I work at a company with many brands and MANY customer-facing websites. Some sites/services can be updated in minutes with little hassle or approval. Some need weeks with much paperwork. It depends on the risk. The apps are built in different ways (CMS or from scratch or with many proven components). The apps have different features (some can result in $million fines if there's a problem).
The tools are there to set up processes where every time I commit, it goes to production. You need a process that matches the risk you are willing to take.
My huge company with many brands has 100s of web sites. We have a few classifications of sites, and each classification has it's own process. In some cases (e.g. credit cards involved), it MUST be deployed & operated by a 3rd party vendor (different than the developer). In other cases, a single (approved) developer can do everything him/herself, as long as it's coordinated with the brand manager and corporate PR and has no features corporate privacy or security teams would object to and is hosted at an approved provider.
In some cases, a seemingly simple new facebook page needs LOTS of input from LOTS of groups, and needs to follow a pretty complex process of who does what. In other cases, it's a trivial task that can be done in a morning with emails between 3 people.
The key is to think up front about the different classifications. What are the legal/privacy/security/pr risks? In our case, risks not just for the brand, but all brands in the company. What can/can't be done in the different classifications? What processes need to be followed for each? What common components/services can be used/deployed without a security or privacy risk? After that, each site can be managed with the quickest and cheapest process? We would have 1/2 the sites and 1/4 of the facebook presence if every site had to follow the same processes (or we'd have lots of privacy, security, and operations issues).
While credit card sites are operated differently, all sites and facebook pages are operated by the same 2 vendors with the same SLAs. We worked very closely with the operations companies to come up with the different deployment processes so that we can have both the quick/cheap and more complex types of sites with the same 24x7 SLAs. We also worked with our legal, privacy, security, and PR teams to make sure they are all satisfied that the processes are acceptable.
It depends on premises and goals in many cases. And, why do we seem so hung up on proving people wrong. Why not use the title "Proponents of Apollo Program Proven Right" and cover predictions that opponents got wrong in the body? Also predictions opponents got right and opponents got wrong (if any) should be covered?
We should take an objective look at both sides and use what they got right and remember what they got wrong to not repeat it. If this had a great stimulative effect and created jobs, maybe proponents can work with the poverty program proponents to create a program that both gets us further into space and helps with poverty. Getting both groups working together is more likely to advance both causes than trying to "prove" that one is wrong in order to advance the other.
I have worked place where a few people spent 50% of their time in the break room, at lunch, in the bathroom, on the phone, "talking to HR", or any other excuse to leave their desk. There seemed to be a correlation between who did/didn't do this and who didn't/did get good end of year evaluations. But it's still not good for day-to-day moral.
The only time I've seen tracking used was when a contractor was let go for spending OVER 80% of his hours on the phone. In a job that required no phone (i.e. he worked only with us in the office and nobody outside the office). It was a pretty easy talk for the manager since he had the detailed phone usage report.
My company has faced fines of 100s of thousands and even millions of dollars in fines and even a threat of a 5 year ban on internet presence in a country. We've also had a $50K project cost 20x as much because of a "minor" bad decision by a developer.
I'm 80-90 words per minute with 2 hands. I had really bad carpel tunnel problems in the 90s and got to where I could type about 60 words per minute with either hand on a one-handed dvorak keyboard. It took about 2 months of coding every day to get to my max.
I went about 5 years changing hands every 3-4 months. There are left and right handed dvorak layouts.
Will they at least tell the non-volunteers that their vehicle has been modified? I hope medical scientists don't pick up this new way of increasing the size of your test group.
But don't forget the chain of custody requirements for evidence to be used in court. You need to physically store it securely. Provide an audit-able method for prosecutors (and others) to access it if they need. Provide a way to get it to court with a full report of custody/access. Any evidence costs much more to keep than you and I keeping the same paper or electronic data. And that's a good thing.
My fortune 100 company spends many 100x as much per GB to store customer data (web PII) than I spend to store my personal data. And that's just the direct $/GB/month, it doesn't include the process we have on top to use the data. I've argued a few times that it's overkill, but it's one area that I'm ok with the lawyer's replies when we disagree.
Everyone learns different but for me it was best to pay attention to the class (professor and/or discussions). I'd write a few keywords for topics I need to pay extra attentions to - either I didn't feel I fully understood or thought the professor put greater importance in them. As long as the professor follows the book or hands out notes this works. I knew some people who wrote pages of notes that parroted the book and yet couldn't tell you what the last class was about because they paid attention to writing their notes rather than the subject.
A lot may have changed in classrooms over 25 years, but I still do the same in business meetings. I write more since I don't have a book to refer to, but I don't waste any time making sure my work doc is formated correctly and passes spell check (which other people do often in meetings.) and write down in pen/paper the key details I need to take from the meeting and who to contact if I need more info about anything or forget.
The 80's really sucked when I worked on a Unix kernel. We had unit tests, integration tests, system tests, stress tests, performance tests, compatibility tests (AT&T, BSD, SunOS, DB, major apps, Orange Book/security tests, various CPUs & devices, with builds from both a commercial and gnu compilers), and others.
In addition to working on the kernel, I managed our testing. I had to manually start the tests each morning (after the automatic nightly builds that took 10 hours). Then I had to manually start emacs toward the end of the day and load the result files (which were fortunately analyzed in lisp) rather than looking at a desktop widget, then manually send an email to anyone who caused a problem.
And to make matters worse (as if it can get worse than 10-20 minutes of my time a day) I didn't have lots of people raving about my cool test setup (they all thought it was just a standard and trivial part of software development)
And don't make me go off on the pain of alpha and beta tests. I had to email an ftp location to our major customers using !-notation.
Cities, states, and countries are constantly competing to be the government to vouch for a business entity's credentials (i.e. incorporation services) or to provide other government services for a business (e.g. water, sewage, roads, police, courts to settle disputes).
For these services, sometimes the government wants direct taxes. Other times they are primarily concerned with jobs. These jobs provide residents with money to pay other types taxes (individual income, sales, gas, property, etc) as well as helping other businesses (e.g. restaurants, stores) and decreasing the need for public services (i.e. food stamps).
Sometimes there is corruption in the process. More often than not, the government has decided that having the business is an overall benefit. The government may be incompetent and make a poor decision that doesn't necessarily mean corruption is involved. In any case, you need to look at the total effect (direct + indirect taxes + services that increase + services that decrease) to see if it was a good deal.
It seems "good" when they disable phones reported as stolen.
But I think most people would think it's "bad" if they disable phones reported as downloading "stolen" (i.e. copyrighted) content.
I'd prefer they only be allowed to disable phones with a court order (regardless of the reason for the order). If police and courts want to streamline a way to get the court order to the carrier in the case of stolen phones (with adequate judicial review), then I'm all for it. But I don't want carriers to become part of the policing effort. And doing it with our support and without considering our rights - i.e. disabling a phone is the equivalent of seizing our property.
And only use it for your job. When you're in it, you are "at work". I'll "work from home" evenings or weekends at my kitchen table or couch. But there is a physical difference between when I'm "at work" vs "working from home" even though it's in the same house. Been doing it that way 8 years. I'd spent months at a time working from home before that and this is much better.
But I've been in many jobs where it's the workers. Where workers constantly and repeatedly overcommit (I can do this in 4 weeks). Then the customer is waiting and the boss (not unreasonably) expects the date to be met. The boss could do better at limiting this but the workers do usually deliver then commit again.
In other places, a few workers want to "get ahead" or just enjoy what they're doing and work more hours. Many of these people CAN and want to work 60 hours (actually around 50 is the limit I've seen and there's less productivity increase doing more month-after-month). The problem is that other worker start to try this to compete for the next promotion - and they can't do it.
Since then he's gotten pretty good with Java, C#, C, and python and played with F#.
The key part of the title is "intro language". Seems like some comments are expecting kids to come out of this and write the next Office suit, or Google competitor, or missile guidance system. I think javascript is a great way to see if a kid wants to do more.
Coke doesn't know if you personal bought a coke based on an ad. But the way they work with test/control markets they can say with a high degree of accuracy that ad A increases sales by X% and ad B increases sales by Y%. I thought marketing was stupid before I got into the business (IT in marketing at a company similar to coke). After a decade I think consumers are easily manipulated.
Also, they may know if you personally are likely to buy a coke after seeing an ad - that's what the coke bottle cap numbers, or McDonald's monopoly pieces and other games where you enter a code on line are for. They know what online ads people saw recently and how that correlates to them entering bottle cap numbers. It may not work for you personally if you clear cookies or block ads, but it works. And it's not all bad for the consumer. My company is looking at how other companies run "loyalty programs". Customers who purchase more (or enter more numbers online) receive more or higher value coupons, cheaper shipping, early access to new products, better customer support and other things they aren't even aware of - in addition to being able to use their points to purchase something like a coffee mug with a coke logo.
Facebook will have to send a 1099 to everyone who earned credits this year and we'll have to pay taxes. My bank sent me one saying I earned $17 in interest. If I earned enough credits to buy 2 movies they'd probably be worth more than that and I'm sure the IRS would want their cut.
My fortune 100 company has branches, subsidiaries, and employees all over the world. We have fired VPs of a region for things like this going on in their geographic area. There are many things we don't allow anywhere globally even though they are legal or the only way to get things done in some countries.
I can't stand all of the business practice, ethics, and legal training I have to go through every year (along with 10s of thousands of other employees) at a pretty high cost to the company. But everyone from the top down to new hires knows that stuff like this won't be tolerated and that responsibility doesn't stop with the person doing the unethical behavior (so the VPs insist on everyone under them being aware of corporate policy and follow it, and you do need the push from that level).
So I know it's possible to control and have have no problem blaming "Google" as well as "Google Kenya". I don't know all the facts here, so google may very well have similar policies to my company and someone high up will be fired. But, if they haven't been making an effort to stop things like this from the corporate level, I will put some blame on them.
That's what most upper management will make decisions on
gaps - what can't you do now that needs to be done. both capabilities and time to execute may be important
risks - what risks do you face with the current organization? (viruses, lack of auditing for any regulations you need to meet, hardware/software at end-of-life etc)
savings - how much money the business saves with a proposed re-organization. this will require determining the costs of the new IT department. If the cost is $0, just do it today and present the savings - but I'd guess it will take at least your time and probably parts of other peoples' time all the way up to the CEO (reading a new department line-item on reports does take time)
It would be best to present ways to fill the gaps and minimized the risks without a reorg as well. Then let management decide if IT department solution is better than the other solutions.
New departments are not always better. There is overhead of creating budgets which can lead to debates over resources, attention from upper management, and allocating time from other departments (HR, legal, etc) You may just need to better define the mission of your department (e.g. include IT services) and annual/quarterly goals and change individual responsibilities and hiring if needed. I'm in a situation with too many departments. Some minor things require 4 people (team lead level) to approve. When I want to start a new project I have 3 department heads I can go to for funding - they'll all start by asking if one of the others will approve and I may end up needing something from each of them which means extra stakeholders to deal with in the project (which isn't always a bad thing)
Every morning my inbox is full of requests from co-workers in Asia, Europe, and South America. They shouldn't be allowed to send email outside of MY working hours.
Modern tax apps have to deal with things like this. But "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is."
I'm sure my company and many others will be doing a test run before issuing 10s of thousands of checks and direct deposits.
I'd bet more than a few companies restore from backup and lose tax rate updates. Probably not big companies, but plenty of small ones where accounting and IT don't have their own "department" and don't have processes that drive everyone crazy most of the time but make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen.
Unless you can find a way to make voters care, nothing else matters. I'm afraid the UI they want has 2 big buttons "R" and "D" for voting and discussion boards where only like-minded people can post.
>but it would be equivalent to declaring war on the entire planet at once, which would be pointless.
You must not be familiar with the way the US government works. If they accept your challenge they'll spend the next 3 months trying to see which party can be most pointless and constantly accusing each other of having a valid point. And they won't even notice all of us shaking our heads and thinking "how did we elect these people"?
Slashdot Mirror
But I used a one-click payment button so I had to take it down.
I work at a company with many brands and MANY customer-facing websites. Some sites/services can be updated in minutes with little hassle or approval. Some need weeks with much paperwork. It depends on the risk. The apps are built in different ways (CMS or from scratch or with many proven components). The apps have different features (some can result in $million fines if there's a problem).
The tools are there to set up processes where every time I commit, it goes to production. You need a process that matches the risk you are willing to take.
My huge company with many brands has 100s of web sites. We have a few classifications of sites, and each classification has it's own process. In some cases (e.g. credit cards involved), it MUST be deployed & operated by a 3rd party vendor (different than the developer). In other cases, a single (approved) developer can do everything him/herself, as long as it's coordinated with the brand manager and corporate PR and has no features corporate privacy or security teams would object to and is hosted at an approved provider.
In some cases, a seemingly simple new facebook page needs LOTS of input from LOTS of groups, and needs to follow a pretty complex process of who does what. In other cases, it's a trivial task that can be done in a morning with emails between 3 people.
The key is to think up front about the different classifications. What are the legal/privacy/security/pr risks? In our case, risks not just for the brand, but all brands in the company. What can/can't be done in the different classifications? What processes need to be followed for each? What common components/services can be used/deployed without a security or privacy risk? After that, each site can be managed with the quickest and cheapest process? We would have 1/2 the sites and 1/4 of the facebook presence if every site had to follow the same processes (or we'd have lots of privacy, security, and operations issues).
While credit card sites are operated differently, all sites and facebook pages are operated by the same 2 vendors with the same SLAs. We worked very closely with the operations companies to come up with the different deployment processes so that we can have both the quick/cheap and more complex types of sites with the same 24x7 SLAs. We also worked with our legal, privacy, security, and PR teams to make sure they are all satisfied that the processes are acceptable.
It depends on premises and goals in many cases. And, why do we seem so hung up on proving people wrong. Why not use the title "Proponents of Apollo Program Proven Right" and cover predictions that opponents got wrong in the body? Also predictions opponents got right and opponents got wrong (if any) should be covered?
We should take an objective look at both sides and use what they got right and remember what they got wrong to not repeat it. If this had a great stimulative effect and created jobs, maybe proponents can work with the poverty program proponents to create a program that both gets us further into space and helps with poverty. Getting both groups working together is more likely to advance both causes than trying to "prove" that one is wrong in order to advance the other.
I have worked place where a few people spent 50% of their time in the break room, at lunch, in the bathroom, on the phone, "talking to HR", or any other excuse to leave their desk. There seemed to be a correlation between who did/didn't do this and who didn't/did get good end of year evaluations. But it's still not good for day-to-day moral.
The only time I've seen tracking used was when a contractor was let go for spending OVER 80% of his hours on the phone. In a job that required no phone (i.e. he worked only with us in the office and nobody outside the office). It was a pretty easy talk for the manager since he had the detailed phone usage report.
My company has faced fines of 100s of thousands and even millions of dollars in fines and even a threat of a 5 year ban on internet presence in a country. We've also had a $50K project cost 20x as much because of a "minor" bad decision by a developer.
I'm 80-90 words per minute with 2 hands. I had really bad carpel tunnel problems in the 90s and got to where I could type about 60 words per minute with either hand on a one-handed dvorak keyboard. It took about 2 months of coding every day to get to my max.
I went about 5 years changing hands every 3-4 months. There are left and right handed dvorak layouts.
Will they at least tell the non-volunteers that their vehicle has been modified? I hope medical scientists don't pick up this new way of increasing the size of your test group.
But don't forget the chain of custody requirements for evidence to be used in court. You need to physically store it securely. Provide an audit-able method for prosecutors (and others) to access it if they need. Provide a way to get it to court with a full report of custody/access. Any evidence costs much more to keep than you and I keeping the same paper or electronic data. And that's a good thing.
My fortune 100 company spends many 100x as much per GB to store customer data (web PII) than I spend to store my personal data. And that's just the direct $/GB/month, it doesn't include the process we have on top to use the data. I've argued a few times that it's overkill, but it's one area that I'm ok with the lawyer's replies when we disagree.
Everyone learns different but for me it was best to pay attention to the class (professor and/or discussions). I'd write a few keywords for topics I need to pay extra attentions to - either I didn't feel I fully understood or thought the professor put greater importance in them. As long as the professor follows the book or hands out notes this works. I knew some people who wrote pages of notes that parroted the book and yet couldn't tell you what the last class was about because they paid attention to writing their notes rather than the subject.
A lot may have changed in classrooms over 25 years, but I still do the same in business meetings. I write more since I don't have a book to refer to, but I don't waste any time making sure my work doc is formated correctly and passes spell check (which other people do often in meetings.) and write down in pen/paper the key details I need to take from the meeting and who to contact if I need more info about anything or forget.
The 80's really sucked when I worked on a Unix kernel. We had unit tests, integration tests, system tests, stress tests, performance tests, compatibility tests (AT&T, BSD, SunOS, DB, major apps, Orange Book/security tests, various CPUs & devices, with builds from both a commercial and gnu compilers), and others.
In addition to working on the kernel, I managed our testing. I had to manually start the tests each morning (after the automatic nightly builds that took 10 hours). Then I had to manually start emacs toward the end of the day and load the result files (which were fortunately analyzed in lisp) rather than looking at a desktop widget, then manually send an email to anyone who caused a problem.
And to make matters worse (as if it can get worse than 10-20 minutes of my time a day) I didn't have lots of people raving about my cool test setup (they all thought it was just a standard and trivial part of software development)
And don't make me go off on the pain of alpha and beta tests. I had to email an ftp location to our major customers using !-notation.
Cities, states, and countries are constantly competing to be the government to vouch for a business entity's credentials (i.e. incorporation services) or to provide other government services for a business (e.g. water, sewage, roads, police, courts to settle disputes).
For these services, sometimes the government wants direct taxes. Other times they are primarily concerned with jobs. These jobs provide residents with money to pay other types taxes (individual income, sales, gas, property, etc) as well as helping other businesses (e.g. restaurants, stores) and decreasing the need for public services (i.e. food stamps).
Sometimes there is corruption in the process. More often than not, the government has decided that having the business is an overall benefit. The government may be incompetent and make a poor decision that doesn't necessarily mean corruption is involved. In any case, you need to look at the total effect (direct + indirect taxes + services that increase + services that decrease) to see if it was a good deal.
It seems "good" when they disable phones reported as stolen.
But I think most people would think it's "bad" if they disable phones reported as downloading "stolen" (i.e. copyrighted) content.
I'd prefer they only be allowed to disable phones with a court order (regardless of the reason for the order). If police and courts want to streamline a way to get the court order to the carrier in the case of stolen phones (with adequate judicial review), then I'm all for it. But I don't want carriers to become part of the policing effort. And doing it with our support and without considering our rights - i.e. disabling a phone is the equivalent of seizing our property.
And only use it for your job. When you're in it, you are "at work". I'll "work from home" evenings or weekends at my kitchen table or couch. But there is a physical difference between when I'm "at work" vs "working from home" even though it's in the same house. Been doing it that way 8 years. I'd spent months at a time working from home before that and this is much better.
In my current job it is the bosses :)
But I've been in many jobs where it's the workers. Where workers constantly and repeatedly overcommit (I can do this in 4 weeks). Then the customer is waiting and the boss (not unreasonably) expects the date to be met. The boss could do better at limiting this but the workers do usually deliver then commit again.
In other places, a few workers want to "get ahead" or just enjoy what they're doing and work more hours. Many of these people CAN and want to work 60 hours (actually around 50 is the limit I've seen and there's less productivity increase doing more month-after-month). The problem is that other worker start to try this to compete for the next promotion - and they can't do it.
Since then he's gotten pretty good with Java, C#, C, and python and played with F#.
The key part of the title is "intro language". Seems like some comments are expecting kids to come out of this and write the next Office suit, or Google competitor, or missile guidance system. I think javascript is a great way to see if a kid wants to do more.
Coke doesn't know if you personal bought a coke based on an ad. But the way they work with test/control markets they can say with a high degree of accuracy that ad A increases sales by X% and ad B increases sales by Y%. I thought marketing was stupid before I got into the business (IT in marketing at a company similar to coke). After a decade I think consumers are easily manipulated.
Also, they may know if you personally are likely to buy a coke after seeing an ad - that's what the coke bottle cap numbers, or McDonald's monopoly pieces and other games where you enter a code on line are for. They know what online ads people saw recently and how that correlates to them entering bottle cap numbers. It may not work for you personally if you clear cookies or block ads, but it works. And it's not all bad for the consumer. My company is looking at how other companies run "loyalty programs". Customers who purchase more (or enter more numbers online) receive more or higher value coupons, cheaper shipping, early access to new products, better customer support and other things they aren't even aware of - in addition to being able to use their points to purchase something like a coffee mug with a coke logo.
Facebook will have to send a 1099 to everyone who earned credits this year and we'll have to pay taxes. My bank sent me one saying I earned $17 in interest. If I earned enough credits to buy 2 movies they'd probably be worth more than that and I'm sure the IRS would want their cut.
My fortune 100 company has branches, subsidiaries, and employees all over the world. We have fired VPs of a region for things like this going on in their geographic area. There are many things we don't allow anywhere globally even though they are legal or the only way to get things done in some countries.
I can't stand all of the business practice, ethics, and legal training I have to go through every year (along with 10s of thousands of other employees) at a pretty high cost to the company. But everyone from the top down to new hires knows that stuff like this won't be tolerated and that responsibility doesn't stop with the person doing the unethical behavior (so the VPs insist on everyone under them being aware of corporate policy and follow it, and you do need the push from that level).
So I know it's possible to control and have have no problem blaming "Google" as well as "Google Kenya". I don't know all the facts here, so google may very well have similar policies to my company and someone high up will be fired. But, if they haven't been making an effort to stop things like this from the corporate level, I will put some blame on them.
That's what most upper management will make decisions on
gaps - what can't you do now that needs to be done. both capabilities and time to execute may be important
risks - what risks do you face with the current organization? (viruses, lack of auditing for any regulations you need to meet, hardware/software at end-of-life etc)
savings - how much money the business saves with a proposed re-organization. this will require determining the costs of the new IT department. If the cost is $0, just do it today and present the savings - but I'd guess it will take at least your time and probably parts of other peoples' time all the way up to the CEO (reading a new department line-item on reports does take time)
It would be best to present ways to fill the gaps and minimized the risks without a reorg as well. Then let management decide if IT department solution is better than the other solutions.
New departments are not always better. There is overhead of creating budgets which can lead to debates over resources, attention from upper management, and allocating time from other departments (HR, legal, etc) You may just need to better define the mission of your department (e.g. include IT services) and annual/quarterly goals and change individual responsibilities and hiring if needed. I'm in a situation with too many departments. Some minor things require 4 people (team lead level) to approve. When I want to start a new project I have 3 department heads I can go to for funding - they'll all start by asking if one of the others will approve and I may end up needing something from each of them which means extra stakeholders to deal with in the project (which isn't always a bad thing)
Every morning my inbox is full of requests from co-workers in Asia, Europe, and South America. They shouldn't be allowed to send email outside of MY working hours.
The summary didn't specify "traffic safety", so
1. red light cameras increase revenue (that's their purpose, so if they can't prove that, get rid of them)
2. more revenue means they have to lay off fewer police officers (easy to fudge some books and threaten layoffs to "prove" this)
3. more police officers result in better public safety (use Biden's quote about fewer officers means more rapes and murders)
Modern tax apps have to deal with things like this. But "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is."
I'm sure my company and many others will be doing a test run before issuing 10s of thousands of checks and direct deposits.
I'd bet more than a few companies restore from backup and lose tax rate updates. Probably not big companies, but plenty of small ones where accounting and IT don't have their own "department" and don't have processes that drive everyone crazy most of the time but make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen.
Unless you can find a way to make voters care, nothing else matters. I'm afraid the UI they want has 2 big buttons "R" and "D" for voting and discussion boards where only like-minded people can post.
>but it would be equivalent to declaring war on the entire planet at once, which would be pointless.
You must not be familiar with the way the US government works. If they accept your challenge they'll spend the next 3 months trying to see which party can be most pointless and constantly accusing each other of having a valid point. And they won't even notice all of us shaking our heads and thinking "how did we elect these people"?