Posts by Headley_Grange 2206 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Feb 2010
It's also hard to reconcile the views of the company between hiring and firing time.
When hiring, the company needs role requirement, people requirement and job description documents which will be used to screen and select candidates.
When firing, the main criterion seems to be that they didn't work long-enough hours.
Yep. I've lived through at least three versions of psychometric testing, various personal statements, "technical" tasks (..if this sentence has less than one aardvarks in it then write I'm wasting my time here ____) and other crap. The people you remember from work are the ones that surprised you - in both a good and a bad way - and it's hard to design a recruitment process that finds those surprising people.
Personal recommendations from people you trust is the best way, in my experience, and interviewing the recommender about the candidate is more important than interviewing the candidate.
To be fair, a lot of the queueing is due to the law - airports have to screen people, they have to make people put stuff in plastic bags, remove belts and shoes etc. and the procedures are mandated.
The annoying meander through duty free before getting near the waiting areas and departure lounges is because airports make bugger all money from flying. Ditto the lack of seating - they want you spending money in the shops and cafes, not sat on your backside. LGW and LHR aside, the CEOs of most airports would describe their businesses as shopping centres and car parks with the buggeration of an attached airport. The reason that these airports make so little from flights is mostly, down to passengers because they want cheap flights. They might whinge like fuck about Ryanair and Easyjet, but when it comes to their next flight they pick the cheapest ticket regardless of which airline it is. If you think that Ryanair and EasyJet are penny-pinching as a passenger then you should try dealing with them from the airport side - especially if you're somewhere like Luton, where EasyJet has most of the flights - or Southend......... The airports could, for example, put more security staff on and have more lanes to get people through quicker, but that costs money - training, wages, equipment, etc. The airlines won't pay for it cos they don't give a toss about pax experience before they get on the plane*. A lot of the stuff they used to pay the airport for - air bridges, ground handling, etc. they have either binned or they contract separately and cut the airport out completely. The reason that the bar's open at 5am is because it's where the airport can make money.
*yeah - I know
I suspect that they are more concerned about passenger management. What happens when a bunch of passengers refuse to get on a flight or refuse to sit down on the aircraft cos their trackers show that their bags are half a mile away after the baggage has been loaded? It could case flights to be delayed or cancelled. For the airlines that are particularly crap at this then maybe they'd deserve what they get and it might nudge them into improving, but shit happens and sometimes the ground handling problems aren't always the airlines' fault.
Fixing the "overemphasis on consent" would be easy. Pass a law that says necessary* cookies only must be the default when a website loads. Ban pop-ups requesting consent for other cookies, and leave it to the user to search in the website's settings for the switch to turn on the other cookies, should they wish to.
*"Necessary" would be carefully defined in the law, of course, to prevent scumbag sites defining all tracking and ad cookies as necessary.
Maybe, but why would you? The dispersion of workers applies to companies even more. There's no need to be in the old centres any more cos your customers and workers are no longer there. Park yourself in a provincial city, with good transport links and decent quality of life for workers.
It's hard to believe that companies can get scammed out of money just by someone calling up and saying "transfer some money here, please". I get invoices bounced all the time because the P/O reference format is wrong, the line item description doesn't match, the delivery hasn't been matched in the system, I'm not "on the system", etc. Similarly, I've worked on installing ERP systems and no money or product moves without a purchase req., a P/O, an order acceptance, goods receipt, inspection, etc. and all the records have to match before anyone will cut a payment. None of the companies I've worked for would send money or product anywhere just cos the boss told them to or on the basis of a zoom call with a VIP client, so what sort of companies are these that just send money willy-nilly to someone who looks like someone they know?
"..that change in velocity is about 0.57 millimetres/sec.."
Pedantically, that's a change in speed. Velocity is a vector and it's the change in direction that is more important. If you hit something that's a long way off and change its direction by only a few millirads it could be the difference between hitting or missing earth.
Much of the management task is suited to AI - task and resource assignment, activity, cost and schedule tracking, training assessment, etc. An important thing that should probably be left to people would be the pastoral side of management/leadership, but looking back at some of the bosses I've had I'd have been happy for some of them to have been replaced with a Commodore Pet.
I think that a valuable function would be if AI could improve schedule estimates for developing code. Overrruns in development are the cause of much stress and strife in the industry for both staff and customers. I am, of course, assuming that management would take more notice of AIs than human developers when preparing estimates.
"Gamin is stupid expensive and needs charging constantly"
Garmin is stupid expensive - can be true.
Garmin websites apps and support are crap - true.
Garmin needs charging constantly - partly true. The Instinct Solar runs for weeks as just a watch and for many hours of activity tracking, especially if it's sunny, and you can tweak settings to save power. It's not got a colour screen, no maps, no apps, no music, no tap-and-pay, but I use mine for planning and tracking hiking, cycling and swimming and I'd recommend it for those activites, especially if you're out all day. I don't work for them.
My mileage varies. I use FF because it's the only browser I've found with an RSS reader add-on that I like. As for everything else it does - it's just a browser for me. But, looking at your post:
Memory usage - I've got a 7 year old Mac with 8GB and never noticed a memory problem, but that's probably because I use it more in browse mode than with web apps.
GUI - it sounds like you'd like Firefox to hire a designer to create a GUI just for you and I wouldn't mind if they did TBH.
Profile manager - I had to look up what it is. Never used it. Never will.
Deleting cookies. I'm puzzled by this. You want a big button to do it because you can't remember where it is in the settings. If you clear cookies that often then you'd remember, surely? However, you could bookmark the privacy page in settings or just right-click the padlock to clear cookies for a particular site. To clear recent history hit Ctrl+Shift+Delete or Command+Shift+Delete and the dialog box pops up.
Thunderbird - I probably agree with you.
I think you're right. For me it's less about apps and more about interoperability. I can synch contacts, notes, ToDo, calendar, browsing history, media,.... etc. across all my devices and, more importantly, do it all natively without paying* subscriptions for range of apps to manage it. A while ago I bought a Blackberry and all this collapsed. Calendars and contacts synched relatively painlessly (it was still a pain), but all the rest had to be either manually managed or I had to pay subs for something like Evernote.
*The price of entry is high, so I know I am paying for it.
You're right that HR is there to protect the company but, in the UK, that means treating employees fairly and according to the law. None of the big companies I've worked for in the UK would have done what you describe because it opens the company up to unfair or constructive dismissal and HR would have been the first to jump in and stop it happening. Putting them in a job for which they are not qualified, with no training plan would cause problems at tribunal. In one company I was a mentor for engineers on improvement plans - which meant I was on their side and there to help them hit their targets - and the company went out of their way to help them succeed. Again, an unfair plan, unreasonable or unattainable goals don't play well at tribunals. Improvement plans cost money and time as do tribunals and I've seen HR persuade people to leave, with a decent payoff, just to avoid going through the arseache of an improvement plan.
Your mileage, of course, probably differs, and I know by reputation that there are nasty companies out there who ignore the rules, treat people like shit and turn up on the court steps with a cheque and NDA just before the tribunal starts. Given a choice, I wouldn't work for them.
In theory it's a bit better in the UK and the process is defined in law for large layoffs. For starters, people aren't made redundant, their positions are, so the company first has to define which positions it no longer needs. Then it can identify the groups of people who are affected by the positions going and then it comes up with a scoring system to decide who in the groups go. Scoring can be based on performance reviews, sickness record, disciplinary record, etc.
I've seen it work well (in the sense that it was fair in terms of selecting the ones to leave) and I've also seen it gamed by the management to make sure that they got rid of the "right" people. The gaming covers two scenarios really. Firstly, the one where management are crap/scared of using performance management to get rid of poor performers, so they skew the scoring to help. Secondly, to prevent the good people leaving; the rules are that the company has to ask for volunteers in each group and, legally they must accept volunteers before any compulsory redundancies. So if your best three engineers volunteer to go because they'll get a decent payoff then you have to accept them, so don't be surprised if a redundancy round comes closely after a re-org.
Interestingly, the one that worked well was in a company with a couple of unions.
Note that the above covers large layoffs - smaller ones have less process and are a bit simpler from a management point of view, but the company still has to demonstrate fairness.
Rules and regulations aren’t there for the good and perfect. If no one broke the speed limit then we wouldn’t need limits and enforcement. As it is there are lots of people who don’t give a toss for the safety of other people on the road or/and overestimate their abilities, so we need speed limits and enforcement and the limits need to be based on the abilities and judgement of the poorest, oldest drivers, not the best. There are lots of vulnerable people out there - parents and kids - and a decent society would look to protect them first and foremost instead of believing that the alleged rights of the privileged are more important.
The fact that you consider having to identify yourself as a "punishment" speaks volumes about your sense of entitlement. I sincerely hope that you and yours never find yourself on the receiving end of the nastiness that your approach to society and community engenders for people who haven't been as lucky as you.
In the 80s our spanking new PC came with a dot-matrix printer. We were allowed the PC in the lab, but the printer had to go in the secretary's office - which was outside the boss's inner sanctum. As we used it more we badgered him for a laserjet, but they were expensive and the boss was tight. What convinced him was printing a large document using a near-letter-quality programme.
I gave up shopping on Amazon many years ago, but it really is a pain in the arse to go direct and it's no wonder really that most people can't be bothered to look elsewhere. 90% of sites still need an account before they'll let me spend my money. There are a million different payment systems out there, so the transactions crash at the last minute when the payment site JS is blocked. Some sites present everything as if they are in the UK and then ship from somewhere in the EU, with the arseache of unexpected import duty and VAT.
The world (well, my world) needs an online marketplace like Amazon - just not Amazon. eBay could be it, I suppose, but there be lots of dragons, including the eBay sellers that just drop ship "gifts" from Amazon using their Prime accounts.
"How many small (< 500 employees) companies out there who need to plug in desktops and some servers, some VPNs, and a couple of uplinks"
Lots of us, probably. I'm not a networking expert. I'm happy to tinker with my LAN until it goes titsup and I have to load the last router backup, but that's as far as it goes. Every so often I tell myself I'll read up on it and set up my NAS as a mail server, surveillance centre, website, etc. but until I understand it well enough I won't do anything that opens my LAN to the outside world. I certainly wouldn't trust a set of plug-an-play boxen to do it for me automatically and if I needed such a set up tomorrow I'd pay a pro to set it up for me.
I think that the vast number of people who think they've got a database in Excel will be more than happy** to have an improved toolset for sorting, matching, analysing, querying, reporting, or whatever it is they do with their data.
The people who really need a database or understand the difference between a database and a collection of spreadsheets will carry on using whatever their or their comapnies'/clients' preferred database software is.
I'm in the former group - I work mostly with Excel "databases" of info that I need to analyse, query and report/present. On the odd occasion where it was apparent that a database was needed for what I was doing I found a database bod, explained what I wanted, gave them the job number and let them get on with it. I think that my years of using Excel have rendered my brain incapable of understanding proper databases and their associated software. One develops habits that need to be unlearned - a bit like trying to learn classical guitar after years of playing electric - and I'm too old for that. Maybe a project for retirement.
**although the security aspects of this could temper some of that happiness.
I really don't understand the basics of this. As I remember it, when Musk first said he wanted to buy it, the Twitter board turned him down. Now, it seems, they can have that particular cake by letting him walk away and waiving the agreements. They might be down a few dollars on lawyers fees, but I'm sure they could suck that up if they wanted. So what changed to make Twitter want to die in a ditch for a deal they didn't want in the first place?
It's also pretty context free in terms of what "tech procurement" means. 22 months to buy a printer would be very bad - although I'm sure someone will pop-up with worse times for UK local Gov. However, to spec., vendor pre-qualify, compete, evaluate tenders, adjudicate and negotiate a contract for, say, a new nationwide Highway Management System in less than 22 months could be in the ballpark of "not bad", especially if a bit of time is allowed for legal challenges.
When the price is higher than the CfD price then they pay the difference back to the government. What CfD does for customers is get them power stations. If the operators aren't guaranteed a price for the electricity they generate then they wouldn't build the power stations in the first place.
Valve amplifiers often have two switches - off/on and standby/on. The on/off just switches the mains to the power supply. In standby position the PSU only powers the valve heaters. Flipping the standby switch to on turns on the HV to the valves as well.
As a callow youth buying my first real six string - and amp - I was told always to use the standby switch when turning on because it protected the output valves or the output transformer or the speakers or the giant mutant star goat or something. As I started playing I used it as just a handy switch so you could do the sound check, turn the amp off but leave the valves running so the amp came up as soon as you ran on to the stage to thunderous applause avoiding an embarrassed wait and shouts cross-stage of "are you on yet?". Over the years I've heard tales about it protecting the HV PSU from big spikes due to the reactance of cold valves which would blow the regulators/capacitiors/inductors/fuses, etc. The fact that some valve amps don't have standby switches might mean this is all bollocks or it might mean they have different designs.
I've owned a lot of valve amps with and without standby switches and with and without using the standby switch "properly" I've never had one blow up.
It's nonsense until you're stood by the side of the road trying to explain to a French cop. There was a story many, many years ago about a British motorcyclist in France who had a bike with twin headlights. By design, on dip it only used one light but on main beam it used both. He was stopped and fined by the cops because they said that one of his lights didn't work.
