At 12:35 AM 11/27/02 -0500, Erik Reuter wrote:
On Tue, Nov 26, 2002 at 11:01:09PM -0600, Dan Minette wrote:
> Good lord, an innovative technique, including coming up with a
> radically new design, building and testing hardware, all within a
> year?
If they spent 6 hours per day working and it took two years, then yes,
it is likely it could be done in one year if they spent 12 hours.
> But, the creative stuff requires me to do things like clean the
> kitchen, play golf, etc. in order to solve the problem. When I stop
> looking at the problem, the solution appears.
And the solution probably would have appeared faster if you weren't
doing those other things. There are lots of things you can do to change
your viewpoint on a problem, talk to others about it, read books, make a
list of all possible solutions that have worked in the past for related
problems, check your journal of ideas that you keep, or any of another
million ways that you can look up in various problem solving books. It
isn't the golf that helps you solve the problem, it is the process
of looking at the problem from a different angle. And there are more
efficient ways to do that than golf.
> Question, then. Management A ran the company, respecting how these
> and other guys worked. The company was first in market share, by a
> good margin. It was sold for a very good profit by the parent company
> (it was groomed for sale, they didn't have the global infrastructure
> to really expand the company). The corporation that bought them had a
> philosophy like yours.
I don't think you understand my philosophy.
> After 3 years, engineering productivity fell to pieces. There were
> long hours,
one factor
> tight schedules,
another factor
> no time to think.
and another factor, two of them indicate that management expected things
to be done more quickly than you think they could be done, and one
factor indicates people were working long to make that schedule. That
isn't a good example for what I was talking about, without more details
about the schedule. From what you have said, it is quite possible that
the longer hours resulted in faster progress than shorter hours would
have, but the schedule was so unrealistic that it STILL did not meet the
deadline.
> Junk was turned out.
Quality has often been sacrificed to meet an unrealistic deadline. I
don't claim that ANY task can be done in X days if you work long enough
(when X is sufficiently small). What I claim is that in most cases, a
task can be done in Y days by working longer hours, where it would have
otherwise taken Z days, and Y < Z.
Who else here has read "The Mythical Man-Month"?
_Anyone_ who hasn't now knows what to ask Santa for this year:
<<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201835959/102-8617843-9359302>>
--Ronn! :)
I always knew that I would see the first man on the Moon.
I never dreamed that I would see the last.
--Dr. Jerry Pournelle
_______________________________________________
http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
