Re: How would you respond? Message #6 Posted by Chris Smith on 21 Apr 2013, 3:28 a.m., in response to message #1 by Matthew Richards
This is a fairly typical attitude of people these days. People are unwilling to expend time and learn how to do something when a canned answer is available elsewhere with no investment on their part apart from throwing some money at it or sticking it in google or doing it with minimal learning even if the approach is retarded. Anything contrary to that had been programmed into their mind as obsolete and idiotic.
A case in point, one of my coworkers gets 10 people to fill in a spreadsheet rather than extract the data from our project management software via a report. He doesn't know how to do it and doesn't want to expend any effort past a google search. This wastes ten lives for two hours a week.
In my particular case, i find a calculator considerably more useful and usable than an iPhone/Android/PC device. The android and iPhone type devices are designed for consumption i.e. pushing information to the user and upselling the vendor's sales platform. The calculator is designed for serving the user and solving problems quickly.
People who invest the time to understand are invaluable. Everyone else is fungible. Its good to be totally non fungible which is why I've managed to fight off one engineering crash and two "dot com" crashes.
There is a good discussion of this whole problem in Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance by Robert Persig under the guise of quality, romanticism in the form of Chautauquas.
Philosophy aside, my 50g just works and yes it is fun to be able to solve a problem before people have even booted windows and fired up excel on their laptops or downloaded a calculator app for their iPhone.
I write software too, for financial services.
Edited: 21 Apr 2013, 3:33 a.m.
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