[Coco] Re: I'm signing off - 6309 Microprocessor Enhancements

[KnudsenMJ at aol.com]

In a message dated 3/10/04 12:34:19 PM Eastern Standard Time, wb8tyw at qsl.net 
writes:

>  If the low cost off shore programmers were as talented as the myth, they
>  would be selling a Windows clone that was free if copyright infringement 
and
>  significantly eating into the PC market.

Good point!  I take it you mean a clean-room, forward-engineered Windows 
replacement.  Maybe just enough difference in look & feel to avoid the lawsuits 
that Apple laid on GEM and at least considered against Microsoft.

There is that UNIX clone from Finland...

>  Just like the back in the '70s, there was a belief that the Japanese import
>  cars were of superior quality.  And this was reinforced by a public 
statement 
> by a mid-level U.S. Auto executive.

It was an eye-opener when Honda started making cars in Ohio, and Toyota 
followed suit.  You couldn't tell the difference between cars built by American 
workers or Japanese.  The difference was in the management and company values.  
It was a relief to learn that there was nothing genetically inferior about US 
auto workers.

>  And it was Americans that the Japanese hired to put these quality control
>  procedures in place.  The same ones that that the American plants would not
>  listen to.

Oh yes, that was Deming and his team from Bell Labs.   They went to Japan and 
taught their concepts over there, which came back to haunt us big time.  
FWIW, Bell Labs/AT&T/Wester Electric always had high quality products and services.

>  At the time, the union view was that these quality control  people
>  were hatchet men to remove jobs, so they fought putting in the changes.

When all that lip service was being paid to "quality" in the late 1980s, the 
"quality" person had the same rating around the office as the one who drained 
the coffee pot and didn't make another batch.

>  Based on what I saw from cleaning up the messes that job hoppers had left
>  behind, frequently it would be believed that the project fell apart because
>  the "expert" had left, and the successor was not as good, because all of
>  the "expert" status reports were good and showed a 80% completion at the 
> time the expert left.

Everyone knows that "80% debugged software" (or 98%) still has the worst bugs 
left yet to go.  And around 80% is probably when the remaining team members 
start bumping up against the "expert's" bad design decisions, which are now 
built into the SW and can't be undone.

>  The reality was that almost nothing was working, but a lot 
> of  almost useless code had been generated.

Funny story -- we had a SW group supervisor at Bell Labs who still loved 
writing code, but was well-known for writing beehives of bugs.  People figured out 
how to assign him to a particular piece of the project that would get linked 
and loaded with the rest of the system, but everyone was warned under the 
table NOT to call any routines in his code!

The joke was that since bugs are never squashed, only moved, that since 
nobody executed or debugged this guy's code, all the bugs would eventually wind up 
in his stuff, and the system would be bug-free :-)

>  > But there are plenty of jobs that cannot be offshored. I even looked
>  > at funeral directing, which is basically party planning for a guest
>  > who won't be coming back! The nasty stuff is done by technicians.

It's good to make a list of jobs that require a personal presence, whether 
counseling or loading dock.  Foreigners who want those jobs will have to *come 
here*.

>  Our school systems trains us to be employees, not to be managers and 
> business creators.

True.  College teaches you to work for someone else in a white-collar job.  
High school, with its rigid rules and schedules, is good training for factory 
work or prison.  If Bill Gates had stuck it out at Harvard, we might all be 
programming in Linux on Motorola processors (hmmm...).
  
>  It seems that the most jobs in this country and profitable businesses are
>  created by people that do not go to business school or colleges and just 
use
>  their common sense.

See the above.
  
>  Those will be the people that come up with the new jobs, not the 
politicians 
> or the unions or the professional "experts".

Hopefully the new jobs and industries will make some money and spread it 
around before the pols tax and regulate it to death, and the experts move in to 
steal from the wannabees.  --Mike K.