It is an advantage to understand what the people you are managing are supposed to do, but remember one thing:
EVEN IF YOU KNOW HOW TO DO THE JOB, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD LEAVE YOUR TEAM ALONE.
The worst thing is the engineer-turned-manager who constantly has to have his hands in everyone and the dog's work because he thinks he is still hot and knows better than those kids how to do stuff. Even if this is the case: If you find out your team is staffed with total idiots rather fire them and get better ones than try to do their work for them. Just won't work out.
You still can give a demonstration of your geek-god-like skills from time to time at chosen occasions to show them that they cannot tell you an X for an U, and you can give them good advice IF THEY ASK YOU FOR IT, but otherwise just manage them and don't do their work. Been there, done that, and it just didn't work out, neither for them nor for me.
Well, Unix had gotten 64-bit with OSF/1 around that time, that later became Digital Unix and then died a horrible death at the hands of Carly the Ripper Fiorina, IRIX most likely also, I'm not sure about Solaris and AIX. Prices for both the machines and the systems where through the roof and could not be compared at all with PC-based systems. The only serious players in that field were Novell, NT and Unixware. Linux was still in the later stages of its infancy yet.
So you compare systems in the low-end market and bring in high-end stuff like commercial Unices. Get real. NT didn't kill Novell for nothing. Novell was great as a file and print server and had funky admin stuff, but it sucked for running applications. NT didn't. Would Linux or the BSDs already have been where they are today, who knows, things might have been different, but they were far far away from that.
I know that it was meant that way, and I admit that it basically is right. What was irking me about the GP post was the general mindset: "Why do we need improved security and/or longer patch cycles if we just can use a workaround." Similar sentiments come up in other posts in this thread "Oh, it's just a DoS attack, there are worse things" "Oh, don't you have a firewall" etc.pp.
Either you aim for excellence or you don't. Getting this right is a pretty hard thing, but if you start making excuses and getting into workarounds you end up some years down where MS is today: A nightmare of workarounds and makeshift solutions barely held together with pieces of string and duct tape. They also started out with making a compromise here and a compromise there and saying "Oh, this won't matter much, let's do this later". You see where it got them.
Trying to get the code right is an important part of this. If you don't get it right the first time, fine, then review the code and patch it, but do it right. Not just one bug today, and another one of the same kind tomorrow, and the third the next week.
If someone knowledgeable is able to find a series of similar bugs in a widely used and widely reviewed piece of code like the Linux kernel in a couple if minutes and if bugs are mostly fixed in a piecemeal fashion getting us to the kernel security bug of the day (we are now almost at the kernel bug of the week already) the Linux community should say "Hey, could we do something better ?" instead of saying "Doesn't matter, use a workaround and there are worse vulnerabilities anyway, so what ?"
Yeah, and porting games makes sense then because people want to run games on their servers and customized and locked down corporate desktops. Down kid yourself; Linux may have a higher overall marketshare than OS X, but its importance on the home desktop (=games) is still more or less nil.
There is a difference between some hundred thousand people more or less peacefully commuting and even half this amount of people panicky trying to get away from somewhere in a hurry.
Think of the proverbial person crying "fire" in a crowded theatre; normally the same amount of people would leave the theatre and the end of the show without any trouble in a couple of minutes; in case of emergency, everyone tries to get away in a hurry, thus creating chaos and traffic jams.
Remember 9/11; an event that had a very localized effect on Southern Manhattan nevertheless bringing down traffic all over the area and requiring people to walk for hours and hours to clear Manhattan.
In theory all of those emergencies would be no problem at all if everyone kept quiet and the authorities reacted without delay and 100% correctly; in practice there will be widespread panic and fuck-ups in emergency management so that nothing gets done as planned.
Try to read up about the large Vajont dam disaster that killed over 2100 people in 1963 in Italy when a whole mountainside collapsed into the dam's reservoir, making it splash over the dam and flooding several villages and small cities in minutes.
There also several experts warned that the mountainside, having been found instable for a considerable amount of time, could slide in one piece right into the lake. The experts of the Italian government and of the company operating the dam said exactly what you said above. Yeah, could happen but will not. It will break into small pieces, which will be a nuisance for the dam's operations but nothing more. They were wrong. Lots of people died.
Better safe than sorry if that much might be on the line (even if it might be a futile exercise nevertheless; even if you know what will happen it's not realistic to evacuate the whole Atlantic seacoast in several continents in a couple of days).
As already said elsewhere in this thread one thing most people IMO completely underestimate when it comes to ERP and other financial packages is the shitload of regulatory requirements and tiny but vital details that MUST be in your package. It is not an option, it's a must have.
Taxes (all kinds of), good bookkeeping practice, all of that most of the time wildly different from country to country, and if certain bits are missing every auditor will just shake his head and you will have a big audit on your hands.
We are using a comparatively simple ERP package compared to SAP, PeopleSoft and the likes, but just keeping current with the patches and upgrades for ever changing tax and other regulations makes me want to break down and cry. And I am not even writing that stuff but just maintaining it.
Also IMO you either have to be an accountant or at least have to have a good understanding of accounting or you just will not get it right.
Those things were obscenely expensive back then in Germany, even by 90s measures.
I admit that we didn't knew what we were doing; my friend had a grant he wanted to burn on some nice shiny toy (we were in the back then very early (at least in Germany) bioinformatics and he had attended a course at the European Molecular Biology Lab a short time before; they were mostly an SGI shop back then, stayed it until end of the 90s), so he said "Let's buy an SGI !" I certainly didn't object always having wanted to have an SGI to play around with, and in contrast to the only other machine we had besides his Macs, a completely overloaded RS/6000 320H with 16 MB RAM some chemicists were constantly running simulations on, it was a pretty decent machine and the only SGI we could get from our grant anyway. So we were pretty happy with the machine at first.
At least until we got the Pentium. And after we had a look at the pricing for upgrade options. After that I dawned on me that perhaps the SGI hadn't been the greatest idea ever. Like buying a very little Ferrari to deliver parcels.:-)
Nevertheless, having had the bragging rights to have our very own SGI was worth the fun.
The problem with SGI was that at least the low-end Indies really sucked, at least compared to contemporary PCs, especially given their high pricing.
When I joined a friend's startup in '94 we where mightily proud to get an entry-level Indy for a super-special academic discount (we were still an academic group when we bought the machine) for 16000 DM (about 8000 EUR today). I was absolutely in love with the machine until we purchased six months later our first P5/90 for less than a quarter of the price. Running Linux 1.x it ran circles around the SGI. And it had at least 16-bit color graphics (don't remember exactly) while the SGI only had 8-bit.
Looking back this was not really surprising. SGI apparently had intended the low-end Indies as development machines and had really been tightfisted in the specifications: Only 8 bit colour graphics, the CPU was lacking 2nd level(?) cache, thus crippling the machine considerably, and to add insult to injury the machine had some stability issues and the file system (EFS, this was before XFS came up) lost data like a sieve everytime the system crashed. So we went Linux from then on for our Unixy needs and never looked back.
But admitted, I still have a weak spot in my heart for SGIs and I am really struggling every time to resist the temptation to buy some cheap SGI oldtimer everytime I encounter one on eBay. Back then, SGIs just were THE dream computer, even if all I ever used were even back then dog slow as the University didn't want to pay a fortune for SGI-branded RAM and peripherals and so they really sucked for everyday use. But they had that certain flair. It's really a pity that today there's not such a "dream computer" company anymore... takes away a lot of fun.
It's hard enough getting cats into a pen, it's that much harder to get countries known for 'cutting corners' (like Russia) to do their job correctly.
Without the corner-cutting Russians they would have to wait for the next Space Shuttle for food... could be a long hungry wait. (yes, I know that they have a Soyus capsule for emergencies, which incidentially also is Russian).
This thing to realize about software, unlike pretty much any other good you pay for, is that it's "all gross margin".
I don't know which world you are living in, but in my world you still have to account for development and support costs, selling costs etc. There is no question that you can have obscene gross margings in software, but if it would be "all gross margin" automagically, no software company ever would go broke.
I don't think that a commercial vendor would be able to deal with it; people who love code, yes... people who just want money from it... no.
Surprise ! There are people in commercial entities that love code, too ! *GASP* And they even sometimes can make money from this ! *BOOM**Head explodes*
The rampant anti-Americanism in Europe at the moment might be a problem too.
I don't know about other European countries, but in my experience at least in Germany, even if there currently are lots of reservations towards the US as a nation, these usually don't extent to USians as people.
If you do not try to force certain US mindsets down people's throats you will usually be treated friendly. Several of my friends work sometimes very closely with Americans and they are usually well liked (the Americans). What can happen is that people want to discuss with you US foreign policies, but normally this also happens in a non-aggressive manner as long as both sides are not completely drunk.
Another advantage in Germany is that at least in the bigger cities and in larger companies people speak reasonably well English, at least in contrast to most South European countries and France.
If you use a third-party upgrade tool or cook your own solution it can happen. The same if you just copy over the files by hand or some script. The service packs themselves do not install on the wrong OS, e.g. they politely remind you that they are intended for W2K, but that you currently are running the installer on XP (tried this myself and assume it also behaves the same the other way round which would have applied in this case). But in the end there is no final cure to utter stupidity any vendor or Open Source group can apply.
most people in Europe don't have a commute that takes them on a freeway for more than a few minutes
Even if the amount of longer-range commuting traffic in Europe (here: Germany) may be considerably less than in the US due to the usually much better public transportation around most larger cities there are still more than enough people having a 50-100 km commute each way per day. I know more than enough people that commute every day from the city where I am living (Ulm, Southern Germany) to Stuttgart or even Munich every day by car (80-120 km, between 45 min. and 1,5 h. each way). If there wouldn't be any, the Autobahns around major cities wouldn't be clogged every day by commuters.
The same when I used to work in the London area; a lot of my colleagues commuted every day considerable distances by car, fighting their way over the constantly clogged M20(?) around London.
Yeah right. As if the NSA, the CIA or GWB would give a damn if Ann had her date with that hot guy that turned out to be a complete yerk but Frank told me *yadda*yadda*yadda*. This is teen talk, not Wall Street.
Especially as your customers (internal and external) will notice really soon that you are a Yes-man (if they are not completely braindead, but in that respect most of them aren't) and you will be that "Yeah, he always promises the sky but never delivers" guy everyone really hates and that finally noone even belives the time of day from.
What everyone wants is to get the job done, but no empty promises you cannot live up to.
Slashdot Mirror
It is an advantage to understand what the people you are managing are supposed to do, but remember one thing:
EVEN IF YOU KNOW HOW TO DO THE JOB, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD LEAVE YOUR TEAM ALONE.
The worst thing is the engineer-turned-manager who constantly has to have his hands in everyone and the dog's work because he thinks he is still hot and knows better than those kids how to do stuff. Even if this is the case: If you find out your team is staffed with total idiots rather fire them and get better ones than try to do their work for them. Just won't work out.
You still can give a demonstration of your geek-god-like skills from time to time at chosen occasions to show them that they cannot tell you an X for an U, and you can give them good advice IF THEY ASK YOU FOR IT, but otherwise just manage them and don't do their work. Been there, done that, and it just didn't work out, neither for them nor for me.
Well, Unix had gotten 64-bit with OSF/1 around that time, that later became Digital Unix and then died a horrible death at the hands of Carly the Ripper Fiorina, IRIX most likely also, I'm not sure about Solaris and AIX. Prices for both the machines and the systems where through the roof and could not be compared at all with PC-based systems. The only serious players in that field were Novell, NT and Unixware. Linux was still in the later stages of its infancy yet.
So you compare systems in the low-end market and bring in high-end stuff like commercial Unices. Get real. NT didn't kill Novell for nothing. Novell was great as a file and print server and had funky admin stuff, but it sucked for running applications. NT didn't. Would Linux or the BSDs already have been where they are today, who knows, things might have been different, but they were far far away from that.
I know that it was meant that way, and I admit that it basically is right. What was irking me about the GP post was the general mindset: "Why do we need improved security and/or longer patch cycles if we just can use a workaround." Similar sentiments come up in other posts in this thread "Oh, it's just a DoS attack, there are worse things" "Oh, don't you have a firewall" etc.pp.
Either you aim for excellence or you don't. Getting this right is a pretty hard thing, but if you start making excuses and getting into workarounds you end up some years down where MS is today: A nightmare of workarounds and makeshift solutions barely held together with pieces of string and duct tape. They also started out with making a compromise here and a compromise there and saying "Oh, this won't matter much, let's do this later". You see where it got them.
Trying to get the code right is an important part of this. If you don't get it right the first time, fine, then review the code and patch it, but do it right. Not just one bug today, and another one of the same kind tomorrow, and the third the next week.
If someone knowledgeable is able to find a series of similar bugs in a widely used and widely reviewed piece of code like the Linux kernel in a couple if minutes and if bugs are mostly fixed in a piecemeal fashion getting us to the kernel security bug of the day (we are now almost at the kernel bug of the week already) the Linux community should say "Hey, could we do something better ?" instead of saying "Doesn't matter, use a workaround and there are worse vulnerabilities anyway, so what ?"
Hey, great argument ! So Linux doesn't even need to be stable, you just can string together several boxes because it is sooo cheap. Yeah right.
Yeah, and porting games makes sense then because people want to run games on their servers and customized and locked down corporate desktops. Down kid yourself; Linux may have a higher overall marketshare than OS X, but its importance on the home desktop (=games) is still more or less nil.
There is a difference between some hundred thousand people more or less peacefully commuting and even half this amount of people panicky trying to get away from somewhere in a hurry.
Think of the proverbial person crying "fire" in a crowded theatre; normally the same amount of people would leave the theatre and the end of the show without any trouble in a couple of minutes; in case of emergency, everyone tries to get away in a hurry, thus creating chaos and traffic jams.
Remember 9/11; an event that had a very localized effect on Southern Manhattan nevertheless bringing down traffic all over the area and requiring people to walk for hours and hours to clear Manhattan.
In theory all of those emergencies would be no problem at all if everyone kept quiet and the authorities reacted without delay and 100% correctly; in practice there will be widespread panic and fuck-ups in emergency management so that nothing gets done as planned.
Try to read up about the large Vajont dam disaster that killed over 2100 people in 1963 in Italy when a whole mountainside collapsed into the dam's reservoir, making it splash over the dam and flooding several villages and small cities in minutes.
There also several experts warned that the mountainside, having been found instable for a considerable amount of time, could slide in one piece right into the lake. The experts of the Italian government and of the company operating the dam said exactly what you said above. Yeah, could happen but will not. It will break into small pieces, which will be a nuisance for the dam's operations but nothing more. They were wrong. Lots of people died.
Better safe than sorry if that much might be on the line (even if it might be a futile exercise nevertheless; even if you know what will happen it's not realistic to evacuate the whole Atlantic seacoast in several continents in a couple of days).
That guy's name was Balin. Bali is the Indonesian island.
As already said elsewhere in this thread one thing most people IMO completely underestimate when it comes to ERP and other financial packages is the shitload of regulatory requirements and tiny but vital details that MUST be in your package. It is not an option, it's a must have.
Taxes (all kinds of), good bookkeeping practice, all of that most of the time wildly different from country to country, and if certain bits are missing every auditor will just shake his head and you will have a big audit on your hands.
We are using a comparatively simple ERP package compared to SAP, PeopleSoft and the likes, but just keeping current with the patches and upgrades for ever changing tax and other regulations makes me want to break down and cry. And I am not even writing that stuff but just maintaining it.
Also IMO you either have to be an accountant or at least have to have a good understanding of accounting or you just will not get it right.
Those things were obscenely expensive back then in Germany, even by 90s measures.
:-)
I admit that we didn't knew what we were doing; my friend had a grant he wanted to burn on some nice shiny toy (we were in the back then very early (at least in Germany) bioinformatics and he had attended a course at the European Molecular Biology Lab a short time before; they were mostly an SGI shop back then, stayed it until end of the 90s), so he said "Let's buy an SGI !" I certainly didn't object always having wanted to have an SGI to play around with, and in contrast to the only other machine we had besides his Macs, a completely overloaded RS/6000 320H with 16 MB RAM some chemicists were constantly running simulations on, it was a pretty decent machine and the only SGI we could get from our grant anyway. So we were pretty happy with the machine at first.
At least until we got the Pentium. And after we had a look at the pricing for upgrade options. After that I dawned on me that perhaps the SGI hadn't been the greatest idea ever. Like buying a very little Ferrari to deliver parcels.
Nevertheless, having had the bragging rights to have our very own SGI was worth the fun.
The problem with SGI was that at least the low-end Indies really sucked, at least compared to contemporary PCs, especially given their high pricing.
When I joined a friend's startup in '94 we where mightily proud to get an entry-level Indy for a super-special academic discount (we were still an academic group when we bought the machine) for 16000 DM (about 8000 EUR today). I was absolutely in love with the machine until we purchased six months later our first P5/90 for less than a quarter of the price. Running Linux 1.x it ran circles around the SGI. And it had at least 16-bit color graphics (don't remember exactly) while the SGI only had 8-bit.
Looking back this was not really surprising. SGI apparently had intended the low-end Indies as development machines and had really been tightfisted in the specifications: Only 8 bit colour graphics, the CPU was lacking 2nd level(?) cache, thus crippling the machine considerably, and to add insult to injury the machine had some stability issues and the file system (EFS, this was before XFS came up) lost data like a sieve everytime the system crashed. So we went Linux from then on for our Unixy needs and never looked back.
But admitted, I still have a weak spot in my heart for SGIs and I am really struggling every time to resist the temptation to buy some cheap SGI oldtimer everytime I encounter one on eBay. Back then, SGIs just were THE dream computer, even if all I ever used were even back then dog slow as the University didn't want to pay a fortune for SGI-branded RAM and peripherals and so they really sucked for everyday use. But they had that certain flair. It's really a pity that today there's not such a "dream computer" company anymore... takes away a lot of fun.
Now show me the great Open Source product being able to replace SAP, PeopleSoft and the like and everything will be jolly good.
Oh, I forgot, I'm supposed to write it myself. My stupid.
It's hard enough getting cats into a pen, it's that much harder to get countries known for 'cutting corners' (like Russia) to do their job correctly.
Without the corner-cutting Russians they would have to wait for the next Space Shuttle for food... could be a long hungry wait. (yes, I know that they have a Soyus capsule for emergencies, which incidentially also is Russian).
This thing to realize about software, unlike pretty much any other good you pay for, is that it's "all gross margin".
I don't know which world you are living in, but in my world you still have to account for development and support costs, selling costs etc. There is no question that you can have obscene gross margings in software, but if it would be "all gross margin" automagically, no software company ever would go broke.
I don't think that a commercial vendor would be able to deal with it; people who love code, yes... people who just want money from it... no.
Surprise ! There are people in commercial entities that love code, too ! *GASP* And they even sometimes can make money from this ! *BOOM**Head explodes*
The rampant anti-Americanism in Europe at the moment might be a problem too.
I don't know about other European countries, but in my experience at least in Germany, even if there currently are lots of reservations towards the US as a nation, these usually don't extent to USians as people.
If you do not try to force certain US mindsets down people's throats you will usually be treated friendly. Several of my friends work sometimes very closely with Americans and they are usually well liked (the Americans). What can happen is that people want to discuss with you US foreign policies, but normally this also happens in a non-aggressive manner as long as both sides are not completely drunk.
Another advantage in Germany is that at least in the bigger cities and in larger companies people speak reasonably well English, at least in contrast to most South European countries and France.
Ok, funny it is. But...+5 interesting ? Someone forgot to take their medicine ?
Unfortunately, dilbert.com seems to no longer exist
;-)
HUH ? About a minute ago it was still there... is your employer filtering you ?
If you use a third-party upgrade tool or cook your own solution it can happen. The same if you just copy over the files by hand or some script. The service packs themselves do not install on the wrong OS, e.g. they politely remind you that they are intended for W2K, but that you currently are running the installer on XP (tried this myself and assume it also behaves the same the other way round which would have applied in this case). But in the end there is no final cure to utter stupidity any vendor or Open Source group can apply.
Apparently they were trying just to do that and accidentially "tested" it on all 60000. OOPS.
:-)
At least their automatic upgrade system seems to work both reliably and fast.
most people in Europe don't have a commute that takes them on a freeway for more than a few minutes
Even if the amount of longer-range commuting traffic in Europe (here: Germany) may be considerably less than in the US due to the usually much better public transportation around most larger cities there are still more than enough people having a 50-100 km commute each way per day. I know more than enough people that commute every day from the city where I am living (Ulm, Southern Germany) to Stuttgart or even Munich every day by car (80-120 km, between 45 min. and 1,5 h. each way). If there wouldn't be any, the Autobahns around major cities wouldn't be clogged every day by commuters.
The same when I used to work in the London area; a lot of my colleagues commuted every day considerable distances by car, fighting their way over the constantly clogged M20(?) around London.
Yeah right. As if the NSA, the CIA or GWB would give a damn if Ann had her date with that hot guy that turned out to be a complete yerk but Frank told me *yadda*yadda*yadda*. This is teen talk, not Wall Street.
And certainly the good old "AS LONG as you stick your LAN cable into MY switch YOU'll DO WHAT I SAY ! " ;-)
Especially as your customers (internal and external) will notice really soon that you are a Yes-man (if they are not completely braindead, but in that respect most of them aren't) and you will be that "Yeah, he always promises the sky but never delivers" guy everyone really hates and that finally noone even belives the time of day from.
What everyone wants is to get the job done, but no empty promises you cannot live up to.
Working on computers does not equal "being in IT"
In regards to people doing office jobs or data entry on computers women most likely outnumber men.