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From: Stephen
Subject: Re: I would agree with most or all the employment advice herein:
Date: 14 Nov 2011 17:23:05
Message: <4ec194c9@news.povray.org>
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On 14/11/2011 8:12 PM, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> but I have never, ever heard anybody say the words "profit center".
> Perhaps it's just because people don't argue about it quite so much?
In my line of business cost centres will incur costs and pass them onto
profit centres sometimes indirectly. For instance a Maintenance
department will buy spare parts and use man-hours which will be charged
to a production cost centre. Which in turn will buy raw and or
semi-finished products, convert these into finished products and charge
the sum to a profit centre which will sell the finished products. The
total profit or loss of the controlling area will be the aggregate of
these monies after settlement.
And as Jim said every intelligent person uses a dictionary and often a
thesaurus.
--
Regards
Stephen
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From: Patrick Elliott
Subject: Re: I would agree with most or all the employment advice herein:
Date: 14 Nov 2011 22:11:18
Message: <4ec1d856@news.povray.org>
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On 11/14/2011 12:00 PM, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> On 14/11/2011 05:35 PM, Warp wrote:
>
>> I suppose I should be (and I *am*) very glad to be, at least at the
>> moment, in a job where I get to solve and implement real, interesting
>> programming problems (such as problems related to geometry,
>> combinatorics,
>> low and high level program optimization, and so on) with immediate
>> visible
>> results and payoff (namely: a playable computer game), where I make the
>> programming decisions and design.
>
> I love how when I did my "computer science" degree at uni, the entire
> course was predicated around the idea that you will be writing large
> enterprise systems which consist of a database backend, and a Java or
> HTML front-end, possibly with some middleware in the center. Because,
> seriously, that's all there is, isn't it? It's not like anybody writes
> device drivers, or industrial control software, or computer games, or
> compilers and interpretters, or anything that isn't an enterprise CRUD
> system...
>
> ...oh, wait. :-P
>
Sounds like you went to damn near the same place I did. Note however
that there where three other courses:
Electronic Engineering Technology- The people expected to write device
drivers, and build shit that used something vaguely microprocessor like.
Electronics - The guys that built simple shit that didn't do more than
use basic circuits, like switches.
Telecommunications - Where the people that couldn't, for some
incomprehensible reasons "grasps" databases, or programming, and found
all the stuff in the 'Computer Information Systems' course, "to hard!",
despite the fact that, at the time, we didn't even need to deal with
middleware, Java, HTML, or all that other stuff, just Dummy Terminals,
some basic commands to the mainframe's file stores, to execute jobs, and
COBOL, the simplest, stupidest, and most "human friendly", in terms of
syntax, of the languages, at that time, or likely since (for some reason
making them understandable by humans makes them useless for computers...
lol)
We started out with the largest class they had ever had, like 60-70
people, and by the third trimester where down to like 20, of which maybe
12-14 graduated. Many of the rest ended up in telecom, where I presume
they struggled to grasp how to dial modems.
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From: Darren New
Subject: Re: I would agree with most or all the employment advice herein:
Date: 15 Nov 2011 22:04:26
Message: <4ec3283a@news.povray.org>
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On 11/14/2011 12:12, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Perhaps it's just because people don't argue about it quite so much?
I can't imagine knowing the one term and not the other. That's weird.
> (I also had to go look up WTF an MBA actually is, since I've never heard of
> one...)
Probably more of an americanism? I still haven't figured out how your
universities or undergraduate classes are named. :-)
> That sounds pretty much like *exactly* how almost every company views
> programmers.
Well, that's what he's saying. You have to go to either a technical start
up, or to someplace like Microsoft or Google or Facebook or something like
that where what they're selling is what you're producing.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
People tell me I am the counter-example.
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From: Darren New
Subject: Re: I would agree with most or all the employment advice herein:
Date: 15 Nov 2011 22:05:35
Message: <4ec3287f$1@news.povray.org>
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On 11/14/2011 13:19, Jim Henderson wrote:
> Nook e-reader) when reading to make sure I understand what I'm reading.
That too. Indeed, it's so easy to look stuff up on the Kindle that when I'm
reading, if I see a word that I know what it means but I don't know the
definition, I still look it up. Plus, I read books with lots of big words
now, too. :-)
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
People tell me I am the counter-example.
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From: Darren New
Subject: Re: I would agree with most or all the employment advice herein:
Date: 15 Nov 2011 22:11:11
Message: <4ec329cf@news.povray.org>
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On 11/14/2011 9:35, Warp wrote:
> I'm glad I didn't.
Heh. I've had a few of those. After a while, I figured out how to avoid them
during the job interview. For example, if the interviewer asks "What's a
deadline", and expects the answer "it's when we promised to deliver it to
the customer", then you're fucked if you take the job.
I still remember a conversation I had back in the MS-DOS days.
"How long do you think it'll take?"
"I don't know. I never did anything like this before."
"Give an estimate."
"On the order of months."
"What does that mean?"
"More than week, less than a year."
"Can you be more specific?"
"Do you want me to lie?"
"How about February 17th?"
"If you already promised it, why are you asking me?
Why February 17th?"
"It's the customer's birthday."
Feh. Nowadays, if they ask you how long a multi-week/multi-month project
will take and they won't accept "I'll get back to you in 2 days with the
answer", you're fucked.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
People tell me I am the counter-example.
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From: Darren New
Subject: Re: I would agree with most or all the employment advice herein:
Date: 15 Nov 2011 22:25:33
Message: <4ec32d2d$1@news.povray.org>
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On 11/14/2011 11:00, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Daft thing is, I imagine time and again it plays out like this:
Nah. It's more like the salesman tries to sell something to the customer.
The customer doesn't want it, but either the salesman can't convince the
customer or won't leave the customer alone. So the customer says "I'll buy
it if you have this [9-month-feature] ready next month." And of course the
salesman promises it.
Salesman comes back and asks for it. Even *if* you pull off the amazing
impossible, the salesman goes back to the customer, who *still* doesn't want
the product, and the dev team is of course "spinning their wheels working on
useless features."
I can't tell you the number of times I worked on urgent rush features that
never ever got used.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
People tell me I am the counter-example.
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From: Orchid XP v8
Subject: Re: I would agree with most or all the employment advice herein:
Date: 16 Nov 2011 16:56:06
Message: <4ec43176$1@news.povray.org>
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>> Perhaps it's just because people don't argue about it quite so much?
>
> I can't imagine knowing the one term and not the other. That's weird.
I'm surprised too. The only thing I can think of is that if you sell a
widget, that *obviously* goes to the widget profit center. But if you
have to buy 10 more PCs, does that go to the admin office cost center?
Or does it go to the IT cost center? Or perhaps it goes to the project
planning cost center, because it was them that wanted more admin staff?
Or...
>> That sounds pretty much like *exactly* how almost every company views
>> programmers.
>
> Well, that's what he's saying. You have to go to either a technical
> start up, or to someplace like Microsoft or Google or Facebook or
> something like that where what they're selling is what you're producing.
As I understand it, a "technical startup" is a polite way of saying "you
will be paid peanuts and in three months' time you will be unemployed
again because the company has been liquidated".
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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From: Stephen
Subject: Re: I would agree with most or all the employment advice herein:
Date: 16 Nov 2011 17:22:43
Message: <4ec437b3$1@news.povray.org>
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On 16/11/2011 9:56 PM, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> I'm surprised too. The only thing I can think of is that if you sell a
> widget, that *obviously* goes to the widget profit center. But if you
> have to buy 10 more PCs, does that go to the admin office cost center?
> Or does it go to the IT cost center? Or perhaps it goes to the project
> planning cost center, because it was them that wanted more admin staff?
> Or...
If the PCs are bought on a project the costs will be credited to the
project. (To make things even more transparent financial bods view
things from a banks point of view. So when you pay out from a cost
centre or WBS that is a credit and pay in is debiting.) As long as you
are within budget all is well. If the purchasing department buys the PCs
they will charge the IT department who in turn will charge the Admin
department the cost of the PCs plus labour and maybe an overhead. It is
simple if your mind is wired like an accountant.
--
Regards
Stephen
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From: Invisible
Subject: Re: I would agree with most or all the employment advice herein:
Date: 17 Nov 2011 04:03:07
Message: <4ec4cdcb$1@news.povray.org>
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On 16/11/2011 10:22 PM, Stephen wrote:
> On 16/11/2011 9:56 PM, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>> I'm surprised too. The only thing I can think of is that if you sell a
>> widget, that *obviously* goes to the widget profit center. But if you
>> have to buy 10 more PCs, does that go to the admin office cost center?
>> Or does it go to the IT cost center? Or perhaps it goes to the project
>> planning cost center, because it was them that wanted more admin staff?
>> Or...
>
> If the PCs are bought on a project the costs will be credited to the
> project. (To make things even more transparent financial bods view
> things from a banks point of view. So when you pay out from a cost
> centre or WBS that is a credit and pay in is debiting.) As long as you
> are within budget all is well. If the purchasing department buys the PCs
> they will charge the IT department who in turn will charge the Admin
> department the cost of the PCs plus labour and maybe an overhead. It is
> simple if your mind is wired like an accountant.
Except that it seems to have a lot more scope for people to argue over
who gets to actually pay for stuff. Which would perhaps be why I've
heard plenty of people argue about cost centers, but I've never ever
heard anybody use the phrase "profit center".
Alternatively, maybe my employer just doesn't *have* any profit centers? :-P
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From: Stephen
Subject: Re: I would agree with most or all the employment advice herein:
Date: 17 Nov 2011 04:43:45
Message: <4ec4d751@news.povray.org>
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On 17/11/2011 9:03 AM, Invisible wrote:
> Except that it seems to have a lot more scope for people to argue over
> who gets to actually pay for stuff. Which would perhaps be why I've
> heard plenty of people argue about cost centers, but I've never ever
> heard anybody use the phrase "profit center".
>
Your company probably does not need profit centres as from what I can
gather it is a service company. That is, it provides a service not a
product.
> Alternatively, maybe my employer just doesn't *have* any profit centers?
> :-P
Scary!
--
Regards
Stephen
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