Re: OT: Ping Lottadata

Chris Malcolm <cam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:4lctjjF1aareU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

Gene <Gene@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Chris Malcolm <cam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:4l2ftbFeeiimU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx:
Jenny <lottadata@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Chris Malcolm wrote:

Managers don't like eccentrics, and prefer not to hire them. But
the more difficult a task is, and the rarer the talent to do it
well, the more they simply have to lump it and hire eccentrics who
can do it. So you find few eccentrics in easy jobs that any fool
could do, and lots of eccentrics in the difficult jobs which
require rare talents.

Sounds like you've spent some time around really good software
developers. <g>

Not only that, I was one :-)

When I entered the field in the late 70s, the need for people who
could do the work was so great that managers were forced to hire
women, musicians, linguists, philosophy Ph.D.s because they were
the only ones who could get results. It made for some wonderful
working environments.

Yup. And I'll raise your bid to entering the field in the mid 60s,
in London. We used to joke that the ideal programmer type was
someone who'd been to university but was too clever to end up with a
degree.

That's changed now that software tools have gotten sophisticated
enough that it no longer takes high level analytic thinking to make
computers do your bidding.

Unless you're trying to get them to do things which nobody has been
able to get them to do yet because the tools and methodology don't
yet exist.

I'm glad I was around to be part of the fun in that particular
"good old day!"

Yup! My good old computer days started in London in the psychedelic
60s, a long ago and far away land of dreams where the Rolling Stones
were young men :-)

Hey Chris, My first real job was working with IBM 360/370's for a
railroad around the time your started.

Mine was working on an ICT 1904, a British machine with a similar
general spec but different architecture. ICT was one a few British
mainframe manufacturers of the time, which were later forcible
amalgamated by Govt fiat to become ICL in an attempt to keep the
British mainframe computer industry standing against IBM.

But I was drafted and ended up
flying instead. I always ended up being the computer guy at every
base which worked out well.

Ny first serious computer was a Sequa Chameleon. I paid 2400 dollars
for it. It had dual processors - one Z80 that ran CPM programs and an
8088 that ran DOS programs. It had two 5 1/2" in floppies a 9 in
green screen and a whopping 521K of ram. No hard drive, the company
never figured out how to put one in the case.

Mine was a Nascom II, a hobby kit computer you built yourself from a
bag of chips and a couple of printed circuit boards. It too was based
on a Z80. It was similar to the Apple I. I had nearly finished my own
word processor on it, when I took the opportunity to buy a more
powerful machine with an inbuilt office suite.

I liked that time although it hasn't lived up to it's promise it has
gotten close.

I miss the old languages and left programing behind when all the
GUI's starting getting in the way.

That was about when I moved from doing the programming myself to
managing others. It was a move I'd resisted for decades because I was
an extremely good programmer, and a rather poor manager, but most
organisations are too inflexible to handle the idea of very senior
technical people who don't manage, or have a manager working for them
to do the managing.


Managing was difficult until I worked with a great manager. Luckily that
happen early on. I guess it's close to making the ultimate heuristic
program. You pick the people/code, organize it and test it and then stand
back and let it run spending your time looking for improvements for the
next version.


--
"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much
liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it." Thomas
Jefferson

T2, Dx Oct2005
A1C 5.1
Lantus/Novolog
.

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