Re: Join The Navy, See The World
Don't forget the fresh fruit every day. WHich can be in short supply on longer cruises.
436 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Dec 2014
your statement strikes at the heart of Economics. It creates externalized costs, in other words freeloading which causes most Economic models to fail as it creates an unmeasurable part of the economy. You can't do policy with those models.
It also suppresses wages. I don't care if you are donating part of your wages. But if in the process you you suppress mine I do mind.
Part of the goal is to keep researchers out of the hands of competition. That's it. Keep your competitors from innovating. MS often does this as well. There is less risk with the status quo than with introducing destabilizing new products. Assuming those projects take hold. Pay people well, put them under restrictive contracts, and let them tinker with pet projects and they will stay, effectively rendering their talents as useless.
I wouldn't worry too much about axe wielding. It's just a spreadsheet game, "we need to eliminate 200 programmers to meet our goals", so the then grab 200 of the highest paid people and send them packing. Regardless of performance, how many patents they have thier names on, performance rating etc. I saw it happen at HP.
Once your done w/ the extra task send our an email saying, the effect, "I worked late so I'll be in late tomorrow. That way everyone, inc. boss' boss, knows you are a hero and deserve well earned rest.
Here are your specs:
1) replicate working features
2) rip out unused or poorly function feature
3) add a list of new features.
You basically have a template or prototype to start with. You just have to ask the users what works and what doesn't. Ignore manglement.
Garbage In Garbage Out. A saying as old as computing. When I was spending a large amount of time merging data from other sources into the databases of a company I was working for I made sure my juniors and the SMEs spent a bit of effort vetting those data. All our data had to be defensible in court. It is the cavalier attitude to data and assumption all data are perfect which caused to avoid those areas. There are no standards of quality though they wouldn't be hard to to develop.
Why amounted to adapting to new information as it became available, making things up as you go along, ruthless testing, focused on doing one job well, attracting the best people, and being results focused. You know, being agile. Not "Agile", that's a product, but "agile" which is a paradigm.
And fire fighters always look good on paper. Ignore the fact they started most of the fires themselves through incompetence. Meanwhile, the competent manager is overlooked because "they don't do anything". Except for professionally and competently manage teams, projects, and departments.