...As a service.

Missed a trick there. All shiny button software is a service these days. By paying a low monthly fee of $7 per user you can generate metrics that will allow you to waste at least 30 people's time at a rate of $50 an hour, for an hour per month while the compulsory meeting to discuss the metrics that no one has read takes place. The outcome of which will be a reduction in over-all spend by the equivalent of at most $1 per month per month, per user, by making everything slightly more annoying.

If it's going to cut jobs the per user pricing is going to need looking at. Best make it a fixed rate based on initial number of users otherwise it will end up cutting its own income.

Oh, no, you should keep using a per user charge because everyone who buys it will think they're getting a great deal. We pay for 200 users this month, then next month we only have to pay for 180. Then they realize that the software doesn't actually let them cut staffing as they thought and they still end up paying for 200 users.

Shiny Buttocks Software

(FTFY) A must-have for your IT vitality checks from server to client.

I see your Shiny Buttocks Software and raise you a Shiny Bollocks Software

Don't forget Cover Your Arse™. This package will ensure that, whatever happens, someone else gets the blame.

Ah. The Enterprise Bullshit Pro Licence.

64 bit.

Tack on turbopromaxultraextreme2 and we might well have a winner there

It always confuses me when managers are so keen to get onboard with this. They will not see a bonus from the savings as that is well above their paygrade but there may be questions about the need for their role once the staff numbers reduce as we are seeing from the WFH movement over the last 4 years. So many staff are happier and working more efficiently without the hourly interruptions from a manager that needs to be seen to be 'in the loop' that entire layers of management are now desperate for people to be back in the office before the axeman comes to encourage them to spend more time with their family.

Some companies appear to be looking at this is a good way and are downsizing their office space and making savings that way but there are a number of big enterprises out there who are too invested in their offices, especially since it is now a buyer's market for office space so selling a 'quantum experience in flexible ergonomic working spaces featuring ambient music and meditation pods' is not a quick process.

"entire layers of management are now desperate for people to be back in the office"

The smarter managers will be attributing such an increased productivity to their success at managing a remote working staff.

Of course the smarter managers wouldn't have been interrupting their staff on an hourly basis in the first place so they'll have less of an increase in productivity anyway.

It's the gravy for ambitious but no so talented managers. People who haven't worked in the service industry shouldn't want to be managers, but they do. Management done right provides a service to the employees; done wrong, try to treat employees like servants.

Realignments are inevitable when it becomes clear that the last set of consultant-based reorganisation didn't work and now even fewer people who need to work together are working together. Instead everything has been streamlined and nobody knows what they should be doing. So, time for a realignment and cue the next lot of consultants arriving with whiteboards, charts and games to break the nose ice. Add some creative accounting and, while productivity goes down, it's bonuses all round as profits are juiced by selling assets and leasing them back. Then there's a round of musical office chairs as the most motivated middle managers are whittled down for allowing the most talented employees to leave.

Mine's the one with The Mythical Man Month in the pocket.

You've just given me a bad case of Deja Vu!

---------> Mine's the one I'll need soon, cos it's happening again!

Apart from a certain microbiome, and blood in the water, there is the distinct smell of database normalization warnings in the air.

once more confusing the words "open" and "empty."

The other one which keeps getting confused with "empty" is "clear" as in "A clear desk is the sign of a clear mind".

This is a riopste I am going to steal openly (sic) and frequently in all walks of life where weasels play.

Years ago I worked in a place where the senior manager was fixated upon appearance and "order".

There are numerous stories about edicts being issued about things being stored on shelves in general view, level of venetian blinds... projects were running late and staff churn was high, but it wasn't poor management to blame - no it was a pile of binders on top of a filing cabinet!!

One particular time he was having a go about general tidiness and voiced the opinion that "A messy, cluttered desk is the sign of a messy, cluttered mind".

Unfortunately, at the time I had a very young family and a mortgage to consider; even so, I still regret to this day not asking what an empty desk signified -- his room always had a completely clear desk.

Let me guess : the next word would have been "Dashboard".

It was the easiest way to sell any useless, everybody knows this stuff anyway, metric visualising Fisher Price My First Management Tool software to the aspirational middle manager. "Cockpit" would have been an even more impressive sounding name for such crap, allowing the exec to feel that they were a pilot at the controls of a huge complex airliner, but for some reason that never caught on.

The 'cockpit' idea was suggested where I worked around 17/18 years ago.....

I can't help wondering whether Word's spellcheck auto-correct dealt with mistyping "cockpit" in all too many interesting ways.

Er, Pebble-dashboard?

With a mostly brown, but also a slightly worrying yellow/green, colour scheme.

One of my clients got a consultant to make them a dashboard. They asked me to export some production data.

I gave them a big CSV where each row was a production batch, with start and end timestamps and quantity.

They said that they needed the total hours and quantity by day.

I pointed out to the customer that they have the start/end timestamps and quantity per operation. Turning that into totals by day was just arithmetics. Some tricky bits if an operation is active at midnight, okay, but still nothing that doesn't get routinely taught to teens.

I could change the exporter in the production software, of course, but surely the dashboard software, whose entire reason of being is to visualize data, would already be set up to do something like that?

Some time passed, and then they confirmed that they wanted me to export total quantities per day.

So I did that, and the CSV now had a row per day, with the total.

Some time passed, and then they asked me to add a column with the quantity-per-hour.

I pointed out that this is literally just a division.

I'll do it, of course, for free even, but a question comes to mind. This dashboard software. It's just a thing that makes a time series plot out of a CSV, isn't it? Like, literally three mouse clicks on Excel? How much are you paying for it?

Still have to get an answer.

Fecal Strategery

It'll wink and blink, but not make you think

There's a song, or at least a tshirt design, in that line alone.

Happy Friday everybody.

Keyboard

Quote

""And you think I can convince a couple of them to quit?" the Boss asks.

"I was thinking more of murder suicide," I reply.

"Or something that looked like murder suicide," the PFY suggests."

And now the boss is wondering why theres sounds of laughter coming from the programming office... indeed ... any sounds at all apart from post-pub snoring before I go home.

Although there is talk of replacing our late not so lamented production engineer with a new one..... which means sharing the office again.. must come up with a plan......

* Clippit.

Lovely ending - an appropriate alternative to signing in blood.