Do they really need it that bad? Why don't they just take ten thousand hoses to ten thousand cows and hook them up butt first? They'd have all the methane they could ever need and help preserve the ozone layer at the same time.
Ummm, no. Take a close look at shuttle liftoff pics and you'll see the rudder on the vertical stabilizer activated to roll the shuttle onto its back.
Still, great point about it not being the jet. This thing never entered the phase of testing the jet.
To be an effective technical person, you have to have an RTFM atttitude. The RTFM attitude is one of self-reliance; it says that if there's no one else in the room but me and this problem, the problem is damn well gonna get solved. Results are everything.
However, if you want to sell devices (that get used, that don't get returned, that get a good buzz, and that lead to a good overall reputation for the company producing the device) you have to provide users with a positive experience. And, for better or worse, Reading the F'ing Manual is not what most users consider a quality experience.
Most users are expert in only one thing: what they want. To me, a high-quality user interface lets the user walk up to the interface knowing what they want, and they can quickly figure out how to get it, with little to no mental effort required.
Give the people what they want, and they'll come back for more.
I have to disagree. You are arguing as a man (human) of principle, and assuming that the law is the embodiment of principle. In practice, however, if you've got the bucks, you can make life hell for a mere mortal by making shit up that sounds reasonable enough and then filing your complaint. Not because it's right, but because it's in your interest and you can.
Cingular is a corporation, and they are not going to do what they *should* but what they *can*. They've decided (I'm guessing) that they can get maximum network utilization by cutting out those who are some of the biggest bandwidth users, when most of these are not going to complain. How many people would really stand up and fight for this?
Wait a minute! Didn't you read Heinlein's Between Planets? Asimov's Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus? What about the froglike peoples below the sea? Don't confuse us with science!
Are you serious? Get a grip. Upper management doesn't care about technology; they care about winning, and the only reason you have a job is because your work supports (in some small or large way, more or less directly) the strategic objectives of the owners of your company. It's very possible that upper management likes you personally, but that's irrelevant -- if they could succeed as a business without having to pay your salary, they would.
Yeah, man, you got that right. He did good with: 1) catching her off guard, for maximum emotional impact, and 2) declaring her lovability in public, for the whole world to see.
Then he definitely needs to be there in person for the follow-up and to close the deal. Doing the whole thing online we be just too nerdy. "OK, great, see you in June at the wedding."
A *big* consideration in my book is the fact that the law pretty much says companies have to pay you on time if you're a W-2 employee. There is apparently an unwritten law that if you're a contractor then you can be used by the company to help them manage their cash flow ie pay you when they feel it. YMMV but it's worht considering.
That's an interesting idea, this division of labor. I've tried it a few times with Age of Empires, with no luck. The main problem: communication bandwidth between me and my teammates. Couldn't talk about events fast enough to be tightly coordinated as a team, so it always devolved into loosely-coordinated individual players working for team victory.
What seems to work in getting around the bandwidth limit is playing with the same people all the time: don't have to communicate when you know their style. Would be fun to try with my teammates sitting next to me.
As much fun as it is to build a grand and complex strategy then set it in motion, I think the successful strategy contains the following rather simple elements:
1. make sure the battle is in your enemy's front yard rather than in your own
2. get the enemy off balance, so that he is responding to your actions rather than the other way around
3. fight the fire, not the flames, i.e. extinguish his productive capacity rather than just killing off his military units
These elements call for an early attack, targeted against the workers, and continued unrelenting attack of increasing intensity. Once you've done this, the law of accelerating returns is on your side, and victory is only a matter of time.
Although I guess you could use a combined strategy: once you have him on the ropes, you may have time to sit back and build up to the grand strategic coup de grace which demonstrates your style and consummate skill.
How about letting you build up a base of AI rules that you invoke while you play? Every human has limits, so there's only so much you can do / invent / control / comprehend during real-time game play, but if you can apply your cleverness ahead of the game then unleash AI hell on your command, that could be cool.
OK maybe not a disorder -- it's a matter of degree -- but we all know the type, and many of us are them: hasta hasta hasta be the special one, the center of attention, has to be different, on top, front and center, the star.
If you've read Miller's "Drama of the Gifted Child" you understand this type of person. These people have tremendous unmet needs (no need to go into the psychogenesis here, read the book). If you as a manager can meet those needs, they will perform for you beyond expectations. Meeting those needs requires one simple thing: you have to help them feel good about themselves, valued, safe and secure, because they never learned how to do it for themselves when they were younger.
This simple thing isn't so simple, though, especially since many technology managers are themselves former geeks -- insecure, hypercompetitive types to whom the idea of building someone else's ego is the very last thing to occur to them. Not everyone can effectively manage the gifted and driven. Done right, however, the return on a manager's interpersonal investment can be significant.
Every team has room for a star, but to give the star slot to someone without the star abilities risks at least two bad things: having the rest of the team laugh them out of the office (bad outcome), and having other potential stars perform at less than their full ability (why is this person getting the glory when I'm better than him?).
So, as a hiring manager, you have to ask yourself a couple questions:
does this person have stellar abilities that make it worth the extra effort?
am i willing to provide the frequent ego-stroking required to keep them performing at a high level?
are the team and the organization willing to support me in providing this individual with the social identity of "the gifted one"?
There's more you can say, but I think this is the essence of it.
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Do they really need it that bad? Why don't they just take ten thousand hoses to ten thousand cows and hook them up butt first? They'd have all the methane they could ever need and help preserve the ozone layer at the same time.
Ummm, no. Take a close look at shuttle liftoff pics and you'll see the rudder on the vertical stabilizer activated to roll the shuttle onto its back. Still, great point about it not being the jet. This thing never entered the phase of testing the jet.
To be an effective technical person, you have to have an RTFM atttitude. The RTFM attitude is one of self-reliance; it says that if there's no one else in the room but me and this problem, the problem is damn well gonna get solved. Results are everything.
However, if you want to sell devices (that get used, that don't get returned, that get a good buzz, and that lead to a good overall reputation for the company producing the device) you have to provide users with a positive experience. And, for better or worse, Reading the F'ing Manual is not what most users consider a quality experience. Most users are expert in only one thing: what they want. To me, a high-quality user interface lets the user walk up to the interface knowing what they want, and they can quickly figure out how to get it, with little to no mental effort required. Give the people what they want, and they'll come back for more.
I have to disagree. You are arguing as a man (human) of principle, and assuming that the law is the embodiment of principle. In practice, however, if you've got the bucks, you can make life hell for a mere mortal by making shit up that sounds reasonable enough and then filing your complaint. Not because it's right, but because it's in your interest and you can.
Cingular is a corporation, and they are not going to do what they *should* but what they *can*. They've decided (I'm guessing) that they can get maximum network utilization by cutting out those who are some of the biggest bandwidth users, when most of these are not going to complain. How many people would really stand up and fight for this?
Funny. They weren't too picky about the domain name. http://www.spiderman.sonypictures.com/
Wait a minute! Didn't you read Heinlein's Between Planets? Asimov's Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus? What about the froglike peoples below the sea? Don't confuse us with science!
Are you serious? Get a grip. Upper management doesn't care about technology; they care about winning, and the only reason you have a job is because your work supports (in some small or large way, more or less directly) the strategic objectives of the owners of your company. It's very possible that upper management likes you personally, but that's irrelevant -- if they could succeed as a business without having to pay your salary, they would.
Yeah, man, you got that right. He did good with: 1) catching her off guard, for maximum emotional impact, and 2) declaring her lovability in public, for the whole world to see. Then he definitely needs to be there in person for the follow-up and to close the deal. Doing the whole thing online we be just too nerdy. "OK, great, see you in June at the wedding."
A *big* consideration in my book is the fact that the law pretty much says companies have to pay you on time if you're a W-2 employee. There is apparently an unwritten law that if you're a contractor then you can be used by the company to help them manage their cash flow ie pay you when they feel it. YMMV but it's worht considering.
That's an interesting idea, this division of labor. I've tried it a few times with Age of Empires, with no luck. The main problem: communication bandwidth between me and my teammates. Couldn't talk about events fast enough to be tightly coordinated as a team, so it always devolved into loosely-coordinated individual players working for team victory. What seems to work in getting around the bandwidth limit is playing with the same people all the time: don't have to communicate when you know their style. Would be fun to try with my teammates sitting next to me.
As much fun as it is to build a grand and complex strategy then set it in motion, I think the successful strategy contains the following rather simple elements: 1. make sure the battle is in your enemy's front yard rather than in your own 2. get the enemy off balance, so that he is responding to your actions rather than the other way around 3. fight the fire, not the flames, i.e. extinguish his productive capacity rather than just killing off his military units These elements call for an early attack, targeted against the workers, and continued unrelenting attack of increasing intensity. Once you've done this, the law of accelerating returns is on your side, and victory is only a matter of time. Although I guess you could use a combined strategy: once you have him on the ropes, you may have time to sit back and build up to the grand strategic coup de grace which demonstrates your style and consummate skill.
Which is, I guess, a restatement of your concept.
How about letting you build up a base of AI rules that you invoke while you play? Every human has limits, so there's only so much you can do / invent / control / comprehend during real-time game play, but if you can apply your cleverness ahead of the game then unleash AI hell on your command, that could be cool.
OK maybe not a disorder -- it's a matter of degree -- but we all know the type, and many of us are them: hasta hasta hasta be the special one, the center of attention, has to be different, on top, front and center, the star.
If you've read Miller's "Drama of the Gifted Child" you understand this type of person. These people have tremendous unmet needs (no need to go into the psychogenesis here, read the book). If you as a manager can meet those needs, they will perform for you beyond expectations. Meeting those needs requires one simple thing: you have to help them feel good about themselves, valued, safe and secure, because they never learned how to do it for themselves when they were younger.
This simple thing isn't so simple, though, especially since many technology managers are themselves former geeks -- insecure, hypercompetitive types to whom the idea of building someone else's ego is the very last thing to occur to them. Not everyone can effectively manage the gifted and driven. Done right, however, the return on a manager's interpersonal investment can be significant.
Every team has room for a star, but to give the star slot to someone without the star abilities risks at least two bad things: having the rest of the team laugh them out of the office (bad outcome), and having other potential stars perform at less than their full ability (why is this person getting the glory when I'm better than him?).
So, as a hiring manager, you have to ask yourself a couple questions:
does this person have stellar abilities that make it worth the extra effort?
am i willing to provide the frequent ego-stroking required to keep them performing at a high level?
are the team and the organization willing to support me in providing this individual with the social identity of "the gifted one"?
There's more you can say, but I think this is the essence of it.