I don't think that's true. The current climate makes it harder to change job, but that just means it takes a little longer. It's still possible.
Most companies aren't terrible to work for. If they are for you, consider why - some people cant cope with how large companies work, some cant handle the pressures of a small business, some prefer to run their own, some would just be better switching career.
Or it's possible you live somewhere that all companies are shit. Move? Start your own? Telecommute with a firm elsewhere? Not Yahoo though;)
Seriously, if you can't find work that you can enjoy then you won't enjoy retirement either.
So do you know the rate of delivery failure with 'Lasership'? Is it possible that they make several million successful deliveries each year and because you've had a poor experience, you've gone hunting for the other 2000 people that have had a similar problem?
Amazon are absorbing the costs and dealing with the issue on your behalf. This is good. Whether the stop using that delivery service is far more complex than whether your delivery got fucked up. 'Lasership' may have error rates a quarter of those from other companies. They may have error rates twice as high, but a lower total cost due to savings outweighing the return/replace overheads. They may give most customers a superior experience, with you being one an unfortunate few.
Or they could be completely incapable and dishonest, and Amazon are in the middle of securing alternative service providers. Just because you can't see a response doesn't mean that there isn't one.
Odd, I buy my games through steam and avoid buying EAs 'always on' DRM infested games, even when they're continuations of franchises I've previously loved - e.g. Battlefield and SimCity.
So please, tell me, how is EAs DRM helping me as a potential customer? They lose out on a sale, I lose out on a game to play, and I'm still not going to buy their buggy malicious software.
I'm not going to accuse you of being shrill, or even a shill. Just naive, deluded and wrong.
Comically at senior management levels, the "increasingly in the form of after-hours work, working from coffeeshops, that sort of thing" is a standard part of the job, in addition to the 9-5.
Interestingly though, the corporate offences have been at companies with 'traditional' management styles, but are also demonstrated to be failures in the governance processes.
However, you're right in that achieving that governance doesn't require everybody to be sat within a whip-crack of the boss.
(although if she's cute and wearing leather boots..)
A lot of managers come from operational backgrounds. Results are 'calls answered', 'time per call', 'accounts produced on time', 'sales made'. They achieve that through standardised approaches - hell, one of our call centre employees says the wrong thing, the COO goes to jail. Of course he's going to demand compliance.
So a ROWE approach isn't just not necessarily obvious to them, it's potentially damaging.
I've always been in 'knowledge worker' type roles. My managers have all accepted that I'll commit to, and hit, challenging deadlines. Or re-negotiate them (usually due to something else taking higher priority, or a dependency failing, etc). Very much results oriented, and indeed my preferred way of working.
Startups tend to be nearer to the knowledge worker type approach, because there aren't standard processes, there isn't an established way of working. So it's quite understandable that people focus on specific outcomes rather than conformance to process.
The other factor is that as companies get larger, corporate governance becomes far harder. If you have 4000 people in the organisation, how do you know they're all achieving the results you need, without breaking the law, without committing fraud, without making decisions for which they aren't qualified, without deviating from the overall corporate strategy?
ROWE doesn't easily scale to that type of scenario.
(Don't get me wrong. I'm leaving my current employer in part because I've been given a management team that focusses on "were you at this briefing every month, have you completed your timesheet, did you complete this document for each piece of work" and not "did you get your job done and/or add value to the organisation")
Hating the fact that you have to work doesn't mean you have to hate your job.
I hate having to work, to earn the money to buy food, shelter and shiny electronic toys. I like the way in which I earn that money, and prefer it to other viable alternatives.
Give me $10m and I'll retire immediately. Until then, I'll keep finding and doing jobs I don't hate, even though I hate having to work.
People aren't unproductive because they hate having to work for a living. There's more to it than work ethic, but that's a significant factor across the population.
Happy people are more productive. Engaged staff contribute more. The whole is greater than its constituent parts.
If your team act like loners with clearly defined interfaces between them, they're nowhere near as productive as a team that engage, interact, share ideas and work together.
When your team's objective is "secure the perimeter" then it's a pretty low skill task. When your team's objective is "boost global sales by 20% while taking 30% out of operating costs and reducing staff turnover by 4%" individual competence just isn't going to be enough.
Except that... lazy people can make excellent programmers. They get things done right first time and automate the hell out of everything, because having to repeat shit just takes far too much effort.
You just have to understand how laziness really work. For instance I annoy a friend of mine by parking a couple of hundred yards away from the supermarket. He doesn't realise that a 200 yard walk is less effort than driving around in circles trying to find a space closer.
There is no reason for corporate to spend any more money on supposedly unproductive talent.
Why is Joe unproductive? Is it because he's being misused, is it because he's finished his work, is it because he's being distracted supporting someone else's work, is it because he broke his leg last week, is it because he's adding value in ways that your measurement system can't detect?
None of those are reasons to sack him.
Shit, he could be going through a divorce, a house move, a mental breakdown, a sex-change. Again, no reason to sack him.
Good corporations seek to understand and support their employees. It reduces turnover, increases motivation, boosts productivity and adds far more value than the destructive arbitrary firing of people because "they didn't log onto the VPN today".
In the real world (and trust me, the military doesn't run like the real world - it's a far simpler, more constrained and occasionally far more real environment) everyone is different and any good manager of a team can manage a situation like that.
It's not favouritism to let Alice work from home but force Bob to stay in the office. It's bad management if that's all you do, but if you pull Bob into a quiet meeting room and suggest that he demonstrates productivity while working from home or you'll have to ask him to come in every day, then Bob now knows why you're treating him differently and you've also managed to set up the basic situation for a conversation on cryptography.
Shit, I'm a terrible manager and I know how to approach that sort of situation. Hell, even if Bob is utterly pissed off, Alice, Charlie and Dan are glad someone's finally making him pull his weight.
Of course, if he's being productive in less easily measured ways then he has the opportunity to draw attention to that, and maybe there isn't a problem at all.
"All or nothing" approaches may work in the military, but the rest of us are allowed far more subtlety and flexibility.
(My experience of the military is that British officers are extremely good man managers, and will make decisions appropriate to the individuals they're working with and not blanket approaches that are imposed on everyone. Unless it's weapons safety, in which case their blanket approach is to leave it to the NCOs anyway. Shit, any RSM is automatically one of the finest man managers on the planet, purely because he wouldn't get the job otherwise!)
A manager who comes by your cube and notices a pattern of you doing not-work-things when they walk up to you has a clear cut basis to look into what you are actually doing.
Wait, people actually do work at their desks? I use mine to eat lunch, browse the web, check email on my phone, check email on the work system and chat to my colleagues.
If I want to get real work done, I'll somewhere conducive to that.
Ironically I had a new manager earlier this year, and every time he approached my desk I had the BBC news site open, or was looking at my mobile, or was chatting to someone.. never actually doing work. He didn't say anything, I didn't worry about it. Few weeks later he came to me saying that he'd been approached by with thanks for the extent and quality of the work I'd been doing.
It may not be obvious what work is being done, or when, but the people adding value do get noticed. Being sat there looking busy isn't an indicator of productivity.
Back on topic, I work from home mostly disconnected, and only one day every 2-3 weeks. I can get stuff _done_ at home, but I can't talk to people. Getting stuff done demonstrates diligence and aids communication (and keeps regulators and auditors happy) but talking to people adds the real value.
It's one thing to have a nuke, entirely another to have a delivery system capable of getting to where it needs to go
Yeah, they might have to attach it to a seventy year old propeller powered aircraft.
Delivery is EASY. Especially if you only have one. The first one is the easiest to deliver.
Any attack NK tried to make against the US would have a very predictable outcome.
Yeah. The WTC wont be the 'ground zero' everyone remembers in New York.
Do you really think this can't be done? Are you that naive? Are you so arrogant that you think only good ol' Americans can actually use nuclear weapons?
North Korea may not survive the fallout, but don't be under any illusions about their ability to hit the US.
Even the US would balk at causing the deaths of over a million civilians (assuming a mere 1 in 10 death rate amongst a crowded population).
how confident the US feels about its ability to pre-emptively take out most of NK's artillery.
I don't think the US is actually capable of delivering enough ordinance in a short enough timeframe to achieve that, without going nuclear. Pre-emptive nuclear strikes will annoy even more people that causing the deaths of a million South Korean civilians.
On the whole I suspect the US will continue to bitch about North Korea without actually doing much, right up until the day there's sufficient proof of a(n imminent) North Korean nuclear attack.
Of course, we've seen previous US claims of imminent use of WMD before. Not the actual WMD of course, but hey, can't always be right.
Sky used to offer 2mbps broadband for free in the UK. It may have been only to their TV customers though.
I didn't bother, I was already on a 20mbps cable link anyway. I did consider it for Sky's movie download service though - it used p2p tech for distribution and I didn't want them flooding my main connection's upload.
No, they don't compare on performance. They have less range.
However: if cost per mile is your concern, my point is that you shouldn't buy a $90k car. It's going to have to pay you for the first 50,000 miles just to offset the purchase price.
I went for the E-PL5. High iso noise isn't upsetting me at all, although I have a max ISO of around 2600 set.
The sensor is actually superb, although obviously nothing like the lowlight capability of this new Canon one. There are issues with the camera but broadly they can be easily summarised as 'user error'.
It doesn't discount the fact that (as of now) electric miles are 1/5th the cost of a gasoline equivalent and are practical for most urban and suburban uses.
Is that before or after you buy a $90k car instead of a $12k one that'll do the job slightly better?
Clarkson trashes anything he disapproves of -- that means most American car
You do know that Clarkson was so enthused by his test drive of a Ford GT that he bought one? I know because.. he mentioned it on Top Gear.
If he trashes an American car, it's because it's not as good as it should be. He'll trash a lot of things for comedy effect but if something is genuinely good, he'll admire it.
You may disagree with his views, but that doesn't mean he's applying inherent prejudice.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that's true. The current climate makes it harder to change job, but that just means it takes a little longer. It's still possible.
Most companies aren't terrible to work for. If they are for you, consider why - some people cant cope with how large companies work, some cant handle the pressures of a small business, some prefer to run their own, some would just be better switching career.
Or it's possible you live somewhere that all companies are shit. Move? Start your own? Telecommute with a firm elsewhere? Not Yahoo though ;)
Seriously, if you can't find work that you can enjoy then you won't enjoy retirement either.
So do you know the rate of delivery failure with 'Lasership'? Is it possible that they make several million successful deliveries each year and because you've had a poor experience, you've gone hunting for the other 2000 people that have had a similar problem?
Amazon are absorbing the costs and dealing with the issue on your behalf. This is good. Whether the stop using that delivery service is far more complex than whether your delivery got fucked up. 'Lasership' may have error rates a quarter of those from other companies. They may have error rates twice as high, but a lower total cost due to savings outweighing the return/replace overheads. They may give most customers a superior experience, with you being one an unfortunate few.
Or they could be completely incapable and dishonest, and Amazon are in the middle of securing alternative service providers. Just because you can't see a response doesn't mean that there isn't one.
Odd, I buy my games through steam and avoid buying EAs 'always on' DRM infested games, even when they're continuations of franchises I've previously loved - e.g. Battlefield and SimCity.
So please, tell me, how is EAs DRM helping me as a potential customer? They lose out on a sale, I lose out on a game to play, and I'm still not going to buy their buggy malicious software.
I'm not going to accuse you of being shrill, or even a shill. Just naive, deluded and wrong.
Comically at senior management levels, the "increasingly in the form of after-hours work, working from coffeeshops, that sort of thing" is a standard part of the job, in addition to the 9-5.
Interestingly though, the corporate offences have been at companies with 'traditional' management styles, but are also demonstrated to be failures in the governance processes.
However, you're right in that achieving that governance doesn't require everybody to be sat within a whip-crack of the boss.
(although if she's cute and wearing leather boots..)
A lot of managers come from operational backgrounds. Results are 'calls answered', 'time per call', 'accounts produced on time', 'sales made'. They achieve that through standardised approaches - hell, one of our call centre employees says the wrong thing, the COO goes to jail. Of course he's going to demand compliance.
So a ROWE approach isn't just not necessarily obvious to them, it's potentially damaging.
I've always been in 'knowledge worker' type roles. My managers have all accepted that I'll commit to, and hit, challenging deadlines. Or re-negotiate them (usually due to something else taking higher priority, or a dependency failing, etc). Very much results oriented, and indeed my preferred way of working.
Startups tend to be nearer to the knowledge worker type approach, because there aren't standard processes, there isn't an established way of working. So it's quite understandable that people focus on specific outcomes rather than conformance to process.
The other factor is that as companies get larger, corporate governance becomes far harder. If you have 4000 people in the organisation, how do you know they're all achieving the results you need, without breaking the law, without committing fraud, without making decisions for which they aren't qualified, without deviating from the overall corporate strategy?
ROWE doesn't easily scale to that type of scenario.
(Don't get me wrong. I'm leaving my current employer in part because I've been given a management team that focusses on "were you at this briefing every month, have you completed your timesheet, did you complete this document for each piece of work" and not "did you get your job done and/or add value to the organisation")
Hating the fact that you have to work doesn't mean you have to hate your job.
I hate having to work, to earn the money to buy food, shelter and shiny electronic toys. I like the way in which I earn that money, and prefer it to other viable alternatives.
Give me $10m and I'll retire immediately. Until then, I'll keep finding and doing jobs I don't hate, even though I hate having to work.
People aren't unproductive because they hate having to work for a living. There's more to it than work ethic, but that's a significant factor across the population.
That's not teamwork though.
Happy people are more productive. Engaged staff contribute more. The whole is greater than its constituent parts.
If your team act like loners with clearly defined interfaces between them, they're nowhere near as productive as a team that engage, interact, share ideas and work together.
When your team's objective is "secure the perimeter" then it's a pretty low skill task. When your team's objective is "boost global sales by 20% while taking 30% out of operating costs and reducing staff turnover by 4%" individual competence just isn't going to be enough.
Except that... lazy people can make excellent programmers. They get things done right first time and automate the hell out of everything, because having to repeat shit just takes far too much effort.
You just have to understand how laziness really work. For instance I annoy a friend of mine by parking a couple of hundred yards away from the supermarket. He doesn't realise that a 200 yard walk is less effort than driving around in circles trying to find a space closer.
There is no reason for corporate to spend any more money on supposedly unproductive talent.
Why is Joe unproductive? Is it because he's being misused, is it because he's finished his work, is it because he's being distracted supporting someone else's work, is it because he broke his leg last week, is it because he's adding value in ways that your measurement system can't detect?
None of those are reasons to sack him.
Shit, he could be going through a divorce, a house move, a mental breakdown, a sex-change. Again, no reason to sack him.
Good corporations seek to understand and support their employees. It reduces turnover, increases motivation, boosts productivity and adds far more value than the destructive arbitrary firing of people because "they didn't log onto the VPN today".
Let me guess, you're ex-military.
In the real world (and trust me, the military doesn't run like the real world - it's a far simpler, more constrained and occasionally far more real environment) everyone is different and any good manager of a team can manage a situation like that.
It's not favouritism to let Alice work from home but force Bob to stay in the office. It's bad management if that's all you do, but if you pull Bob into a quiet meeting room and suggest that he demonstrates productivity while working from home or you'll have to ask him to come in every day, then Bob now knows why you're treating him differently and you've also managed to set up the basic situation for a conversation on cryptography.
Shit, I'm a terrible manager and I know how to approach that sort of situation. Hell, even if Bob is utterly pissed off, Alice, Charlie and Dan are glad someone's finally making him pull his weight.
Of course, if he's being productive in less easily measured ways then he has the opportunity to draw attention to that, and maybe there isn't a problem at all.
"All or nothing" approaches may work in the military, but the rest of us are allowed far more subtlety and flexibility.
(My experience of the military is that British officers are extremely good man managers, and will make decisions appropriate to the individuals they're working with and not blanket approaches that are imposed on everyone. Unless it's weapons safety, in which case their blanket approach is to leave it to the NCOs anyway. Shit, any RSM is automatically one of the finest man managers on the planet, purely because he wouldn't get the job otherwise!)
A manager who comes by your cube and notices a pattern of you doing not-work-things when they walk up to you has a clear cut basis to look into what you are actually doing.
Wait, people actually do work at their desks? I use mine to eat lunch, browse the web, check email on my phone, check email on the work system and chat to my colleagues.
If I want to get real work done, I'll somewhere conducive to that.
Ironically I had a new manager earlier this year, and every time he approached my desk I had the BBC news site open, or was looking at my mobile, or was chatting to someone.. never actually doing work. He didn't say anything, I didn't worry about it. Few weeks later he came to me saying that he'd been approached by with thanks for the extent and quality of the work I'd been doing.
It may not be obvious what work is being done, or when, but the people adding value do get noticed. Being sat there looking busy isn't an indicator of productivity.
Back on topic, I work from home mostly disconnected, and only one day every 2-3 weeks. I can get stuff _done_ at home, but I can't talk to people. Getting stuff done demonstrates diligence and aids communication (and keeps regulators and auditors happy) but talking to people adds the real value.
It's one thing to have a nuke, entirely another to have a delivery system capable of getting to where it needs to go
Yeah, they might have to attach it to a seventy year old propeller powered aircraft.
Delivery is EASY. Especially if you only have one. The first one is the easiest to deliver.
Any attack NK tried to make against the US would have a very predictable outcome.
Yeah. The WTC wont be the 'ground zero' everyone remembers in New York.
Do you really think this can't be done? Are you that naive? Are you so arrogant that you think only good ol' Americans can actually use nuclear weapons?
North Korea may not survive the fallout, but don't be under any illusions about their ability to hit the US.
Even the US would balk at causing the deaths of over a million civilians (assuming a mere 1 in 10 death rate amongst a crowded population).
how confident the US feels about its ability to pre-emptively take out most of NK's artillery.
I don't think the US is actually capable of delivering enough ordinance in a short enough timeframe to achieve that, without going nuclear. Pre-emptive nuclear strikes will annoy even more people that causing the deaths of a million South Korean civilians.
On the whole I suspect the US will continue to bitch about North Korea without actually doing much, right up until the day there's sufficient proof of a(n imminent) North Korean nuclear attack.
Of course, we've seen previous US claims of imminent use of WMD before. Not the actual WMD of course, but hey, can't always be right.
Sky used to offer 2mbps broadband for free in the UK. It may have been only to their TV customers though.
I didn't bother, I was already on a 20mbps cable link anyway. I did consider it for Sky's movie download service though - it used p2p tech for distribution and I didn't want them flooding my main connection's upload.
No idea whether they still offer that or not.
No, they don't compare on performance. They have less range.
However: if cost per mile is your concern, my point is that you shouldn't buy a $90k car. It's going to have to pay you for the first 50,000 miles just to offset the purchase price.
I went for the E-PL5. High iso noise isn't upsetting me at all, although I have a max ISO of around 2600 set.
The sensor is actually superb, although obviously nothing like the lowlight capability of this new Canon one. There are issues with the camera but broadly they can be easily summarised as 'user error'.
Bah. You win this time, but I'll be watching you.
(I wont, but hopefully you'll feel better thinking I might)
I did ponder documentary uses - I guess weddings count in that :)
But you're right, anywhere that you can't control lighting is a good candidate, especially if you can't bring in a fullsize TV camera.
It's litter collection, cleaning up the neighbourhood and returning lost property.
Force-feeding them to the publishers may be actionable, but merely returning them is surely a public service.
It is illegal to post signs in public space
That'll be why the suggestion was "Post a sign on your property".
I save mine until I need to test a bow. Then I shoot them.
Murdoch? Is that you?
It doesn't discount the fact that (as of now) electric miles are 1/5th the cost of a gasoline equivalent and are practical for most urban and suburban uses.
Is that before or after you buy a $90k car instead of a $12k one that'll do the job slightly better?
Clarkson trashes anything he disapproves of -- that means most American car
You do know that Clarkson was so enthused by his test drive of a Ford GT that he bought one? I know because.. he mentioned it on Top Gear.
If he trashes an American car, it's because it's not as good as it should be. He'll trash a lot of things for comedy effect but if something is genuinely good, he'll admire it.
You may disagree with his views, but that doesn't mean he's applying inherent prejudice.
I enjoy the show, but they are truly a bunch of prats when it comes to sucking their sponsors off.
They have sponsors?
You must be watching the American show. I watch the unsullied British show on BBC2.