A surprisingly strong jobs report for January came out today.
Maybe the US economy will have a soft landing after all —a short and shallow recession this year. (Or none? There is going to be a recession at some point in the future, we know that. That’s just the way the economy works).
From the Wall Street Journal: January’s seasonally adjusted payroll gains were the largest since July 2022 and snapped a string of five straight months of slowing employment growth, the Labor Department said Friday. December job growth was also stronger than previously estimated, pushing the average job gains for the last three months to 356,000, well above the 2019 prepandemic average of 163,000.
Payrolls grew most strongly at services businesses, the Labor Department said. Leisure and hospitality industries added 128,000 workers in January, up from 64,000 in December.
From the WSJ: ‘January’s seasonally adjusted payroll gains were the largest since July 2022, and snapped a string of five straight months of slowing employment growth’.
Is Elon Musk bent on killing the blue tweety bird?
The one he paid 44 billion dollars for? Many more departing employees signed off on Thursday by sending the salute emoji — the new symbol for departing at Twitter.
‘Hundreds of Twitter employees refused Thursday to sign a pledge to work longer hours, threatening the site’s ability to keep operating and prompting hurried debates among managers over who should be asked to return, current and former employees said’ reported the Washington Post on Thursday after a deadline for reporting at the office for work came and went.
A Twitter manager reportedly said: Those writing great code will constitute the majority of our team and have the greatest sway.
A reader commented: All the great coders I know, possess exceptional logical thinking abilities, such as — if I stay then my life will be miserable (working for a tyrant that may fire me on a whim) else (I get 3 months pay) and (a chance to find a good place to ply my trade)
Posted by Owl! at the Library 😴🧙♀️@SketchesbyBoze Nov 5 in lieu of joining a new platform I will be disappearing into the night sky in a hat carriage pulled by bats
It was Labor Day here in the United States today.
Many workers — but not all — had the day off. The American economy is in a strange place. The Washington Post reports that there are some 10 million job openings, yet more than 8.4 million unemployed are still actively looking for work.
I guess this could be a job interview in the year 2500, after Mars and other planets had been inhabited by humans. [Cartoon by Jerad Berg/ bad oranges 2015]Writes Heather Long, Alyssa Fowers and Andrew Van Dam in The Post: There is a massive reallocation underway in the economy that’s triggering a “Great Reassessment” of work in America from both the employer and employee perspectives. The reassessment is playing out in all facets of the labor market this year, as people make very different decisions about work than they did pre-pandemic. Resignations are the highest on record — up 13 percent over pre-pandemic levels. There are 4.9 million more people who aren’t working or looking for work than there were before the pandemic. There’s a surge in retirements with 3.6 million people retiring during the pandemic, or more than 2 million more than expected. And there’s been a boost in entrepreneurship that has caused the biggest jump in years in new business applications.
The April jobs report pegged the US unemployment rate at 14.7%, a cataclysmically bad figure* .. and one that will almost certain be even worse for May.
*The only figure on record that’s worse, was the 25% unemployment recorded during the Great Depression in 1933.
One can argue that some – most, hopefully? – of these jobs will come back in a few months, but absolutely not all of them. There is a small business die-out in progress in the United States. Stores, restaurants, bars and entertainment businesses are taking a severe hit.
It’s Thursday, and I ran out of the office promptly at 1.30 pm, roller bag in tow, to the Embarcadero station on Market Street to make it out to the airport. Our first week of workshops went well, given all the materials we had to scramble to put together. Our new project is about projects*. It is about improvements to a project portfolio management solution. In other words, it is about the systems tools that a large organization uses to track, prioritize, fund and manage its large inventory of capital projects year in and year out.
*So, a metaproject. ‘Meta’ means ‘a concept which is an abstraction from another concept’. Another example: metadata is data about data.
This morning’s street car 1075 was built in 1946. This car is painted to honor Cleveland Transit System, which ran PCC streetcars from 1946 to 1953.
These modern office workers are on a video conference call (picture from the Cisco WebEx homepage) .. something I still do very rarely. I do use WebEx extensively to do on-line training, or to show an on-line audience slides and screens that we need to discuss.
I came down with a cold and an ear infection (as I learned when I visited the doctor on Monday) over the weekend, and so: no travel to San Francisco for me this week.
These days we have all the technologies for collaborating remotely – e-mail and text messaging of course, conference calls, remote screen sharing, and so on. What is still rare to this day, in my experience, is using video conferencing. Our on-line meetings are mostly a telephone conference only, and then we use the WebEx meeting software to look at a presenter’s computer screen. And if needed, someone else can be made presenter, and share his or her screen, and so on.
I was a tired puppy today and so happy to be able to work a short day and skedaddle off to the airport to go home. I ate something on Wednesday that did not sit well with me and did not sleep well at all.
There’s an antique porcelain exhibit in the International Terminal in SFO. This platter depicting the Taj Mahal was made in 1824. (I love porcelain). The Taj Mahal itself was commissioned in 1631 by the great Mughal emperor Shah Jahan to commemorate his deceased wife. The Taj took more than 20 years to build and is one of the most celebrated architectural structures in the world. (I love architecture, as well!).This is at San Francisco airport at 6 pm today. I have just settled into seat 9A on Alaska Airlines’s airplane, and I’m checking out the Air Berlin jet at the gate next door. I looked up the flight and : it makes non-stop flights from San Francisco all the way to Düsseldorf, Germany (flight time 10 hrs and 40 mins).
We handed over our work on the gas utility implementation project to the support team on Friday. (There is a follow-up phase in the works). It’s been 18 months, my engagement there! In the mean time – back at the SAP ranch – there has been major new software upgrades and new product offerings of SAP’s business software. So I have a lot to catch up on. Can the old dog learn new tricks? Well, the dog should at least try.
SAP’s business software applications are moving to the cloud*, with a new interface that can be deployed across desktops as well as mobile devices. SAP has an enormous installed base of its business software around the world, and the company is working very hard to make it easier for businesses to migrate their data and applications that reside on-site, on their own infrastructure, into the cloud. The value proposition is that the cost of ownership will be lower, system upgrades will be quicker, cheaper and less painful, and the users will be happier with desktop or mobile ‘apps’ much more tailored to their requirements. And so SAP is encouraging its implementation partners and consultants to get up to speed, by offering training based on the principle of ‘Massive Open Online Courses’ (MOOC). Everything is on-line, and participants look at videos and do exercises, and submit assignments on-line.
*Cloud computing is a general term for several kinds of internet-based computing that provides shared processing resources and data to computers and other devices on demand (from Wikipedia).
There is even a free on-line course offered by SAP just for learning German .. aimed especially at the large number of asylum seekers that Germany is integrating into their society. Translation : ‘You can do it. German for asylum seekers. For volunteers.’
P.S. Donald Trump beat Marco Rubio in his home state of Florida by a wide margin, and Rubio dropped out as a result. John Kasich won in his home state of Ohio, keeping his hopes for the nomination alive (barely). The Republican race is now down to three : Trump, John Kasich and Ted Cruz. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton won all five of her primaries over Bernie Sanders, albeit with slim margins in Missouri and in Illinois.
It was Thursday again, and I got to go home. (Yay!). Today I had to host two WebEx* virtual training sessions, the second one from San Francisco airport, until I had to board my flight. Man! The free airport wi-fi was as poor as the signal I could get from my supposed 4G personal ‘Mi-fi’ device. But we struggled though it somehow.
*WebEx is an application that transmits the trainer’s computer screen to all the participants’ screens.
Here is British Airways’ big bird Boeing 747 lumbering up to the runway for its departure to London Heathrow. The flight across North America and the Atlantic Ocean takes 9 hours.And here we are approaching 10,000 ft up after take-off .. look for a little spec of black between the two landmasses on the left : it is the Golden Gate bridge. The Bay Bridge is the long one over Yetba Buena and Treasure Island, in the middle of the picture.
Another Thursday fly day has come, and it felt good to get in my little rental car with its semi-flat-or-not-who-knows tires and head out the San Francisco International airport. It was a hectic week at work, and on Tuesday there was no water and no air conditioning in the office. We had to go outside to makeshift Honeybucket construction toilets! Man!
Only a Cathay Pacific Airlines 747 to be seen from where I’m sitting before they push us back from the gate.. it had just arrived, and I’m sure all the way across the Pacific from Hong Kong International airport.
Thursday came quickly this week since the countdown for our November Go-Live has started. There is a Go/ No-Go meeting on Monday to garner agreement from all the major stakeholders that – the data conversions had come together, end-user training had gone well enough, and that the business is ready to start using the new work management solution that we are rolling out.
These travelers in San Francisco’s International Terminal are about to board Paris-bound Air France flight 93. Gate A10 to board Alaska Airlines to Seattle is right across from them. The big white ‘Welcome’ potted plant vase is new and the ‘Welkom’ caught my eye. It’s Afrikaans and Dutch at the same time. (Many Afrikaans and Dutch words are the same).
I spent the last five days working with the BW and BOBJ team here to make some corrections to critical reports that we need for our go-live in November. Any SAP installation is a giant database with tens of thousands of tables and hundreds of millions of records.
BW stands for Business Warehouse, SAP’s data warehouse product. To be sure, a data warehouse is also a database, but one with pre–processed statistical data that is ready for reporting. It typically contains statistical daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly figures of costs and numbers of transactions of certain types from the raw SAP database so that reports can quickly and efficiently be produced ‘on demand’. (With no data warehouse, it will could 20 minutes or longer to produce a report. And then you find out oh! I want to select other data as well, or adjust the selections .. another 20 minutes. And so on everyday). So what is BOBJ? It stands for (SAP) Business Objects, and it is a product that runs in a web browser, and provides quick access to the business critical information available from any device and from anywhere. (How much of this product have we sold today? What percentage of the scheduled work for today is done? and so on).
I made it into SFO for another week on the project. The end of the project is in sight : we have started with what we call the ‘Dress Rehearsal’ data conversions. This is for a roll-out of the pilot solution in November, and then there is one more in December. And then we’re done! Yay!
It looks as if our Boeing 737-900 is parked inside Seatac airport’s Terminal C! I will remember next time to press my phone right up against the window pane to take out the reflection. We are just getting ready to board, at about 6.30 am.
Our training day started on time – no mean feat, since the trainer had to set up a router with a bunch of notebook computers in the room given to us, and also fretted she did not have enough printed binders – but it all worked out in the end. At the end of the day at 5 pm, I decided to stick around a little before attempting to drive up to Walnut creek on Interstate 680. It paid off : traffic was moving nicely by the time I headed north.
This is early in the morning, and a view of the Plaza de Cesar Chavez in downtown San Jose, from the 26th floor of the San Jose Marriott. And who was Cesar Chavez ? Cesar Chavez (1927-1993) was an American farm worker, labor leader and civil rights activist, who, with Dolores Huerta, co-founded the National Farm Workers Association.I drove by the SAP Center this morning .. an indoor arena for which the primary tenant is the San Jose Sharks (a team in the National Hokey League). I had to look it up .. thought it was a training center or conference center !
I had to assist with a demonstration to an important prospective client via a WebEx* conference call on Wednesday. ‘We are so happy that you can do this .. you are a known quantity‘, said a colleague, one of the organizers – which made me chuckle.
The other non-human phrase that people sometimes use at work is : do you have any bandwidth to do this? Well yes, I will find some time to do it.. I am not a radio station or a robot that broadcasts with bandwidth !
*WebEx displays your own computer screen over the internet at a remote location.
I am not in San Francisco on the project site, but I am still working on it ! In fact, our code and configuration settings for our solution made it into the production system which is called PR1. SAP installations are gigantic databases with all kinds of associated database servers, application servers, web servers and other connections. The PR1 refers to the Production system server installation, and distinguishes it from other supporting installations such as a QAS-Quality Assurance and DEV-Development installation.
Anyway, making it into the Production system after 15 months of work is a big deal. I thought : I guess we can say our solution has shipped. ‘Ship’ is a cult word in information technology. It is the ultimate deadline in a series of deadlines in delivering a new product, or a major upgrade of a product. There is money involved, and careers, and reputations – all of which could be tarnished with a missed shipping date. Ouch.
A page from Bloomberg’s ‘What is Code?’ issue from a few weeks ago. Check out the programmer ‘productivity enhancers’ !
Check out this week’s Bloomberg Businessweek What is Code? issue, explaining what computer code is, and how pervasive it has become. Bloomberg says any young person starting out with a career needs to be able to at least read computer code. (Resistance is futile? We will be assimilated?). What about me? I can read the business enterprise software SAP’s proprietary ABAP language – sort of. I have made a career out of telling people what SAP can do, what its data structures look like, and how to configure its basic functions. I’ve mostly been the facilitator interpreting my clients’ business user requirements and telling the ABAP coders how to extend or adjust SAP’s prepackaged functions.
We are wrapping up the third of four cycles of testing, and have plenty of defects that the testing team had logged, to sift through and resolve. Some defects are small coding bugs; others are combinations of bad data and missing system checks that are not catching the data flaws early enough. Finally – some ‘defects’ that had been logged are not really defects, but features that never made it into the design.
Example, using a car as a metaphor for a software product : testing the factory installed brakes of a prototype car may prove that they are a little too sharp and need adjustment (a defect), but the car not having an anti-lock braking system (ABS) is not a defect if the engineering design of the braking system never called for it !
From left to right (from HP Quality Center’s home page) : Start with a functional specification that includes flow charts; build the code; test it; install and use it ! (If only it were as quick and simple as it sounds! ).
I’ve never owned a pressure cooker! Am I missing out? We had a mishap once with a pressure cooker with beets in while I was growing up. Yikes! It made quite a mess in the kitchen.
We are rallying to get ready for the third cycle of testing for the solution we are building, and feeling the pressure. On Tuesday I had a full day of meetings, and I just could not keep up with the e-mails pouring into my inbox.
So! January, February and March of 2015 have come and are how gone. It’s already April and the weeks are rushing by remorselessly as we approach the middle of the year – and our targeted system go-live date of late July. We are preparing for the third of four cycles of integration testing*, and we’re now reaching the point where we jettison some of the unfinished parts of the design. I have worked on many of these SAP implementation projects, and that is just the way it is. Time to face reality for some parts of the solution. Not going to make everything happen, not going to have perfectly cleaned up data. We are rapidly running out of time.
*I see some software bloggers say that the ubiquitous term integration testing is actually very troublesome and hard to pin down – and that it really should be called high-value testing. One can only select a very few typical scenarios to test in a limited time. I think I agree with that.
An extract from a blog post from ‘The Code Whisperer’, illustrating the complexity of testing modern software applications in an integrated way.
