[TUHS] Re: Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?

[arnold@skeeve.com]

To a large extent it still applies in startups. If a software person
doesn't know the first thing about wiring a building for Ethernet,
do you really want him/her to do that for you?  In situations like
these, you get what you pay for, and it's better to bring in someone
who knows what they're doing in order to get it done right. (Yes, I
had that experience too.)

I do understand your point, in startups people have to be flexible
and do many things, but it still should require some consideration
for the longer term.

Bakul Shah <bakul@iitbombay.org> wrote:

> I was talking about startups, while in a bootstrapping mode. Intel stopped
> being that a looong time ago! But yes, I wouldn't want to play a lawyer!
> 
> In a startup there are lots of other things that need done and you of
> course try to hire/contract the right people but it isn't always easy
> or quick.
>
> > On Jul 5, 2024, at 12:13 AM, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > 
> > The flip side is when you're asked to do something you're not competent
> > at. At Intel, I was once tasked in reviewing the license for something
> > we wanted to use. I Am Not A Lawyer, nor do I play one on TV. I did my
> > best, but got fussed at by a higher-up for it not being good enough.
> > 
> > I'm sorry, but that bullsh*t --- Intel has lawyers out the wazoo, and
> > that's who should have been involved in reviewing that license.
> > 
> > Would you take your car to TV repair shop to get fixed? Same thing.
> > 
> > Arnold
> > 
> > Bakul Shah via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
> > 
> >> A better analogy might be to compare early employees (especially
> >> engineers) to stem cells. They are the type of people that can (& are
> >> willing to) do pretty much anything but over time end up specializing
> >> in a few things. I have done things like look at office spaces, set up
> >> furniture, order machines & office supplies, select ISP, wired up the
> >> place, and many sysadmin things, dealt with janitorial services, selecting
> >> insurance, payroll services, debugged issues not related to engineering,
> >> many interviews (tech and otherwise), dealt with vendors & headhunters,
> >> set up guidelines, software systems, documentation, etc. etc. As times
> >> goes on you let go and get out of people's way and focus on where you're
> >> most effective (or where there is temporarily no one else).
> >> 
> >>> On Jul 4, 2024, at 7:24 PM, Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> 
> >>> Two replies to things Larry said:
> >>> 
> >>> ARM or one of the smaller RISC-V flavor-sets (RISC-V is super-modular) would be a perfectly reasonable architecture to learn these days.  After the PDP-11 but before ARM I'd'a suggested 68000.  Definitely NOT x86 and its betentacled descendants.  Even so, you'd still want to treat it (if you're learning "how do computers work?") as if it were not superscalar, even though it obviously is.  Which I guess is pushing me into "please let me just pretend it's a PDP-11 and keep all the scary pipelining and speculative execution and all the things that are hard to reason about below the layer where I need to care" territory.
> >>> 
> >>> And yeah, if you need me to sweep the floors, I'll sweep the floors, but if I'm needed to sweep the floors often, there's a management problem here, in that you can hire people who are much better at sweeping floors than I am for much less money than you hired me to do software engineering for.
> >>> 
> >>> Adam
> >> 
>