I see parallels between the IT field and my own (communications, as in PR, not telcom) because, while you can come up with certain measurements, they mean very little in the end. This is because most of the people who matter don't understand what you do anyway. What they know is leadership, management and teamwork, and IT and communication departments many times really are black holes in these areas. I've been a couple of places where the only reasons people put up with IT and PR is that they don't understand computers and they're afraid of the media.
On the PR side we have a concept called the dominant coalition. I just means the group of people who dominate the organization (it's usually more than just the boss, and rarely mirrors the organization chart exactly). Do a little strategic communications research on them: figure out what they like, how they talk, what they value and how they do things. Then get on board as much as your field and personal ethics will allow. You don't have to go whole hog sycophant, either. Just find out what's important to them and do the things you feel comfortable doing -- learn their staff work, wear "management" clothes, take a couple business courses to learn the lingo. Just remember that sometimes the leader has to take one (or several) for the team. You might have to buy a couple sport coats to wear to meetings so you can better represent your guys while you're there. And it all counts in the end -- how you work, your personal habits, etc. Yeah, it's not fair, but it's fact.
You're not trying to build up brownie points, either. You're trying to do two things, really: show them you're part of the team, and build up enough credibility so they're open to your education and ideas. If you really, really want to resist becoming a "suit," or whatever you want to call it, you might consider telling them you'd rather go back to being a code monkey. You've taken on a responsibility, and most of earning your money now comes down to two things: taking care of the boss and taking care of your guys. There's nothing wrong with wanting to stay on the technical side. There's only something wrong with taking the management money, sitting in the management seat and keeping your head on the technical side. You're screwing your boss and your guys.
Once you build up some credibility, you can educate them slowly and carefully about what you do and what you can do. For most people, getting down to the nitty gritty with IT guys is like listening to Geordi LaForge. It's all tachyons and sub-space transmissions. And most IT guys, I must say, seem to cultivate that. As I made my personal journey from a Mac user who was happy to fiddle with themes to a Slackware user who built his own boxes, I discovered what bullshitters many IT guys were. Not that they were evil or lazy, just that they had a perfect cover for continuing to do what they preferred to do, or not taking on something they didn't want to, or for getting money they didn't really need. And while they got away with it quite a bit, people knew. They could rarely pin the IT guys down enough to enforce their will, but in the backs of their minds they knew. That also explains a lot of seemingly capricious decisions: the management just doesn't trust you, and can't base denial on a deep understanding of what you do, so it denies things on whim or intuition, which is sometimes quite wrong. But bullshitters bring it on themselves.
Anyway, as you educate, get your guys on board with the rest of the team. Go where they're going, and don't just be the slave standing in the back with the emergency oar repair kit. Row. Figure out a way. If you take the previous poster's advice and start to get noticed for the fact things run so well you're not terribly busy, manage by walking around. Stop by some drone's desk and ask how you could help him more.
And lastly, remember you're in a service industry. Don't let the hardware fool you. You're the guys who keep the computers and the Internet working. T
We've all seen these skewed comparisons before. The technical bits tick me off, because everybody knows that with a half hour at distrowatch and an hour or two of googling you could find a version of Linux that would make for a valid comparison.
The thing I find interesting is the PR side (I guess I would, that's my field). In PR you learn that one key to winning public opinion is to appear to be reasonable. The American public (can't speak to any others, even though I live in Germany at the moment) will give you the benefit of the doubt if you appear reasonable.
MS did that. They loaded up the most popular versions of Linux, they used the default installations (hey, it's what the Linux guys recommend!), they let the chips fall where they may. A couple of things helped them, of course. They have Linux guys (or former Linux guys) working in the lab that did it. People will assume those guys would, if not put up a fuss about an unfair comparison, at least make sure Linux was installed as well as Windows was. Second, they traded on the computer user psychology they themselves have mostly set up -- use what comes on your machine, or what comes in the shrinkwrap. Go with the default on everything, because it's too damn complicated to figure out all this tech stuff. We know what's best for you (and it ain't choice).
And, as somebody noted, they alluded to the "we've got to help our little brown brothers" school of thought by talking about the poor devils just trying to get by with older hardware and limited knowledge, completly ignoring ingenuity, necessity being the mother of invention, etc.
All very slick, all very reasonable sounding to those who don't know the details and aren't inclined, or don't have the time, to find out more or think it through.
Unfortunately, people fall for this stuff all the time. How often should you change the oil in your car? Every 3,000 miles or three months. Who says so? Why, the guys who sell oil changes, of course. You see it again and again. MS is just playing the game. Open source is a different game. The question is, can is stay on the court with the big boys playing the usual game. Looks promising now, but (as we used to say in the Army) every day's an adventure.
Sorry I was unclear. I meant lumping Novell Suse and OpenSuse together, and Red Hat and Fedora, which were also mentioned separately (and got 45 percent together).
It's sad to see an opinion piece based on a news story about a survey that doesn't really tell you anything concrete about what the opinion piece claims to be about. If you look at the survey, you see that only 50 percent of the respondents claim they have already deployed Linux on the desktop. The question about distros asks which distro they're considering or currently running. So there's a good chance half the people are doing rectal extrapolations based on what they've been mulling over after reading something somewhere in the mainstream media about easy-to-use versions of desktop Linux.
And the survey choices can be questioned. They list quite a few distros, but don't have three -- Mepis, Slackware and Damn Small -- that have been in the Distrowatch top 10 for a while now.
Worse, the guy who wrote the opinion piece goes out of his way to lump Kubuntu in with Ubuntu (which seems fair, given the Kubuntu respondents would probably pick Ubuntu), but doesn't lump the two versions of Suse and Red Hat together. Maybe he was put off by the fact Suse would have ended up with 60 percent of some imaginary number (seeing as respondents could apparently choose as many distros as they wanted) and beat out Ubuntu. I can see why they would want paid-versus-free information on the survey, but if you're doing an opinion piece strictly about popularity, I think you should lump them together.
But popularity is the point. And the little note about the survey getting more attention in some communities than others is, I think, the telling point. I use Slackware and Ubuntu, and as somebody who lurks in both communities, my take is that Slackers are busy keeping to themselves, solving their own problems and doing stuff, while those Ubuntu guys set aside some time in their days for evangelism. They're everywhere, and they're apparently writing and voting all the while. Reminds me of when I was a Mac user and certain sites would link to online surveys to make sure the Mac platform wasn't left out. You could watch the numbers change as the word spread in the Mac community, skewing the results.
So the article is air, and not even hot air at that. That said, I use Ubuntu on my laptop after getting several distros (Gentoo, Slackware, FreeBSD...) almost there (damn suspend and CPU frequency scaling). I popped in Ubuntu and everything worked out of the box. It's not my main machine, so it's the path of least resistance. And we all know how appealing that is to most people.
Years ago somebody did a study on newspaper consoldiation. They found that the second (and third or whatever) newspapers in cities got eaten by the bigger paper or went out of business in pretty much the same way. They dubbed it the death spiral. Basically, the newspaper business guys did the usual business thing (no matter what the editorial slant or quality of the paper): cut costs to make (or increase) profits. The problem was, they did that by cutting value -- cutting sections or reporters or whatever. The readers, seeing less value, left. The advertisers, seeing fewer readers, left too. So they business guys had to cut costs, which they did by cutting value...
There were the exceptions that proved the rule by fighting back with better writing and more value and winning.
It seems to me that the author sees a similar inability to recognize a fundamental change in the value their publication offers in a changing marketplace. Before, things changed for various reasons, but the upshot was that, in all but the biggest cities, the market would only support one newspaper per city. Now, the marketplace is changing again, and the newspaper business guys are again failing to see the change for what it is and how to operate around it or profit from it.
This reinforces my opinion that newspaper business guys may be very intelligent, but they're not very smart. It also reinforces my opinion that the term "newspaper business" should be recognized as an oxymoron. Good reporting is, or should be, antithetical to good business. The fact that somebody latched onto newspapers as an advertising vehicle is probably the worst thing to ever happen to journalism, and it might be that blogs are a return to the pre-let's-make-this-newspaper-a-business days of journalism. Which means that onlines ads in blogs are...Ah well. It was good while it lasted.
Lastly, I have a question for those who think it has to do with the political bent of today's newspapers: Why didn't you just call Rush Limbaugh? It may be that journalistic balance is gone, but that's more likely because the whole country is polarized, not because journalists are natural-born left-wingers. More and more (it seems to me) people only want to see things they know they are going to agree with. Talk radio, blogs, personalized news portals and feeds all reinforce this be allowing people to edit out the opposition before they ever see or hear any of it. The result is that much of the population seems to think that partisan politicians should be the model for intellectual honesty and balance.
I did learn one thing from Rush Limbaugh and his fellow failed wrestling announcers, though: "mega dittoes" is English for "Baaaa."
Slashdot Mirror
I see parallels between the IT field and my own (communications, as in PR, not telcom) because, while you can come up with certain measurements, they mean very little in the end. This is because most of the people who matter don't understand what you do anyway. What they know is leadership, management and teamwork, and IT and communication departments many times really are black holes in these areas. I've been a couple of places where the only reasons people put up with IT and PR is that they don't understand computers and they're afraid of the media.
On the PR side we have a concept called the dominant coalition. I just means the group of people who dominate the organization (it's usually more than just the boss, and rarely mirrors the organization chart exactly). Do a little strategic communications research on them: figure out what they like, how they talk, what they value and how they do things. Then get on board as much as your field and personal ethics will allow. You don't have to go whole hog sycophant, either. Just find out what's important to them and do the things you feel comfortable doing -- learn their staff work, wear "management" clothes, take a couple business courses to learn the lingo. Just remember that sometimes the leader has to take one (or several) for the team. You might have to buy a couple sport coats to wear to meetings so you can better represent your guys while you're there. And it all counts in the end -- how you work, your personal habits, etc. Yeah, it's not fair, but it's fact.
You're not trying to build up brownie points, either. You're trying to do two things, really: show them you're part of the team, and build up enough credibility so they're open to your education and ideas. If you really, really want to resist becoming a "suit," or whatever you want to call it, you might consider telling them you'd rather go back to being a code monkey. You've taken on a responsibility, and most of earning your money now comes down to two things: taking care of the boss and taking care of your guys. There's nothing wrong with wanting to stay on the technical side. There's only something wrong with taking the management money, sitting in the management seat and keeping your head on the technical side. You're screwing your boss and your guys.
Once you build up some credibility, you can educate them slowly and carefully about what you do and what you can do. For most people, getting down to the nitty gritty with IT guys is like listening to Geordi LaForge. It's all tachyons and sub-space transmissions. And most IT guys, I must say, seem to cultivate that. As I made my personal journey from a Mac user who was happy to fiddle with themes to a Slackware user who built his own boxes, I discovered what bullshitters many IT guys were. Not that they were evil or lazy, just that they had a perfect cover for continuing to do what they preferred to do, or not taking on something they didn't want to, or for getting money they didn't really need. And while they got away with it quite a bit, people knew. They could rarely pin the IT guys down enough to enforce their will, but in the backs of their minds they knew. That also explains a lot of seemingly capricious decisions: the management just doesn't trust you, and can't base denial on a deep understanding of what you do, so it denies things on whim or intuition, which is sometimes quite wrong. But bullshitters bring it on themselves.
Anyway, as you educate, get your guys on board with the rest of the team. Go where they're going, and don't just be the slave standing in the back with the emergency oar repair kit. Row. Figure out a way. If you take the previous poster's advice and start to get noticed for the fact things run so well you're not terribly busy, manage by walking around. Stop by some drone's desk and ask how you could help him more.
And lastly, remember you're in a service industry. Don't let the hardware fool you. You're the guys who keep the computers and the Internet working. T
Point taken. I probably should have thought of a better example, because I do change my oil on the Jiffy Lube schedule.
We've all seen these skewed comparisons before. The technical bits tick me off, because everybody knows that with a half hour at distrowatch and an hour or two of googling you could find a version of Linux that would make for a valid comparison.
The thing I find interesting is the PR side (I guess I would, that's my field). In PR you learn that one key to winning public opinion is to appear to be reasonable. The American public (can't speak to any others, even though I live in Germany at the moment) will give you the benefit of the doubt if you appear reasonable.
MS did that. They loaded up the most popular versions of Linux, they used the default installations (hey, it's what the Linux guys recommend!), they let the chips fall where they may. A couple of things helped them, of course. They have Linux guys (or former Linux guys) working in the lab that did it. People will assume those guys would, if not put up a fuss about an unfair comparison, at least make sure Linux was installed as well as Windows was. Second, they traded on the computer user psychology they themselves have mostly set up -- use what comes on your machine, or what comes in the shrinkwrap. Go with the default on everything, because it's too damn complicated to figure out all this tech stuff. We know what's best for you (and it ain't choice).
And, as somebody noted, they alluded to the "we've got to help our little brown brothers" school of thought by talking about the poor devils just trying to get by with older hardware and limited knowledge, completly ignoring ingenuity, necessity being the mother of invention, etc.
All very slick, all very reasonable sounding to those who don't know the details and aren't inclined, or don't have the time, to find out more or think it through.
Unfortunately, people fall for this stuff all the time. How often should you change the oil in your car? Every 3,000 miles or three months. Who says so? Why, the guys who sell oil changes, of course. You see it again and again. MS is just playing the game. Open source is a different game. The question is, can is stay on the court with the big boys playing the usual game. Looks promising now, but (as we used to say in the Army) every day's an adventure.
Sorry I was unclear. I meant lumping Novell Suse and OpenSuse together, and Red Hat and Fedora, which were also mentioned separately (and got 45 percent together).
It's sad to see an opinion piece based on a news story about a survey that doesn't really tell you anything concrete about what the opinion piece claims to be about. If you look at the survey, you see that only 50 percent of the respondents claim they have already deployed Linux on the desktop. The question about distros asks which distro they're considering or currently running. So there's a good chance half the people are doing rectal extrapolations based on what they've been mulling over after reading something somewhere in the mainstream media about easy-to-use versions of desktop Linux.
And the survey choices can be questioned. They list quite a few distros, but don't have three -- Mepis, Slackware and Damn Small -- that have been in the Distrowatch top 10 for a while now.
Worse, the guy who wrote the opinion piece goes out of his way to lump Kubuntu in with Ubuntu (which seems fair, given the Kubuntu respondents would probably pick Ubuntu), but doesn't lump the two versions of Suse and Red Hat together. Maybe he was put off by the fact Suse would have ended up with 60 percent of some imaginary number (seeing as respondents could apparently choose as many distros as they wanted) and beat out Ubuntu. I can see why they would want paid-versus-free information on the survey, but if you're doing an opinion piece strictly about popularity, I think you should lump them together.
But popularity is the point. And the little note about the survey getting more attention in some communities than others is, I think, the telling point. I use Slackware and Ubuntu, and as somebody who lurks in both communities, my take is that Slackers are busy keeping to themselves, solving their own problems and doing stuff, while those Ubuntu guys set aside some time in their days for evangelism. They're everywhere, and they're apparently writing and voting all the while. Reminds me of when I was a Mac user and certain sites would link to online surveys to make sure the Mac platform wasn't left out. You could watch the numbers change as the word spread in the Mac community, skewing the results.
So the article is air, and not even hot air at that. That said, I use Ubuntu on my laptop after getting several distros (Gentoo, Slackware, FreeBSD...) almost there (damn suspend and CPU frequency scaling). I popped in Ubuntu and everything worked out of the box. It's not my main machine, so it's the path of least resistance. And we all know how appealing that is to most people.
Years ago somebody did a study on newspaper consoldiation. They found that the second (and third or whatever) newspapers in cities got eaten by the bigger paper or went out of business in pretty much the same way. They dubbed it the death spiral. Basically, the newspaper business guys did the usual business thing (no matter what the editorial slant or quality of the paper): cut costs to make (or increase) profits. The problem was, they did that by cutting value -- cutting sections or reporters or whatever. The readers, seeing less value, left. The advertisers, seeing fewer readers, left too. So they business guys had to cut costs, which they did by cutting value...
There were the exceptions that proved the rule by fighting back with better writing and more value and winning.
It seems to me that the author sees a similar inability to recognize a fundamental change in the value their publication offers in a changing marketplace. Before, things changed for various reasons, but the upshot was that, in all but the biggest cities, the market would only support one newspaper per city. Now, the marketplace is changing again, and the newspaper business guys are again failing to see the change for what it is and how to operate around it or profit from it.
This reinforces my opinion that newspaper business guys may be very intelligent, but they're not very smart. It also reinforces my opinion that the term "newspaper business" should be recognized as an oxymoron. Good reporting is, or should be, antithetical to good business. The fact that somebody latched onto newspapers as an advertising vehicle is probably the worst thing to ever happen to journalism, and it might be that blogs are a return to the pre-let's-make-this-newspaper-a-business days of journalism. Which means that onlines ads in blogs are...Ah well. It was good while it lasted.
Lastly, I have a question for those who think it has to do with the political bent of today's newspapers: Why didn't you just call Rush Limbaugh? It may be that journalistic balance is gone, but that's more likely because the whole country is polarized, not because journalists are natural-born left-wingers. More and more (it seems to me) people only want to see things they know they are going to agree with. Talk radio, blogs, personalized news portals and feeds all reinforce this be allowing people to edit out the opposition before they ever see or hear any of it. The result is that much of the population seems to think that partisan politicians should be the model for intellectual honesty and balance.
I did learn one thing from Rush Limbaugh and his fellow failed wrestling announcers, though: "mega dittoes" is English for "Baaaa."
See ya,
joe f.