[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]
On Saturday 14 June 2008 00:00, tom wrote: > David Brook wrote: > > It is not only those at the top who are to blame - in fact I am not in > > the slightest convinced by the argument that the head of an IT department > > needs to know how to write a program. > > On the other hand you could have a Director of IT who DOES know how to > program but blocks every attempt to put free / open source software on > the agenda ...... Having never got to the lofty heights of IT director - partly deliberately - I often wonder at the incentives available from non-free software. It could be that people at that level (where you get bonuses for avoiding responsibility) are afraid to admit they've been wasting money. However, having been fired from one job for providing a working solution to the problem at hand, I'm convinced that theres a lot of slush money around for those that do avoid floss. As for the IT director who does know how to program - never met one, met a lot that said they could. I'd argue that theres a fault line just below that level: engineers tend to produce things that are a result of logic, or something resembling logic flow.* management mainly does things for political reasons - decision made, attempt to provide logic later, or pass buck if choice has no logical solution. Tom te tom te tom *Anyone do top down/bottom up design? Roughly outlined, you take a problem and try an subdivide its functionality until eventually you have a lot of lowest level functional blocks stuck together making up the solution. With M$ there are no low level functional blocks - just malfunctioning middle tier! -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html