Keeping an Eye on Technology Futures, No Hidden Agendas, New Attitudes, No Platitudes!
Shreesha Chandra [Shreesha.Chandra@in.yokogawa.com] sent this regarding my discussion of "female futures" (eNews 9 May 2007):
"The neighboring Asian countries are following these footsteps. Bangaladesh (Rehman/Zia) and Sri Lanka have women leaders with enough substance/following to rule the country. Pakistan is slowly moving away from Musharraf and leaning towards Bhutto.
"Already one key European country (Germany) is headed by a woman (Merkel) and more may follow suit. The US is following by showing open disapproval of Bush and inclination to Hillary Clinton.
"If only few more follow - UK, Russia and China - we may have powerful women leaders ruling the world (forcing even the Middle East to re-think). This may be the right way out of the current mess the world is in. More accommodative and peaceful decisions may emerge in all spheres."
In response to my article on "Compensation Styles" (24 May 07) Jake Brodsky [jBrodsk@wsscwater.com] discusses how this can be applied for engineers:
"Some of the goals aren't easily met or measured. This is why engineering performance is so damned difficult to measure in real time. Many features of the engineers work won't be known until long after the life cycle of the product is over. This is not some elementary school math problem with neat clean data and only one correct answer. Elements of marketing, finance, and user ergonomics/psychology/education come into play as well.
"The second is a retainer fee of sorts. Engineers learn things from each job they work on. With any intelligence, most of them ought to get better with each project. You want to keep that learning in-house, so that you don't need to have some new guy re-learn all these ancillary bits of background. Thus, to keep the engineer from walking off the job and on to another one with the hard earned experience, one ought to consider a retainer element to the pay structure.
"The engineer's managers probably have better intuition than actual milestones to show how well the engineer is doing. And if executive managers were real-world people, they'd realize that this is how things need to be. The very best coaches know that you can't always put a player in a particular position based just upon statistics. There are individual motivations, psychology, preferences etc. which come into play.
"My feeling is that compensating an engineer for performance is not as straightforward as you make it out to be. I think the sort of methods you advocate are missing some key aspects of what a good engineer is supposed to design for. This is most definitely a case of "be careful of what you ask for, because you might get it."
Neil Brown [neil.brown@rtel.com] has a hot-button - accelerating technology:
"My opening question was: 'If computer memory cost as much now (1999) as when I started in this business in 1974, how much would the memory in my laptop cost now?'
"The answers ranged from $10,000 to $10,000,000. The correct answer was $640,000,000. Here's the argument:
"The (magnetic core) memory on the first system I worked on was £1 per 24-bit word; say $0.5 per byte. Inflation from 1974 to 1999 was pretty close to 10 times; therefore in 1999 terms, the memory was $5/byte. My laptop had 128Mbytes memory - do the math! On this basis, your 1GB stick should cost well over $1 billion....
"The point was that the consequences of all this are all around - personal computers, PDAs, the internet, mobile communications, satellite TV etc. etc. and have ALREADY caused irreversible changes to society. The controls industry is conservative, so changes more slowly, but change is never in doubt.
"Despite all this, I know for a fact that several of the people I presented to went on to buy already obsolescent 2nd generation systems and are now pretty much left high and dry in an evolutionary dead-end - nothing changes...."
