[sdiy] ot: is it true that Waldorf crashed?

[Rainer Buchty]

> Well, all , managers sooner or later loose contact with reality, i.e.
> physics. Some are not capable from the beginnning, others will loose
> their skill, anyway, they will not really know what you're doing.

...and some of them never were capable at all. I still find it hard to
believe that in a typical company you usually find two strands:
sales/management and tech. sales/mgt often are of the PHB type, get the
big bucks and if the company wants to get rid of them, they even get big
layoff payments.

Tech, however, will never make big bucks and get fired first during hard
times. If they do their job well (which sometimes means the impossible)
it was good management. If they fail (doing the impossible), it's entirely
the techs' fault.

> If you're really good in your job, you'll win all such fights against
> mid-level management, because top management can afford to fire the mid
> level guys (you do not notice when they are on vacation, do you?), but
> they can not afford to fire good programmers and certainly not designers
> of hardware. Because that would stop development at once.

Where this is awfully true by idea, it's not necessarily true out there in
real life. During hard times entire development crews get fired and only
a torso consisting of the upper and mid management levels survive;
everyone else, i.e. the people who actually developed products, get laid
off.

> And if they fire you, the better it is because they didn't estimate the
> value of your work anyway, which means that this company will crash
> sooner or later.

There's just the problem that if $BIG_COMPANY (the ones which are usually
stupid enough to apply layoff strategies like the one mentioned above) can
lay off much more people than smaller companies (which mostly follow more
rational strategies) can absorb.

Rainer