bahr

3. Look good doing it.

easier said than done :-)

2006-01-09 07:15:13 AM bahr

There are really fewer than that.

1. Be on time.
2. Get it done.
3. Look good doing it.

If you accomplish those three things, the sky is the limit for your career. Of course, as tolerances stretch in competing directions, often we find that we must abandon one of the three in favor of the other two. This is where your career is in danger and you must be at your sharpest.

For example, just after my first year of law school, I was burning the midnight oil on a case for the small firm I was clerking with, and I came in the next day looking every inch the all-nighter I had been. The motions were done, the case was all set, it was there early, and there was no question we were going to win. BUT... I looked like hell, so the other clerk got to go to court and argue the motion. Had I better managed my time, I could have given my law career an incredible jumpstart - especially in front of a judge who I still lack courtroom time with - by arguing the motion myself. In the end, though, I'm glad at least that the client was taken care of.

In other words hard work got you nowhere, while superficial looks got the other clerk ahead.

Exactly.


/Has spent years working hard and getting nowhere.
//Finally getting a break because the only programmer in my company decided to quit
///Probably wouldn't get that either without the hard work, but hard work alone doesn't generally count for shiat... luck is the final, and often most important, ingredient for success.

Work for yourself.

PeterNorth

"Only the paranoid survive."

"Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod. And never put anything in an e-mail."

Doesn't the Mafia have these same rules?

Don't forget, staying off of FARK will only help you get ahead.

now, shouldn't I be working?

I like Spitzer, but he's full of CRAP. If you don't put things in writing, people will "hear"/infer what they damn well please. 6 Months from now, your versions of who said what will differ dramatically. I prefer E-mail over phone conversations for just this reason. All my "non-junk" E-mails are kept, and all my IM sessions are logged. It has come in handy many, MANY times!

Though I probably wouldn't survive long in the Business World behaving like this...I'm sure I'd be on the "outs" pretty damn quickly once people knew I could and would hold them to what they actually said!

I'm nodding right now!

Meliorist

I would be surprised if his code didn't compile, or was something equally stupid.

The R&D people were probably like "We could search for this in O(Nlog(n)), but we'd like to get it to be O(N)" and the chief turns around and gives them something that runs in O(n^n).

clown-freak


reading through those,the secret appears to be being a white male; but being a skinny white female can also make a few million if they get lucky.

/no trolling intended but I've seen a man being chosen over a women with more qualifications and a better personality/people skills many times.
//not me,duh.

Haven't tried getting a job lately have you?

was once passed up in a company I applied to for a far less qualified black person because they had no minorities in the department at the time and have worked in companies where "HR made an EOC decision." was code for "sorry yor dept. just got saddled with an idiot because they had to go with a minority hire." So spare me the "it's easier to be white" thing.

Farkeologist
I like Spitzer, but he's full of CRAP.

As noted above, the quote is out of context. He is telling you what to do if you are breaking the law.

panda

You DO realize only a couple of us know what you're talking about right?

For everyone else: O(N) means it goes through every record once, which is about as fast as you can expect. O(Nlog(N)) is ok, basically it goes through every record N * log(n) times. (Yeah, I know... difficult to figure out huh?)

O(N^N) - Don't count on the program ever finishing except with very small datasets.



Of course, it's possible the CEO in question was Bill Gates, who is probably an old C hack who probably could write a really good function for processing records. :P

# 49 - Don't post a rule of 48 ways to keep an affair quiet on Fark.com

/Jerk

Dagnabbit. Wrong thread.

/I fail...

this is why I was always nice to my IT guy -- not only did I not have to worry about emails, but he showed me the layout of our new office when no one else saw it so I could find an excuse to get a seat farther away from my lame ass boss.

shreading just doesn't fix the problem anymore.

I loved how Hellmuth was in there talking about honor.

While I talk to my customers, I always make a point of putting things in writing. If only to recap our conversation. People can be such incredible asses and try to get something for nothing. Having a verified hard copy of everything can save your ass as a business person. I know it has mine.

Many customers will remember what they want to -- especially if they see it benefits them -- and they will try to milk it for anything extra they can get free. Especially if you work in an IT service related field. AND especially if you produce anything in a digital medium (programming, web dev, etc). They don't have a tangible product to hold in their hand, they don't have a sense of value of its worth.

If you have some concept of honesty and spelling, you have nothing to fear from e-mail or the written word. As for me personally, if it isn't important enough for you to write it down, it isn't important enough for me to think about. All meaningful business communication must take place in writing or I will have nothing to do with it.

"Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer." - Don Michael Corleone.

There are two ways to "looking good doing something."

1 is to try and fake it, where eventually the rest of the office is snickering about how much of a nimrod you are.

The other way is to truly work hard, and love what you do. Hard honest work always looks good - and gets noticed eventually.

Doesn't Bill Gates regularly send out Executive E-mail to all of Microsoft?

Most of these were good points. From my own personal experience I can add a few:
1. Always treat everyone you work with as you would want to be treated (customers, bosses, co-workers, vendors, etc.)
2. Allow yourself (and others) to make mistakes
3. Have fun

/happily working for a company he resigned from 3 years ago

Well, that was just a steaming load of platitudes. For a minute there I thought I'd wandered into some $79 self-esteem seminar.

I suppose that reading what people of this sort have to say might be interesting if you're obsessed with copying them and making a lot of money, but otherwise it is like listening to the deranged ramblings of a whacked-out wino. It is useful to remember that the wealthy, especially the so-called "self-made men," are psychotic. Contemporary CEO's are sickos. These people are at best disturbed individuals, at worst, they are sociopathic monsters. Try to keep that in mind as you read these horrid little testimonials.

"Eliot Spitzer
New York state attorney general

Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod. And never put anything in an e-mail."

He left out "never post advice on the Internet".

the way to be rich is to be evil and sell your soul
the more you're willing to give up, the more money you'll have, and the less human you will be

bill gates is just looking for forgiveness?

canyoneer: Well, that was just a steaming load of platitudes. For a minute there I thought I'd wandered into some $79 self-esteem seminar.

I suppose that reading what people of this sort have to say might be interesting if you're obsessed with copying them and making a lot of money, but otherwise it is like listening to the deranged ramblings of a whacked-out wino. It is useful to remember that the wealthy, especially the so-called "self-made men," are psychotic. Contemporary CEO's are sickos. These people are at best disturbed individuals, at worst, they are sociopathic monsters. Try to keep that in mind as you read these horrid little testimonials.

Translation: they are more succesful than me, no matter how many big words I put in my fark comments. Thus, i hate them...for there is something fundamentally wrong with them.

While I'll admit that there is likely a larger percentage of people who, in some way but likely not to the degree you paint, fit your description...to make a blanket statement that all succesful people are hollow, backstabbing privateers is rediculous.

I'm sorry your online t-shirt biz didn't rocket off the ground like you thought it would...hey, how were you supposed to know the shirts were flamable, but do take off your tinfoil hat long enough to peek out and realize that sometimes...good people acomplish great things.

--Gizmo, jaded only rocks if you're emo

Telos: For everyone else: O(N) means it goes through every record once, which is about as fast as you can expect. O(Nlog(N)) is ok, basically it goes through every record N * log(n) times. (Yeah, I know... difficult to figure out huh?)

O(N^N) - Don't count on the program ever finishing except with very small datasets.

My balanced binary tree laughs at your O(N) search times.
/nerd trash-talk

Bah! Ok, my Big-O is a little rusty, forgot about the faster ones. Balanced tree... O(log(n)) right?

When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: "Whose?"

- Don Marquis

In other words, don't put anything in writing.

That sounds like something one might do if one were up to no good, but it's actually good advice. Off the top of my head, I can think of four or five ugly incidents at work that involved innocent, well-intended emails that were misread or misinterpreted by the reader (who then proceeded to throw a hissy fit). They didn't involve me, but I heard about them because management screamed at everyone within earshot for days on end.

mciann: "If you have some concept of honesty and spelling, you have nothing to fear from e-mail or the written word."

Not necessarily. During one of Spitzer's cases, he subpoenaed all email records from Merrill Lynch I believe. Turns out among the stuff that was useful were emails with phone numbers and social security numbers as well as illnesses in the family, that crazy trip to Thailand with the hookers, and those conversations about your lame-ass boss. Think of it this way, if you don't want anyone else seeing what you wrote, don't write it. Use IM or something [and that's only if your company doesn't track those too -- some investment banks have IM tracking programs as well].

Business 2.0 is a really good magazine and always has useful and enjoyable articles. It and Wired are the only 2 subscriptions I still keep just because they are so fun to read.

How come there's no advice from David Brent?

Telos: Bah! Ok, my Big-O is a little rusty, forgot about the faster ones. Balanced tree... O(log(n)) right?


Yup, nothing like searching for something in a tree with a million items and only taking a maximum of 20 iterations.

For those not down with the computer science, as long as the tree is balanced, you cut out half the search space each iteration of the search, leading to a runtime of log2(N) (base 2 logarithm). For a tree with 2^40 items (over a trillion), at most you will have to make 40 comparisons. This upper limit only applies if the tree is perfectly balanced, though, an unbalanced tree breaks down to O(N) for the worst case.

//Algorithms was useful for something after all

vsync: There is one reason only to avoid putting things in writing, and it is to avoid responsibility and use your subordinates as scapegoats for your own poor decisions.

You've clearly never been in business litigation of any kind. During discovery, everything in writing or e-mail must be disclosed to the other side's counsel. Attorneys are nothing if not good at finding technicalities to help their cases, so e-mailing around or writing down sensitive material is akin to shooting yourself in the foot.

Gizmorocks: You aren't much of a translator, and you don't spell very well, either. Furthermore, it seems likely you've never considered the neurotic roots of the pathological desire to "succeed" as represented by people like this.

Since you've never reasoned it out, I'll help you get started: In psychological and evolutionary terms, the obsession with amassing vast amounts of wealth embodied by this type of person (and the normalization of the tendency in popular culture) is objectively insane. When you consider that the basis of the worldview represented here is the idea of infinite growth, you can see that the philosophy of industrial capitalism itself is the philosophy of the cancer cell. In personal terms, the need to hoard a perpetually increasing stock of the world's wealth (particularly when contrasted with the obvious poverty of hundreds of millions of your fellow human beings) is an obvious sign of severe mental and emotional imbalance. IOW, these are not "great people" achieving "great things" but rather psychotically selfish and often power-mad nut cases. That so many in our culture admire and seek to emulate them is a testament to the power of propaganda and an expression of collective insecurity.

"I don't understand, Michael"
-that bald guy with the squeaky voice

Have a former boss that was well versed in how to avoid an evidence trail of her ineptness, work she was not doing and outright fraud and theft from the company.

She refused to answer anything in email and wanted everything done verbally. We also didn't have any sort of time/hours tracking on paper.

She would then use this lack of evidence to conveniently blame everything on her staff to cover her tracks.

/Hopes she burns in hell.

2006-01-09 04:30:33 AM Freak
I can't believe some of the stupid shiat people forward through the company email servers. People flirting, preaching, attacking others, all broadcast company wide. Makes me wonder how these people can be so educated, and be so stupid at the same time.

Heh, especially the insults. My office is good at it, but we've caught a few that were sent company wide. And by "company" I mean "national company with hundreds of employees".

vsync:

Well put.. Spitzer sounds like a typical under-paid government lawyer.

That Russell Simmons guy is one cool cat.

2006-01-09 08:04:58 AM Farkeologist
If you don't put things in writing, people will "hear"/infer what they damn well please. 6 Months from now, your versions of who said what will differ dramatically. I prefer E-mail over phone conversations for just this reason. All my "non-junk" E-mails are kept, and all my IM sessions are logged. It has come in handy many, MANY times!

Jesus Christ, yes. Remember this, I will, having just fallen for it, I have.

Which reminds me, I've gotta make a few printouts...

Not committing to writing orders that could be communicated verbally was a favorite admonition of Adolph Hitler.

The More You Know (c)