IT staff should *never* badmouth their customers (and yes, users should be considered customers). It is unfortunate that some of them do. There are legitimate reasons for frustrations, however. It seems that you are turning around and blaming the IT staff, which I think is not the appropriate thing to do. This creates a cycle of user-blames-IT-who-blames-users. The blame game circles around the root cause of much of these problems: poor project management.
Software engineering has many similarities to building bridges or buildings, at least at this time. However, perhaps because the product isn't physical, there seems to be an enormous amount of pressure in many companies to build with little regard to SQA testing, documentation, or user community research. This to me is equivalent to opening a restaurant without performing basics like demographic surveys and making sure your broilers are up to fire code standards. Fundamental questions (such as flexibility versus security, a *huge* dilema when designing any IT framework) are often unanswered, and left up to chaos to decide (not always in the way either IT staff or users want).
When bugs arise, there is often a demand to quickly repair the bugs and get them out of there ASAP. I understand that bugs look the same to users, but they are not always easy to solve. To put it in construction terms, you can use spackle to quickly patch up a small hole in the drywall. But patching a major structural defect with spackle is foolhardy. Yet patching software with "spackle", regardless of bug severity, seems to be standard practice in too many companies.
On the opposite side, when I've seen management put into place, they too often act more as a shield than a useful business process tool. Too many help desks have large layers of unnecessary bureaucracy and paperwork to deal with, while the user sits there with their problem. No wonder many users refer to the help desk as the "helpless desk". The same goes for IT change management processes, they are often way too unresponsive in my experience.
Communication and technical skills seem to be a ying and a yang type thing in people: it's rare to see both in the same person. This is why IT management is so important (and well paid): the best kind can act as a successful medium between the technical and the user community, and avoid many of the problems so common with IT development.
Two other points. First, it is mistaken to say that IT is the only field with personality type conflicts. (Take creative people vs. business users, for instance.) Finally, the online world is not representative of the real world. Many people use blogs to vent their frustrations. Hell, just look at the "customers suck!" websites and Livejournal communities. Many of these blogs are vents, nothing more, and not representative of what goes on in the workplace.
Sounds like, instead of university police, UCLA needs to hire a couple of bouncers from the local bars to keep things safe.
In bars, when some guy comes in being a prick, a couple of big guys from the bouncing staff simply grapple the guy and throw him out. At UCLA, huge amount of campus police, with their training and their badges, have to taser one lone troublemaker five times just to drag the guy away.
There are many reasons why you use as little force as possible, as quickly as possible, to keep things under control. Doesn't matter how much of a prick the guy was. Just look at the reaction of the crowd in the video. Here's a bunch of sedate brainy UCLA students, and even they get fairly ticked at the officer (leading to the taser threat when a person simply asks for the badge number). In other scenarios, the excessive force could have easily started a riot among sympathizers. This *has* happened in the past, and that certainly is *not* a good thing when part of your job as a police officer is keeping the peace.
Florida law is very clear on this. In the event someone is incapacitated, decisions on medical care fall to the *husband* first. Not the *parents*. Marriage is a big deal because the parents are giving up things like this to the husband, you know.
The only way to get out of this hiearchy is to prove that the guardian is incompetent. The whole point of the Schindler's investigations into Schiavo's life, and massive publicity, IMHO was simply to somehow prove this in regards to Michael Schiavo. In the end the courts decided -- unanimously -- that this was not the case. Repeatedly.
Upon further review, the case started, frankly, solely because of money. Michael Schiavo won a malpractice suit. None of the problems with Schiavo started at that time. I have personally come to the opinion that the Schindlers more greedy than concerned about their daughter's welfare. Draw your own conclusion. After a certain point, it seems it became an issue of stupid pride, with neither side willing to budge.
From a medical perspective, I have found no instance of anyone recovering from a PVS after three years -- let alone *fifteen*. I challenge you to find me that. Even those who recover after a *year* of PVS are often severely debiliated for life. I do not see a lot in Michael Schiavo's actions that makes him that wrong, based on the facts about PVS that I see.
All of this would be a tragic case of a bad family dispute at this point. The *real* insanity is how the nation got involved. Why were so many religious groups rushing to get involved in a *personal family case*? Even in many ways violating their own code of ehtics in doing so? (I mean, do they not believe in the sanctity of marriage?) The Schindlers appealed to these folks, and it worked.
Even worse, why in the heck did the government get involved in what was a clear *family dispute?* This annoys me. Jeb Bush, and later the Congressional Republicans, went out of their way to jump through legal hoops so that the Schindlers could make appeal after appeal. Congressional Republicans, in fact, called an emergency session on this. Is *one PVS dispute* really the *biggest* issue of our nation?
This is a pretty classic example of the type of behavior I've been seeing, both from blogs that represent an extremist viewpoint, and from Google.
From Google's angle... like it or not, Google is growing up. They are no longer the idealistic "anything goes" company of the dot.com days. I imagine, in some respects, that there is a legitimate concern among some towards promoting anything that could legally get them in trouble in the future -- including stuff possibly perceived as "hate sites". In this respect, Google appears to be heading towards your typical company -- often overparanoid to a fault. What some might see as "PC" may be, in fact, "CYA" -- a desire not to get sued. So, if enough people complain about being offended, they may make a business decision to remove an offensive site from their news index. That's business after all, in its own way.
Is this wrong? I'll let the marketplace decide that. If some news media organization can do better than Google by including your New Media Journals, they are welcome to start. Actually, the opposite seems true -- from all I've heard, Yahoo's editor-selected news pages (which exclude a lot more blogger-news than Google) get well more hits than Google's algorithmic selected stories. Maybe Google feels that the links to heavily opinionated, often unreliable, possibly racist sources hurts them from a business perspective. You tell me.
Now, the "censorship" complaints... Part of the appeal of the alternative opinion IMHO is that it is underground. For those with heavy-left or heavy-right viewpoints, there seems to be a legitimate desire to be an "alternative" to what is perceived as standard media. Thus both the extreme left wing and extreme right wing really push the fact that they are being censored all the time, and that you are lucky to get this "true news" that often is extremely slanted bogus information, and that Big Evil Corporate Media is against them. Reality is, usually these types are pushing an opinion that the vast majority of people would disagree with if they have all the information. Even WorldNetDaily's post-apocalyptic, somewhat xenophobic Christian perspective does not fit anything close to the opinion of the majority. Let alone NMJ's heavily-emotion based xenophobic, paranoid stance. These folks are a niche market, and like any niche market they want to feel "special".
Personally, I think these complaints are something akin to a special interest group whine. Islam as a religion has some problems for certain, but the blanket condemnation -- and overt racism -- by New Media Journal is ridiculous. All you need to do is travel some, and you'll never become the type of xenophobe that reads stuff like this. Heck, even meeting a single person of the Islam faith (or for that matter, Mexicans, the latest complaint of this bunch, or anyone not of your own race) will change your opinion. If you have an open mind. (Some people don't -- they prefer to blame their own personal problems on anything foreign.)
I do not believe in censorship of the paranoid xenophobes. IMHO xenophobia thrives on censorship and oppression by "the government" in order to live. In a country like America, which is more lax than some nations on this sort of stuff, xenophobia has to get by with "vast left-wing conspiracies" and Big Media complaints and the like. Most American xenophobes don't realize how ridiculous they sound. As easy as it is to make fun of America's xenophobes, European xenophobes -- living in a place with harsher censorship laws in this regard -- have done a lot better politically in the last ten years, and I think the overly-nanny laws have helped fuel this.
Here in America, decrying Google is what it has come down to for these types. Google is a corporation, it makes business decisions. If you don't like Google's business decisions, well, this is America. Start your own damn news search engine.
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IT staff should *never* badmouth their customers (and yes, users should be considered customers). It is unfortunate that some of them do. There are legitimate reasons for frustrations, however. It seems that you are turning around and blaming the IT staff, which I think is not the appropriate thing to do. This creates a cycle of user-blames-IT-who-blames-users. The blame game circles around the root cause of much of these problems: poor project management.
Software engineering has many similarities to building bridges or buildings, at least at this time. However, perhaps because the product isn't physical, there seems to be an enormous amount of pressure in many companies to build with little regard to SQA testing, documentation, or user community research. This to me is equivalent to opening a restaurant without performing basics like demographic surveys and making sure your broilers are up to fire code standards. Fundamental questions (such as flexibility versus security, a *huge* dilema when designing any IT framework) are often unanswered, and left up to chaos to decide (not always in the way either IT staff or users want).
When bugs arise, there is often a demand to quickly repair the bugs and get them out of there ASAP. I understand that bugs look the same to users, but they are not always easy to solve. To put it in construction terms, you can use spackle to quickly patch up a small hole in the drywall. But patching a major structural defect with spackle is foolhardy. Yet patching software with "spackle", regardless of bug severity, seems to be standard practice in too many companies.
On the opposite side, when I've seen management put into place, they too often act more as a shield than a useful business process tool. Too many help desks have large layers of unnecessary bureaucracy and paperwork to deal with, while the user sits there with their problem. No wonder many users refer to the help desk as the "helpless desk". The same goes for IT change management processes, they are often way too unresponsive in my experience.
Communication and technical skills seem to be a ying and a yang type thing in people: it's rare to see both in the same person. This is why IT management is so important (and well paid): the best kind can act as a successful medium between the technical and the user community, and avoid many of the problems so common with IT development.
Two other points. First, it is mistaken to say that IT is the only field with personality type conflicts. (Take creative people vs. business users, for instance.) Finally, the online world is not representative of the real world. Many people use blogs to vent their frustrations. Hell, just look at the "customers suck!" websites and Livejournal communities. Many of these blogs are vents, nothing more, and not representative of what goes on in the workplace.
Sounds like, instead of university police, UCLA needs to hire a couple of bouncers from the local bars to keep things safe. In bars, when some guy comes in being a prick, a couple of big guys from the bouncing staff simply grapple the guy and throw him out. At UCLA, huge amount of campus police, with their training and their badges, have to taser one lone troublemaker five times just to drag the guy away. There are many reasons why you use as little force as possible, as quickly as possible, to keep things under control. Doesn't matter how much of a prick the guy was. Just look at the reaction of the crowd in the video. Here's a bunch of sedate brainy UCLA students, and even they get fairly ticked at the officer (leading to the taser threat when a person simply asks for the badge number). In other scenarios, the excessive force could have easily started a riot among sympathizers. This *has* happened in the past, and that certainly is *not* a good thing when part of your job as a police officer is keeping the peace.
Florida law is very clear on this. In the event someone is incapacitated, decisions on medical care fall to the *husband* first. Not the *parents*. Marriage is a big deal because the parents are giving up things like this to the husband, you know.
The only way to get out of this hiearchy is to prove that the guardian is incompetent. The whole point of the Schindler's investigations into Schiavo's life, and massive publicity, IMHO was simply to somehow prove this in regards to Michael Schiavo. In the end the courts decided -- unanimously -- that this was not the case. Repeatedly.
Upon further review, the case started, frankly, solely because of money. Michael Schiavo won a malpractice suit. None of the problems with Schiavo started at that time. I have personally come to the opinion that the Schindlers more greedy than concerned about their daughter's welfare. Draw your own conclusion. After a certain point, it seems it became an issue of stupid pride, with neither side willing to budge.
From a medical perspective, I have found no instance of anyone recovering from a PVS after three years -- let alone *fifteen*. I challenge you to find me that. Even those who recover after a *year* of PVS are often severely debiliated for life. I do not see a lot in Michael Schiavo's actions that makes him that wrong, based on the facts about PVS that I see.
All of this would be a tragic case of a bad family dispute at this point. The *real* insanity is how the nation got involved. Why were so many religious groups rushing to get involved in a *personal family case*? Even in many ways violating their own code of ehtics in doing so? (I mean, do they not believe in the sanctity of marriage?) The Schindlers appealed to these folks, and it worked.
Even worse, why in the heck did the government get involved in what was a clear *family dispute?* This annoys me. Jeb Bush, and later the Congressional Republicans, went out of their way to jump through legal hoops so that the Schindlers could make appeal after appeal. Congressional Republicans, in fact, called an emergency session on this. Is *one PVS dispute* really the *biggest* issue of our nation?
This is a pretty classic example of the type of behavior I've been seeing, both from blogs that represent an extremist viewpoint, and from Google. From Google's angle... like it or not, Google is growing up. They are no longer the idealistic "anything goes" company of the dot.com days. I imagine, in some respects, that there is a legitimate concern among some towards promoting anything that could legally get them in trouble in the future -- including stuff possibly perceived as "hate sites". In this respect, Google appears to be heading towards your typical company -- often overparanoid to a fault. What some might see as "PC" may be, in fact, "CYA" -- a desire not to get sued. So, if enough people complain about being offended, they may make a business decision to remove an offensive site from their news index. That's business after all, in its own way. Is this wrong? I'll let the marketplace decide that. If some news media organization can do better than Google by including your New Media Journals, they are welcome to start. Actually, the opposite seems true -- from all I've heard, Yahoo's editor-selected news pages (which exclude a lot more blogger-news than Google) get well more hits than Google's algorithmic selected stories. Maybe Google feels that the links to heavily opinionated, often unreliable, possibly racist sources hurts them from a business perspective. You tell me. Now, the "censorship" complaints... Part of the appeal of the alternative opinion IMHO is that it is underground. For those with heavy-left or heavy-right viewpoints, there seems to be a legitimate desire to be an "alternative" to what is perceived as standard media. Thus both the extreme left wing and extreme right wing really push the fact that they are being censored all the time, and that you are lucky to get this "true news" that often is extremely slanted bogus information, and that Big Evil Corporate Media is against them. Reality is, usually these types are pushing an opinion that the vast majority of people would disagree with if they have all the information. Even WorldNetDaily's post-apocalyptic, somewhat xenophobic Christian perspective does not fit anything close to the opinion of the majority. Let alone NMJ's heavily-emotion based xenophobic, paranoid stance. These folks are a niche market, and like any niche market they want to feel "special". Personally, I think these complaints are something akin to a special interest group whine. Islam as a religion has some problems for certain, but the blanket condemnation -- and overt racism -- by New Media Journal is ridiculous. All you need to do is travel some, and you'll never become the type of xenophobe that reads stuff like this. Heck, even meeting a single person of the Islam faith (or for that matter, Mexicans, the latest complaint of this bunch, or anyone not of your own race) will change your opinion. If you have an open mind. (Some people don't -- they prefer to blame their own personal problems on anything foreign.) I do not believe in censorship of the paranoid xenophobes. IMHO xenophobia thrives on censorship and oppression by "the government" in order to live. In a country like America, which is more lax than some nations on this sort of stuff, xenophobia has to get by with "vast left-wing conspiracies" and Big Media complaints and the like. Most American xenophobes don't realize how ridiculous they sound. As easy as it is to make fun of America's xenophobes, European xenophobes -- living in a place with harsher censorship laws in this regard -- have done a lot better politically in the last ten years, and I think the overly-nanny laws have helped fuel this. Here in America, decrying Google is what it has come down to for these types. Google is a corporation, it makes business decisions. If you don't like Google's business decisions, well, this is America. Start your own damn news search engine.