Interesting results of informal survey of 11-12-03

I just now had time and patience to sum up the informal survey I posted on
11-12-03. For those who remember and care it's self explanatory, for those
that don't whatever. I was surprised by the answers. It seems to come down
to personality more than financial stake. Feel free to check my math; if an
answer wasn't obvious I had to guess a respondent's alignment. If a
response didn't apply it was ignored.

Result tally of those who replied ("use" is defined as work with daily for
some design related function - var representatives were disqualified from
being users. Anyone with initials "JB" were disqualified from having an
opinion):

Group A: respondents who use the software and bitch (10)

Group B: respondents who use the software and don't bitch (10)

Group C: respondents who don't use the software and bitch (0)

Group D: respondents who use the software and bitch about the people who
bitch (0)

Group E: respondents who don't use the software and bitch about the people
who bitch (1)

- - - -
Question originally was....

"Did you as a SW user pay for the software or are you using company provided
software and maintenance? While this isn't intentionally a troll I do
suspect the bitchers are on one side of the fence and the zealots are on the
other."

 

Your tally doesn't appear to capture which users bought the software with
their own money - wasn't financial stake the main thrust of your question?

 

Oops, sorry, you're absolutely right. I took the opportunity to go down a
tangental road and got distracted. However; as I mentioned, financial stake
ended up having not much to do with whether or not someone chooses to vent.
My original question was trying to assess a connection between the two but
the informal results seem to indicate there isn't one. And my apologies to
anyone I accidentally mis-classified.

Out of 20 unique responses:

Bought - Bitch: 5
Bought - No Bitch: 6
No Bought - Bitch: 5
No Bought - No Bitch: 4

- Eddy

 

Eddy,

Unfortunately, I don't think you recieved enough responses to have accurate
results. I think it is safe to say that whether you paid for the software
with your own money or not, if you're gonna bitch about it you're gonna
bitch about it. I think those who paid for it themselves feel that they have
more of a reason to do so. Can you imagine if I paid for mine? LOL.

I think it's important that people view their employers money as their own
in terms of this subject. Not to get more people to bitch (my original
master plan) but because if you actually like the place you work for and
want it to be successful, then every penny spent counts and should be made
the most of. You should view that $1295/year for subscription as money you
spent. Pretend like it would have been in your salary, and that alone will
motivate you enough to either drop the subscription (and ask your employer
for a raise ) or take full advatage of what it has to offer (a bitch pass
).

I think the question should be, "If you had to pay subscription out of your
own pocket, would you?"

-Jeff

 

Always nice to see a pre-biased survey exposed by it's own author. ;>)

jon