What is on Your Mind?

Hi rbatte1...
Ha ha, I am not that good, but I am flexible, I do learn quickly and I reckon I have jgt's quote of attitude and aptitude...
YES! I am not alone. In my industry the amount of poeple who have advanced qualifications that cannot do a basic electronics task. If a simple relay will do a task then these people will try and include some microprocessor and peripherals just to show how clever they are...

This doesn't work with me as I have been on the planet too long and done so much with electronics over my life span that I will always attempt to take the easy route.

Thanks so far to those that have responded, interesting to read your opinions...

Bazza...

I did that once... Designed this complicated digital circuit with clocks and counters and timers to measure pulse widths, and Basil takes one look at it, nods politely and tells me "that could work" -- and takes 5 seconds to scribble an equivalent analog circuit. It had one transistor -- just one -- and maybe 5 components total. I still don't entirely understand how it worked but it was important that it be a PNP transistor, the circuit had no NPN equivalent...

The Arduino is causing something of a renaissance for electronics, yet it's hard to shake the feeling something's been lost when nobody uses anything but the brute-force approach.

Yes - it is the desired outcome.

In fact for some (in a historical sense short) time the IT business was ruled by the witch doctors and not the serfs. This time seems to be over by now and the business has become like any other business: compliance over accomplishment, processes over getting things done, covering ones ass instead of taking responsibility.

Drones are a great sort of human resource, because they are easily intimidated (pardon, make that: "easily managed") and because they are trained to have no innate creativity, responsibility or willingness to achieve anything the product of their work is well calculatable and hence easy to plan with. A witch doctor will easily outperform 10 drones, but when genius strikes he will outperform 1000 drones. You cannot plan with this, because you cannot foresee exactly when the stroke of genius happens. A drone will do every day the same amount of work - next to nil, but predictably so! If you need twice the work done, get twice as many drones.

Frederick Brooks, project leader for the development of OS/360 and OS/370 relates (in his book "The Mythical Man-Month") this project had up to 1500 coders. OS/370 was the predecessor of MVS, and todays z/OS. I bet these 1500 people were not complete drones (this was the seventies of the last century) but not very far from that.

Compare this to the staff that built UNIX at around the same time: a handful of very special individuals (truly witch-doctors of their trade), who did what 1500 people did there, even in less time. But take into account that IBM had a very very rigid dresscode back then and now imagine: what would Denis Ritchie have told some AT&T manager who insisted on DR coming to office in a proper suit, a tie and please get rid of that awful hippie look:



What, do you think, Denis Ritchie would have answered him? How often, do you think, Denis Ritchie was at the office at 8:00 o'clock sharp - not because his muse blessed him but because every employee is to show up at 8am sharp and leave office at 5pm?

Lets face it: the faceless, nameless, disinterested i-am-just-in-it-to-mark-time-towards-retirement's are the future of our business. The time of the witch-doctors is over and if there shows up some raw talent: for every flower sticking out of the grass there is the lawn mower making sure all are of equal height. If someone really accomplishes anything a lot of fulfillment focal points, compliance auditors, project leaders, staging managers and similar ilk will make sure the accomplishment will be ground down is ground down to be as shitty as the rest.

If for nothing else, then for "avoiding dependencies": serfs can easily be replaced and one is as good (or as bad) as the other. Individuals are like they are and once you have lsot one you cannot simply replace it with a "standard Class A individual fo subtype 7". This is why instead of skills, "certifications" are sought after. Back around 1995-2000, Microsoft introduced the "MCSE" certification and the BAA (the national agency for the unemployed in Germany) sent practically every unemployed person to this certfication for some time. Many of these people managed to become certified - but of course, lacking a background in IT, still were unable to work as systems administrators. From this time "MCSE" is said to stand for "Minesweeper Consultant, Solitaire Expert". (Actually there are some accomplished M$$ admins, but not in this group and the accomplished ones, more likely than not, shun people with a MCSE, who even mention the fact.)

I have sometimes been asked about a CATE certification (the IBM analogon), but i don't. I still hold seminars sometimes about AIX topics where CATEs show up.

But in a way, these were the human resources which were sought after: easily replaceable, easily intimidated and VERY docile. Tell an accomplished engineer too much bullshit and you will get some deserved answer - along with a letter of resignation in the wake of him seeking for greener pastures. Give a serf the same amount (or even more) of bullshit and he will duck.

Welcome to the brave new world, we're gonna be epsilons!

bakunin

The playing field is a little different now. They began in the era when being able to use a computer at all was a rare and expensive privilege and you had unquestioned full control over the machine. (At least, unquestioned by the machine.) I feel they knew they had some power over the future and tried to use it wisely. Now, even a homeless person is liable to carry greater computing power with them wherever they go, albeit only accessible in a peculiarly limited way; more availability and less control.

What used to need "witch doctors" now uses historians, since new tools aren't needed for common purposes and everyone keeps forgetting the old ones.

What the witch doctors are doing now, I'm less certain, but I bet they'll turn up sooner or later exactly where we weren't looking.

We shall see if managers are the future. Or project managers. Or coordinators. Or whatever...

A nice real life example how things are wrong today is, unfortunately, shown in 2011 by the death of two persons, Mr.Ritchie and Mr.Jobs.

Jobs died, he was glorified in the mainstream media as the god of everything done well.... Steve the modern Michelangelo..

Couple of days after Ritchie passed away. Coverage of that was in best case poor.
"One of the creators of C lang has died, now sports".

O tempora, o mores!

P.S I apologize for the offtopic.

Yes - as long as the other Steve provided the brushes, the colours, the canvas and drawings.

Steve Wozniak is truly one of the mentioned witch-doctors of technology, Jobs was just a glorified accountant.

bakunin

@ Corona688...
Germaium transistor by any chance? These did have some odd characteristic that is never divulged, especially if used in a blocking oscillator type config.
I have two Arduinos and Raspberry PIs and only ise them for basic I/O boards these days, if you remember I use one for AudioScope, using only one ADC, what a waste...

@ bakunin

Yup, Dennis Ritchie has/had done more for the computing world than anyone else.
His legacy is in just about everything we touch or use today. I still have my C book by Kernigan & Ritchie; (sp).
And Wozniak was a Wizard too....