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From: hutch@shark.UUCP (Stephen Hutchison)
Newsgroups: net.flame
Subject: Ken Arndt Ozone Bluze
Message-ID: <1414@shark.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 3-Jun-85 00:05:53 EDT
Article-I.D.: shark.1414
Posted: Mon Jun  3 00:05:53 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 6-Jun-85 08:31:53 EDT
References: <2356@decwrl.UUCP>
Reply-To: hutch@shark.UUCP (Stephen Hutchison)
Organization: Tektronix, Wilsonville OR
Lines: 63
Keywords: "Header Line!"
Summary: 

In article <2356@decwrl.UUCP> arndt@lymph.DEC writes:
>
>My word.  I can only hope that you work for AT&T or some other rabbit company
>like that.  Your tale of being a software evaluator and having "schedule slips
>and changes to specifications two weeks before the product is due to ship to
>customers" makes me laugh and cry at the same time.  

Ummm, If you look at the header (that stuff that includes the name, address,
keyword limes, etc.  you'll see a line that says 
	Organization: Tektronix, Wilsonville OR
We're not a "rabbit company" at all.  We've been around longer than you
Dec'kies and came within 50Kbucks of owning half of this upstart company
called "Digital Equipment Corporation" back in the late '60s or early '70s
when y'all had over-extended your cash and wanted to pay in stock for some
scopes and test equipment.  Unfortunatly Tek management was sometimes a
tad short-sighted...

As for laughing and crying at the same time, see below.
>I am a Product Manager in a software group and it is my job, among other
>things,to see that that sort of crap doesn't happen.  And it doesn't.
>There are slips,but for valid reasons not because we don't know what we
>should build or a programmer fell off his chair two months back and nobody
>noticed (they're doing it all the time so how can you tell if it's serious?).
Hmm... Management you say.  So that's how you can afford to waste all this
net bandwidth!

As for slippery schedules, I don't know anything about your group, but I do
know that Dec has its share of slips, and judging from other replies from
inside Dec, Evaluation gets the short end there just like everywhere else!
And as far as "valid reasons" goes, "valid reasons" are whatever the upper
management, who follow the bottom line of sales, says they are, and it takes
a lot of expertise and a real good justification to say no to them.

>As for being one + 'ed by some turkey who comes in at the last moment to
>"change the specs"  (do people actually get away with that in other
>companies??)  I once put up a sign over a wastebasket outside my office for
>suggestions on the current product.  What ever happen to marketing sign off,
>management buy-in?  Is your manager letting this happen?  Crazy.  If you
>work somewhere for DEC don't tell and if you work for someone else get out
>before they fold caus' we're going to eat them alive.

You betcha people get away with that.  Even at Dec, although there they seem
to call it "the next revision" and have a slightly more formal method for
inflicting it on customers, called "software support" ... not to slander
software support, most of my friends at Dec are doing that sort of thing.

Of course, I could discuss things like the various changes which are made
to Dec software without the formality of changing specifications, or the
difficulty of doing original, cutting-edge stuff which hasn't really been
done before, on a very large scale, with lots of very bright and very
egotistical people, and still doing everything exactly right without the
need to change anything.  Now, even though this is net.flame, I will be
nice and avoid suggesting that you don't have this problem :-).

>Wow.  Talk about war stories.  Poor lad.
>
>Keep chargin'
>
>Ken Arndt

No thanks, I prefer to pay cash whenever possible.

Hutch