Generally CEOs can't do any work at all. It's best to escape them from our discussion lest we get political.
However, my statement was scoped to one level below and one level above. Anything more than that is reaching. Reaching isn't bad, but it's outside of the scope of this discussion. It's not necessary that the CEO understand how to deliver mail. It is essential that he understand the modes of business.
"Requires Windows XP" Is a good way to say "is insufficently examined." Especially if it's a USB device.
The USB port can be spied. There is no USB device that can withstand thorough inspection. If there is a USB device you would like to use that is not available now, it will soon be because there exists someone somewhere who also needs it who is also good with code and who does not mind to share in hope that you too might have some good ideas.
Your previous clueful boss bailed out and was replaced by a clueless one. This isn't your fault. It isn't your former boss's fault - he doesn't owe you to continue to improve your situation after he's bailed out when he's got his.
You have a new clueless boss. This is an environment ripe for workplace entertainment. I leave it to you to figure out how best to optimize your amusement here. If you can't make a lot of money at least you can have a lot of fun.
Thanks for sharing your opinion with us, AC. I value your opinion even if you're not willing to back it up with a pseudonym, even though many other/.ers wouldn't.
Your guesses are wrong though. My people are glad to find work and most of them find permanent positions with our customers after gaining reasonable experience with me. At this point I have more former employees placed with customers as permanent employees than I have working for me. I claim the credit for orienting them toward the customer's need and little more. Many who have skills but who can't do that find work here briefly. Some few find themselves in IT accidently because it was "work they can get." We're the "farm team". Some of our alumni go on to be Cisco and Citrix engineers or find homes as techs in the IT departments of our customers. The rest move on in search of the role that is right for them.
In the meantime we deliver what the customer needs -- whatever that is. My job isn't to hire, fire, or manage people. It's to deliver what the customer needs. Those other things are just methods of accomplishing that goal. I have yet to fail, but if I start to do so I know what to expect and both my unders and my overs are prepared for that.
If you don't have a single employee who has a skill that you don't, then your real failure is in hiring.
No, if I have a single employee who has a skill that I don't, the problem is my boss's hiring me. He should have hired somebody more qualified to lead my team. If that ever happens, I have some people to recommend.
For example, I am the only person that does my job at my work site. My boss has zero ability to take over for me, she only understands what I do at a high level. She leaves me be, trusts me and pretty much lets me do what I want.
You have a "job" because there is work that needs to be done. If there is noone in your organization who could step up and fill in for you until a replacement for you could be found, that is not your fault. It is still not right.
You have a job because there is a job that needs to be done. If (heaven forfend!) you should be either unwilling or unable to do it and your manager hasn't planned for that, then they have failed. Your manager/team leader/supervisor has a job to do and part of that job is to keep the line moving; to keep the customer satisfied; even if you and all your coworkers are unwilling or unable to do the work. If they're not ready, they're not earning the money they're paid.
That was not supposed to happen. You made an insightful and interesting response to my post.
Managing people is a craft, and there are educational resources to teach people that craft. When an organization grows beyond a certain size it requires some people who are trained and skilled in this craft. The common practice is to compensate them disproportionately for this skill. Most of these people are quite proud of the fact that they don't know how to do anything other than manage people.
Given a choice I'd line all these sort up against a wall and shoot them. The company would do better, but that's probably insensitive, eh?
I think it's interesting that you think of the techs on your projects as "under you".
They're "under me" because I'm responsible for what they do. I am responsible for everything that happens "under me" on my watch. Does your organization have some different accountability system? That would be interesting.
But this is wholly dependent on the project itself, some projects it's wise to have these kinds of managers. For others they are not required. Some knowledge definitely is required IMHO, but it doesn't have to be deep, and it is wholly dependent on the context.
The key ability is to be able to separate truth from what is not true, have enormous vision and foresight into the overview and people that others lack.
By this I expect you mean to confess that you're an IT middle manager in the classical sense. I would recommend you investigate opportunities in agricultural infrastructure. They need ditch diggers too.
Plus, I couldn't stand working for someone who thinks he/she can do my job as well as I can. This is insulting on many levels.
Then you've already failed. Your customers just don't know it yet.
But when there's something I don't know how to do, I hire someone.
If you're in this position it's your boss who's failed. He's hired someone who doesn't know his job.
there's no way that I can be good at everything.
It's not necessary to be good at everything. It's necessary to understand what you expect of your unders and what's expected of your overs so you can fill in at need. If you can't do this, you're a poor choice for your spot. Eventually it will work out but not to your benefit, or your customers will suffer your lack and then your customers will choose my company over yours the next time contracts are up for review. In the end water finds its own level.
I don't believe you have enough knowledge in all areas of IT to step in and replace anyone, as well as train their replacement..... You must run some small narrowly focused projects... The projects I have been involved with have involved SAN, Unix and network admins, DBA's, developers, BA's, etc, etc. There's no way that a PM could step in to any one of those roles, fill in at 100% capacity, train the replacement and still manage the project.
You don't believe. I shouldn't be trolled so easily, but ok. I've been trolled so let's just trot out our what-fors, shall we?
I learned machine language, Assembly, BASIC and APL on the IBM 5150 under Allen Schultz in 1980. He helped invent the "PC" and was in for a couple decades on that whole "VMS" thing. Several of the developers of the ADA "strawman" through "ironman" implementations are personal friends of mine. By 1986 I had solved all of the solveable classical problems in any language, was a published programmer, and had written my first program that is still in use today. Shortly thereafter I had written a program to write poetry sufficiently to get an A in high school poetry class, an AI to challenge Minerva, and explored the depths of the Mandelbrot. I've memorized all of the Communications of the ACM up to 1980, and I understand them. I've written several programming languages - each better than the last and none better than C. I was a certified network admin for Unix SVR3 in 1985. I've integrated databases, enabled printers, mastered the classical compression algorithms and written an indexing algorithm as good as Google's that you can't have because it belongs to me and me alone. You can use it here though. I gave up being a.com billionaire long before it became fashionable. I am a certified and certifiable member of the technolgy priest class.
I've used dozens of successful platforms and hundreds of unsuccessful ones. I know people. People who know stuff. I've tested more failed technologies than you've run successful ones. Here on slashdot I've enjoyed communication with most of the pantheon of IT names. Most of them I've agreed with, and some not.
Since school I've mastered all the languages that I care to. I consider programming a "solved problem" that is no longer interesting because I've plumbed its mysteries and found its depths in sufficient variety to know there is no more to learn. The odds are very good that I've installed more computers, fixed more computers, installed more versions of every operating system of every version, than you'll ever see, let alone do yourself - literally thousands of each.
All of the people I work for have just as interesting stories, and all of the people who work for me have interesting stories of their own.
All of this takes away from the point. I'm replaceable. You're replaceable. Get over it. Do your job well and know the jobs of your overs and unders. If you catch a bus your unders will be ready to step up - and if your overs catch a bus you'll be ready too. Your customers deserve no less.
By your logic, your boss should be able to step in and replace you.
In my particular case not only can he, but he got to be my boss by having my job and delegating responsibilities to grow the business. The same with his boss. Either of them has and can fill my role. That's how it should be and I'm preparing my unders to seize the opportunity. He expects me to do the same so both of us can move up to more responsible positions in a larger business by growing our business. If I fall out and I'm too lame to have juniors step right in, he's prepared to do that until he can bring others up to speed. If the day comes that I must take up his chores I'm ready to give it my best and to be replaced by someone better.
Again, it's about the customer. The customer does not need to worry about personnel details. When I recently I decided to swap out a key person in a customer facing role, I just did. The customer did not ask why because it's implied that I did so in their best interest and with due consideration for the inconvenience. They trust me in this role and they would trust my replacement also. We do what the customer needs done with minimum fuss or the customer hires somebody else. Period.
I once had a similar gig for a major newspaper. They had contracted the usual clueless newb to engineer their online presence. The app had a memory fault that crashed the server. They hired me to fix it so that it worked, and incidentally deny the original guy the pay for the contract. I found that a different method of memory allocation would eliminate the issues. Rather than telling my bosses about it, I called the original programmer and told him how to fix all three lines of code that were at fault. He revised it and it worked.
I lost my gig but I still feel good about it. Doing the right thing is not always in your immediate best interest. I'd feel bad about stealing the benefits from his work for three lousy lines of code.
The retarded newspaper editors - not so much. They haven't given up their horse-and-buggy-whip model of business. If they had kept me we would have fixed this issue by now. It's not too late to fix this but I no longer care about their welfare and they neither think I have the answer nor remember where to look for me to find their salvation. Such is the ebb and flow of business.
As usual, Cringely is right. The fat floats to the top.
I'm an IT project manager. If one of my peeps bailed and I couldn't step right in and fill their spot and train their replacement myself I would consider myself a failure. It's all about the customer and if we fail to meet the customer's needs because of this everybody involved has failed.
I had this conversation recently: "Can you replace X?" Answer: "Of course. If I couldn't, we both need replacing."
I've got people both under and over me. I fully expect both the unders and the overs to be able to step in and catch the load if I step in front of a bus. I don't want to catch a bus, and I don't want my unders and overs to do so either. But I'm prepared for either event and you should be too because if you can't you're neither responsible nor capable of advancement and that's a sad place to be.
That said, most days my role is reduced to catering. I let my peeps do their gig and I get stuff out of their way. Only the newbs need direction and they get over it right away.
As soon as they're oriented:
They're qualified to do what the customer needs.
They're authorized to do what the customer needs.
They're educated on how to replace me at need.
I'm only an IT project manager until my bosses find someone better. My techs only work for me until I find someone better. That's the way it is and that's the way it should be.
Hmm, this could solve the problem with trying to play content with proprietary codecs on Linux systems.
The solution to this problem is to ignore proprietary codecs. In time they all go away, stranding all the content encoded on them. All the smart people are done converting their data from one proprietary format into another. Once media are encoded in open standards they can remain there forever and you avoid the reencoding work for the rest of forever. If you have the White Album on MP3, you don't ever need to buy it again unless you lose all your backups. If you have it in Plays For Sure and you reencode it into AAC don't expect us to feel bad for you when your new format is deprecated.
I would probably have gone with USBspy because I'm not afraid of commercial software, I just prefer the other kind. I'm sure Sourceforge has something to solve the problem but I'm not actively seeking an answer today so it's better if the grandparent does the rest of this work himself.
A year and a half old. Even if Samsung hasn't released specs for it it's easy enough to spy on the USB port and get the protocol. That means that the only way there's no kernel driver for it is that it hadn't caught the attention of some kernel hacker enough to motivate him to write the code.
If it hasn't happened already, the granparent post, your post and this one should do the trick.
Behold the power of open source: where pointing out cool stuff is the same thing as hiring a crack team of engineers.
If people really understood about information security and countermeasures they'd probably close all their accounts, burn all their personal papers and do all their business under a randomly rotated set of deniable assumed names, in cash. That's pretty much how corporations and political figures do it -- they never do business in their own name without a layer of paper corporations or expendable underlings between themselves and an actual decision. In the current climate that's the only way to reliably build personal brand equity.
It isn't a bad idea actually... But me, I like a little risk. It's the spice of life. Now and then I'll even drink out of a public fountain, or (gasp) check my email over somebody else's network. Not on a Windows box, though. That's not exciting -- just irresponsible.
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You're a troll, but yes. I have five kids. I hope none of them ever meet you, but I'm preparing them for the sad event.
Generally CEOs can't do any work at all. It's best to escape them from our discussion lest we get political.
However, my statement was scoped to one level below and one level above. Anything more than that is reaching. Reaching isn't bad, but it's outside of the scope of this discussion. It's not necessary that the CEO understand how to deliver mail. It is essential that he understand the modes of business.
"Requires Windows XP" Is a good way to say "is insufficently examined." Especially if it's a USB device.
The USB port can be spied. There is no USB device that can withstand thorough inspection. If there is a USB device you would like to use that is not available now, it will soon be because there exists someone somewhere who also needs it who is also good with code and who does not mind to share in hope that you too might have some good ideas.
Your previous clueful boss bailed out and was replaced by a clueless one. This isn't your fault. It isn't your former boss's fault - he doesn't owe you to continue to improve your situation after he's bailed out when he's got his.
You have a new clueless boss. This is an environment ripe for workplace entertainment. I leave it to you to figure out how best to optimize your amusement here. If you can't make a lot of money at least you can have a lot of fun.
Thanks for sharing your opinion with us, AC. I value your opinion even if you're not willing to back it up with a pseudonym, even though many other /.ers wouldn't.
Your guesses are wrong though. My people are glad to find work and most of them find permanent positions with our customers after gaining reasonable experience with me. At this point I have more former employees placed with customers as permanent employees than I have working for me. I claim the credit for orienting them toward the customer's need and little more. Many who have skills but who can't do that find work here briefly. Some few find themselves in IT accidently because it was "work they can get." We're the "farm team". Some of our alumni go on to be Cisco and Citrix engineers or find homes as techs in the IT departments of our customers. The rest move on in search of the role that is right for them.
In the meantime we deliver what the customer needs -- whatever that is. My job isn't to hire, fire, or manage people. It's to deliver what the customer needs. Those other things are just methods of accomplishing that goal. I have yet to fail, but if I start to do so I know what to expect and both my unders and my overs are prepared for that.
I can guarantee you that no display I recommend will require Windows Vista. If you need to do that, you're doing it wrong.
No, if I have a single employee who has a skill that I don't, the problem is my boss's hiring me. He should have hired somebody more qualified to lead my team. If that ever happens, I have some people to recommend.
You have a "job" because there is work that needs to be done. If there is noone in your organization who could step up and fill in for you until a replacement for you could be found, that is not your fault. It is still not right.
You have a job because there is a job that needs to be done. If (heaven forfend!) you should be either unwilling or unable to do it and your manager hasn't planned for that, then they have failed. Your manager/team leader/supervisor has a job to do and part of that job is to keep the line moving; to keep the customer satisfied; even if you and all your coworkers are unwilling or unable to do the work. If they're not ready, they're not earning the money they're paid.
Thanks. You sound like the kind of person I'd like to work with too, and I also wouldn't care which.
That was not supposed to happen. You made an insightful and interesting response to my post.
Managing people is a craft, and there are educational resources to teach people that craft. When an organization grows beyond a certain size it requires some people who are trained and skilled in this craft. The common practice is to compensate them disproportionately for this skill. Most of these people are quite proud of the fact that they don't know how to do anything other than manage people.
Given a choice I'd line all these sort up against a wall and shoot them. The company would do better, but that's probably insensitive, eh?
Huh? Reading skills? I know on /. it's not expected you would read TFA, but please do try and read the post you're responding to.
They're "under me" because I'm responsible for what they do. I am responsible for everything that happens "under me" on my watch. Does your organization have some different accountability system? That would be interesting.
By this I expect you mean to confess that you're an IT middle manager in the classical sense. I would recommend you investigate opportunities in agricultural infrastructure. They need ditch diggers too.
Because you could do the same job with a 320x200 USB photo frame for $50, and do it with color images?
Was that not the answer you were looking for?
You don't work for my company. And you're not welcome to. If you can't orient toward the customer's need, we can't orient toward the need for you.
Then you've already failed. Your customers just don't know it yet.
If you're in this position it's your boss who's failed. He's hired someone who doesn't know his job.
It's not necessary to be good at everything. It's necessary to understand what you expect of your unders and what's expected of your overs so you can fill in at need. If you can't do this, you're a poor choice for your spot. Eventually it will work out but not to your benefit, or your customers will suffer your lack and then your customers will choose my company over yours the next time contracts are up for review. In the end water finds its own level.
You don't believe. I shouldn't be trolled so easily, but ok. I've been trolled so let's just trot out our what-fors, shall we?
I learned machine language, Assembly, BASIC and APL on the IBM 5150 under Allen Schultz in 1980. He helped invent the "PC" and was in for a couple decades on that whole "VMS" thing. Several of the developers of the ADA "strawman" through "ironman" implementations are personal friends of mine. By 1986 I had solved all of the solveable classical problems in any language, was a published programmer, and had written my first program that is still in use today. Shortly thereafter I had written a program to write poetry sufficiently to get an A in high school poetry class, an AI to challenge Minerva, and explored the depths of the Mandelbrot. I've memorized all of the Communications of the ACM up to 1980, and I understand them. I've written several programming languages - each better than the last and none better than C. I was a certified network admin for Unix SVR3 in 1985. I've integrated databases, enabled printers, mastered the classical compression algorithms and written an indexing algorithm as good as Google's that you can't have because it belongs to me and me alone. You can use it here though. I gave up being a .com billionaire long before it became fashionable. I am a certified and certifiable member of the technolgy priest class.
I've used dozens of successful platforms and hundreds of unsuccessful ones. I know people. People who know stuff. I've tested more failed technologies than you've run successful ones. Here on slashdot I've enjoyed communication with most of the pantheon of IT names. Most of them I've agreed with, and some not.
Since school I've mastered all the languages that I care to. I consider programming a "solved problem" that is no longer interesting because I've plumbed its mysteries and found its depths in sufficient variety to know there is no more to learn. The odds are very good that I've installed more computers, fixed more computers, installed more versions of every operating system of every version, than you'll ever see, let alone do yourself - literally thousands of each.
All of the people I work for have just as interesting stories, and all of the people who work for me have interesting stories of their own.
All of this takes away from the point. I'm replaceable. You're replaceable. Get over it. Do your job well and know the jobs of your overs and unders. If you catch a bus your unders will be ready to step up - and if your overs catch a bus you'll be ready too. Your customers deserve no less.
What have you got?
In my particular case not only can he, but he got to be my boss by having my job and delegating responsibilities to grow the business. The same with his boss. Either of them has and can fill my role. That's how it should be and I'm preparing my unders to seize the opportunity. He expects me to do the same so both of us can move up to more responsible positions in a larger business by growing our business. If I fall out and I'm too lame to have juniors step right in, he's prepared to do that until he can bring others up to speed. If the day comes that I must take up his chores I'm ready to give it my best and to be replaced by someone better.
Again, it's about the customer. The customer does not need to worry about personnel details. When I recently I decided to swap out a key person in a customer facing role, I just did. The customer did not ask why because it's implied that I did so in their best interest and with due consideration for the inconvenience. They trust me in this role and they would trust my replacement also. We do what the customer needs done with minimum fuss or the customer hires somebody else. Period.
I once had a similar gig for a major newspaper. They had contracted the usual clueless newb to engineer their online presence. The app had a memory fault that crashed the server. They hired me to fix it so that it worked, and incidentally deny the original guy the pay for the contract. I found that a different method of memory allocation would eliminate the issues. Rather than telling my bosses about it, I called the original programmer and told him how to fix all three lines of code that were at fault. He revised it and it worked.
I lost my gig but I still feel good about it. Doing the right thing is not always in your immediate best interest. I'd feel bad about stealing the benefits from his work for three lousy lines of code.
The retarded newspaper editors - not so much. They haven't given up their horse-and-buggy-whip model of business. If they had kept me we would have fixed this issue by now. It's not too late to fix this but I no longer care about their welfare and they neither think I have the answer nor remember where to look for me to find their salvation. Such is the ebb and flow of business.
As usual, Cringely is right. The fat floats to the top.
I'm an IT project manager. If one of my peeps bailed and I couldn't step right in and fill their spot and train their replacement myself I would consider myself a failure. It's all about the customer and if we fail to meet the customer's needs because of this everybody involved has failed.
I had this conversation recently: "Can you replace X?" Answer: "Of course. If I couldn't, we both need replacing."
I've got people both under and over me. I fully expect both the unders and the overs to be able to step in and catch the load if I step in front of a bus. I don't want to catch a bus, and I don't want my unders and overs to do so either. But I'm prepared for either event and you should be too because if you can't you're neither responsible nor capable of advancement and that's a sad place to be.
That said, most days my role is reduced to catering. I let my peeps do their gig and I get stuff out of their way. Only the newbs need direction and they get over it right away.
As soon as they're oriented:
I'm only an IT project manager until my bosses find someone better. My techs only work for me until I find someone better. That's the way it is and that's the way it should be.
The solution to this problem is to ignore proprietary codecs. In time they all go away, stranding all the content encoded on them. All the smart people are done converting their data from one proprietary format into another. Once media are encoded in open standards they can remain there forever and you avoid the reencoding work for the rest of forever. If you have the White Album on MP3, you don't ever need to buy it again unless you lose all your backups. If you have it in Plays For Sure and you reencode it into AAC don't expect us to feel bad for you when your new format is deprecated.
I would probably have gone with USBspy because I'm not afraid of commercial software, I just prefer the other kind. I'm sure Sourceforge has something to solve the problem but I'm not actively seeking an answer today so it's better if the grandparent does the rest of this work himself.
A year and a half old. Even if Samsung hasn't released specs for it it's easy enough to spy on the USB port and get the protocol. That means that the only way there's no kernel driver for it is that it hadn't caught the attention of some kernel hacker enough to motivate him to write the code.
If it hasn't happened already, the granparent post, your post and this one should do the trick.
Behold the power of open source: where pointing out cool stuff is the same thing as hiring a crack team of engineers.
If people really understood about information security and countermeasures they'd probably close all their accounts, burn all their personal papers and do all their business under a randomly rotated set of deniable assumed names, in cash. That's pretty much how corporations and political figures do it -- they never do business in their own name without a layer of paper corporations or expendable underlings between themselves and an actual decision. In the current climate that's the only way to reliably build personal brand equity.
It isn't a bad idea actually... But me, I like a little risk. It's the spice of life. Now and then I'll even drink out of a public fountain, or (gasp) check my email over somebody else's network. Not on a Windows box, though. That's not exciting -- just irresponsible.
Just go with as many USB Monitors as you need, eh?