Does Ferrari have the same "relationship requirements" as other high-end manufacturers? I.e. to get the latest and greatest ICE sports case, you'll need to buy one of these first.
I'd imagine a similar ballpark to any other day-to-day government spending. It might affect perception around the absolute number on the balance sheet, but it won't significantly affect the proportion of spending.
Smoking on airplanes is the one that just seemed like an accident waiting to happen. And yet there were (relatively) few incidents caused by cigarettes.
I heard that air quality on planes was better back then (maybe someone who was alive then can confirm). Because of smoking they had to ventilate the whole aircraft much better. While these days I feel like they are just starving us for oxygen so as to not have to heat up fresh air.
Old person here. I think it's really hard to convey the extent to which smoke literally permeated everything. It's not just the immediate air quality aspects of it, but there was just a residue on all the surfaces, every cushion and fabric held onto the stuff.
I can recall the week that no-smoking indoors at restaurants/bars passed and it was literally shocking to walk into a place and not have it be hazy. It really felt weird.
Anyway, air quality + quality of life was much worse. Sometimes the future does get better.
Another old person here. At an office in Zurich I saw a layer of smoke filling the upper reaches of the atrium. I wondered how many working (i.e. smoking) hours it would take before it reached the balcony on which I was standing.
except for the dance bars. Dear lord the sweat smell during the transition was bizarre. It as always masked thanks to the smell of smoke. I think a lot places had to start thinking about adding nice parfumes, because almost at the end of that first year of zero tolerance inside bars, it was 'solved'.
Lol. I was 14 when I took a long distance international flight on a 747 in 1979. The family was sitting in the “non-smoking section”. I can tell you for a fact that the air quality in that plane was terrible. Possibly because a number of passengers in the non-smoking section still deigned to smoke. Whaddaya do eh?
It's an addiction, they're compelled to smoke, and so at the edges of the area they'll light up.
That's how the Kings Cross Fire started. Escalator full of potential fuel, smoker drops a used match, it falls inside the machine, fire. It wasn't legal technically to be smoking on that escalator, but it would have been legal in a few paces so "everybody" did it. The investigators found signs that such fires had likely started or almost started many times before, the disaster was just that this time it burned for long enough to create a pool of extremely hot gas flowing up the inclined ceiling for the escalator, and we got to discover the Trench Effect in the least fun way possible.
I flew to Japan from US in the "non smoking section" and which the smoking section started in the row immediately behind me... A woman smoked in the seat behind me most of the trip.
The airplanes were awful, usually with silly little signs stuck in some seats to designate the switchover which the smoke didn't seem to respect. I was in a train brought back to service from smoking times a few years ago and the stench still emanating from the fabric seats brought back those memories right away.
Turns out using less engine bleed air is good for fuel economy, so now it's 50% recirculated HEPA filtered (which does nothing for the co2 contents) air.
Or smoking a cigar in an oxygen rich spacecraft cabin, as per the opening scene of the original Planet of the Apes (released in Feb 1968, after the Apollo 1 fire in Jan 1967).
I like how they still have the ash trays in the bathroom. I get it, throwing the heater into the paper towel trash is a recipe for disaster. But still, the idea of taking a poop in this tiny little uncomfortable bathroom with 5 people waiting for you and sitting there demolishing an entire cigarette while you do it is sort of hilarious in its desperation.
Interesting. I'd define all of those tasks as the job of a team/tech lead, rather than a manager. I've worked at places where the same person did both roles, and it was not always a great mix.
If you think hiring, prioritizing, planning, and cross-team negotiation are all tasks of a tech lead and not a manager, then what is the job of an engineering manager in your opinion?
But how can you know who to promote, how to balance resources, or who to hire if you're not leading the project?
People management is about managing the company's resources to achieve goals. If you are not the one leading the implementation of those goals, you are not going to be able to:
* reason about what the right about of resources should be
* see opportunities for optimization
* forecast future need
You will be completely dependent on a technical lead who does have that information. So then what is your independent role? Just to shuttle information between the technical lead and others?
The most common split I'm aware of is tech lead / eng mgr. The eng mgr does "people stuff" like hiring/firing and cross-org negotiation, and tech lead does "technical stuff".
But the thing is this makes no sense. Tech issues always turn into people issues - when there is a disagreement, who adjudicates? How can a manager adjudicate something they don't understand. And how will engineers respect / follow the decision?
And people issues invariably become tech issues. How can you hire the right people if you don't understand the tech? How will you know when to fire?
This setup makes no sense to me and i have very rarely seen it work. It seems like it was a product of an earlier time when there was a lot of money floating around and provided a way to (a) shield senior eng from dealing with people problem they just didn't want to, and (b) provide cushy jobs to professional managers that didn't know much about the tech.
But it doesn't work. There's no way to do the shielding well and a person with hiring/firing power needs to know what the fuck is going on.
Really good eng leaders must be both good at tech and good at people. That's the job.
I wonder if that will remain the case. The input costs for farming are increasing (seed, fertiliser, energy), the output is becoming less predictable (flood, drought) and the grants from DEFRA which are meant to smooth things out have dried up somewhat since Brexit. If farmers are offered a guaranteed income for a field, I suspect they'd take it.
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