From Time magazine:
BORN. To ANNIE LEIBOVITZ, 52, photographer: a daughter, Sarah Cameron Leibovitz. Neither Leibovitz nor her companion Susan Sontag offered word on the child’s paternity.
For some things, you still need a man.
I couldn’t help noticing that Harriet Quimby is a lot prettier than Harriet Tubman.
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
Our new Sales VP came down from his office on the 7th floor to the development area on the 4th floor. He was gripping and waggling a golf club, a driver.
As you might imagine, we don’t have a golf course on the 4th floor — so why is this jackass holding a golf club?
Does he want to be a golfer? Could we possibly find a salesman who wants to be a salesman?
Not coincidentally, our booking of new business since his arrival has been nonexistent.
He only seems to be able to keep one piece of information in his head at any given time — and usually that piece of information is his next tee time.
We got an email from him the other day stating that anyone who brings in a qualified sales lead that is subsequently closed and billed will be paid $1,000.
Honestly, if I had a qualified lead on a development project — unfortunately, I don’t — but if I did, I’d go work it myself before I turned it over to this guy and the collection of hayseeds and slobs he calls a sales team.
Thus spoke The Programmer.
Fortunately, however, the chief damage done will be to the author himself, who thus dishonors his own physical nature; for imperfect though the race is, it still remains so much purer than the stained and distorted reflection of its animalism in Leaves of Grass, that the book cannot attain to any very wide influence.
“I’d like to thank my family for loving me and taking care of me. And the rest of the world can kiss my ass.”
“I did not get my Spaghetti-O’s, I got spaghetti. I want the press to know this.”
“Hurry it up you Hoosier bastard! I could hang a dozen men while you’re screwing around.”
Resemblance to persons living or dead is statistically probable.
Name: Snopes, Flem
Title: Software Development Manager
| Developing Others |
|
Flem was not effective in giving team members an opportunity to be successful or to do high-quality work. The project development process was limiting and frustrating.
Rating: Did Not Meet Expectations |
| Integrity |
|
Good work ethic. Big problem here is that Flem didn’t seem to see how poor project outcomes were a direct result of anything he did or didn’t do. He seemed to feel that he was a victim primarily of bad technology, as well as bad clients, bad luck, bad karma, etc. And while there were some unavoidable setbacks on the project, as there are on any project, Flem didn’t seem to see the human decision points in the process where he could have made a difference.
Rating: Met Some Expectations |
| Change Management |
|
Flem was slow to react to changing circumstances. He took a “stay the course” approach and continued to pursue strategies long after they had proven ineffective. Rating: Did Not Meet Expectations |
| Communication |
|
Flem is an articulate communicator but does not seem to be effective in reporting bad news to clients and upper management. He has a “can do” communication style that unfortunately keeps people in a state of total denial about what’s actually happening. As a result, what could have been modest setbacks, had they been acknowledged as such and dealt with, escalated into full-blown breakdowns. Rating: Met Some Expectations |
| Customer Service/Responsiveness |
|
Flem was probably overly responsive to customer requests, with a resulting boomerang effect. He took client requirements at face value and did not provide the kind of risk management one would expect from a responsible professional. As a result, most of the client’s investment in web development was wasted on non-productive activities.
Rating: Met Some Expectations |
| Leadership |
|
Flem maintains a positive attitude when things aren’t going well. Unfortunately, his projects never seem to be going well. He failed to fulfill the main role of a project leader, which is to monitor plan vs. actual and to take action as needed to bring the two closer together. In some cases, a project manager fails to observe that a project is veering off course, but I don’t think that was the case here. I think Flem just failed to act on that observation.
Rating: Met Some Expectations |
| Performance Effectiveness |
|
Flem did not establish any sort of professional quality standards for the project, resulting in a considerable waste of time, money and human potential. He did not demonstrate the ability to effectively steer a software project.
Rating: Did Not Meet Expectations |
| Problem Solving/Judgment |
|
Flem advocated a fairly random approach to problem solving. When dealing with system errors, rather than attacking root causes, we took some random action hoping that would fix the error. Sometimes it did, although we didn’t know why. Sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes it introduced a new error. This is an area where a technical leader needs to take a stand and do the right thing.
Rating: Did Not Meet Expectations |
| Team Orientation |
|
I think Flem’s failure to establish professional quality standards had a disheartening effect on the team. People will work hard to achieve excellence, but not if they see that management places no value on it.
Rating: Did Not Meet Expectations |
| Technical Expertise |
|
Flem has some very good technical skills, but did not exhibit a good understanding of the full range of technical options, risks and tradeoffs involved in developing a web application.
Rating: Met Some Expectations |
Thus spoke The Programmer.
A man bought a new suit from Levine the Tailor, but when he tried it on, it didn’t fit him at all.
The jacket was too big in back, one sleeve was too long, one pant leg was too short, but Levine showed him that by hunching his back, leaning to one side, stretching out his right arm, and pulling up his leg at the hip, the suit could be made to fit, although he ended up limping rather badly.
As he hobbled down the street, he was stopped by a stranger, who said, “Pardon me, but where did you get that suit?”
“Levine,” he replied. “Just up the street.”
“Why, I believe I’ll go to Levine for my new suit,” the stranger said. “He must be a genius to fit a cripple like you!”1
From a consulting company’s marketing literature:
We approach enterprise-class technology implementations with a simple philosophy:
- Use COTS whenever possible
- Leverage existing technology whenever possible
- When custom software is required, make it as modular and generic as possible
If I’m a potential client looking at that, I have a couple of concerns:
Thus spoke The Programmer.
More highlights from the Census Bureau’s Fertility of American Women report released last week:
The labor force participation rates of mothers with infant children fell from a record-high 59 percent in 1998 to 55 percent in 2000, the first significant decline since the Census Bureau developed the indicator in 1976, according to the Fertility of American Women report released last week.
We recently put the following message, in a bold blue font, at the top of a client’s home page:
The store portion of the site is being upgraded and will be inaccesable for a few hours.
Note that “inaccessible” is misspelled.
And that it’s not just off by one letter so you might think it’s a typo. Clearly the person who wrote it didn’t know how to spell the word and couldn’t be bothered to look it up.
I really hate things like that. It’s a minor defect but it has a high embarrassment factor, in that it’s going to be perceived as evidence of overall negligence.
We might as well post a message saying
Dear Customer,
We hold you in complete contempt. If we can’t be bothered to find and fix errors as obvious as this, you may rest assured that we employ no quality control measures whatsoever.
Please go away.
I’ll tell you how:
People need to have a sense that the work they’re doing is important and that doing it well is worthwhile.
Unfortunately, our management team has shown a willingness to build and launch web sites that they know do not meet any sort of professional quality standards.
The result is an anti-quality culture that breaks down people’s inherent pride in their own work.
How hard are you willing to work in pursuit of excellence if it’s obvious that no one cares about it?
Thus spoke The Programmer.
Motto on the wall at my son’s tae kwon do school:
A Winner is never Excuse.
A Looser is always Complain.
Marie Antoinette misreads the mood of the peasantry:
When we went to walk in the Tuileries, there was so vast a crowd that we were three-quarters of an hour without being able to move either forward or backward. The dauphin and I gave repeated orders to the Guards not to beat any one, which had a very good effect . . . When we returned from our walk we went up to an open terrace and stayed there half an hour. I cannot describe to you, my dear mamma, the transports of joy and affection which every one exhibited towards us. Before we withdrew we kissed our hands to the people, which gave them great pleasure. What a happy thing it is for persons in our rank to gain the love of a whole nation so cheaply.
If you leave the final “s” off the word “assess,” a spell-checker will not flag it as an error. This was an accidental discovery, like penicillin . . .
We have some vending machines at our office, in a small alcove off the development area — the kind that have the snacks lined up between spiral rods, so when you buy something, the appropriate rod rotates and the snack drops down for you.
This is obviously a horrible design for a couple of reasons:
When that happens, the victim usually rocks the machine back and forth trying to dislodge the snack. This often works, but not on the first couple of tries.
It also makes an incredible racket.
I’ve heard that vending machines are extremely top-heavy and tip over easily, but so far — despite my fervent hope that someone will be mashed flat as a lesson to other machine-rockers — that hasn’t happened.
Today, a young woman was in the process of shaking one of the machines when our dim-witted Lothario of a CTO wandered by and said, with absolute sincerity:
“Can I help you with that?”
Abraham Maslow posited a hierarchy of human needs, in which “lower-level” needs like food, water and shelter must be met before moving to “higher-level” needs like esteem and belongingness.
If we apply this theory to the workplace, I think it’s fair to say that before knowledge workers can be innovative or creative or anything like that, they’ve got to at least be able to hear themselves think.
Thus spoke The Programmer.
I was reading Bleak House last night, and my 8-year-old son said, “Charles Dickens is dead, right?”
And I said, “Yes, he’s dead.”
“It seems like all the good writers are dead.”
“Well, a lot of them are dead.”
“Dav Pilkey is still alive.”
So there you have it: Charles Dickens is dead but Dav Pilkey lives.
Tra-la-laaaaaa!
