Argh. We get a solid customer for Oversing, and the investors pull the plug on the company. This has not been a good month for our business. It’s been a pretty bad summer really. lol
So damned close. But close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. 🙂
We know we’re too early. We have too many nits left.
Source date (UTC): 2016-08-11 12:11:00 UTC
New life lesson. Hire female programmers over 35. The value of young men is throwing their lives away to master disposable technology. The value of programmers over 35 is they don’t do all the stupid stuff. God.
Source date (UTC): 2016-08-09 12:29:00 UTC
I’m writing. (As usual.) Business plan. Been my task for the past week. Probably too much detail but then that’s my thing. I like to understand market mechanisms and convey them in both business plans and strategy documents. It creates a common model and language for management teams. I find I stick with my strategy documents a long time after I write them.
I’m sitting under a canopy at a pub, drinking a cappuccino and water with lemon.
I’m surrounded by two bunches of Ukrainan and Russian men drinking beer, smoking, and trash-talking. And loud. Louder than Americans. They’re Indistinguishable from Italians by other than accent, (bad) haircuts, and dress. And different in my knowledge that the amount of verbal nonsense tolerated before a fight in Italy, and the amount of verbal nonsense tolerated before a fight in Ukraine and Russia are inversely related.
So you don’t act irritated in these circumstances. You just roll with the noise, bravado. And in my case, I’m thankful I can’t understand them very well, or my autism would force me to leave rather than endure the idiocy.
There are a LOT fewer fights in Kiev now that the Russians don’t visit. There are more Turks on sex tourism adventures. (It’s no wonder. have you seen their women? ) But in general, I feel much safer here than I do in any American city. I usually carry in the states. I don’t even feel the need to here.
I just make sure I have a bottle or coffee cup nearby.
Just in case.
🙂
Source date (UTC): 2016-08-07 05:26:00 UTC
( I’m doing biz plan stuff today. so have mercy. lol )
Source date (UTC): 2016-08-01 03:50:00 UTC
We had such a good reaction on TRS to mixing man-talk and philosophy that I wish I had a weekly show to do in that format.
I can’t possibly manage that kind of thing. But the idea of picking a topic and drilling down on it with normal (intelligent) folks is pretty attractive.
Source date (UTC): 2016-07-25 13:02:00 UTC
( law of customer service: it is better to fail with a customer and fix it than it is to never fail. )
Source date (UTC): 2016-07-22 12:21:00 UTC
Programming is so much more fun than managing projects. Application architecture and UI design is more fun than programming. And business analysis is more fun than architecture and design.
Why? Because learning as the major deliverable is fun. Producing a suite of deliverables on time and on budget is not fun.
:). Accountability.
Source date (UTC): 2016-07-19 22:42:00 UTC
(I can’t talk about it but I love the company I’m working with.)
Source date (UTC): 2016-07-19 12:02:00 UTC
Business isn’t anything like the infantry, other than engineering public works.
It bears little resemblance to the work of officers only in bureaucracies.
And it begins to be similar when one compares the work of most work to that if high level officers and politicians.
Major reasons are:
1) Emphasis on reward vs risk.
2) Emphasis on defection ( competition ) vs duty ( loyalty )
For the lower classes risk mitigation, direction and loyalty provide security. They think in controlling costs.
For the upper classes reward opportunities, innovation, and defection provide security. They thin in creating opportunities.
This is fairly obvious.
What is not obvious is contrasting the difference in bonds which decreases as one increases in rank precisely because it limits opportunity.
In other words politicians have the inverse incentives of soldiers.
And business people have the approximate incentives of high ranking officers.
And labor had the approximate incentives of low level officers.
And the underclasses have the incentives of soldiers.
And not surprisingly that’s how demographics tend to work out.
Incentives.
Source date (UTC): 2016-07-15 02:42:00 UTC
In technology here in Ukraine we have a lot of ‘labor’ but not a lot of ‘professionals’. In America we have even professional ‘labor’. Just as we have nearly every living soul capable of entrepreneurship.
A professional means a member of the middle class. What does the middle class mean? It means organizing production. What does a professional do? Organize his production and the production of others. And cooperate with peers on using empirical evidence and scientific reasoning to organize voluntarily.
Still the post-soviet thing everywhere: limited empirical experience, limited theoretical understanding, the need for direct supervision, the inabilty to resolve problems scientifically rather than authoritarively and intuitionistically.
I have problems with staff here that you only have at the very worst organizations in america – where people are overemployed above their abilities (which is very common in the states). But professionalism often compensates for lack of personal ability.
What we see here is the opposite, self reliance, or reliance on instruction rather than teamwork.
It’s one reason why they’re poor.
When contemporary economists label a middle class they mean “the ability to possess discretionary income”. Well, in the western past, the middle class could possess discretionary income. But that is not what defined the middle class: it was organizing production.
So while in theory economic, social, genetic, middle class should be synonyms, it’s quite possible to be a member of a genetic middle class, and socially and economically impoverished.
Conversely, it’s also possible to be a member of an economic middle class but socially and genetically impoverished (most of our artistic classes, and sportsman classes).
Most of ukraine seems to be populated by genetic middle classes with surprisingly few defects caused by long periods of urbanization. But they are artificially impoverished socially and therefore artificially impoverished economically.
I love them. But it frustrates me no end.
Source date (UTC): 2016-07-09 07:32:00 UTC