suggestion: add dollar amounts to Schedule Transactions summary window

Jean-David Beyer jeandavid8 at verizon.net
Sat Sep 17 09:50:23 EDT 2016


On 09/17/2016 07:53 AM, ed65love wrote:
> 
>> That's because programming is a discipline where you are asked to
>> accurately predict how long it will take you to do something that you've
>> never done before, have only a vague idea of what is involved, and which
>> will all change along the way anyway.

I think programming could be a discipline, but few do it right. Mostly
done by untrained hobbyists. I call them coders, not programmers.
> 
> And those who want you to do the work usually don't really know what 
> they want yet, and you have to get every single instruction out of 
> thousands just right, and half the time the libraries you use have their 
> own bugs.
> 

I once worked for a large regulated monopoly that should have known better.

A friend and I had built an optimizer to make the code produced by the C
compiler run faster. It ran on one class of machines, the machines that
that company made.

We were asked to make an estimate for how long it would take to make it
work for a very different (RISC) class of machines. The first question I
asked was "what speed improvement was required and for which
benchmarks." They would not answer thse questions, so I cynically picked
a set of easy benchmarks (of no usefulness), and defined the speed of
the resulting code to be the same as the speed of unoptimized code; i.,
as though there were no optimizer at all and said we could do it in a
couple of months. They wanted it sooner.

Pretty soon, they canceled the hardware program and the software
program, and bought National Cash Register (the cheapest computer
company) to do the whole thing. They paid about $7 billion for it. They
mismanaged it so badly that they spun it off later for less than half
what they paid for it.

Now the company I worked for no longer exists, though another company
uses its name and trademarks.

That is what happens when top management is run by a bunch of retired
high-school football coaches. They had slogans and stuff, but no idea of
what their company was doing. Ready, Fire, Aim was a favorite of mine (I
am not kidding).

The worst slogan was 10x quality improvement every 5 years. I asked how
quality would be defined and measured. They had no clue. And, at least
in software, they had no process for developing it; every thing they did
was started over fresh, so none of the classical quality control
techniques could be used and stepwise refinement was impossible.


-- 
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