[Sussex] Anyone actually met any Gods ?

[Steve Dobson]

Geoff

On 07 October 2002 at 11:20 Geoff Teale said: 
> Chaps..
> 
> Self professed Gods, hmm, yeah, every 2-a-penny VB or ASP 
> programmer I ever met.. generally because they think
> completing a series of MCSD courses makes them better than
> Bjarne Stroustrup (or as they call him, "Benny who..?").

(-: Aren't you a VB programmer at the moment :-)
 
> Generally these are the same guys who'll argue with you in 
> strategy meetings because they feel that your plan to build
> a 10,000 user app as a browser-based application with some
> _serious_ sun kit at the back end (running Oracle, because
> that's who we've got the deal with) would be a terrible and
> costly solution.  They feel a much better idea for the company
> would be a thick VB client running off an MS Access database
> on a NT 4 Server (which is, apparantly, robust because it can
> do level 2 RAID in software) - usually they'll throw around
> the odd term like "DCOM" or "MTS" that they remember hearing
> on the later part of their course, but which they don't really
> understand.  Of course they say, what with Microsoft being such
> a big company, you couldn't possibly get a better
> price/performance ratio than good 'ol Access and VB.  "Scale?",
> they say, "Of course it'll scale, it's Microsoft technology. 
> Did I mention what a big company they are, they can't be wrong."

Sounds like the IT manager at my company.  But his reason for
liking M$ is that "With the number of f**k ups they make I'll
be in a job for life".

> Often they'll say "what makes you think that your Sun box can 
> be any more secure than what Microsoft have to offer. They're
> a very big company, who could possibly know better than them?".

So get some big blue iron.
 
> Generally I leave the room muttering something like..
> 
> "Because you won't be able to install MS Outlook on a Solaris 
> server as part of your 'standard' build..."
> 
> Also falling into this category was an IT director at a 
> former company who expected all staff to come with an MCSE
> attached.  He refused to let us employ a former Senior
> Sysadmin at Google as a UNIX Sysadmin purely because
> he didn't have an MCSE... Barry (the IT Director) of course
> considered himself to be not only a God, but quite possibly a
> complex collaboration of entities (much like the holy trinity).
> This obviosuly allowed him to have gained IT omniscience in his
> 5 years experience as a FoxPro programmer....

The Dilbert Principle at work again.....

Steve