Fuzzy Orange

If there is one thing thats really p*ssing me off at the moment, its this.
Everyone I’ve met who manages a company, people, country.. whatever, has no management skills at all and are so detached from the real world, I often find myself wondering if they smoke crack.

The people I meet that have great management skills (Hi Nick if you read this ), and good ideas to move companies forward, are usually ignored.

Recently one of the owners of the company that I currently work for came into our office to give a highly motivational speech. In the middle of this speech he announced that pay rises would NEVER be authorised. Apparently pay rises are only applicable if your roll within the company changes.
What are these people on? I realise if you drive 4 cars, have 2 villas in spain and only come back to the UK for business that you must be slightly detached from the current going-ons, but EVERY company should give a cost of living increase. Fuel prices are rocketing, food is more expensive, mortgages are going up, rent is going up, but wages stay the same? How does that work??

As a direct result of this announcement, the entire development team at my work have started interviewing for new jobs.. *sigh*

But.. he’s not a spot on the manager at my old company. The guy was completely detached from reality. He had this bizarre feeling that he was always right, even when talking about stuff that he had absolutely no previous experience in. Worse than that he ignored the advice from the highly qualified professionals that he hired to work for him.

There is NOTHING worse than being hired for a job because you have nearly 10 years experience in your area of expertise, but then being told by a manager that they aren’t doing things the way you suggested because he/she has a better idea based on the complete lack of any experience in your field that they have.

me – “If we use php with codeigniter, or even better, ruby on rails – we could dramatically shorten development times and increase profit on web projects”
manager – “Oh no we are a microsoft company, we don’t trust open source solutions, so carry on with ASP”
…or even better the day I was told that we had to buy MSSQL for a project because MYSQL isnt an enterprise level solution! haha

This isn’t just a rant about companies though, its the same with our government
They keep increasing fuel tax and road tax, because they think it will reduce congestion
Are they f*cking retarded???????

People get up at 8am in the morning, jump into their car and drive to work
They don’t do this for leisure, its not just a pointless drive, they do it because they need to get to their job
They live in villages outside of towns, because the policing in the UK is soooo shit you wouldnt want to live near where you work (trust me, I am at the moment and I’d give my left leg to be living in a village again)
You cant catch a bus, because they hardly ever run. Trains are worse.
The local bus that I could catch costs 4x what it does to run my car to work!!

Increasing road tax and fuel tax, isnt going to magically make people stop driving, except of course when your wages can no longer cover your car costs so you lose your job and sit taking dole money every week!

Everyone else in the UK can see that if the government did more to improve public transport, and pressure companies to use flexible working hours so that people driving in and out of towns were staggered, that it would make a much bigger impact on congestion than increasing road tax by £100 a year!!

What needs to happen is that for 6 months we should take the government, and put them in low cost housing in a town center. Make them attend a job in an industrial estate and give them the choice between the bus or a car.
Take the managers from our companies and give them a low wage, high rent, and see how they feel in 6 months time

I tell you something, they’re view of the world would change.
Maybe also after 6 months of watching immigrants dealing drugs outside your house, and fighting on the street at 3am in the morning, or driving cars around with no mot,tax or insurance, their view of that situation might change too… but that little rant can wait till another day

Finally after what seems like an eternity of being jealous of Rick’s mac, I went out last week and bought myself a nice mac mini.

2.0ghz dual core with 2gb of ram

I’ve taken both my 320gb drives out my PC, reformatted them and put them in USB caddies on my mac

Only had it for a week, but god its nice..
Last night I was sat converting a few of my movie rips to MP4’s ready for itunes, chatting to a few mates on msn, watching a tv show in quicktime, doing a bit of work in photoshop and browsing around in coda, and it never skipped a beat

Compared to vista x64 ultimate which blue screened on average 6 times a day, I’m in heaven

I’ll stand by Rick’s comments here… if you use your computer professionally for either coding or graphic design, you NEED a mac!