Nonsense and other useful things

It al started back in 1995 when I was counting down for defending my PhD Thesis. Working on HPUX I modified XDaliclock, a C program for the X windows system to countdown in seconds to the moment supreme. Ever since that time I have been using a countdown timer whenever I am going to switch jobs. It has been modernized a little over time and is now a Java applet (Edit: 2011, and now implemented using jQuery), but the principle is the same. 

The countdown timer has become a tradition or even a ritual that I cannot do without. It is like a public statement that I am going to start something new very soon, which is so important that it is worth counting down to in seconds. 

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The stateless manager is someone who prides himself on not knowing or understanding anything, and most importantly on not remembering anything.

Symptoms:

• the manager must be informed of the same issues over and over again. Clearly, by definition, a stateless manager cannot remember anything.
• the manager does not take any intiative and reacts only to outside stimuli. Clearly, taking initiative would require some sort of context or problem for which to take initiative, and doing this would require keeping some state (namely the state of the problem).
• the manager manages to delegate every issue back to you. If he would handle an issue himself it would require keeping state, which he cannot do because he is stateless.

Remedies:

• make sure you get a stateful manager between you and the stateless manager who takes care of all communication for you.
• try to convince the stateless manager that he should keep certain state himself. Typically, the stateless manager would solve this problem by delegating to someone else. Nevertheless, looking at it in a positive way, at least your own problem is gone.

Other remedies also exist but are not discussed here 🙂

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