Re: Disobeying jet engines - why?

On Mon, 28 Jan 2008 13:55:38 -0800, "Joel Koltner"
<zapwireDASHgroups@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"John Larkin" <jjlarkin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:2dhpp3p0ahl3qm4co9ms0jgiqak12vp7tq@xxxxxxxxxx
So it dawned on me
that he didn't ever give a damn about my problem, he just wanted to
fiddle with databases. Similarly, there are lots of programmers who
aren't interested in your dinky buttons and LCD's, they really want to
get into context switching and schedulers and dynamic memory
assignment algorithms.

I think even more would-be programmers have simply been sold a bill of goods
by those who'd like to sell you databases, RTOSes, etc. in the first place --
they have a difficult time conceiving how the problem ought to be solved "from
scratch" so they fall for the advertisements telling them that all their
problems will become trivially simple if only they send over a purchase order.

Fire them.

Don't hire them in the first place; the guy in your example sounds like he'd
be an excellent employee at a company -- just not *your* company.



The problem with programmers, even worse than with engineers, is that
you don't know how good they are until after you've worked with them
for a while. Programming is especially bad, as it's hard to judge
quality when something is 90% done, and everything is always 90% done.
Hardware design is a lot more visible.

I had a friend who started up a nanotech business and hired some
software jocks to do the analysis and visualization stuff, pretty
heavy code. All they seemed to do was rave about Java. It gave me a
bad feeling. Sure anough, all they wanted to do was play with Java. It
cost him a year and a half, and a few hundred kilobucks, for zero
results. We demoed and sold his first system running my 5-day
PowerBasic hack.

John


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