What you mean there are bogus repairs? Hell yeh

WSJ had an article on bogus repairs on trains at port complex.

TERMINAL ISLAND, Calif.—Ten thousand railcars a month roll into this sprawling port complex in Los Angeles County. While here, most are inspected by a subsidiary ofCaterpillar Inc. CAT +0.44%

When problems are found, the company repairs the railcars and charges the owner. Inspection workers, to hear some tell it, face pressure to produce billable repair work.

Some workers have resorted to smashing brake parts with hammers, gouging wheels with chisels or using chains to yank handles loose, according to current and former employees.

In a practice called "green repairs," they added, workers at times have replaced parts that weren't broken and hid the old parts in their cars out of sight of auditors. One employee said he and others sometimes threw parts into the ocean.

It is bit ironic that the term “green repairs” is used to describe the practicer.  What could be more non-green (environmental) than damaging a part to create a repair transaction. 

Even so, they said, car men are under pressure to identify repair work to be done. The quickest way to do so, they said, was to smash something or to remove a bolt or other part and report it as missing.

They weren't instructed to do that, the workers said. But they added that some managers made clear the workers would be replaced if they didn't produce enough repair revenue.

"A lot of guys are in fear of losing their jobs because there's no work in California," said one worker, standing in front of his small ranch house a few miles from the Terminal Island ports.

Car men are expected to justify their hourly pay "and then some," this worker said. "If you find no defects, it's a bad night," he added, and that creates a temptation to "break something that's not broken."

This is a consequence of having performance based systems that are short sighted.

 

In the Microsoft Layoffs treasure to be found, Got mine within an hour

The Microsoft Layoffs are all over the news.  The announcement that up to 18,000 would be let go over the next year got people’s attention.  When you go through the various Microsoft announcements it doesn’t say that Microsoft is letting go of bad performers.

The first step to building the right organization for our ambitions is to realign our workforce. With this in mind, we will begin to reduce the size of our overall workforce by up to 18,000 jobs in the next year.

Microsoft is eliminating roles.

It’s important to note that while we are eliminating roles in some areas, we are adding roles in certain other strategic areas.

So if you happen to be an amazingly good person with years and years of experience and Microsoft decides your role is no longer needed, then you could be one of those who has their role eliminated.

One of my good friends who has been at Microsoft 21 years had her role eliminated.  At first it was sad that she had her role eliminated.  Then in our e-mail discussion we discussed what she could next and how we could work together.  Out of the 18,000 having their job reduced there are good people and some awesome.  I have found one of the awesome ones, and there are many more.

There is a huge perception issue that because you are let go, you are a bad performer.  Wrong.  There are great people in those who were let go which is why there are dozens of recruiters ready to hire.  Local Seattle News KiroTV covers some perspectives on the local job market.

“It's probably a good time to be laid off any time in the past 5 years,” said Hilwa.

Seattle tech companies can't hire people fast enough.  Amazon continues to grow its empire in South Lake Union and tech giants like Google and Facebook continue to expand in Seattle. 

University of Washington professor Ed Lazowska told KIRO 7 he sees the layoffs as a positive.

“I believe that those who are displaced from Microsoft in the Seattle area will rapidly find new employment in the field,” said Lazowska.

 

Documenting the Right to Be Forgotten, shows you who is behind the action, Streisand Effect at scale

GigaOm’s Jeff John Roberts posts on a site that documents the execution of the “Right to be Forgotten."

“Hidden from Google” shows sites censored under EU’s right-to-be-forgotten law

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SUMMARY:

A controversial law lets EU citizens remove search results from Google. A web developer who feels this is censorship has made a site to keep track of some of the sites that are disappearing.

the Hidden from Google website has an about page.

The purpose of this site is to list all links which are being censored by search engines due to the recent ruling of "Right to be forgotten" in the EU.

This list is a way of archiving the actions of censorship on the Internet. It is up to the reader to decide whether our liberties are being upheld or violated by the recent rulings by the EU.

This Right to Be Forgotten seems like it is the Streisand effect at scale.

The Streisand effect is the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet.

It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose attempt in 2003 to suppress photographs of her residence in Malibu, California, inadvertently generated further publicity. Similar attempts have been made, for example, in cease-and-desist letters, to suppress numbers, files and websites. Instead of being suppressed, the information receives extensive publicity and media extensions such as videos and spoof songs, often being widely mirrored across the Internet or distributed on file-sharing networks.[1][2]

Mike Masnick of Techdirt coined the term after Streisand unsuccessfully sued photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com for violation of privacy. The US$50 million lawsuit endeavored to remove an aerial photograph of Streisand's mansion from the publicly available collection of 12,000 Californiacoastline photographs.