into the code. Commonly, they just state "This is not a bug!" or "This was never requested!" effectively dismissing QA having any clue or say in the matter. QA is not the bad guys, QA is a mirror that developers can stand to look into....entirely self-inflicted!
You need new friends, i mean, developers.
You get what you promotes. If you promotes bad developers, you will get bad developments.
Yes, please, write bad code if that helps you learn, but then, please, fix it once you know better and don't give me all that BS. And stop discussing and triaging bug reports, go and fix the issues. Takes typically way less time than the discussion aimed at convincing everyone not to do anything.
And by all means, fire the fscking bastards that don't fix their mess. You get what you promotes.
In civil engineering the problems and needs are well understood, you also either build something or you don't.
Being the reason I don't think that Management is the key problem on I.T.
In IT the problems and needs are NOT well understood. Even when you do a ton of requirements gathering there will pop up edge cases or the legislative requirements change and you need to change your scope.
Yes. Somehow, some guys decided that it would be a good idea to start Projects without a well bounded requirements set in advance. And then the very same guys insisted in using management practices that works only on projects where that requirements set is well known, bounded and established.
You get what you design.
We are wrapping up a 4 year health records system implementation (successfully, not my credit though, I was just a SME on it) and we have the big brown paper sheets the original workflow and process needs were mapped out on, they are laughably out of date. A big part of the success is the platform we are using is custom but its a framework so some areas were able to be their own subprojects.
Good design.
Most of the big failed projects that I have seen the common complaint is the scope creep and changing scope made it impossible to actually deliver. Coders can only code what they are asked to, yes there may be bad code in there along with the good code but that code does not matter if the scope changed and its no longer valid.
Agreed. And the most successful projects I have seen are the ones that can be break in small enough parts where the developers can have a word on the design and implementation. Not necessarily the final word, as the parts should connects each other and what can be the best solution for a component, can kill the other.
Management has a very small role on this process (what's different from saying that Management has no role on the process).
The thing is useless except by the eventual coder. As long as you need something really sturdy, it fails
I could not even load 1 megabyte sized files (logs from a system I was analysing).
The UI is fancy, I give it to them. But even Eclipse is more useful for real life work.
The first UNIX machines were 16 bits, and TTY terminals were the main interface to them.
You underestimate the importance of good coders. Or perhaps, overestimate the importance of managers.
Good developers can delivery a viable product besides bad management. But the best management of the World can't deliver a viable product without a minimum threshold of good code!
I agree and understand the problematic of big projects, I had my share of it too. But when the worst happens, and it eventually happens (more than once I saw a project being trashed by external causes, as a legislation that was changed without notice that fsck up our funding) it was always possible to salvage something from the mess, specially good and well written artifacts that were reused on other projects. Bad code is always trashed.
However, it is clear that the failure rate in large IT projects is higher than in projects, for example, from Civil Engineering. The Project Management Theory is essentially the same for all areas, so I have serious reservations to believe that this apparent crisis in IT is merely managerial.
Wow! Really sorry to say that sizeof(int) is 32 bits even on a 64-bit architecture.
Q.,E.D. :-)
The size of the int is a compiler decision, not architectural one. On my old 8 bits time, the sizeof(int) was 16 bits.
Assange is offically not wanted by the US, and he already have the right to be in EU. Snowden needs an Asylum to protect him from being extradicted, and to be allowed to stay in EU in the first place.
Humm... Do you realize that Assange is the one in confinement inside the Ecuador's Embassy IN LONDON in order to avoid extradition, don't you?
Oh horsepoo.
Lisias. Nice to meet you. :-)
The EU were a willing party in the campaign to spy on citizens of the world. They are only a bit pissed when it turned out senior government figures were being spied on too.
Exact. They want to spy citizens of the world, they don't want the world spying THEIR citizens.
Being the reason I stated " *their* privacy concernings", not mine of yours. ;-)
You will never write good code without writing bad code first.
And you will never stop writing bad code without being accountable for the results of writing bad code.
Experience is not how long you spend writing code. Is about how much time you spend fixing code, learning how to avoid having to do it again,
On the other hand, it would be a good idea to people stop harassing open source projects when serious and/or old bugs are discovered *and* fixed.
Nasty 7 years old bug discovered? Bad indeed.
Nasty 7 years old bug *FIXED*? Good, very very good.
Once you decide not to throw everything through the Windows, I mean, window every year ("fixing" old bugs with new bugs), you must expect that old flaws will one day be discovered. And fixed.
There're too many criticizers nowadays - but almost none of them got his hands dirty to know what they are criticizing.
This seems entirely contradictory to their stance on Assange.
I wonder why.
It's a wild guess, but perhaps Snowden being a whistle blower that helped (indirectly) the EU in their privacy concernings, in contrast with Assange, that is a whistle blower that fsckd up every single Country in the World, can be a reason.
Guys that assume sizeof(int) as 32 bits, instead of using "sizeof(int)" explicitly will have a bad time.
And believe me, they're at loose even nowadays.
Are you sending your bank account number, your social security number, and your personal phone number in plaintext email messages ..?
You have that information? No? It's because I didn't sent to you.
But how I can prevent someone else to send you such information using non secure channels?
The only possible way is never give such information to anyone. But that would render you useless on society - try to get paid without an bank account, or try to get medical care without your social security number.
Once you give this information to anyone, you can't control it anymore.
All you can do is to prevent that yourself would be the leaking vector. But that's all.
My son's phone number, that is not Android and I don't want nobody out of the family to know. Just for starters.
They knew his phone number the moment one of your family or his friends added it to their android contact book.
If and only if they also adds the custom email I made to him to play on the Social Networks - what don't happens. The email account he's allowed to give away is another one.
Without a direct connection, the info is useless for them. Some social engineering can be used to infer that that phone number can be related to my son, as it's added to my sister's phonebook that is registered using an email account that was used to register an G+ account where it's said she is my syster. But what would be the value of such non-confirmable information for them? Too much hassle for such valueless information.
Only thing he does not mention and I suspect is, he's behind a residential DSL/cable line and that is problematic nowadays. My server is at a VPS provider. Those do cost little and work acceptably well.
*Excellent point*. I didn't thought of that.
Home Internet provider's IP are probably blacklisted by default.
I'll bite. What is in your email that you don't want Google knowing?
My son's phone number, that is not Android and I don't want nobody out of the family to know. Just for starters.
Better question - What is in your email that you think Google doesn't already know?
Only Google knows, and this is exactly why it is a problem.
Everyone with a smartphone complaining about privacy in 2015 has lost their mind. Privacy is dead. Get over it.
Being this the reason you posted as an Anonymous Coward? :-)
You don't know my bank account. You don't know my social security number. You don't know my personal phone number. And this is how things need to be.
from TFA:
The tech info you provide is solid and good, but your logic is flawed - you assume the author don't know that he is doing, while in the text he says de does (and hints some third party services to validate his claims).
Do you have some reserves with mail-tester and Port25?
... to this new Brave New Internet.
Fighting SPAM was easy since the beginning. In the early 2k years, most of the SPAM fighting techniques was already somewhat prototyped on the mailing lists I was following,
Now, 15 years later, I think I know why nobody did anything for a decade and a half - control. Now it's God Damn easy to drop someone from the mail system - you can render a company inoperative if it dare to run his own mail system.
And so, for "safety", you need to pay for some bug corporation to run it for you - while harvesting you mail on the process.