I'm not sure what you mean. You implied that OWS should emulate the Tea Party people because of their success, but the Tea Party is a complete failure. They allowed themselves to be co-opted by a major party that didn't share their beliefs, and allowed themselves to get painted as stupid, racist, whack-jobs. All of this was to get more support so that they could get people elected into office, and then the people that they elected are no better than the people they replaced. Essentially they sold their souls in order to achieve their goals, and then it still didn't achieve its goals.
The Tea Party should be considered a cautionary tale on what a movement like OWS should *not* do.
Yes, the solution IS "get out and vote". And the rallying cry should be "No more private financing of elections!"
So is the solution to get out the vote, or to have rallies in favor of ending private financing of elections?
That is one point ANY rational person on either side of the political spectrum would be able to support.
And yet people don't support it. Even if you "get out the vote", this isn't something that people get to vote on. Even if people were able to vote on it, it probably wouldn't pass in an election. So...?
Please articulate one actionable "demand" from the OWS movement.
From the Wikipedia page:
The Guardian interviewed OWS and found three main demands: get the money out of politics; reinstate the Glass-Steagall act; and draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.
The demand to "get the money out of politics" may be vague, but there were more clearly actionable demands related to this. For example, there seemed to be a consensus that they wanted a constitutional amendment that stated that corporations were not "people" and were not therefore entitled to the same constitutional protections as people.
Well first, that's 1 candidate in 1 election. The Republicans are not in favor of campaign finance reform. Second, McCain was pulling in less money to begin with-- when you get into a boxing match with a man whose right arm was amputated, don't be surprised if he wants you to agree to only fight with your left hand.
The '99%' are unsuccessful because they're bunch of smelly, clueless Marxists complaining that they can't get jobs, when anyone of clue can see precisely why no-one would want to hire them. Their solutions to this problem all involve taking everything that people with jobs make and giving it to the government so the government can give it to them.
Well they're unsuccessful because people in power have done what they always do. They either co-opt popular movements and turn them to their own goals, or they raise of the worst people within the movement as a straw man and tear them apart. Even if the OWS people were all clean-cut middle class people except for 1 hippie, the news would be showing you the hippie.
they don't have the popular support they pretend they have...So you're unhappy with the way things are going in this country? Get in line.
So they're unsuccessful because they have no support, and they have no support because their complaints are so common that they're not interesting? And your solution is to "get out and vote"? Really?
If people can't be motivated by common complaints of massive corruption because the complaints are so common as to be boring, then what's your hope for motivating people to do something as boring as voting?
There was a story a while back about a guy who was pretending to be a girl on Craigslist, trolling for sex, getting guys to send their names and pictures, and then posting them online. That sucks. That has the potential to ruin lives.
This guy? Meh. He was a dick, and now his bad behavior has been publicly exposed. This will hurt his career, but his career deserves to be hurt. The Internet will be vicious with him, but the Internet has a short attention span. I bet there won't be much harassment 6 months from now. If I had to place bets, I'd bet that his guy will even land on his feet and still have a career in PR after this. There are lots of stupid people to hire him, and incompetence doesn't stop companies from hiring people into very high positions.
If you've developed something useful on your own time, well outside of any contractual obligations or restrictions, then you now have a product to sell.
Many companies make you sign something before you start work that essentially says, "Anything I make during my time of employment, even if it's in my off-hours, belongs to the company."
If you want to justify anything to management, the best way is often going to be to relate it back to money. Will creating an IT department save money? Will it help cut some kind of expense? Will it make it easy to bring in revenue? Will it help your revenue grow? Will it allow you to do something more efficiently, requiring fewer people to accomplish the same thing?
There are lots of routes that lead back to money somehow. Improved security might mean protection against lawsuits, meaning less money lost in settlements. Improved employee morale might mean that you can hire and retain better people without increasing salaries. Changing the division of labor might improve efficiency and productivity.
* App developers are looking at 'safe' (marketshare-wise) platforms to write apps for. iOS and Android are among them, while WP7 is not.
I think this is really important. Basically, developers don't really want to support a whole lot of platforms. On the desktop, you see a lot of Windows support and a fair amount of OSX support from commercial applications, and after that it kind of falls off. Among the Linux applications, it's not that common for apps to only have good support for Linux/BSD, but not Windows/OSX, or else only have support for Windows or OSX but not both.
So anyway, my point is that nobody really wants to rewrite the same application 5 different times for a bunch of different platforms, and especially not when you can write for 2 platforms and cover most of the market. When you already have 2 entrenched players, you can't jump into being the major player or the alternative, so people look at it and say, "Why bother with this new startup thing that isn't already well supported?" And you need a really good answer to that question.
The Users are responsible for keeping their data backed up.
This is where your misunderstanding creeps in. You can say, "users are responsible for keeping their data backed up" all the way up until a user loses an important piece of information, and then suddenly IT will need to bend over backwards trying to recover it anyway. That's how these things work in most companies. You can say, "Users can bring their own iPhones and IT isn't responsible for supporting it," and then a user has an iPhone problem they can't fix, and IT is required to fix it.
And then if the file is unrecoverable or the iPhone can't be fixed, the IT department will get blamed. It doesn't matter whose responsibility it was supposed to be. "There's a computer problem and IT can't fix it, so IT must not be doing a very good job." That's all people know.
You can say "just don't pick up" or "just don't set up the corporate email" but when you have the capability there is a natural tendency to use it. You can say "just don't pick up" or "just don't set up the corporate email" but when you have the capability there is a natural tendency to use it.
I think the second part is definitely more important. I don't even think it's about whether people actually know that you have a smart phone, but more and more, I'm finding that people *assume* you have a smart phone and that you'll respond withing 10 minutes at any time, day or night. I've had friends, coworkers, and even bosses that will email me at 9pm, and when I don't respond until the next day, they're like, "Why didn't you respond when I sent that? I sent that 12 hours ago."
Somehow, "I'm not on the clock" doesn't seem to be a reason that people accept anymore. Everyone expects that you're checking your email and responding 24 hours a day. It's really too bad.
If you want to avoid being the PHB, then don't read a bunch of management books or go to management seminars or get your MBA. Avoid taking a lot of the advice that you'll be given.
Really, it can be helpful to read about management, but the main source of PHBs is that it's some guy who has been thrown into management without being comfortable with it, and his response is to latch on to whatever random management self-help book he read. He reads something about how to motivate people or how to manage an IT department, and instead of thinking critically and applying his own experiences, he follows the quick-fix methods that he read about.
There's plenty to learn and plenty to study, but use your head. There's no metric to replace knowing the people you're managing. There's no procedure to replace good judgement. There's no magical workflow that replaces knuckling down and doing your job.
While the developers are your friends you now have new responsibilities and may have to make some tough decisions.
This reminds me of something: understand that you might not be able to be friends with the people you're managing. You can be on friendly terms with them, but in my experience, friendships are pretty hard once that power imbalance exists. As their manager, at some point, you might need to call them on some kind of bad/irresponsible behavior. If you're like me, you won't really want to, but it'll be your responsibility.
I don't think that's why. I support a bunch of people, and have dealt with a bunch of people who bought netbooks. In my experience, most often, people who buy netbooks are not happy with them, and this has been a problem since netbooks were introduced, before the iPad was announced.
The problem is that, to some extent, you get what you pay for. Most of the people who buy netbooks are hoping to get around the whole "you get what you pay for" thing by buying a $300 laptop, expecting that it will have the performance and feature-set of a $1000 laptop. They bring the netbook home and try to work on it for a little while, and then they find that they haven't successfully cheated the system. The $300 laptop they bought is a $300 laptop, and there is not a secret magical way to get a $1000 laptop at a fraction of the price. So of course, they're dissatisfied.
It's really not that complicated. Most people don't actually want a $300 cheap/slow laptop.
Remember when he added the 0th rule in one of his later books? Again is was because he was NOT naive and knew that the 3 rules were not enough.
Maybe I'm crazy, but I never thought the 3 rules were even the point. I didn't even think it was about robots per se. Asimov's interest seemed to me to be more directed at the difficulties with systematizing morality into a set of logical rules. Robots are a handy symbolic tool for systemizing human behavior in thought experiments or fiction.
I guess I could be reading too much into things, but really arguing about the 3 rules seems to me a bit like arguing about the proper arrangement of dilithium crystals in the Star Trek universe-- it may be fun or interesting for the sake of a discussion, but it's kind of not that important.
You may need corporate backing to advance the project particularly far, and get some high quality polishing done, however OSS can still add a lot of developer effort. It's not a cure-all, but it can be a nice assist depending on the project.
See, I don't even think that you can count on the "nice assist". You might get it, but there's a decent chance that any goals you have for the project will still need to be accomplished by *you*. What open source really does is increase support and, to some extent, increase some technical comfort in knowing that you won't have the rug pulled out from you later on. For a lot of the end-user benefits of open source, it's as much PR as anything else.
The real value of something like this might come from the collaborative effect from other corporate entities. So HP opens WebOS, and then lets say Motorola implements it in one of their phones, finds a bug, and wants to fix it. It may be that it's simply easier to push the fix back upstream rather than re-implement it with every new release. Yes, it would mean that their competitors will also benefit from the fix, but it may well be worth it.
More to the point: There is no good reason to use metrics for a 3 person team. You could sit down and observe the 3 person team for a week and get a very good idea of what's going on, and it would be easier and probably take much less time than designing, implementing, gathering, and analyzing metrics. It's easier and more accurate.
If you're going to use metrics, use it in situations where you're managing such a large group that you can't possibly know who everyone is. Don't use it in situations where you have the option of doing a simple evaluation.
I agree. I think there is a focus in our society on "objectivity" which has lead us to become obsessed with metrics and procedures. We have a coherent view that the proper way to maximize the performance of *anything* is to come up with various dry procedures that supposedly everyone can perform equally well because they're well documented. Then we test the procedures with metrics, find the correct procedure, and then we know "the right way to do things". Once that's established, we drop people in like interchangeable cogs, require that they follow the procedure to the letter, and measure their performance with metrics.
The intention here (if it's not immediately obvious) is to remove the requirement for "good judgement". No one wants the responsibility of having to exercise good judgment, and nobody wants to trust anyone else's judgment. Instead we try to convince ourselves that metrics can take the place of judgement. Like, yeah, we spent thousands of years developing philosophy and arguing about how to develop and exercise good judgment, but that's because nobody ever thought of using simple statistics before you.
One of my coworkers got huge amounts of management praise for processing lots and lots of cases... My management was too dumb to run numbers on how many callbacks he had, that the rest of us were fixing...
I remember a similar situation early in my career. I think I've told a longer version of this story here on/. before. I was working for an in-house corporate helpdesk, and there were 5 of us to run around the building (actually 2 buildings) fixing things. One day they decide to start mining the helpdesk system for performance metrics, and they find that one of the older guys was always at the bottom of all the stats. His resolution times were longer, and he actually took a shockingly low number of tickets per day. Apparently there was talk of some kind of disciplinary action. The manager, luckily, was a good manager, and argued with upper management. He insisted that, even though this older tech closed a small number of cases, he was worth the money.
The helpdesk manager had known through daily observation what the numbers didn't show: the older tech had been spending a lot of time teaching (and even helping to manage) the younger techs. The younger techs routinely passed difficult trouble calls to the older tech, and those calls took longer. The older tech would help younger techs with their own calls, which he would get no credit for in the metrics. The older tech would also sometimes spend more time on calls because he was thorough.
Upper management still wasn't happy. They wanted objective metrics that could judge each worker. Eventually the helpdesk manager did his own analysis and showed that whenever the older tech was on vacation or otherwise out of the office, all of the other techs' numbers dropped. Once that was proven, upper management gave up on the whole thing.
It was a good lesson early in my career: metrics often aren't showing you what you think they're showing. I don't even know why they were putting so much stress on metrics when they were measuring an IT staff of 5 techs.
Why are we paying so many high priced engineers when we've never had a problem, they think.
This is a big logic problem for management. "Why are we paying people to fix things when we never seem to have a problem?" So they fire some people, and they start having problems. Then they ask, "Why are we paying out remaining staff so much? They must not be good at their jobs, since we have more problems than ever and they can't seem to fix all the problems." So they fire some more people. Then it's "Why do our problems keep getting worse? We've fired all those incompetent techs, after all. Things should be working great now!"
I'm simplifying, but I've actually seen this happen before. People don't understand that when all your tech is working, that *might not* mean that your IT staff has it easy. It *might* mean that your IT staff is doing a good job.
They've been losing sales to the used markets for years, and they're used to it. It's not that bad, either, because lots of people have an emotional aversion to buying anything "used".
The publishers have cut off their nose to spite their face, and in their fear of low-margin ebooks have lost their margin entirely.
It's not exactly that they cut off their nose to spite their face. To some extent, what's going on with ebooks is the same thing that's happening in movies/television, which is the same thing that happened in Music a few years ago. Publishers can see that their business may move more and more into digital downloads, and they don't want to miss the boat, so they're getting involved in that arena. However, they prefer to keep their old business model because they understand it, it's predictable, and it's profitable. To some extent, they therefore want their own business ventures in digital streaming/downloads to fail, and they sabotage these ventures.
Now I'm not convinced that they are literally consciously thinking, "I want this venture to fail." However, they aren't approaching it from the standpoint of "This is the future of my business and I must make it succeed," either. It's a little more like, "Ok, well we have to do this, and I don't trust it, so let's just throw this sloppy attempt out there and see what happens. But let's make sure we aren't cannibalizing our other sales."
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I'm not sure what you mean. You implied that OWS should emulate the Tea Party people because of their success, but the Tea Party is a complete failure. They allowed themselves to be co-opted by a major party that didn't share their beliefs, and allowed themselves to get painted as stupid, racist, whack-jobs. All of this was to get more support so that they could get people elected into office, and then the people that they elected are no better than the people they replaced. Essentially they sold their souls in order to achieve their goals, and then it still didn't achieve its goals.
The Tea Party should be considered a cautionary tale on what a movement like OWS should *not* do.
Yes, the solution IS "get out and vote". And the rallying cry should be "No more private financing of elections!"
So is the solution to get out the vote, or to have rallies in favor of ending private financing of elections?
That is one point ANY rational person on either side of the political spectrum would be able to support.
And yet people don't support it. Even if you "get out the vote", this isn't something that people get to vote on. Even if people were able to vote on it, it probably wouldn't pass in an election. So...?
Please articulate one actionable "demand" from the OWS movement.
From the Wikipedia page:
The Guardian interviewed OWS and found three main demands: get the money out of politics; reinstate the Glass-Steagall act; and draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.
The demand to "get the money out of politics" may be vague, but there were more clearly actionable demands related to this. For example, there seemed to be a consensus that they wanted a constitutional amendment that stated that corporations were not "people" and were not therefore entitled to the same constitutional protections as people.
Well first, that's 1 candidate in 1 election. The Republicans are not in favor of campaign finance reform. Second, McCain was pulling in less money to begin with-- when you get into a boxing match with a man whose right arm was amputated, don't be surprised if he wants you to agree to only fight with your left hand.
The '99%' are unsuccessful because they're bunch of smelly, clueless Marxists complaining that they can't get jobs, when anyone of clue can see precisely why no-one would want to hire them. Their solutions to this problem all involve taking everything that people with jobs make and giving it to the government so the government can give it to them.
Well they're unsuccessful because people in power have done what they always do. They either co-opt popular movements and turn them to their own goals, or they raise of the worst people within the movement as a straw man and tear them apart. Even if the OWS people were all clean-cut middle class people except for 1 hippie, the news would be showing you the hippie.
He gave you the answer, do what the tea party did. Find candidates who will run in the primaries and support your position.
Yeah? How is that working out for you?
Now there's a core group of congressmen who are actively pushing for the tea-party platform in congress.
You mean there are a group of Republicans who pander to "tea partiers" in public speaking events.
they don't have the popular support they pretend they have...So you're unhappy with the way things are going in this country? Get in line.
So they're unsuccessful because they have no support, and they have no support because their complaints are so common that they're not interesting? And your solution is to "get out and vote"? Really?
If people can't be motivated by common complaints of massive corruption because the complaints are so common as to be boring, then what's your hope for motivating people to do something as boring as voting?
Wait, why would it make sense to team up with the GOP? The GOP doesn't want "less money in politics".
There was a story a while back about a guy who was pretending to be a girl on Craigslist, trolling for sex, getting guys to send their names and pictures, and then posting them online. That sucks. That has the potential to ruin lives.
This guy? Meh. He was a dick, and now his bad behavior has been publicly exposed. This will hurt his career, but his career deserves to be hurt. The Internet will be vicious with him, but the Internet has a short attention span. I bet there won't be much harassment 6 months from now. If I had to place bets, I'd bet that his guy will even land on his feet and still have a career in PR after this. There are lots of stupid people to hire him, and incompetence doesn't stop companies from hiring people into very high positions.
If you've developed something useful on your own time, well outside of any contractual obligations or restrictions, then you now have a product to sell.
Many companies make you sign something before you start work that essentially says, "Anything I make during my time of employment, even if it's in my off-hours, belongs to the company."
If you want to justify anything to management, the best way is often going to be to relate it back to money. Will creating an IT department save money? Will it help cut some kind of expense? Will it make it easy to bring in revenue? Will it help your revenue grow? Will it allow you to do something more efficiently, requiring fewer people to accomplish the same thing?
There are lots of routes that lead back to money somehow. Improved security might mean protection against lawsuits, meaning less money lost in settlements. Improved employee morale might mean that you can hire and retain better people without increasing salaries. Changing the division of labor might improve efficiency and productivity.
* App developers are looking at 'safe' (marketshare-wise) platforms to write apps for. iOS and Android are among them, while WP7 is not.
I think this is really important. Basically, developers don't really want to support a whole lot of platforms. On the desktop, you see a lot of Windows support and a fair amount of OSX support from commercial applications, and after that it kind of falls off. Among the Linux applications, it's not that common for apps to only have good support for Linux/BSD, but not Windows/OSX, or else only have support for Windows or OSX but not both.
So anyway, my point is that nobody really wants to rewrite the same application 5 different times for a bunch of different platforms, and especially not when you can write for 2 platforms and cover most of the market. When you already have 2 entrenched players, you can't jump into being the major player or the alternative, so people look at it and say, "Why bother with this new startup thing that isn't already well supported?" And you need a really good answer to that question.
The Users are responsible for keeping their data backed up.
This is where your misunderstanding creeps in. You can say, "users are responsible for keeping their data backed up" all the way up until a user loses an important piece of information, and then suddenly IT will need to bend over backwards trying to recover it anyway. That's how these things work in most companies. You can say, "Users can bring their own iPhones and IT isn't responsible for supporting it," and then a user has an iPhone problem they can't fix, and IT is required to fix it.
And then if the file is unrecoverable or the iPhone can't be fixed, the IT department will get blamed. It doesn't matter whose responsibility it was supposed to be. "There's a computer problem and IT can't fix it, so IT must not be doing a very good job." That's all people know.
You can say "just don't pick up" or "just don't set up the corporate email" but when you have the capability there is a natural tendency to use it. You can say "just don't pick up" or "just don't set up the corporate email" but when you have the capability there is a natural tendency to use it.
I think the second part is definitely more important. I don't even think it's about whether people actually know that you have a smart phone, but more and more, I'm finding that people *assume* you have a smart phone and that you'll respond withing 10 minutes at any time, day or night. I've had friends, coworkers, and even bosses that will email me at 9pm, and when I don't respond until the next day, they're like, "Why didn't you respond when I sent that? I sent that 12 hours ago."
Somehow, "I'm not on the clock" doesn't seem to be a reason that people accept anymore. Everyone expects that you're checking your email and responding 24 hours a day. It's really too bad.
If you want to avoid being the PHB, then don't read a bunch of management books or go to management seminars or get your MBA. Avoid taking a lot of the advice that you'll be given.
Really, it can be helpful to read about management, but the main source of PHBs is that it's some guy who has been thrown into management without being comfortable with it, and his response is to latch on to whatever random management self-help book he read. He reads something about how to motivate people or how to manage an IT department, and instead of thinking critically and applying his own experiences, he follows the quick-fix methods that he read about.
There's plenty to learn and plenty to study, but use your head. There's no metric to replace knowing the people you're managing. There's no procedure to replace good judgement. There's no magical workflow that replaces knuckling down and doing your job.
While the developers are your friends you now have new responsibilities and may have to make some tough decisions.
This reminds me of something: understand that you might not be able to be friends with the people you're managing. You can be on friendly terms with them, but in my experience, friendships are pretty hard once that power imbalance exists. As their manager, at some point, you might need to call them on some kind of bad/irresponsible behavior. If you're like me, you won't really want to, but it'll be your responsibility.
I don't think that's why. I support a bunch of people, and have dealt with a bunch of people who bought netbooks. In my experience, most often, people who buy netbooks are not happy with them, and this has been a problem since netbooks were introduced, before the iPad was announced.
The problem is that, to some extent, you get what you pay for. Most of the people who buy netbooks are hoping to get around the whole "you get what you pay for" thing by buying a $300 laptop, expecting that it will have the performance and feature-set of a $1000 laptop. They bring the netbook home and try to work on it for a little while, and then they find that they haven't successfully cheated the system. The $300 laptop they bought is a $300 laptop, and there is not a secret magical way to get a $1000 laptop at a fraction of the price. So of course, they're dissatisfied.
It's really not that complicated. Most people don't actually want a $300 cheap/slow laptop.
Remember when he added the 0th rule in one of his later books? Again is was because he was NOT naive and knew that the 3 rules were not enough.
Maybe I'm crazy, but I never thought the 3 rules were even the point. I didn't even think it was about robots per se. Asimov's interest seemed to me to be more directed at the difficulties with systematizing morality into a set of logical rules. Robots are a handy symbolic tool for systemizing human behavior in thought experiments or fiction.
I guess I could be reading too much into things, but really arguing about the 3 rules seems to me a bit like arguing about the proper arrangement of dilithium crystals in the Star Trek universe-- it may be fun or interesting for the sake of a discussion, but it's kind of not that important.
You may need corporate backing to advance the project particularly far, and get some high quality polishing done, however OSS can still add a lot of developer effort. It's not a cure-all, but it can be a nice assist depending on the project.
See, I don't even think that you can count on the "nice assist". You might get it, but there's a decent chance that any goals you have for the project will still need to be accomplished by *you*. What open source really does is increase support and, to some extent, increase some technical comfort in knowing that you won't have the rug pulled out from you later on. For a lot of the end-user benefits of open source, it's as much PR as anything else.
The real value of something like this might come from the collaborative effect from other corporate entities. So HP opens WebOS, and then lets say Motorola implements it in one of their phones, finds a bug, and wants to fix it. It may be that it's simply easier to push the fix back upstream rather than re-implement it with every new release. Yes, it would mean that their competitors will also benefit from the fix, but it may well be worth it.
More to the point: There is no good reason to use metrics for a 3 person team. You could sit down and observe the 3 person team for a week and get a very good idea of what's going on, and it would be easier and probably take much less time than designing, implementing, gathering, and analyzing metrics. It's easier and more accurate.
If you're going to use metrics, use it in situations where you're managing such a large group that you can't possibly know who everyone is. Don't use it in situations where you have the option of doing a simple evaluation.
I agree. I think there is a focus in our society on "objectivity" which has lead us to become obsessed with metrics and procedures. We have a coherent view that the proper way to maximize the performance of *anything* is to come up with various dry procedures that supposedly everyone can perform equally well because they're well documented. Then we test the procedures with metrics, find the correct procedure, and then we know "the right way to do things". Once that's established, we drop people in like interchangeable cogs, require that they follow the procedure to the letter, and measure their performance with metrics.
The intention here (if it's not immediately obvious) is to remove the requirement for "good judgement". No one wants the responsibility of having to exercise good judgment, and nobody wants to trust anyone else's judgment. Instead we try to convince ourselves that metrics can take the place of judgement. Like, yeah, we spent thousands of years developing philosophy and arguing about how to develop and exercise good judgment, but that's because nobody ever thought of using simple statistics before you.
One of my coworkers got huge amounts of management praise for processing lots and lots of cases... My management was too dumb to run numbers on how many callbacks he had, that the rest of us were fixing...
I remember a similar situation early in my career. I think I've told a longer version of this story here on /. before. I was working for an in-house corporate helpdesk, and there were 5 of us to run around the building (actually 2 buildings) fixing things. One day they decide to start mining the helpdesk system for performance metrics, and they find that one of the older guys was always at the bottom of all the stats. His resolution times were longer, and he actually took a shockingly low number of tickets per day. Apparently there was talk of some kind of disciplinary action. The manager, luckily, was a good manager, and argued with upper management. He insisted that, even though this older tech closed a small number of cases, he was worth the money.
The helpdesk manager had known through daily observation what the numbers didn't show: the older tech had been spending a lot of time teaching (and even helping to manage) the younger techs. The younger techs routinely passed difficult trouble calls to the older tech, and those calls took longer. The older tech would help younger techs with their own calls, which he would get no credit for in the metrics. The older tech would also sometimes spend more time on calls because he was thorough.
Upper management still wasn't happy. They wanted objective metrics that could judge each worker. Eventually the helpdesk manager did his own analysis and showed that whenever the older tech was on vacation or otherwise out of the office, all of the other techs' numbers dropped. Once that was proven, upper management gave up on the whole thing.
It was a good lesson early in my career: metrics often aren't showing you what you think they're showing. I don't even know why they were putting so much stress on metrics when they were measuring an IT staff of 5 techs.
Why are we paying so many high priced engineers when we've never had a problem, they think.
This is a big logic problem for management. "Why are we paying people to fix things when we never seem to have a problem?" So they fire some people, and they start having problems. Then they ask, "Why are we paying out remaining staff so much? They must not be good at their jobs, since we have more problems than ever and they can't seem to fix all the problems." So they fire some more people. Then it's "Why do our problems keep getting worse? We've fired all those incompetent techs, after all. Things should be working great now!"
I'm simplifying, but I've actually seen this happen before. People don't understand that when all your tech is working, that *might not* mean that your IT staff has it easy. It *might* mean that your IT staff is doing a good job.
They've been losing sales to the used markets for years, and they're used to it. It's not that bad, either, because lots of people have an emotional aversion to buying anything "used".
The publishers have cut off their nose to spite their face, and in their fear of low-margin ebooks have lost their margin entirely.
It's not exactly that they cut off their nose to spite their face. To some extent, what's going on with ebooks is the same thing that's happening in movies/television, which is the same thing that happened in Music a few years ago. Publishers can see that their business may move more and more into digital downloads, and they don't want to miss the boat, so they're getting involved in that arena. However, they prefer to keep their old business model because they understand it, it's predictable, and it's profitable. To some extent, they therefore want their own business ventures in digital streaming/downloads to fail, and they sabotage these ventures.
Now I'm not convinced that they are literally consciously thinking, "I want this venture to fail." However, they aren't approaching it from the standpoint of "This is the future of my business and I must make it succeed," either. It's a little more like, "Ok, well we have to do this, and I don't trust it, so let's just throw this sloppy attempt out there and see what happens. But let's make sure we aren't cannibalizing our other sales."