Re: OT: Where? and What?

Bob Badour wrote:
...
> I would not be comfortable in SA or Asia. For one, I am allergic to
> tobacco smoke. For another, market dominant minorities tend not to do so
> well in the long term.
> ...

I'm not sure I understand what "market dominant minorities" means, guessing it has to do with economics but I'm pretty sure we're all allergic to hydrocarbons. Africa and Asia are fond of leaded gasoline too.

> What do you recommend for important work? It seems to me the important
> work is the interesting work and vice versa.

It's hard for me to say what's important to somebody else. I think your many corrections to what's posted in c.d.t. are important, but suspect you find them boring. For me, the search for simplicity in software is important and I do find it interesting. I say interesting because I find myself thiking about it when I'm not even trying to think about it.   But most people I know don't find it interesting or important at all.

In the big systems I've seen over the years, I always concluded thinking that the most important work was winnowing or refining requirements but that was a very boring slog, sometimes acrimonious too, going over people's heads after I couldn't get them to agree that what they thought they needed to do their individual jobs wasn't what was most economic for the rest of the company.

I'd bet a significant number of the frequent posters here would agree that it's important to stop the spread of SQL but to tackle the Oracles of the world on their own playing field, eg., corporate America would not seem interesting to most of them.

On a grander scale, I think it is very important for society/societies to have freedom of development. In software, this means finding ways to counter the monopolies. I don't see the price of M$ Windows in a third-world village as the essential issue, rather I think it is that village's ability to not be hamstrung by choices made in Redmond or indeed by a mom-and-pop Linux distributor. I think what the Linux distributors are doing is important but not because their 'distros' are better than Windows for example but because they potentially can make more of their own design choices. Admittedly they are partly hamstrung by closed hardware specifications, font licences, bloated standards et al but I think their bigger problem is that many of them feel they are competing with Windows.

For me, the biggest kick has always come from seeing somebody happily use a program I wrote, without further intruction from me. I often had to put up with various corporate BS to get that kick. At one time everybody I worked with was smarter than I but as time wore on many of them seemed to be getting dumber. Now there are always a few people who seem to be smarter but I rarely learn from them, I suppose because I've reached some of my own limits.

Having done apps, tech support, big and small product development for me it is now apps that feel most satisfying and I think it is only through apps that a better OS or DB engine can catch on in a big way. My view of an app is a pretty expansive one (one little example - I think app design should include a transaction design that doesn't depend on conventional transaction support, I like to think of that as a holistic approach, but I think that is a challenge most paid db practioners aren't interested in). Some app areas are quite interesting to me personally, eg social systems, genealogy, little leages and especially learning software, but that doesn't mean anybody else should care about them. I remember a grade-school teacher who was bored so jumped the gun and tried to teach us set theory when according to the authorities we were too young to be taught that. I don't see why ten-year-olds shouldn't be designing their own relational db apps and maybe their db engines too. I also notice that there are tens of thousands of genealogy fans who think hierarchical db's are where it's at - I think this is due to the apps that were based on that Gedcom creation.

Enough of that ramble which doesn't have much direct connection with making a living. I think it is a natural, innate pleasure to apply one's learned skills in a repetitive way but it is also easy to fall asleep and stop learning which the often-imaginative types that lean towards IT rightly fear. The amount of dogma in IT shows how easy that is. For an individual to counter this is a matter of discipline and character. Same goes for selling oneself which can be a tough slog but if one is good enough at it, one can dictate one's location!

p Received on Fri Feb 16 2007 - 14:42:09 CET