Readit NewsMy former manager used to have Dilbert comic strips on his wall. It always puzzled me - was it self deprecating humor? At a certain point though it became clear that in his mind the PHB was one layer ABOVE him in the management chain and not anyone at his level. I suspect it may be a recursive pattern.
Also what's up with the people hiking (by themselves) with a bluetooth speaker. You're by yourself, in nature. If you want to listen to music wear headphones!!
Also why are people using speaker phones in public places at max volume. The speaker in your phone is designed to deliver the sound directly to your ear, probably at higher fidelity.
I'm loving the fact that battery technology will eventually eliminate weed wackers.
Sorry if I sound cranky, I find loud noises challenging.
Washington Department of Natural Resources recommended bluetooth speaker playlists for hiking:
https://unofficialnetworks.com/2022/08/20/washington-roasts-...
I was instantly jealous of the devs who got the SGI machines, not only did they have color monitors (!) but they got to play networked games with each other (battletanks I think?) at lunchtimes.
I think there are multiple reasons for this, but they are mostly overlapping with preserving internal power structures.
PM's don't want anecdotal user evidence that their vision of the product is incomplete.
Engineering managers don't want user feedback to undermine perception of quality and derail "impactful" work that's already planned.
Customer relations (or the support team, user study, whatever team actually should listen to the user directly) doesn't want you doing their job better than they can (with your intimate engineering and product knowledge). And they don't want you to undermine the "themes" or "sentiment" that they present to leadership.
Legal doesn't want you admitting publicly that there could be any flaw in the product.
Edit: I should add that this happens even internally for internal products. You, as a customer, are not allowed to talk to an engineer on the internal product. You have to fill a bug report or a form and wait for their PMs to review and prioritize. It does keep you from disturbing their engineers, but this kind of process only exists on products that have a history of high incoming bug rate.
In retrospect, the customers I helped were ones that had the most interesting problems to me, that I knew I could solve, but they were usually not the changes that would have the biggest impact across the whole customer base. By fixing a couple of customers' specific issues, I was making their lives better for sure, and that felt good, but that time could have been used more effectively for the overall customer base. PMs, managers etc should have a wider view of product needs, and it is their job to prioritize the work having that fuller context. Much as I felt at the time that those roles added little value, that was really not true.
Of course agreed that all the points made above for PMs, managers, support having their reasons to obstruct are true in some cases, but for a well run company where those roles really do their job (and contrary to popular opinion those companies do exist), things work better if engineers do not get too involved with individual customers. I guess Google might be a good example - if you have a billion customers you probably don't want the engineers to be talking to them 1:1.
https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/einstein/heao2.html
But this is a new Chinese instrument, also an X-ray telescope, also called Einstein:
Not clear yet on the exact charge speed or launch date. Or what the 0-100km/h time is, but expect a low number, of course. That number has to be eye-catching.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrari_Luce