Re: Low end desktop for EE tasks?

Hi Jeff,

"Jeff Liebermann" <jeffl@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:0fdqf3dn4oamnaf97papu7trhbclkeftnp@xxxxxxxxxx
Sorry. I forgot we were talking about engineers as users. That's
quite different as operating and configuring computers is part of
their tool kit, and not just an office appliance.

Not only operating and configuring, but also programming in many cases. It
does depend on the particular user, of course.

However, even those have machines
that are at least partially locked down allegedly to prevent security
problems, but really to keep the engineering from wasting company time
tinkering with their computers.

Understood, and that's not a particularly unreasonable policy, although I
would point out that -- at least with good engineers -- the line between
"wasting time" and "research that might eventually turn into a profitable
product" is often blurry. Historically, many of the best circuits came out of
some engineer goofing around with some particular part of topology he wanted
to understand better, and with software the canonical example is Google where
*company policy* is that you're *supposed* to spend some certain percentage of
your paid work time working on "things that interest *you*" and they figure
that every now and again one of them will turn into something that makes money
for the company.

I think I've related before how I worked at one big company where the IT
policy was... your user account was just a "power user" or similar to start,
and if you wanted to be an admin, just call up IT can give them a credible
explanation of why you need to be one and -- poof! -- you're it. Took no more
than two minutes in my case. The deal was that once you're an admin, you were
agreeing that you were "self supporting" as far as maintaining your PC goes
and that IT's only responsibility if you thoroughly hose your machine's
configuration was to restore it to the stock configuration they had imaged on
a hard drive somewhere. That was a reasonable policy that respected the
legitimate need of some engineers to completely control their own PCs while
making sure that the "casual tweaker" wouldn't immediately shoot himself in
the foot.

Where I am now, everyone (well, all the engineers at least) has two
accounts -- a "power user" account and an "admin" account. The idea is that
you generally spend your day logged on as a power user, and then use "run as"
or similar tools to give yourself admin access when needed... or just log out
and back on with your admin account if you need to have extensive needs. This
too balances security with recognizing the legitimate admin needs of
engineers. (And so far I only know one engineer who just changed his power
user account into an admin account as well :-), but that really was because he
had a lot of problems with certain software that didn't work with the power
user account and -- unlike me -- didn't feel like "goofing off" and creating
scripts to just run specific programs as an admin! :-) )

I had one architect proudly proclaim
that he trashed an entire day fixing a computer problem, that I could
have fixed in 10 minutes.

Sure, but he presumably learned a lot about his PC in that day, don't you
think? Whether or not that's worthwhile is of course up to the guy paying his
paycheck, of course.

In one of the books I have (possibly Jim William's one on analog techniques)
there's an anecdote about how the protagonist gets a job in charge of an
electronics lab. He submits a budget to his superior, which is completely
approved except for one item: A request for so-many dollars for out-of-house
equipment repair. "No," the boss says, "everything that breaks -- including
what you inadvertently blow up yourself -- will be fixed by you." Although
he's annoyed at the time, over the course of years he recognizes that it
forces him to sit down and analyze a lot of designs from which he learns and
thereby becomes a much better designer himself. So while in the short term
the company ends up having him "waste time" spending days fixing designs that
could have been repaired out of house for far less, in the long term they end
up with a much more capable and hence valuable employee.

Of course, in today's world such long-term thinking is somewhat uncommon.

Question: Do you know of any intelligent engineer, who cannot resist
installing every utility program he finds on the internet? I don't
and have spent far too much time undoing the damage.

Sure, plenty of people around here. I have very few such "utility" programs
on my PC, and I'm willing to bet that folks like Joerg, Jim, and John do
likewise.

Incidentally, there are really smart ones, that use a Linux boot disk
to mount NTFS partitions, hack whatever they please, tweak the
registry, and then cover their tracks. I leave them alone.

Talk about wasting the company's time... :-)

I only have one customer that has an engineering lab full of test
equipment. They have two types of computers. One group is strictly
for use within the lab and does NOT connect to the corporate LAN. The
engineers and techs can do what they please with these. Just don't
call IT for help when you trash these. Most of these are used for
data collection and instrument control. There is a connection to the
internet, but it's completely independent of the corporate gateway.

Sounds reasonable enough, but how do they transfer "results" data back to the
corporate network? E-mail themselves? USB thumb drives? Where I am the lab
machines have highly-controlled access to the main fileservers, getting to
read and write only in a couple of places -- but this is a lot more productive
than having to copy 10MB report files to a thumb drive!

They're very different skills, but I see your point. Competence in
one area of expertise automatically qualifies that person to be
competent in computing. I don't think so.

I guess I just don't see myself ever hiring people who profess competence in
one area but somehow aren't even competent enough to know their own
limitations when it comes to another area such as PCs.

Thanks for your advice regarding backup up PCs.

---Joel



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