[FRIAM] I am accepting wagers

[Marcus Daniels]

Most people live somewhere in the middle of their organization.   Yet many people aspire to be managers or deciders or some other sort of Important Person.  The status, or at least the money, is important to them.  To fulfill this aspiration, these people need have people to manage.   At the same time, these decider people are of about the same level of talent, knowledge, and intelligence of the people they manage.   The easiest thing to do is to create inefficiency.    Then there are more jobs and they can actually manage the complexity of the problems that they are tasked with solving.  Everyone wins!   The organization itself may not win, because it becomes inefficient, but the employees and managers can always move to another organization.   Other organizations, like government labs, have budgets that go on forever.   This is the best situation for people that want somehow to move up in an organization.   There is no driver to leave or to get smarter about work.

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Monday, March 15, 2021 7:39 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] I am accepting wagers

I started as a programmer (COBOL for business apps / Assembler for internals) in 1968. I have held almost every title up to and including CIO. I was a professor of, essentially, management information systems but also taught the non-math CS stuff, like O/S, programming, database, and AI.

Spent the last part of my career making wild and fantastical claims about how information systems could be orders of magnitude simpler and therefore easier, faster, and cheaper to develop, with no loss of quality. The jeers were loud and rude.

Only had two opportunities to prove, in the real world, I was "right." One a national company that produced forms (loan applications, disclosure forms, mortgage documents, etc) for banks in all fifty states. They employed 50 attorneys to review changes in law and generate requirements for programmers, and fifty programmers using C++. My system, written in the then still quite primitive Smalltalk) reduced the programming staff to five.  The other was an insurance company rewriting and updating a legacy system supporting sales and management of commercial insurance (car fleets, boats, commerical real estate). They planned a 500 million, five-year, 1000 developer effort with multiple subcontractors and off-shore teams. Ended up being an 18 month project with a third of the development staff (still some off shore, and one subcontractor) at a cost of 20+ million. 

In both efforts the company had to fight a continual rear guard effort by traditionalists. In the case of the banker forms company that effort was lost and last I heard they were up to 100 Java programmers.

Not a brag — I have no idea if my approach could be promulgated across the industry with similar effect. Certainly am not claiming some kind of philosopher stone for simplicity and low cost.

Just anecdotal support for Jon.

davew


On Sun, Mar 14, 2021, at 11:41 PM, jon zingale wrote:
> Ha, *bringing some more reality* is what I listen for to know when I 
> have some naysayers on the ropes. Much of the last decade of my career 
> has been working to reconcile data whose interfaces radically vary. 
> Claiming it to be an 11 billion dollar problem is a rhetorical move 
> that smells of
> *abstraction* rather than *reality* to me. Barry states the problem 
> clearly, but it isn't IMO an insurmountable problem, just an 
> intentional one with lots of particularities. At least one small 
> start-up that I wrote for managed a similar problem surprisingly well 
> (up to Google's data standards, for instance), and sold for orders of magnitudes less than the number above.
> Stating the problem is great, working the problem is best, but the 
> rest is simply whining.
> 
> 
> 
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