A project manager's job is different from a manager.

And I'm saying it's very easy to be a bad manager. It's even easier to be a "bad manager" in the sense that those who work for you think you're a bad manager.

I've worked for one company that I thought did a rather smart thing: They separated out the "manager" and "boss" roles.

So they had one person, a "manager", keep an eye on people, keep an eye on projects, allocate resources, and basically manage the group. The "boss" was a rather technical guy who was not good at managing, and did not want to manage, and who mostly worked as part of the team. The "manager" was treated more as a resource to keep the group working effectively, and really wasn't "in charge". For any substantial decisions, the manager would discuss it with the boss, and the boss would make a decision.

Admittedly, it was a small company doing a rather niche set of work, but it worked really well. There seemed to be something to the idea.

But according to that logic, you'd need techs all the way up.

Yeah. I've been a manager before, and if I'm being honest, I think I did a pretty good job at it. Relatively. Mostly.

But the guy who said, "It's too easy NOT to be." doesn't know what he's talking about. It's really easy to make a dumb managerial decision. It's really hard to be a good manager. For example, he says;

So great, now instead of being the absentee manager who doesn't know what's going on, you're the micromanaging asshole who calls constant meetings. As a result, you remember all the reasons why your project is delayed, but what are you going to do about it? Do you let the project be late? Do you cut back on the project goals? Can you throw more resources into the project to meet deadlines? Sometimes more resources don't work.

Sometimes you can push your people harder and get more work out of them. You don't want to do that all the time, because it has diminishing returns, and your people might hate you for it. They probably will hate you for it, but in doing so, you might be saving their jobs.

Now upper management calls you in. They're upset that the project is going wrong. You know it's because little bubble-headed Billy screwed up again. Billy is bad at his job. How much do you protect Billy, knowing that he really ought to be fired. Maybe you could throw him under the bus and get everyone else out of a jam, but that seems like a shitty thing to do. You prefer to be the type of manager that says, "This is my responsibility. The buck stops here."

But does Billy need to be fired? If you want to fire him, you're going to need reasons, and this could be one. He's a nice guy, and people like him. You're afraid of ruining the guy's life. You'd like to see him do well. Maybe you could sit down and have a talk with him, give him some help, and get him on the right track. That sounds great to you. You'd be a little bit of a hero, if you took this guy who's a bit of a fuck-up and helped him become a big success. You have a little fantasy about the whole thing: Someday, Billy is a big-shot millionaire, but he owes it all to you. That's a nice thought. Of course, you've tried the same thing with Peter last year, before eventually firing him. You really should have just cut your losses earlier, because everything you did to try to help Peter just fell flat. Ultimately, he wasn't motivated. Maybe Billy will be like that too, and you'll look back and say, "I wish I'd fired Billy earlier."

.... and Sorry about that. I went down a rabbit hole there, but I wanted to try to illustrate that these decisions aren't particularly easy. There are a bunch of competing interests, and there's not a clear "correct" answer. You can read books about management, with all their trite aphorisms. They might give some good examples of where other managers succeeded or failed, but the reality is that those examples worked because of context and chance. Often, the real lesson is that you have to be aware of all of the details and subtleties of your situation, sometimes ignoring conventional wisdom, try to find a solution that works in that exact, particular context, and hope for the best.

No, I think that's insufficient. The real issue here is that we need real, fast, high quality, unfettered telecommunications infrastructure. It's an economic issue, an issue of technological development, and First Amendment issue. There can be no compromise there.

Unfortunately, infrastructure development can only be left to the "free market" in limited ways. We can't have businesses developing completely independent roadways. Cities can't have a bunch of different electrical companies all laying down cables. We can't have a free market for water, with many different companies laying independent pipe networks throughout our cities. It's not practical and it doesn't make a bit of sense.

Companies like Verizon and TWC keep trying to re-frame the whole thing as though the Internet is an entertainment service, and we shouldn't regulate it any more than we regulate companies that make socks. They keep trying to re-frame it, and we keep letting them. They pay corrupt morons like Rand Paul to champion their causes, and we vote people like him into office. We should stop doing that.

The Internet is telecommunications infrastructure. We need it. We can't allow businesses to control and subvert out ability to communicate for their own short-term business goals. Net neutrality is not like telling a sock manufacturer how to set their prices. Net neutrality is like telling a company, "You're not allowed to own all the ink and paper in the world, and then decide which news stories get printed, and which personal letters get sent." It's like saying, "We can't let a company buy all of our roads, and then decide who gets to drive where, when, and in which car."

So far you've been wrong about just about everything. I know you think that prefacing nonsense with insults makes it an argument but it isn't.

Mainframes do precisely what you claim cannot be done and have done since long before Unix. So your categorical assertions of what can and can't be done are simply and obviously provably false. The fact that rather than admit this and engage you continue to be rude proves that you lack character as well as knowledge.

How can a service handle a situation when it is down? The services have to register in advance how to handle things. Moreover other services might still have issues.

  B depends on C and C needs to reinitiate with B, but D is also talking to C. How does the new B signal C?

As for it being contrived that's one of the key issues in process management how to handle chains and stacks of processes. That doesn't happen much in the sysv world because sysv handles it so badly that everything ended up having to write its own process manager.

If you're Home Depot, no ... while it's important, those few milliseconds of lag and somewhat less native UI isn't a primary business concern.

If you're trying to take on an 'A' player like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc, or trying to establish a new service, yes ... your experience has to be as optimized as possible to stay / get ahead of your competition.

Mixed with the sarcasm and the editorial I'm having a tough time extracting the position you are advocating. Or more importantly what you are disagreeing with. The point above is that you can't sue patent examiners. Your position seems to be that patents should be subject to a more complex and hostile review (i.e. a much more expensive review). If that's your point I'd agree. Otherwise you are going to have to represent.

Supercomputing? HAH!Linux is so fucking weak that it can't even support my super-server with 12 GPUs PER BOX.

http://www.top500.org/statisti...

In 2011 Cray deployed a Linux supercomputer with 9600 GPUs and from that point on Linux has been able to handle essentially infinitely many. I think you may want to read up a bit.

RedHat has had their own kernel for a quarter century. They don't need Linus' permission to introduce change into their kernel.

First off you sound like you would be happier on BSD. You should however get a grip. Non systemd distributions exist.

The upsides of Linux in 2015 are in spaces like huge range of software, IaaS, supercomputing and embedded. If you want to run 1990s style traditional Unix servers with software available for BSD, BSD is probably the better choice.

Wow wish I could mod you up. Your last paragraph is spot on.