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(slightly skeptical) Educational society promoting "Back to basics" movement against IT overcomplexity and  bastardization of classic Unix

Softpanorama IT Slackers Society. Established December 31, 2006


IT Slacker Society Manifest

by Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov
Version 1.02 (Mar 10, 2012)

Give yourself a break -- slow down...

After several years of working in IT many highly qualified programmers and top system administrators face strange symptoms which might be defined as "allergy to IT environment". Among them: 

  1. You feel that you need to explain things to idiots well too often and that after your explanations they will go their idiotic way anyway; only few people are qualified enough to do quality job (at the same time, if all people around look like idiots, you probably need to look in the mirror ;-)
     
  2. You observe tremendous waste of talent and resources, a kaleidoscope of stupid decisions adopted by IT brass and crave escape.  At this point you may also understand that IT with its current outsourcing mania  and related run to the bottom  is a mouse trap with no good escape path...
     
  3. You suddenly realize that different types of PHBs such as "control freaks" (the most common and the most dangerous category), "frauds", �soap bubbles�, "wanna-be�s" and "know-nothings" are not only caricature characters in Dilbert cartoons. They are actually the most common IT managers types and your manager is not an exception.
     
  4. Working for a completely crazy control freak or a half-crazy right wing authoritarian jerk, or know nothing who is school friend of vice-president of IT is much less fun that you expected in college. Your resentment is growing day by day and several times you already was razor-thin close to being summoned on "red carpet" for friendly counseling. You start to understand that the key task of IT brass is to impede wherever possible the adoption on useful technologies as they might threaten their existence. And that there is a real danger of severe punishment for anybody who still has the remnants of sanity in the selection of applications or architecture. Especially if he/she is trying to introduce something new. 
     

  5. Your career is blocked, your job is at risk and instead of competent employee promotion (you :-) as exemplified in  Peter Principle ("In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to or above his level of incompetence." ) you see harsh reality were the most ineffective and vicious people around you get promoted to where they can do most damage: management.  This actually does not violate Peter Principle, if you think about it...
     
  6. You understand that the politically correct clich�s  like  "IT culture",  "team work", and, especially, "empowerment" in your environment are oxymorons and wish you had the guts to resign.
     
  7. But you need to feed your family and understand that even if you can find another job, other organizations are probably as bad as this one or worse.

If you think that three or more points in this list are true about your current position, don't fall in despare --  help is coming. Join Softpanorama IT Slacker Society.

Below you can find the IT Slacker Manifest. The key motto is "give yourself a break -- slow down". This is a society for IT "neo-slaves" who are only superficially different from the "damned of the service industry", condemned to dress up as clowns all week or mid-management lemmings who waste all their lives in pointless meetings.

In order to join you just need read and accept the following manifest and click on one of the advertisements at any page of the Softpanorama Web site to pay your annual fee :-).  You need to realizes that this is the time for IT wage slaves to hit back and that you can make a difference being an underground member of this resistance movement.  Here are the key ideas that we proudly call "IT Slacker Society Manifest."  They are only few of them and they are definitely devoid of usual corporate BS (see also Ten Commandments of  Software Development Slackerism) :

  1. You need to accept that you are a modern day slave and try to resist overexploitation on the IT plantations. There is no scope for personal fulfillment in regular corporate IT. May be there was some in the last century but those days are long gone. Please understand that like people at Wall Mart or McDonalds you work for pay-check to feed yourself and your family and need to survive till 66 without getting a stroke or something even worse. It you die at 55 or get stoke at 45 nobody will thank you for this sacrifice in the name of some stupid organization or some even more stupid project. Give yourself a break and for some part of the day just do nothing. Tell everyone that you're going to be "busy" and will be unavailable. Whether you choose to tell them that you're actually setting aside some time to do nothing, or you just give them the vague explanation "I'm going to be busy" (busy doing nothing!), tell them not to call, visit, or interrupt unless it's a real emergency. Set an alarm on your cell phone when your "do-nothing" time is over, so that you don't have to constantly look at the clock and count the minutes. 
     
  2. It's pointless to try to change the system. Opposing it simply makes it stronger. Consider your own work experience and answer this question: "How many incompetent employees or managers have you encountered and how many were subsequently fired?" Fired, not relocated or bump upstairs so to speak. Although this is very sad to see, but  promotion from one level of incompetence to another level of incompetence does not negate  the Peter Principle
     
  3. Beware of excessive zeal in pushing keys on the keyboard and moving electrons too fast.  While you can think about yourself as a brilliant programmer or administrator it does not matter one bit. In reality you are just a special kind of mover -- electrons mover. And as such you can be replaced  by almost anybody sitting next to you. Or outsourced to some remote or not so remote place.  So work as slow  as possible, do quality job to preserve your dignity and reserve some time to venture outside your cubicle.  Despite your excessive zeal to push keys on the keyboard you need to spend some time (not too much, if you can help it) cultivating your personal network so that you're untouchable when the next outsourcing wave or reorganization comes knocking in the your door Try to spend some time making real contact with those around you instead of sending email and using IM.  As system provide you with the lunch break never try to skip it to do more. This is your tiny slot of personal time and you need to use it in full to eat and communicate with people, not to push keys on the keyboard.  This means sticking your head out of your cubicle, leaving the server room, and dealing with the real people. As Prince Kropotkin once noted about his prison guards, "people are better then institutions."
     

  4. You're not judged on merit, but mainly on your appearance. That means that you need to learn to use IT jargon: management will suspect that you have insights. You cannot manage your boss, if you speak in a language he finds foreign. You just need to be vigilant against going too far and demonstrating excessive zeal in this area as quantity tends to turn in quality ;-)...
     
  5. You may benefit from avoiding "in the trenches" jobs and positions of responsibility. You'll only have to work twice harder and under more stress for a raise which is just peanuts.
     
  6. Try to navigate yourself to the most benign IT positions  such as research, strategy, security or any other position where it is difficult or impossible to assess your contribution. Slow down when programming: nobody will praise you for the work anyway, so do quality work that ensure your personal satisfaction.
     
  7. If you managed to get into sinecure job, never move. You will be surrounded by people whom management tends to protect; it is usually the guys in the trenches who are the most exposed to outsourcing and risk their physical and mental health fighting close hands IT combat in the trenches. Snow flowers, as management cronies are called in eastern Europe, are nice, friendly environment as they are confident in their job security.
     
  8. Cultivate good relations with upper management and learn to identify similar thinking people who, like you, understand Peter Principle and believe the system is absurd enough not to fight it  (quirks, peculiar jokes, warm smiles might be telling signs of your potential allies).
     
  9. Always be nice to consultants on short-term contracts. They are among few people in IT who do  real work and do it quick.
     
  10. Don't fool yourself that the absurdity of  corporate IT environment cannot last forever. That it will eventually go the same way the communist system went. It actually might happen someday for one particular corporation, but this would be largely an unfortunate incident. The problem here is that if you wait it to happen your life might well be too short to enjoy the crash, not mentioning that you can be hurt during it... 

    More sound approach to consider this to be a regular working environment to which you need to adapt. There is little merit in becoming a corporate IT revolutionary who fights the system on barricades.

Warnings



Etc

Society

Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers :   Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism  : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy

Quotes

War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda  : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotesSomerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose BierceBernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes

Bulletin:

Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOSProgramming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC developmentScripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-MonthHow to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater�s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

Most popular humor pages:

Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor

The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D


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Last modified: August 14, 2012