BB Reads the Business Rags - Special Edition
You know those scarab beetles, last seen as gawddawful CGI in The Mummy franchise? Well, Thraxxus has one firmly planted in his arse. This post is for him. In the August 18th issue of Fortune, the cover article is about bank analyst Meredith Whitney. OK, so I’m a little late with my magazines - they are practically stacked up. My feet have been killing me, and you can only read so much on the can. Not only is Whitney the “the woman who called Wall Street’s meltdown”, but very pretty to boot. Why do I bring this up? Because the article infers that her looks and personal life were reasons why she wasn’t taken seriously. She’s married to a pro wrestler who also moonlights as a stock pundit on Fox News. Keep in mind, this was before Sarah Palin rode hotness, moose hunting, and book-banning to stardom. Back in the day, being beautiful and smart yet disregarded was called The Lara Logan Principle. Another reason she was unpopular: Whitney has a reputation as a hardcore bear, which often pissed off the financial companies she covered. God forbid she does her job and downgrade a stock - what a bitch!
The article goes on to mention six other industry experts who saw the crap hitting the fan - apparently the greed gremlin didn’t have everyone by the throat.
- Sean Egan bitched about subprime-backed bonds from day one.
- Nouriel Roubini called shenanigans on exaggerated home prices, and knew they would sink the economy.
- David Einhorn shorted Lehman stock earlier this year, which makes him smart AND a prick. I’ve read several sources on short-selling and I just don’t get it. It’s not that I don’t understand the process, I don’t understand how you can sell something you don’t technically own. Nevertheless, Einhorn also thought credit-rating agencies weren’t doing their job and monitoring leverage ratios at banks.
- Robert Rodriguez of MFA actually started pulling out of mutual funds way back in 2004 when he thought mortgage lending standards were going down the shitter. Four years ago!
- When Richard Baker was a congressman, he wrote legislation to keep Fannie and Freddie under control. After that bombed, he left to lead a hedge fund lobbying group. Apparently, the little devil on his shoulder won.
- William Poole was also skeptical of Freddie and Fannie - this was way back in 2002.
Well Done 2
I take back everything I said about Sarah Silverman. Well, almost everything.
Urgent Update from the Vice President Debates
I wish the Angels/Boston playoff series was on.
Sigh.
The Difference is One of the Problems
Perhaps you’ve seen all the articles online and in business rags about “Main Street versus Wall Street”, or how “Main Street” has finally become fed up with corruption on Wall Street and is rejecting the greed that has fueled the system, or how blah blah blah. That Fortune article even goes as far as to refer to this as a “class fury”. Only on Wall Street can widespread yet logical objection to a massive bailout plan be called “class fury”. Maybe, probably not in my or my child’s lifetime, there will be a true revolution in the way we deal with massive corruption and greed. Until then, I will be buying the most extravagant version of Iron Man on DVD tomorrow.
Nonetheless. Not to put too fine a point on it, but since when are these two groups so different? Actually, they are not - as this NY Times article sums it up quite nicely. Denial about how you are pulling money out of your ass is universal; whether it be buying a new TV on high-interest credit, or borrowing money from a loan that ceased to exist in 1956.
OK, but I have an even more specific example: Jack Welch is one of the wealthiest, most successful businessmen on the planet. White, older than dirt, married to a woman 25 years his junior - he fits the profile of Wall Street fatcat. Anywhoo, in a recent BusinessWeek column he was asked his opinion of the obscene income of business leaders, and why it irritates many investors. Mr. Welch was unapolgetic. His response is that there is a “difference in philosophies” between investors and the business leaders. This struck me as funny, because investors are just that - the money source of the businesses. If there is a difference of philospophies, you tell me who should prevail.
1 min 17 seconds
Currently My Favorite Political Cartoon Series
Chrome Colored Musings
So driving into the office today with Enigma we heard a strange little diddy on NPR regarding the “slip up” made by Google regarding pre-announcing via email the release of their completely open source web browser- CHROME. Word has it that Google created said web browser as they were concerned that the evil dark wizard Microsoft was going to tweak Internet Explorer to magically ignore Google.com.
As it turns out, on Google.com, Google has presented a different, more politically correct version of the story. According to Google, and this may be true - kind of like those weapons of mass distraction, they are launching Chrome so that the web user of today can use a browser of today, not one designed for 7 years ago with pasted add-ons and patches galore. Nice theory.
So what does it do? According to Google, Chrome is a developers web dream. It doesn’t crash. Javascript is like heroin through its code based veins. Plugins are like musical notes to Mozart, French horns to Beethoven. The ability for a developer to debug a web application will be easier than Paris Hilton. It is multi-threaded, which means that multiple tabs will actually load at the same time, and it also means that with any luck, if you are on Vista anyway (odd the not definded dependancy here), the browser will actually use all those extra processors and cores you paid Dell good money for. Basically that means that the Browser will act like a GOOD operating system coughnotwindowscough.
I could go on and on about the features, instead I suggest you give the cartoon I linked a good read. Its fun coffee/poop reading material. Print it off! No I won’t do that, I won’t tell you every drop of the supposed features. If I had a link to download and install Chrome, I’d give it to you. Tragically though Enigma has spent the better part of the last hour trying to find a link, oddly enough using GOOGLE.com, and can’t seem to locate it. Irony is an evil bitch it seems.
My parting thought is this: Does the Google staff have a mantra that they sing at the start of every meeting? “Microsft sucks. Microsoft sucks. We hate Microsoft. Kill Kill Kill.” I am not a song writer, it shows. Perhaps they meet in the woods, under the cover of darkenss, in cloaks, sacrificing screen shots of Internet Explorer to some Google god, Googleisis - the Goddess of Search Engines, after which they have some weird dork laden sexcapade to the song musings of Moby. Who knows?
Orangina - Balls of Steel, Brains of Mush
I like it when marketing departments take chances - I really do. If they bomb, then at least they went down swinging. Holy cripes, this ad goes down in FLAMES. Warning - this could haunt you.
Why didnt we come up with these?
While reading through my hundreds of RSS feeds I ran across these two rather profound greeting cards. I thought I would share them with you.
Who can be as sarcastic as we are, but have artistic talent to boot and then turn it into greeting cards? The folks over at Someecards.com pure brilliance I tell you. There are hundreds of these cards to send to your friends family members, and enemies.
DOH! another awesome idea that I cant come up with.
Until I have my brilliant Idea I will continue to take over the world one blog post at a time. O and I will be sending someecards.
Thanks is all.
The Programmer Pyramid
As some of you may have figured out many of us who write this blog are in one form of IT or another. This post will be a series of posts hoping to shed some light on the mystical world of programming / programmers. I have to admit much of this post is driven by frustration caused by the people I work with, but I am trying to tell myself these posts will enlighten the masses and turn more people into better programmers where as I would be happy with many programmers just hanging up their keyboards and never comming back.
OK enough ranting, onto the pyramid. The Programmer Pyramid is a method of classification that I use to slot people into that work in a programming department. I find these classifications to be a very effective way to group my staff. The Programmer Pyramid is designed to have the most talented at the top and the people that need to get the hell out of this field at the bottom.
- The Guru - These are the few and the rare, savants that can do everything from designing a software system to building the user interface. When I say rare I mean rare - if you think you have one working for you…. well you don’t.
- The Architect - These are the people that are really good at designing systems. They can see how all the elements fit together from a very high level but also know the devil is in the details. Architects can fall into two sub categories: the ones that can do and the ones that just draw pictures. The ones who just draw pictures but do not get their hands dirty deserve to be dragged outside and drawn and quartered. If you think you have a good architect on your staff email me. I would be happy to donate 30 mins of my time to confirm your statement. These people are worth their weight in gold, but sad to say more often than not the people you hire as architects are nothing more than over paid Visio charlatans.
- The Technical Lead - This is your field general. This person should be able to build any block of code you ask him/her to, in addition they need to be able to manage a project schedule and train/mentor the people below them. This person should also know everything about the system or subsystem they are working on. Sadly the Peter Principle takes the cake here. More times than not I see technical leads that would make better fry cooks at Burger King.
- The Engineer - A Real Problem solver - this person wants to know not just what they are building, but why they are building it, who will use it, what business need this component is solving and how this will plug into the bigger picture. These are diamonds in the rough of the programmer world. With a good team of engineers and a good architect you can build anything. Oh wait! You think you have one of them on your staff, well maybe, it is possible, but more likely you should read on. Do not confuse these people with architects (and many of them think they are architects) - they are not. These people like to know the details of the tasks/problems they solve but if you throw too much information at them, they well go Chernobyl on you.
- The Developer - This is the worker bee of your crew. A critical component to any successful team. They want to know little more then their next task, and how it fits in to the rest of the world (sometimes that means knowing the business problem). This information is so they can better test their code and design their solution. Yes, I said design a solution, I know, I know - I did not mention it before in the pyramid, I had assumed that since you made it this far in my rant you were smart enough to realize that as you moved up the chain an engineer should be able to do everything a developer does etc.. etc… Therefore this is the first tier of “programmers” that start to actually think through a problem. Yes if you have one of these on staff you are most likely correct, but I am willing to bet for every 1 of these you found / hired you have met, interviewed, hired, wanted to kill 20 “programmers”.
- The Programmer- A drone. They do what they are told, little thinking about a solution, too quick to put code to paper. They are more interested in quantity of code then quality of code. Test???? what???? you expect them to test something?? My lord - you are lucky they can dress themselves in the morning and you expect them to test?
- The Hacker- This is not to be confused with someone who breaks into systems etc… These are people that will sit at a computer and break the software to learn how it works. They do this over and over again. This is a great way to learn how to program….. if you are 10….. God help you if you have one of these on staff. They like to deploy code from their desktop to production, and watch it burn while praying it does not. They also like to make you think a rain storm can effect your websites ability to process data. (Lets not go into the science of the insanity of this please…. ) It makes me sleep better at night thinking these people are mildly retarded if they are still “coding” this way pass the age of 12.
- The Hack- Do you have one of these? wow you are screwed…. or you have a bad Indian outsourcing company…. These programmers, if you can call them that, will just type random crap into a program without research, without thinking, just to “fix” a problem that may or may not be there. If you have one of these at your company I suggest strapping this device to the person. This way while your business fails to do anything and continues to hemorrhage money your staff can at least laugh at the loser in the corner.
- The Gas Station Developer - This douchebag jumped on the band-wagon during the .COM boom. They bought a book for $5.95 at a garage sale from some “hack” programmer that was titled learn to program in 24 hours. Let us put this in perspective. Most people who have gone to school and been taking programming courses for a total of 6-8 years… know shit about programming real software so how the fuck are you going to learn anything other than how to put my company out of business with this book. Go back to pumping my gas you asshole.
Oh and I have a pretty picture for those of you who can not read.
