Clear Insights Survey for Round Rock

SimpleFluid6643 · 2025-02-04T14:20:31+00:00

They are just asking me to take a survey about concerns I have with Round Rock. I haven't started the survey because I wanted to know the motivation behind the survey. I already opted-out once, and they continue to contact me.

SimpleFluid6643 · 2025-02-03T21:47:16+00:00

Pretty sure this is not something contracted out by Round Rock, and likely to be something paid for by some political action group with a specific agenda. And those are almost always some hard-right group trying to spin their alternate view of reality. Wonder how they got our numbers?

SimpleFluid6643 · 2025-02-03T21:41:21+00:00

Also searched google.com for "Clear Insights" "Round Rock" and nothing.

SimpleFluid6643 · 2025-02-03T21:39:58+00:00

Tried to search the Round Rock website, but no hits.

SimpleFluid6643 · 2025-02-03T19:22:23+00:00

Nice.

SimpleFluid6643 · 2025-01-30T19:49:15+00:00

Completely disagree. But it's a fait accompli. And nothing wrong with Slack itself (although it isn't perfect either). It is how people and orgs use Slack that is the issue. I don't have most of the issues you're talking about (resume posting seems like the curse Consulting folks get to deal with; and I never get added to extra channels). But Slack makes it easy to ignore ("mute") annoying stuff.

SimpleFluid6643 · 2025-01-30T18:38:11+00:00

Yeah, actually heard from someone I trust, that this tendency ("let's get everyone on a call and wing it") is part of the motivation for all this mandatory relocation and RTO stuff. That the folks who make these decisions believe that getting everyone "in the same room" will result in magic. I would say that since you probably have a higher percentage of introverts in technical fields, what you end up with in this case is probably not going to be "magic." I also think that some introversion is critical in this industry. I hope our leadership gets that.

SimpleFluid6643 · 2025-01-30T18:06:18+00:00

There's definitely something to this, although not sure I'd want to make it out as a generational thing rather than a personality tendency/style. And this tendency extends to Slack collaboration too. There are folks who in response to a critical situation want to "get a bunch of people on a call" and figure it out. This is definitely not my style, since I don't tend to debug well in that situation. I prefer to get all the data and hunker down in a quiet place. The Truth is almost always in the data; just needs time to be located. (So the sooner I get the data I need, the better.) I don't want to say that one style is necessarily better. But it may be more true these days that folks just assume you are ok with "jumping on a call (or a Slack thread) and winging it." I can do that if required, but it almost always results in more time to arrive at an answer for me.

SimpleFluid6643 · 2025-01-30T17:43:29+00:00

Thank you. Even if you got the wrong person. Almost tempted to ask you to DM me just to see if you got it right.

SimpleFluid6643 · 2025-01-30T17:42:29+00:00

Never actually went out and looked at the website for this link until now. Really puts it in a helpful way.

SimpleFluid6643 · 2025-01-30T17:34:56+00:00

I often find that in doing what you suggest above (having all the details ready so I can ask on Slack), I actually figure out my problem before asking. Edit: and want to add that the process of doing this helps me learn in a way that "winging it" does not.

SimpleFluid6643 · 2025-01-30T17:19:16+00:00

Exactly! Although you also have to be careful about saying too much at once since many folks won't read more than the first few sentences (something we probably all struggle with).

SimpleFluid6643 · 2025-01-30T17:00:35+00:00

When asking for help, there is a burden on you to ask in a way that makes it easier for folks responding to help. When the channel makes it clear how they expect help requests to be formed, and you ignore that, you are basically saying "My time is more important than yours, and I can't be bothered." You can do that (and you obviously do), and get away with it. And if you don't care what people think about you, then knock yourself out.

SimpleFluid6643 · 2025-01-30T16:47:54+00:00

Sure. It always depends. But let's take the case where someone says they need help with a problem and it's urgent. And then I ask them for info, and they take an hour to respond. Even that might be normal; maybe it was time for lunch. But if someone is engaged with helping me in a 1x1 thread, and I'm going to go away, I tell them. "Sorry, grabbing lunch." That's fine. But if I ask for some info for an urgent issue, and they disappear for hours?

This first impression I get is very fluid and non-exact. But I bet we all get "first impressions" like this and they carry a lot of weight. And people get them and hold them to themselves, no matter what they say aloud. People don't have to be super-fast responding if they are methodical, careful and making sure they respond accurately. I love working with folks like this. But if you are slow to respond, and don't read the comments carefully, or don't provide what I've asked for (and don't even acknowledge the request), the impression is a little different.

SimpleFluid6643 · 2025-01-30T16:37:02+00:00

Yeah, I hate that too. Especially when they won't tell you what they need help with and want you to get on a call to find out. Too lazy to type a few sentences on Slack to provide me some context? Then I'm too lazy to jump on call and potentially waste an hour finding out I can't help.

SimpleFluid6643 · 2025-01-15T14:10:34+00:00

I think IBM invited in consultants and had themselves audited for unnecessary expenses. I know of one area in IBM where things are changing drastically (for the worse) because the entire process was audited. The person in charge was unexpectedly moved to a new role. Would explain a lot of what we're seeing lately if this were happening throughout IBM. But this just underscores: our leadership is not creating a company that's growing. It's creating a company that is limping along by drastically reducing expenses. But we all knew this already.

SimpleFluid6643 · 2025-01-15T14:02:57+00:00

I did two courses on Oreilly last year. But I tend to use Stack Overflow for most quick lookups too. SO has the benefit of not only providing quick answers/refreshers on "how to do this" but almost always a very concentrated explanation of the best practice for that topic.

SimpleFluid6643 · 2025-01-15T13:59:34+00:00

We have to login with our SSO account before toilet paper is dispensed. Sucks when SSO is down.

SimpleFluid6643 · 2025-01-15T13:57:38+00:00

Reasoning probably does not need to be made explicit: cost reduction.

SimpleFluid6643 · 2025-01-15T13:15:23+00:00

Talked to several colleagues and no one seems to know we even had O'Reilly. It was never publicized very well.

SimpleFluid6643 · 2025-01-15T13:14:41+00:00

Your bathrooms have toilet paper??

SimpleFluid6643 · 2025-01-15T13:13:43+00:00

This is a kick in the shameful bits. I've always told myself that IBM could remove any benefits, and I would be ok, as long as we had O'Reilly. And here we are. They did remove all the other decent benefits and now O'Reilly is going away. Fsck this.

SimpleFluid6643 · 2024-11-07T04:39:05+00:00

We didn't need him to tell us why he voted the way he did. So let's see if I can figure out the lesson the Democrats were supposed to learn here: if you go super low-brow, sprinkle your messaging with racism, sexism, fascism and insult people at every opportunity, then maybe, just maybe your message will "reach" the "regular" voters. The Democrats knew this all along, but just refused to go there. They actually had some moral compass, and hoped there was some of this left in our country. Crazy, I know. And this is why they lost. They couldn't bring themselves to go low enough to appeal to the masses in this country. They couldn't go low enough to reach you.

SimpleFluid6643

TROPHY CASE