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Middle and senior management in the health trust I work in is wall to wall big egos with utter poo poo for brains who seem to exist to get in the way of people trying to do actual stuff  https://i.imgur.com/08Oa10U.mp4 crispix fucked around with this message at 10:06 on Jan 6, 2021 |
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Jan 6, 2021 10:04
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Tarnop posted:You'd be surprised how much common sense appears indistinguishable from magic to people raised on "that's how we've always done it" orthodoxy Yeah it's this, I'm still reeling from the transition from practical, get-the-job-done STEM academia to corporate pharma , 3 years ago. As e.e. cummings* said "Disdain the trivial labelling of punctual brains" *No relation to Cumbrain, I believe
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Jan 6, 2021 10:05
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Re: middle management scams, at my old job a partner org very proudly displayed their new ISO27001 credentials and kept trying to insist we did the same. One of my staff found that every single customer detail for any organisation using their software was embedded in any hardware they ran it on, and the decryption password could be found in a plain text file on the same systems. Certification gets you a logo to put on your website and an easy tick in the “ISO27001 certified?” box when completing a tender.
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Jan 6, 2021 10:14
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I just had a blood test and I don't think I've ever had such a smooth GP surgery appointment. I arrive a bit early so sat in my car. I use the intercom to explain I have a blood test in five minutes and they let me in after a temperature check. On time the nurse turns up and calls me in and about three minutes after my scheduled time I'm done and out of the building. I don't know how much is the covid effect keeping people away and how much is the system for actually booking appointments putting off people. I now have to use the NHS app to request a GP appointment via a medical survey (the reception can't book a GP appointment, all they can do is fill out the questionnaire for you). That got an initial triage and assigned to someone to look at the following day and only then did a human decide I should have a GP telephone appointment. The subsequent booking of the blood test was done via a human on reception but only after an hour phone queue (fortunately the system will call you back rather than having to stay on the line. I suspect reception having to fill out the form for old people is the main cause of the long wait time).
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Jan 6, 2021 10:19
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Sanford posted:Re: middle management scams, at my old job a partner org very proudly displayed their new ISO27001 credentials and kept trying to insist we did the same. One of my staff found that every single customer detail for any organisation using their software was embedded in any hardware they ran it on, and the decryption password could be found in a plain text file on the same systems. Certification gets you a logo to put on your website and an easy tick in the “ISO27001 certified?” box when completing a tender. What people forget about all of these process certs if that they are reliant on someone, somewhere actually having a functioning brain. As long as it's written down somewhere that they're going to store all of your financial data in plain text on a Windows XP machine running pirated IIS 4, and the exact format of "stealthis.txt" is defined and documented, ISO27001, ITIL, and every other certification can be yours!
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Jan 6, 2021 10:20
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Sanford posted:Re: middle management scams, at my old job a partner org very proudly displayed their new ISO27001 credentials and kept trying to insist we did the same. One of my staff found that every single customer detail for any organisation using their software was embedded in any hardware they ran it on, and the decryption password could be found in a plain text file on the same systems. Certification gets you a logo to put on your website and an easy tick in the “ISO27001 certified?” box when completing a tender. I failed my training on the revised ISO27001 regulations because I said that taking an unsecured device with private data out of the office was a data security risk. Those of you with memories may recall that the regulations were revised precisely because a couple of dumbasses left their unsecured devices containing private data on the train.
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Jan 6, 2021 10:30
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Butternubs posted:This is a few pages back but I'm convinced six sigma/agile etc are pretty much just middle management scams. Having seen some six sigma training its just common sense stuff?? with numbers?? and then they charge you 5k??? and they call themselves blackbelts? also I'm pretty sure in some places scrum is a euphemism for butthole. I think one of the major issues is that the average person in the UK has an absolutely appalling lack of ability with numbers. I was shocked to discover in my time: - a head of performance (assets not people) producing number-based reports for our national organisation who did not know how to calculate a % (I don't mean anything fancy like a gross profit margin, just a straight up 'what is 15% of 100' type thing - and did you know that a lot of people when asked that question will after some pondering say 6.67? Explain that! (I can but it took me quite some time to figure out why so many people got the same wrong answer). - People who didn't understand why, in a spreadsheet say, it was important to use a 0 (zero) for null if that's what you meant, not an O (oh) and why it made any difference. - People who thought that if inflation was 6% one year and 5% the next, then prices should be coming down (no wonder the tories get in all the time) - A senior person running extensive capital charging quarterly reports for a £500m estate who thought there were 4 months in a quarter (and then threatened to sack and not give a reference to the little clerk who realized the error that had been made and came in off her own back unpaid, unasked, on a saturday & sunday to rerun all the reports with 3 months in a quarter.) - Senior board level people who couldn't read a simple graph and were never going to own up to it (after realising this, I told my team that no graph was to leave our department without 3 bullet points on it explaining exactly why the graph was interesting) - A bunch of CEOs who had no clue as to the difference between a 'median' and 'mean' I could go on but I shan't. My main issue with 6 sigma was the 'values' - when you got in your team and those who were from the upper echelons of the management didn't think, for example, that the agreed at the first team meeting value of, say, 'honesty', applied to them, only those from the lower echelons. And as I mentioned, trying to use 6 sigma to prove a gut feeling and to force results that way, when it did the opposite. The problem with many of these new-fangled management toys is that as someone else has said ITT - if they contradict the 'gut feelings' and 'way we've always done things' and so forth, the companies will try to ignore the results that don't bolster their own prejudices.
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Jan 6, 2021 10:34
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if they can persuade you that everything they're saying is obvious/self-evident, they've already won; a lot of their biggest effects are "read between the lines" stuff some common flaws in management-led 6s: proposed new measurement mechanisms and data entry interfaces add nontrivial work relative to the improvement envisioned; proposed product owners have bad incentives to rig the KPIs (goodhart's law/campbell's law/mcnamara fallacy); small changes are heavily subject to hawthorne observer effects; management can be poorly placed to identify what existing mission-critical processes are when electing to measure them the biggest gain in 6s is in forcing stakeholders to 1) articulate any form of decisionmaking loop rather than none at all 2) codify business practices so that people know that they're happening at all 3) improve legibility of these processes to upper management so that they can be a conscious choice rather than a cumulated tradition. As pointed out, tradition and the accumulation of ad hoc processes is a powerful force, especially when feedback from stakeholders is not instantaneous. This is what all continuous improvement processes set out to achieve; the rest is just tweaking for industry suitability likewise for scrum: sprint commitments in scrum are not promises and they are not KPIs. Scheduling is owned by the product team. It is perpetually tempting for management to seize upon it as a performance measure; it is the role of the product owner to shield the team from external stakeholders like management, who can no longer seek to intervene with scheduling directly. A trick is to ask the external scrum consultant to clarify this when both the external consultant and management are in the room; you may see faces turn interesting colours scrum is a gain when sub-responsibilities are numerous and easily-defined, yet production legibility is inherently poor and regularly syncing the team's understanding of what's-happening-right-now is critical; hence a great deal of ceremony to pull people into general awareness. e.g., in daily standup, these are my blockers for today (scrum doesn't care to record it because it assumes that blockers evolve rapidly). Many products don't actually fit this production model though my sense is that kanban is more appropriate in the situations where many depts reach out for scrum/agile for - mainly they want long-term visibility and not short-term visibility
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Jan 6, 2021 10:41
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:- a head of performance (assets not people) producing number-based reports for our national organisation who did not know how to calculate a % (I don't mean anything fancy like a gross profit margin, just a straight up 'what is 15% of 100' type thing Jaeluni Asjil posted:- People who thought that if inflation was 6% one year and 5% the next, then prices should be coming down (no wonder the tories get in all the time) Jaeluni Asjil posted:- Senior board level people who couldn't read a simple graph and were never going to own up to it (after realising this, I told my team that no graph was to leave our department without 3 bullet points on it explaining exactly why the graph was interesting)  • This is good. • It means it works. • I don't care what you read on facebook.
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Jan 6, 2021 10:44
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His Divine Shadow posted:I did show this to my boss and we both agreed they can't actually enforce it, so gently caress 'em and sold some stuff to a UK customer with vat 0%. Short term that's likely fine, but medium to long term they'll just block the package at the customs border and ship it back.
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Jan 6, 2021 10:49
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Guavanaut posted:I blame Latin, if you said "what is 15 per hundred of 100" at least half of those would get it right. Percents are quite terrible anyway for many reasons. Off the top of my head, you've got percent vs percentage point change; the fact that e.g. something going up by 5% and then down by 5% leaves it at 99.75% of the original; the ambiguity of "has gone up by 200%" vs "has gone up to 200% of what it was". I wish more people would use factors, especially in the last case - gone up by a factor of 3 or 2. And yes, the number of otherwise intelligent people who are scared of going up a tax band...
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Jan 6, 2021 10:54
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:- a head of performance (assets not people) producing number-based reports for our national organisation who did not know how to calculate a % (I don't mean anything fancy like a gross profit margin, just a straight up 'what is 15% of 100' type thing - and did you know that a lot of people when asked that question will after some pondering say 6.67? Explain that! (I can but it took me quite some time to figure out why so many people got the same wrong answer). Well, I'm stumped. Why did people think 15% of a hundred is 6.67? Edit: Oh naturally it comes to me the moment I post, they divided 100 by 15
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Jan 6, 2021 10:55
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Gort posted:Well, I'm stumped. Why did people think 15% of a hundred is 6.67? I like this one, because then you ask them to work out 1% of 100 using the same method
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Jan 6, 2021 10:57
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I'm giving it 100% today!
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Jan 6, 2021 10:58
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Tarnop posted:I like this one, because then you ask them to work out 1% of 100 using the same method And 100% of 100. It's impressive numbering.
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Jan 6, 2021 11:00
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Gort posted:Well, I'm stumped. Why did people think 15% of a hundred is 6.67? Exactly! They half remember a handy 'trick' from school that to get 10% of something, divide by 10, and wrongly extend it to others. Took me weeks to fathom that one out! (It was question 1 of a test for job applicants who would be dealing with refund credits back in the days when VAT rates used to change frequently). (I'm talking pre-history here, when a whole branch office had one computer that had two floppy disks to run it and you had to book your hour a week on it in advance so all these calculations were done by hand.)
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Jan 6, 2021 11:04
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Bobstar posted:Percents are quite terrible anyway for many reasons. Off the top of my head, you've got percent vs percentage point change; the fact that e.g. something going up by 5% and then down by 5% leaves it at 99.75% of the original; the ambiguity of "has gone up by 200%" vs "has gone up to 200% of what it was". I wish more people would use factors, especially in the last case - gone up by a factor of 3 or 2. I have similar frustrations about how many people don't get "relations" (whatever the English word is) right. E.g. "Dilute syrup 10:1 with water" -> quick, how many parts are in the mix? how much water do you add to 1 dl of syrup?
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Jan 6, 2021 11:04
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Percentages are awful and unintuitive for anything other than very simple values. Instead of saying “Production this year saw a 20% decrease” just say it dropped by a fifth or even better give raw values
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Jan 6, 2021 11:05
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Mano posted:I have similar frustrations about how many people don't get "relations" (whatever the English word is) right.
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Jan 6, 2021 11:07
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The other biggie is 'risk'. Eg: Year 1: Your risk of getting Blogg's Disease from drinking too much water is 1 in 10000. Year 2: Ditto is 2 in 10000. Newspaper headlines: OMG! Risk of catching Blogg's Disease from drinking too much water has doubled in a year. (which it has - sounds terrifying - but what was it to start with?)
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Jan 6, 2021 11:09
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stev posted:And 100% of 100. It's impressive numbering. I wonder how much of that is because of the weird and counterintuitive way calculators deal with percentages? I'm generally pretty good at maths (well arithmetic - once letters start getting involved my brain refuses to process them) and have never, ever got a correct answer out of a calculator when trying to do percentage calculations using the percent key - I just remember how to do them by multiplying/dividing by number/100 instead. (I once had to spend a fun afternoon teaching a project manager - who for some reason insisted on using a desk calculator rather than Excel or even a pen and paper for working out budgets - how to do this. The thing is he was a contractor who had been doing the job for years at dozens of companies and apparently nobody had realised all of his numbers were complete bollocks until I came along)
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Jan 6, 2021 11:11
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:The other biggie is 'risk'.  
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Jan 6, 2021 11:11
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https://twitter.com/NickMotown/status/1346494330027073536 Could have been worse, there could have been chocolate mousse involved.
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Jan 6, 2021 11:16
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Tarnop posted:You'd be surprised how much common sense appears indistinguishable from magic to people raised on "that's how we've always done it" orthodoxy The company I work for had a failing call centre in South Africa that was in danger of being shut down. I think most companies would hire a management consultant to solve that, but instead my company sent me. At the time I was a regular front-line call handler, with the only thing to distinguish me that I'd completed the company's internal course that qualified me to train new staff. The message I got was basically "You work in a site that performs well, go over there and tell them what they're doing wrong. Oh and if you can't fix it we'll shut the centre and fire them all". I'll tell you, you've never really felt impostor syndrome until you're giving a presentation to a Vice President of Operations on how to manage their entire operation with such stunning insights as "give every team 15 minutes every day to just get together and talk about work" and "team leaders should spend time more time interacting with staff".
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Jan 6, 2021 11:22
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Just had a quick company all-hands meeting (we have one every couple weeks) - - Company employees have had the covids (we're 200 people or so and it's 1 in 40 in London right now I think? So not surprising) - They know and expect we're not going to be at full working capacity for the next bit and will be communicating that to our shareholders - They're not going to even try and predict a back in the office date, even 'the summer' - instead they'll give us 2 months' warning, whenever it is. It's nice working somewhere that doesn't want to kill me.
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Jan 6, 2021 11:26
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Today's hosed already, going back to bed.
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Jan 6, 2021 11:28
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Bobstar posted:Percents are quite terrible anyway for many reasons. Off the top of my head, you've got percent vs percentage point change; the fact that e.g. something going up by 5% and then down by 5% leaves it at 99.75% of the original; the ambiguity of "has gone up by 200%" vs "has gone up to 200% of what it was". I wish more people would use factors, especially in the last case - gone up by a factor of 3 or 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrAgT86UzSU
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Jan 6, 2021 11:29
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feedmegin posted:It's nice working somewhere that doesn't want to kill me. They still probably do, they're just biding their time
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Jan 6, 2021 11:30
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:I think one of the major issues is that the average person in the UK has an absolutely appalling lack of ability with numbers. Human beings are stupid as gently caress but don't worry; https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180308105152.htm https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/29/air-pollution-worlds-children-breathing-toxic-air-who-study-finds They are going to get a lot stupider
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Jan 6, 2021 11:34
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kyojin posted:Human beings are stupid as gently caress but don't worry; Whatever about toxic particulates, in 30 years the CO2 ppm is gonna be about equivalent to an unventilated classroom 5 minutes before lunch - we'll be lucky if anyone is able to form a complete sentence
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Jan 6, 2021 11:37
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Failed Imagineer posted:Whatever about toxic particulates, in 30 years the CO2 ppm is gonna be about equivalent to an unventilated classroom 5 minutes before lunch - we'll be lucky if anyone is able to form a complete sentence maybe the plastic will form a protective layer https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/22/microplastics-revealed-in-placentas-unborn-babies
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Jan 6, 2021 11:42
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Pablo Bluth posted:This all reminds me of this video that Youtube decided to show me recently. kyojin posted:Human beings are stupid as gently caress but don't worry;
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Jan 6, 2021 11:43
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Guavanaut posted:Today's hosed already, going back to bed. Tobty Young Guavanaut posted:Badly worded question problem, they were obviously going for addition but hosed the wording. Reminds me of all those "only genius will get this" social media questions like 4 + 2 * 5 - 1 = ? and the correct answer is "define your order of operations binch".  E: having watched the video, I could see the first too options from the thumbnail slide, but the third option hadn't even occurred to me, presumably because it matches my preconception that "gone up by 200% = factor of 3" is stupid and makes as much sense as Ralph thinking he's a viking at sleep meaning he's very good at it (see Simpsons meme thread). Bobstar fucked around with this message at 11:55 on Jan 6, 2021 |
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Jan 6, 2021 11:46
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Guavanaut posted:Badly worded question problem, they were obviously going for addition but hosed the wording. Reminds me of all those "only genius will get this" social media questions like 4 + 2 * 5 - 1 = ? and the correct answer is "define your order of operations binch". Well as a society we've agreed on the order of operations ( I assume it's the same in non-Anglophone countries even if they don't use BEDMAS/BOMDAS/PEDMAS or whatever). But yeah it becomes more a test of cultural recollection than any objective measure of logic or whatever. Personally as a maths non-conformist I treat all such problems as ISDN numbers and the answer is whatever book title is the closest match
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Jan 6, 2021 11:49
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He's so poo poo https://twitter.com/GMB/status/1346735384751960065?s=19
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Jan 6, 2021 11:49
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Jose posted:He's so poo poo Prosecuting antivaxxers isn't poo poo.
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Jan 6, 2021 11:52
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feedmegin posted:Just had a quick company all-hands meeting (we have one every couple weeks) - Yeah we had an email round on Monday saying that they were postponing any back in the office date to an indeterminate point in the future. I'm still trying to push to stay home forever because honestly gently caress going into the office.
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Jan 6, 2021 11:53
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feedmegin posted:Just had a quick company all-hands meeting (we have one every couple weeks) - I've started a new role at a company which didn't have any culture of working from home until COVID hit. They've just announced that everyone can buy a grands worth of kit for a home office and get it reimbursed, including anything they've bought since the pandemic hit. That's pretty good.
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Jan 6, 2021 11:53
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Jose posted:He's so poo poo He IS hugely poo poo but not for this, can't disagree that antivax should be considered a crime, because seriously, it's killed people
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Jan 6, 2021 11:57
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I've been working at home since March and I love it. It's one of the few little upsides of the government completely loving up the pandemic response.
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Jan 6, 2021 11:58
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