On Mon, 27 Sep 2004, Dwayne Monroe wrote:
> The other day I sat in a trans-national conference call with a person
> blessed with the title of "VP of Security Engineering". She made wildly
> inaccurate statements about the operation of firewalls and related
> barrier technologies. This wouldn't be at all worth commentating on if
> she simply deferred to the judgment of her staff on complex tech matters
> and asked questions about managerial sorts of things. But she decided
> that she needed to actually engineer the topology.
>
> And so, by following orders, experienced network engineers are creating
> an incredibly insecure system - one responsible for all sorts of
> frighteningly necessary things I don't even want to go into.
It's interesting how this thread is spinning far from Woj's original argument. He claimed the mediocrity of American workers in general, and where we end up is with Dilbert-style stories of bumbling supervisors whose asses are saved by their competent underlings. Dwayne's story clearly supports my position, not Woj's here: workers in general are competent, efficient, and effective, bureaucratic snafus notwithstanding.
Let's face it, we live in a complex society, and most of the stuff works most of the time (I can't think of the last time I didn't have phone, gas, water, electric services). This is an amazing accomplishment of motivated, intelligent, and knowledgable workers. The fact that many of their supervisors are fuckups is just further testament to the workers' ingenuity in keeping everything humming!
Miles