I guess we are a real company now?
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Ex-Microsoft manager lady come into our chaotic disorganised startup company. A week later, we get an email with:
- our new branding
- new public facing website (done by her friends on the cheap)
- our new corporate mission
- our new mandatory email signatures
- our new org chart
- our (unrealistic) marching orders
Pictured: my place in the new hierarchy of things:
You have one guess at who is at the top.
Well... this is certainly a change of pace. Not sure how to feel about this...
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@cartman82 said in I guess we are a real company now?:
You have one guess at who is at the top.
The Queen?
We had an org chart at a previous job where the structure was basically flat. Like 2 levels between a graduate new hire and the CEO. The horizontal scroll bar on it was ridiculously small
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@cartman82 I wouldn't think much of it. We've sold off a few months ago and aside from our logo now having a tiny "part of XXX group" and some internal systems integration not much has changed for us developers.
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@cartman82 said in I guess we are a real company now?:
Well... this is certainly a change of pace. Not sure how to feel about this...
It looks like you've been demoted. :-P
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@cartman82 - I'm unclear about your position... were you once in a position of greater responsibility, and now you're not? Were you once in a position of less responsibility, and now you have more?
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@lordofduct said in I guess we are a real company now?:
@cartman82 - I'm unclear about your position...
That makes two of us :)
It's more like, I'm coming from a position of unspecified authority and responsibility, and am moving into a position of equally murky responsibility , only this time drawn on an org chart.
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Almost half the company reports directly to the CEO-like person? What could possibly go wrong?
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Is Iron Manager Lady someone actually working there, or did she just show up there one day and say, "wrap it up, I'll take it"? The way you wrote it makes it sound as if she wasn't even part of the company before all this.
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@Dragnslcr said in I guess we are a real company now?:
Almost half the company reports directly to the CEO-like person? What could possibly go wrong?
In a small firm, that's absolutely fine. Even up to 100–150 people, they really wouldn't need anything much more complicated.
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@cartman82 said in I guess we are a real company now?:
our new mandatory email signatures
I fucking hate those. When viewing mails on my phone it feels like a scrolling for miles in an email chain.
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@lucas1 said in I guess we are a real company now?:
@cartman82 said in I guess we are a real company now?:
our new mandatory email signatures
I fucking hate those. When viewing mails on my phone it feels like a scrolling for miles in an email chain.
And they usually aren't legally binding. Total waste of bytes.
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@NedFodder The best one is the "please don't print save the environment" which takes up more room and thus more paper if you need to print them out.
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@lucas1 Those are so stupid, because the more paper you buy, more trees will be planted, because the paper industry plants their trees, they aren't taking them from a random forest.
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@groo I know. My dad is a joiner and actually has a book of "trees" and how each type of wood should be used. You try telling people about this and they kinda just ignore this.
EDIT: It is like telling anti-gmo people that we have been doing for centuries through artificial selection and then they say "well it is different somehow". Really fucking pisses me off. I just wanna say "no you fucking dumbass, we have just got really fucking good at it".
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@ScholRLEA said in I guess we are a real company now?:
Is Iron Manager Lady someone actually working there, or did she just show up there one day and say, "wrap it up, I'll take it"? The way you wrote it makes it sound as if she wasn't even part of the company before all this.
I've never actually seen her. She's in corporate headquarters in EU, we are in a backwater code outsourcing heaven.
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Not a real company until they start replacing your tools with enterprisey stuff.
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@groo Or renaming perfectly good features with buzzwords.
Sitecore went from "Page Editor" to "Experience Editor"
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@lucas1 said in I guess we are a real company now?:
EDIT: It is like telling anti-gmo people that we have been doing for centuries through artificial selection and then they say "well it is different somehow".
It's different by "we're doing things that are literally impossible the way we (and nature) have been doing it since the beginning of time." Like taking genes from one species and deliberately grafting them into specific points on another species' genome. No matter how much selective breeding you do, you can't accomplish that.
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@lucas1 terminator genes and patents on seeds are different in important ways
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@masonwheeler no but science similar to this has saved millions of lives.
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@lucas1 said in I guess we are a real company now?:
@masonwheeler no but science similar to this has saved millions of lives.
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@lucas1 said in I guess we are a real company now?:
@groo Or renaming perfectly good features with buzzwords.
Sitecore went from "Page Editor" to "Experience Editor"
I should probably take sitecore off my resume so those people leave me alone.
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@cartman82 said in I guess we are a real company now?:
It's more like, I'm coming from a position of unspecified authority and responsibility, and am moving into a position of equally murky responsibility , only this time drawn on an org chart.
Well, hey, at least you're not literally the only person in the entire office whose job description is as follows:
Duties as assigned
Webmaster
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@fwd Ditto for me. Just read my new contracts post.
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@groo said in I guess we are a real company now?:
patents on seeds
Lots of FUD around them. Like the guy who was supposedly sued by Monsanto for GM pollens ting his plants but was actually intentionally taking seeds
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@masonwheeler said in I guess we are a real company now?:
No matter how much selective breeding you do, you can't accomplish that.
Bacterial plasmids do something vaguely like that all the time.
Heck, the intersection of bird, pig, and human flus is probably somehow similar.
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@FrostCat said in I guess we are a real company now?:
Bacterial plasmids do something vaguely like that all the time.
@FrostCat said in I guess we are a real company now?:
Heck, the intersection of bird, pig, and human flus is probably somehow similar.
I used to know the answer to that, but I forgot the mechanism by which the various flus change almost as soon as I passed Immunology. That class was not fun.
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@FrostCat said in I guess we are a real company now?:
@masonwheeler said in I guess we are a real company now?:
No matter how much selective breeding you do, you can't accomplish that.
Bacterial plasmids do something vaguely like that all the time.
Heck, the intersection of bird, pig, and human flus is probably somehow similar.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/03/humans-may-harbor-more-100-genes-other-organisms
@Fox said in I guess we are a real company now?:
@FrostCat said in I guess we are a real company now?:
Bacterial plasmids do something vaguely like that all the time.
@FrostCat said in I guess we are a real company now?:
Heck, the intersection of bird, pig, and human flus is probably somehow similar.
I used to know the answer to that, but I forgot the mechanism by which the various flus change almost as soon as I passed Immunology. That class was not fun.
http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/viruses/transmission.htm
And just because I've always thought this was neat:
A gene horizontally transferred from a virus is important in reproduction.
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@groo said in I guess we are a real company now?:
Those are so stupid, because the more paper you buy, more trees will be planted, because the paper industry plants their trees, they aren't taking them from a random forest.
Still, producing paper that is not needed is a waste of resources / energy.
On the other hand, if someone wanted to "save the forest", the solution would be to "eat less", because forests are removed to make place for farms.
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@Adynathos Kill the animals!
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@FrostCat said in I guess we are a real company now?:
@masonwheeler said in I guess we are a real company now?:
No matter how much selective breeding you do, you can't accomplish that.
Bacterial plasmids do something vaguely like that all the time.
Very vaguely. It happens entirely at random, and there's no natural mechanism to do so deliberately.
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@groo said in I guess we are a real company now?:
@lucas1 Those are so stupid, because the more paper you buy, more trees will be planted, because the paper industry plants their trees, they aren't taking them from a random forest.
Excellent news for our great-grandchildren when those saplings are ready to be harvested.
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@Mikael_Svahnberg doesn't the paper industry use fast growing trees that are ready to harvest in a couple of years?
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@cartman82 said in I guess we are a real company now?:
Ex-Microsoft manager lady come into our chaotic disorganised startup company. A week later, we get an email with:
- our new branding
- new public facing website (done by her friends on the cheap)
- our new corporate mission
- our new mandatory email signatures
- our new org chart
- our (unrealistic) marching orders
Pictured: my place in the new hierarchy of things:
You have one guess at who is at the top.
Well... this is certainly a change of pace. Not sure how to feel about this...
Look on the bright side. You're only four assassinations away from absolute power.
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@lucas1 said in I guess we are a real company now?:
@cartman82 said in I guess we are a real company now?:
our new mandatory email signatures
I fucking hate those. When viewing mails on my phone it feels like a scrolling for miles in an email chain.
I was able to get rid of mine because I kept putting "Views and opinions expressed reflects those of the company" in it.
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@Jaloopa said in I guess we are a real company now?:
@Mikael_Svahnberg doesn't the paper industry use fast growing trees that are ready to harvest in a couple of years?
They are doing so to an increasing degree, but it's still only part of the overall usage. They still clear a fairly large amount of previously unharvested forest area (I won't say 'old growth', because most of the areas in question aren't really old growth due to fire and other factors) for paper pulp, with much of it being in areas dominated by types of trees which wouldn't be usable for lumber and thus would probably be left untouched otherwise.
For the most part, the 'sustainable' practices in any industry are aimed at sustaining their bottom line. Paper mills only started planting trees because they were running out of the existing ones in areas that were easy to work in, and it cost less to plant new ones on nice, flat, even ground that has already been cleared than to harvest the less accessible ones in the wild.
Sustainable and less damaging practices generally are good business practices too, if only because then generally are also more efficient practices (e.g., many forms of industrial waste management involve reclaiming valuable chemicals), but converting to them costs money and time. Inertia and human psychology being what they are, industrial managers and corporate leaders often resist changes even when they would improve the company's fiscal status, especially in fields where management turn-over is fast or immediate profit is prized over long-term viability.
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@masonwheeler said in I guess we are a real company now?:
Very vaguely. It happens entirely at random, and there's no natural mechanism to do so deliberately.
So what? I mean, that's true, but it doesn't change what I said.
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@Mikael_Svahnberg said in I guess we are a real company now?:
Excellent news for our great-grandchildren when those saplings are ready to be harvested.
It only takes something like 7 years to grow a tree enough for Christmas trees, IIRC. Some quick Googling I just did suggests that 25-40 years is good enough for timber harvesting. That's probably plenty of time for trees harvested for paper, too. Actually, ecology.com says that paper farms are on 20-35 year cycles.
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@FrostCat said in I guess we are a real company now?:
So what? I mean, that's true, but it doesn't change what I said.
@masonwheeler said in I guess we are a real company now?:
It's different by "we're doing things that are literally impossible the way we (and nature) have been doing it since the beginning of time." Like taking genes from one species and deliberately grafting them into specific points on another species' genome. No matter how much selective breeding you do, you can't accomplish that.
That's what.
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@masonwheeler said in I guess we are a real company now?:
That's what.
I said plasmids do graft genes cross-species, you said "but it's very rare". That's not denying it happens.
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@FrostCat said in I guess we are a real company now?:
I said plasmids do graft genes cross-species, you said "but it's very rare". That's not denying it happens.
Seriously? I just reiterated the point and you still missed it?
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@masonwheeler Do plasmids take genes from other species or not? The only thing there that's different is the word "deliberately", which I'll grant you.
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@FrostCat said in I guess we are a real company now?:
@masonwheeler Do plasmids take genes from other species or not? The only thing there that's different is the word "deliberately", which I'll grant you.
Deliberately and at specific points. That is the crux of the difference between "random transfer" and the engineering inherent in "genetic engineering". The odds of random plasmid gene transfer producing the stuff that's coming out of labs these days is within epsilon of 1-to-infinity-against, and that's why the "this is no different from what we've been doing forever with selective breeding" line is a flat-out lie.
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@masonwheeler Ok, then we now arrive at the practical question: who cares? Unless you think that inserting genes from a catfish into a strawberry is going to cause all the plants in the world to expel suicide gas or something, it doesn't seem like it will matter.
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@masonwheeler said in I guess we are a real company now?:
Deliberately and at specific points.
I don't think you know much about how these techniques actually work.
Have you heard of the gene gun? You put DNA on tiny tungsten spheres and shoot them into plant tissues then grow them on media. If you're very lucky you get integration into the chromosome. It's how they made GMO papayas, among other things.
Plasmid integration usually takes place at specific chromosomal recombination sites (see attP sites or the Cre recombinase) but sometimes it just happens at random (transposon insertion is completely random, for instance). We're only able to do genetic engineering by piggybacking on the natural DNA transfer mechanisms. It was only very recently(last year?) we got the ability to insert a specific sequence at a specific place.
@masonwheeler said in I guess we are a real company now?:
The odds of random plasmid gene transfer producing the stuff that's coming out of labs these days is within epsilon of 1-to-infinity-against,
The combinatorial nature of the problem means that the probability of random plasmid gene transfer producing the same thing twice is also 'within epsilon of 1-to-infinity-against'.
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@FrostCat said in I guess we are a real company now?:
@masonwheeler Ok, then we now arrive at the practical question: who cares? Unless you think that inserting genes from a catfish into a strawberry is going to cause all the plants in the world to expel suicide gas or something, it doesn't seem like it will matter.
Remember, genes are NOT blueprints. This means you can't, for example, insert "the genes for an elephant's trunk" into a giraffe and get a giraffe with a trunk. There are no genes for trunks. What you CAN do with genes is chemistry, since DNA codes for chemicals.
-- Academician Prokhor Zakharov, "Nonlinear Genetics"
The more we learn about genes, the more weird things we discover. For example, scientists used to wonder how a certain virus (Ebola IIRC but not 100% sure) is even possible, because it contains far too little RNA to hold the code for the things it does... until they discovered that there are multiple gene sequences encoded on the same RNA. First there's the normal sequence, then other overlapping sequences that you get by starting from the next RNA base down. (Imagine having an array of 4-byte ints, then you increment the pointer to the start of the array by 1 byte and find that the resulting "array" is also valid data!)
Even if we know what the gene being inserted does, and manage to get it transferred in such a way that it will do what we want, we don't know what else it does, or how it will interact with all the rest of the DNA we inserted it into. Mapping that out will still take decades of research, and until we've done that research, releasing such organisms into the ecosystem--and particularly into the food chain!--is reckless in the extreme.
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@masonwheeler If we think our WTF code is hard to read, imagine something that developed by changing small bits at random until it works.
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@groo ...you think that's not how most of our WTF code was written?