Alexander Mikhailian

There are three types of positions in an organizational hierarchy:

• Top management, the decision makers;
• middle management, those who detail and implement top management strategies, communicating execution plans to the people who do the real work that is,
• employees and workers.

Note that only the middle managers communicate both with the top management and with the employees and workers. In a traditional enterprise, the communication is oriented top-down, with middle management only detailing and passing on the orders.

In IT, as probably in the other hi-tech industries, bottom-up communication is of a paramount importance as the problems arrive unexpected and are sometimes not only difficult to overcome, but even difficult to explain. However, managers are still evaluated mostly on their abilities to manage subordinates, not on the ability to channel information to the top management, guiding and orienting corporate decision-making.

My brief manager's career ended partly because my company could not avoid the usual problems of software development, the problems that I knew about, could forecast, but was unable to mitigate as they arrived, mostly because I could not guide the much less knowledgeable boss through the minefield of decision-making without hurting his ego.

A manager that can not influence the decisions of the boss is only a half-manager, I now see clearly which half I was. Being aware of this handicap in advance could have helped me. Reading this post and applying it to your situation will probably help you.

Want to know what BI is but were always afraid to ask?

Here is a use case that covers 90% of Business Intelligence software use in the real world.

Imagine an Excel table containing banking transactions that you exported from your online banking system.

Once they are exported, you may be tempted to construct pivot tables, to view e.g.

• The bank accounts you credited for the last 12 months;
• the ratio between credit and debit by month;
• the expenses from your banking cards compared to those of your wife.

All of these pivot tables will be constructed for you in a matter of seconds, or even milliseconds.

Unfortunately, the construction of pivot tables does not scale up. A bank manager trying to construct a pivot table to identify the most debiting accounts or to identify the accounts performing most of transactions over a month is likely to wait many hours until his pivot tables are calculated. This is because the amount of transactions he is analyzing is likely to be in the hundreds of thousands, and more. He will also try to lump together much more information by adding columns with addresses, information on insurance policies of account holders, etc, thus growing the table to tens, sometimes even hundreds of columns, aggravating the performance issue.

Микрософт мне не нравится прежде всего тем, что популяризировала ненавистные многим методы работы.

Следуя примеру Микрософт, индустрия ПО, которая по сути является индустрией услуг, стала вдруг индустрией продуктов, а типичный цикл разработки ПО превратился из многолетней совместной работы специалистов над разработкой и поддержкой ПО для конкретных потребителей в годичный аттракцион «слабай-продай-свали».

Нежелание женщин заниматься этой профессией, массовый исход программистов в смежные специальности после 30-40 лет, дауншифтинг, развитие малого бизнеса в IT — это во многом отголоски негативного влияния Микрософт.

ЗЫ: Изначально этот пост был комментарием на Хабре.

This is a follow-up to the T3: Semantic Role Labeling: Past, Present and Future tutorial by Lluís Màrquez.

A lenient evaluation of the state-of-the-art F₁ in Semantic Role Labelling is around 80%, but the quality degrades by ~10% when switching to a test set from a new knowledge domain.

The most promising approach is the construction of a joint system of syntactic and semantic labeling parsers that operate in parallel on the same stream of input tokens.

The field is plagues by the complexity and low performance of the tools.

Well, this is not technically a BSOD nor even a RSOD, but a Windows startup repair screen on a two-store high screen in the center of Singapore.