Posts by CDD 12 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Nov 2012
Not sure if the law is different, but in the UK it used to be the case (and still is AFAIK) that any company that can't pay its employees - which under the terms of the umbrella agreement I understand these contractors to be - can be declared insolvent by any of the outstanding payees.
So that would be handy, I am sure!!
Well, Zuckerberg is a knob. We all know it, and he seems continually determined to give us more and more evidence to back up this view.
Personally I detested him ever since El reg reported on his business card job title a few years ago (I'm CEO... Bitch). Not sure what he puts now - 'Messiah' perhaps?
Still, my point really is just how long is FB likely to remain the premier social media platform. My wife uses it, a 54 year old woman with limited IT skills who just this morning said to me "Facebook seems to be going out of fashion". My kids no longer use it, and my wife feels it is losing its appeal, with four adverts to every post. My friend's young grandkids on being asked about FB replied "oh no, that is for old people", which makes one wonder just how much longevity FB actually has. I have no research data to back this up, and I realise that as they expand into developing countries there will be new uptake of the product, but in more developed countries it does seen that FB is reaching the 'mature' stage of the product lifecycle, if not moving into 'decline'. They do say the hardest thing for a business with one great idea is to then come up with a second good (and marketable) idea - the second album is always the hardest - so once his platform does start to seriously decline, in the best traditions of The Register, will he learn to shut the fuck up???
...and I agree, a medal for the poor guy that had to read this narcissistic drivel in full.
- More expensive overall
- Lower quality of skills and output
- Loss of knowledge that is key to the business
- High attrition replaced with the inexperienced and untrained
- Lack of care or understanding of what is being done
- No leverage to fix any of it
Sounds to me like you aren't doing it right!
Everyone is saying how bad the situation is in HPE, but the one underlying point everyone is forgetting is that HPE is just too expensive in its current form. It is fine to constantly rebid for work, but as customers increasingly go for the lowest bid in competitive tenders (regardless of demonstrable capability to actually do the job) HPE finds itself priced out of the market. Therefore HPE has to cut costs drastically to be competitive, and sadly, offshoring is a really good way to do this.
Despite what earlier commentators have said, there are no bonuses, pay rises or promotions (that have a pay rise attached at least) in HPE, but everyone is working to try and solve this problem of excessive cost.
I am a senior Manager in HPE and I know Maurice really well, and my job it to help the transition to offshore roles in India, Malaysia, and most surprisingly, Egypt. People have made comments about peanuts and monkeys, but in fact I have found the quality of our Indian colleagues is actually very high, with all of the PMs and technical people coming with a huge amount of technical training and experience. One thing we do do is fly these guys into the UK for up to two years to really get a feel for the systems and accounts they will be working on, before taking that experience back to their country. This helps the role transition enormously
So far surprisingly (to me more so than anyone else after a lot of bad experience of this in the past. After all, I used to work with Techmahindra) the offshoring programme is working very well!
Cue the Reg commentard's howls of disbelief..!!
Yes, good call on the Dune ref. Interestingly, this links into an earlier point. The Titans created AI to serve mankind, but they had human safeguards built in just as proposed by Peter2 above. Problem was, they became lazy, and handed over more and more control to the AI, until finally the last human intervention was removed by a lazy programmer. The AI became Omnium and enslaved the galaxy.
Far fetched indeed, but you can see it happening in a smaller way. Yes, lots of interventions such as putting in a key, or charging the battery are great safeguards, but a car or robot manufacturer will add keyless entry as a feature, or self charging as a paid for option, and by missing the big picture will hand over control to the machines one feature at a time..!!
This sounds to me like a touch of cognitive bias. There is a psychological fallacy known as 'Masters of the Universe syndrome' which effectively states that people (mostly the CEOs of large corporations) tend to believe that because they are hugely successful in one arena, they will be successful in any area they choose to become involved in. This is rarely true, and can be seen when big companies start to diversify into areas in which they have no experience - and subsequently fail.
A good (if somewhat smaller) example of this was in the 1980s when the CEO of Boots (the hugely successful pharmaceutical company) bought Halfords and Focus DIY - firmly believing they could turn the companies around despite having no experience in these retail sectors. Of course, they failed miserably having invested millions in the effort. Several people have said that the relative investments Zuckerberg is talking about investing is tiny compared to the total value of current investment (both private and public) in disease research. Couple this with the fact it has been reported as a profit-making organisation, and this whole enterprise smacks of hubris and self-aggrandisement. We may well eliminate all disease by 2100 - but it will not be thanks to Facebook!
Is only a part of what BT actually do, and sits within Retail and Openreach. The rest of us in BT often decry this part of the business, as it is hard to sell Professional Services and Major Programmes to corporate customers, when the buyers have had crappy Broadband services at home.
Here we go again, lots of contractors complaining about how harsh the world is,
Thing is, if they stayed around long enough for us IT managers to get some benefit, and stopped trying to hold us to ransom every time they fancy a pay rise, then contractors and consultants might not be the first ones out of the door when times are hard. Every time you try and train up your own staff in particular skills, then they realise they can earn more in the contract/consultant market and leave, so we feel that contractors have no loyalty, are greedy, and are only in it for the money - a view which some of the comments above would seem to underpin.
One comment accuses management of ruining the business. Personally, I think consultants are like premier league footballers, acting like prima-donnas whilst bankrupting the IT budget. Politics of envy - very probably. If our contractors didn't show off their Porsche's in the car park whilst doing the same job as the people sat next to them, the rest of the staff might not be so pleased to see them go. You earn a lot more than your permanent colleagues, but do you have to rub their noses in it?
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