Boris Johnson's surprising early poll ead over Ken Livingstone in the run-up to the London mayoral election next month could be a headache for the makers of this excellent motoring accessory, the KenBuster. This automatic device senses when you stray into the congestion charge zone and pays the relevant charge for you. You might well ask how a device that pays the charge for you constitutes busting anyone, but that would be to forget the nature of the modern bureaucrat who, of course, pefers you not to pay such fees so he can hit you for even more via fines. Acording to the KenBuster people over 25 per cent of Transport for London's income comes from congestion charge fines, with about 4,500 people being stung every day.
So is now a good time to buy a KenBuster? Johnson promises only to "reform" the congestion charge. My guess is that a notional Mayor Johnson (a keen yclist) will steer clear of abolition, especially once he's seen the books. So it's all clear, I suspect, to buy a Ken/BorisBuster. £200 to buy outright, or £50 with a 12-month contract of £8 per month, from www.kenbuster.com.
(From the FT's How to Spend It magazine)
Showing posts with label bureaucracy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bureaucracy. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Friday, March 21, 2008
why bosses are bad for you
Paul Graham on why You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
The restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on programmers, because the essence of programming is to build new things. Sales people make much the same pitches every day; support people answer much the same questions; but once you've written a piece of code you don't need to write it again. So a programmer working as programmers are meant to is always making new things. And when you're part of an organization whose structure gives each person freedom in inverse proportion to the size of the tree, you're going to face resistance when you do something new.
This seems an inevitable consequence of bigness. It's true even in the smartest companies. I was talking recently to a founder who considered starting a startup right out of college, but went to work for Google instead because he thought he'd learn more there. He didn't learn as much as he expected. Programmers learn by doing, and most of the things he wanted to do, he couldn't—sometimes because the company wouldn't let him, but often because the company's code wouldn't let him. Between the drag of legacy code, the overhead of doing development in such a large organization, and the restrictions imposed by interfaces owned by other groups, he could only try a fraction of the things he would have liked to. He said he has learned much more in his own startup, despite the fact that he has to do all the company's errands as well as programming, because at least when he's programming he can do whatever he wants.
(Graham's argument is bolstered by an appeal to the habits of our prehistoric ancestors, as well as the social behaviour of various other species in the wild; this is a move that always strikes me as unlikely to strengthen an argument in need of support, but the piece strikes a chord.)
Jefferson argued that each generation should create its own laws. A Forefather malgré soi, he thought that no generation should be bound by laws drawn up by persons ignorant of the conditions to be faced. The drag of legacy code is downright unAmerican.
The restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on programmers, because the essence of programming is to build new things. Sales people make much the same pitches every day; support people answer much the same questions; but once you've written a piece of code you don't need to write it again. So a programmer working as programmers are meant to is always making new things. And when you're part of an organization whose structure gives each person freedom in inverse proportion to the size of the tree, you're going to face resistance when you do something new.
This seems an inevitable consequence of bigness. It's true even in the smartest companies. I was talking recently to a founder who considered starting a startup right out of college, but went to work for Google instead because he thought he'd learn more there. He didn't learn as much as he expected. Programmers learn by doing, and most of the things he wanted to do, he couldn't—sometimes because the company wouldn't let him, but often because the company's code wouldn't let him. Between the drag of legacy code, the overhead of doing development in such a large organization, and the restrictions imposed by interfaces owned by other groups, he could only try a fraction of the things he would have liked to. He said he has learned much more in his own startup, despite the fact that he has to do all the company's errands as well as programming, because at least when he's programming he can do whatever he wants.
(Graham's argument is bolstered by an appeal to the habits of our prehistoric ancestors, as well as the social behaviour of various other species in the wild; this is a move that always strikes me as unlikely to strengthen an argument in need of support, but the piece strikes a chord.)
Jefferson argued that each generation should create its own laws. A Forefather malgré soi, he thought that no generation should be bound by laws drawn up by persons ignorant of the conditions to be faced. The drag of legacy code is downright unAmerican.
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