<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
-----Original
Message-----
From: David Lyon
[mailto:david.lyon@preisshare.net]
Sent: Monday, April
02, 2007 3:23
AM
To: Michael Kay
Cc:
xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: Re: [xml-dev]
Opinions
About typecasting..
Michael
Kay wrote:
But I do know of one guy that charged $250,000 p/a as a
'interoperability consultantant'. He didn't actually do any
programming or implementation. Just looked at (message)
exchanges at a stock-broking company.
Actually, he probably listened to the arguments of the programmers who
wanted to do it using tool X, and the arguments of the programmers who
wanted to do it using tool Y, neither of whom was able to explain the
business reasons for their preference; and then he told the managers which
lot to back, and saved the company $2m a year by helping them get off the
fence.
(Alternative ending: he told the managers which lot to back but they ignored
his advice and employed another consultant to give a third opinion...)
quite possibly....
if so then I really need to get back into the corporate world because
that
sounds like the easy life to me.... :-)
are you listening Len ?
