Posts by Bart Janssen
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OnPoint: MSD's Leaky Servers, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
and Paula Bennett’s head on a spike would totally restore my confidence
To be serious, She of course has no control over this. Her losing her job would not in any way make this all better.
BUT
Like the CEO part of her job is accepting responsibility for the actions of the staff under her control. That is part of the reason she is paid as much as she is ... not because her job is hard, but because she takes on a responsibility for the actions of people over whom she has very little actual control.
That's a shitty position to be in, essentially she might lose her job because someone far beneath her fucked up, but that is also part of the job she took on. Along with all the good bits like having the power to make changes (for good or ill) come responsibility.
I get annoyed with people who take on those roles but are unwilling to accept responsibility.
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OnPoint: MSD's Leaky Servers, in reply to Daniel Webster,
“accessing the information wasn’t easy”
As far as I can tell this is roughly equivalent to a bank leaving the keys under the front door mat attached to note with the alarm codes.
Now most folks wouldn't think to look under the mat...
and most folks wouldn't know where the alarm keypad was ...
but that is about the level of difficulty we are talking about -
OnPoint: MSD's Leaky Servers, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
people who are a little more directly responsible for data security.
I'm certain the codemonkeys at the bottom of the pay scale will get fired.
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OnPoint: MSD's Leaky Servers, in reply to Sacha,
Any IT manager right up to the new CIO should have spotted this stuff and fixed it.
Nope.
The CIO probably has no computing experience beyond powerpoint but he/she will have an MBA. The priority will have been to meet budgets, their KIPs will be based on reducing salary costs and they will have met those KPIs and received appropriate bonuses.
The poor schmucks on the ground will have come fresh out of their tech training and may or may not be good. But they will have NO experience, because industry experience would cost more in salaries.
This is the nature of business in NZ, worship the MBA and management experience dismiss the experience of the workers as irrelevent.
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OnPoint: MSD's Leaky Servers, in reply to mjb,
it’s more likely that IT staff heads will roll, not Bennett or the guvmint.
Sadly that's true.
It's likely the people building this system were the cheapest that they could hire. Not necessarily bad workers just lacking in the kind of experience that would prevent this disaster.
They of course will have been hired by manager who will be paid full "market rates" who will have been given direction by senior executives who will have demanded salaries equivalent to those overseas.
The heads that should roll should be those managers. But in all likelyhood it will be the overworked IT codemonkeys who get the chop and the managers will survive.
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Hard News: The Advocate, in reply to Damian Christie,
while Average Audience is the % of all people in NZ who are watching your programme
So if I understand that means ~30% of New Zealanders are watching TV1, 2 or 3 at 7 pm. So how many are watching all the other channnels combined? Another 20%? Do half of the people in NZ watch TV at 7 pm? The seems kinda high to me.
And then if 5% of NZ watch TV3 at 7 pm that's 200000. Is that actually enough to make the advertising worthwhile?
Sorry kinda derailing but the numbers are interesting in terms of what it takes to make producing a program worthwhile.
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Hard News: The Advocate, in reply to John Armstrong,
Yep, but also vice versa.
I agree entirely.
The relationship between the fact of too few lifeboats (the company finagled shipping regulations to avoid having too many lifeboats spoil the look of the decks) the fact of poor crew training and policies that led to lifeboats being launched half empty.
And
The people and lives involved, the owers, the designers, the crew, the passengers, their motivations, the effects on families.Without both parts you can't understand what happened properly.
Note I do think Campbell has being doing a great job with the stories it's been telling. I just don't see any need to denigrate facts to justify telling the story of the people and their responses to the facts.
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Hard News: The Advocate, in reply to John Sellwood,
asking about the lack of life-boats
As a complete aside, while it is true there were too few life boats overall on the titanic that is not why so many died.
Many lifeboats were only half-filled due to time delays to guide the women and children first into boats, or no open doors to release passengers on lower decks.
The real problem was lack of training and some pretty awful proceedures.
Stories, they are complicated by facts.
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Hard News: The Advocate, in reply to John Sellwood,
I had the audacity to follow twelve Spring Creek coal miners on a journey from Greymouth to Wellington to plead with politicians for their mine not to be closed. Yes I mentioned the basic facts; Solid Energy, the dollar, falling demand, 200 plus jobs at risk (later to become 400 plus), Don Elder was mentioned, rescue plans were raised, but this story was fundamentally about people. That’s what will be remembered grown men, hard men near tears, doing everything in their power to save their mine, their jobs and their community. That was the story.
I think this is a particularly interesting case. First there really is a worthwhile story about the effects of a mine closure on families and people. You presented that.
But what bugged me is that there were several other stories that got lost. Business over humans? Government spending choices? Burning coal as energy? Environmental damage of mining? The lives of the workers in the factories that use the coal? The shipping companies that transport the coal across the planet? The pollution effects where it is burned? Some of those stories are boring, but aren't they important too?
You chose to tell only one story in full. That is your call but I wanted to know the other parts to the story. It felt incomplete to me. Not that you had done a bad job telling the story you told, just that there were other stories to tell.
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Hard News: The Advocate, in reply to John Sellwood,
so called facts
grrrrrrr
Fact are facts. Sometimes we can get the facts wrong and that is called a mistake, which is just fine, we all make those. But don't denigrate factual information just to justify presenting human opinions.
I think your point would have been made better by noting that the opinion and feelings of a person affected by an event are also "facts". They are just as real and just as valuable a part of the story.
You didn't need to denigrate "facts" and professionals who have spent time and energy learning those facts to make your point.