Eldar University - IT and Economy

  IT#23 As shareholder I'm concerned #sharesvalue #effectivemanagement #IT #ITManagement A slight digression from the topic On Monday I had to visit a doctor. Here is what Google Maps suggested me: Now, please, look at the left part of the picture. And notice, that's just ⅓ of proposed routes. Now, the question: How a human being is supposed to make a choice??? No, it cannot. We, humans, are not equipped with an equivalent of a SQL engine in our brains. We are not good when facing a lot of choices . You may say, don't criticise, offer a constructive alternative. Here it is. The whole thing should have being structured as: Get to HB (main railway station). From there get to Stadelhofen. Then take 5 stops on Tram #18 to Waldburg. And then it's a two minute walk to your doctor. Then #1 and #2 could have variants, plus for especially masochistic customers, you could give routes that avoid HB, but that's it. Is it so hard to implement? Maybe, but doable. The problem is, ...

Recently I recalled that I already wrote an article “How much do mass layoffs cost?” in 2009, specifically 06/25/2009. Which shows that Google 2023 is essentially Microsoft 2009. Here is that article:   As you know, Microsoft recently conducted two rounds of mass layoffs due to difficult economic times. The motivation was to save money and “the right allocation of resources” and, well, "this is the right thing in the current circumstances!" I'm not going to discuss this case, it's not my job. After all, " The boss said - a ferret! And no gophers!" No, really, if I were elevated at Microsoft into execs, then I would discuss that decision, but since this is not the case, it’s none of my business!   Yesterday Toastmasters magazine came in the mail. If you've read my blog, you should know that I'm part of this interesting community. And inside I found an article, "Taking Through Tough Times at Work." An article is about an interesting ...

 #IT, #ITManagement, #ITManagementTheory, #ITHiring, This article explains that in some cases getting hired by a great company is not a guarantee of a great team or a manager, and sometimes actually the opposite. Imagine that you've got hired by a great company, at least so “The Best Employee” polls say. Great, is not it? Don't jump to conclusions yet. Let's look how it works inside. First let's create a model. Assume the company has 10 teams with 10 positions in each. Also, assume that all teams are filled 90%, and so each team has one headcount. By the way, this model is implemented in Java and available on the GitHub  (it was actually first done around 2010, and I re-implemented it in 2023). Now, remember? The company is great! Which means most of the teams are good. But the cannot be all good, so let's assume a couple of them is bad. Let's say, 90 (green) is good, and 0 (red) is bad. What will we have after N iterations? Here it is: You see, two things are h...

March 29, 2024 Yesterday, I've got a warning that unless I use my Google Voice account for outgoing calls, my Google Voice number will be taken away. For outgoing calls. And so I won't be able to receive calls and SMSs… Please, hold with me for a moment to see what It really says about modern Google as a company. 12 years ago, when I joined Google, it was very hard to get into the company. In fact, it was harder than to get admitted into Harvard. The company employed the smartest people in the world and it was very proud of that. And so were googlers. With that came trust and loyalty. Tens of thousands engineers were watching confidential TGIFs worldwide with nearly no leaks. And there was enough confidential stuff there, but… no leaks.The company trusted employees. The employees trusted the company. The company was loyal to the employees. The employees were loyal to the company. Did I mention, it was 12 years ago? A quick Universal Evolution 101 Reminder A friend of mine was t...

#IT Management #ITHiring #SoftwareEngineering A story Long ago in 1998 I was interviewed by a guy from one Chicago company about C++ and MFC (Microsoft UI library for C++). He asked me: "How would you put 50000 items in UI into a dropdown box." "I would not put 50000 items into a dropdown box." "But what if the customer wants that?" "Then I would talk to the customer and explain why this is a bad idea." "But still..." The guy wanted a hack. Specifically, he wanted to implement scrolling event handlers and dynamically update the list. He clearly was very proud of knowing about those interceptors and his goal in the interview was to show that. I know, odd for an interviewer. The idea itself was horrible, it’s expensive to implement and maintain and the result would be... inferior. For example, the slider would jump around when scrolling. But this is not why the idea was bad. As I wrote before, all Computer Science and things like GUI are ...

#IT, #Economy This article points out to a rarely considered reason that drives high-tech salaries up: corporate greed. This is a basic premise of Ayn Rand capitalism theory that individual greed (self-interest) produces a common good. How is self-interest of large corporations expressed today? One of the main forms is the pursuit of technology that allows to create products that can do more and that are easier to use. And therefore, to get ahead of the competition and get better profits. Makes sense, right? Right. But now let’s see the other side of it. Reminder about IQ Let’s refresh some background information that will be very useful for our further conversation on the topic. To be factual and not emotional we will need metrics. The metric we will use is IQ. It is well known that IQ is not the best metric to predict people’s success, however we are not talking about success, and for the matter, we will discuss, IQ is quite adequate tool. So, clearly you know that by IQ ( Intelligen...