I haven't thrown my hands up in the air and given up. Ok I did once. OK maybe twice but it hasn't become a bad habit. This is what the progressing news on the bailouts sounds like to me, and there seems to be no end to it.
Now with the mighty mighty Citibank in jeopardy, it's difficult for me to know what to think, which is of course the worst news of all. When everybody says they don't know what to think, that's when emotion takes over and people do what makes them feel good, whether or not it makes any logical sense whatsoever. I'm not talking about panic, I'm talking about excuse-making. It seems to me that we are at that point when the people who ought to know better keep saying "Well, OK but we're going to have to figure out what that means.." when they ought to be saying. NO! HELL NO!
I don't know what it's called in finance and economics but I know what it is in the software business. Let's call it 'refusing to lose'. When a customer refuses to do for themselves what they pay consultants to do for them, especially when they want everything to be easy, it is a surefire way to break the budget.
When you're a software consultant, you're out in the field working with customers who recognize your genius but really don't have much of an idea what you do or how you do it. They just have a budget, a schedule and some desires. Depending on the reasonableness of these three items a project will succeed or fail. There are rather predictable ways in which they fail spectacularly. One of the ways is when they keep asking for something to be made idiot-proof.
When you're an expert, it's often difficult for you to recognize how much you actually know. When you compare yourself to laymen it's difficult to say whether your expectations are reasonable. What's easy and common sense for you seems impossibly difficult for them. For example, I might say to my customer: Hey all you have to do is go to the DOS prompt type in a command line with today's date in it, and then view the log file. But it might be that your customer cannot fathom exactly how to do all of that. So instead, they want you to build a website where they can just push a red button and have the button turn green when the job is done. The difference between the solution you offered and the one they want will cost hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars, but it will be made child's play.
This is how I'm viewing the financial crisis. The egos of the experts are allowing them to present solutions to problems their customers ought to know how to do themselves. Except that the cost of idiot-proofing the system is not borne by either party. It's coming out of the taxpayer's hide.
The experts have to stop pretending to be Oscar Goldman and let Steve Austin die of natural causes.
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