The average user learns fast when they go to visit theonion or reddit, and get the "STOP" page from the web proxy that megacorps direct all traffic through to censor the internet.
The metrics don't have to be so obtuse. Your employees are assigned to projects and they're held accountable on being able to deliver, and having managers on the ball enough to recognize that 25 day estimate for modifying text on a dialog box is bullshit, and a 5 day estimate to make web systems be able to print blueberry waffles at users homes is impossible.
This. And while it annoys us ICs when managers lead inquisitions into why we're not delivering as unreasonably expected, this is really what they're trying to understand and what a good manager knows how to parse and report up.
I may deliver something way ahead of schedule and be a ridiculous loser, or I may deliver something 6 months late and be a superhero. My bosses job is to a) understand what I do enough to know when i'm padding (and why, and if maybe the padding is a good idea for the company) and b) understanding what i'm doing on a weekly basis enough to know how busy I am. It really does not matter if I am physically there, rarely do I even SEE my boss and as a hw guy I'm almost always physically at work. But he always knows what I'm doing (and I have had exceptionally good managers).
This thing where hte CEO pulls VPN logs implies she doens't trust her management chain, and thinks her employees are slacking off. Or she's decided she's got to knife 10% of her workforce cheaply, so she's starting with low hanging fruit.
I only connect to VPN if I need to see a VNC session. I do all my coding/verilog work locally and ignore VPN (and use our webmail to see what's going on).
She just wants to fire people, the data is a pretense.
I'm just struggling with the question. Take technology out. Isn't it illegal for our government to randomly kill it's civilians already? How do drones blur that line any?
It sounds, and this is kind of funny, like a Republican is pinning the crime on the WEAPON, not the person using it.
Figuring out which is which is easy. Being "fair" is hard, if you interpret "fair" as setting equal rules for everyone, rather than setting rules for the employees demonstrated capabilities.
I know, when I'm sitting there having to manually solve maxwell's equations to validate the piece of a product that will singlehandedly make or break our 2013 revenue because the CEO won't cough up the $75K to purchase a field solver that will do it for me and there's no one else on staff who can, what I really should be ready for is to be interrupted by marketing to ask me what the difference between an RDIMM and a UDIMM is so she can plan for her $500K boondoggle in 2014 in Belgium (while I will most likely be sent to the ass end of China to teach kids from a degree factory how to string some wires together).
You know, because that's really urgent and email won't suffice (having given up on ever getting marketing to just google it). This is not made up, this happened just now, this is how it's been happening for years. While I cannot telecommute, anyone who can, should. At least if they work for a living.
Not everyone's job can be done by guessing or hiding behind bureacracy. The buck has to stop somewhere, and it usually has to stop with technical people. For that to work, they need to be able to do their fucking job without incessant interruptions by idiots.
+1 imaginary mod. I don't like his politics, but his politics stay out of his books so why boycott his books? If we were to boycott every company whose employees disagreed with homosexual agendas (or abortion, climate change, etc.), we'd have to live in yurts and wear hay. I don't think I've even been on a 10 person team where people were of a mind on any of those issues.
Contrast that with Terry Goodkind for example, whose books I just stopped buying because their unworkable, one sided view of a selfish political goal makes the books impossible to read without raising my bloodpressure. It was beyond being political, it was making the story unreadable and unbelievable.
In case you haven't noticed "us or them" hasn't been working out real well, it's just been moving more people into the "us" or "them" category and making compromise difficult.
Without question I can support this. My macbook pro was the best investment I've ever made, it is an excellent laptop.
I never run OS X though. If I want to be productive I use Linux, if I want to be compatible I use Windows. I'm just not sure what OS X does for me. I could take some time to learn it, I'm sure I could employ it as effectively as X or Win7, I'm just not sure why I want to as those other two are indispensable.
hey actually had a VP come down one week and tell us we needed to tape yellow lanes on the floor to tell people where to walk and then 3 weeks later another VP came down and made them change it to red tape, then 2 months later another VP came down and wanted all the lines moved because he didn't think it was clear which areas were for walking and which areas were work areas. Ridiculous.
[VP 1]: The red zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only. There is no stopping in the yellow zone. [VP 2]: No, the yellow zone is for loading of passengers and there is no stopping in a RED zone. [VP 1]: The red zone has always been for loading and unloading of passengers. There's never stopping in a yellow zone. [VP 2]: Don't you tell me which zone is for loading, and which zone is for stopping! [VP 1]: Listen Betty, don't start up with your yellow zone shit again.
[VP 1]: There's just no stopping in a yellow zone. [VP 2]: Oh really, Vernon? Why pretend, we both know perfectly well what this is about. You want me to have an abortion. [VP 1]: It's really the only sensible thing to do, if its done safely. Therapeutically there's no danger involved.
That's a ridiculous statement. In attrition layoffs, bits of the baby and the bathwater are thrown out.
You do this because either a) you're a total moron, or b) you're so broke you can't afford performance based layoffs and will accept cost reduction regardless of price.
Or email. Email works. IM is just as obnoxious as showing up at my cube. If you find yourself annoyed that someone wasn't physically there, YOU are broken. Send email. If the person doesn't reply right away, assume that means he's in the middle of something and will get back to you shortly.
Email is a great tool, IM is never a replacement for email, IM is for conversation. E-mail is for questions.
Sounds like employees in general. Some are great, some are poor. Get rid of the losers and bring in the performers. If bringing in is hard, then you have to use other means to get something out of the losers.
But from my perspective, it doesn't seem as good as having the same person nearby, when that is possible to do.
Then I'd wonder if there is something wrong with HOW you work such that having the person nearby on demand is useful. Because, as a hardware guy, I HAVE to work from work most of hte time. And I get really annoyed and angry at people who interrupt me all the time to ask me inane questions. That's what email is for, I will respond when I reach a stopping point that is convenient for me.
There are jobs that require on site presence, I have one of them. But even my job has long periods where it's mostly email. spreadhseets and phone calls, and that can be done from anywhere. BETTER from anywhere but work, where people who are disorganized or just want to stretch can get up and be disruptive.
Hush now, you're implying that employees aren't fungible. If they had some unique value they'd be rich, and/or a CEO of something. If your job is "HW Engineer, Senior" you're just a lazy old guy who blackmailed the right middle managers into keeping his job.
What about when the opposite happens; when the majority of state voters decide to not allow same sex marriage but the unelected judiciary orders it allowed anyway? Is that a failure of democracy?
It would be an awakening that what we have here in America is not exactly a democracy (nor in most of the civilized world, though mechanisms vary). If the judiciary system determines that banning gay marriage is somehow unconstitutional (at the state or federal level, and i have little hope or respect for most state "constitutions"), then you may seek to get the constitution changed. At the federal level that requires an amendment to the constitution, which means getting 2/3's of both houses to agree, then passing the vote to the voting public and getting 3/4ths of the states to pass it. Before it is democratic, it is first representative, and even when it is democratic, it is quantized by state.
All of this is what we idol worship in civics classes in school. At no point has the US been a direct democracy, and in almost no cases does "democracy" mean sampling the public and passing laws based on simple majority of opinion at random times.
Changing ANYTHING is very hard to do if people don't agree or adopt polemic positions (and honestly that is very descriptive of many pro and anti-gay marriage supporters). This should be obvious to those bitching about how their "government has failed" when we hit fiscal cliffs or sequestrations or whatever the media wants us worked up over. The judiciary system is no different, in highly contentious debates they can act arbitrarily or by reading of law, it hardly matters as a large portion of us will hate them anyway. If the majority of us do agree on something, we can get it fixed. But since we cannot agree on this issue, it really doesn't matter what they do, lots of people will be unhappy either way.
None of this makes me look for the four horsemen, this is the system created for us, and that has served us well.
Slashdot Mirror
Fewer sunburns, higher risk of street violence.
It is, if you're under 30 there are plenty of jobs. But as soon as your salary reaches a certain point, manage or panhandle.
I was reading that as a shot to everyone who hates Unity.
You know, Everyone.
The average user learns fast when they go to visit theonion or reddit, and get the "STOP" page from the web proxy that megacorps direct all traffic through to censor the internet.
The metrics don't have to be so obtuse. Your employees are assigned to projects and they're held accountable on being able to deliver, and having managers on the ball enough to recognize that 25 day estimate for modifying text on a dialog box is bullshit, and a 5 day estimate to make web systems be able to print blueberry waffles at users homes is impossible.
This. And while it annoys us ICs when managers lead inquisitions into why we're not delivering as unreasonably expected, this is really what they're trying to understand and what a good manager knows how to parse and report up.
I may deliver something way ahead of schedule and be a ridiculous loser, or I may deliver something 6 months late and be a superhero. My bosses job is to a) understand what I do enough to know when i'm padding (and why, and if maybe the padding is a good idea for the company) and b) understanding what i'm doing on a weekly basis enough to know how busy I am. It really does not matter if I am physically there, rarely do I even SEE my boss and as a hw guy I'm almost always physically at work. But he always knows what I'm doing (and I have had exceptionally good managers).
This thing where hte CEO pulls VPN logs implies she doens't trust her management chain, and thinks her employees are slacking off. Or she's decided she's got to knife 10% of her workforce cheaply, so she's starting with low hanging fruit.
I only connect to VPN if I need to see a VNC session. I do all my coding/verilog work locally and ignore VPN (and use our webmail to see what's going on).
She just wants to fire people, the data is a pretense.
I'm just struggling with the question. Take technology out. Isn't it illegal for our government to randomly kill it's civilians already? How do drones blur that line any?
It sounds, and this is kind of funny, like a Republican is pinning the crime on the WEAPON, not the person using it.
Ok let me rephrase, I'd love to see Apple prosecute someone who purchased a copy of OSX,be taken to court over a DMCA violation.
Figuring out which is which is easy. Being "fair" is hard, if you interpret "fair" as setting equal rules for everyone, rather than setting rules for the employees demonstrated capabilities.
It was written to be +3 Ironic or Mildly Funny. +4 Insightful is an accurate portrayal of how slashdot has fallen into disrepair.
I know, when I'm sitting there having to manually solve maxwell's equations to validate the piece of a product that will singlehandedly make or break our 2013 revenue because the CEO won't cough up the $75K to purchase a field solver that will do it for me and there's no one else on staff who can, what I really should be ready for is to be interrupted by marketing to ask me what the difference between an RDIMM and a UDIMM is so she can plan for her $500K boondoggle in 2014 in Belgium (while I will most likely be sent to the ass end of China to teach kids from a degree factory how to string some wires together).
You know, because that's really urgent and email won't suffice (having given up on ever getting marketing to just google it). This is not made up, this happened just now, this is how it's been happening for years. While I cannot telecommute, anyone who can, should. At least if they work for a living.
Not everyone's job can be done by guessing or hiding behind bureacracy. The buck has to stop somewhere, and it usually has to stop with technical people. For that to work, they need to be able to do their fucking job without incessant interruptions by idiots.
If I knew a person was my enemy I would not enrich them by buying their works.
I know, but it's pretty hard not to buy Chinese products.
+1 imaginary mod. I don't like his politics, but his politics stay out of his books so why boycott his books? If we were to boycott every company whose employees disagreed with homosexual agendas (or abortion, climate change, etc.), we'd have to live in yurts and wear hay. I don't think I've even been on a 10 person team where people were of a mind on any of those issues.
Contrast that with Terry Goodkind for example, whose books I just stopped buying because their unworkable, one sided view of a selfish political goal makes the books impossible to read without raising my bloodpressure. It was beyond being political, it was making the story unreadable and unbelievable.
In case you haven't noticed "us or them" hasn't been working out real well, it's just been moving more people into the "us" or "them" category and making compromise difficult.
Without question I can support this. My macbook pro was the best investment I've ever made, it is an excellent laptop.
I never run OS X though. If I want to be productive I use Linux, if I want to be compatible I use Windows. I'm just not sure what OS X does for me. I could take some time to learn it, I'm sure I could employ it as effectively as X or Win7, I'm just not sure why I want to as those other two are indispensable.
I would love to see Apple prosecute an individual who has a legal copy of OS-X they installed on a PC under the DMCA.
It would be a great thing to have happen. It will never happen.
hey actually had a VP come down one week and tell us we needed to tape yellow lanes on the floor to tell people where to walk and then 3 weeks later another VP came down and made them change it to red tape, then 2 months later another VP came down and wanted all the lines moved because he didn't think it was clear which areas were for walking and which areas were work areas. Ridiculous.
[VP 1]: The red zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only. There is no stopping in the yellow zone.
[VP 2]: No, the yellow zone is for loading of passengers and there is no stopping in a RED zone.
[VP 1]: The red zone has always been for loading and unloading of passengers. There's never stopping in a yellow zone.
[VP 2]: Don't you tell me which zone is for loading, and which zone is for stopping!
[VP 1]: Listen Betty, don't start up with your yellow zone shit again.
[VP 1]: There's just no stopping in a yellow zone.
[VP 2]: Oh really, Vernon? Why pretend, we both know perfectly well what this is about. You want me to have an abortion.
[VP 1]: It's really the only sensible thing to do, if its done safely. Therapeutically there's no danger involved.
Actually, somewhat dickish to fire a guy on the phone, too, I suppose.
I don't see why, especially if you telecommute. Feels like a holdover from a bygone age.
That's a ridiculous statement. In attrition layoffs, bits of the baby and the bathwater are thrown out.
You do this because either a) you're a total moron, or b) you're so broke you can't afford performance based layoffs and will accept cost reduction regardless of price.
Or email. Email works. IM is just as obnoxious as showing up at my cube. If you find yourself annoyed that someone wasn't physically there, YOU are broken. Send email. If the person doesn't reply right away, assume that means he's in the middle of something and will get back to you shortly.
Email is a great tool, IM is never a replacement for email, IM is for conversation. E-mail is for questions.
Sounds like employees in general. Some are great, some are poor. Get rid of the losers and bring in the performers. If bringing in is hard, then you have to use other means to get something out of the losers.
Where they are physically located is moot.
But from my perspective, it doesn't seem as good as having the same person nearby, when that is possible to do.
Then I'd wonder if there is something wrong with HOW you work such that having the person nearby on demand is useful. Because, as a hardware guy, I HAVE to work from work most of hte time. And I get really annoyed and angry at people who interrupt me all the time to ask me inane questions. That's what email is for, I will respond when I reach a stopping point that is convenient for me.
There are jobs that require on site presence, I have one of them. But even my job has long periods where it's mostly email. spreadhseets and phone calls, and that can be done from anywhere. BETTER from anywhere but work, where people who are disorganized or just want to stretch can get up and be disruptive.
Hush now, you're implying that employees aren't fungible. If they had some unique value they'd be rich, and/or a CEO of something. If your job is "HW Engineer, Senior" you're just a lazy old guy who blackmailed the right middle managers into keeping his job.
Discrimination is just unpopular talk about a segment of the population.
Lately my view has been very discriminatory against wall street and the wealthy.
What about when the opposite happens; when the majority of state voters decide to not allow same sex marriage but the unelected judiciary orders it allowed anyway? Is that a failure of democracy?
It would be an awakening that what we have here in America is not exactly a democracy (nor in most of the civilized world, though mechanisms vary). If the judiciary system determines that banning gay marriage is somehow unconstitutional (at the state or federal level, and i have little hope or respect for most state "constitutions"), then you may seek to get the constitution changed. At the federal level that requires an amendment to the constitution, which means getting 2/3's of both houses to agree, then passing the vote to the voting public and getting 3/4ths of the states to pass it. Before it is democratic, it is first representative, and even when it is democratic, it is quantized by state.
All of this is what we idol worship in civics classes in school. At no point has the US been a direct democracy, and in almost no cases does "democracy" mean sampling the public and passing laws based on simple majority of opinion at random times.
Changing ANYTHING is very hard to do if people don't agree or adopt polemic positions (and honestly that is very descriptive of many pro and anti-gay marriage supporters). This should be obvious to those bitching about how their "government has failed" when we hit fiscal cliffs or sequestrations or whatever the media wants us worked up over. The judiciary system is no different, in highly contentious debates they can act arbitrarily or by reading of law, it hardly matters as a large portion of us will hate them anyway. If the majority of us do agree on something, we can get it fixed. But since we cannot agree on this issue, it really doesn't matter what they do, lots of people will be unhappy either way.
None of this makes me look for the four horsemen, this is the system created for us, and that has served us well.