Chris, that's not cynicism, that's business. One of the
reasons they can downsize so easily is because of the
excess they hire. All of these exercises with numbers,
hours, and work weeks are just more of the same. The
size of the company separates you so much from those
who truly control the tasks that waste is rampant. After
a 13 year experience with academia, I decided not to
trust my work to anyone other than myself and my own
close colleagues. My wife on the other hand worked
both as a manager and as an expert flexible for several
of the world's larger companies. I was amazed at how
little she really needed to do to complete her job. She
loved it however and always gave more than the system
required and ultimately cared about having. I'm glad that
she is now my GM. I'll take all I can get.
REH
Christoph Reuss wrote:
> Brad McCormick wrote:
> > I worked on a big educational website (just a
> > lot of HTML an Javascript -- pretty "simple"
> > stuff, as computer programming goes!), where,
> > every time Netscape came out with a new
> > "maintenance release" of their web browser, it
> > was time for me to find out how it would
> > cause my application to break "this time", so
> > that I'd expect to spend from a few hours to
> > a few days getting back to where I had been
> > before.
>
> Well, that's how the guild of programmers makes sure they'll _never_
> run out of work. Micro$oft is the master of this particular "art" of
> "creating" work (and income!). I know of a big corporation that
> first migrated all their applications from DOS to Unix, and a few
> years later "back" from Unix to Windows. Some "smart" programmers
> got really rich of this back-and-forth (or rather, forth-and-back!),
> without "creating" anything -- just migrating the same applications.
> Another big company is now desperately looking for some "genius" to
> "sidegrade" their 600 PCs from Windows 95 to Windows NT (talk about
> "industry standard"!) -- to later "backgrade" to Windows 00, probably.
>
> If other industries would finally "learn" this art, it could be the
> end of unemployment. ;-)
> (Who will *pay* this idling nonsense is a different question, of course.)
>
> Cynically yours,
> Chris
>
> ___
> CORPORATION, n. -- A miniature totalitarian state governed by an unelected
> hierarchy of officials who take a dim view of individualism, free speech,
> equality and eggheads. The backbone of all Western democracies.
> --==(The Cynic's Dictionary)==--
