Gowator Posted February 26, 2004 Report Share Posted February 26, 2004 Because, Im not my manager. :D HE thinks powerpoint is the best thing since someone else did his job for him ... Him and hundreds like him are creating the damned things here the and everywhere then the get pushed onto the intranet or even internet. My manager is head of the IT dept, yet he's never programmed a line. When you explain about maintainable code he just shakes his head and says 'ah you techy types always malking things complicated' I work in a dept of 400 people doing the jobs of maybe 20. (seriously) 80%+ of the work we actually created for ourtselves becuase someone had a meeting and decided the powerpoint slide with the downward cost graph was more important than the techy saying, yep but it won't work. Well it does work.... we just throw 50 people to manually do a job for 1 person. Cant transfer from database a to database b becuase of some tech foul up or crazy policy.... no problem just get 50 people to retype the data in a 6 month project. Last month I started and completed a 3 year 9 person project. Yes your reading that right, last MONTH. That is 9 people have been working in it for 9 years but it isn't finished yet. Why ? Well, it was only ever a 1 week project except the guy who knows the databases is a contractor from the wrong company. Policy says he's not allowed the Oracle system password .... Yep, just policy.... out of 4 weeks 3 weeks were spent guessing SID's and instance names and password. 1 week actually doing the work! In contrast the 9 man team has been retyping it ...(yep over a million records with about 400 fields each in the top level table and they just threw away the data in the related child tables) and rather than change the system password, give it to the guy in the office opposite mine let him do wht I did (except better and faster since he actually worked on the database design) they RETYPE IT! However my company is competitive.... benchmarked against our rivals we are mid range on costs and performance....So in other words it seems likely that all our rivals are as screwed up as us. This is upsetting of course, it takes away the option of quitting and gettng a better job with the rivals! So i have to believe that this is common practice in big companies and governments. Certainly no-one in the UK government thought anything of sticking a .doc file on the goverment website. Having actually claimed not to have been aware of something some minister turns up in the hidden deletions and edits !! So this is the prob with office stuff. MS are MASTERS at smoke and mirrors... hey it looks like a web page, its acting like one ... However they are just problems in the making. I once had a finance manager who didn't know how to use word. Guess what, he used to type MEMO's in Excel. This sounds really ridiculous BUT its just like using Excel to link to a database or making HTML from word or powerpoint. It kinda looks OK, when he printed it. Anyway thats just half the story! Abusing the stuff is easy BECUASE MS build it all in. Insert a MSscrewup object in .... etc. They make it so easy noone thinks about the consequences! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arthur Posted February 27, 2004 Report Share Posted February 27, 2004 ....So in other words it seems likely that all our rivals are as screwed up as us. This is upsetting of course, it takes away the option of quitting and gettng a better job with the rivals! :D You might want to start your own company, and blow them awaY! M$ is costing the world billions in lost productivity and lack of competition. Have you been to google recently? when I see "powerpoint presentation" or "word document" containing the info I'm looking for, I say, "oh crap..." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted February 27, 2004 Report Share Posted February 27, 2004 hehe Yeah but then i end up in the same position as the guy opposite! He actually worked on the development of the database! His job is every bit as crappy as mine because when he goes to other companies its the same crap. Just as I spent 3 months doing little except editing crappy HTML in wordpad (I can't have a real HTML editing tool because I havn't been on the right training course (sic) ...) After documenting an IT project in PURE html (over 5000 pages) you know what my manager wanted.... the whole thing printing out! Bear in mind this is procedures and recipees etc. the idea is you follow the recipee and then click the link to follow the next stage depending on the outcome of the first stage! I almost wanted to cry ... I had pages and pages of hyperlinked references that all worked... Then after I printed it and resisted the tempatation to add lots of bits of string to the binders ... my manager decides its really good and needs making available to all the subsidiaries worldwide.... Its on a UNIX server with apache however the DNS isn't working for the internal network for this machine outside the HQ. (all becuase were using a MS DNS server) So instead of fixing the DNS reolution i get told to put it on the windows Internet server. The snag is I'm not allowed to do this! I have to give it to someone 'qualified'. The bigger snag is Im no longer allowed to edit it (becuase Im not qualified). So when we change a procedure I am expected to change a single page and email this to the qualifed person....DOH, it doesn't work like that because its linked to/from other pages. On the UNIX server its no big deal, I just recursively change it. Grep all the links and such and it takes 5 mins or so. So the procedure is NOW.... I update the whole site on the unix server, ZIP it (its about 1GB) and then the guy replaces the WHOLE site each time. I wish I could say this wasn't 'normal' BUT it is. If I was working for myself as a contractor it would be even less efficient. I had a contractor work with me for 3 months on the same project.... 1 month before he arrived i requested a PC etc. since he isn't allowed to connect his company laptop to our network.... (This is bizarre in that the same company he works for have a direct ethernet link to ours....) So anyway we spend the 3 months waiting for the PC and using the CD writer network... and after he's finished the contract I have to cancel the order for a PC which still hasn't arrived. 3 months at USD 650 per day ... or about $40,000 in consultants fees and we can't even provide a PC for him to work on! The sad thing is I know lots of contractors and the companies are so similar the 'unofficial' rating for which company is best to be contracting for is based on selections at the drink vending machines! I think we strayed from MS office !!!!! However its my firm belief that not only does MS office thrive in this kind of environment it actually helps create it. It makes it look for instance that making HTML pages is a matter of pressing save as in word. Making presentations is about adding a windows movie player plug-in and stuff. Its like a virus, seeking out sick companies where it then takes hold and replicates itself making the company still sicker but dependant upon it like a drug. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aRTee Posted February 27, 2004 Report Share Posted February 27, 2004 Quick tip, just thought of this: howabout reading in the html in OOo and then saving to html again? I know, OOo is not for that either, but it is far from as crappy as MSO from the few things that I have seen from it in html...... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkelve Posted February 27, 2004 Report Share Posted February 27, 2004 Another tip: put it in Html-Kit / Html-Tidy, then check "Stip surplus tags in word 2000 pages". Html-Kit which comes with tidy is only available in Windoze. Html Tidy (a W3C-tool) is, I think, available for various operating systems. http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zero0w Posted February 27, 2004 Report Share Posted February 27, 2004 (edited) Gowator, it was quite fascinating to read your working experience on how IT company operates, or how MS Office made people dumb; I never imagine that dumb. Ah, I guess I should go and learn LaTeX in document typesetting B) , that way exporting to pre-press PDF and HTML will work easier when I plan to mass produce my docs for both public and internal consumption. Edited February 27, 2004 by zero0w Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkelve Posted February 28, 2004 Report Share Posted February 28, 2004 (edited) Gowator, it was quite fascinating to read your working experience on how IT company operates, or how MS Office made people dumb; I never imagine that dumb. I wonder if it is M$ Office only? Our company uses a Windows NT 4.0 network with a Citrix client and we just switched from token ring to Ethernet. While that may be justification for some problems, we got a whole month of problems, things go slower than a turtle sleepwalking, several people lost the contents of their entire hard disk and/or their e-mail correspondence and agenda, and/or lost work while yet another program crashed. Makes you wonder about some things... Edited February 28, 2004 by Darkelve Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted February 28, 2004 Report Share Posted February 28, 2004 Nah; Office just INVITES people to be dumb; It plays to the lazy, dont want to learn part of people. Most of all, it plays to the fact someone just wants to get somethibng done now; and would rather not think of the consequences! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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