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I used to work with a very smart man that I'm sure was some kind of secret genius. He's was that sort of tech gofer. Hardware, software, didn't matter, if there

• oblio 4y ago
  Never confuse movement for action :-)
  • hef19898 4y ago
    As everybody who saw people, and orgs, rotating in place at incredible speeds can confirm.
  • prometheus76 4y ago
    This isn't always easy to determine, especially if you are part of the movement. Often, we move by dead reckoning and only after some amount of time can we determine if what we did was "movement" or "progress".
• smitty1e 4y ago
  In this sense, Oscar Wilde was the executive's executive: "I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out."
• TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
  I'm 53, and I've worked for 3 Fortune 250's. Can confirm. I've seen this happen over and over again. Senior management makes some broad pronouncements, and the mid-level lieutenants have meetings with consultants, and then implement new, expensive projects that "will surely fix 'it' this time." Five to ten years later, after the dust settles, and we figure out that we've strapped YET ANOTHER LAYER of technical debt on top of everything else, and things are worse than ever. But at the height of the project, when everything is still rosy, the managers in charge update their resumes, and hit the bricks. IN PARTICULAR, at one Fortune 250 (which no longer exists), we implemented OneWorld to replace the mainframe. After 7 years, we still had the mainframe, AND a badly-implemented version of OneWorld. Then the company got bought by another Fortune 250, moves were made to "commonize" the IT systems, and then the parent company sold everything. But I'm positive that everyone involved in the project to retire the mainframe made the project look very successful on their resumes.
  • lallysingh 4y ago
    In SOFTWAR Ellison called it a sort of fashion cycle.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • bluGill 4y ago
    8-10 years is as long as senior executives last, if they don't make a big change then thee is no way to take credit for their vision. Even if the company had a "perfect" org chart (as if such a thing is possible), they need to make changes otherwise someone will say that they old org chart is the cause of success and they as a leader were not worth anything. I don't know if the above fear would actually play out, nobody is willing to not make changes to find out.
    • seoaeu 4y ago
      I would expect it is just as much a hedge in case things go wrong. When your job is to steer the course of a company, it won’t look good if you crash and your hands weren’t even on the wheel
• adwn 4y ago
  > the pain mixing machines That sounds ... dystopian.
  • TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    This is what grabbed me to kee pop reading his story
    • ItsLeeeeeee 4y ago
  • HPsquared 4y ago
    The pain is mixed, then applied in the pain booth.
  • NDizzle 4y ago
    Obviously he's been working with javascript recently.
    • deckard1 4y ago
      definitely sounds like webpack to me
• B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
  > "Change gives the illusion of progress". That itself is based on the belief that (historical) progress is an improvement. Mostly true over the last few centuries - aspirin is nice - except for those occasions where it was mass murder.
  • lephty 4y ago
    First "pain mixing machines," and now "asp(i)rin is nice."
    • tablespoon 4y ago
      So? People can't spell and typos are a common phenomena.
      • lephty 4y ago
        Just noting humorously related typos, that's all. I'll add smilies here so you can comprehend. :-) :)
• tablespoon 4y ago
  > "Change gives the illusion of progress". I asked him what he meant and he responded with something to the effect of "They have the habit of changing big things every 5-10 years on purpose to make it look like they are productive, and to justify their own roles, one guy will come in and 'cut costs', the new guy after him will 'invest'". That's a very succinct way to put it. I think that observation also applies to consumer technology (e.g. regularly re-doing UIs to "improve" them when the changes are either in fact regressions or just different but not better). We've had it drilled in our heads throughout the modern era that new == better (e.g. the ubiquitous "new and improved!" marketing language), but that's not actually always true. Change for change's sake justifies itself through that misunderstanding. In the recent past, we had a really high rate of genuine technological progress. But at some point we'll have picked most of low hanging fruit and will enter a period of slower progress, where faking progress will become more an more tempting for producers than the real thing.
• HPsquared 4y ago
  It sounds a bit like the bodybuilding method of bulking and cutting.
  • sjtgraham 4y ago
    Bodybuilders make progress though :)
    • jjoonathan 4y ago
      Isn't there a ceiling? Or if we lived as long as those turtles, would you go to the gym and see spheres of muscle?
      • aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
        The returns are diminishing each cycle.
      • bombcar 4y ago
        Some of the extreme pictures I've seen look like people that can't move, let alone lift, but I guess it works.
• RandomWorker 4y ago
  right now, they can't retain the people or afford the people to do this work. When you can go work elsewhere for more money you move. And, running a main frame isn't just having it, it's keeping the people running it, plus paying for the electricity and space. Depending where, the real-estate and energy prices are nuts in most places. And, the engineers are expensive right now, and the services are cheaper. It's not about giving it up, or change for the sake of change, it's about seeing the writing on the wall. These managers see the larger trends, rising energy costs, maintenance costs rising, hiring difficult, and retention of existing engineers impossible. Once you see those trends and a department is underwater and it's getting worse, you have to move. At another point in the market, when you may find engineers are less expensive, easier to hiring, technologies and space are less costly and easy to deploy. You move back.
  • SoftTalker 4y ago
    > These managers see the larger trends, rising energy costs, maintenance costs rising, hiring difficult, and retention of existing engineers impossible. But how will the cloud providers avoid these trends? They won't. They will have to do the same thing as anyone else: pay more. And therefore charge more. There are economies of scale, but those savings are logarithmic and a company like FedEx is already pretty far out on the X axis.
    • plonk 4y ago
      > a company like FedEx is already pretty far out on the X axis AWS and Azure probably run hundreds of Fedex-sized clouds and it's their core business. I don't think Fedex is very far compared to them.
    • jodrellblank 4y ago
      They aren't playing the same game. Facebook designed its own servers, they were chassis-less, didn't have a mains power input so no switch-mode power supplies, instead they had a 12V DC feed, they had no rack-wide large UPS instead each server had a small battery in it, they were not built for massive redundancy like a Dell server with dual PSUs and redunant networking, because they were disposable nodes in a larger software cluster, e.g. [1] [2] Things that aren't Fedex's core competency. Or, Microsoft's roofless datacenters[3], or locating datacenters in remote and colder climates, things the big players can do with economies of scale beyond buying things cheaply, they can customise the entire datacenter. Microsoft has experimented with underwater datacenters[4] and modular containerised datacenter extensions[5] which could be datacenters no human needs to be near to work on, or which could be dropped off somewhere with cheap land and power and internet, and picked up three years later and retired from use, or etc. Ideas which are not FedEx's core competency and need large scale and software clustering on top. While FedEx would be hiring ordinary IT employees to work in a standard datacenter in cheap business park - not very enticing - Amazon could be hiring datacenter workers to work with Amazon's undersea cabling connecting their worldwide datacenters; more enticing work for skilled employees. Google has been known/rumoured to migrate heavy batch processing workloads around the planet, following the day/night cycles to take advantage of regional cheaper night-rate electricity all the time. Something which reduces their energy costs but which FedEx may not be big enough to do. [1] https://engineering.fb.com/2016/03/09/data-center-engineering/facebook-s-new-front-end-server-design-delivers-on-performance-without-sucking-up-power/f https://engineering.fb.com/2016/03/09/data-center-engineerin... [2] https://engineering.fb.com/2019/03/14/data-center-engineering/f16-minipack/ https://engineering.fb.com/2019/03/14/data-center-engineerin... [3] http://www.500eco.com/exhibits/microsoft-roofless-datacenter-natural-air-cooling http://www.500eco.com/exhibits/microsoft-roofless-datacenter... [4] https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/project-natick-underwater-datacenter/ https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/project-natick... [5] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-develops-modular-azure-data-center-optional-satellite-connectivity/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-develop...
• rootsudo 4y ago
  ""Change gives the illusion of progress". I asked him what he meant and he responded with something to the effect of "They have the habit of changing big things every 5-10 years on purpose to make it look like they are productive, and to justify their own roles, one guy will come in and 'cut costs', the new guy after him will 'invest'". " That's deep and 100% makes sense, I can see how the cloud is both of these "things."
  • SoftTalker 4y ago
    Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
• spaetzleesser 4y ago
  That’s definitely how the IT department at my company works (I bet a lot of other roles too). Every few years a new exec comes in, sets a new strategy, claims tons of savings, creates “excellence” initiatives (everything that has “excellence” in its name triggers my BS detector). This lasts for a few years until the next guy comes in and goes through the same process but different direction.
• citizenpaul 4y ago
  >"Change gives the illusion of progress". This is one of the biggest reasons many jobs are so miserable. You want to be in the job at the beginning of the"invest" decision. Unfortunately most people get little say in when they join because the information about this is kept internally to the company.
• hinkley 4y ago
  Other formulations of this I’ve heard are “movement doesn’t mean progress” and “fire and motion”, the latter offers by Joel Spolsky in one of his better blog entries.
• iamtheworstdev 4y ago
  there used to be an allegory of how to identify a bad, new CIO... if your current system was massive, networked printers that were shared amongst floors.. the new CIO would come in and give everyone individual printers... or vice versa .. because 'change'
• floxy 4y ago
  "A new CEO was hired to take over a struggling company. The CEO who was stepping down met with him privately and presented him with three numbered envelopes. “Open these if you run into serious trouble,” he said. Well, six months later sales and profits were still way down and the new CEO was catching a lot of heat. He began to panic but then he remembered the envelopes. He went to his drawer and took out the first envelope. The message read, “Blame your predecessor.” The new CEO called a press conference and explained that the previous CEO had left him with a real mess and it was taking a bit longer to clean it up than expected, but everything was on the right track. Satisfied with his comments, the press – and Wall Street – responded positively. Another year went by and the company continued to struggle. Having learned from his previous experience, the CEO quickly opened the second envelope. The message read, “Reorganize.” So he fired key people, consolidated divisions and cut costs everywhere he could. This he did and Wall Street, and the press, applauded his efforts. Another year passed and the company was still short on sales and profits. The CEO would have to figure out how to get through another tough earnings call. The CEO went to his office, closed the door and opened the third envelope. The message began, “Prepare three envelopes...” " https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=the+three+envelopes&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=the+three+envelopes&ia=web
  • infogulch 4y ago
    Is this a quine where the processor is a CEO?
    • majewsky 4y ago
      I think it's more like malware. A virus that spreads from CEO to CEO.
      • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        CEO is the virus that spreads from one organisation to another
  • lostlogin 4y ago
    This is how governments run too, but they add a few more envelopes as they have more avenues to peruse. War, plague, etc.
• garrybelka 4y ago
  A better analogy is a ship sailing against the wind: "To reach its target, sailors that intend to travel windward to a point in line with the exact wind direction will need to zig-zag in order to reach its destination. This technique is tacking." https://www.lifeofsailing.com/post/how-to-sail-against-the-wind https://www.lifeofsailing.com/post/how-to-sail-against-the-w...
• karaterobot 4y ago
  Good anecdote! In exchange I offer two relevant quotes from my quote file: > The empire long united must divide, long divided must unite; this is how it has always been. (Luo Guanzhong) > When cuffs disappeared from men’s trousers, fashion designers gave interviews explaining that the cuff was archaic and ill-suited to contemporary living. It collected dust, contributed nothing. When the trouser cuff returned, did it collect less dust and begin at last to make a contribution? Probably no fashion designer would argue the point; but the question never came up. Designers got rid of the cuff because there aren’t many options for making trousers different. They restored it for the same reason. (Ralph Caplan)
• MrDresden 4y ago
  I work in a bank. This is literally what upper management does every 4-5 years. Always some new "initiative" that was preached to them at a conference somewhere, and will now presumably change everyone's lifes.
• majormajor 4y ago
  So what's the moral of the story? Do you think it's "don't change"? Cause that gives right up on progress anyway. So good luck on getting large shareholders to give you the reins with that message. They're looking for ROI, not the status quo - if you don't evolve, your competitor will, barring monopolies and such. And even there... Microsoft of today is much less dominant than the MS of 25 years ago, and arguably could be worth a lot more had they made better moves. If that's not a compelling example, maybe check out Sears... Maybe most people in these positions know that change doesn't guarantee improvement, but they know that sitting still is the same as just waiting to be defeated. So maybe there's something less-than-stupid about these "short-sighted" "illusory" changes. But maybe if you want to be a wise executive, the key is to recognize that change might not just fail to improve your position - it might actually actively harm it. So the good executive is the one who chooses to try to change things according to reasonable calculations about both potential upside benefit and downside risk...