Soul-Crushing Email of the Day

by  on The Programmer
 
BIG font

I swear to God this is a real email from a once-promising manager with degrees from Brown and Princeton, who recently accepted a new position as Chief of Staff to the CEO, and now uses her Ivy League education to put out emails like this:

Effective immediately please ensure that all written communications at [insert company name here] have a minimum font size of 12. In particular, [insert CEO’s name here] has asked me to convey that he will be ‘throwing away’ any communication he receives (over email or on paper) that does not meet this criteria [sic].

Please call me with any questions or comments, and hope everyone has a great weekend!

I always say if you’re going to misuse the word “criteria,” at least do it in a highly readable 12-point Verdana font . . .

Thus spoke The Programmer.

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Completion Percentages

by  on The Programmer
 
It ain’t over till it’s over.
— Yogi Berra

A project manager reports that her project is “48 percent complete.” In terms of what, I wonder? Calendar time? Cost? Effort?

I know it’s not 48 percent complete in terms of functionality because there hasn’t been any working code delivered, just a bunch of documents.

One approach that makes sense to me is to express completion percentages in terms of implemented requirements.

For example, if you have 100 functional requirements, and 48 of them have been successfully implemented, then you’re 48 percent complete!

Actually, I oversimplified that a little . . .

All requirements are not created equal: Because some requirements cost more to implement than others, and some requirements have a greater business value than others, you could assign relative cost and relative value numbers to each requirement, and calculate completion percentages accordingly.

This is good both for measuring the value of work already completed, and for estimating time to completion on the work remaining.

Completion percentages continue to be one of the enduring fictions of our business. I wish I had a dollar for every time someone reported that work is 90 percent complete, it continued to be 90 percent complete until a week before the due date, at which time the date was pushed out another six months because nothing actually worked . . .

Thus spoke The Programmer.

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Notes from the Asylum

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Abandoned psychiatric ward at Ellis Island

Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be blest.

— Alexander Pope, Essay on Man. Epistle i. Line 95

Thus we never live, but we hope to live; and always disposing ourselves to be happy.

— Blaise Pascal, Thoughts, chap. v. 2

My wife is schizophrenic. She’s mostly functional, but she’s crazy.

I always feel like someday things are going to get better, even though they never do.

Does that make me an optimist?

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Another Cultural Phenomenon That Gives Me an Assache

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Children at Play signs

Children at Play sign

My neighbors just put one of those Children at Play signs in the street in front of their house.

These are for parents who don’t want to be bothered with actually watching their kids to make sure that they’re not playing in the roadway.

I’d like to take the damn sign and beat them over the head with it . . .

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The Ephemeral Beauty of the World

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Who shall blame him? Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her—who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?

— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

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Profiles in Management: The Baffled Bigwig

by  on The Programmer
 
Businessman looking puzzled

Our Sr. EVP dropped by today for a meet and greet . . . he was 45 minutes late, and when he arrived, it was obvious he had no idea who he was talking to.

“Is this the IT group?” he asked.

It was explained to him that some of the people were from IT, but some were from the call center and tech support.

“And do they all report to you?” he asked the senior manager in the room.

Here’s a little trick I’ve picked up over the years: When you’re addressing a group of people, take a few minutes beforehand to learn who they are. It will make them feel less insignificant.

After this fiasco, he went off to a catered meeting with other highly compensated executives, and I went out to buy my own lunch.

Prediction: This meet and greet will be mentioned in at least two exit interviews in the not-too-distant future . . .

Thus spoke The Programmer.

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Parental Guidance

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I talked my 11-year-old son and his friend into seeing House of Flying Daggers instead of Meet the Fockers.

House of Flying Daggers

The title alone — Meet the Fockers — is a tipoff to the level of wit that you’re going to be dealing with. Fockers! Get it? It sounds like a naughty word! HA HA HA HA! Geez, make an effort, will ya?

How about House of the Flying Fockers? You meet the Fockers and throw daggers at them. That sounds like a good movie!

Read more

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Structured Procrastination

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I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time.

— John Perry

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Tsunamis: Another Reason I Just Stay Home

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From Reuters:

PHUKET, Thailand — William Robins vowed Monday to change his life forever after the professional golfer from California and his new bride, Amanda, narrowly escaped death in the grip of a tsunami.

The newlyweds were honeymooning on Phi Phi island — made famous by the film “The Beach” starring Leonardo DiCaprio — when a giant tsunami wave slammed into it Sunday.

Read more

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A Pretty Good One-Sentence Analysis of Blogs

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True believers of one stripe or another, no longer content to merely bore spouses and neighbors with their nutty opinions, can now spew forth on their own blogs, thereby playing a pivotal role in creating the polarized climate that dominates debate on nearly every national issue.

— Randell Beck

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