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Admin
Heartbreakingly, someone else with less altruism came along shortly and began manufacturing them. I still lose sleep over the starving families of those poor guys...
Admin
There, fixed that for you.
Admin
Regardless of how stupid friends boss' idea may have been, it is at least equally stupid to call him out in front of his boss. Sorry but your friend should have seen that coming.
Admin
You have sex in a freezer?
Admin
Back in the early 90's when I was a young Private in the US Army we would be assembled every morning and assigned our duties for the day. One day the Sergeant asked if anyone knew how to type and, much to my surprise, I was the only one who raised his hand. From then on I was always assigned to HQ duties. Most of which involved doing this WTF. Although, I couldn't quit that job even if I wanted to. It was still better than mowing a field in 110 degree weather with 100% humidity (this was Texas BTW). I had air conditioning, breaks and a vending machine. I wasn't quitting that duty for nothing.
Admin
Qbasic?!? But but I'm still on Basica!! (Way better than basic, thank you play statement!)
Admin
Or, Han was trying to bullshit Sir Alec Guinness and it didn't work.
Admin
[quote user="m0ffx"][quote]the 6 processing people... you'd be putting them all out of a job![/quote]That's the key point. If management had approved it, Joe would have had his 6 former colleagues baying for his blood. Not good. He'd also have possibly put HIMSELF out of work.
[quote=Rush]Another thing I've heard happening is keeping people employed to eat up some of your budget, because if you don't use most of your budget then you won't get as much money next year.[/quote]Grrrr. This pisses me off. BUDGETS. SHOULD. ROLL. OVER. That's the only way to incentive saving money. When unspent money is lost, or worse, results in less next year, the result is spending the budget needlessly. I've seen it happen in the NHS - painting walls that were painted last year, to 'use up the budget'. :-@ Only if a surplus accumulates for a few years should the budget be re-evaluated, and even then I'd say the excess should be used for some capital expenditure. If all government organizations worked like that we could have the Holy Grail of tax cuts AND better public services.[/quote]
hehe, you're so cute when you get all rational.
One day when you grow up you'll join us in the real world.
Admin
Of course, the problem here is that there isn't always enough to do for everyone willing to work. What we're heading towards is either a 30 hour work week or a large unemployed underclass and a heavily moneyed aristocracy. Personally, I'd go for the former, but we'll probably get there by way of the latter.
Admin
I the real world, companies that use budgets rationally eat the lunch of those that don't.
/your milkshake //I drink it.
Admin
My reading is that he didn't have sufficient knowledge or access privs to just write the import script himself. As a data entry monkey, he'd probably only have been able to access the DB through the icky VB frontend. And likewise, he probably didn't have access to the source data, except through the hard copy dumps provided by the print guy.
Admin
Uh, no. The speed of light is a speed. That means it's expressed in units of (distance) / (time); it isn't "299,792,458", but "299,792,458 meters / second. That's why, when you divide a distance (such as parsecs) by it, you end up with a result in time units.
Admin
Admin
Admin
No, it's not really a conversion in the same way as going from inches to meters is; it doesn't make sense in the same way to say that 3,000,000 meters is equal to 1 second. Yes, time and space are the same thing, but we can't rotate the universe through 90 degrees and measure a ruler with a stopwatch.
Yes, all constants can be expressed as 1, with the correct choice of units. No, this doesn't mean that saying the speed of light is one lightyear per year is useful.
Admin
WHAT? BRING ME SOLO AND THE WOOKIE. THEY WILL SUFFER FOR THIS OUTRAGE!
Admin
I worked on a fairly standard project accounting / finances webapp for a while. It wasn't my work, but the work of one of my coworkers, that ended up cutting several accountant-weeks of work down to the press of a button (and a few seconds of computation). I don't know as the accountants were particularly happy, but that project wasn't immediately canceled.
That project was told to "slow down, become trimmer" as it was spending in excess of $1M per month. Perhaps related, I don't know - my term was up and I haven't heard from them since.
Admin
Admin
flux capacitor!
heat of the meat is proportional to the torque of the pork, which is proportional to the angle of the dangle and the throb of the knob.
Admin
Back in the early internet days there was a site called homokaasu which had a "Kill Everyone" page. You got points for clicking a bar which would kill a virtual person - the object being to depopulate the earth. The bar moved around each click so you had to adjust the mouse. The intent was to keep people busy clicking the mouse on the bar. They mentioned they had methods to detect cheaters.
I looked at some of the high scores and worked out that they would have to click many times a second to get to where they were. I enquired and found out people used macros and whatnot to simulate several mouse clicks per right click.
Seeing that, I did one better and automated with VBScript and a COM object for the system APIs. It would query the pixels around the mouse pointer to see where the bar was moving, then adjust the mouse pointer, and then send an event to click. I purposely kept it to a rate just shy of the the fastest ones but kept it running many hours of the day. Not 24 in a row though, as I suspected that would raise alarms.
I entered the top hundred in a day, then top twenty, and was inching closer and closer to top ten. I was elated. I would probably be number one today had I not stupidly logged in from the work computer to see the progress. Multiple logins were flagged and I was made persona non grata. I still feel bad about it to this day - not for cheating, but for getting caught.
I suppose I could have re-registered under a different name and restarted, but I had an automated door opener to work on.
That was really cool, didn't need a receptionist to open the door. Just bring up the web page at the live web camera stream and click "Open" to open the door. In the ceiling was an old laptop with a circuit connected to the parallel port. The circuit required a special combination of on-off pins from the parallel port so it wouldn't open the door if the laptop rebooted (e.g. you'll see all ones and all zeroes during reboot).
In short, automation is the way to go. To hell with keeping inefficiency for the sake of keeping people employed. Adapt or die.
Admin
The moneyed aristocracy is smarter than that. If they have too many starving peasants they get a revolution, so they balance exploitation with reward. Moving past the Marxian zero-sum view of the world, the technological innovations of the last 200 years that have allowed us to produce exponentially more stuff with less labor haven't lead to permanent unemployment, they've just drowned us in stuff.
Admin
$nitpicking = 0;
I respectfully disagree. Yeah, sure if it's some little VB frontend that you only use once a week and it's only got maybe six or fewer fields to tab through, then this would count as nitpicking.
But when you're doing grand-scale laborious, boring-ass data entry and you've got ten to twenty different data entry fields per record... well now all of a sudden, it's not nitpicking. It's actually pretty important to be able to move through the fields as smoothly as possible. If you have to mouse-click from field to field every record will take a little bit longer, and since you're doing many records, that little bit gets compounded many times over.
Or perhaps "${nitpicking}" is a tdwtf joke reference that I am unaware of? Oh well.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
Admin
The timeline on the story is basically as follows:
(1) Programmer gets job. (2) Programmer realises job is dumber than GWB on coke. (3) Programmer proposes scripting 95% productivity improvement to boss. (4) Boss is dumber than GWB on coke. (5) Programmer quits job.
I don't see how this is less fulfilling than:
(1) Programmer gets job. (2) Programmer realises job is dumber than GWB on coke. (3) Programmer writes script for 95% productivity improvement. (4) Boss is dumber than GWB on coke, even when given a blindingly obvious solution. (5) Programmer quits job.
Gotta go now: this is more than 200 words. The JimMs would not approve.
Admin
Oh, agreed. He was young, naive, and this was like his second job since dropping out of college during the dot-com bubble. He was just doing what any techie geek with no social skills or real work history would do.
Today he just got done selling his company for an undisclosed sum (enough to not have to work for a few years at least), and he's 29. Guess he found a place where he could be appreciated, even if he had to start it.
Admin
Okay, after squinting at your post a bit, I think I can see the point you're making here. But surely for every day purposes there should be no problem acting as though the speed of light were a measurement of distance divided by a unit of time like we would normally assume.
I mean if you're gonna get that pedantic and Einstein-ian on us about the speed of light, then I'm afraid you're going to have to rephrase--since it's only the speed of light in a vacuum that's constant. When light is traveling through some other medium it can and does move more slowly.
And remember, that beam o' light is actually made out of photons, and btw is it a particle or a wave or what? C'mon, c'mon we're waiting for an answer...
Or you could just let us keep referring to the speed of light in the conventional way for now. AFAIK we are all stuck close to the skin of a (relatively) small lump of rock and water called Earth. As such we don't have much opportunity to experience the Universe at relativistic speeds where stuff like "the speed of light is 1" really matters.
-- Furry cows moo and decompress.
Admin
Those people can do something more valuable for the company instead.
Admin
Neither. And the cat has a 50/50 shot at living, unless you're in the box with it....at least, in Denmark, that is...
Admin
The problem in this case is that it is a highly boring and dull job. Which means that at some point the mind will wanders. Which in turn means that you will make mistakes - and I don't think that it's a good idea to introduce typos into your customer database.
Admin
Economists call it the ''lump of labor fallacy.'' It's the idea that there is a fixed amount of work to be done in the world, so any increase in the amount each worker can produce reduces the number of available jobs. (A famous example: those dire warnings in the 1950's that automation would lead to mass unemployment.) As the derisive name suggests, it's an idea economists view with contempt, yet the fallacy makes a comeback whenever the economy is sluggish.
Admin
I never got the whole Schrodingers cat thing; how come the cat doesn't count as an observer? Surely the moggy knows (albeit briefly) if it is being gassed, shouldn't this "collapse the waveform" or whatever?
Admin
There are ways you can end up in a lump-of-labor situation.
When old tasks are automated, people are available to do new tasks. If regulations make it difficult to invent or experiment with new tasks, however, the people might be left without work to do.
Admin
Ever break a key system that is working (no matter how inefficiently)? When a company has a working system, they don't tend to change it, unless there is sufficient measurable benefit.
Smart companies do not change things just for some engineering benefit (our product will be a bit faster,....). They consider the business case of it. Does it save money, increase sales, reduce service calls. They also consider what is the cost if the change fails. What happens if the script runs amok on the billing system and they don't get to bill customers for a while of service. What happens if you stop service for a few hours? When you consider this, sometimes a big cost savings is not so big.
That being said, in this situation the manager should be looking for a way to prototype the changed system (backup all the transferred data then try the script).
Admin
And those people are theoretically the cream of the crop. They get good grades/degrees, way off the bell curve ... but, smart? No. There seems to be some sort of interesting interplay between regression to the mean, and in-bred psychosis; but not much of an evidential basis on which to base a conspiracy theory.
Admin
This challenges my entire cosmology.
Admin
I think he was picking at Jake including the mouse option twice.
Admin
You're really not supposed to go mixing intuition with quantum mechanics;)
(the bonus is that your interpretation validates the experiment...which, to oversimplify, was created just to show how bizarre the study of qm is.)
Admin
And why should we listen to anything economists say these days?
Obviously there isn't a fixed amount of work to be done in the world, but I believe we have created an untenable bubble, where we've borrowed heavily against the future to create an artificially high level of both production and consumption. Now that the chickens have come home to roost, consumption is falling (a spartan like me would say back toward sanity). Production has no choice but to fall as well. It could be years or even decades before the total work in the world starts to grow again.
Admin
Back up a bit. How many articles on this site start off with "... and Joe decided to run the code over the weekend, despite what the boss had said..."? Way to many for all the cowboys on here saying "just do it" no matter what management says. Oh wait, those are the guys that will keep this site stocked with articles for years to come*.
There are reasons that business processes are in place, no matter how stupid they might seem to you at the time. Your boss says no to your offer to automate the process? Maybe he doesn't have as much confidence in your abilities as you do.
*yeah, I know, YOU know how to code so you'd NEVER make a mistake... ever...
Admin
No, it's an artifact of the world we live in. Automate a bunch of people out of a job and you end up with some unemployed people. Do this rapidly and often, and you get a lump of unemployed people who can't retrain fast enough to get that next better job and get the training paid for. Basically, people have a reaction time for retraining, and if we boot them faster than there are jobs available, all sorts of bad things can happen.
Seen another way, the lump of labor is masked by layers of busywork - most of what is done in offices probably doesn't need to be done at all, but as long as we can afford to pay for it, there are a myriad reasons not to examine and trim the fat.
You're still left with a choice: spread the work across more people or hire fewer people. A lot of companies don't even want to consider option 1 - they are totally wedded to the idea that everyone shows up 9-5 M-F and gets 2 weeks a year to do their own thing.
Admin
Because private consumption is falling, not all consumption. Roads, bridges, infrastructure, all that has been ignored and could probably stand to be worked on now.
Admin
And if Joe had run it over the weekend (or his lunch break) with writes disabled, he'd know what the total runtime would be with minimal system impact.
Of course, the comments on page 1 show a real world example - all the data was imported in a half hour, but 'joe' took over the mainframe for 30 minutes. Bad on the sysadmin, I guess, but this is why it's good to support people when trying something new - that way the sysadmin can watch while 'joe' runs his app and see if anything breaks. Most of these automation tasks are a net win, they just need to be looked after.
Admin
I have done something like this.
When I walked into my current job I was tasked along with two other new recruits to manually check Oracle accounts (we had a previous policy of giving everyone an Oracle account) against AD to find which users should be removed.
We divided the list in 3 and the other two recruits started manually checking each record. I wrote a python script which did all the work for me in 3 hours. I offered them the script but they prefered to check manually. 3 days later they finished.
Thankfully nobody cared how I did it, only that I had the results. I also kept the script and have used it multiple times since then for checking other lists.
Admin
What's wrong with a God's dozen? Add one to twelve, and you get a slightly sickly loaf. (That's 0.4 of a slightly sickly fish, measured in parsecs.) Subtract one, however, and you get:
"Thou shalt not regulate thy people's business, lest they be left without work to do. (Other than cleaning out the yard, recreational things with wood, and playing with the kids. I am, after all, a Compassionate God.)"
I see the Light! (Or perhaps it's somebody experimenting with a new task.)
Let's all go back to the good ole light-regulated days. (That's the square root of c-squared minus v-squared over something or other, but I'm sure it'll all work out, given an appropriate spreadsheet.)
Cargo-cult cretinism, here we go!
Admin
Makes sense. The moron's I work with had to get their degrees somewhere.
Admin
I did have a situation where I had to do some manual migration of old, manually written HTML to new, manually written HTML. We had a month or so to do it. There were a couple of other teams doing the same job worldwide.
We got sick of manual work pretty soon and decided to risk it and wrote a migration script. Finished the migration two weeks earlier than everyone else, maybe spent a couple of days manually fixing bugs.
Some very good relationships established during that, no budget wasted. The risk that we did take, was a possible loss of an extra week of sleep - not a big deal in this line of work! Lesson: do it, if you can do it!
Admin
Admin
You are very right here - one should not put his bosses' ass on the line*
Whenever I take a risk at work - it's me who's taking it. I always make sure that the company as a whole doesn't get hurt, if I do fail.
*no matter how incompetent the boss is.
Admin
Somewhat relevant--
[image]Admin
All right then, who's up for smashing the weaving machines? That'll get the economy back on its feet for sure!
Admin
BTDTGTT as a temp undergrad "Data Analyst" for a utility company. More depressing was that I was working with actual programmers, not monkeys.
One project involved manually importing a whole database from a SQL server into hundreds of bloated Excel spreadsheets (a WTF of its own). Every new thing they wanted to do with the data required a complete new set of spreadsheets to be created. In the end, I had a coffee mug on the Ctrl key of this computer and my job was tapping through the shortcut keys of the macros I'd written, spending the rest of my time pretending to be busy.
This programmer I worked with was showing off his orgasmic VB load-data-into-Excel software. Every time he wanted to use it, he had to scroll though ~100 checkboxes to make sure they were all clear and then find and tick the ones he wanted. Any mistake and he'd load the wrong data and have to start again (if he even noticed the error). Okay, maybe he was too lazy to write a better UI but I did suggest he add a reset button to clear all the checkboxes. He'd been working with the software god knows how long and this had never occurred to him.
After that, he had the team sit at computers zombie-watching progress bars for several days and skilfully hitting the OK button at the right moments to load the next lot of data. I soon suggested tweaking the code to be fully automated and running it overnight. Getting death stares from zombies is creepy.
Okay, so I learnt a lot about reality from this job. I learnt not to assume that people want their problems to be solved. I learnt that a major proportion of human existence is being wasted and prefers the security of knowing that it's being wasted. I also learnt that I don't want that kind of job, even if I make a fifth of the money that I could.
BTW, I've heard that "but automation might cause errors" argument before. Okay, I accept that some people just want job security but the argument itself is flawed. If you do 100,000 records manually, there will be loads of errors. You just don't know because you don't want to spent another three months double-checking them manually. On the other hand, automation can be highly accurate if you use good practice: