* Posts by Jon 16

3 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Apr 2010

So you wanna be a Wall Street techie? Or anyway, get paid a lot

Jon 16
Meh

Consulting

Many years ago I was interviewed by McKinsey for an entry-level consulting job. My 'thought puzzle' was: "A mobile phone company is losing money, why?" I had no idea. I'd not studied business and I certainly knew nothing about the industry. The answer that they were looking for (when I told them straight up after several minutes of flailing) was trivially simple and had something to do with not charging subscribers enough.

Run forward ten years and I was a technical consultant to a mobile operator. Let's just say that their problems had nothing to do with what they were charging customers. I still wish that I had had the balls to say to this consultant: give me a chance to interview the junior staff and the techies and I'll tell you a host of things that your mindless spreadsheet certainly wont. Ah well.

Auditor declares FiReControl a 'comprehensive failure'

Jon 16
Stop

Government Sector

@Angus Wood: I don't think it's particularly fair to tar all "government workers" with the same brush. For instance, the Fire Service is, generally speaking, fairly good at dealing with fires. The Ambulance Service is, again generally speaking, fairly good at dealing with emergency medical care. And so on. What none of these people are good at dealing with is complex IT projects.

Clearly, some of that is because these people don't have backgrounds in IT and someone has been promoted into the "IT Manager" position who came up through the ranks of dealing with something completely different. Or they were told by central government to outsource the whole thing because it wasn't a core competency. And now your public sector worker is expected to manage a complex outsourcing contract as well!

And, of course, the private sector never gets these wrong, do they? Do they? Of course they do, and they get it wrong for the same reason that the public sector does: because these are political decisions that have nothing to do with 95% of the division's staff and are never really worked through with someone who actually has some insight into the real problem. CEO of large company or director of large government bureaucracy (or, worse, MP of some piddling constituency) reads something in the loo about how integrating your IT systems can save you a bundle if you call IBM/Fujitsu/whoever. So they go and make it a policy without trying to grapple with what could possibly go wrong.

So fire the bosses, but don't pretend that "the public sector can't be trusted". After all, you trust them with your health, education, etc.

Adobe man to Apple: 'Go screw yourself'

Jon 16

Adobe story a *little* more complicated

As much as I hate Adobe's CS tools (and my god, their Windows installer is the worst piece of software I've ever used, and that's saying something) the story with the OS/X migration is a *little* more complicated than Adobe saying "Ooooh, that OS/X platform will never amount to anything."

Does Quark ring a bell? They were even *worse* and it took something like four years for them to produce a version of XPress that worked on the 'new' Mac OS. Both Adobe and Quark had invested massive amounts of time and energy in developing software for the older MacOS 7-8-9 frameworks, and their users would *not* have been happy to migrate to a 'new' version that had fewer features. So both companies were on the hook for a huge investment in porting their suites of apps. As well, they probably both figured they had time since Carbon would be around for the foreseeable future.

Remember that Adobe took advantage of that 'break' to bring out InDesign -- they didn't have a competitor to Quark that anyone gave a rat's a** about before the OS/X migration, they sure as heck did after because they started from scratch. Meanwhile, Quark was left looking completely flummoxed. Result? InDesign stole the market from under Quark's nose.

So while I think there's a bit of 'handbags at dawn' going on here, I don't think it's entirely worth it to hold Adobe's behaviour in the 1990s up to the light as an example of them 'screwing over Apple'.