I've got a 1440 and can quite easily have a shitty experience if I select the wrong settings (2x770GTX 4Gb).
Still, I'm happy as larry that the PC world has finally decided to leave 1080 panels behind. I was running higher res than 1080 for years, and then those pesky TV panels turned up everywhere and put us back years.
So let's ignore prices - why is a US graduate in IT worth 100k? Could their job be done by 3 people elsewhere for 30k each?
I'm in the UK, working with great people offshore, who are as good as me.
Only thing I can think of that justifies my salary versus my production, is racism (white guy in a decent suit) or my accompanying "Sense of privilege" in that I'll blurt out any idea that comes into my head (based upon turning up without having to have fought my way through all manner of useless numpties and have been politically-scarred) or...
I don't know. Just seems horrifically f'ed up and liable to be rightfully corrected in the near future.
in standard .@gmail.com format
All been fine for years - and then recently I've had:
1) Info from a Ford dealer in the US, discussing servicing, receipts for servicing etc. (In US, I'm in UK)
2) Gym membership that hasn't been paid in the UK - right up until collection agency was mailing me
3) Mobile phone bill in UK (but few hundred miles away), that's been purchased, and seems to pay each month.
4) Random US woman, who thinks I'm her newly married husband and told me "she loves me" (Googled, they did get married, but her husband hasn't my name).
Also been a few legitimate newsletters coming in, I've simply never subscribed to. Either google has some massive internal screw-up, or the world has become a shit-load more fat-fingered recently.
Ours tend to have graduated up through the ranks from dev, so to me it sounded like a fair suggestion.
However there's wide variance between companies - I've incredulously interviewed people unable to do a join..
This decision underlines that AMD wanted to make something great, that people would want and would buy - rather than being a vanity project for the company.
Been with nVidia for the last batch of GPUs and for last few CPUs - but I'm still rooting for them. The plucky, power-guzzling underdog:)
Maybe my next upgrade will switch me back to them, maybe it won't - but this decision at least shows me they've not lost their minds, and should still be considered.
What's refreshing is that they've recognized this. I'm reasonably sure this choice was the output of some rather heated meetings - but so.. 'refreshing' to see that the correct decision was made, for those people wanting to purchase the product.
Also gives a pretty good internal target for AMD - v2 of this box WILL have an AMD CPU in it (or else we're getting out of the CPU market).
I mean I quite like them in their place, like commenting and indenting - they seem nice to have and something you *should* do.
But... well we seem to have taken it a bit far. We let compiler/OS handle so much for us and yet we seem hell-bent on preserving this 'nickety' little annoyances.
Reverse the situation. You have great skills, but don't get hired as the useless guy/lady next to you bullshits, and gets the job.
Whilst not moral - I'd be tempted to equal their bullshit to get my foot in the door, and hope my ability covered me, whilst removing them. What else am I supposed to do. Hope this lot get found out and fired, then the next lot - and then eventually somebody decides to do their job and recognize *me* for my real abilities?
Poster above mentions "a whole team got fired" - was anybody onshore fired for managing to miss the fact an *entire team* was lying about their qualifications and abilities?
The offshore people I tend to respect and defer to are those who are a little bit older - with a spouse and maybe children. They've survived on their technical and social ability, have a track record, and aren't either fishing for their first job, nor hellbent on getting onshore somewhere.
What rankles is that they often get overlooked.
Linkedin and the like maybe help - but what I'd love to be able to do is give praise to great people and have onshore HR from another company pay attention.
I work for an international company with majority off-shore by headcount - and reasonable number brought on-shore
I get *very* pissy when people start disparaging my colleagues, solely because of where they came from and their visa status.
However - there is some truth in the complaints - the level of bullshit on CVs (not internally, but on prospective hires) is quite incredible - but I can see why. Entry level pays like shit, and more importantly you seem to get treated like shit - the goal set is to get on-shore or promoted off-shore. To get noticed.
Usually good people get promoted - but what *really* hurts me is where somebody I consider to be awesome isn't recognized by the larger company - mainly as they're expected to compete in the escalating CV-bullshit, and they refuse.
Personally I'm convinced the next step in corporate evolution is for us all to express our love for the genuinely great off-shore people we've worked with, some smart company to pick up on this (and then hopefully my ex-colleagues will hand me a token job in this timezone out of gratitude).
Can only speak for myself - but I did biochem, then a masters in bioinformatics (mainly as my degree had taught me I didn't enjoy it, and seemed sensible to not throw away what I'd learnt and add some IT to it, which I'd always enjoyed).
I then got an entry level IT job on the basis of (I believe) 20 hours of formal java and maybe 10 of formal Oracle (plus maybe double that in labs) - and threw away all my biochemistry.
Company that employed me had just left their startup phase - but mainly seemed to employ anybody they liked and had an interesting chat with in the interview. I never quite worked out if this was deliberate, or just a consequence of HR being pretty non-existent
Initially I thought I'd "chanced it" - but then eventually the scales were lifted from my eyes as I found out what everybody else had done prior. Plenty of arts doctorates. Maybe it was a mass experiment, but I wasn't an exception.
Bit I look back fondly on was that we all mucked in and I learnt so much from those around me and the liberal pile of O'Reilly books scattered around. I thought I was catching up on my formal IT education - but again, looking back, I wasn't - was just a continuation of what I'd done before. Stumbling my way through with plenty of swearing, beer, with the odd moment of breakthrough and inspiration.
Without the rose-tinted glasses, there was an awful lot of knowing what I wanted to do, needed to do, and blindly running around screaming for help from my colleagues (which was given - and I loved giving to anybody who needed it in turn).
Then we got bought by big-scarey-international-market-behemoth, and I had a few years of misery. Again, looking back, I can see why I hated it. Everybody was told to sit in their little silo and stay there. I loathed that. But again, looking back, it's really really useful to learn what you hate.
I'm still with them, as I got dropped into a pilot project with a bunch of smart and lovely people (including the customer).
Notionally I'm a "solution architect" now - which I'd always used to think meant I should be leading from the front with my unequalled vision and expertise (maybe it does, and I'm just a shit SA). My view is that it's simply to sketch out what we collectively need to do, and let those with real ability drift in to have a go, whilst covering them from above. I'll probably look back in another few year though, and realize I'm massively deluded, again.
Back to the points of the story and what I've learnt in 15 years of chancing it in an environment I don't officially belong
1) You're not the best at anything. You might, if you're lucky, be the best at most of what you need to do - but mainly you're going to be relying on others. Both to do the work, and to learn from. Accept this, be open - *never* tell anybody their thought is unimportant. Worst you can do is teach why it won't work - Best is that you realize you're wrong and you get better.
2) Follow-on: Don't micro-manage. You don't like it happening to you, you don't do it to others. More importantly, people try different approaches - if they feel they're on the right path, they'll stick to it. But, if they decide they want to try another tack, for god's sake let them - rather than making them justify themselves (they've already have to convince themselves).
3) "Science" is a method. It gives you a great big pile of tools/understanding to build on - but no reason it can't be improved. No. That's not right. Everything you have is an improvement on what went before - and it's your job to improve it more. You're not going to win a Nobel, but you should make things better - and nothing, nothing feels better than solving a problem with that feeling of 'elegance'.
Actually, I'll finish on 'elegance' - I've been subjected to all manner of methodologies and management techniques - but 'elegance' is what makes me happy and usually gets completely ignored (with exception of bland terms like 're-use')
I'd always taken science to be true, over the arts. The answer lay with
Ubisoft, who are right up there with EA released Valiant Hearts, which from editorial seems to have been borne from a desire of their internal "drones"
MS and Sony have both released a plethora of great Indie stuff on their platforms
The PC's renaissance is leading the pack mind - but I've never in my life had so many great and different games exposed to me as a have today.
Maybe "big business" can't create art - but it can certainly provide an environment in which it can flourish, and hand over a percentage of sales.
I'm sure we can argue over the details - but gaming is getting more commercial by the year, and I've never had games so good.
But my memory of what's special about Pancreatic Cancer - is that you are f*cked to a high degree of certainty if you get it.
Not the most common type of cancer, and there are many types of it - but for those with this cancer, in this place, it's pretty damn important as there weren't a surfeit of alternatives.
If somebody could point to some line that Asad's Syria (or whoever you perceive to be an enemy), refused to cross, but the CIA/NSA/GCHQ did...
Well I'd be very surprised.
I'm British. I like my "western, secular, demcocracy"
But then our governments have shown no sign of respecting any limits either.
I think we find ourselves today existing in a world where every power, will do whatever it can, and answers to nobody. I don't like it, I've seen the 'revelations' but none of us seem to have stepped up and prosecuted any hypocrisy.
Defending something should come with a cost.
Defending is supposed to be about making a stand.
If your justify your defending by ripping up your own rules, then you've tainted yourself forevermore.
on their screens - speaking for myself.
Extending that - I as a purchaser of games don't give a flying fig what engine was used - but I'll judge the devs I gave my money to on their decision.
I'm assuming the 'freeness' of commercial offerings is based upon trying to get devs to use their software and then taking a percentage if it ever takes off and sells.
So, what you're asking is a question to the devs - what to the commercial offerings that might skim from your future income offer, that OOS doesn't?
My guess would be a huge amount of support/tools, that OOS doesn't, and is only ever going to take a small percentage of your profit (if you make any).
Rah capitalism.
CM is 'nice' but (and I might be being cowardly here) - has enough rough edges and battery hammering on their bleeding edge stuff, to make me want to shy away.
If you want 'latest stock' ideally get a Nexus or a "Google Play edition" phone (which you can 'upgrade' your carrier bollocksed phone to easily enough if they support your model).
Should phone vendor specific bells and whistles be your thing, or there's no Google play rom, then just randonly pick a foreign GSM carrier that got their release out early (normally as they didn't mess too much with the original, unlike some of the larger mobile companies who seem to feel 'they know best' (and want their useless music store cluttering up your phone)).
*points to XDA developers*
Entirely without bothering to google the information and randomly grabbing the headline examples that come to mind - HP, bad, Yahoo, good, GM, bad etc.
*shrugs*
I simply think that a company that it less set in its historical ways (men strong and better) has more flexibility - and is therefore more likely to promote a woman if she's the best person for the job.
I happen to work for an evil-capitalistic-Israeli-mega-corp. I could bang on about their shortcomings for a very long time - *but* - they do have a pretty enlightened gender oblivious attitude - and we're better for it.
Oh I'm wandering off-topic here - but my point is mainly that if you consider men and women, on average, to be equally competent and the current sausage-party of male-dominated everything to therefore be a historical hangover, then it's not a huge leap to realize that more progressive companies, are more likely be succeeding and also to have plonked a female CEO on the seat.
That assumes the product owner is developing what's needed - not they shiny new feature he was able to sell to the product budget holder.
Also assumes that the people deploying/using the software are involved in the Agile process.
i.e. Product may be developed in an Agile way, but if product just releases a new version every year, that emerges from a black-box, then it really doesn't matter what methodology was followed.
and really wasn't complaining even about the groups - more just the environment they've all been put in (apart from marketing, who should all be shot... as long as they keep selling the stuff that pays my salary... OK, I'll give some of them a pass..).
The guy leading the scrum team, who tells me he sees the issue and isn't going to fix it, isn't personally being a bastard. Actually, he's probably a pretty good leader, protecting his team from my random requests, leading to team late nights, leading to tester queries and defects all based around something he wasn't supposed to be doing in the first place.
It has to come top down. At one end there's a happy customer throwing money at us for our flexible "can-do" attitude - and it's just making sure that money and accompanying 'kudos' attaches itself to everybody in the chain. If you've got hard walls between depts in that chain, each one just seems to want to shaft the ones on either side of it - skim off as much as they can as it goes from the customer to dev. So, when it reaches dev finally they look at the risk/reward and (rightly) determine it's not worth the effort - so nobody benefits.
My counter-view (sitting, between product and customer).
Product have made something that's not quite right. We ask them to fix it. They don't want to, as they're adding the latest shiny new feature instead.
This makes sense to them, shiney got given budget, fixing something would mean them admitting they screwed up before and there'll be a teensy bit less shiny/budget. They don't like doing that.
So, I have to fix it. I can't charge the customer more, I can't internally pay product less, so I just got myself some additional work.
I can then repeat this process for each customer - or hope that product pick up the fix/feature and integrate it.
This second favoured option whilst easiest for me, sticks in the craw a bit as it's not really motivating product to actually make what we need - throw something out the door, and it'll get fixed if we missed anything important.
Now, obviously you get to point when you lose your rag a bit - and tell the customer it's all borked, tell them to escalate it, and sit back as product fixes product. This can only be used rarely, too often and the customer twigs it's all messed up internally.
A better alternative, and something we seem to be moving towards, is to slice the company the other way - Take chunks of sales, site, delivery, support, product to create a 'functional slice' through all of them. Common purpose, common(ish) pot of money - "We" have a problem, "We" need to fix, or our whole slice is screwed (and the multi-VP shit will rain down equally on all of us).
Above still isn't perfect (more services, than product) but even as a small step, if you get product closer to the customer it improves. Not just people feel more involved in actually providing a solution, but helps shape the product roadmap - These aren't just new "Shiny Features" - They're "A Shiny feature we know if we add to the product, has landed us all another million dollars in the next release".
I guess if I had to sum it up, it's just being more open and then trying to align all the interests. People want to do a good job, but asking them to sacrifice themselves to do something they'll never be rewarded for just demeans and pisses them off, which leads to resentment, which leads to the internal barriers, fiefdoms and all the rest.
I seem to originally recall when he was first arrested, that he was charged with actually having people killed.
This having been proudly announced before they actually knew who these people were, had any bodies, just ridiculously, laughable over-charging (and clearly designed to bias whatever came next).
I'm interest to see where this all goes - but so far it appears to be utter bollocks and lies (now) from both sides.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got a 1440 and can quite easily have a shitty experience if I select the wrong settings (2x770GTX 4Gb).
Still, I'm happy as larry that the PC world has finally decided to leave 1080 panels behind. I was running higher res than 1080 for years, and then those pesky TV panels turned up everywhere and put us back years.
So let's ignore prices - why is a US graduate in IT worth 100k? Could their job be done by 3 people elsewhere for 30k each?
I'm in the UK, working with great people offshore, who are as good as me.
Only thing I can think of that justifies my salary versus my production, is racism (white guy in a decent suit) or my accompanying "Sense of privilege" in that I'll blurt out any idea that comes into my head (based upon turning up without having to have fought my way through all manner of useless numpties and have been politically-scarred) or...
I don't know. Just seems horrifically f'ed up and liable to be rightfully corrected in the near future.
in standard .@gmail.com format
All been fine for years - and then recently I've had:
1) Info from a Ford dealer in the US, discussing servicing, receipts for servicing etc. (In US, I'm in UK)
2) Gym membership that hasn't been paid in the UK - right up until collection agency was mailing me
3) Mobile phone bill in UK (but few hundred miles away), that's been purchased, and seems to pay each month.
4) Random US woman, who thinks I'm her newly married husband and told me "she loves me" (Googled, they did get married, but her husband hasn't my name).
Also been a few legitimate newsletters coming in, I've simply never subscribed to. Either google has some massive internal screw-up, or the world has become a shit-load more fat-fingered recently.
"Mr Escobar has offered $100 meellion, if the State of Washington commits to no longer search lockers"
Ours tend to have graduated up through the ranks from dev, so to me it sounded like a fair suggestion.
However there's wide variance between companies - I've incredulously interviewed people unable to do a join..
This decision underlines that AMD wanted to make something great, that people would want and would buy - rather than being a vanity project for the company. :)
Been with nVidia for the last batch of GPUs and for last few CPUs - but I'm still rooting for them. The plucky, power-guzzling underdog
Maybe my next upgrade will switch me back to them, maybe it won't - but this decision at least shows me they've not lost their minds, and should still be considered.
What's refreshing is that they've recognized this. I'm reasonably sure this choice was the output of some rather heated meetings - but so.. 'refreshing' to see that the correct decision was made, for those people wanting to purchase the product.
Also gives a pretty good internal target for AMD - v2 of this box WILL have an AMD CPU in it (or else we're getting out of the CPU market).
and typing of variables then?
I mean I quite like them in their place, like commenting and indenting - they seem nice to have and something you *should* do.
But... well we seem to have taken it a bit far. We let compiler/OS handle so much for us and yet we seem hell-bent on preserving this 'nickety' little annoyances.
and the story?
Reverse the situation. You have great skills, but don't get hired as the useless guy/lady next to you bullshits, and gets the job.
Whilst not moral - I'd be tempted to equal their bullshit to get my foot in the door, and hope my ability covered me, whilst removing them. What else am I supposed to do. Hope this lot get found out and fired, then the next lot - and then eventually somebody decides to do their job and recognize *me* for my real abilities?
Poster above mentions "a whole team got fired" - was anybody onshore fired for managing to miss the fact an *entire team* was lying about their qualifications and abilities?
The offshore people I tend to respect and defer to are those who are a little bit older - with a spouse and maybe children. They've survived on their technical and social ability, have a track record, and aren't either fishing for their first job, nor hellbent on getting onshore somewhere.
What rankles is that they often get overlooked.
Linkedin and the like maybe help - but what I'd love to be able to do is give praise to great people and have onshore HR from another company pay attention.
I work for an international company with majority off-shore by headcount - and reasonable number brought on-shore
I get *very* pissy when people start disparaging my colleagues, solely because of where they came from and their visa status.
However - there is some truth in the complaints - the level of bullshit on CVs (not internally, but on prospective hires) is quite incredible - but I can see why. Entry level pays like shit, and more importantly you seem to get treated like shit - the goal set is to get on-shore or promoted off-shore. To get noticed.
Usually good people get promoted - but what *really* hurts me is where somebody I consider to be awesome isn't recognized by the larger company - mainly as they're expected to compete in the escalating CV-bullshit, and they refuse.
Personally I'm convinced the next step in corporate evolution is for us all to express our love for the genuinely great off-shore people we've worked with, some smart company to pick up on this (and then hopefully my ex-colleagues will hand me a token job in this timezone out of gratitude).
Can only speak for myself - but I did biochem, then a masters in bioinformatics (mainly as my degree had taught me I didn't enjoy it, and seemed sensible to not throw away what I'd learnt and add some IT to it, which I'd always enjoyed).
I then got an entry level IT job on the basis of (I believe) 20 hours of formal java and maybe 10 of formal Oracle (plus maybe double that in labs) - and threw away all my biochemistry.
Company that employed me had just left their startup phase - but mainly seemed to employ anybody they liked and had an interesting chat with in the interview. I never quite worked out if this was deliberate, or just a consequence of HR being pretty non-existent
Initially I thought I'd "chanced it" - but then eventually the scales were lifted from my eyes as I found out what everybody else had done prior. Plenty of arts doctorates. Maybe it was a mass experiment, but I wasn't an exception.
Bit I look back fondly on was that we all mucked in and I learnt so much from those around me and the liberal pile of O'Reilly books scattered around. I thought I was catching up on my formal IT education - but again, looking back, I wasn't - was just a continuation of what I'd done before. Stumbling my way through with plenty of swearing, beer, with the odd moment of breakthrough and inspiration.
Without the rose-tinted glasses, there was an awful lot of knowing what I wanted to do, needed to do, and blindly running around screaming for help from my colleagues (which was given - and I loved giving to anybody who needed it in turn).
Then we got bought by big-scarey-international-market-behemoth, and I had a few years of misery. Again, looking back, I can see why I hated it. Everybody was told to sit in their little silo and stay there. I loathed that. But again, looking back, it's really really useful to learn what you hate.
I'm still with them, as I got dropped into a pilot project with a bunch of smart and lovely people (including the customer).
Notionally I'm a "solution architect" now - which I'd always used to think meant I should be leading from the front with my unequalled vision and expertise (maybe it does, and I'm just a shit SA). My view is that it's simply to sketch out what we collectively need to do, and let those with real ability drift in to have a go, whilst covering them from above. I'll probably look back in another few year though, and realize I'm massively deluded, again.
Back to the points of the story and what I've learnt in 15 years of chancing it in an environment I don't officially belong
1) You're not the best at anything. You might, if you're lucky, be the best at most of what you need to do - but mainly you're going to be relying on others. Both to do the work, and to learn from. Accept this, be open - *never* tell anybody their thought is unimportant. Worst you can do is teach why it won't work - Best is that you realize you're wrong and you get better.
2) Follow-on: Don't micro-manage. You don't like it happening to you, you don't do it to others. More importantly, people try different approaches - if they feel they're on the right path, they'll stick to it. But, if they decide they want to try another tack, for god's sake let them - rather than making them justify themselves (they've already have to convince themselves).
3) "Science" is a method. It gives you a great big pile of tools/understanding to build on - but no reason it can't be improved. No. That's not right. Everything you have is an improvement on what went before - and it's your job to improve it more. You're not going to win a Nobel, but you should make things better - and nothing, nothing feels better than solving a problem with that feeling of 'elegance'.
Actually, I'll finish on 'elegance' - I've been subjected to all manner of methodologies and management techniques - but 'elegance' is what makes me happy and usually gets completely ignored (with exception of bland terms like 're-use')
I'd always taken science to be true, over the arts. The answer lay with
Ubisoft, who are right up there with EA released Valiant Hearts, which from editorial seems to have been borne from a desire of their internal "drones"
MS and Sony have both released a plethora of great Indie stuff on their platforms
The PC's renaissance is leading the pack mind - but I've never in my life had so many great and different games exposed to me as a have today.
Maybe "big business" can't create art - but it can certainly provide an environment in which it can flourish, and hand over a percentage of sales.
I'm sure we can argue over the details - but gaming is getting more commercial by the year, and I've never had games so good.
But my memory of what's special about Pancreatic Cancer - is that you are f*cked to a high degree of certainty if you get it.
Not the most common type of cancer, and there are many types of it - but for those with this cancer, in this place, it's pretty damn important as there weren't a surfeit of alternatives.
If somebody could point to some line that Asad's Syria (or whoever you perceive to be an enemy), refused to cross, but the CIA/NSA/GCHQ did...
Well I'd be very surprised.
I'm British. I like my "western, secular, demcocracy"
But then our governments have shown no sign of respecting any limits either.
I think we find ourselves today existing in a world where every power, will do whatever it can, and answers to nobody. I don't like it, I've seen the 'revelations' but none of us seem to have stepped up and prosecuted any hypocrisy.
Defending something should come with a cost.
Defending is supposed to be about making a stand.
If your justify your defending by ripping up your own rules, then you've tainted yourself forevermore.
on their screens - speaking for myself.
Extending that - I as a purchaser of games don't give a flying fig what engine was used - but I'll judge the devs I gave my money to on their decision.
I'm assuming the 'freeness' of commercial offerings is based upon trying to get devs to use their software and then taking a percentage if it ever takes off and sells.
So, what you're asking is a question to the devs - what to the commercial offerings that might skim from your future income offer, that OOS doesn't?
My guess would be a huge amount of support/tools, that OOS doesn't, and is only ever going to take a small percentage of your profit (if you make any).
Rah capitalism.
CM is 'nice' but (and I might be being cowardly here) - has enough rough edges and battery hammering on their bleeding edge stuff, to make me want to shy away.
If you want 'latest stock' ideally get a Nexus or a "Google Play edition" phone (which you can 'upgrade' your carrier bollocksed phone to easily enough if they support your model).
Should phone vendor specific bells and whistles be your thing, or there's no Google play rom, then just randonly pick a foreign GSM carrier that got their release out early (normally as they didn't mess too much with the original, unlike some of the larger mobile companies who seem to feel 'they know best' (and want their useless music store cluttering up your phone)).
*points to XDA developers*
Entirely without bothering to google the information and randomly grabbing the headline examples that come to mind - HP, bad, Yahoo, good, GM, bad etc.
*shrugs*
I simply think that a company that it less set in its historical ways (men strong and better) has more flexibility - and is therefore more likely to promote a woman if she's the best person for the job.
I happen to work for an evil-capitalistic-Israeli-mega-corp. I could bang on about their shortcomings for a very long time - *but* - they do have a pretty enlightened gender oblivious attitude - and we're better for it.
Oh I'm wandering off-topic here - but my point is mainly that if you consider men and women, on average, to be equally competent and the current sausage-party of male-dominated everything to therefore be a historical hangover, then it's not a huge leap to realize that more progressive companies, are more likely be succeeding and also to have plonked a female CEO on the seat.
I do care about the f'in abysmal quality of it..
That assumes the product owner is developing what's needed - not they shiny new feature he was able to sell to the product budget holder.
Also assumes that the people deploying/using the software are involved in the Agile process.
i.e. Product may be developed in an Agile way, but if product just releases a new version every year, that emerges from a black-box, then it really doesn't matter what methodology was followed.
and really wasn't complaining even about the groups - more just the environment they've all been put in (apart from marketing, who should all be shot... as long as they keep selling the stuff that pays my salary... OK, I'll give some of them a pass..).
The guy leading the scrum team, who tells me he sees the issue and isn't going to fix it, isn't personally being a bastard. Actually, he's probably a pretty good leader, protecting his team from my random requests, leading to team late nights, leading to tester queries and defects all based around something he wasn't supposed to be doing in the first place.
It has to come top down. At one end there's a happy customer throwing money at us for our flexible "can-do" attitude - and it's just making sure that money and accompanying 'kudos' attaches itself to everybody in the chain. If you've got hard walls between depts in that chain, each one just seems to want to shaft the ones on either side of it - skim off as much as they can as it goes from the customer to dev. So, when it reaches dev finally they look at the risk/reward and (rightly) determine it's not worth the effort - so nobody benefits.
My counter-view (sitting, between product and customer).
Product have made something that's not quite right. We ask them to fix it. They don't want to, as they're adding the latest shiny new feature instead.
This makes sense to them, shiney got given budget, fixing something would mean them admitting they screwed up before and there'll be a teensy bit less shiny/budget. They don't like doing that.
So, I have to fix it. I can't charge the customer more, I can't internally pay product less, so I just got myself some additional work.
I can then repeat this process for each customer - or hope that product pick up the fix/feature and integrate it.
This second favoured option whilst easiest for me, sticks in the craw a bit as it's not really motivating product to actually make what we need - throw something out the door, and it'll get fixed if we missed anything important.
Now, obviously you get to point when you lose your rag a bit - and tell the customer it's all borked, tell them to escalate it, and sit back as product fixes product. This can only be used rarely, too often and the customer twigs it's all messed up internally.
A better alternative, and something we seem to be moving towards, is to slice the company the other way - Take chunks of sales, site, delivery, support, product to create a 'functional slice' through all of them. Common purpose, common(ish) pot of money - "We" have a problem, "We" need to fix, or our whole slice is screwed (and the multi-VP shit will rain down equally on all of us).
Above still isn't perfect (more services, than product) but even as a small step, if you get product closer to the customer it improves. Not just people feel more involved in actually providing a solution, but helps shape the product roadmap - These aren't just new "Shiny Features" - They're "A Shiny feature we know if we add to the product, has landed us all another million dollars in the next release".
I guess if I had to sum it up, it's just being more open and then trying to align all the interests. People want to do a good job, but asking them to sacrifice themselves to do something they'll never be rewarded for just demeans and pisses them off, which leads to resentment, which leads to the internal barriers, fiefdoms and all the rest.
I seem to originally recall when he was first arrested, that he was charged with actually having people killed.
This having been proudly announced before they actually knew who these people were, had any bodies, just ridiculously, laughable over-charging (and clearly designed to bias whatever came next).
I'm interest to see where this all goes - but so far it appears to be utter bollocks and lies (now) from both sides.
He didn't.
Having oil traded in dollars seems to be working out reasonably well for some.