Middle management has become such a joke that neither the C level management, nor the workers take them seriously. No doubt the fact that the C level management doesn't take them seriously is a big reason why so many people that are bad at management end up in middle management.
In most companies, there is a serious problem with middle management because good managers are promoted - what is left is either on its way up or not worth much. This is a problem that is seen mostly in management because in specialized jobs (such as software development) there is a smaller ladder to climb.
This is similar to the problem of teachers working in poor schools. The top teachers usually get better opportunities and they run away, so what is left is either waiting for their chance to go, or just coasting until retirement.
Throughout the process of creating the assignment, my management has consistently over-promised and under-delivered (financial compensation, timelines, and even job scope).
From their perspective, this makes sense because they have short-term incentives. Talk is cheap, and leading people on is a typical management tactic.
My immediate manager understands that I could easily leave and work elsewhere, joining the steady trickle of coders and team leads that have moved to greener pastures over the last 12 months. My senior managers, though, don't seem to understand this.
Working for a Fortune 50 IT company has benefits (nobody will ask you to take out the garbage or change the printer toner, and you will never worry about bouncing paychecks), however the bigger the company, the more likely significant gaps will appear between management layers.
This is exactly how Rockefeller was thinking: when you come across talent, you hire, then you adapt your business based on the people available. Even if in the short term it does not fit in an existing MS-Project plan, over the years you build a strong core and the team is driving the business, not the other way around. And if people walk away to get more experience, you keep the door open so you can benefit from what they did elsewhere.
Unfortunately, a lot of companies are doing the exact opposite because the MBAs are trained to manage by balance sheet, stock price and quarterly projections: short-term metrics.
I almost modded you down just for bringing nightmarish memories of Tivoli back into my conscious mind. Do you know how long it has taken me to successfully repress those memories?
Nevertheless I will refrain from down-modding and instead I will send you the bill from my shrink.
If you want to have a surreal experience, visit an IBM conference or trade show (such as the IBM Tech University) and go for a drink with a bunch of Tivoli consultants. Yep, people who have spent their days in Tivoli, for years. They are a special breed, very resilient.
All well and good, but "racetrack" memory, when all is said and done, is just a reimplementation of the mercury delay lines that were used for storage in the Leo machines back in the 1950s.
Different, but still the same concept of cycling the bits round a circuit and reading them sequentially.
I'd shout "Prior Art" at it.
Let's play Prior Art Jeopardy: "I am a technology that provides an abstraction layer allowing components written in different languages to interact". 1) What is the.Net Framework CLR 2) What is a web service 3) What is CORBA 4) What is CICS
Based on the notion of "prior art", guess who would get the patent...
People underestimate the value of all the R&D IBM is doing. They spend a lot of money on this kind of research, and they do it seriously. And they don't look for the latest fad to blow the mind of consumers - they build for the long run.
Ok, their GUIs usually make my eyes bleed and the setup for some of their products is painful (Tivoli anyone?). But IBM is moving forward; their cloud offering, which was a complete joke a few years ago, is getting pretty good. Their stuff does not shine like Apple, it does not integrate like Microsoft, but it works pretty well.
It is very important that TV continues to exist as it is, as well as PVRs. Otherwise, people won't be able to upload the good tv series on usenet so I can download commercial-free episodes and watch them on my PS3.
House, the Big Bang Theory, Family Guy, the Mentalist, Supernatural, Storage Wars, Dexter: good entertainment for about 400MB/hour (I don't care much for HD).
A good usenet provider with a decent retention is not free (maybe 10$/month) but the insanely fast download combined with the excellent filtering provided by hand-crafted search engines (such as Nzbmatrix or Newzbin) is worth it. And for the poor people, I think there is some stuff available on P2P (if you don't mind getting some weird midget porn when you look for Disney content), but I find it slow and dirty.
Also, they mention that the cost of the system is something like $1.30 per account per month. I don't know much about IT budgeting, but that seems like a really low number for something as critical as messaging and calendaring. I have to imagine that they spend more money per user just cutting the grass around the campus.
Totally agree. One of my client did a major cost-cutting initiative for its email platform, and there was just no way to make it reliable under 9$ a month (per account). And this is when there is no Crackberry (which brings the numbers way up).
Outsourcing would work, because when there is another failure they will have another party to blame instead of pointing fingers to a decision made in Spring 2011 (even as a total stranger I could feel the bitterness under that bullet point in the slides).
I used to archive my emails, then one day by mistake they were deleted. For a minute or two I was freaking out, then I felt relieved. I needed to lose them completely to understand that I did not need them. It was like a security blanket (what if I need a cd-key I received by email, or if I want to read again the bad poetry I sent to my ex?), nothing else.
For the last few years not only did I not archive my emails, I also made sure to change my email address once or twice a year to weed out the crap. And there was never a single time where this "lean" policy caused me a problem. It's like losing everything after a fire at home; losing that Dallas VHS box-set or all those National Geographic magazines is refreshing.
So you are not only M$ tool, but also now advertise for IKEA???
P.S. And you think that e-mail is that simple? Ignorance is bliss, they say.
Thank you for sharing these valuable thoughts. I will now go for a long walk on the beach, letting your wisdom and insight slowly sink in my soul until they are anchored forever. (Ok I don't live near the beach, but if I did, I would definitely go)
Natalie.. oh wait, this thread isnt natalie vs keira vs scarlett, it was about hackable routers... doh!
You ruined everything. The discussion was going somewhere, talking about cute chicks (still can't believe someone prefer the fake Padme to the real one), but you HAD to burst that bubble and bring back the router thing.
Reminds me of a guy I know. One time we were at Best Buy and there was that pretty lady, so I said to him: "I think I'm in love" and he said: "Me too!" then he walked right past her to go check out the new Vaio that was on display. I think if we went to the strippers he would probably focus on the laser thingy or on the sound system, ignoring Bebe and Cassandra.
Same problem with reporting technologies. Some (such as Microsoft RDL) are xml-based, so it is always possible (at least) to search the source or do a quick fix in a text editor. However with other technologies (such as SAP BO) the reports are stored in a binary format, so you need the whole toolkit even for the most mundane task.
For a moment, I thought you were one of the people on our log analysis team that I work with.
There are places where a database is good. I recommend them heavily, but the original log output shouldn't be database. If you want a database of logs (appropriate in many cases), send a copy of the logs off host (which you have to do anyway for PCI and many other audits) and store that copy in a database. That makes it easier to comply with other requirements.
Best of both worlds. Plain text local to box in case Things Go Wrong, and database for cross-system forensic analysis.
Basically that process is called "chinese whispers" - you take the output of a context-aware source (the application) to an intermediary dumb format (a text file) and then you interpret the dumb format to put data in a database designed to store exactly what the initial source offered. From a business perspective, this process adds exactly zero value but it does add a lot of risk (ever heard of "lost in translation"?).
So the exact opposite of what you suggest would probably be the best of both world - store the actual log in a database, and offer a quick way to export that in text format for the people who need to process text with grep and sed. Less risk, more value.
On Windows there is a lot of built-in capabilities for log exploring in Powershell or even in VBS/WMI. A toolbox contains many tools, not just grep.
Oh, so you like all that stuff over something as fool-proof, robust and simple as the grep? OK.
I am curious: are you using a fool-proof, robust and simple approach such as print-fax-scan-ocr instead of that crazy thing called email? And when you assemble IKEA furniture, are you sandblasting the screws so they are easier to hammer down?
You've got to be kidding. The first and second were both plagued with absolutely horrible acting and dialog, but the first was a little better simply because Anakin was a child, played by a (poor) child actor, and most peoples' expectations of child actors aren't that high. In the second, Anakin was played by a ~20-year-old, and his acting was just as bad as Jake Lloyd's, except he didn't have the excuse of being only 10 and not having any real training in acting. The lines between Christensen and Portman were probably the worst I've ever seen in a movie on a big screen.
Another good point for the first movie: the chick was looking much better, for some reason (maybe the proximity of the Dark Side made her less attractive in the following movies - or maybe I am just partial to a subtle ambiance of pedophilia).
Also, while it does not make you an honorary member of NAMBLA, I must say that I find slightly creepy the fact that you know the name of that 10 year-old actor. Do you have posters of him in your room? Or as your cellphone wallpaper maybe?
You've got to be kidding. The first and second were both plagued with absolutely horrible acting and dialog, but the first was a little better simply because Anakin was a child, played by a (poor) child actor, and most peoples' expectations of child actors aren't that high. In the second, Anakin was played by a ~20-year-old, and his acting was just as bad as Jake Lloyd's, except he didn't have the excuse of being only 10 and not having any real training in acting. The lines between Christensen and Portman were probably the worst I've ever seen in a movie on a big screen.
Another good point for the first movie: the chick was looking much better, for some reason (maybe the proximity of the Dark Side made her less attractive in the following movies - or maybe I am just partial to a subtle ambiance of pedophilia).
No matter your experience, plain-text logs make more sense, especially in *nix operating systems. You have a vast array of tools to search log files with; my favorites being tail and grep. The minute you go to binary logging your options shrink or you end up having to use additional tools to reconvert it to text (ie. the Windows event log).
The more a system becomes complex, the more one needs to see events as part of a whole and do some kind of analysis and correlation. This type of work is done more easily with databases. I like grep like everyone, but if I want to have a nice rollup of events based on time and source, I will get the info much more easily with a SQL query than with a regex piped into a reporting utility piped into a paging utility.
Also I think one has to adapt to a technology, not try to make it work like what was there before (unless he is a one-trick pony). Why would you want to "reconvert" the Windows event log to text? On Windows there is a lot of built-in capabilities for log exploring in Powershell or even in VBS/WMI. A toolbox contains many tools, not just grep.
Slashdot today is a bad joke. I often find better content and discussions on Twitter.
IMHO, part of the problem is that most Slashdot comments are literally bad jokes. Too many of the comments are feeble attempts at humor by some attention starved idiot who believes he/she is far more clever than they actually are.
IMHO, part of the problem is that most Slashdot comments are about what comments should/should not be. Too many of the comments are feeble attempts at trying to tell people what they should or should not post.
This is just semantics. That's the problem with liberals, you think too much, and you end up with all those subcategories.
Foreign policy is so easy: all we need is the Axis of Evil. We put a "good" or "evil" label on every country, and people in "evil" countries can either overthrow Kim Jong Il and join us on the good side, or face the consequences and get nasty viruses.
As for determining if a country is evil, there is a simple solution: we ask ourselves "Would Jack Bauer collaborate with their ambassador or would he commit a B&E in their embassy to extract a prisoner and hijack the cctv".
Remember that money makes for strange bedfellows. For instance, take Reuters. They been found to be lying in their reporting in this area... but what few THEN ask, why they ALWAYS been found lying to favor one side.
This is exactly why I always watch Fox News. They have never been caught lying because they give me opinions, not facts. It is very convenient because the news I get from them are biased in a way that is compatible with my preconceived notions about the world. I am pretty busy, especially since Skyrim was released, so I don't have time to start shuffling good guys and bad guys around.
Slashdot Mirror
Middle management has become such a joke that neither the C level management, nor the workers take them seriously. No doubt the fact that the C level management doesn't take them seriously is a big reason why so many people that are bad at management end up in middle management.
In most companies, there is a serious problem with middle management because good managers are promoted - what is left is either on its way up or not worth much. This is a problem that is seen mostly in management because in specialized jobs (such as software development) there is a smaller ladder to climb.
This is similar to the problem of teachers working in poor schools. The top teachers usually get better opportunities and they run away, so what is left is either waiting for their chance to go, or just coasting until retirement.
Throughout the process of creating the assignment, my management has consistently over-promised and under-delivered (financial compensation, timelines, and even job scope).
From their perspective, this makes sense because they have short-term incentives. Talk is cheap, and leading people on is a typical management tactic.
My immediate manager understands that I could easily leave and work elsewhere, joining the steady trickle of coders and team leads that have moved to greener pastures over the last 12 months. My senior managers, though, don't seem to understand this.
Working for a Fortune 50 IT company has benefits (nobody will ask you to take out the garbage or change the printer toner, and you will never worry about bouncing paychecks), however the bigger the company, the more likely significant gaps will appear between management layers.
This is exactly how Rockefeller was thinking: when you come across talent, you hire, then you adapt your business based on the people available. Even if in the short term it does not fit in an existing MS-Project plan, over the years you build a strong core and the team is driving the business, not the other way around. And if people walk away to get more experience, you keep the door open so you can benefit from what they did elsewhere.
Unfortunately, a lot of companies are doing the exact opposite because the MBAs are trained to manage by balance sheet, stock price and quarterly projections: short-term metrics.
I almost modded you down just for bringing nightmarish memories of Tivoli back into my conscious mind. Do you know how long it has taken me to successfully repress those memories?
Nevertheless I will refrain from down-modding and instead I will send you the bill from my shrink.
If you want to have a surreal experience, visit an IBM conference or trade show (such as the IBM Tech University) and go for a drink with a bunch of Tivoli consultants. Yep, people who have spent their days in Tivoli, for years. They are a special breed, very resilient.
All well and good, but "racetrack" memory, when all is said and done, is just a reimplementation of the mercury delay lines that were used for storage in the Leo machines back in the 1950s.
Different, but still the same concept of cycling the bits round a circuit and reading them sequentially.
I'd shout "Prior Art" at it.
Let's play Prior Art Jeopardy: "I am a technology that provides an abstraction layer allowing components written in different languages to interact". .Net Framework CLR
1) What is the
2) What is a web service
3) What is CORBA
4) What is CICS
Based on the notion of "prior art", guess who would get the patent...
38% Unix market share and growing. Just dropped some dollars on Power7 HW running AIX a few months ago.
Power7 is making me question the theory of evolution because it is "Intelligent Design" ;-)
People underestimate the value of all the R&D IBM is doing. They spend a lot of money on this kind of research, and they do it seriously. And they don't look for the latest fad to blow the mind of consumers - they build for the long run.
Ok, their GUIs usually make my eyes bleed and the setup for some of their products is painful (Tivoli anyone?). But IBM is moving forward; their cloud offering, which was a complete joke a few years ago, is getting pretty good. Their stuff does not shine like Apple, it does not integrate like Microsoft, but it works pretty well.
It is very important that TV continues to exist as it is, as well as PVRs. Otherwise, people won't be able to upload the good tv series on usenet so I can download commercial-free episodes and watch them on my PS3.
House, the Big Bang Theory, Family Guy, the Mentalist, Supernatural, Storage Wars, Dexter: good entertainment for about 400MB/hour (I don't care much for HD).
A good usenet provider with a decent retention is not free (maybe 10$/month) but the insanely fast download combined with the excellent filtering provided by hand-crafted search engines (such as Nzbmatrix or Newzbin) is worth it. And for the poor people, I think there is some stuff available on P2P (if you don't mind getting some weird midget porn when you look for Disney content), but I find it slow and dirty.
If you rely on email for research, you have a bigger problem than living in the moment
Also, they mention that the cost of the system is something like $1.30 per account per month. I don't know much about IT budgeting, but that seems like a really low number for something as critical as messaging and calendaring. I have to imagine that they spend more money per user just cutting the grass around the campus.
Totally agree. One of my client did a major cost-cutting initiative for its email platform, and there was just no way to make it reliable under 9$ a month (per account). And this is when there is no Crackberry (which brings the numbers way up).
Outsourcing would work, because when there is another failure they will have another party to blame instead of pointing fingers to a decision made in Spring 2011 (even as a total stranger I could feel the bitterness under that bullet point in the slides).
I used to archive my emails, then one day by mistake they were deleted. For a minute or two I was freaking out, then I felt relieved. I needed to lose them completely to understand that I did not need them. It was like a security blanket (what if I need a cd-key I received by email, or if I want to read again the bad poetry I sent to my ex?), nothing else.
For the last few years not only did I not archive my emails, I also made sure to change my email address once or twice a year to weed out the crap. And there was never a single time where this "lean" policy caused me a problem. It's like losing everything after a fire at home; losing that Dallas VHS box-set or all those National Geographic magazines is refreshing.
So you are not only M$ tool, but also now advertise for IKEA???
P.S. And you think that e-mail is that simple? Ignorance is bliss, they say.
Thank you for sharing these valuable thoughts. I will now go for a long walk on the beach, letting your wisdom and insight slowly sink in my soul until they are anchored forever. (Ok I don't live near the beach, but if I did, I would definitely go)
Natalie..
oh wait, this thread isnt natalie vs keira vs scarlett,
it was about hackable routers...
doh!
You ruined everything. The discussion was going somewhere, talking about cute chicks (still can't believe someone prefer the fake Padme to the real one), but you HAD to burst that bubble and bring back the router thing.
Reminds me of a guy I know. One time we were at Best Buy and there was that pretty lady, so I said to him: "I think I'm in love" and he said: "Me too!" then he walked right past her to go check out the new Vaio that was on display. I think if we went to the strippers he would probably focus on the laser thingy or on the sound system, ignoring Bebe and Cassandra.
Same problem with reporting technologies. Some (such as Microsoft RDL) are xml-based, so it is always possible (at least) to search the source or do a quick fix in a text editor. However with other technologies (such as SAP BO) the reports are stored in a binary format, so you need the whole toolkit even for the most mundane task.
For a moment, I thought you were one of the people on our log analysis team that I work with.
There are places where a database is good. I recommend them heavily, but the original log output shouldn't be database. If you want a database of logs (appropriate in many cases), send a copy of the logs off host (which you have to do anyway for PCI and many other audits) and store that copy in a database. That makes it easier to comply with other requirements.
Best of both worlds. Plain text local to box in case Things Go Wrong, and database for cross-system forensic analysis.
Basically that process is called "chinese whispers" - you take the output of a context-aware source (the application) to an intermediary dumb format (a text file) and then you interpret the dumb format to put data in a database designed to store exactly what the initial source offered. From a business perspective, this process adds exactly zero value but it does add a lot of risk (ever heard of "lost in translation"?).
So the exact opposite of what you suggest would probably be the best of both world - store the actual log in a database, and offer a quick way to export that in text format for the people who need to process text with grep and sed. Less risk, more value.
On Windows there is a lot of built-in capabilities for log exploring in Powershell or even in VBS/WMI. A toolbox contains many tools, not just grep.
Oh, so you like all that stuff over something as fool-proof, robust and simple as the grep? OK.
I am curious: are you using a fool-proof, robust and simple approach such as print-fax-scan-ocr instead of that crazy thing called email? And when you assemble IKEA furniture, are you sandblasting the screws so they are easier to hammer down?
You've got to be kidding. The first and second were both plagued with absolutely horrible acting and dialog, but the first was a little better simply because Anakin was a child, played by a (poor) child actor, and most peoples' expectations of child actors aren't that high. In the second, Anakin was played by a ~20-year-old, and his acting was just as bad as Jake Lloyd's, except he didn't have the excuse of being only 10 and not having any real training in acting. The lines between Christensen and Portman were probably the worst I've ever seen in a movie on a big screen.
Another good point for the first movie: the chick was looking much better, for some reason (maybe the proximity of the Dark Side made her less attractive in the following movies - or maybe I am just partial to a subtle ambiance of pedophilia).
Also, while it does not make you an honorary member of NAMBLA, I must say that I find slightly creepy the fact that you know the name of that 10 year-old actor. Do you have posters of him in your room? Or as your cellphone wallpaper maybe?
You've got to be kidding. The first and second were both plagued with absolutely horrible acting and dialog, but the first was a little better simply because Anakin was a child, played by a (poor) child actor, and most peoples' expectations of child actors aren't that high. In the second, Anakin was played by a ~20-year-old, and his acting was just as bad as Jake Lloyd's, except he didn't have the excuse of being only 10 and not having any real training in acting. The lines between Christensen and Portman were probably the worst I've ever seen in a movie on a big screen.
Another good point for the first movie: the chick was looking much better, for some reason (maybe the proximity of the Dark Side made her less attractive in the following movies - or maybe I am just partial to a subtle ambiance of pedophilia).
No matter your experience, plain-text logs make more sense, especially in *nix operating systems. You have a vast array of tools to search log files with; my favorites being tail and grep. The minute you go to binary logging your options shrink or you end up having to use additional tools to reconvert it to text (ie. the Windows event log).
The more a system becomes complex, the more one needs to see events as part of a whole and do some kind of analysis and correlation. This type of work is done more easily with databases. I like grep like everyone, but if I want to have a nice rollup of events based on time and source, I will get the info much more easily with a SQL query than with a regex piped into a reporting utility piped into a paging utility.
Also I think one has to adapt to a technology, not try to make it work like what was there before (unless he is a one-trick pony). Why would you want to "reconvert" the Windows event log to text? On Windows there is a lot of built-in capabilities for log exploring in Powershell or even in VBS/WMI. A toolbox contains many tools, not just grep.
You mean like you just did?
I wonder if you have an extremely sophisticated sense of humor, or none at all
Slashdot today is a bad joke. I often find better content and discussions on Twitter.
IMHO, part of the problem is that most Slashdot comments are literally bad jokes. Too many of the comments are feeble attempts at humor by some attention starved idiot who believes he/she is far more clever than they actually are.
IMHO, part of the problem is that most Slashdot comments are about what comments should/should not be. Too many of the comments are feeble attempts at trying to tell people what they should or should not post.
it's basically a ponzi scheme
You mean: a Grouponzi scheme
Iran is not an arab country.
This is just semantics. That's the problem with liberals, you think too much, and you end up with all those subcategories.
Foreign policy is so easy: all we need is the Axis of Evil. We put a "good" or "evil" label on every country, and people in "evil" countries can either overthrow Kim Jong Il and join us on the good side, or face the consequences and get nasty viruses.
As for determining if a country is evil, there is a simple solution: we ask ourselves "Would Jack Bauer collaborate with their ambassador or would he commit a B&E in their embassy to extract a prisoner and hijack the cctv".
Remember that money makes for strange bedfellows. For instance, take Reuters. They been found to be lying in their reporting in this area... but what few THEN ask, why they ALWAYS been found lying to favor one side.
This is exactly why I always watch Fox News. They have never been caught lying because they give me opinions, not facts. It is very convenient because the news I get from them are biased in a way that is compatible with my preconceived notions about the world. I am pretty busy, especially since Skyrim was released, so I don't have time to start shuffling good guys and bad guys around.