Victor Rozek
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As I See It: Pass The Chips
July 18, 2022 Victor Rozek
Decades ago, I was sent to Taiwan and met a colleague there to install a computer system in a silicon wafer manufacturing facility and provide necessary training to the staff. I took a cab from the airport to my hotel in Taipei and recall marveling at the extraordinarily generous freeways that served surprisingly light traffic flows. In many places, six to eight lanes stretched for miles in both directions supporting traffic that could have been accommodated by no more than two.
I became curious and finally asked my driver if he knew why the roadways were so incongruously wide? It …
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As I See It: Unwritten Rules
June 6, 2022 Victor Rozek
Organizational change is always a bastard. Getting hundreds – if not thousands – of people rowing at the same speed in the same direction is about as problem-free a proposition as . . . well, nothing. Getting people to agree is never easy. But they like to be employed, too, because eating is a good habit.
Companies generally have a stated vision, imparted goals and formal policies, but they tend to morph over time or are superseded by regime and marketplace changes. Alternately, they are simply ignored. Although desired behavior and motivation are outlined in job descriptions and employee handbooks, …
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As I See It: A Taxing Problem
May 3, 2022 Victor Rozek
Elon Musk sifted through his couch cushions and found $44 billion in pocket change, so he bought himself some barbecue with a side of Twitter.
Elon managed to make a lot of money while the economy tanked during the pandemic years, and there have been rumblings of discontent from mere mortals suggesting that perhaps he, and his billionaire brigade, should actually pay their fair share of taxes. But while Americans are disinclined to begrudge a man his good fortune, these days, middle class realities are rife with rising costs and resentments. To put things in perspective: the average American would …
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As I See It: Transitions
April 18, 2022 Victor Rozek
Over the past two years, as many of us sequestered, masked-up in public, dodged strangers, and kept friends at arm’s length, our socially distanced conversations shared a common, oft-expressed yearning: “I just want my life back.”
Now that we’re in a lull between variant fronts, millions of us are anxious to reclaim our old, comfortable and predictable lives. They may not have been perfect, but they were at least manageable, set in a world we knew how to navigate.
Beyond familiarity, our old lives were even more central to our identity. As sociologist Anthony Giddens notes: “A person’s identity is …
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As I See It: Two Front War
March 28, 2022 Victor Rozek
History records that the Second World War began when Germany invaded Poland, breaching its western border on September 1, 1939. For the Poles, however, that accounted for only half of their unfolding misery. Largely forgotten, 16 days later, the Russians invaded Poland from the East.
Being situated between Germany and Russia in the war-ravaged 20th century turned out to be geographically inauspicious. Long after the Germans were defeated, the Russians stayed. Opportunistic invasion turned into long-term occupation.
A similar story is unfolding in Ukraine, where a two-front war is being waged: one analog, the other digital. Weeks before tanks and …
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As I See It: A Second Life
February 28, 2022 Victor Rozek
These days it’s not unusual for high school students to be computer savvy to a degree their parents could only dream of. But that wasn’t the case in 1972 when Jay Brandt attended high school.
Oregon-based Benson Polytechnic High was conceived as a trade school, but over time adopted a pre-engineering curriculum. There, students could build a rudimentary foundation in a technology that would shortly transform the world. Jay quickly mastered the Four Horsemen of ancient IT: Basic, Fortran, COBOL, and Assembler; and when school broke for the summer, he had a novel idea.
Although the high school had a …
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As I See It: The Ideal Workplace, Part 2
January 24, 2022 Victor Rozek
New year, new possibilities. And what better place to start than sharing the experiences and aspirations of IT professionals.
Last month, as 2021 was coming to an end, I asked readers for feedback on how they would describe their ideal workplace; the issues that were important to them, the quality of their working environment, and how they wanted to be treated by their company and its management. I offered a list of issues for consideration, and below is a summary of their responses.
The first question was a variation of the classic “paper or plastic” dilemma. Would you prefer to …
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As I See It: The Ideal Workplace
December 13, 2021 Victor Rozek
Traditionally, at yearend, I would write a predictive article about IT trends and prospects for the coming year. But if you’re not among the lucky few who have been abducted by aliens and kept closeted these past two years, you doubtless already know that our foreseeable future will include more dreck and disruption, liberally peppered with stress and uncertainty.
Of course, computers could care less, but the people who work with them do, so writing about anything uplifting was preferable to another dose of dour reality. I wracked my brain to find it, failed miserably, and was about to settle …
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As I See It: Home Work
November 1, 2021 Victor Rozek
Data collection and privacy weren’t much of an issue when the Constitution was being debated, which may account for the fact that those words don’t appear anywhere in the document. Probably the greatest threat to privacy at the time was gossip.
At best, privacy is implied in the Bill of Rights. But while the government can’t quarter soldiers in your home willy-nilly, there are plenty of other digital intruders that may be billeting in your residence; tools designed specifically to tread on your privacy. And while social media has long been Hoovering every available scrap of personal data, a subclass …
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As I See It: The Management Challenge
October 18, 2021 Victor Rozek
Imagine coaching an athletic team under the following conditions: Some percentage of your players do not practice in your facility. You have minimal contact with them, and even less influence over how, when, and how long they practice. Building and maintaining team cohesion is almost impossible. There’s a chance some of your players may be unavailable at some point during the season, and your training facility could be closed for an unspecified period of time. Yet you are still expected to win.
That’s roughly the situation in which managers find themselves. Some percentage of their employees probably still work from …
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