Posts by Terry 6 4327 posts • joined 31 Jul 2009
I hadn't noticed that salary. About the same level as a Headteacher of a smallish local authority school. So a bit more than a head of a large LA school department would get. Perfect for a moderately successful head of IT wanting to get out of education
Also, from the private sector, I found this online;
Head of Finance - job post
St Helen's School
Northwood
£60,000 a year
"Whitehall"
It's indicative of how Londoncentric the Civil Service still is that such a word is still used. In essence, they can devolve the dogsbody civil servants to place North of the M25. But anyone important is in "Whitehall"
Whitehall is a road and area in the City of Westminster, Central London. The road forms the first part of the A3212 road from Trafalgar Square to Chelsea. It is the main thoroughfare running south from Trafalgar Square towards Parliament Square. Wikipedia
As Doctor Syntax said, he considered this when he retired. As did I. Because when we are still working we're...well...., working .
Most of those " Teachers, bricklayers, stay-at-home mums," are busy teaching, sticking bricks together or staying at home being mums. And in the case of the latter, if they wanted and were able to go out to work, presumably, mostly they'd take paid jobs, just like the teachers and bricklayers and everyone else.
but that's exactly why there needs to be a mechanism for communicating those bugs back to the developers.
This is an issue that goes far beyond Google or this story. It is a general issue in all large companies ( and a good few medium ones, I think)
Beancounter lead companies do not want to hear from the public that things are going wrong, that there is a fault etc. To do that would cost money providing customer service and hit short term profits, bonuses etc. So they hide or remove contact details, create websites that take customers round in circles from "contact us" to FAQs to "need more help" to "contact us" to..... Or direct users to "Support forums" where people who have nothing to do with the official company and don't get paid can offer amateur advice that may or may not be helpful, but won't make the company aware of or resolve any genuine product issues.
That they piss off customers and lose them, is a matter for the next financial reporting period.
Tat is what's behind a lot of UK govt. COVID decision making. They are under pressure to get people back using the massive amount of office space being developed in the major cities, because so many companies have invested in these; financing and building enormous skyscrapers, opening branches of big chain catering establishments to service them, and so on.
I can remember, as a very junior specialist teacher ( n.b. quite senior in general terms) being pulled up by the Senior Specialist Teacher (i.e. manager) for some minor aspect of how I was working. My defence "But I get the results" was met with "Results aren't everything".
These were real kids' futures we were working on, so yes results were every bloody thing. If we got it wrong there weren't (m)any more chances for those kids!
The facts do not bear this out. It is not up to being " an autopilot with a warning". And tesla isn't just covering themselves by issuing a warning. It is not self-driving. See above comments.
(Upvotes for the previous post are surprising. They so contradict the agreement with earlier posts).
Even though not an American ( and my psychology degree decades in the past) I'd assert pretty strongly that no one would think that Tesla used the word part "auto" as being short for automobile. Indeed, I'd say that it was a close to inconceivable as you can get. (Not 100% so, obviously, since previous poster has suggested it).
The definition of a camel is, I remind us all, a horse designed by a committee.
Each of those big failed projects in IT, school design, whatever, was probably initiated by someone who'd imagined an efficient, effective thoroughbred. Then someone insisted they should add a hump........
How as the project initiated? Who made the decisions to start, to define the project and to identify the need and scope/?. IOW - who decided what they needed, why they needed it and how to achieve it?
This is fundamental to any project, from changing a door handle to building a new school or hospital. You could probably flow chart it.
The door handle is failing.
We need to replace it. Is the current handle's design adequate for current usage? Or is a higher specification needed. What is that spec?
Are there likely to be any new developments in door security and threats within the expected life time of a new handle and would a new kind of handle meet these needs? What handle do we need to meet these future needs?
Where can we get said handle?
What should said handle cost? What is the total budget?
Who will obtain/install......etc.
It's not rocket science.
The 1975ish IBM schools' computer ( it was an experimental programme) was a bit like that. If for some reason it lost its OS someone ( a teacher) had to sit and type lists of numbers into it. God knows how they did this without errors. And it was (is) a mystery to me how this worked.
I was unable to learn languages at school. Near total failure. After I left school I discovered I could pick up languages really quite easily if I was actually in a place that spoke them. Other people I knew did really well at school languages. I was really envious. But they proved totally useless trying to use them in real life. So I guess it's horses for courses.
I'm hazy on dates, but much of Microsoft's descent into moral ambiguity, crap software and aggressive design changes seems to have its roots in the moment when they realised that the internet was going to be a big part of the future ( or indeed was already) and that they'd totally missed it. The sense of panic knowing that they were on the verge of irrelevance is still, I'd guess, a big part of their decision making
Oh my God!
I agree. Is it me?
My assumption has been for a while that MS want everything to arrive through the "Store". That they envy Google's control of phone apps and Apple's of their phone/tablet apps. With the cash flow and ad harvesting they can accrue.
And that is about the only thing that they do that seems to have any logic ( however malign) to it.
The rest, stupid design changes that worsen user's experience etc. is probably just internal politics and empire building --is my guess.
.....some poor receptionist get canned over not noticing that the plug wasn't fully seated in the jack....
No No No. This is so wrong.There is no way a receptionist should be responsible for troubleshooting a system. Not even for the simplest of issues. Their job, the clue's in the name, is to deal with people. How were these issues phoned in? Who's job was it to do so? If the receptionist is told "Any problems call this number" then that's what they should be doing. If not, then who does make the call?
Either there's a tech support contract and it's not her/his responsibility what the fault is, or there's a first line support locally who should check the obvious. Maybe the receptionist ought to have checked, just plain common sense, you might think.. But it's not their responsibility to do so.
I think this is endemic in call centre staff. I don't think I've ever had someone from a major company come to fix something, who'd been told what the call centre knew and brought the right bits. I'm not meaning technical stuff here. What part of "The freezer handle is broken and needs a new one refitted" is too complicated to pass on so that he arrives with the dratted handle?
Virgin are my faves for this. They seem to never tell their phone staff or update the service status when there's a problem at their end. So you can find the internet not coming through. Reboot the box, and it still isn't working ( but had been an hour or two before and nothing has happened otherwise). Check service status- nothing.
Phone 'em up and they say they need to run a check. Then it's "We'll send an engineer a week on Monday" time.
Usually by then Downdetector has caught up.
Once, just once, a phone jockey said "I've been getting a lot of calls- I'll check". He asked his manager - who'd heard nothing but went to make some calls. And in due course I was told there was work going on in the area to fix a problem they'd known about for 4 hours already.
I think VM managers are afraid to admit publicly if anything goes wrong.
I did that as a kid. Old enough to want to know how the light switch suspended over my bed worked. Not old enough to know that unscrewing the thing could be a bad experience.
The switch was a bakelight globe thing, probably about 3cm diameter, that was in two halves with an external push arm and then the live gubbins inside. Easy to unscrew for even a small child.
"They're not given much time for a job"
There's a whole world of wisdom tied to that. Whenever I find a cock-up in some corporate process, from cleaning to completely rebuilding a school there will always be a point where some fuck witted bean counter has said one of "We need to get that done in n number of days", fewer than the experts have assessed it, or reduced the budget to less than it's possible to complete the work with, or said "We'll find money for that bit later". ( They never fucking well do, though.).
So you end up with inadequate storage space/cupboard doors that don't quite fit/ the promised and essential electronic locks that weren't installed/network sockets with no computers ( or vice versa), but staff who need to use them and so on and so on.
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