I have found that the best middle ground is to work with the developers and project team to set deadlines and project milestones. While down to the tenth of an hour estimates are not necessary, there have to be goals to hit.
The best managers are going to let the developers provide their own estimates, and then calibrate the timelines accordingly. Some people are good at estimating time. Others are horrible at it. The project manager needs to know their team well enough to account for those factors.
The of thumb that I have always worked with is double the estimated time. Under promise and over deliver. This does lead to some grumbling up front, "It is going to take HOW long?!" But after successfully delivering ahead of time, enough times in a row, people come around.
The biggest challenge is keeping people honest. Some people have a hard time admitting that they are not going to make a deadline. It is important to give those people room to fail, so long as they are responsible about it. "This deadline has some flexibility, as long as you give me 48 hours notice that you are going to miss it. Don't come into my office the day I am expecting a deliverable and tell me that you need another week."
The other side of that is having to be a good manager, and push back on the business team to give the developers room to work. "We told you we would deliver it by X and we are still on track to deliver it by X. STFU you about your cranky client whose expectations you cannot manage despite us being explicitly clear with you about what our timelines are. And no, we are not going to add that extra feature that you promised them but failed to include in the scope."
I really wished that I had discovered a few things earlier than I did. The first is Neuro Linguistic Programming. (Reading: Introducing NLP: Psychological Skills for Understanding and Influencing People by Joseph O'Connor) While it gets a bad rep as being the techniques people use to manipulate each other, I found that it was a solid 'instruction manual for the mind'. Some of the techniques in there made a very positive impact in my ability to learn, and I wish that I had had them in middle and high school when I was struggling with some of the AP work.
The second is eastern philosophy, specifically Taoist and Buddhist philosophy. (Reading: The Taoist Classics & The Classics of Buddhism and Zen by Thomas Cleary.) While technology is cool and all, hacking the body and the mind are way more fulfilling, interesting and beneficial. Some of the practices developed by the ancient masters like tai chi and qi gong are life long practices, and the earlier people get started, the more benefit they will eventually reap from them.
I believe that the majority people who read and contribute to Slashdot understand that our society is seriously ill. In many ways, our society is insane. It can be very isolating and confusing to hold different beliefs. It can be confusing to intuit that things are wrong, yet not understand why... or what the alternative is. I found those alternatives in ancient philosophies that can still be applied to the modern day.
To wrap it up. Children need to understand Neuro Linguistic Programming so that they can see through the bullshit that is constructed by the media, the marketers and politicians. Anyone can benefit from philosophies that espouse the virtues of self cultivation, health and just, balanced societies.
For the OP: Your daughter and wife will be okay. She has your DNA. They have both had your love. They are blessed that you were there to help bring her into the world, and to guide her development. They will miss you, your passing will hurt, but they will be okay.
Some species of birds and social insects routinely help raise another's brood. Even bacteria can cooperate, sticking to each other so that some may survive poison. If extortion reigns, what drives these and other acts of selflessness?
Lacking a human ego, the species in question naturally accept that they are all one and part of a larger whole. Therefore self sacrifice is innate because it leads to the survival of the whole.
I was not going to be the first one to say it, but the exact same thought passed through my head.
This guy has a wife with a serious illness AND a two year old child. His solution is to make it possible for his two year old to keep an eye on his wife.
What kind of long term trauma is that going to cause? "Now Sally, keep a close eye on your mom because it is on you to make sure that when she starts convulsing that you make sure daddy is aware of it." What kind of sick person puts that responsibility on a toddler?
Are you sure about that? They are cutting senior staff positions. A Director of community relations is probably a smart choice given that they are going through a massive transition. Do they really care what the old message to the community is? Can they even afford to care what the community thinks, or court their input at such a delicate time? While fan participation and buy in is important, it is doubtful that they are in a position to do anything meaningful with it right now, or in the near future. It would not surprise me if they fill the position again, probably internally, once they figure out what their new messaging is going to be.
The Director of Development is an odd one, but in a way it makes sense. If they had a solid development program, they would not be in dire financial straights in the first place. While they are losing a leadership position, it will be interesting to see if they fill the position internally, or go outside. An internal hire shows that they are committed to leveraging current talent to lead them in a new direction. An external hire shows that they have little faith in their current staff, and will very likely accelerate a talent exodus.
By and large, the public does not care. They certainly do not care enough to do anything about it.
If people really cared, it would take self sacrifice. People would have to refuse to go to work, for weeks, if not months. We would have to stop working long enough to really throw a wrench into the system. Not only that, we would have to some how convince others not to take our jobs while we are out there doing whatever it is we would do when we were proving to the government that we are not there to perpetuate their system.
Now, to be able to go through 13000 cases (each with multiple documents), each member of this hypothetical team will need to process 928 cases. How many can they process per day?
The relevant metric here is number of documents per case. On average, a trained reviewer is going to do about 2 docs a minute, or 120 docs an hour. Keep in mind, that is for a typical privilege review. They may be able to do it even faster if all they are doing is verifying redactions.
Yes, the recession is already starting. It is going to be another 8-12 months before it starts getting major press coverage, but companies are already cutting back on CapEx in general, and IT CapEx in particular.
You will notice it accelerating when Merger and Acquisition (M&A) activities start picking up.
Especially if you can get into Federal Contracting, the money is good
This is an interesting perspective. I just interviewed someone in the DC area who is looking to get out of Federal contracting because their perception is that it is getting harder to find stable work.
Now granted, I ended up passing on the person because their skills were not up to par and that might very well explain their challenge with finding work.
Is there a specific skill set that you find is in demand among Federal contractors?
Who the fuck are you to come on and assassinate someone else's character who you have not even met, and whose work product you have never seen?
At least you had the dignity to post with a legitimate account instead of as AC.
I have to wonder what is so wrong with your own character, that you are so threatened by the potential competence of a complete stranger, that you have to take to defaming them in order to re-enforce whatever impoverished view of the world you have adopted for yourself.
It seems to me like you have had some bad past experiences that you are still projecting into the now. Hopefully you find your way out of whatever pathetic, asshole infested farce of a career that you seem to be stuck in.
I manage a technical team in a medium sized corporation (~3000 employees). Our primary offerings are SaaS based applications and we are on board with all of the buzzword trends from the last few years; virtualization, cloud, flash storage, blah blah blah. Our environment is fairly small with 60 UCS servers at two sites (full SRDF/A replication between them) running ~1500 VMs.
One of my guys is an engineering rock star. He can pick up any language given a week or two to sit down with it. On top of that he is an excellent systems administrator, DBA, networking guy and project manager. Retention is a constant challenge because there are very few engineers who excel in so many different areas.
The technologies that we are working with are widely deployed. We could be implementing them somewhere else and making the same money. At a high level, we are just infrastructure plumbers. We could care less about the applications. Our purpose is to make sure that they are stable and that they perform well. With my particular employee, he keeps coming to work because we give him the opportunity to work with the latest technologies and the ability to leverage them to make his, and everyone else's, lives easier.
The two things that keep this team together are money, and the leeway to continually improve things. We have had a lot of territorial disputes with various teams over their inability to effectively manage infrastructure at scale. In many ways, they are scared of losing their jobs and are resistant to adopting better ways of doing things. We win those battles one at a time, but continually fighting them gets lame.
In that regard, I think that the author of the article is on point with the observation that good engineers need to believe that they are involved in setting the direction of how the office, and most importantly, operations, will develop. There are too many companies who need good engineers, and not enough good engineers to go around. Therefore good engineers will choose to work for companies where they can do things "the right way". Life is too short to put up with organizations who are slow to adopt new technologies and better ways of doing things.
Are you sure about that? My understanding is that the insurance company will only pay up to the level of coverage that you have. Anything beyond that is still your liability.
SAML repository for authentication so that we can treat it as much as possible like an extension of our general security stance with password attempt monitoring, rate throttling and attack blocking, user lockout, etc.
You sir, sound like you know what you are doing.
Do you ever have attempts coming back from any of your vendors?
Or is the vendor simply passing data back to you about when accounts from your site are used in failed logon attempts to the cloud apps, via whatever their presentation layer is?
A typical SaaS vendor has numerous clients, all with varying levels of sophistication in their password and identity management procedures.
As if the need to ensure tenant isolation does not put enough pressure on the architects, they also have to worry about how well their customers are securing their own staff. The smart ones are doing Federation for predictable data transfers, and two-factor to secure the application layer. Even then, the legal people still make them sign disclaimers that ultimately, data breaches due to compromised credentials are the responsibility of the authorized bearer of the credentials.
It sucks to have to secure a slew of web servers, especially for those who have to run LOB apps on Windows platforms. VDI is being used pretty heavily on that front prevent information leakages. It's cheaper to spin up a session for them via a webpage, than it is to trust that their client is secure. Not to mention easier to maintain and troubleshoot. Staff can shunt the user to a clean session, shadow it, hold the user's hand through whatever.
On the plus side, with a good cloud provider, when your datas get pwnt, it is replicated somewhere else. Maybe even on tape in some cold, humidity controlled warehouse. Because no matter how good security is, sooner or later, it will get compromised.
At that point though, it is all about RTO/RPO which is outside the scope of security. BTW even with LTO6, restore rates from cold storage still blow.
I see the geo-engineering deniers are out in force today with their mod points.
Go ahead and ignore what is hanging above your heads. I have made my peace with it already.
I am not sure why people get so defensive whens someone points out that they are trying to make it rain over California, a state that is experiencing its worst drought in decades.
One would think that I was touting conspiracy theories about the Illuminati trying to poison the masses with aerial bombardments of bacteriological agents.
Some data where desalinization projects did not go through due to greed on the part of the incumbent water utility.
I am curious because I used to live in a city that used desalinization. I always wondered why it was not more widely adopted. Everything that I found led me to believe that the root cause was due to the cost of energy required to make the process work.
I am not sure desalinization is not viable due to the cost of the technology, or due to the infrastructure required to get the water from the coast, up over the mountains and into the Central Valley where all of the farmland is.
I call bullshit on "the first". I do not know what is going on in the rest of the world, or even the rest of the United States, but geo-engineering is happening nearly every day in California. Jets are creating clouds on a daily basis. Just search Google image for "Chemtrails" and you can see plenty of evidence, from the clouds themselves, to the interior shots of the planes with all of the tanks and pipes and systems for creating the clouds.
The results are real. Just last week we had tropical storm level winds and snow at less than 1000 feet. That is in Southern California, which is a desert climate.
I believe that they are doing everything that they can to keep the state's agricultural economy from cratering. Too much of the Western United States is dependent on California's agriculture. The drought has the powers that be more worried than they are letting on to.
Slashdot Mirror
I have found that the best middle ground is to work with the developers and project team to set deadlines and project milestones. While down to the tenth of an hour estimates are not necessary, there have to be goals to hit.
The best managers are going to let the developers provide their own estimates, and then calibrate the timelines accordingly. Some people are good at estimating time. Others are horrible at it. The project manager needs to know their team well enough to account for those factors.
The of thumb that I have always worked with is double the estimated time. Under promise and over deliver. This does lead to some grumbling up front, "It is going to take HOW long?!" But after successfully delivering ahead of time, enough times in a row, people come around.
The biggest challenge is keeping people honest. Some people have a hard time admitting that they are not going to make a deadline. It is important to give those people room to fail, so long as they are responsible about it. "This deadline has some flexibility, as long as you give me 48 hours notice that you are going to miss it. Don't come into my office the day I am expecting a deliverable and tell me that you need another week."
The other side of that is having to be a good manager, and push back on the business team to give the developers room to work. "We told you we would deliver it by X and we are still on track to deliver it by X. STFU you about your cranky client whose expectations you cannot manage despite us being explicitly clear with you about what our timelines are. And no, we are not going to add that extra feature that you promised them but failed to include in the scope."
I really wished that I had discovered a few things earlier than I did. The first is Neuro Linguistic Programming. (Reading: Introducing NLP: Psychological Skills for Understanding and Influencing People by Joseph O'Connor) While it gets a bad rep as being the techniques people use to manipulate each other, I found that it was a solid 'instruction manual for the mind'. Some of the techniques in there made a very positive impact in my ability to learn, and I wish that I had had them in middle and high school when I was struggling with some of the AP work.
The second is eastern philosophy, specifically Taoist and Buddhist philosophy. (Reading: The Taoist Classics & The Classics of Buddhism and Zen by Thomas Cleary.) While technology is cool and all, hacking the body and the mind are way more fulfilling, interesting and beneficial. Some of the practices developed by the ancient masters like tai chi and qi gong are life long practices, and the earlier people get started, the more benefit they will eventually reap from them.
I believe that the majority people who read and contribute to Slashdot understand that our society is seriously ill. In many ways, our society is insane. It can be very isolating and confusing to hold different beliefs. It can be confusing to intuit that things are wrong, yet not understand why... or what the alternative is. I found those alternatives in ancient philosophies that can still be applied to the modern day.
To wrap it up. Children need to understand Neuro Linguistic Programming so that they can see through the bullshit that is constructed by the media, the marketers and politicians. Anyone can benefit from philosophies that espouse the virtues of self cultivation, health and just, balanced societies.
For the OP: Your daughter and wife will be okay. She has your DNA. They have both had your love. They are blessed that you were there to help bring her into the world, and to guide her development. They will miss you, your passing will hurt, but they will be okay.
Some species of birds and social insects routinely help raise another's brood. Even bacteria can cooperate, sticking to each other so that some may survive poison. If extortion reigns, what drives these and other acts of selflessness?
Lacking a human ego, the species in question naturally accept that they are all one and part of a larger whole. Therefore self sacrifice is innate because it leads to the survival of the whole.
I was not going to be the first one to say it, but the exact same thought passed through my head.
This guy has a wife with a serious illness AND a two year old child. His solution is to make it possible for his two year old to keep an eye on his wife.
What kind of long term trauma is that going to cause? "Now Sally, keep a close eye on your mom because it is on you to make sure that when she starts convulsing that you make sure daddy is aware of it." What kind of sick person puts that responsibility on a toddler?
Are you sure about that? They are cutting senior staff positions. A Director of community relations is probably a smart choice given that they are going through a massive transition. Do they really care what the old message to the community is? Can they even afford to care what the community thinks, or court their input at such a delicate time? While fan participation and buy in is important, it is doubtful that they are in a position to do anything meaningful with it right now, or in the near future. It would not surprise me if they fill the position again, probably internally, once they figure out what their new messaging is going to be.
The Director of Development is an odd one, but in a way it makes sense. If they had a solid development program, they would not be in dire financial straights in the first place. While they are losing a leadership position, it will be interesting to see if they fill the position internally, or go outside. An internal hire shows that they are committed to leveraging current talent to lead them in a new direction. An external hire shows that they have little faith in their current staff, and will very likely accelerate a talent exodus.
By and large, the public does not care. They certainly do not care enough to do anything about it.
If people really cared, it would take self sacrifice. People would have to refuse to go to work, for weeks, if not months. We would have to stop working long enough to really throw a wrench into the system. Not only that, we would have to some how convince others not to take our jobs while we are out there doing whatever it is we would do when we were proving to the government that we are not there to perpetuate their system.
Good luck with that.
Now, to be able to go through 13000 cases (each with multiple documents), each member of this hypothetical team will need to process 928 cases. How many can they process per day?
The relevant metric here is number of documents per case. On average, a trained reviewer is going to do about 2 docs a minute, or 120 docs an hour. Keep in mind, that is for a typical privilege review. They may be able to do it even faster if all they are doing is verifying redactions.
and search using OCR. But these cant be redacted as easily.
There are plenty of systems out there that can perform keyword searches and redact accordingly once the originals have been OCR'd.
Yes, the recession is already starting. It is going to be another 8-12 months before it starts getting major press coverage, but companies are already cutting back on CapEx in general, and IT CapEx in particular.
You will notice it accelerating when Merger and Acquisition (M&A) activities start picking up.
Especially if you can get into Federal Contracting, the money is good
This is an interesting perspective. I just interviewed someone in the DC area who is looking to get out of Federal contracting because their perception is that it is getting harder to find stable work.
Now granted, I ended up passing on the person because their skills were not up to par and that might very well explain their challenge with finding work.
Is there a specific skill set that you find is in demand among Federal contractors?
I did not realize that. Thanks for the heads up.
Who the fuck are you to come on and assassinate someone else's character who you have not even met, and whose work product you have never seen?
At least you had the dignity to post with a legitimate account instead of as AC.
I have to wonder what is so wrong with your own character, that you are so threatened by the potential competence of a complete stranger, that you have to take to defaming them in order to re-enforce whatever impoverished view of the world you have adopted for yourself.
It seems to me like you have had some bad past experiences that you are still projecting into the now. Hopefully you find your way out of whatever pathetic, asshole infested farce of a career that you seem to be stuck in.
There are better solutions for that, like Ghostery.
I manage a technical team in a medium sized corporation (~3000 employees). Our primary offerings are SaaS based applications and we are on board with all of the buzzword trends from the last few years; virtualization, cloud, flash storage, blah blah blah. Our environment is fairly small with 60 UCS servers at two sites (full SRDF/A replication between them) running ~1500 VMs.
One of my guys is an engineering rock star. He can pick up any language given a week or two to sit down with it. On top of that he is an excellent systems administrator, DBA, networking guy and project manager. Retention is a constant challenge because there are very few engineers who excel in so many different areas.
The technologies that we are working with are widely deployed. We could be implementing them somewhere else and making the same money. At a high level, we are just infrastructure plumbers. We could care less about the applications. Our purpose is to make sure that they are stable and that they perform well. With my particular employee, he keeps coming to work because we give him the opportunity to work with the latest technologies and the ability to leverage them to make his, and everyone else's, lives easier.
The two things that keep this team together are money, and the leeway to continually improve things. We have had a lot of territorial disputes with various teams over their inability to effectively manage infrastructure at scale. In many ways, they are scared of losing their jobs and are resistant to adopting better ways of doing things. We win those battles one at a time, but continually fighting them gets lame.
In that regard, I think that the author of the article is on point with the observation that good engineers need to believe that they are involved in setting the direction of how the office, and most importantly, operations, will develop. There are too many companies who need good engineers, and not enough good engineers to go around. Therefore good engineers will choose to work for companies where they can do things "the right way". Life is too short to put up with organizations who are slow to adopt new technologies and better ways of doing things.
...A ZONE OF LAWLESSNESS!!@11!!1!11!!1!
Your move Uncle Sam.
Give up yours first, and then maybe we can talk about what Apple and Google are up to.
Are you sure about that? My understanding is that the insurance company will only pay up to the level of coverage that you have. Anything beyond that is still your liability.
SAML repository for authentication so that we can treat it as much as possible like an extension of our general security stance with password attempt monitoring, rate throttling and attack blocking, user lockout, etc.
You sir, sound like you know what you are doing.
Do you ever have attempts coming back from any of your vendors?
Or is the vendor simply passing data back to you about when accounts from your site are used in failed logon attempts to the cloud apps, via whatever their presentation layer is?
A typical SaaS vendor has numerous clients, all with varying levels of sophistication in their password and identity management procedures.
As if the need to ensure tenant isolation does not put enough pressure on the architects, they also have to worry about how well their customers are securing their own staff. The smart ones are doing Federation for predictable data transfers, and two-factor to secure the application layer. Even then, the legal people still make them sign disclaimers that ultimately, data breaches due to compromised credentials are the responsibility of the authorized bearer of the credentials.
It sucks to have to secure a slew of web servers, especially for those who have to run LOB apps on Windows platforms. VDI is being used pretty heavily on that front prevent information leakages. It's cheaper to spin up a session for them via a webpage, than it is to trust that their client is secure. Not to mention easier to maintain and troubleshoot. Staff can shunt the user to a clean session, shadow it, hold the user's hand through whatever.
On the plus side, with a good cloud provider, when your datas get pwnt, it is replicated somewhere else. Maybe even on tape in some cold, humidity controlled warehouse. Because no matter how good security is, sooner or later, it will get compromised.
At that point though, it is all about RTO/RPO which is outside the scope of security. BTW even with LTO6, restore rates from cold storage still blow.
Step out from behind your fear, AC. It is easy to sling mud when nobody knows who you are.
I see the geo-engineering deniers are out in force today with their mod points.
Go ahead and ignore what is hanging above your heads. I have made my peace with it already.
I am not sure why people get so defensive whens someone points out that they are trying to make it rain over California, a state that is experiencing its worst drought in decades.
One would think that I was touting conspiracy theories about the Illuminati trying to poison the masses with aerial bombardments of bacteriological agents.
Some data where desalinization projects did not go through due to greed on the part of the incumbent water utility.
I am curious because I used to live in a city that used desalinization. I always wondered why it was not more widely adopted. Everything that I found led me to believe that the root cause was due to the cost of energy required to make the process work.
Do you have any data to back up those assertions?
How old are you?
How long have you been looking at contrails?
I am not sure desalinization is not viable due to the cost of the technology, or due to the infrastructure required to get the water from the coast, up over the mountains and into the Central Valley where all of the farmland is.
I call bullshit on "the first". I do not know what is going on in the rest of the world, or even the rest of the United States, but geo-engineering is happening nearly every day in California. Jets are creating clouds on a daily basis. Just search Google image for "Chemtrails" and you can see plenty of evidence, from the clouds themselves, to the interior shots of the planes with all of the tanks and pipes and systems for creating the clouds.
The results are real. Just last week we had tropical storm level winds and snow at less than 1000 feet. That is in Southern California, which is a desert climate.
I believe that they are doing everything that they can to keep the state's agricultural economy from cratering. Too much of the Western United States is dependent on California's agriculture. The drought has the powers that be more worried than they are letting on to.