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<offtopic>This is not pleasant reading.</offtopic>
Yes. See last reply.
I know how it works. I know how it fails. I’ve seen sex, gender, political persuasion, silent acknowledgement of immoral behavior and even acquiescence to it become conditions of employment. These are all symptoms of bad management and inbreeding. Cliques can run companies for years. Right into the ground. The phrase is, “the snakes have taken over”. Clowns can run a successful act. They don’t poison the dancing dogs. Snakes do. The locusts get the money; the snakes get the resume slots.
None of that means they know how to write a line of code or debug it.
What happens to the generalists who do understand the basics regardless of the platform? There are titles for consultants and analysts who’s job is exactly what Michael describes. They read everything, the listen to everyone and they walk from desk to desk unlocking the process to ensure work gets done. Once upon a time, these were the skills of the managers, but no longer. Management in America has become a political job consisting mainly of obstructing the work of other divisions and managing customers. They spend too much time in meetings and too much time on airplanes. They are very good at deducing the effect of the industry on their stock portfolios and terrible at deducing the impact on their customers. As a result, they pay an organization of product planners and technical consultants to move the items from desk to desk. This works until the failure to maintain the competence in the face of change fails, then the company begins to lose sales or customer confidence slowly or suddenly sometimes with a press-worthy failure, but usually when the RFPs simply quit coming to them, or they can’t bid them, or the customers go to the next bright and shiny faces on the block. Or the government discovers back dated stock options or falsified bidding or falsified time cards, and so on. See GE Ill Wind. When it happens, it is a tsunami: first the opportunities recede, then a wave of lawsuits.
The American computer industry looks like a WWI battlefield: entrenched and at stalemate with big pushes and high casualties. To stave off the inevitable discovery of the inbred incompetence, we send our work to countries where people are proud of their computer science degrees although they are even more slavishly attached to their toolkits, so even less innovative.
The overall result is a slowdown globally in innovation. This continues for a period until smart groups of typically small teams with deep understanding or luck manage a change into a product or a protocol or a standard and the universities put them in their curricula.
Stay fit. But not to be tied.
len
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Michael Kay wrote:
Actually, he probably listened to the arguments of the programmers whowanted to do it using tool X, and the arguments of the programmers whowanted to do it using tool Y, neither of whom was able to explain thebusiness reasons for their preference; and then he told the managers whichlot to back, and saved the company $2m a year by helping them get off thefence. (Alternative ending: he told the managers which lot to back but they ignoredhis advice and employed another consultant to give a third opinion...)
quite possibly.... |