Getting fired for Blogging
Published on 5 Aug 2005 at 12:21 am by John |
No Comments |
Trackback
Filed under And Stock Options For All, Technopolitical, Blogosphere, Business and Corporation Related, Information Technology.
Am I missing something here? Shouldn’t this all be very simple? If you’re using your employer’s resources, time, network connection, computer system, you follow their rules. If you’re using your own, you follow your rules. (which should also include legal issues such as NDA, libel, fraud, slander, etc.)
The only grey area I can see is this question of whether you’re representing the company or not. That needs to be made clear in the same way that if you are active in a political party or a civic group you wouldn’t reference your employer and if you’re speaking at a trade association etc. you might or might not depending upon company approval, and if you’re negotiating with a supplier, you definitely are. This seems to me to one of those areas where traditional "world of atoms" rules are entirely adequate and the technology aspect of it is largely superficial.
On the other hand, if you have an employer who will fire you for the difference in appearance, you’ve got bigger problems and you’ll have to work it out for yourself whether you want to work for someone with such a superficial understanding of the dynamics of business and technology. It might at first seem smart to "go along to get along" and perhaps that is a viable short term strategy, but I think these things all come out in the wash, and eventually an employer hung up on superficialities and/or in the habit of over reaching into an employee’s personal life is going to be a bigger problem than finding a new job.
Cargo Cult of Retirement
Published on 4 Aug 2005 at 12:27 am by John |
2 Comments |
Trackback
Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Thanks for Playing, Technopolitical, Business and Corporation Related, Government: Federal, State and Local, Economics and the Economy.
Jane Galt blogs about whether the Social Security Trust Fund is real, and has a lively discussion in the comments. It’s clear that she and many of her commenters know a great deal more about how the Social Security system works than I do.
I’m wary of the word "just." It’s so often the preface to a remark of profound, and sometimes willful, ignorance of the issues and realities of a complex situation. As in "the software we have isn’t working all that well, let’s just buy something else… " or "the solution we purchased isn’t fitting our needs, so let’s just write our own." It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the solution being proposed, but the word "just" is an indicator that the speaker probably doesn’t grasp the full implication of what they’re suggesting.
At risk of falling into that trap with slightly different wording, it seems to me that the Social Security problems are fairly straight forward. I don’t know about the solutions, but understanding why this "trust fund" question is moot should be pretty easy.
JUST look at it this way…
For all intents and purposes, the federal government has one real income stream, taxation. The lion’s share of which comes from income taxes and Social Security FICA payments.
The federal government has certain outlays which change over time and always seem to run ahead of its income, in order to fund this debt the government issues bonds, IOUs. It is my understanding that the trust fund of the Social Security system in invested in these instruments. The issuer of these bonds, the government (general fund I guess you’d say), doesn’t have the cash sitting around to pay them, they spent it.
IF the Social Security system’s obligations to an exploding retirement age population cause it to need to tap into those bonds, assuming that they are going pay, one of two things can happen, both of which are pretty much equivalent.
1. In order to prevent the need to cash those bonds, the government can raise the FICA contribution on current workers, thus increasing the Social Security system’s income and ability to meet those obligations.
2. The government can cash the bonds, in order to do that they raise income taxes on current workers to pay that.
So, it doesn’t matter, you pay on the FICA line, or you pay on the regular income tax line, but you still pay. There are some fine points in terms of the regressive nature of FICA, and the different distribution of who pays how much where, but the point remains that the existence or non-existence of this fund is largely academic. It’s a matter of appearance not reality since neither the holder, nor the issuer of the bonds has the ability to pay without recourse to its income stream, which is you and me.
It’s worth noting that there are some other possible actions, but they don’t effect whether the trust fund exists or not. They could cut benefits, or simply default on Social Security altogether. The money could come from an even greater national debt rather than taxation, but that’s a distinction without a difference really.
Well, if it doesn’t matter, then what should we do? Well, like the man said, "Here’s what I think, but I might be wrong."
In my opinion this is a golden opportunity for Social Security reform. At the moment, the real crisis has not yet struck. I don’t know of anyone under the age of 45 who expects or has ever expected to see a dime from Social Security. As that population ages into their 50s we’re going to lose that advantage.
Some ideas, these are off the cuff and not well thought out, but the idea is plain:
1. Immediately begin to sunset Social Security, stop collecting FICA.
2. Build a graduated tapering down of benefits. Perhaps anyone over 60 gets the current standard package. Anyone between 50 and 60 gets 75% with very high means test cap, perhaps no benefits to anyone with over 50 million in assets, or some income figure. Taper it down from there.
3. Break the bad news to those of us who never expected to benefit anyway, we still have half our lives to *not* pay into Social Security and most of us will be happy to trade the already lost payments for not having to pay in the future.
4. Create a means tested safety net so that anyone over a certain age (say 60) or disabled under the old SSI rules can get a minimum standard of living. Never try to claim this is a retirement plan, it’s a minimum standard for those who fall through the cracks.
5. Fund the saftey net out of the general fund, don’t try to claim there’s a Trust Fund, don’t regressively cap the "contribution".
6. Raise the contribution limit on Roth and 401K to extremely high limits. If people take care of themselves the rest of us won’t have to.
IBM Speaks With Forked Tongue
Published on 3 Aug 2005 at 1:24 pm by Paul |
1 Comment |
Trackback
Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Manifest Masquerade, Service With A Smirk, Brain Trust, Technopolitical, Business and Corporation Related, Information Technology, Open Source Software.
It seems that bait-and-switch with promises to comply with licensing terms are the vogue these days. Although IBM has gone above and beyond the call of misdirection on this one, with a slippery slide of weaseling worthy of a certain erstwhile U.S. President. TechTarget/Search400 covers the initial "Neener-Neener!" from IBM to its user base. You have to give these slick dogs some credit though; in spite of operating in what is clearly a crass and viciously self-serving paradigm, ol’ Big Blue was quick to backpedal when the heat started rising.
But this sort of corporate shilly-shallying is not what leads IBM to suddenly grace the pages of Cargo Cult. Infomatics (in turn webcasting VNUnet) has the 411 on the real dish in this incident: IBM was pulling a stipulated open source license. And this wasn’t a simple case of "well, we changed our minds" either, which the whole paradigm of open source is designed to prevent. No, it’s clear from just the superficial facts that Big Blue deliberately engaged in a campaign of misinformation regarding the license terms of the product.
As noted in the Infomatics/VNUnet article, IBM slung all the right buzzwords to generate the appearance of an open source product, without ever putting their lawyers where their mouth was. Of course, it only worked because the user community was willing to buy off on the bamboo airframe IBM was putting up in lieu of specific licensing terms. But shame and shame again on IBM for such double-dealings. And it doesn’t stop there; they’re still at it with their damage control. Per Infomatics/VNUnet, "She [Spokeswoman Kathleen McGraw] added that the vendor is looking to release the code under an Open Source licence."
"Looking to release the code." The nerve of these people! It makes you wonder how many people are going to swallow that little bone hook, line, and sinker, and think that IBM has now somehow repented of its deceptive ways and is going to play it straight. Don’t anyone believe it until you see the whites of their counsel’s eyes. If they truly recognized the wickedness of their ways, they would have thrown a gallon of midnight oil at the legal team and spat the code back out the next day under legitimate OSS paper. Instead, we get statements like this (per TechTarget): "In fact, Herring said if Perotti had brought the issue up with him directly, he would have told him that IBM was perfectly willing to support CGIDEV2 moving forward."
"Willing to support" being the operative words here. Not, "willing to make good on their stipulation of offering the tool as open source." And given IBM’s initial response to Perotti, I can’t help but take Herring’s comment with a large shaker of salt. Were I in upper management and I got wind of these goings-on, I’d start my internal war engines rolling. This is probably a bigger PR problem than IBM realizes, since thanks to the Internet and the blogosphere, their ability to just erase their deceptive marketing is severely limited. That being the case, as an IBM Xzec I’d want to get all my open source circles closed poste haste, immediately issuing a press release that IBM was reviewing all products currently marketed as open source to make sure that attendant OSS licensing was in place. And then, by God, I’d make sure it happened.
It’s our mission here at Cargo Cult to expose twisted memetic engineering, and IBM’s behavior in this case nearly makes it a poster child for how to hoodwink a user community. We can still hope that the upper ranks of IBM will take a dim view of this incident and work to restore Big Blue’s reputation for forthrightness and diligence with all things open source, especially given their prominence with Linux based products. Obviously, I’m hoping that my own obscure blog entry in some way helps effect this. But until IBM gets their licenses back on their sleeve where they belong, anyone dealing with them in the area of open source development should upgrade their memetic firewall code accordingly. And for all the other engineers out there, "show me the license" should become watchwords.
Greetings Corporate America!
Published on 3 Aug 2005 at 9:00 am by Administrator |
No Comments |
Trackback
Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Business and Corporation Related.
What else are two entrepreneurial IT consultants to do but form a weblog to share our expertise and perspectives with the business community at large. At the least, we seek to entertain and enlighten, fostering change for the better in those aspects of corporate life desperately in need of improvement. At best, we hope to become a center for recognizing the outstanding quality and excellence in execution that so few firms seem to actually achieve. And perhaps our profiles will be raised sufficiently for new clients to seek out our business insights and retain our services. 
Dynamic running engagement with a constituency: that’s the whole idea behind a "business" blog in the first place, isn’t it? As our About page indicates, as we see it our mission is pointing out the unwitting attention to form over substance that is the cause of so much disruption and failure in the business world. Wherever possible we hope to offer prescriptive advice on how to avoid this deadliest of pitfalls. But there’ll be plenty of opportunity to reveal the nakedness of emperors and post "Danger, Will Robinson!" signs going forwards. For now, on with the show…
John and Paul
Mental Mono-Culture
Published on 2 Aug 2005 at 12:19 am by John |
No Comments |
Trackback
Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Principal Acronyms Only, Business and Corporation Related, Information Technology.
Michael Hawley writes about the paucity of modern renaissance men — and women — in Technology Review. He especially points out the extreme specialization of modern careers.
In agriculture the term “monocrop" is used to describe large plantings of the same, usually genetically similar, and in some cases genetically identical crops. Such plantings are very susceptible to disease and pests. Economically speaking, it is also madness to depend upon them because a failure of one crop can wipe out the farmer financially. Diversification is, of course, the solution, as any financial planner will tell you.
Modern American business practices nearly ensure a mental monocrop. A business which has hired and developed a staff consisting of people from one particular discipline has embraced this practice, but so has one which preferentially — or lazily — hires individuals with a very narrow skill set. Since neither the staff as a whole, nor individual employees themselves are sufficiently diversified the organization cannot adequately respond to changing market conditions, recognize opportunities outside its usual core business, or develop the unique synergies which arise when ideas and viewpoints are allowed to cross from one discipline into another.
Hiring smart, flexible people with broad education and experience can solve this problem, but is rarely practiced. I suppose it’s more difficult to identify smart, capable, flexible people than it is to check off buzzwords on a resume. Still, this is what’s needed.
I will use IT as an example since it is the area with which I’m most familiar. Most software developers will tell you that a solid understanding of how computer systems work is the keystone of their art. Once a developer really understands computers and programming them, the rest is mostly syntax and slogging. While there is an advantage in recent experience with a particular syntax it is not an overwhelming one, and a good developer can pick up a new syntax in a matter of a few days to a few weeks.
Furthermore, IT issues in general are largely the same across industries. The British government has actually constructed a management standard called ITIL which pays little or no attention to industry or market sector, and is quickly becoming the global standard for certifying IT managers and organizing IT departments and infrastructure.
In spite of all of this, a quick look at Monster or Dice will show you thousands of employers requiring experience in a particular industry, and thousands more requiring experience with a particular software package. Similarly certifications are taken in lieu of actual ability, the ads are filled with requirements for MCSE, ITIL, PMI, 6 Sigma, CCNA, and many others. It’s not that I don’t recognize the need for expertise, or even for a certain degree of specialization. Rather the problem comes in mis-defining the level of specialization (experience with QuickBasic vs. VisualBasic for an extreme example) and in failing to set the proper value on a broad background of experience and education. Perhaps the IT world is a little faster changing than some, but across the modern business spectrum we live in an environment of fast and accelerating change.
Overspecialization and monoculture both individually and organizationally leave us poorly prepared to meet, or profit from, change.
Cisco and the Serpent’s Tooth
Published on 1 Aug 2005 at 12:00 pm by Paul |
4 Comments |
Trackback
Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Brain Trust, Technopolitical, Business and Corporation Related, Networking Technology, Information Technology.
I normally prefer to address issues in the networking industry at a more strategic level, but the recent flap over the response to Michael Lynn’s dogged determination to air confidential information at a trade conference begs commentary. What interests me about this situation are the off-the-cuff reactions that seemed to ripple through the various hi-tech industries in the wake of Cisco’s decision to not disclose details of the vulnerability in their products. The Washington Post’s initial take on the situation is evocative, and clearly shows an "anti-censorship" bias in the treatment of the incident. Cnet has a somewhat more even-handed treatment, but even their very page title implies a "retaliatory" position on Cisco’s part. As might be expected for the world’s largest networking vendor throwing its weight around, the tempest in a teapot gained legs in the media, culminating in a gathering storm of pitchforks and torches according to this subsequent Cnet article (warning: Cnet’s proofreading failures waxed scatological, at least at the time of this article’s writing. I guess the columnists are above needing spam-checking software… 
).
And so, watching the hacker community cycle up into a dull roar of opprobrium at Cisco, I find myself wondering, "Which part about ‘confidential and proprietary’ don’t these people understand?" We can presume and infer from various comments from the principals involved in the (now supposedly settled) dispute that at no time was the question of whether the "sensitive data" was Lynn’s property in dispute: It most decidedly was never his! Were the context of this situation different, namely, an employee of an American defense contractor disclosing secret– and damaging– military information on say, weapons systems architecture, such treacherous behavior would be resoundingly denounced. The bigger the supposed "vulnerability" ("Look, ma, you can set off an atomic warhead remotely!"), the more treacherous the "whistleblower’s" activity would be viewed as. But because of the context– and, I contend, only because of the context– of the Cisco imbroglio, the violator’s actions come to be viewed as some noble blow in the cause of freedom, and the victims (Cisco and ISS) end up portrayed as overbearing thugs for trying to recover control of their intellectual property.
In what will surely become a mantra on Cargo Cult, you just can’t make this stuff up. Such complete disengagement from the factual proceedings and the ongoing conflation of purely emotional biases into actual policy positions is the meat and potatoes of the very idea of cargo cult business practices. At least on Slashdot, we notice that some of the more level-headed folks figured this out. It’s just insane to think that as an employee you can walk around disclosing whatever confidential information you please in direct defiance of your prevailing legal agreements with your employer and even your employer’s explicit instructions. If the information you disclose could be– or, worse, is– used to cause widespread harm to millions of people, then it’s equally insane to think that you’re not going find yourself doing a legal dance in the criminal courts. As noted by the Slashdot readers, it’s been long established that the first ammendment just doesn’t apply in cases of causing widespread harm, panic, and disruption. And it certainly doesn’t apply when you’ve signed a legal agreement to maintain the confidentiality of information that is under your control and that never in any way ever belonged to you.
This isn’t a case of "whistleblowing", it’s a case of near-criminal misconduct on the part of a (clearly misguided) employee. Read on…
A Resurgent Sears?
Published on 1 Aug 2005 at 12:25 am by John |
No Comments |
Trackback
Filed under Brain Trust, Winners and Losers.
Sears was synonymous with catalog retailing and virtually owned the rural retail market in America. In 1993, after many false starts they blew it completely when they discontinued their catalog just in time for the World Wide Web (already in existence at that time) to breathe new life into the market that they abandoned. Now Kmart has purchased this American institution in an effort to compete with Wal-Mart. It seems to me that Sears actually has a great opportunity to come back in a big way.
Merely being a "me too" in the online retailing world won’t do the job though. Historically Sears did some things that no one is doing now.
1. They maintained a string of "catalog outlet stores" in small towns across the country. These stores served as a distribution system for large objects, a network of service centers, and a show room for selected (usually high dollar) products.
2. They offered nearly everything at one time or another, including items that are no longer available mail order from anyone, and they had built a brand which reassured people about purchasing unusual and high cost items, even houses.
3. Their big book catalog contained a truly amazing range and selection of products with published prices. These products included items which were not necessarily trendy, but which were genuinely in line with the changing day to day needs and wants of their customer base.
Can Sears come back? I think so. The brand isn’t completely shot, and if they were to begin living up to it again it could very well come back. The reputation of Craftsman hand tools has never lost its luster… I think they need to use modern technology, air freight, the internet, customer polling data, etc. to rebuild that catalog outlet network and couple it with a database driven online version of the big book which would put even its original to shame. How to compete with Wal-Mart? Don’t, just go around them and get back to the roots of your business and your brand.
Bad Weekend for Best Buy
Published on 25 Apr 2005 at 9:29 am by John |
No Comments |
Trackback
Filed under Service With A Smirk, In Corporations We Trust.
Both Lileks and GeekWithA.45 had run-ins with Best Buy over the weekend. I think they’ve pretty much covered the poor customer service angle. I hope retailers are taking note and we’ll soon see them competing for anonymous/no hassle service.
This over reaching appears to be a general pattern, not just retailers. Why is it that we suddenly think we have the right to subject others to routine requests for personal data? I believe that it’s an attitude shift originating in government practices which has been picked up and imitated by corporations but I also think that the educational system has a lot to answer for. The idea that public schools and even universites act in loco parentis has turned out to be a subtle and destructive doctrine in many ways, but this one not least among them. Parents are indeed entitled to require information about their children which would be inappapropriate to request let alone require from others. The public school is then substituted for parental authority, and just when the adolescent breaks away from the actual parent, a giant collegiate bureaucracy steps in to take over the role.
After 23 years of practice we’re in the habit of mindlessly providing anyone with an authoritative demeanor and a large bureaucracy any information which they might demand. It’s a short step from there to employer drug testing and financial disclosure. I think the same dynamics contribute to the extreme susceptibility to social engineering. "Name please, address, social security. Thanks. Phone number please… Please read off the MAC and IP addresses… thank you. Bank account number and credit card number please… Yes, thank. Oh, and may I have your PIN? Thank you so very much. Now, how may I help you today?"
One more small item, Lileks mentions an entire corporate phone system malfunctioning. I couldn’t help but wonder whether this is one of those organizations where they’ve decided that IT isn’t part of the core business and outsourced it. Or perhaps the CIO was instructed to eliminate that ridiculously expensive new phone switch from the budget. I can’t say for sure how much business is lost through these two means, but I really believe that companies lost far too much through poor infrastructure management and planning and far too little through customer reaction to excessive and intrusive data gathering.
