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From: Jasper
Date: 4/11/02
Time: 5:28:14 AM
Rovaan,
In part I, I said that I am in the front lines of an historic war of images that I can't even talk about publicly. The pressure is therefore unimaginable. There has been at least one suicide in the original group of fifty or so (not sure about the number or whether I could reveal it if I knew). Several people have come close to nervous breakdowns. One of our best and brightest as been physically and mentally incapacitated by a chronic medical condition. Most of us are emotional wrecks. All but two of us have been bullied into submission because of serous health problems and some appear to have died of stress related causes.
The reason I was away from the boards for so long was because I fell critically ill from a sudden mysterious cause that left me incapable of handing most simple chores for months. The Sword of Damocles dangled over my head the whole time. Sorry, but I still can't tell you the specifics until the lawsuit is settled.
When I read the Heidstra Timeline on Dick's site and looked at the formulas he used to perfect his models, I flashed on what I was going through with the lawsuit. I realized that I was probably only one person out of hundreds or even thousands of visitors to his site with the professional background to read his matrix, to follow exactly what he did and to understand why he did it.
This is the problem-solving approach taught in the finest engineering schools and used by the best and the brightest young engineers in the world that the big auto companies like Ford recruit and hire. These are the guys with less than fifteen years in the trenches who are put on a fast track and fast-forwarded to the top. They have rapidly replaced the "old guys" who kept the company afloat with their "battle tested" expertise.
To understand what I mean by "new guys with less than fifteen years in the trenches," you have to know that it takes longer to become a master modeler or a master engineer in a production automotive design studio than it takes to become a skilled brain surgeon. It takes that long to learn how to make complicated tasks simple.
The new guys have introduced excessively complex, cumbersome and unreliable math modeling programs into design and engineering. These math modeling programs create manufacturing problems, cost problems, safety problems and quality control delays. The "old guys" can see the built-in booby-traps in the "new process" just by looking at the number of PERFECT STEPS required to get anything to do anything and the number of diagnostic tools required to see what you did. If everything goes well, it takes an expert program user slightly less than forever to track down fatal errors in the product. Nobody else can do it and the more the system breaks down from program user error, the more valuable the program experts become. The BS factor at every level thus becomes an increasingly greater portion of the equation until no one honesty knows what they're looking at.
Some of these wizz-kids eventually catch on to what the "old guys" learned decades ago about building models that reflect the real world. Months and sometimes years later they identify the most visible part of the problem. They get "Outstanding" performance reviews for working overtime within the "news system" to solve the whole problem, which hasn't been solved and shouldn't have existed in the first place.
The golden boys (and now some golden girls, too) keep these inordinately complex systems in place by mastering them. It's not that the old masters (I was a master modeler before I was funneled into engineering about seven years ago) don't know what's going on. That's the problem. We know too much to fool around with systems that complex. We know that you can do anything if you give it enough time and make it complicated enough (exhibit A: the crappy Rube Goldberg fixes that I came up with to preserve the archives and keep the Iago board up and running). But to do it right time after time, on time, every time you have to make it simple. Simple is hard. The old guys know that if it ain't simple it ain't right.
Unfortunately there are few of us left who how to do it and the company is pulling out all stop to kick us out of the game. -- Jasper