Now about that change request...
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You work in a hospital now, code doctor? All them patients and all?
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This could be interpreted a couple different ways... Ewwwwwww.
A dirty mind is a joy forever.
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Are we on the starship Endocrine now?
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No, we're stranded on Starbug after the nanobots stole Red Dwarf
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Where it's cold outside and there's no kind of atmosphere?
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I'm all alone
filed under: More or less
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Let me fly
far away from here...
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I like fresh mango juice
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What about the goldfish exfoliation?
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for (int i = 0; i < 3; i++)
{
Console.Writeline("fun");
}
Console.Writeline("in the");for (int i = 0; i < 3; i++) { Console.Writeline("sun"); }
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This post is deleted!
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I spammed 7 posts to a new topic: "Now about that change request ..." Had a spam post
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This post is deleted!
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Omg so true! I totally Love and Buy It!
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[Triple-epilogue]
Random Developer: Do you remember that thing six months ago? Where we told them all sorts of bad stuff would happen if we unbundled change x and y, and then they unbundled changes x and y and they happened and the world went on fire? And then they decided they didn't want x in the first place? Turns out that was a compliance thing and they're being fined millions of dollars a day and want to know why it wasn't done.
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[Triple-epilogue]
Random Developer: Do you remember that thing six months ago? Where we told them all sorts of bad stuff would happen if we unbundled change x and y, and then they unbundled changes x and y and they happened and the world went on fire? And then they decided they didn't want x in the first place? Turns out that was a compliance thing and they're being fined millions of dollars a day and want to know why it wasn't done.
And of course it is entirely possible that nobody mentioned, in 116 posts about goldfish and other crap, the real WTF. You don't have one company with two(1) departments. You have two companies with one department each, that happen to share accounts, tech support, HR, and so on. After all, in the real world, a company bills clients for work, not other parts of itself, and makes profits or losses on the activities of the whole company rather than per-department.(1) I say "two" here because your conversations have been about Sales versus Dev.
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After all, in the real world, a company bills clients for work, not other parts of itself, and makes profits or losses on the activities of the whole company rather than per-department.
Many companies (especially larger ones) maintain profit-and-loss accounting at the departmental level, and use internal billing so that they can figure out whether a department is actually spending “wisely”. That isn't to say that there's freedom for the other departments to go anywhere else they want — we're not talking a free market here — but it does provide a better way to track WTF is going on than looking at the overall balance sheet for the entire organisation.
The downside is that it encourages some types of dysfunctional behaviour, such as internal empire building and setting up of parallel/shadow sub-departments. Oh well…
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Internal cross-department billing is almost guaranteed to result in a syndrome Scott Adams called "Battlin' Business Units" (BBU). There are other ways, probably more effective, but equally probably requiring more work, to assess spending wisdom. And the promotion of BBU is a very good reason NOT to do it...
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the promotion of BBU is a very good reason NOT to do it
The problem is that not doing any kind of accounting at the BU level results in different unintended outcomes, and anything else seems to require really able management to make it work. It does appear to work better when the BUs have some sort of natural vertical integration within them, e.g., I think individual stores within Walmart would be a sensible level to account at, since the stores can't really compete with each other (since they can't open new stores themselves).
The point where it really fouls up is when people forget that some general transfers between BUs (which aren't really very visible in the accounting) are there to enable certain services to be offered across BU boundaries at reduced per-use cost.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said:
the promotion of BBU is a very good reason NOT to do it
The problem is that not doing any kind of accounting at the BU level results in different unintended outcomes, and anything else seems to require really able management to make it work. It does appear to work better when the BUs have some sort of natural vertical integration within them, e.g., I think individual stores within Walmart would be a sensible level to account at, since the stores can't really compete with each other (since they can't open new stores themselves).
The point where it really fouls up is when people forget that some general transfers between BUs (which aren't really very visible in the accounting) are there to enable certain services to be offered across BU boundaries at reduced per-use cost.
So in effect, if the "natural" BU boundaries don't correspond with the billing boundaries (the Walmart example shows a sort of BU - an individual store - whose billing boundaries correspond with its natural BU boundaries), you have a problem. If you divide Weng's company into business units along product lines rather than job-function lines (i.e. product type 1 vs 2 vs 3 instead of Sales vs. R&D vs After-Sales support), then you'll be able to avoid Weng's problem, up to a point.And the question of requiring able management is a distraction. If you promote management practices that require less skill because they require less skill, then you encourage management-by-idiots, and I don't think we want that.
Do we?
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If you promote management practices that require less skill because they require less skill, then you encourage management-by-idiots, and I don't think we want that.
It matters not whether we want it…
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Some of the people here live that experience daily...
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Some of the people here live that experience daily...
We went through that a while back for a few years. The head of IT was one of those people who couldn't manage their way out of a wet paper bag, and had all the leadership skills of a small cornish pasty. He was eventually “encouraged” to take employment elsewhere; I'm not sure whether higher management or the unions were keener on pushing him out. :D