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- Thread starter amirm
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To is or not to is, that be the question
To is or not to is, that be the question
THE peace and good will of the Christmas season was disrupted by a noisy debate over how African Americans speak English
A strange debate, but it doesn't matter me none.
If that's all there is, then let's keep dancing!
This is probably a reference to Richard Hamming at the Labs (error-correcting codes and much more)
Richard Hamming - Wikipedia
He wasn't part of the Unix project, but everyone could just walk in on him and ask questions. Famed for his jackets. He was a boss / manager with a secretary and no people underneath him. Fridays were reserved for "just thinking deep thoughts". And so he did. He influenced others that just knowing how to program didn't mean you knew how to write correctly and succinctly. Which may have had an influence on the classic "The Elements of Programming Style" by Brian Kernighan and P.J. Plauger at the labs.
The management style at the ATT labs was entirely unique being a rare state-sponsored monopoly, forced to publish, patent, and be opaque in any research so as not to jeapordize that status. By not being allowed to compete, you'll never likely find that kind of true inspiration and freedom again - like being paid to think deep thoughts on Fridays. And come up with things like error-correcting codes! Well ok then.
This is probably a reference to Richard Hamming at the Labs (error-correcting codes and much more)
Richard Hamming - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
He wasn't part of the Unix project, but everyone could just walk in on him and ask questions. Famed for his jackets. He was a boss / manager with a secretary and no people underneath him. Fridays were reserved for "just thinking deep thoughts". And so he did. He influenced others that just knowing how to program didn't mean you knew how to write correctly and succinctly. Which may have had an influence on the classic "The Elements of Programming Style" by Brian Kernighan and P.J. Plauger at the labs.
The management style at the ATT labs was entirely unique being a rare state-sponsored monopoly, forced to publish, patent, and be opaque in any research so as not to jeapordize that status. By not being allowed to compete, you'll never likely find that kind of true inspiration and freedom again - like being paid to think deep thoughts on Fridays. And come up with things like error-correcting codes! Well ok then.
Well, speaking as somebody who spent 26 years down the hall from the Unix group at Bell Labs in Murray Hill (I was in the Acoustics Research group, then when it split, the Signal Processing Research Group), it's possibly Hamming, but I could imagine any number of people responding in that fashion, including at least 3 or 4 of the Unix group, and a half-dozen of us acoustics guys. Sometimes things are not solved by drawing it out on paper, sometimes it takes a while to DEFINE the problem, or to figure out what to do once you find one that you didn't expect.
That is, in fact, how PXFM and MP3 came about, among other things.
Wow! Nice to meet you. Without taking the thread totally off track, I feel that some computer historians spend too much time obsessing over the old hardware, without getting to know the engineer(s) behind the scenes, what their thought processes were - and what they might think today - which is what is really important.
So yeah, next time I kick back in my chair looking at the ceiling with my cans on, I can also thank an engineer who did the same just defining the problem in the first place before any implementation took place. Discipline and all that.
So thanks for whatever you guys did. I'm sure it has touched me in more ways than just mp3!
So yeah, next time I kick back in my chair looking at the ceiling with my cans on, I can also thank an engineer who did the same just defining the problem in the first place before any implementation took place. Discipline and all that.
So thanks for whatever you guys did. I'm sure it has touched me in more ways than just mp3!
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In the 'early' days of hi-fi, before bling factor became the predominant point, and technology was a primary goal--much of it still to be worked out, Bell routinely advertised in the pages of Audio magazine (in fact, the moniker of Audio was Engineering, Music, Sound Reproduction in that order). Why they advertised, given what they were and given their position within the marketplace is something of a mystery. Perhaps it was simply to lend some legitimacy to the goal of sound reproduction in consumer space, which after all was their working point, albeit from a different angle than what we typically think of when we think of hi-fi. With them it was the upstream stuff.
In any case, the men at Bell Labs could not exist today, inside corporate world. Not like before. Human Resource departments made people like them, and the organizations that hired them, impossible.
Cough, cough, Shockley, cough, cough.
Anecdote: Up until about three years ago, I worked at a mega-corp after spending most of my career as an entrepreneur and business owner. That seems odd, but their structure was one of highly autonomous business units, so as long as we hit our numbers, the BU management (GM, commercial manager, and me) were left strictly alone. For my first five years there, it was a great gig. The GM and I hit it off immediately- I had been scheduled for a day of interviews, but a half hour into breakfast, he told me, "You're getting the offer." The three of us ran the thing the way we wanted, had terrific success in getting innovative products out and pulling in top drawer revenue and profit growth.
Several years passed, and some bright corporate boys eventually came along and tut-tutted about waste and duplication; "Why have separate purchasing, HR, management, and other support functions duplicated between business units? Let's centralize this!" They fired the GM and commercial manager, fired our purchasing and HR folks, and rolled all those functions in with an entire division. This is when I started sending out my resumé... In any case, I had one clash after another with HR. They were VERY upset that I went and did hiring my way, and even more upset (though this was unspoken) that my hiring track record was one of the best in the corporation. A particular sticking point was that my focuses were subject-matter competence and reaction to stress instead of the soft-skill stuff they valued.
Eventually, the edict came down: I was not allowed to conduct job interviews for hires to my staff. Any candidates would be interviewed by HR, with me sitting in and not being allowed to say anything. After dealing with me screaming, yelling, and firing off complaint letters to corporate management, they generously and grudgingly permitted me to have five minutes at the end of the interview to ask one or two questions.
Our first interview, this for a staff chemist position, the HR folks asked every stereotypical question you could imagine. "Tell me about a time you had to deal with a difficult colleague." "What was an example of a failure you had and how did you correct it?" That sort of crap. After sitting through 55 minutes of this drivel, and the HR people being delighted by the candidate's canned and prepared responses to the canned and prepared questions, it was finally my turn for the last 5 minutes. I asked one question. "You make a 0.05 molar solution of phosphoric acid. What's the pH?" Freshman chem. The candidate looked highly uncomfortable, hemmed and hawed, and finally couldn't answer it.
In the post interview meeting, I was ungenerous enough to point out that I could have saved the company a lot of time and expensive staff with an interview that would have only been me and would have lasted 5 minutes. This was not what they wanted to hear, and I was excluded entirely from any further interviews. A year later, I was gone, and the formerly profitable and rapidly growing BU went under.
HR departments are cancer.
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Same here. I used to hire based on two criteria-- 1) could candidates get the job done with minimal supervision and training; and 2) could they get along with other workers, or if they coudn't do that well, could they at least not cause problems for others, and stay to themselves.
Toward the end of my career, HR decided they had to do all the hires. It was downhill from there. People would just show up, and I had to make due. I once met with a small group of PhDs that had come to work for initial training, giving them some material, and instructing them to bring it to formal class, next day. Next morning one informed me that she 'forgot' to bring her training material, leaving it at home, and could I provide another set? I was disgusted, but didn't show it, replying in a matter of fact manner that it was not my job to keep track of her training materials.
Later that day I received a summons to HR. I didn't know exactly why, but I knew enough to know that whenever you get 'the call' it's not going to be pleasant. I was told by a young lady who had been there a year or two (I'd been in management for over 20 years, by then) that it was very difficult for the organization to find PhD candidates with the correct 'requirements', and that I had to be more 'sensitive' to their 'needs'. I could tell where this was going, and being the unsensitive kind of person I am, I immediately realized that the modern workplace was no longer for me. Within a two years I had bought some land quite distant from the city, handed in my resignation letter, and now grow vegetables in order to keep busy. LOL
One of the reasons I got out of the corporate R&D world and we bought a coffeeshop/café in the rurals.
Of course, I'm about to jump from frying pan to fire: I just took a research position with our local university, where I'll get to deal with a lot of kids...
JP
Major Contributor
After many years in large companies, I once went to work for a small, closely-held company with less than 100 employees. The employees were generally pretty good, but the management was a misogynistic dumpster fire. Oh yeah, most of the employees were women. I don't know if a real HR team would have been able to solve that, but without it, the company had a steady revolving door of employees who got tired of the bullsh*t. The firm did not have an HR team, but they did have a notable set of outside lawyers.
If HR departments exist to protect the company and its incompetencies from liabilities, those incompetencies and liabilities don't stop at the Fortune 500 line.
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