Eldar University - IT and Economy

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...

  #ITManagement #Management #OfficePolitics #CorporateParasites #Humor This article is an illustration of what I was talking about in IT#5 devoted to corporate parasites. When I was a child I really loved the books about Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne. But now, after decades in the world of large corporations, they sound a little different for me… Let's read, for example, the chapter "Chapter VIII In Which Christopher Robin Leads An Expotition To The North Pole", where the Hundred Acre Wood is a corporation, Christopher Robin is a C-level exec, and Winnie-the-Pooh is an employee. In the first sentence we see that Pooh actively cared about maintaining friendly relationships with C-level execs and visibility with them: One fine day Pooh had stumped up to the top of the Forest to see if his friend Christopher Robin was interested in Bears at all . More than that, he was very receptive to non-verbal signals and demonstrated readiness to support the management plans whatever t...

  #ITManagement #Economy #layoffs See it on YouTube:   I wanted to start this series with very basic questions like "What is 'science'?" or "What is 'Computer Science'?". But today, in early 2023, the topic of layoffs is unfortunately dominating the minds of people in IT. So here we are. Prehistory In the early 17th Century the English and the Dutch sent their first trading expeditions to India (in 1600 and 1602). The sea trade was not a novel idea at that time, well known to Phonecians, Greeks, Arabs (have you heard of Sinbad the Sailor?), but the terms that we speak about came from Europe. A ship fully loaded with goods to trade was an expensive enterprise, so often several traders joined their funds to finance one. That was the first prototype of a corporation. Essentially it was a partnership, which was well known before the word "corporation" was used. The companions put their shares together and that's why shares, which we can tra...