Analytics

Sunday, November 26, 2017

Post #3457 M

Quote of the Day

Courage does not always roar. 
Sometimes, it is the quiet voice 
at the end of the day saying, 
"I will try again tomorrow".
Anonymous  

Tweet of the Day



























Facebook Corner


(Feminists For Life). Noteworthy: Men care less than women about their boss' gender, and younger women want a female boss more than older women.
Workplace campaigns are ongoing this fall. FFL's CFC number is 10499 -- or please write us in if you are not a federal employee. Thank you!

Nope. My experience is only anecdotal, but I can say, by far, the worst bosses I've ever had have been women--at least 4 I know have been abominations to the profession. They tended to have a chip on the shoulders (it's because I'm a woman, isn't it?), micromanaged and explicitly threatened, were literally incompetent (I work in the IT profession), and were petty, presumptuous and judgmental. I could go into details, but I'm not going to go into detail in a feminist forum, where I seriously doubt people are receptive to frank discussions.

 Oh, to be sure I've also had a couple of cartoonishly bad male bosses, one when I was a professor at UTEP. There are nuances among all of these, but the male bosses tended to be more secure and less defensive, less obtrusive and more willing to delegate authority.

 I will give an illustrative example, not a direct report but a client female VP with the power to have me walked out of the building with a single phone call. My contractor DBA predecessor had been walked off after just 2 weeks, and I was sent to replace her (and was there far longer).

 I don't want to get into the technical weeds, but the client was an American subsidiary of airport shops specializing in tax-preferred merchandise, operating out of the Baltimore suburbs. The HR department had licensed a product to an ERP suite I specialized in; use of the product required a specialized upgrade driver patch. The accountants were opposed to this (because of fear-mongering by troublemaking, incompetent consultants); this plays later in this comment. The upgrade patch failed--which I had never seen happen before. In researching the problem, I discovered that the database character set (set at database creation) was a default US7ASCII, even though the environment was set to reflect the correct prerequisite Western European character set.

 The database publisher basically required the problem to be resolved by recreating the database under the right character set and importing the current database into it. The current production DBA was a long-term contractor, more of a developer (programmer) who eventually inherited the role. He went to the client VP saying there was a simple solution and that I was simply trying to rack up costly billable hours. (In fact, the publisher specifically noted what they described was a temporary fix until the client did the certified migration. I told the client VP they could hire other consultants, check out what I was saying with other experts, etc. I proved that I could do the patch on a database with the correct character set. I further proved that the problem occurred when they hired a third-party DBA to migrate the database--I had a copy of the database build logs where he created the database, implicitly with the default US7ASCII.

 But even after I had made an exhaustive, definitive case about the character set being wrong. I found myself scheduled into a gotcha interview (sort of she won't let it go, a variant of nagging). She proudly held documentation that the database publisher supported US7ASCII. Once again, I pointed out in the ERP technical manual, Appendix A, it specifically noted a specific Western European character set had to be used. The database publisher supported several character sets, but its ERP software required a specific, non-default character set.

 She finally accepted the point, but it was like pulling teeth. In contrast, when I worked for Oracle Consulting, managers usually handed me keys to the car (figuratively speaking) and said to let them know if any of their people were getting in the way.

 One day she pulls me into a personal meeting and explains that she's tired of the bickering between accounting and HR. (Accountants had been told if we added the HRMS module, their financial apps would break. Totally bogus rumor. I told anyone who would listen to me that it was fear-mongering BS.) So she, in her Solomonic wisdom, would give the accountants and HR department their own separate ERP database. I strenuously object to this utterly insane idea. This defeats the very concept of an ERP database; it's a conceptual error of the first order. This is a problem of incompetent contractor troublemakers.

 She continues to persist in this delusional idea, calling me in to tell me that this splitting of an ERP database; in fact, some of her fellow IT managers in the area have done it. I was shocked; how is it that multiple IT managers didn't understand the concept of an ERP database? I decided to humor her--give me the phone number of a DBA from a customer who did it.

 So I call him and asked if that happened. "Yeah, about two years ago. Dumbest move ever, a problem from day one. We've been trying to reunify the database ever since then. Do you know how to undo the split?" Nope. First, do no harm.

 How that executive wasn't aware of his own company's problems post-split, I don't know. I think my client dropped the idea, but I soon left for another assignment. But I did not think much of that manager's analytic or decision-making skills.


 For once, Bernie Sanders is right. A broken clock is right twice a day.

Legalize Prostitution




Economic Liberty




Political Cartoon

Courtesy of Bob Gorrell via Townhall

Musical Interlude: Christmas Mix 2017


Jim Brickman (featuring Susan Ashton & Collin Raye), "The Gift"

Posted by at
Labels: , , , , ,