Day 944 – Don’t Look Up! I’ve seen it for real

Sunday, August 20, 2023

We watched “Don’t Look Up!” the Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio movie about a giant comet heading for Earth that would destroy the planet. They tried to warn the President and officials in Washington. Instead of taking action, the President used it as a means to rally support for her next election and a super rich industrialist used it as an opportunity to try out new stuff and possibly get even richer by mining the comet.

Okay. You may say that’s funny or yeah, it seems like real life sort of … etc. But let me assure you this sort of stuff goes on all the time in the real world. I have witnessed it first hand.

When I was last involved with technology and big corporations the cutting edge stuff was databases. Databases are a way to store information and be able to search and retrieve data from the stored information. There is a language one uses to extract information from a database and there are rules about how to store and create databases. You can think of databases as a series of spreadsheets. Each spreadsheet has a name and each column within the spreadsheet has a name and a type. By type I mean the column may be used to store numbers or names (ie characters) or money etc. You can relate one spreadsheet to another by have a column with the same information in each table. For instance it could be Social Security Number. Spreadsheets in database are called tables. You may have a table with names and addresses in it that is connected via a Social Security Number in another table that says how much a person got paid and when.

Okay, now that you know all you need to know about databases, let’s talk about designing a database. Before you actually create a database you layout a design. This lists al the tables and the columns and the types of those columns and it tells how those tables are connected.

Okay. Let’s leave that for a second and talk about how you can solve problems with computers. There are two approaches: smart and clever, or big and stupid.

If you don’t have much money you go smart and clever. If you have gobs of money you might go the other way.

If you have a really big project then keeping track of everything is hard. It takes lots of oversight and smart people. It is easy for big projects to founder and never reach completion.

If you are trying to sell software and you are a salesperson there is a tendency to say, “We can do that!” with out having any idea if you can or not. This is also true of people in upper management in a big company, “The tech folks will figure it out.”

This behavior leads to a division between the tech people and the sales and or upper management folks. If the tech people are pushing back the sales or upper management will oftentimes tell them to figure it out. The thinking being that the tech folks just need to work hard or put in more effort or something. 

I have watched this in action and it can lead to terrible consequences. Essentially what can and does happen is upper management makes some decision and assumes the tech people will figure it out.

I was stunned when I was brought onto a project where a lot of money was invested and I asked myself and then others, using the buzz words of the day, “Is it better, cheaper, or faster?” The answers I got were, in order, “Probably not, No, and we don’t know, which is really saying no, but we don’t want to say that.”

Gobs of money was spent to buy more equipment in the form of bigger computers and disk drives because the new system demanded it. The old system had a data design that took a bit of time to understand, maybe an hour, maybe half a day, but you could understand it. The new system used a huge data map created for every and any situation and was bulky and slow. It was laid on top of a different database system that was also bigger and slower. 

I asked why and never got a straight answer. I concluded that someone must be getting kick backs or sexual favors. Why would anyone do this? I discovered tech papers that were written by techies in other companies which basically said they were told to shut up and implement the system. I discovered papers written by the tech staff within my own company that pointed out that this was going to be expensive, bulky, and no better than what we had. In fact, it would be worse. They went ahead anyway.

Eventually, I was forced to leave because the guy who had worked for the company selling the software to my company got hired by my company. He became my boss and worked on developing reasons to get rid of me. I guess he had to; I kept saying the king had no clothes.

I learned later that when the system was put in it was so slow that people just treated it like a black box and would begin the login in process, go for coffee, and come back and hope the thing had responded.

They were warned. Others had warned. The techies throughout the industry knew it was a stinkin’ piece of you-know-what, but it didn’t matter. Yes, it can happen, and it does.