Save the Village ID ten T

Ever been in one of these situations?

So, you have this Manager you work with. Seems that every time you have to interact with them, it becomes a painful ordeal. See, they are the Political type. You know, the type that destroys the creativity of organizations.

When you deal with them, all of a sudden your world is in Black and white... Not color. It's a 6th Sense moment. "I see Stupid People. And they don't even know they're stupid!".

You ask a technical question and get the trout look. You know - Fresh off the plate! This person no more understands what the F you're talking about than the man in the moon. Nor do they want to understand. They have tuned you out. In an effort to shut you up, they proceed up the food chain to suck up to every manager in an attempt to put more red tape and BS in front of you.

Well, you figure that because you are obviously not getting your technical points across, you do memos and white papers explaining the technical challenges. Then, you're too condescending and academic.

You do requirements and everything becomes a new negotiation. You can get nothing done. To this person, it doesn't matter if you have valid requirements or not. What matters most is their own personal interest and growing their own empire.

Its Managers like this that hold back Corporations. They kill productivity and teamwork and they can single-handedly poison your Development and integration teams. They have no idea the destruction they cause. The negative effects they have on folks. The creativity they squash.

They foster Analysis Paralysis, lack of evolution and the tragic killing of products and solutions. These types of folks tend to latch on to products or functions and never release control. Such that it kills functionality and the evolution beyond the basic. Everything is about the bare minimums as you don't have to work at it much. You can float, do what you can, and go on. So what if you never ever deliver new capabilities UNLESS it is POLITICALLY ADVANCING to do so.

How do you save someone like this from themselves? They refuse to listen. They are already Lunar Lander personalities - "Tranquility Base here! The EGO has landed!". They don't even have an inkling of what they don't know or understand. Yet they continue to drive out innovation.

As a Manager of one of these personality types, it becomes dangerous for you. You either subscribe to the lineage of politics or they start politically going around you. So the deceit, lies, and ignorance perpetuates. And the company continues to suffer. It takes strong leadership to either control the politics or make a decision to oust the impediments to progress. Both take intestinal fortitude, leadership, and a lot of paperwork.

In summary, I wish I could reach these folks. Have them understand the creativity and peoples careers they kill. All in the name of self preservation. Have them understand that a little common sense would open their whole world.

In my career, I have been in this situation 4-5 times. A Situation where the only way to be successful is to compromise your principals and ethics and start sucking up. My heart goes out to my friends that endure the torture of mindless decisions , the lack of experience and unwillingness to understand, and the unending political positioning and rambling rather than doing the right thing.

I'm soo elated to be away from this. Words cannot do justice to how elated and ecstatic I am to be able from the mindlessness.

Event Management and Java programmers

Question: Why is it a good idea to hire a Java programmer over someone with direct Netcool experience for a Netcool specific job?

I recently heard about an open position for a Netcool specialist where they opened up the position to be more of a Java programmer slot. In part, I think its a lack of understanding regarding supporting Netcool and understanding what it takes, domain knowledge wise, to be successful at it.

Most Java programmers either want to do some SOA sort of thing, Jakarta and struts, Spring Framework, Tomcat / Jboss or some portal rehash sort of thing. Most of these technologies have little to do with Netcool and rules. In fact, the lack of domain knowledge around the behavior of Network and systems devices in specific failure induced conditions, may limit a true Java programmers ability to be successful without significant training and exposure over time.

Here is the ugly truth:

1. Not every problem can be adequately or most effectively solved with Object Oriented Programming. Some things are done much more efficiently in Turing machines or Finite State automata.

2. You give away resources in OO to empower some level of portability and reuse. If your problem is linear and pretty static, why give away resources?

3. With Oracle suing Google of copywrite enfringement over the use of Java, Java may be career limiting. I mean, if Oracle is willing to initiate a lawsuit with Google which has the resources to handle such a lawsuit, how much more will it be willing to sue companies of significantly less legal resources?

So, unless you plan on rewriting Netcool in Java, I'd say this repositioning is a pretty limiting move. And if you were foolish enough to think this is even close to being cost effective, I'd pretty much say that as a Manager, you are dangerous to your company and share holders.