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July 23, 2005
Bad CEO?
In the recent years we've had a lot of corporate mongering against the C-level employees (CEO, CTO, etc etc). Oddly enough, ComputerWorld has a little twinkling gem that basically tells us; "Yep, CEOs really have no control over the company". A fun 30 second read, go check it out.
Posted by Dan at 03:19 PM | Comments (0)
July 22, 2005
Office Parking
Jermey makes a short little rant on the lack of parking at Yahoo!'s office in Sunnyvale. Having done a few interviews at Yahoo! I can say that yes indeed, their parking situation sucks. But why not come on up to the new Elam Young campus Jermey? There seems to be plenty of parking there, and it's right off the commuter train line!
Posted by Dan at 12:59 PM | Comments (0)
Decypher Corporate Speak
I'm absolutely awful at corporate speak, I admit it. In fact, much of the email at work is sent around with TLA (Three Letter Acronyms) that I have taken to calling it encrypted email and just ignore it for the most part. There are no magic keys to de-cypher anything, so you're on your own for what each means. This is one of the primary reasons why I think corporate email has become completely useless. That mixed with the fact that I'm forwarded about 80 pieces a day that have no direct impact on my work (isn't that what weekly status meetings are for anyhow?).
On the other side of the fence are the corporate speak moments that make me go "huh?" and not in the good way. For example, in a job posting putting the terms "Senior Software Engineer" and "Visual Basic 6" in the same sentence seems contradictory to me. Andrei says "you lose -5 points in coolness" (which I think gains you 5 cool points if you deconstruct it logically). Eric gets the "chills just thinking about" those two terms merged, then proceeds to tell me about how amusing VB worms are.
Posted by Dan at 12:49 PM | Comments (0)
July 17, 2005
Software Purchases
I've been quiet recently, mostly because I've been frustrated at work and the inability to get much done. These frustrations run deeper then having another group steal my project(s) and the lawyers tell me to kill another project. Adding a layer of gravy to this is IBM.
In a past life, I had the chance to use Purify on a very large code-base project. I found I liked it a lot, and was always disappointed that it didn't cost significantly less. The open source community has valgrind, which works rather well for the most part, but just doesn't feel as refined or complete. Plus it only really works on Linux, which is a limiting option in my current development environment. For it's part, Mac OS X has MallocDebug, an application that has NEVER worked for me despite it's apparent simplicity (I've only tried it with CLI applications).
Back in late April, I had put in a request for the purchase of a single license of PurifyPlus. The purchasing guy informed me he needed a PO for this, and it'd take a few days to go out. The PO went out within the first few days of May and I was hopeful to get my full licensed copy of Purify before the end of Q2 so that I could justify it's purchase. At this point, IBM ceased all communications with us. After a few weeks of trying to get in touch with them, the sales rep from IBM emailed me a 30 trial license and promptly disappeared again.
On Friday I received a phone call from another sales representative at IBM saying that our PO had expired and they could not fulfill the order until we sent an email requesting this be processed ASAP (literally with the word ASAP in it). When I pointed out to the rep that the order was placed in Ma. In disbelief the rep put me on hold to look up the record. June 15th was the last time the order was edited by anyone. I asked if the rep thought the PO expired, or if they sat on it too long. Regardless the information was forwarded to my purchasing guy, who is taking care of this.
Is this really how IBM plans to continue it's ordering system now that it's almost completely a consulting company? The overall process has left such an awful taste in my mouth that I'm hesitant to purchase anything else from them.
Posted by Dan at 06:47 PM | Comments (0)