Gordon Nichols posted:Mike,
I came from the High Tech revolution of the 1980’s (Data General, “Soul of a new machine” era - Maybe you’ve read the book?) when some doofus (Tom West, whom I refused to ever work for) quoted that “Not everything worth doing is worth doing well”.
Some people read that and thought that it was OK to do something sub-par to “get by”. I looked at it and thought, “Well, OK, not everything needs or deserves to be perfect, it just has to work really well within our budget!”
There is a big difference, there.
YOU, my friend, know the difference, and know that some things need to both look and work well, while others just have to work well (even though “looking well”, waaaay up in there under the covers, may only matter to YOU, not me).
This reminds me of Stan Ostergard, a guy and neighbor when I was growing up who tried, mightily, to teach me how to be a good machinist. The best thing he taught me was to make things that “look like somebody cared” about how they looked and worked. I don’t think that Stan thought of me as being his best pupil (THAT was probably my older brother) but trust me, Stan, I was listening and you did, INDEED, register in my little, 13-year-old mind. Thank you, Stan, for showing me that everything was worth it. Somewhere along the line, Mike learned that, too.
Give it Hell, Mike!
Gordon,
Yep, Tracy Kidder. I was really excited to read that book back in the 80's. I was always a techie although I took a decade detour as a teacher and researcher in the field of mental health. I changed careers after building a Z80 based computer in '82 and coding an assembler based text to speech synthesizer. On to 12 years building clinical applications (yep, make an error and patients die) and then 20 years in technology administration. Retirement is wonderful because nobody is going to die if I don't respond quickly enough and thousands of users won't be annoyed if I make a bad decision. Now I just have to make Marianne and myself happy. What joy!
I suspect we share the same approaches to many problems and many of the same values. School of hard knocks, eh? While I was in college, I had to work to support me and my 19 year old wife splitting my time being an research electronics tech and a machinist assistant. I was in heaven!
Thanks so much for your comments, encouragement and help on the board. A true inspiration!
Mike