Re: Herd instincts?

On Dec 3, 2:13 am, John Fields <jfie...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sun, 2 Dec 2007 12:51:05 -0800 (PST), bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:
On Dec 2, 2:53 am, John Fields <jfie...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
---
Yes, of course, since during that time I'm sure your opinions about
where your time would be better spent were often overridden by your
superiors and what you're left with is the record of how they
decided to use you by prioritizing your time for their advantage.
---

That does show up in a tendency to neglect stuff that I'm not being
actively hassled about, but it also made me well aware that my
superiors often didn't know enough about what they were talking about
and were trying to impose inappropriate and sometime self-
contradictory priorities.

---
In _your_ opinion, and with conclusions reached, by you, without
having access to data which your superiors were obviously loathe to
share with cannon fodder.

Sure, but I did have access to information which my superiors probably
didn't have the time to absorb and certainly didn't have any
inclination to acquire.

But, then, that's always been your problem.

What would you know about it?

That is, you believe yourself to be the ultimate authority on just
about everything but, when in the pinch, you've always knuckled
under and taken subservient roles because you never had the balls to
do it your way, regardless of the risk.

From your point of view, I probably do look like the ultimate
authority on anything that isn't a 555. There are other perspectives.
As far as knuckling under and taking subservient roles because I've
never had the balls to do it my way, regardless of the risk, you
haven't got a clue. The electron beam tester I proposed and worked on
from 1989 to 1991 at Cambridge Instruments stretched the state of the
art to some tune - it used a fast digital timing system (realised in
Gigabit Logics GaAs backed up by 100k ECL) to take a number of
stroboscopic samples (up to 1024) per timing cycle and a tolerably
fast digital signal processing system, (mostly realised in 100k ECL)
to up-date up to 1024 digital data points in parallel.

Even the incidental innovations - it introduced Cambridge Instrument's
to surface mount components - frightened some of my colleagues.

Despite all the technical risks of the project, what finally wrecked
it was the fact that the guy who'd written the daft specification -
10psec timing resolution - that had forced me to go for GaAs in the
timing logic - chickened out when it came to selling the machine once
we'd got the prototype working, and bailed out to set up a company in
a rather different field, leaving us with insufficient real customers
to justify the expenditure required to get the machine into
production.

And now, in the autumn of your life, it's getting to be too late for
you to make the mark you would have liked to.
---

Perhaps.

My expertise in prioritising my time does represent more than a simple
record of what other people told me they wanted and it does include
the signficant insight that the predictive powers of everybody
involved (including me) aren't all that wonderful.

---
Geez, I could have told you that. ;)
---

But your opinion isn't exactly influential.

On one occasion I
produced a project plan (for a fairly simple project) in parallel with
one of my colleagues - neither of us knew that the other had been
stuck with the job, so we didn't collaborate - and both of us came out
with much the same total figure (some 1300 man hours) to within a few
percent

---
Using the same inputs and given the same tools, one would expect
something like that.
---

Pencil and paper?

Neither set of time estimates had that much to do with the length of
time took to complete our part of the project.

---
Then you were both above overhead and there _is_ a free lunch?
---

No. The customer kept on changing the specification, as they always do
if allowed to get away with it.

I've had more trouble
finding work since November 1991 - since then I've worked five years
full time and six years part time - so the skills aren't being
exercised as regularly as they once were, but it's fairly clear that
you won't have anything worthwhile to teach me on that subject.

---
"Fairly clear" is quite different from "perfectly clear" ,and is an
admission that since you're not using your skills (and learning new
ones) you're falling behind and losing whatever edge you might have
had earlier on.
---

You may think so, but since you don't ever seem to have done the kind
of work I was doing, it isn't a particularly well-founded insight.

---
Whether I've ever done the same kind of work you have, or not, (and
I have) has no bearing on whether or not I can see that your lack of
recent activity has made you largely obsolete.

What you think you can see hasn't got much to do with reality. The
laws of physics haven't changed in the last five years. Some of the
components I've worked with have become as obsolete as the 555, but
that's the kind of problem I've been dealing with since I started
doing electronics back in 1967, and I've gotten pretty skilled at
coping with it.

By your own
admission, no one will hire you, while if you had some whiz-bang
stuff going on for you on your own you wouldn't have to be begging
for work, you'd have to be begging for time off.

Dream on.

Take a look at Larkin and Thompson.

Thompson's kind of skill in analog integrated circuit design is
certainly in demand over here - Kevin Aylward had a job offer in
Nijmegen not too long ago to do that kind of work - but its not an
area where I've had any experience.

John Larkin has his own business, which he promotes with some
enthusiasm

Are they whining about that no one will hire them?

No, but if they did want more work, they certainly wouldn't admit it;
they'd be much more likely to spend time drawing attention to
themselves in the hope that someone would come to them. It gives you a
much better bargaining position, and is much easier on the ego.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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