The basic idea of the story is that Sarbanes-Oxley legislation imposes a crushing financial burden on all publicly-owned companies. Which is true. I was one of the thousands of people employed to deal with it. (Not that I’m complaining.)

SOX legislation, specifically section 404, says that corporate reporting needs to be validated by internal and external auditors. This is good in many ways, and I’ve personally seen a lot of good practices instituted, but you have to remember something. Auditing is just another business. The auditors are there to make money. They’re going to turn your company upside-down to find tiny problems that aren’t really against the spirit of honest capitalism. That’s why it’s a crushing financial burden.

I said it then, and I’ll say it again now - there’s no need to overhaul corporations on account of a few bad eggs. It’s really about common sense. You don’t make up financial numbers, and you don’t lie to the public. Is that really so hard?

Allow me to geek out a moment. Object-oriented programming is a Good Thing because it abstracts out some messy details from other types of languages. Rather than having a function like do-something(with, some, values) you get object-with-state.do-something(another-object). This is important for several reasons:

1. It’s often easier to think about objects and interaction than processes with specific inputs and outputs. For example, you kick a football. It makes more sense to say you kick it [you.kick(football)] than to say there is a kick occurring, with you and the football being primary participants. [kick(you, football)]

2. Objects abstract away ugliness. A lot of things in a program can logically be thought of as objects. Say you’re getting information from the web. The site is an object, the receiving computer is an object, (perhaps the stream is an object) and all these objects interact nicely. Each thing knows how to deal with its own information, each thing can exist alone or it can accept input from others. A football object knows to slightly deform and rocket away when it’s kicked. The kicker doesn’t have to know that. If everything had to do every job, it couldn’t be as efficient. Abstraction creates efficiency.

Object-orientation isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, but it’s often a godsend.

Duck Typing is a concept from Ruby, or at least it was popularized by Ruby. Type systems in general determine how a language deals with different types of objects or values. Static typing systems bind variables to specific data types, whereas dynamic typing allows a variable’s type to change. Duck typing, on the other hand, doesn’t care what type a variable is - if it responds to certain signals of a type, it is that type. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck. (thanks Dave)

Where am I going with all this? These models are a perfect fit for an efficient office.

(more…)

I’ve just spent a week in a six sigma class in which I’m supposed to be impressed by the Master Black Belts, and I worked in a group with one of them. He’s a fraud. If he’s supposed to have ultimate knowledge of six sigma then I weep for six sigma. It has such promise, and yet it’s already being adulterated. It’s been adopted by upper management. They’ve thrown out all the parts involving hard work, the stuff in which you have an in-depth understanding of why and how to do six sigma. If you don’t know why, then you don’t know when to use tools and when not to use tools, and what the tools really mean. It becomes cookbook, where no one is expected to think, just do, action action action, and would you please look this way dear and makeup! get over here and powder her face again she needs to look perfect for this shot.

It becomes a special club where you have to know the right people and play the right golf game to get in, it doesn’t matter how competent you are as long as you’re buddy buddy with your boss’s boss, you’ll move up and get that title of Master Black Belt. Hey, why do the work? Let the computer fill it out for you, let the underlings do it, you’re busy making the high level important decisions. While you’re at it send out another inspiring email about how proud the employees should be to work here, and by the way there still will be no reimbursement for travel below the middle manager level. We all need to make sacrifices!

(more…)

They’re well-nigh useless.

In case you haven’t heard of it, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (Sarbanes, D-Maryland; Oxley, R-Ohio) was an effort to reduce the corruption in financial reporting in the wake of scandals like Enron, Arthur Andersen, and WorldCom. Companies were hugely inflating their reported assets and hiding information from investors. Now, I’ll grant that this was a problem. Huge companies were screwing investors.

Two side notes:

1. Were they really screwing anyone but the competition? Inflating your value is dishonest, but it isn’t stealing anything from anyone and it doesn’t hurt how much money the investors get.
2. Companies do what they do to make money. It’s the point of capitalism. Is there really a reason that everything should be made public for a public company? Yes, pertinent business information, but we don’t need to know the details about exactly how a company files their data - it’s their job to worry about it, it’s our job to support them with our money if we so choose.

On the face of it, the SOX act was the right decision. It was passed with flying colors. Was it really the right move to make? I submit that it was not.

(more…)