12 May, 2009

An impromptu survey

Some of you might have noticed (or not, if you're reading this through an RSS feed) that I've been playing with a Twitter feed to do some mini-updates. That's it over there in the right-hand column - have a quick look.

I'll wait.

...

So could I have a quick show of hands, please - is anyone actually reading them?  I'll probably keep them up in either case, but I'm just curious.

8 comments:

Lusus Naturae said...

I am, since I need something to convince me not to try and find a new job in IT/IS and stay in the comparative safety and security of Recovery.

gregor42 said...

I wouldn't look to Twitter to replace the blog - but enhancing it is something else.

Highlights leading up to a full-on rant are probably the way to go.

This way - everyone gets what they want - constant updates - and the occasional lengthy outburst but without the pressure to produce them regularly looming over your head.

dthree said...

Following.

Argh said...

Lusus: I'd like to think that the environments I work in tend to be atypical. You mean they're not?

gregor42: Oh, there was never any intention of not keeping up the blog entries (even if it was in my now customary erratic pattern). There's a lot of stuff that just can't be condensed into the confines of a Twitter post, and your suggestion is more or less how I could saw things working, too.

Godel Fishbreath said...

now that you have pointed them out I will. Any way to access the back stuff? or could you copy and paste to a entry?
Sean

Andy Boal said...

What's the twitter id?

Lusus Naturae said...

Argh: Out of my entire career, I can think of exactly 1 workplace where there wasn't at least one person who seemed hell-bent on completely ignoring protocol, on failing to understand even basic concepts, on being an outright prat, and that one example was because the office was comprised entirely of engineers and sysadmins.

Absolute worst was working for a medium-sized ISP where sales, management, and systems/netops completely failed to communicate with each other on ANY topic, which led to exciting moments like sales selling our service to roughly a 1 modem:1000 users ratio, which... didn't really work well.

So rest assured, you're not alone. Sadly.

Argh said...

Sean & Andy: the Twitter URL is http://twitter.com/blunttraumalite. That has all eight entries to date. The widget on the side of the blog will show the most recent five.

Lusus: that sounds a lot like where I worked for ten years - for a couple of decades, management roles had been filled by the next most senior engineer in line, so the organisation became progressively more technology-focused and lost its ability to deal with human-related issues; it's small retail arm was formed by an ex-navy engineer and then management passed to the next most senior sales rep (and most of the sales staff were techs who'd been pressganged into the role, so they didn't have retail *or* management experience); much later, after the retail arm was euthanised, the organisation established an ISP arm because it seemed like a good idea.

Again, managed by engineers initially, and then by marketing staff with no technology or management background (and sometimes no marketing background!), so that they tended to make decisions devoid of any understanding of what was needed to make the services they were selling work, or what the impact was going to be on any of the admin or tech areas they hadn't think to consult with until after things started to go wrong. For the last several years I was there, the organisation seemed to exist in a near-constant state of review, restructure or realignment as new management came in and tried to work out where things were going wrong.