Although when you do compare employee head counts between Microsoft (91,000) and Apple (21,000), it’s essential to note that at least half of Apple’s employees work in its retail stores.
How does Apple seemingly achieve so much more then Microsoft with only a ninth of the workforce? That Reality Distortion Field must be one strong mo’fo.
UPDATE: I just read that Nokia has over 114000 employees. Which makes the market shattering iPhone even more impressive.
When you run a company that develops software, it makes little to no sense to lump your developers with sub-standard machines and tiny monitors. Managers who wouldn’t bat an eyelid at buying a new Visual Studio (Thank God I’m a Java/Groovy developer) license, gasp in horror and say there’s no budget when you ask for a faster machine or a bigger/dual monitor setup. Those minutes you save every day doing tasks add up to hours over a week, which add up to days over a month, which add up to maybe even a whole month over a year (in your dreams!). Personally, I’d just use that extra time to browse YouTube.
I hate 99% of the meetings I’m invited too simply because nearly all of them are a waste of my time or someone else’s. The number of times I’ve sat in meetings and ended up not saying anything for the whole thing or watched on as 90% of the poor attendants end up not saying anything either, no doubt we would all have been more productive gouging our eyes out with hot pokers.
A lot of my hatred for meetings comes from the fact I think nearly all of them could be eliminated just by sending an email outlining the problem and asking for a solution. But my biggest gripe is what I call the “Pull one out the hat” meetings where a problem is presented to you and you’re expected to provide a course-of-action/solution on the spot. Then the moment you say “I don’t know” or “I’ll have to think about it” you’re still pushed for at least an idea. And God forbid you reply that you don’t know how long a problem will take to solve when you don’t even have a solution yet. “But can’t you give us a rough estimate?” they’ll ask, “Yeah, sometime this year.” is the safest reply. If you give something that they can use as an estimate just wait until you’re held to it even if you include the heavenly “maybe” somewhere in there! “Maybe I can do it in two weeks but I will have to go away and think about it and provide you with a more solid timeframe.”, two weeks later, “But you said it would take you two weeks!”, like fuck I did!
Until people realise development is not an exact science and that we as developers don’t hold every single bit of knowledge on every piece of code and every column of data in our numerous databases in our head then we’ll be forever plagued by meaningless, time wasting, excruciatingly painful meetings.
Don’t get me wrong, there are such a thing as good meetings. For instance, Ian does a really good job when it comes to the Faculty of Trading meetings. I get a well prepared agenda a day or two before the meeting with an open question as to whether everything will be covered or if I need anything added or removed and afterwards a well written summary and action points for each attendant. But heck, not everyone can be a winner like him!
I’ll leave you with an interesting article: Study shows meetings make us dumber
I bought this on a whim as Foyles didn’t seem to have any of the books I was really after. Besides who wouldn’t be interested in the story of the UK’s second richest person. It’s certainly been a up and down ride for old Philip Green, but if there’s two things you can’t deny about the man it’s that he doesn’t give up and that he’s the boss.
Sometimes I think it’s easy to look at these really successful people and think that they all got lucky or that after one of two of our own failures us mere mortals don’t stand a chance of reaching the top like these people, but Philip Green is the perfect example of someone who made it after a string of failures. For years and years he tried his hand at constantly starting new businesses. He’s a risk taker and sometimes those risks haven’t paid off but the ones that have, have paid off extremely well for him.
One thing that is apparent though is that he is a total arsehole to the people around him and especially those that cross him. If he took the arsehole test I posted a few days ago no doubt the system would explode! But to the man’s testament he’s being himself and makes no apologies for it and it’s probably that attitude that got him to where he is today. As someone was quoted as saying “You don’t get to where he is without being a bastard”.
EBay Layoff 1600
WTF do they all do? And more importantly, how many have a rating over 99.8%? Apple has 19,000…