Sounds like my feelings towards my Dakota, except it's hauling my
banshee and driving across the dunes to the beach with the grill and
my mom in the truck for a BBQ. Of course professionally I'm one of the
managers that has to explain things to my regional who get's to
explain it to the Division GM who then get's to explain it to the
executives. Although I have the added joy of explaining other people's
screw ups from before my time as manager to government auditors, I
just can't wait for the European Medication Evaluation Authority to
come next month. If I can swing it right I'll be able to talk my
regional into giving me a little time off after that and I'll be able
to take the quad and the Dak down to the dunes for a long weekend.
On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 8:30 AM, John Dunlap <jsdunlap@roadkill.org> wrote:
>
> WELL, That certainly explains why I am unemployed as a former telecom engineer.
> But hey I like retirement and playing with my li'l 4X4, 318cid, 1998
> DAK, too much.
> It tows my boat and carries me and my Wilson clubs around nicely.
>
> John
>
> On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 6:24 AM, Barry Oliver
> <barrysuperhawk@comcast.net> wrote:
>>
>> it wouldn't be so funny except that it's probably true...
>>
>> Dustin Williams wrote:
>>>
>>> Think about it this way, if a team of 10 engineers came up with 10
>>> ideas in a year and each one was paid $50,000 in annual salary then
>>> each idea would have cost the company $50,000. Assuming it's a team of
>>> good engineers then one of those 10 ideas would have actually been a
>>> good one so if they had only used that one idea it would have cost
>>> $500,000. The cost per idea of that one idea would be too much for
>>> their manager to be able to explain to the executives and more than
>>> the executives could explain to the board so they would have to make
>>> budget cuts to lower the cost per idea settling on a reasonable
>>> $50,000 per good idea which would mean canning nine of the engineers.
>>>
>>> You would hope that only the best and most competent engineer would
>>> still be employed, but since it's a team effort the person with the
>>> most charisma and often the least skill would be the one who got all
>>> the credit and all the more capable engineers would be fired, leaving
>>> someone capable of 1/20th of the work of the team as a whole, but
>>> factoring in the collaborative synergistic efforts of the team, he
>>> would more likely be capable of 1/40th of the work, so at this rate it
>>> would take the one engineer left in the department 40 years to come up
>>> with one good idea.
>>>
>>> The lack of results would be something that the managers would view as
>>> unacceptable and after one year with no good ideas, i.e. an annualized
>>> infinite cost per good idea, the lone engineer would be fired and
>>> replaced by someone who graduated from college two years before but
>>> couldn't find work as an engineer and was suck working at Taco Bell.
>>> This new employee would accept a paid internship at $30,000 with the
>>> promise of a permanent job if her produced one good idea. The manager
>>> is thinking of the joy of getting a $30,000 cost per good idea which
>>> would result in a $20,000 saving and translate into a $10,000 bonus
>>> for the manager. Unfortunately the dumbass would design something that
>>> looked really cool but was totally useless and ultimately would result
>>> in the deaths of dozens of customers which would lead to several class
>>> action law suits that would bankrupt the company and it would be sold
>>> at auction to a conglomerate of Russian mob bosses from St. Petersburg
>>> and Chinese free market communists from Shanghai who would use the
>>> company as a front to build a robot army to overthrow the west.
>>>
>>> So in the long run it is cheaper for the business and in the interests
>>> of national security to implement those annoying bad ideas.
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 8:30 PM, David Gersic <info@zaccaria-pinball.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Tuesday 10 March 2009 04:38 pm, Ray Block wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Couldn't agree more, Jon. My experience with company engineers indicates
>>>>> they feel the need to reinvent the wheel frequently to preserve their jobs.
>>>>
>>>> Yet they rarely seem to hit on a good idea that would actually improve
>>>> something, eh?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>
>
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