Summary: Make sure the processes are worth documenting before starting to document. This happens by getting buy-in from those who do the jobs... they have to write the document.
Most people are worried when presented with this directive because they know innately that once they write what they know about their jobs down, they can be taken for granted by management and replaced with cheaper workers who can read the document and hit the ground almost running.
Thus, there's a difficult road ahead with the workers -- convincing people that they're adding value and that their jobs will be more efficient and effective with procedures, is both difficult and sometimes -- inaccurate. People aren't stupid, and know this almost instinctively.
Your perception missed that those costs were high because the DSL network was regulated by most public utility regulators as a common carrier after a while. The telcos didn't want to build/maintain infrastructure for every ISP out there, they wanted a captive audience.
Verizon figured this out, and built out FIOS while leaving the copper "common carrier" in the ground -- thus they can claim those other ISP's can service anyone in DSL range, as the FIOS network grows to a size larger than the DSL copper.
Eventually the public utility regulators and those that vote for them will figure this out and the battle will begin.
Wishful baby boomers, holding the stock even as the financials underneath the stock fall apart. It'll crash even bigger later on, the longer they hold.
These boomers made a lot of money in the 80's and 90's for themselves, and can't pull themselves away when the underlying fundamentals are failing.
Actually, drywall is cheap. When I first entered the business world in the 80's, almost everyone except secretaries had offices.
The trend away from it was mostly a fad, not a real cost-effective solution. The facilites people bought the utter bullshit the sales people of "modular" furniture sold them, hook line and sinker. Ever see how much it costs to move cubicles around, including carpet repairs/cleaning, electrical sub-contractors, telephony/Ethernet cabling moves/adds/changes, etc?
Starts to make an office that has solid walls that no one would bother ever asking to move -- look cheap -- by comparison.
And they were.
I've seen both budgets. Adjusted for inflation, office buildings and furniture still costs the same today as it did back then, but now it's cubicles, and then it was drywall, a chair and a desk, and a real door that closed.
Not kidding: News tonight showed a girl attending a local college that is not exactly known for high academics or any type of "fast track" to anything big. It's a State college that's a step above the local Community Colleges.
This girl when asked, said she wanted to be "the CFO of a major corporation" and was dead-serious.
Then she proceeded to say she had a BA in Psych, and was working on adding a minor in Finance.
I don't know who's been counseling these kids, if anyone, but she's headed for a rude surprise. If she's lucky, she'll get an Accounting certification and work preparing people's tax forms, and that's about as close as she'll get to her "dream job" with that pedigree.
(Not saying it's right or wrong, but where did she get the idea she could get one BA in Psych and a minor in Finance and end up a CFO of a "major corporation"? Frankly, that's Harvard Business School material, which she obviously wasn't.
I felt sorry both for her and for the interviewer who had to just sit and nod and smile and try not to laugh or feel bad for her.
Don't know how many systems or users you support, but I've seen some damn big companies get by with a LOT less than 75 people on the IT staff. That's almost obscene, and is probably a large reason why all your salaries suck.
Find ways to automate away your co-workers. Unfortunately since you work in government, you'll find no way to get rid of them (no regular layoffs to drop dead weight in government, other than political party power changes for certain employment levels) so...
Yep, you're screwed. Move to the private sector and get paid. Prepare for regular layoffs and job uncertainty and save up an emergency fund... and you'll do better.
My only complaint with your comments is about the "the children won't be better off than the parents" concept. If the parents teach the children that it's not about money, or toys, or huge consumer debt, and base the children in something else (you decide... religion, moralism, humanism, whatever -- something "bigger" than just acquiring shit), the children WILL be better off than the parents, because they'll know when times really ARE good and it'll make them happy.
My grandparents were depression-era kids. They were always happiest when they had a roof over their heads that was relatively affordable, 3 squares a day, good friends, and a little fun time each week. It was rare to see my grandfather not work a 6-day work week, but he was never UN-happy about any of it.
He's 90 now, and he's still one of the most content people I know. Also one of the most grounded in reality. He once owned a Model-T. His aging Ford Taurus is a lighting rocket compared to his first car, and so much more reliable and safe... and he knows it. Deep down he knows things are fundamentally "better" than his childhood, and that keeps him happy and engaged... which is how he lived to be so old and was mostly content along the way.
Children who grow up chasing after things instead of deeper good never find happiness. In that, if you say they won't be better off than their parents -- you're right -- they won't. They'll be just as miserable or worse.
One problem I've seen with performance reviews lately is that managers KNOW going in that they've been given a budget for raises, and they KNOW that no matter how good the staff is performing overall, they're only allowed to hold out one or two people as "exemplary" employees who get slightly better than inflation raises that year, the rest get a fixed 3% and a few unlucky under-performers get 1% or nothing.
This is the same whether or not the department is full of highly-qualified, over-achievers, or a bunch of mediocre slobs. So every department has a few "high" performers that get real, meaningful raises, and the rest see their earning potential actually DROP for the next year.
While it seems like a good idea in theory, because everyone will try even harder "next year", the reality is that the systems most large corporations employ to "make it fair" between departments actually punishes better-than-average performing departments, and rewards poor-performing ones.
Add in the fact that most IT workers know about how much their systems either make or save the company (usually measured in millions of dollars) and they also know how little real staff most companies employ to make or save that money -- while also employing tons of dead weight and other more "traditional" roles -- the reward for making the company millions is often a 3% annual raise that doesn't cover the current or any past values of inflation that you ever saw, and a large 10% raise for LEAVING the company starts to look mighty juicy.
Then employees start playing games in their heads... How many times can I change companies in the next X years without looking like a run-around? Because it's the only way to stay both ahead of 4%+ inflation and also start to see a return on investment in years and years of experience.
Companies think of workers as "dumber" than them when it comes to finance, which has been proven time and time again to be false. EVERYONE has to get up every day to pay the bills, and if there's a way to leverage their "business" to gain 10% out of a system designed to hand out 3% to most workers... they'll find it. Guaranteed.
It's just the "market" correcting itself. Start paying employees a significant percentage of the revenue they're making or keeping the company from losing when they manage systems that do just that, and the problem starts to go away. If someone sysadmins a system that makes a company $40,000/month in cold hard cash, and they sysadmin say... ten of those platforms... is a sub-$100,000/year salary really appropriate while the execs cash out millions in stock options?
Watch EDGAR -- see what the guy/gal two rungs up the ladder from most sysadmins reports in required stock sale reporting. It's obscene. Millions.
I know for a fact that a team of five brings in 80% of the revenue of my entire department at work, which is about 4 times that large. The others bring in 20%. One manager runs that team. The rest takes 3 managers and three times the staff. Are the salaries commensurate? Are they 60% higher on the high-revenue team? Nope...
Companies need to realize that staff SEES this. We're not dumb. We understand the need for other teams and departments that don't make as much money, but salaries need to be adjusted appropriately.
So you're immediately recommending that the machine be made available to pharmacy departments at grocery stores, and for the things it can detect, the prescriptions will no longer need a Doctor's signature, if the patient agrees and their symptoms are standard ones for the known diseases, they can self-medicate using the best drugs available for that particular virus.
Excellent! That and the pay cut you're volunteering for, should lower those "horrifically expensive" costs dramatically -- good on you Doc! Good show!
Oh? You just wanted to keep your salary high and your practice intact, no matter what gains there are in "expensive" technology, even if the patient agrees to use it without a doctor's care? Sorry -- I misunderstood you. My bad.
With an outage a week since the installation of supposedly "Commercial grade" Comcast data service in Denver, and their technical staff not even opening tickets for it...
When someone tells me that Comcast is offering speed, I yawn and ask them to tell me when it will be back up, since it's down at least once a day.
Warning: Anyone thinking about purchasing Comcast in the south Denver suburbs for any serious data purpose... don't. No matter how fast they say it'll be.
When it's up, 12 Mb/s down, 2 Mb/s up is nice. But reliability is more important than those speeds. The downtime will drive you crazy if you're used to anything transported by a previous Bell entity. As bad as the Bell's may be, their crap generally stays up or they fix it.
Comcast shows no interest in fixing chronic problems at all. They're all about the 80/20 rule. If you happen to fall into the 20% that are up and down all the time, they could care less.
The very fact that you have to type Gnome/KDE and not a single name and a signal properly built "product" is the very reason OSX kicked Linux's ass on the desktop.
Linux desktops are fragmented and always have been. Good individual applications and concepts in both Gnome and KDE, but neither is great by itself, and the developers can't get along at all to see past their quibbles to do something truly wonderful.
So for those who like both "choice" and "chaos" a Linux desktop is great. For those who want to get beyond fucking with desktop settings and loading different "competing" apps all the time to see which is better, Mac OS X wins, hands-down.
Well, I'll admit to having a MacBook, but its only saving grace is the dual-tap feature now pretty common on notebooks, but fairly rare on most when the MacBook first came out. At least I can scroll without messing with arrow keys or trying to point at something on the screen and drag it.
Ha. Hey guys, another newbie here thinks companies have time/budget/staff for this thing he calls "testing" again!
Didn't he get the memo? Only enough of this "testing" to be able to say it was done is ever accomplished anymore. Anything beyond that is a waste of resources that could be used getting the next crap-tacular product out the door.
Many cable companies are sending local channels in HD via QAM in the clear also.
If you have a QAM tuner in your HDTV (something to look for, many do NOT have it) and cable, try hooking the cable direct to the RF input on the TV instead of through the switchbox (if you don't have their "HD package").
You might be surprised. You won't get everything, but often you get your locals in HD on alternate channel numbers. You can flip back and forth and compare, which is pretty fun to do.
The real problem with the "right to work" or "right to hire" laws is in how they affect unemployment benefits.
Employers get away with "firing" people "for cause" for quite silly things in "right to work" states and then weaseling out of paying unemployment to that employee. They contest the unemployment filing and usually win.
Even if all the employee did was "wear blue too often".
The economic reality is that there's more employees for most jobs than are needed, or at least employers think there are. Many are not truly qualified, but they'll take a mediocre performance from someone half-qualified for the job who has no "offensive" traits over an eccentric with "possibly offensive" personal life who truly excels at the job.
Large corporations are odd that way.
It's also usually why you meet and work with much more dynamic people who are far more interesting (and who often seem "volatile" due to differing viewpoints and a brain cell or three actually firing) in smaller companies, but they don't seem to "last" through the first round of layoffs.
The government didn't bail out mortgage holders in the 70's and 80's when interest rates hit 12% or more. And practices like 3-2-1 buy-downs with no tax benefits and other supposedly "predatory" practices are nothing new. The only thing "new" in all of this is that the sentiment is that Uncle Sam is supposed to take responsibility for stupid people not researching what they were purchasing. 8-10% is NOTHING compared to the mid-80's.
Those of us who paid attention to the fact that interest rates were the lowest ever recorded, knew (just like anyone else who thought for two seconds about it) that the only direction to go was up. "Adjustable rate" and "it has to go up" meant that we locked in rates below 6% on fixed mortgages and counted our blessings. Now we're going to pay to bail out those who bought more than they could possibly EVER afford if the rates went up? Screw that.
It's not right. People need to take responsibility for their OWN actions.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen a few other drivers that stick their fingers out and flip them up, but rarely down. Is this the gesture you're alluding to?
Summary: Make sure the processes are worth documenting before starting to document. This happens by getting buy-in from those who do the jobs... they have to write the document.
Most people are worried when presented with this directive because they know innately that once they write what they know about their jobs down, they can be taken for granted by management and replaced with cheaper workers who can read the document and hit the ground almost running.
Thus, there's a difficult road ahead with the workers -- convincing people that they're adding value and that their jobs will be more efficient and effective with procedures, is both difficult and sometimes -- inaccurate. People aren't stupid, and know this almost instinctively.
Your perception missed that those costs were high because the DSL network was regulated by most public utility regulators as a common carrier after a while. The telcos didn't want to build/maintain infrastructure for every ISP out there, they wanted a captive audience.
Verizon figured this out, and built out FIOS while leaving the copper "common carrier" in the ground -- thus they can claim those other ISP's can service anyone in DSL range, as the FIOS network grows to a size larger than the DSL copper.
Eventually the public utility regulators and those that vote for them will figure this out and the battle will begin.
Only for SD content. Not for HD.
The TiVO HD works only on cable systems via CableCard, and various Cable companies are trying underhanded ways (illegally) to change this.
How about this -- two thoughts...
1. You can replace yourselves. Any more kids than that, there are financial penalties.
2. Stop giving parents tax breaks for having ANY kids.
That'd make a big enough dent in things.
Only the ass-monkeys that won't pay for good content were offended. They aren't his target audience anyway.
Wishful baby boomers, holding the stock even as the financials underneath the stock fall apart. It'll crash even bigger later on, the longer they hold.
These boomers made a lot of money in the 80's and 90's for themselves, and can't pull themselves away when the underlying fundamentals are failing.
Actually, drywall is cheap. When I first entered the business world in the 80's, almost everyone except secretaries had offices.
The trend away from it was mostly a fad, not a real cost-effective solution. The facilites people bought the utter bullshit the sales people of "modular" furniture sold them, hook line and sinker. Ever see how much it costs to move cubicles around, including carpet repairs/cleaning, electrical sub-contractors, telephony/Ethernet cabling moves/adds/changes, etc?
Starts to make an office that has solid walls that no one would bother ever asking to move -- look cheap -- by comparison.
And they were.
I've seen both budgets. Adjusted for inflation, office buildings and furniture still costs the same today as it did back then, but now it's cubicles, and then it was drywall, a chair and a desk, and a real door that closed.
Not kidding: News tonight showed a girl attending a local college that is not exactly known for high academics or any type of "fast track" to anything big. It's a State college that's a step above the local Community Colleges.
This girl when asked, said she wanted to be "the CFO of a major corporation" and was dead-serious.
Then she proceeded to say she had a BA in Psych, and was working on adding a minor in Finance.
I don't know who's been counseling these kids, if anyone, but she's headed for a rude surprise. If she's lucky, she'll get an Accounting certification and work preparing people's tax forms, and that's about as close as she'll get to her "dream job" with that pedigree.
(Not saying it's right or wrong, but where did she get the idea she could get one BA in Psych and a minor in Finance and end up a CFO of a "major corporation"? Frankly, that's Harvard Business School material, which she obviously wasn't.
I felt sorry both for her and for the interviewer who had to just sit and nod and smile and try not to laugh or feel bad for her.
Don't know how many systems or users you support, but I've seen some damn big companies get by with a LOT less than 75 people on the IT staff. That's almost obscene, and is probably a large reason why all your salaries suck.
...
Find ways to automate away your co-workers. Unfortunately since you work in government, you'll find no way to get rid of them (no regular layoffs to drop dead weight in government, other than political party power changes for certain employment levels) so
Yep, you're screwed. Move to the private sector and get paid. Prepare for regular layoffs and job uncertainty and save up an emergency fund... and you'll do better.
To keep to the point of the article...
Then those idiots DESERVE to lose staff to managers who "get it", right?
I see no problem here. Keep looking if you're stuck in cubicle hell and a cubical is inappropriate for the type of work that you do.
The company's only feedback mechanism is that high turnover rate they're bitching about, and don't understand. They never will, either.
Some places are revolving doors as it relates to staffing, for a reason. They deserve to die off.
My only complaint with your comments is about the "the children won't be better off than the parents" concept. If the parents teach the children that it's not about money, or toys, or huge consumer debt, and base the children in something else (you decide... religion, moralism, humanism, whatever -- something "bigger" than just acquiring shit), the children WILL be better off than the parents, because they'll know when times really ARE good and it'll make them happy.
My grandparents were depression-era kids. They were always happiest when they had a roof over their heads that was relatively affordable, 3 squares a day, good friends, and a little fun time each week. It was rare to see my grandfather not work a 6-day work week, but he was never UN-happy about any of it.
He's 90 now, and he's still one of the most content people I know. Also one of the most grounded in reality. He once owned a Model-T. His aging Ford Taurus is a lighting rocket compared to his first car, and so much more reliable and safe... and he knows it. Deep down he knows things are fundamentally "better" than his childhood, and that keeps him happy and engaged... which is how he lived to be so old and was mostly content along the way.
Children who grow up chasing after things instead of deeper good never find happiness. In that, if you say they won't be better off than their parents -- you're right -- they won't. They'll be just as miserable or worse.
One problem I've seen with performance reviews lately is that managers KNOW going in that they've been given a budget for raises, and they KNOW that no matter how good the staff is performing overall, they're only allowed to hold out one or two people as "exemplary" employees who get slightly better than inflation raises that year, the rest get a fixed 3% and a few unlucky under-performers get 1% or nothing.
This is the same whether or not the department is full of highly-qualified, over-achievers, or a bunch of mediocre slobs. So every department has a few "high" performers that get real, meaningful raises, and the rest see their earning potential actually DROP for the next year.
While it seems like a good idea in theory, because everyone will try even harder "next year", the reality is that the systems most large corporations employ to "make it fair" between departments actually punishes better-than-average performing departments, and rewards poor-performing ones.
Add in the fact that most IT workers know about how much their systems either make or save the company (usually measured in millions of dollars) and they also know how little real staff most companies employ to make or save that money -- while also employing tons of dead weight and other more "traditional" roles -- the reward for making the company millions is often a 3% annual raise that doesn't cover the current or any past values of inflation that you ever saw, and a large 10% raise for LEAVING the company starts to look mighty juicy.
Then employees start playing games in their heads... How many times can I change companies in the next X years without looking like a run-around? Because it's the only way to stay both ahead of 4%+ inflation and also start to see a return on investment in years and years of experience.
Companies think of workers as "dumber" than them when it comes to finance, which has been proven time and time again to be false. EVERYONE has to get up every day to pay the bills, and if there's a way to leverage their "business" to gain 10% out of a system designed to hand out 3% to most workers... they'll find it. Guaranteed.
It's just the "market" correcting itself. Start paying employees a significant percentage of the revenue they're making or keeping the company from losing when they manage systems that do just that, and the problem starts to go away. If someone sysadmins a system that makes a company $40,000/month in cold hard cash, and they sysadmin say... ten of those platforms... is a sub-$100,000/year salary really appropriate while the execs cash out millions in stock options?
Watch EDGAR -- see what the guy/gal two rungs up the ladder from most sysadmins reports in required stock sale reporting. It's obscene. Millions.
I know for a fact that a team of five brings in 80% of the revenue of my entire department at work, which is about 4 times that large. The others bring in 20%. One manager runs that team. The rest takes 3 managers and three times the staff. Are the salaries commensurate? Are they 60% higher on the high-revenue team? Nope...
Companies need to realize that staff SEES this. We're not dumb. We understand the need for other teams and departments that don't make as much money, but salaries need to be adjusted appropriately.
So you're immediately recommending that the machine be made available to pharmacy departments at grocery stores, and for the things it can detect, the prescriptions will no longer need a Doctor's signature, if the patient agrees and their symptoms are standard ones for the known diseases, they can self-medicate using the best drugs available for that particular virus.
Excellent! That and the pay cut you're volunteering for, should lower those "horrifically expensive" costs dramatically -- good on you Doc! Good show!
Oh? You just wanted to keep your salary high and your practice intact, no matter what gains there are in "expensive" technology, even if the patient agrees to use it without a doctor's care? Sorry -- I misunderstood you. My bad.
100 million a year? I can find no projects in their SEC filings that are spending that kind of money, certainly not on education.
With an outage a week since the installation of supposedly "Commercial grade" Comcast data service in Denver, and their technical staff not even opening tickets for it...
When someone tells me that Comcast is offering speed, I yawn and ask them to tell me when it will be back up, since it's down at least once a day.
Warning: Anyone thinking about purchasing Comcast in the south Denver suburbs for any serious data purpose... don't. No matter how fast they say it'll be.
When it's up, 12 Mb/s down, 2 Mb/s up is nice. But reliability is more important than those speeds. The downtime will drive you crazy if you're used to anything transported by a previous Bell entity. As bad as the Bell's may be, their crap generally stays up or they fix it.
Comcast shows no interest in fixing chronic problems at all. They're all about the 80/20 rule. If you happen to fall into the 20% that are up and down all the time, they could care less.
The very fact that you have to type Gnome/KDE and not a single name and a signal properly built "product" is the very reason OSX kicked Linux's ass on the desktop.
Linux desktops are fragmented and always have been. Good individual applications and concepts in both Gnome and KDE, but neither is great by itself, and the developers can't get along at all to see past their quibbles to do something truly wonderful.
So for those who like both "choice" and "chaos" a Linux desktop is great. For those who want to get beyond fucking with desktop settings and loading different "competing" apps all the time to see which is better, Mac OS X wins, hands-down.
Install fink and you have the majority of the debian packages available to you on the mac, too.
Amen brother.
Well, I'll admit to having a MacBook, but its only saving grace is the dual-tap feature now pretty common on notebooks, but fairly rare on most when the MacBook first came out. At least I can scroll without messing with arrow keys or trying to point at something on the screen and drag it.
You've got it right. He's paid to entertain, not be a journalist.
Ha. Hey guys, another newbie here thinks companies have time/budget/staff for this thing he calls "testing" again!
Didn't he get the memo? Only enough of this "testing" to be able to say it was done is ever accomplished anymore. Anything beyond that is a waste of resources that could be used getting the next crap-tacular product out the door.
Man I love Slashdot. Always good for a laugh.
Many cable companies are sending local channels in HD via QAM in the clear also.
If you have a QAM tuner in your HDTV (something to look for, many do NOT have it) and cable, try hooking the cable direct to the RF input on the TV instead of through the switchbox (if you don't have their "HD package").
You might be surprised. You won't get everything, but often you get your locals in HD on alternate channel numbers. You can flip back and forth and compare, which is pretty fun to do.
The real problem with the "right to work" or "right to hire" laws is in how they affect unemployment benefits.
Employers get away with "firing" people "for cause" for quite silly things in "right to work" states and then weaseling out of paying unemployment to that employee. They contest the unemployment filing and usually win.
Even if all the employee did was "wear blue too often".
The economic reality is that there's more employees for most jobs than are needed, or at least employers think there are. Many are not truly qualified, but they'll take a mediocre performance from someone half-qualified for the job who has no "offensive" traits over an eccentric with "possibly offensive" personal life who truly excels at the job.
Large corporations are odd that way.
It's also usually why you meet and work with much more dynamic people who are far more interesting (and who often seem "volatile" due to differing viewpoints and a brain cell or three actually firing) in smaller companies, but they don't seem to "last" through the first round of layoffs.
No, enforce the law of the land. Sign a contract, abide by it.
Don't take money from the "non-stupid" to pay for the stupid.
The government didn't bail out mortgage holders in the 70's and 80's when interest rates hit 12% or more. And practices like 3-2-1 buy-downs with no tax benefits and other supposedly "predatory" practices are nothing new. The only thing "new" in all of this is that the sentiment is that Uncle Sam is supposed to take responsibility for stupid people not researching what they were purchasing. 8-10% is NOTHING compared to the mid-80's.
Those of us who paid attention to the fact that interest rates were the lowest ever recorded, knew (just like anyone else who thought for two seconds about it) that the only direction to go was up. "Adjustable rate" and "it has to go up" meant that we locked in rates below 6% on fixed mortgages and counted our blessings. Now we're going to pay to bail out those who bought more than they could possibly EVER afford if the rates went up? Screw that.
It's not right. People need to take responsibility for their OWN actions.