Posts by My-Handle 893 publicly visible posts • joined 20 May 2011
"You have your own company ? Good for you. That doesn't mean you're a success"
I second this. I had my own company for a while. It was definitely not a success. Turns out that knowing your trade and being able to run a successful business in it are two distinctly different skill sets, one of which I do not possess.
My socket set is complete apart from one 5mm socket that seems to have departed this universe when the whole box got spilled into the guts of a camper van conversion. Found the rest of the set, but never that socket. Said van has since been written off in a motorway collision, so that socket is well and truly gone.
My other tools are a mish-mash of inherited pieces that don't have a set home, so with those I have to be more careful.
Last hose I replaced required me to take apart the engine intake manifold and injector assembly just so I could get to it. Bloody annoying, as the replacement hose only cost a few quid and was only held in with spring clips. Would have been a ten second job if I could only get to it.
I've never consciously done this, but I have a feeling I've been doing this unconsciously ever since I started working on cars. It feels like common sense to make sure your socket set is complete, your spanners are accounted for and any other tools are back where they came from before starting up. Even then, I'll still have a thorough look around the engine bay both before and immediately after starting the engine, just to make sure everything is clean and running freely.
I will admit, I don't quite go to the lengths of a physical checklist.
I used to work in a company that produced websites, and they had a similar sine-wave issue going on. They'd focus on quality for a while - in depth QC checks, refine processes to get a site built right first time etc. Then they'd realise that they were producing sites too slowly, so would scale back QC and push for speed. They'd get more sites out the door, but customers would begin getting angry at the mistakes and the number of issues being raised would skyrocket, making more work for the amendments teams. Then they'd focus on QC again for a while. They went back and forth in that cycle for years, round and round several times. They never stopped to think on how they might break out of that cycle (e.g. continuing with the good QC checks and not pushing the site builders so hard, but hiring more builders). They just reacted to what was happening at the time, nothing more.
Judge Reed O'Connor will actually recuse himself in some cases where he sees a conflict of interest. Case in point is the one where X is sueing GARM, and a bunch of big advertisers.
Unfortunately, Judge O'Connor didn't recuse himself specifically because he had Tesla shares, but because he also had shares in Unilever, one of the companies being sued. Apparently you need to be an investor in both parties before it's a conflict of interest.
/s
I do. The last TV I bought was a dumb TV, and it essentially works as a large monitor for a media PC and a console. Now, there's not a lot I can do to stop streaming services advertising at me, but at least I can watch a DVD without my TV deciding it's time I saw an advert or reporting my viewing choices back to who-knows-who.
Things become a little clearer when you find out that, depending on the state, the state itself gets about 40% of the child support charge they levy against the father. So they are rather perversely incentivised into sticking as many of these charges on people as possible, and for as high an amount as they can get away with. Child support also isn't necessarily based on current earnings, but projected earnings. So sure, you're a supermarket shelf stacker right now, but you could be store manager in 2 years. We'll base your child support payments on that.
I'm all for parents (both father and mother) supporting their children, but the US system as-is is not fit for purpose.
Yep, been there too. The same company as mentioned above marked me down in my annual review because I needed to work on my "customer interaction". The fact that I was officially QA for website changes (and unofficially their in-house software developer whose software was saving them hundreds of thousands of pounds a year) and thus didn't have customers didn't seem to figure in their decision at all.
...and I am guessing there wasn't a lot of actual work to do
Wouldn't have stopped one company I used to work for. That was the kind of company who arbitrarily set targets for an entire floor of people (8 to 10 teams), based on how much upper management thought they could get done. Workers who didn't meet the minimum threshold for their targets were put on disciplinery actions. That in itself wouldn't have been unreasonable if the targets were accurately set (say, based on previous throughput). But they were a) arbitrary and b) didn't actually take account of how much work was available for these teams! The minimum threshold across the entire floor represented about 150% of the work that was actually available to pick up, meaning that a random third of the staff were being put on disciplinery actions every month, depending on how the work got allotted.
Said company also wondered why they had staff retention problems. At the height of that idiocy, that floor had about 2% turnover every week. 200 people on the floor, 4 leaving every Friday.
I guess it all hinges on where that error actually occurred. If it literally happened at the point of transfer, with no other documentation referring to the amount, I'm guessing Twitter might have a more solid case. If the error happened further upstream, say when the amounts were officially calculated, then the recipients may well have letters referring to that amount, which they then received. Twitter would definitely be on less firm ground there, especially if there were any terms like "final settlement" or similar in said letters. A lot of shadier companies are fond of using terms like that in severence packages, as it can shield the company from legal action later (e.g. the recipient can only get the severence on the condition they don't sue). I'd love to see an arrangement like that backfire in a situation like this.
Reminds me of an ex-colleague project manager I once had to deal with, who recommended reverting a comparitively new, automated process in favour of an old manual one on the basis that "it would serve the customers better".
Had he done a survey of the customers? No. Had he spoken to even one or two customers? No. Had he spoken to customer services, or anyone in the company who had contact with customers? No. Did he have any kind of data or metrics to support this position? No. Had he given any thought to the impact within the company, given that the new process had been implemented because it tripled the throughput of work and increased the quality of the output at a point where that particular section of the company had been massively backlogged and overworked due to lack of budget and manpower?
His entire basis for his opinion was what "he felt".
The meeting got shut down very quickly under that barrage of questions and said project manager was instead redirected elsewhere. He had gained a general reputation of being able to wreck any project he touched. Thankfully, I didn't encounter him again before leaving said company
Dennis, you're unmanageable. I just point you at stuff and say go.
Funny, I got comments like that as well. I've seen other commentards around here remark similarly. It's almost like the ability to resist pointless managerial crap and focus on the problem that actually needs sorting is common in IT / Engineering type roles.
They don't need to draft up a set of policies / benefits etc for each individual employee. The sensible thing to do is draft up a handful of flexible policies that can be made to suit a wide swathe of their employees, which can then be tweaked as necessary by each employee and their manager to suit the situation.
Being able to update these policies in response to business and employee needs also helps, whereas issuing dictats based on poor management decisions does not.
My experience is that the "good" people don't often end up in comfortable roles, purely because they're the type of people to take ownership of problems or issues and resolve them. They usually end up being quite overworked precisely because they get things done. What they're paid often bears little relation to what they do and a much closer relation to how good their negotion skill was when they were initially employed. Promotions rarely happen because management dare not promote them out of their current role because they're too damn good doing it.
I can remember one colleague who worked his absolute ass off. Out of a three-to-four-person department (including his boss), he was the main one who got stuff done. He got no help and no significant raises and eventually jumped ship due to being massively overworked and getting a better offer elsewhere. Company had to hire two more people to deal with the shortfall and productivity still fell.
I agree that transferring roles is never easy, and any good worker will be giving up a lot of earned respect and reputation. But often it's the only way to get promoted these days, especially in IT.
but at a previous place of work, I had a reputation of solving a lot of my problems with an angle grinder. Granted this was mostly working on cars, but I did once successfully install a graphics card into a machine with the aid of an angle grinder.
The recipient machine had plenty of space inside, but only one slot available in the chassis. The card's backplate only had ports on the lower half, but was two slots high. Removed the back-plate, used the angle grinder to slice it in two, reinstalled the backplate on the card, then put the card in the machine.
I cannot agree more with this.
A few months ago, a customer turned up at our place to drop their dog off for a groom. They had meant to go back home and pick up again in a few hours - instead they sat in our driveway for nearly an hour while they tried to figure out why their automatic boot door was refusing to close. The eventual answer was "close it manually, carefully". Even that was going against the manual for the car.
So there you are. A fault with either the boot closing mechanism, or the sensor circuit that's put there to stop the closing mechanism from maiming people, can render the car unsafe to drive. And no good reason why the boot closing mechanism needs to be there in the first place.
I would almost extend this to electric windows as well. They're convenient when they work, I'll give you that, but they are unreliable and hard to fix. I've owned four vehicles with electric windows and three of them broke (in similar ways - window went down, refused to go back up). The fourth vehicle I've only owned for a few months. The fifth vehicle I own has manual windows, and they have never broken.
I've a whole stack of compute power in the house. The thought of putting it to use, and potentially even getting a profit from it, has crossed my mind before. I lumped in with Team Reg on the Folding@Home drive during covid. But the fact of the matter was that, even with actual computers, permanently powered, it was generally more hassle than it was worth. I had to pause the client whenever I needed the machine for actual use, and I gradually just stopped turning it on again. When I replaced that machine, the Folding@Home client was never reinstalled.
So, on a machine that's pretty close to an optimal use case for distributed computing, by a guy who's interested in the concept, the idea still ended up being impractical. Add in the fact that the machine is now embedded in a car, with a questionable data connection, questionable ownership / control of the software and a questionable effect on the battery life of the vehicle, and you may be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that this is an idea not worth pursuing.
Let's not even think about what might happen if the car's computers' response times suddenly take a dive while driving because this "distributed computing" module decides to kick in at an inopportune time. Let's take the time to get the bloody thing working right before we distract ourselves on tangential uses, eh Tesla?
4mm wide aluminium pop-rivet? Really? Those things are hollow - I'm surprised if one hard jerk on the petal wouldn't take it off.
If it were me, I'd drill that thing out as soon as I got it home (if I even needed a drill) and replace it with a round-topped coach bolt (stainless steel, trimmed to length). I might even glue the pad down first before bolting it - belt and braces, as my late granddad used to say.
Of course, this would be if I were inclined to get a cybertruck in the first place. Which I'm not.
It happens all the time here in Northern Ireland. We typically get very showery weather. In the mornings, evenings or during winter, the sun is low in the sky. This can mean that the sun is shining even if you have a rain cloud right over your head.
Agree. You don't even need to look far. I occasionally look at El Reg on my phone, which doesn't have an ad blocker installed. Ads are spliced in after every second paragraph or so, and the content keeps bouncing up and down as ads of different sizes are loaded in. And, broadly speaking, I'd say El Reg's ads are on the better side of other news sites out there.
Generally, I do most of my browsing on my laptop, which is properly set up with an ad blocker.
Came to post something similar. The house I grew up in was built in the 1920's. As you say, it might have had the occasional replaced tile, but the roof was original in thr 2000's. The house I'm currently in was built in the 1970's with a slate roof. 50+ years of Northern Irish rain and the occasional bit of wind with no problems.
If you're going to build something, build it right.
We had something similar at our place. Contractor with a mini-digger (tracks, not tires) put a concrete hammer through a main feed line to the house. Not his fault - some nitwit had only buried it a cm under the surface.
One big fat spark later, both he and the machine are ok, but next door has a power cut.
We called NIE sharpish and got them to repair the line and bury it at a decent depth.
I get the feeling that, as far as Boeing's PR dept are concerned, the "watershed moment" is in a constant state of quantum superposition, with the wave-form re-collapsing every time they have to put out a statement.
Currently, the door plug incident is the watershed moment. Right up until the next incident happens, then that will be the watershed moment.
...that WMP have performed this particular trick. My dad was arrested once, on Easter weekend in or around 2005.
The cops had nabbed someone in Staines for something or other, took the guy's name, DoB and address and let him go. Come his day in court, he didn't show up. The address he'd given turned out to be false. So they looked up the name and DoB in the Dept of Work & Pensions database (which they shouldn't have done, and ignoring that he'd lied once already) and came up with my dad. Then issued a warrant for his arrest. Because they'd knocked on my dad's door on Raster weekend, they were going to hold him until the next working day (tues) because "he'd already skipped bail once".
Eventually, the duty sargeant released him on common sense grounds, but advised he don't leave town for a few days.
Ironically, the police in Staines had a photo of their actual suspect, but never thought to send it with the warrant.
An absolute shit-show, start to finish
I would say, treat a company like you'd treat anyone else. Don't trust them until they earn it. I've worked for a range of companies - some good, some bad, and one pretty bipolar one. Generally, I've found it doesn't take a company too long to show it's true colours.
One employer I once worked for fired an entire team of temp (read - "been there for 3 years") staff on a Thursday. The only obvious reason was that, being temps, they only had a week of notice and the company didn't want to pay for them to attend the Christmas do in 8 days time. Meanwhile, temps who had been brought on 3 weeks ago were allowed to attend.
It showed the rest of us exactly how loyal this company was to it's staff.
In the last job I had, I did actually trust my manager and the director with my personal number. Neither abused it.
Ironically, the only one who ever did was Head of HR. No idea where she got my number from, but she wanted me to amend a new job ad on a Saturday morning because she forgot to mention it on the Friday. The message got ignored. The email she also sent got replied to on the Monday, politely but firmly stating that non-emergency stuff would be dealt with in working hours only. I think I let her request hang for an extra day, just to make a point.
I think I've done it once in semi-recent memory. Something bad(TM) happened at the company and required all hands to help fix it. Cue a couple of 16-hour work days, with 12-hour days for probably another week or more. All voluntarily given.
The director even went out to get lunch & dinner for us while we worked. Overtime was never discussed and, technically, never received. But the company got dug out of a big hole and a couple of months later a whopping big bonus landed. So yeah, if I'm needed I'll be there.
The same company once gave me a right old telling off for merely suggesting the idea of overtime, so mixed signals were definitely given.
Technically, there are similar laws and regulations where I live as well. They are just poorly enforced.
If a manager hassles you out of hours, the first step (other than talking to the manager concerned) would be to go to HR. Who will likely brush it under the carpet and mark you as a troublemaker in your file (effects of this could vary, from getting excessive numbers of undesirable jobs, passed over for promotion / raises, to being the first on the chopping block when "downsizing". Or just being "persuaded" to leave). Next step is an employment tribunal. If it gets that far you've already likely been fired, and the legalities can take many months in which you're either still out of work, or still in work having to deal with shitty corporate behaviour.
All of that hangs over an employee as a potential threat.
"It's really that simple, and I don't get why anyone thinks it isn't."
To be the devil's advocate for a moment, I've been in jobs where I've had that kind of weight to throw around. I've also been in jobs where I haven't, with no easy prospect of another job in case I needed an exit strategy.
In the latter case, it's all to easy for a boss to abuse an employee with these kinds of tactics. So, should bosses do this kind of thing? Absolutely not. Should employees stand up to it if it happens? Absolutely. Is it that simple? No. Call me jaded and a cynic, but I've never found anything in life that is simple.
There's a saying that I'm not quite remembering properly - it's something like
"When the punishment for breaking the law is a fine, it's no longer a law but a transaction"
or
"When the punishment for breaking the law is a fine, it becomes two laws - one for the rich and another for the poor"
Can anyone remember the actual saying?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
