Tag: business

The True Reason Behind The 40-Hour Work Week & Why We Are Economic Slaves

“The True Reason Behind The 40-Hour Work Week & Why We Are Economic Slaves” doesn’t really say anything new, but it explains things nice and simple.

We automatically accept a 40-hour workweek with meager hourly pay as normal, even though many work overtime and still struggle to survive. There are also those who make enough to live comfortably but are unable to request less hours—you either work 40 hours a week, or you don’t get to work at all, but how does a debt relief program affect your credit.We submit when told what to wear, when we have to arrive and depart, when we’re allowed to eat, and even when we’re allowed to use the restroom. How is it we have come to allow this?

The 40-hour-work week came about during the Industrial Revolution in Britain when at one point workers were putting in 10 to 16 hour days and began to protest. Working situations for Americans began to worsen as well, and by 1836, labor movement publications were also calling for a 40-hour workweek. Citizens in both situations were so overworked, an eight-hour day was easily accepted. This system is unnecessary now, if it ever was, but we still accept it due to the effects of our capitalist society.

It goes over the relationship of inflation, debt and consumerism with a few historical references.  Good reading for anybody wondering why the paycheck-to-paycheck life cycle is difficult to change, no matter what’s the size of the paycheck.

Power in a distributed organization vs traditional

Chris Hardie, who works for Automattic, shares his observations on where the power in a distributed organization comes from, versus the traditional one.

In an office setting, I see power and influence gather around…

  • The person with the newest, coolest and/or most expensive clothing
  • The person with the larger corner office
  • The person with the most assistants
  • The person with the most impressive sounding title
  • The person with the closest parking space
  • The oldest, richest, whitest males
  • The person who’s allowed to create or interrupt meetings
  • The person with the most impressive social and public-speaking skills
  • The person who uses their power to get what they want

In a distributed organization, I see power and influence gather around…

  • The person who produces output and solutions that exceed expectations
  • The person who can connect deeply with colleagues over a distance
  • The person who can effectively and concisely articulate their own views and ideas
  • The person who helps their coworkers be the best versions of themselves
  • The person generous with their understanding of how to navigate the organization’s processes and culture
  • The person who can give voice to unrecognized or unspoken truths
  • The person who learns fastest from their mistakes
  • The person who uses their power to empower others

It’s of course not fair to generalize this way. There are healthy traditional organizations where appearances are not necessarily the basis for power. There are probably unhealthy distributed organizations where power centers around the appearance of lots of activity that produces few good outcomes. But my experience so far is that a distributed organizational structure inherently facilitates an experience of power, empowerment and leadership that is better for the people in it, and for the work they are doing together.

I don’t have much experience working for a distributed organization, but judging by many Open Source projects, which are, in essence, distributed organizations, I’m inclined to agree with the above observations.  I wouldn’t be able to put in words so well though.

Don’t Build Private Clouds

Subbu Allamaraju says “Don’t Build Private Clouds“.  I agree with his rational.

need-for-private-cloud

There are very few enterprises in the planet right now that need to own, operate and automate data centers. Unless you’ve at least 200,000 servers in multiple locations, or you’re in specific technology industries like communications, networking, media delivery, power, etc, you shouldn’t be in the data center and private cloud business. If you’re below this threshold, you should be spending most of your time and effort in getting out of the data center and not on automating and improving your on-premise data center footprint.

His main three points are:

  1. Private cloud makes you procrastinate doings the right things.
  2. Private cloud cost models are misleading.
  3. Don’t underestimate on-premise data center influence on your organization’s culture.

 

Yet another bit on security

Here are a couple of interesting articles from the last few days on Slashdot.

First, comes in a very non-surprising survey saying that “40 percent of organizations store admin passwords in Word documents“.  Judging from my personal experiences in different companies, I’d say this number is much higher if you extend the Word documents to Excel spreadsheets and plain text files.  I think pretty much every single company I’ve worked at used such common files for admin password storage (at least at some point).

“Why or why?!!!”, the security concerned among you might scream.  Well, I think there are two reasons for this.  The first one is that password management is complicated.  There are tools that help with this, but even those are rarely easy to use.  Storing the passwords in a secure, encrypted storage is one thing.  But, how do you share them with just the right people? How do you trust the tool? What happens if the file gets corrupted, the software updates, the license expires, or the master password is lost?  The risk of losing admin access to all your equipment and accounts is scary.  On top of that, there is the issue of changing passwords (especially when people leave the company) – not a simple job if you have a variety of accounts (hardware, software, services, etc) and a lot of people who have a varying degree of access.  Or automation scripts that need access to perform large scale operations.  Personally, I don’t think this problem has been solved yet.

The second reason is in this other Slashdot post – “Sad Reality: It’s Cheaper To Get Hacked Than Build Strong IT Defenses“.  This is very true as well.  A simple firewall and a strong password policy is often more than enough for many organizations.  The risks of compromise are low.  In those cases where it does happen, you’d often get some script kiddie consequence like a Bitcoin mining app or affiliate links spread across your website.  Both are quite easy to detect and fix.  Is it worth investing hundreds of thousands in equipment and personnel to prevent this? For many companies it is not.

The fact of the matter is that a lot of people don’t really care about security or privacy on the personal level, and that then translates into the organizational mentality as well.

Just think about people leaving in all those high crime areas.  Some of them think the risk is worth it – maybe then can make more money there or have a more exciting life.  Some of them simply can’t afford to move anywhere.  That’s very similar to the digital security, I think.  Some don’t care and prefer to run the risk, saving the money on protection. Some simply can’t afford to have a decent level of security.

What is risk management?

risk management

O’Reilly runs a nice and simple article on what is risk management.  They look at it from the perspective of a web application, but the suggestions are generic enough to be applied universally.  The highlights are:

  • Managing risk
  • Identifying risk
  • Remove worst offenders
  • Mitigate
  • Review regularly

I particularly liked this paragraph from the identifying risks section:

You will likely find that there are obvious entries in the list, but there should also be entries that surprise you. This is good. You want to uncover as many of your risk vulnerabilities as possible, and if some of them don’t come as a surprise to you, you probably haven’t dug deep enough.