It's not about being late. They don't need to get into those. Companies should stick to their identity once they settled somewhere, instead of becoming color-changing chameleon. Database is still very relevant tech and they missed a whole lot in that domain. Infact, if anything, world is even more dependent now on data and databases. Why did Oracle not rule this kingdom?
A software company who does not change the world, and/or change with the world, will die. The world is not dependent on Oracle DB though. Enterprises are chomping at the bits trying to get of Oracle DB. Evolution is brutal.
It’s not even technical reasons my org has loads of oracle it’s compliance. We have to have vendor support for the data layer for certain financial applications which leaves us with only the companies willing to do the insane dance that is involved in getting vendor certified with my bank (6 months on avg, hundreds of pages of legal documents).
It narrows the field, at least for us, to microsoft, ibm, oracle and mongo.
So we’re all in on mongo, as it goes, but I wouldn’t really balk at running some stuff on the giant oracle clusters now and again.
It doesn't sound like it. The articles references competition from low-cost providers, for which I'm assuming, VZN cannot match. As well, converting corporate stores into private franchises would have nothing to do with AGI.
Agreed. It reads like Seven of Nine realizing she's separated from the Collective and needs to rely lowly human capabilities. The insights into vendors was informative.
Perception. Interpretation. Either way, "sprint" is intended to imply short burst, definite endpoint that can be seen. A Burndown is about measured capacity. The only actual speed that matters is time to failure, i.e. "fail fast".
Crazy enough, I'm from the management school that believes the work is only the tool to develop the person and pay the bills. I will always sacrifice the work for the worker. It's sad that the majority of managers see this in reverse.
> I will always sacrifice the work for the worker.
The attitude I see most often is: "the worker is replaceable and therefore expendable, but the work will always be there until someone takes care of it so burn through as many workers as it takes to get it done"
I like to call this zero sum management, and the parent to your post is a good example of positive sum management.
As long as the business is making money, the prospect of it continuing to make money in the near and medium term future is not in jeopardy, and the actors involved are rational, capable and trustworthy, you should always favor the worker over the work.
IME, zero sum management is an emergent symptom of a poorly performing business (maybe if we make everybody work 150% harder we’ll hit our targets this quarter), insecure executives (who don’t understand the work they manage), or poor hiring/firing practices (the only way to let somebody go is by overloading them and rewarding it with a poor performance review, or you’re hiring people who aren’t capable or don’t care).
If you’re a manager forced to make zero sum decisions and don’t feel empowered to change the root of that problem, you should probably consider leaving — good environments grow people instead of expending people.
>IME, zero sum management is an emergent symptom of a poorly performing business (maybe if we make everybody work 150% harder we’ll hit our targets this quarter), insecure executives (who don’t understand the work they manage), or poor hiring/firing practices (the only way to let somebody go is by overloading them and rewarding it with a poor performance review, or you’re hiring people who aren’t capable or don’t care).
This breaks down when you have one player in the arena acting like a snake that tries to devour everyone else(eg. Elon Musk). He has the gift of attracting an endless horde of people to burn through and then tosses them aside once they are no longer useful to him(so many examples in his recent bio). The result is that they move faster than the competition and the others eventually get eaten alive. Normally word would get out that its not safe to work for such a character but SpaceX and Tesla are among the most desired employers that engineering graduates seek to work for. Tesla received 3.6 million job applications in 2022.
Some persons are extraordinarily good at discovering big+solvable problems, and at continuously convincing other people that it’s worth burning themselves out in pursuit of it.
I think it’s worth pointing out that some projects are worth that level of devotion, and visibly so in real-time.
But we can’t make a project worth that level of enthusiasm and attention just by demanding people to act like it is (the siren song that leads to the earlier-discussed culture spirals). Often-well-meaning people will put the cart before the horse, but no amount of quacking will turn you into a duck, etc.
On balance, it’s healthy to be skeptical of people demanding devotion to some process or objective that’s not rooted in first principles you can agree with.
It wouldn’t surprise me too much if a meaningful proportion of the 3.6m applications per year are filed by people who find the first principles behind Tesla’s culture worthy of their devotion.
But yeah, the number of companies or projects that would benefit from that style of approach is quite small. 20% is the ceiling, 10% feels closer to the truth.
As a Dev Manager, please don't "fix it then-and-there." I've found that developers are great at fixing problems but terrible to prioritizing work. After all, its not their responsible to set priorities. The 'fix it then-and-there' on even a small issue has the potential to completely derail a project. Tech debt though, has to be treated with similar reverence to feature development.
$1.2T to OPERATE the F-35 program, yikes! I would love to see the TCO figures on an F-35 (or not). US Military budget concepts have always blown my mind.
Not to say $1.2T is nothing, but that's over the lifespan of the program. It's like if you paid for your car plus all the fuel, oil changes, spare parts, tires, car wash, toll roads, all up front.
> $1.2 trillion to operate and maintain the fleet over more than 60 years.
F16's 50th anniversary is next year. They're still being flown by many countries around the world, including the US, and will soon be fighting in Ukraine.
