Victor Rozek
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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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As I See It: The Misinformation Crisis
September 13, 2021 Victor Rozek
The person who invented the wheel was probably also the first person to run over his/her own toes. That’s just the nature of technology: it’s helpful, but not always friendly. From the wheel to social media, technology has served as both the engine of progress and an instrument of grief. And, paradoxically, there is perhaps no greater accelerant of progress and regress than computer technology.
The name of Floyd Ray Roseberry is deservedly forgettable, but he recently managed to engineer his ten minutes of digital fame by live-streaming his imagined grievances on Facebook. As a remedy, he claimed to have …
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As I See It: Anatomy of Failure
August 30, 2021 Victor Rozek
Decades before the term “woke” became a thing, a couple trained in psychology expanded their portfolio to include corporate consulting. Among other offerings, they taught a seminar called “Conscious Business Practices,” during which they identified three principal reasons why corporations fail.
Their names are Gay and Katie Hendricks, and they are book-writing machines. Those who actually still read books may recognize some of their enduring before-the-turn-of-the-century offerings: Conscious Living, At the Speed of Life, and The Corporate Mystic.
I first wrote about their work over 20 years ago, a time barely recognizable now. And I was curious …
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As I See It: Delusionware
July 19, 2021 Victor Rozek
Currency has always been the product of mass hallucination. From shells to spices, bottle caps to urine, what people decide is valuable, and what they are willing to trade life energy for, is as varied as imagination and circumstance. (In case you’re wondering, clean urine is used in prisons to pass drug tests and can be bartered for goods and services that are best left unnamed.)
All that is required for a currency to have value is that enough people share the same delusion. And suddenly, little pieces of paper with numbers and the faces of departed presidents (and lesser …
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As I See It: The Reluctant Return
June 7, 2021 Victor Rozek
Another day, another questionable announcement from the CDC. This time it was a guideline suggesting that vaccinated people need not wear masks in most circumstances; a pronouncement that many experts found to be both ill-advised and premature.
Nonetheless, many heard it as an invitation to return to normalcy. Long-suffering restaurant and bar owners exhaled for the first time in many months, and everyone seemed delighted just to see the bottom half of their friends’ faces again.
One group in particular was unabashedly eager to return to the pre-pandemic past: CEOs. Newsweek reported on a poll conducted by the Best Practice …
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