Workers and Intellectuals

The commonly held belief is that in any company you need workers (people who do the work) and people who decide what to do. In other words, you need not so bright people who are happy to plug away at their keyboards, the "workers" and you need the intellectuals, people who guide the workers and leverage their value. That is the common view, probably wins the day mostly because you can't find enough "intellectuals", and you can't afford to pay a bunch of intellectuals their full value.

Look up http://www.thoughtworks.com. Started by someone who said no, and created a company of _only_ intellectuals.

But I digress. My Father has always talked about the difference between a manager and supervisor. He's said a _manager_ is an agent of change and a supervisor maintains status quo. Most of the managers in even our top companies are in fact super-visors. This is especially true in middle management. Pnp was a good example of this kind of manager. He has recently been mulling over the idea that leadership and management are not the same thing. This he says is what the cognscenti have recently been coming up with. And he has a point. A leader is someone who inspires, they have vision and drive. Just by sheer circumstantial evidence it is obvious that a manager is not necessarily a leader. I have found that a leader is more effective when they're perceived to be on the same level as the people they're leading. Kinda like the way you have NCO's in the army. They are some of the most important people in the army because they're on the ground. The infantry feel far more loyalty to the NCO's than the officers.

The other thing I wanted to say is that the difference between a manager/leader and worker is not intellectual or in ability. It is in _attitude_. Managers need to have the "can do" attitude. That attitude that says "cool, let's do it", instead of the "why do that?, that's a silly idea". It's question of how big is your world.

What would I do without Cygwin...

I have recently moved from a linux desktop onto a windows desktop. When I first started on the linux desktop I missed the familiar functionality in the "dir /s" command. There was no direct equivalent in linux.

I subsequently overcame this so called difficiency by utilising "find . | grep xxx". I also got used to using tail and less as well as vi.

Now that I am on the windows desktop a minor adjustment was required. Fortunately, and this is a big one, cygwin came to my rescue and provided me with all those familiar commands available in my now beloved bash.

It boggles my mind to think how any self respecting software developer committed to excellence can suffer a desktop without something as simple as tail. What is your windows alternative? Notepad! Heaven forbid. There is no out of the box viewer on a windows platform which can monitor a file for changes and render those changes when they happen. Do the microsoft developers deem the facility useful enough? In linux (and cygwin) you have two options; 'tail' for monitoring a file and 'less' for doing both viewing and monitoring (the best of both worlds).

Those guys at Cygwin make my life on a windows platform bearable.

I salute them.

bureaucracy

The other day I went to the bank in order to have my garage card linked to my debit card instead of to my credit card. Considering I have had a credit card and a garage card for more then 3 years, to any plain man you would think it would simply be the case of, unlink from credit card, link with debit card.

In other words, they would simple cancel the garage card linked with the credit card and issue me with a garage card linked with the debit card...

Why then is it, that in order to acquire a garage card linked to my debit card I did in fact have to apply for a new garage card from scratch! Go figure...

Friends of mine had a similiar issue. They wanted to apply for something at the bank, I can't remember what, and the bank requested that they supply them with bank statements from the last year. To which the obvious reply is, you've got all the records, look it up and approve the application.

No, this is not the manner in which it would be done. Eventually they had to march home, get all the paper work in order and take it down to the bank.

Why is it that when you go to the bank it always seems as if you have to start from the beginning with everything.

The answer lies in usability. Take an average bank employee, the kind who deals with the public. Both the tellers and consultants. They are the "infantry" of the bank. They're the worker bees of the bank, and, just like the rest of the population, they can't even program a VCR. How could you then expect them to understand all the conditions and different ways of applying for a garage card. If the client has an account already then do this... For the sake of the "worker bees", everything is kept simple. If things were more complex, then the average bank employee would be swamped with paper work and would not understand any of the processes. Remember, most of the people in the world do not understand what they're doing, or critical evaluate _why_ they're doing it. They do it because they're told to do it. You average bank consultant is no different.

So the next time you get irritated with bureaucracy, spare a thought for the workers implementing the processes. They have to be simple enough for them to operate.

intro to the fork...

well, as I mentioned on my other blog (thoughts for life), quite a few weeks ago, that I was going to "fork" the blog. That day has finally arrived, thus we have analysis 102. Okay, okay, cool name you might say, well, obviously, because someone has already acquired the analysis 101 name. Hopefully, being a more advanced subject (102), the analysis may be more advanced.

This blog will be for well, thoughts on practical issues, business, computing etc. Hopefully the content will be interesting for anyone who thinks about the way things are and the way to make things better.