Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: I disagree

It sounds a bit like Dublin. Belfast drivers always said Dubliners were terrible drivers. On the few occasions I went to Dublin I always felt more comfortable there. I got the impression that drivers knew what was behind them, something Belfast drivers never seemed to manage.

Re: I disagree

"Don't even ask about third world cities!"

Or rural areas.

Re: Wish you were wrong. But I don't think you are

"Maybe a human can shepard them to the expressway on-ramp and to the terminal at the end of the trip? I have no idea whether the economics work."

I suppose they'll work if the human is satisfied with just being paid for the shepherding bit and not for the journey in between. Maybe there's a possibility of a Working From Cab gig to supplement the otherwise constrained income.

Re: Ah, the old moving goalposts

"Forget the fact that the old meat sacks are causing more harm behind the wheel"

I think you're forgetting that when it gets too hard for the machine it's the old meat sacks that have to engage their greater parallel processing power to dig the machine out of the problem it's got itself into. So exactly who or what is it that's causing more harm?

Re: @Filippo

"I expect it makes sense for haulage to get the truck and goods over long distances"

And unload itself at the other end.

You may not have noticed the essence of this report. That the vehicles can't get along without having to hand over to what you call a bag of mostly water but which, in fact, provides parallel processing abilities way in front of whatever amounts of silicon they can contrive to put into the vehicle.

Re: Stupid educated people in government

"I don't believe that there's much correlation between the qualifications of the high-paid-help and their ability to make questionable decisions about the direction of engineering projects."

The one skill you can rely on finding in people who successfully climb corporate ladders is corporate ladder climbing. Anything else is a bonus. As corporate ladder climbing is usually their full-time occupation there's seldom room for anything else.

Re: Stupid educated people in government

He actually said "I dont need to know what you do here, I'm here to manage"

As was pointed out in a previous thread this can work out providing he really is a manager, takes care to appoint the best people he can who actually know the engineering or whatever it is, listens to what they say and makes it possible for them to get on with it. But these are rare beasts.

Re: Doesn't matter anyway...

Close enough.

Re: "signing contracts [..] before it has a good understanding of the requirements"

This is more or less Sir Humphrey's explanation. The public is assured by the fact that the government is spending large sums of money on something. As I recall it applied to both Trident and the NHS.

Re: Only one person can save us

Check her wonkypedia page. She's now a security consultant. Either that or an editor with a sense of humour has been at work on it.

Re: Do they ever learn?

“Blackadder, here’s a map of the known world (hands over blank parchment)… fill it in as you go along”

This extends all the way down to small software houses. Having just arrived in one I was given the job of looking after a system they'd put together for one client which they were now trying to sell to a few more. For two of the customers it was something new, for the third they'd been told it would drop in in place of what they already had. I already had problems such as trying to pick it apart and reassemble it in such a way that users in one part of the business didn't have access to every other users' part of the database. I quickly found out I had another: that it was in no way going to be a drop in replacement - the data model was too different.

So I asked management what the spec was for what I was to produce. I was told that whatever I produced would be the spec.

Fortunately, shortly after as I was leaving Embankment station I bumped into someone from my previous employer's customer and more or less offered a job there and then (the ensuing interview was one question "Are you still interested?").

Quite. There's a headline on BBC News saying the Home Office needs to get a grip. There's only one ting they've had a grip on for years and that's successive Home Secs. And much good has it done either.

Re: No shit, Sherlock?!

Also, the management consultant is reassuringly expensive and the local advice is somebody who's on a salary less then the PHB. Advice must be worth what you pay for it, otherwise why pay so much.

Re: re: countries that haven't ventured an opinion on the invasion and shelling of civilians

"At least there's an argument that Ukraine being part of NATO threatens Russian security. It is on their border."

Is there? If had to explain this once in another thread. Perhaps you didn't understand it.

NATO was set up as a mutual defence pact to deter war by making invasion of a NATO country counter-productive.

Putin has demonstrated what can happen to a country that's not a member of NATO.

In consequence it looks like Finland which has a long border with Russia but currently isn't a member will become one.

I don't recall NATO being involved in Iraq. I do remember Iraq invading Kuwait.

Re: Capgemini....

But a twice the number you first thought of is a good starting point.

Re: Business as usual

"For example, the did not understand the difference between 'delegation of authority' and 'abrogation of responsibility'."

They probably did.

"Under no circumstances should I ... become a 'self-employed consultant' as I am just not that sort of person."

Actually this works out quite well. You'd find that as a manager you took due note of your staff and as staff you had a manager who had your best interests at heart. You'd also find decisions being made rapidly. You might have had to slap yourself on the wrist for not carrying out annual reviews.

Seriously, a lot of the crap just disappears.

Re: I want to believe, but...

"there were no toilets in his design. He passed."

In that case where did he pass it?

As to miss-placed pillars, we had a lab designed by a crayon wielder architect who wanted the trendy look of windows extending right to the corners so it looked as if the roof was being held up by magic. My boss's corner office windows were largely blocked by the internal pillar just inside them. They were on the original plans. No amount of complaining would get them changed.

Re: I want to believe, but...

"The CEO, who is ultimately responsible for employing all these people and overseeing their work but didn't bother to learn about any of this until he happened to encounter a former employee outside the office."

The article says "president". I'm not sure I grok all these top titles which seem to work such as a company can have a president and a chairman and maybe a few others but I'm pretty sure a resident and a CEO are different beasts.

Re: I want to believe, but...

"It just doesn't seem plausible."

Not all connections are hierarchical. If it had been golf rather than hiking you'd probably have accepted it without a second thought.

Re: Business as usual

"management books I've read all say something similar:"

Very few managers have read them. Reading is such a waste of time....

Re: Watch Your Backs

"recorded it formally as my saying that I didn't believe in managing"

As a micro-manager it probably looked that way to her.

Re: Responsibility

You forget one of the maxims of IT, especially when dealing with HR: the ultimate sanction of IT is to give the user eactly what they asked for or, in this case, didn't.

Re: The first casualty of war is the truth.

"Dictators and HR"

"And" not needed. The one is a subset of the other.

Re: HR or Steve's Boss

HR would be the first to realise the cheapest direction of blame shifting would be onto someone on probation. Steve's manager would simply be bypassed when reporting upwards.

Re: Chatbots are pointless

"I bet that the $7bn figure was plucked from the a$$ of some marketing droid with no information to back it up."

Close. It's from Gartner.

Re: Alternate Reality?

More likely the other 2,000 people in the queue before you are there because they have also found the website to be useless for their query. The only people who don't know this are managing customer disservice. They think their website does everything the customer should need. They think the reason the telephone queues are so long is that people don't know about the website. If they actually cared they might analyse the queries coming in through the phone to find out whether they could be answered by the site as it stands, what needs to be done to improve in and how to then staff their phones at a level which doesn't result in them claiming they're dealing with the same unusual level of enquires they've had for the last several years.

Re: Captcha

I was thinking of a Captcha with "Click on the images of Ukrainian apartment blocks shelled by the invading Russian army" or "Click on the images of casualties injured by the invading Russian army" etc.

Re: The West will have this chance only once...

"5-10 years from now, China will have those keys."

Given that western countries have spent the last few decades steadily pushing their more and more of their supply chains to China, whose fault is that?