Thanks for this. A million mod-points to you. I'm one of Slashdot's Most Maligned: an MBA corporate manager for an offshore outsourcer. A significant proportion of technical discussions here include material that is over my head, but I have just enough residual geekiness from my high school days to enjoy visiting every day.
Whenever people on Slashdot complain about "corporate-speak", I see ridiculous examples that have just got to be made up because they don't make any sense to me, the target audience of such language. But if you transcribed real examples of "management speak", odds are many or most would have precise meanings understood by the people to whom the communication was intended. There are plenty of examples of misuse, of course, but any competent "management type" looks down on such misuse and isn't fooled by it.
I'm as amused as anyone by the Bullsh*t Bingo cards, but I can tell you that phrases like "Total Cost of Ownership" and "Turnkey Solution" have specific meanings that, absent those phrases, would take many more words to describe.
Three statisticians go out on a deer hunting trip, when they see a magnificent buck step out into a clearing. The first statistician misses 7 feet to the left. The second misses 7 feet to the right.
Finally: This particular settlement costs Google $0.00. They are literally manufacturing the "money" for this settlement. They are paying in stock. Stock that does not yet have a market value. And, any perceived loss on the potential sale of the stock is made up for by adding more stock to the IPO. It works GREAT for Google, from a business perspective.
That's not really the way it works. You can't issue stock for free. Stock is just a percentage of your company. With more outstanding stock, those IPO shares would be worth, say,.00009% of the company instead of.0001% of the company (numbers entirely made up). Therefore, the IPO shares are worth slightly less, and Google makes less money on the IPO. And if the market is working efficiently (and it usually is), the money lost, between Google's cash payday and the value of the unsold privately held shares, will equal more or less what those new shares would have been worth in the IPO.
That being said, if you think your shares are going to be overvalued at IPO, then this strategy it works great in the long run. It's the only way a company like AOL could buy a company like Time Warner.
Re:Everyone remember what a hit the Barbie PC was?
on
Disney Enters PC Market
·
· Score: 5, Informative
It's true that the OP didn't RTFA, but it should be noted that a similarly configured Dell (the lowest model they have with some RAM tacked on) is currently priced at $476, including monitor and speakers.
So there is definitely a sizeable Disney premium on a decidedly low-end system. Tough sell.
I'm not really trying to crack a joke here, but honestly: What are the chances ANY competent person is going to stay with a Help Desk job for any significant period of time?
As a technical support center manager I can tell you that the answer is "surprisingly many". Never underestimate the power of inertia. Competence as a helpdesk technician and ambition are often unrelated.
I don't like to see good people leave, but I view the job as a stepping stone, since we can't afford to advance technician pay and responsibilities as they gain skill. I expect to keep people maybe six months, while they parlay the experience they get here into something better.
As for the many that don't take that path, well, I'm happy to have their skills for as long as possible, but I just have to smack my forehead at their complacency.
With most blogs, that's swatting a fly with a sledgehammer.
A friend of mine recently had the insight that while his site was highly ranked enough to attract a ton of blog spam, it certainly wasn't important enough that spammers would attempt circumvention of even the simplest security measures.
Hence, the comment entry page became:
Enter the number 3 here:
Enter your comment here:
It's been in place for a month and a half has a 100% success rate so far.
The real estate market is looking really good right now.
And the stock market was looking really good around 1999.
A lot of people talk about rent as if it is "wasted money." That's not at all true, most of the time. Buying a house is an investment, and investments are inherently risky.
If you have $10,000 to make a downpayment on a house (assuming you live in Gary, Indiana or something), then you have the choice whether to invest that $10,000 in a house or in some other investment. Choosing to continue to pay rent allows you to invest it somewhere else if you feel the return will be greater or the risk is reduced. Much of the time, your rent will be cheaper than what you pay on a mortgage, and most of that mortgage payment is going towards interest at first. Calculate the "expected return" on each investment (including the tax implications)and you can figure out whether buying a home is a good (financial) use of your available capital.
How can you tell whether home prices are likely to keep rising? One way is to look at the ratio of home prices to rents. Over time, rents and home prices should keep roughly the same ratio. One reason that ratio can get out of whack is when people are buying a home not because of its value compared to rent, but because they expect to sell it for more later. When home prices rise without a proportional rise in rents, that can be indicative of a bubble. And that ratio is at historic highs right now in the U.S.A.
Of course, low interest rates can also push home prices higher, but it's not nearly as simple as people usually make it out to be. A home will become part of your investment portfolio, and your entire investment portfolio should be considered carefully.
Really? You don't think social skills are important to people who manage other people? You don't think social skills are important to people who need to enter into deals with other people, or sell things to other people?
Different people have different skill sets, and showing contempt for someone who lacks your skill set is, imo, unreasonable. Showing contempt for someone who is not interested in aquiring the skills necessary to do their job and tries to mask their ignorance is much more reasonable, and no doubt many execs fall into this category. But why direct your scorn at the ones who have made it a point to aquire a skill which is important to their jobs and which you already possess?
Shame at your own ignorance is the very thing that keeps illiterate people from getting help reading and guys from asking for directions. A smart company makes the education process completely transparent, which results in a greater willingness to attempt self-improvement.
What GE did need, however, was a system to train its top management in the wonders of the Internet. It didn't do much good to preach the values of e-business if the people making the big decisions in the corporation didn't know how to use the tool.
To alter the situation, GE started a mentoring program for nearly 1,000 senior executives. Younger members of the GE staff, proficient in the ways of the new electronic world, were assigned to teach a senior executive how to use the Internet.
You don't need a computer expert to teach computer basics, and the upside is that the lower level employees get executive mentorship, and the executive employees learn these tools while keeping connected to employees down the ladder. This, to me, is a much more sensible approach than seclusion, shame, and secrecy.
Danger isn't the issue. Steroids aren't really that dangerous if their use is carefully monitored by qualified people. It might not be that dangerous to have someone push you out of the starting blocks either, but it is cheating. The whole point of these competitions is to see what the athletes are capable of doing on their own through dedication and sacrifice, not seeing who can make the most bodily upgrades.
In any competition the participants all agree to abide by the same rules and these rules are dictated by the purpose of the competition. In bodybuilding there are "natural" competitions and untested competitions. All of the top bodybuilders are steroid freaks, but nobody minds because the rule there is "freakish proportions by any means necessary."
In the olympics, the whole purpose is to see the intersection between natural ability and hard work. Part of the appeal is that you know that the athletes are, to some extent, comparable to athletes from centuries ago (though with better nutrition and training methods). You allow gene therapy and steroids, then why not bionics or jet propulsion?
Slashdot Mirror
Whenever people on Slashdot complain about "corporate-speak", I see ridiculous examples that have just got to be made up because they don't make any sense to me, the target audience of such language. But if you transcribed real examples of "management speak", odds are many or most would have precise meanings understood by the people to whom the communication was intended. There are plenty of examples of misuse, of course, but any competent "management type" looks down on such misuse and isn't fooled by it.
I'm as amused as anyone by the Bullsh*t Bingo cards, but I can tell you that phrases like "Total Cost of Ownership" and "Turnkey Solution" have specific meanings that, absent those phrases, would take many more words to describe.
You can't fool me... I know you're that clever virus.
Actually, I'm only a dolphin, ma'am.
A dolphin? Well then I guess it would be ok to cl-aaaaaaargh!
e-mail illiteracy is just illiteracy. The rise of e-mail is just exposing how many people used to get by without writing anything down.
Three statisticians go out on a deer hunting trip, when they see a magnificent buck step out into a clearing. The first statistician misses 7 feet to the left. The second misses 7 feet to the right.
The third statistician shouts "We got him!"
Finally: This particular settlement costs Google $0.00. They are literally manufacturing the "money" for this settlement. They are paying in stock. Stock that does not yet have a market value. And, any perceived loss on the potential sale of the stock is made up for by adding more stock to the IPO. It works GREAT for Google, from a business perspective.
.00009% of the company instead of .0001% of the company (numbers entirely made up). Therefore, the IPO shares are worth slightly less, and Google makes less money on the IPO. And if the market is working efficiently (and it usually is), the money lost, between Google's cash payday and the value of the unsold privately held shares, will equal more or less what those new shares would have been worth in the IPO.
That's not really the way it works. You can't issue stock for free. Stock is just a percentage of your company. With more outstanding stock, those IPO shares would be worth, say,
That being said, if you think your shares are going to be overvalued at IPO, then this strategy it works great in the long run. It's the only way a company like AOL could buy a company like Time Warner.
It's true that the OP didn't RTFA, but it should be noted that a similarly configured Dell (the lowest model they have with some RAM tacked on) is currently priced at $476, including monitor and speakers. So there is definitely a sizeable Disney premium on a decidedly low-end system. Tough sell.
As a technical support center manager I can tell you that the answer is "surprisingly many". Never underestimate the power of inertia. Competence as a helpdesk technician and ambition are often unrelated.
I don't like to see good people leave, but I view the job as a stepping stone, since we can't afford to advance technician pay and responsibilities as they gain skill. I expect to keep people maybe six months, while they parlay the experience they get here into something better.
As for the many that don't take that path, well, I'm happy to have their skills for as long as possible, but I just have to smack my forehead at their complacency.
A friend of mine recently had the insight that while his site was highly ranked enough to attract a ton of blog spam, it certainly wasn't important enough that spammers would attempt circumvention of even the simplest security measures.
Hence, the comment entry page became:
Enter the number 3 here:
Enter your comment here:
It's been in place for a month and a half has a 100% success rate so far.
And the stock market was looking really good around 1999.
A lot of people talk about rent as if it is "wasted money." That's not at all true, most of the time. Buying a house is an investment, and investments are inherently risky.
If you have $10,000 to make a downpayment on a house (assuming you live in Gary, Indiana or something), then you have the choice whether to invest that $10,000 in a house or in some other investment. Choosing to continue to pay rent allows you to invest it somewhere else if you feel the return will be greater or the risk is reduced. Much of the time, your rent will be cheaper than what you pay on a mortgage, and most of that mortgage payment is going towards interest at first. Calculate the "expected return" on each investment (including the tax implications)and you can figure out whether buying a home is a good (financial) use of your available capital.
How can you tell whether home prices are likely to keep rising? One way is to look at the ratio of home prices to rents. Over time, rents and home prices should keep roughly the same ratio. One reason that ratio can get out of whack is when people are buying a home not because of its value compared to rent, but because they expect to sell it for more later. When home prices rise without a proportional rise in rents, that can be indicative of a bubble. And that ratio is at historic highs right now in the U.S.A.
Of course, low interest rates can also push home prices higher, but it's not nearly as simple as people usually make it out to be. A home will become part of your investment portfolio, and your entire investment portfolio should be considered carefully.
Really? You don't think social skills are important to people who manage other people? You don't think social skills are important to people who need to enter into deals with other people, or sell things to other people? Different people have different skill sets, and showing contempt for someone who lacks your skill set is, imo, unreasonable. Showing contempt for someone who is not interested in aquiring the skills necessary to do their job and tries to mask their ignorance is much more reasonable, and no doubt many execs fall into this category. But why direct your scorn at the ones who have made it a point to aquire a skill which is important to their jobs and which you already possess?
Consider GE, which instituted an internet mentoring program (Word doc) for its top executives, including former CEO Jack Welch.
You don't need a computer expert to teach computer basics, and the upside is that the lower level employees get executive mentorship, and the executive employees learn these tools while keeping connected to employees down the ladder. This, to me, is a much more sensible approach than seclusion, shame, and secrecy.Danger isn't the issue. Steroids aren't really that dangerous if their use is carefully monitored by qualified people. It might not be that dangerous to have someone push you out of the starting blocks either, but it is cheating. The whole point of these competitions is to see what the athletes are capable of doing on their own through dedication and sacrifice, not seeing who can make the most bodily upgrades. In any competition the participants all agree to abide by the same rules and these rules are dictated by the purpose of the competition. In bodybuilding there are "natural" competitions and untested competitions. All of the top bodybuilders are steroid freaks, but nobody minds because the rule there is "freakish proportions by any means necessary." In the olympics, the whole purpose is to see the intersection between natural ability and hard work. Part of the appeal is that you know that the athletes are, to some extent, comparable to athletes from centuries ago (though with better nutrition and training methods). You allow gene therapy and steroids, then why not bionics or jet propulsion?