Ba-Da Ba Ba Baaa, I'm Hijackin' It

Today, McDonald's promoted the Twitter hashtag, #CheersToSochi. The idea was to have people send well wishes to athletes and organizers of the upcoming Winter Olympics.  Not surprisingly, the hashtag was quickly taken over by people protesting Russia's anti-gay laws.

This isn't the first time tweeters have turned a company's hashtag against itself. I'm left wondering how these corporations don't see it coming. It's easy to say that these companies are hopping wildly in to the social media bandwagon before they understand it. We've seen organizations misuse new technology trends throughout the Internet era.  And JPMorgan had a similar problem when they apparently forgot that some people hate banks.

But banks are kind of out-of-touch with public opinion; this is McDonald's we're talking about here. They're the masters of marketing.  If they're that clueless, what hope is there for everyone else?  They do understand that Twitter is a participation medium, not a broadcast medium.  They just don't seem to realize how varied the general public's opinions are.  So have they always believed that everyone loves them?

Burning Questions

I often find answers to programming problems at a site called Stack Overflow.  It's a site where programmers can post questions for anyone to answer.  So if you want to know what's on programmers' minds, here it is:

(Note that "Hello World" refers to a simple demonstration program.)

Statues Of Limitations

There's been a proposal for Victoria Park, near where I live. The idea is to build statues of each of the Prime Ministers of Canada.

There are plenty of reasons not to like the idea. For one thing, it's going to be expensive, at about $2 million (though most of it through grants from higher levels of government.) Also, I'm not sure statutes are the right thing for a park that is blessed with more wildlife than your average groomed and neutered city park. And of course, there's been a recent drawn-out debate over replacing the park washrooms, which has many locals sick of discussing the park. 

And of course, it commits us to continually pay for new statues as new PM's come along.  In our system, where a John Turner or Kim Campbell can pop in and out of office in a few months, that could get pricey.  They could perhaps have a rule that you have to be in office for a couple of years before you get a statue.  Or better still, the size of the statue is proportional to how long the Prime Minister was in office.

But what gets me is the number of people whose criticism just comes down to: The Prime Ministers are politicians, and politicians are the worst kind of scum.

I again say that we have to get over our dichotomy of politicians as entirely evil, and the rest of us are their innocent victims. I'm used to seeing the voters' persecution complex in the Letters to the Editor, but I still find it kind of shocking that our loathing of politicians goes back to people who have been dead for a century.

The Americans don't seem to have this problem; they hate politicians more than anyone, but I don't see any of them complaining about Mount Rushmore. But then the Americans mostly focus their hatred on the other party's politicians. Canadian society is not as divided, but incidents like this make me think there is just as much unfocused anger in it.

So I propose a statue of the hard-done-by taxpayer.  Say, a statue of an anguished person turning their pockets inside-out.  Perhaps a fat politician behind him, chomping a cigar, and stealing the taxpayer's wallet.

Here's Your Gold Stopwatch

Netflix HR recently said that their way of keeping good employees is to make sure they are working with quality co-workers. And the way they ensure those workers are high quality is that they are quick to get rid of employees once their skills don't match what's needed.

To be fair, they did also emphasize generous severance packages as part of this strategy. But it does also exemplify the unrealistic view tech companies have of finding talent.

As many have noted, there's a contradiction in the way employers relate to employees: they try to get enthusiasm and loyalty from their employees, while also reserving the ability to reduce the workforce whenever they want, and there doesn't seem to be much recognition that these two desires are contradictory. The Netflix situation seems to be the ultimate embodiment of this contradiction: they think they can get loyalty and enthusiasm from their employees because they are quick to let them go.

Any business wants the best employees they can get, but in high tech, the need is particularly acute. And yet, there doesn't seem to be much intelligence given to finding the best.

Part of the problem is the speed with which modem tech companies can grow. In other areas, there's an understanding that you need a great reputation before you can be demanding of your employees. Not so much in technology.  I remember one company I came across during my post-graduation job search, who wanted to see the transcript of recent grads, and said they would only consider applicants in the top quarter of their class. Who would do this, IBM? Microsoft? Google? Nope, some start-up that didn't even have a product on market yet.  But since everyone assumes their start-up is the next Google, they have all the swagger from day one.

What's curious is that in other areas, businesses are acutely aware of the different factors that go into a company's positioning. For instance, expensive, luxury products tend to be more lucrative than cheap products. But companies don't all simplistically go after the luxury market to make more money. They understand that the luxury market is small, and if someone else has captured it, you're probably better off to make do with a less profitable segment. But when it comes to hiring, no one seems to even acknowledge that there are only so many above-average employees, and a lot of companies will have to make do with less.

The Self-Help Section At The End Of The Universe

Like any long-time geek, I was quite disappointed that this book was not filled with facts that would help me travel the galaxy:

Hello Squirrel

Have you seen the ads for this new movie The Nut Job which is about to be dumped into the motion picture no-man's-land that is January released?  It's a computer-animated movie about squirrels trying to steal nuts or something.

I'm left thinking, shouldn't squirrels be cuter than that?  Squirrels are thought of as inherently cute animals, loveable to anyone who doesn't have a bird feeder.  To put it another way, rats are seen as squirrels' uncute cousins.  They're squirrels without the PR of a big bushy tail.  And yet Pixar managed to make them more likeable in Ratatouille.

It seems like animated movies are trying so hard to make in-your-face goofy characters that they don't make something that looks good on the screen.  It's been all downhill since that little...whatever it was... in The Lion King.  Look, the world doesn't need more aggressive manic characters.  Especially with Kevin Hart starting up his movie career.

Fans Of Denial

An odd thing happened in one of the NFL playoff games today.  The San Francisco 49'ers managed to sack Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton.  The 49'ers were then flagged for Roughing The Passer.  The commentators expressed surprise, since it had looked like a fairly ordinary sack.  But on seeing the play again from a different angle, the reason for the flag became obvious: the defender had hit Newton helmet-to-helmet, which is a no-no in the modern NFL.

What was odd was that I seemed to be the only person who noticed that.  The commentators continued to rant about how that was a terrible call.  Wondering if I had missed something, I checked the tweets on the game.  But they were just the same generic comments about how that was the Worst Call Ever.

Obviously, the crackdown on head-shots is not popular with everyone, so I don't expect it to be a popular call.  But no one was saying, "I hate that rule." rather, they seemed oblivious to the rule.  And no one seemed to remember that this has been illegal for several years now.  I was starting to wonder if I was the one suffering the head injuries.

The incident brings up an issue I've been meaning to mention for a while:  The accusations that the NFL has not been doing enough to protect players from head injuries.  Particularly, the accusations have come from the recent book, League of Denial, which claims the league has been ignoring the science on concussions for years now.  I don't know much about the evidence that the NFL has covered up the sport's dangers in the past, so I can't really comment on that. 

But many people extend the criticism to the present, and claim that the league is continuing to drag it's heels on the issue.  That, I do have to disagree with.  I see incidents like the one above as evidence that the NFL is willing to anger its fan base in the course of fixing the sport.  It relates back to what I was saying earlier this week about how all sports have fans that want to push the sport towards more violence and physicality. It's hard for a league to turn its back on such a large constituency, and it's tempting to compromise with them, or roll-back changes when the complaints start.  I'm impressed that the NFL has remained steadfast through the howls of protest.