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Thread: The OT thread V1

  1. #3811
    Insider PBSteve's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by cockerpunk View Post
    mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

    the farther i go in my career the less i see technical or scientific problems, and the more i see ALL problems as organizational or motivational. either you don't have the organization to tackle the problem, or you lack the vision to go after it effectively. the scientific and technical details are minor issues compared these.
    Great point.
    Ever so many citizens of this republic think they ought to believe that the Universe is a monarchy, and therefore they are always at odds with the republic. -Alan Watts

    I work for the company building the Paragon

  2. #3812
    yeah, idk. like i like being the hero technical guy. thats a role i trained all my life for, and i like it, and when it happens its great.

    but in the grand scheme of things, the hero technical guy is actually a band-aid for a set of fundamental problems. you dont need to be the hero if your organization actually dedicated the time and resources you need to fix the problem when you actually needed to fix the problem. and he/she doesn't need to be a technical hero if the team is cross functional and working together properly.

    ultimately, these are management problems, not technical problems. they manifest as "it doesn't work" but really, its "we don't work"



    idk, i liken it to taking over bedlam at the old CPX. everyone, including the woodsballers, LOVEs to mix it up in bedlam, but the tournament guys are much much much better at it, because it functionally plays far closer to a tournament field, than the woods do. but the dirty secret to actually taking over bedlam, isn't to fight through the city itself, its to take the woods on the one side and shoot everyone in the back. and yet, the second bedlam is in play, everyone run there, including the woodsball guys who are just gonna die in a gun fight with someone who is smaller, lighter, faster and and better at it than them. meanwhile, they'd have a way better chance at taking bedlam, if they stayed in the woods, and steamrolled them there. and like managers, woodsballers are even bad at playing woodsball, where they are supposed to be better than the tournament guys. thus forcing the guys who understand this, to play crawl on there belly woodsball, and try and push through the woods because thats the actually effective way to win the game.

    if feel like this in my career right now. like, i want to play bedlam and be a technical guy. but its also largely useless in comparison to actually fixing the systemic problems in the organization that some level of management could actually do. and, that woodsballers (managers) are actually super shitty at woodsball (managing).
    social conservatism: the mortal fear that someone, somewhere, might be having fun.

  3. #3813
    Insider imped4now's Avatar
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    As an ex-tourney player who enjoys woodsball more than anything now (and I don't use the typical "woodsball" gear), I can definitely agree. The "woodsball" guys are largely incompetent and just tend to be annoyances.
    OlllllllO

  4. #3814
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    Feeling that pretty hard right now.

    Loving doing deep technical work, and taking training on stuff. It's my job to do this tech work.

    But at the same time, I know that it's more beneficial to be looking at the organization as a whole and trying to find efficiencies to make my team's job easier. But hitting roadblock after roadblock in doing so.

    As an example: I want to roll out some 'lego blocks' style code chunks, as many of my team's software components are largely identical, and we're having to write them multiple times. Yet I'm being cautioned against it left and right, it's like people actively want 4 engineers doing work when it could be done by 1 in the same amount of time.

    Another would be a style guide - we don't have one and it shows, and it takes us just THAT much longer to get acquainted with each person's code during a review. Like, it wouldn't be that hard to make a guide and have everyone follow it. It's unanimously agreed within my team that it's a good idea. But every time I try to do something, someone finally pipes up and goes "but I don't agree and I'm doing it MY way." Well FUCK YOUR WAY WE'RE TRYING TO DO THIS AS A TEAM YOU DICK

  5. #3815
    Quote Originally Posted by new ion? View Post
    Feeling that pretty hard right now.

    Loving doing deep technical work, and taking training on stuff. It's my job to do this tech work.

    But at the same time, I know that it's more beneficial to be looking at the organization as a whole and trying to find efficiencies to make my team's job easier. But hitting roadblock after roadblock in doing so.

    As an example: I want to roll out some 'lego blocks' style code chunks, as many of my team's software components are largely identical, and we're having to write them multiple times. Yet I'm being cautioned against it left and right, it's like people actively want 4 engineers doing work when it could be done by 1 in the same amount of time.

    Another would be a style guide - we don't have one and it shows, and it takes us just THAT much longer to get acquainted with each person's code during a review. Like, it wouldn't be that hard to make a guide and have everyone follow it. It's unanimously agreed within my team that it's a good idea. But every time I try to do something, someone finally pipes up and goes "but I don't agree and I'm doing it MY way." Well FUCK YOUR WAY WE'RE TRYING TO DO THIS AS A TEAM YOU DICK
    interesting.

    we certainly have what i would call "soft power" issues where i work too. getting buy in from folks on the vision of the solution is tough. I've been trying pretty hard to tackle that issue with a communication chain problem we consistently have here. but there are so many issues that hard power can't solve. that just having the authority to actually fix the problem wont fix it either, everyone along the chain needs to have buy in, needs to understand there role in the vision, and how what they are doing every day fits into that vision.

    and thats not a job description problem, its a management problem. you need buy in on a real level, not just based on authority, but based on soft power to solve the problem.
    social conservatism: the mortal fear that someone, somewhere, might be having fun.

  6. #3816
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    Re: soft power

    I've had much more success just implementing solutions (e.g. style guide, standardized data frame, tooling ecosystem) and then proselytizing for them to get gradual conversion. Earlier in my career I would try to design a sweeping solution set, present it at a meeting, and you can get nods of agreement, but you never get any conversion of behavior. Obviously this doesn't work where a large investment is required, I'm thinking mostly about inefficient processes.

    It takes a shocking amount of time and touch to enact change. Right now I am dealing with a bunch of historical data from a contract lab that was conducted without a formal SOP, with something like a 5 dimensional variable space. I have to waste a month of contract lab time ($$$) just to build a statistical model so I can normalize our old historical data in a meaningful way just to screen hypotheses and then anything interesting we'll have to re-run empirically anyway. It's a pain, but we would have all agreed up front to do the data collection in a logical (full factorial) fashion.
    "So you've done this before?"
    "Oh, hell no. But I think it's gonna work."

  7. #3817
    Quote Originally Posted by Lurker27 View Post
    Re: soft power

    I've had much more success just implementing solutions (e.g. style guide, standardized data frame, tooling ecosystem) and then proselytizing for them to get gradual conversion. Earlier in my career I would try to design a sweeping solution set, present it at a meeting, and you can get nods of agreement, but you never get any conversion of behavior. Obviously this doesn't work where a large investment is required, I'm thinking mostly about inefficient processes.

    It takes a shocking amount of time and touch to enact change. Right now I am dealing with a bunch of historical data from a contract lab that was conducted without a formal SOP, with something like a 5 dimensional variable space. I have to waste a month of contract lab time ($$$) just to build a statistical model so I can normalize our old historical data in a meaningful way just to screen hypotheses and then anything interesting we'll have to re-run empirically anyway. It's a pain, but we would have all agreed up front to do the data collection in a logical (full factorial) fashion.
    yeah, i mean, like any engineering problem, perfect is the enemy of good enough. some minor part of a larger solution being implemented is already significantly better than a bunch of power points expounding some kind of perfect solution. change and improvements rarely happen in step changes, they happen in evolution.

    and what i've found is that you can get a lot more buy in a lot faster if you have a track record established on minor things that work great, than on trying to convince someone else you have the perfect solution if they only listen.

    this also means limiting the scope of your solution is key to actually getting it implemented.
    social conservatism: the mortal fear that someone, somewhere, might be having fun.

  8. #3818
    Insider PBSteve's Avatar
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    There's a severe lack of management where I'm at. Historically we've been an R&D company, but recently the owner has been pushing for production items. I'm in charge of one of those "production" items - think tens of units annually.

    At any rate, due to the void of management I have incredible leeway and can pretty much usurp power at will. It's very dangerous. The frustrating part is that most people where I work have no clue what production looks like (the higher ups), so convincing people to adopt and enforce standards of work and documentation of work has been a nightmare.
    Ever so many citizens of this republic think they ought to believe that the Universe is a monarchy, and therefore they are always at odds with the republic. -Alan Watts

    I work for the company building the Paragon

  9. #3819
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    Its somewhat therapeutic to learn this isn't limited to Architecture.

    I'm on the technical team for my firm, taking "design" and making it work. Client is already sold, I have to make it buildable.

    Boss is old school. Loves to complain about how long stuff takes, how they've always done it, etc.

    Except the way they used to do it allowed 6 months to a year to draw a construction set. I'm getting 8-12 weeks for ever more complicated designs.

    And I'm not allowed to implement BIM.

    The amount of stuff I could solve in minutes with a live 3d model vs hours or days of line drawing is astounding.
    Draws houses, doesn't own markers that aren't single tube designs, unapologetic AGD zealot.

  10. #3820
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    About six months ago my wife made the decision to drive past our local grocery store and start shopping at Lidl instead. Lidl is pretty much the same thing as Aldi, only you don't have to pay for your shopping carts and the checkout process is not quite so barbarian or annoying.

    And... we haven't really gone back to our regular grocery much at all since then. We pay somewhere between a quarter to a half of the price of our former shopping bills at Kroger. Proteins in particular are much cheaper, though the selection is also seasonally limited (Halibut and Rack ribs show up for a few weeks and then disappear again). Also seasonally the Lidl franchise seems to do theme offerings - Taco Month or Greek Month or similar where they have an aisle just dedicated to items that fit within the theme. Not just competing on fruits and vegetables, they also sell European brand hardware, tools, clothing, and toys. It's an interesting addition to the original premise of much cheaper groceries.

    I read a newspaper article that said the stores are basically designed around attracting people in upper middle class areas, and it certainly seems like the store is catering to my interests and tastes (specialty coffees and pastries, artisan cheeses, etc.). Has anyone else tried switching to Aldi/Lidl, and what are your thoughts about the good and bad of making a switch like this?

    TLDR: I feel like I'm winning a grocery store game when I buy salmon and prosciutto for a third of the price of my old grocery bills.

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