Blog – The IT Blog

Dell CEO has forgotten how telephones work

I just read on heise online about Dell Orders All Staff Back to the Office 5 Days a Week: Read the Memo – Business Insider.

“Oh I’m curious about the reasons” I thought. And the article is really fun to read. This has the potential to be a #BullshitMonday story:

“What we’re finding is that for all the technology in the world, nothing is faster than the speed of human interaction,” [CEO] Michael Dell told staff. “A thirty-second conversation can replace an email back-and-forth that goes on for hours or even days.”

Uhm, okay. You’ve got too much email back and forth. I can SO understand that. But … has he ever heard of this … telephone thing? You can talk to remote people in real time. It’s like true magic!

And I just imagine being in the office needing some clarification for something: So I first look up where the person’s office is, I walk there, likely I won’t find that person because – well – (s)he is also clarifying things, or I just interrupt the person, have a chat and walk back. 30 seconds with an overhead of 5-10minutes.

Oh and .. let’s not even discuss WHY there are so many eMails. Can’t be lack of / unclear responsibilities, fear of taking decisions, bad processes, bad adoption of technology – nooo, never. O-M-G.

Don’t Believe Everything …

We’ve all been there: listening to a talk, podcast or reading about groundbreaking innovations, especially on LinkedIn. It all sounds fantastic, super new, cutting edge technology – almost too good to be true. And often … it is.

Overselling seems to be more common lately – or maybe I’m just noticing it more? Especially with the AI “trend” lately, everyone is “AI first” and doing extremely successful programmes – it seems. But when you get to know someone in the tech field directly, it turns out that we’ve just seen a proof-of-concept project, a project that was stopped after a while for various reasons (didn’t bring the expected results, was over budget, or was never intended to go live at all), or that it is just WAY more complex than illustrated and only the very tiny cool part was told.

It also seems like a pattern to me: The higher someone is in a company, the less reliable their statements are. C-level executives sell visions, middle management sell their successes / themselfes, while engineers are more likely to tell the real story (tech debt, failed experiments, complex architecture and hard compromises).

I think I’ve developed a healthy(?) scepticism. The first questions I ask myself are Who is telling the story (position)? Why are they telling the story (promoting the technology, promoting themselves, promoting a solution)? What is not being said?

The truth seems to be often in the gaps … unfortunately.

Tim Berners-Lee is on Mastodon

I’m hardly following any very well-known people on any social media – but I was positively surprised to see Tim Berners-Lee (@timbl@w3c.social) on Mastodon! Well for the unlikely event that you don’t know what we owe him, check out his Wikipedia entry:

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955),^[1] also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, the HTML markup language, the URL system, and HTTP.

Kill It with Fire – Manage Aging Computer Systems

I just noticed that I never made a book recommendation, even though I’m reading quite some books – well okay, not too many IT books to be honest. A while ago a – very valued – colleague recommended Kill It with Fire – Manage Aging Computer Systems to me.

Now that was ironic …

At the beginning of January, I joked on LinkedIn that calling people back to work at the start of flu season was probably one of the dumbest things a company could do.

Is your phone listening – or is it IP based Ad Tracking?

In my recent blog post about reducing Ad-Tracking by using Firewall rules, I already mentioned that I might dig a bit deeper into the topic of IP-based AD-tracking.

RaspberryPi System upgrade vs. Fresh install

Recently I noticed that one of my RaspberryPIs was running a rather old version of Raspian. I thought it might be a good idea to upgrade and followed the instructions from Upgrade Raspberry Pi OS to the Latest Version (2024) – RaspberryTips.

Are you ready to hear the Feedback you were asking for?

Feedback is a double-edged sword – powerful for growth but tough to hear. Whether it’s improving a skill, leading a team, or refining creative work, feedback is invaluable. Yet, how we react to it can make or break the result.

IBAN UX Fail …

I don’t often write about UX failures, but one thing that keeps coming up is the handling of IBANs in checkout processes.

You would think that there’s nothing special about entering an IBAN into a web form: Form, enter IBAN, submit. Well … I keep noticing two things/problems:

Avoid commercial (WordPress) Plugins that require annual licences

One reason to stay away from commercial Plugins is that you might be f**ed when they raise prices:

Years ago, I chose the Before-After-Slider from Themefic (like here: https://www.franzgraf.de/blog/2024/discovering-the-bosensteiner-almpfad/ ).

Back then for 19$ / year.
Now we are at 39$ / year.

Yes, the plugin now can do more – more stuff that I simply do not need. Well … Don’t get me wrong: I’m totally fine to pay for some service – but doubling the price for stuff that I just don’t need.