61–70 of 119 posts
Stupid engineer...just draw the thing in an 11-dimensional space, and he would have gotten transparency and perpendicularity. No wonder he got talked down by management.
Perhaps I'm not thinking clearly - it's late here - but wouldn't 8-space suffice?
Also, if you ease the restriction to each line perpendicular to every line it intercepts, you can get as many lines as you want in 3d already.
At one marketing-overrun startup, the suits were calling two hour meetings every afternoon and then wondering why I wasn't getting any work done. So I installed a cuckoo clock in that meeting room. The CEO loved it; he even helped wind it. I knew I'd succeeded when one of the marketing types looked at the clock and said, "I hate that thing." I don't remember if the meetings got any shorter or less frequent, but they…
As an aside, how could you get zeroed out of a billion dolloar company where you worked at, and also funded?
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Perhaps I'm not thinking clearly - it's late here - but wouldn't 8-space suffice?
A 7-dimensional space would suffice to fit 7 orthogonal directions---though we should probably add an extra dimension for the alpha channel ;) BTW, I'm also guessing @lam's comment was referring to the 11 dimensions in string theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory#Extra_dimensions
and yes I am the "expert"
I think the best way I've found to combat these types of meetings and cut through the talk is simply to ask "Why" Find out pretty quickly (generally) what they are actually wanting and nobody needs to print things in transparent ink... (usually)
Don't just ask why. Ask why until you know you've found the root cause. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys
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I think your claim requires some elaboration. How about some concrete examples?
I've been on business calls where I've literally been offered a job in front of my boss. This happened to be because I had debugged a vendors' appliance and had the opportunity to say to their CTO something like: "You're product is such a piece of crap because it always crashes randomly, I narrowed it down to X and I had to break into the device and recompile the kernel with these flags to make it stop", turns out ma…
"Would you like me to draw a kitten using only 7 red lines that, where they cross, are perpendicular?"
Some of the comments here claim this is just showing how engineers think they are the only smart ones, or how there's equal frustration pointed back at engineers. However, this is illustrating a particular problem that only[2] affects engineers -- engineers are the ones at the end of the day who have to make a solution reality. This particular weight doesn't fall on any other role. It's easy for anyone, including eng…
This is simply not true. In the past I was a Business Analyst. I would meet with clients to gather requirements and that illustration would often unfold in the same manner.
It has nothing to do with a persons role, it has everything to do with having large knowledge or expertise gaps.
I think it's like being a man in an all-girls gathering. You can either be awkward or the center of attention. It depends on your perception and how you would present yourself.
Common guys. The downvotes are okay (points don't mean anything anyways). I just like to explain that what I wrote is a metaphor and that's it. It ain't to be taken literally.
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The problem with the meeting (hourly rate | billable rate) × members × time cost approach is this: a well-performed meeting is what provides your worth. In this sense, considering a meeting to be a cost based on what you can charge for your time is as ridiculous as a professional sports team considering workouts and training to be costed at the average revenue rate of a game. The training is what provides the ability…
> The training is what provides the ability to charge for admission and airtime royalties for games. The meeting is what gives you a product or service offering. The cost analysis of the meeting is however helpful to make people realize that there's way too many people in that meeting. It's just like a sports team where half of the players are not actively training while you're paying them all. And on top of that, th…