[ih] A paper

[Andrew Sullivan]

Hi,

More than one reply at once.

On Sun, Jul 18, 2021 at 07:57:02PM -0400, vinton cerf wrote:
>
>Vint: huh? I thought that was good engineering!

I think so, too, but I rather hope it isn't contentious to suggest
that there are organizational politics that are sometimes involved in
how one tackles an engineering problem.  One of my persistent
annoyances, actually, is the tendency of people who show up with a
design to burn everything down and start over because of "technical
considerations".  It might even be _true_ that what they propose is
technically better in some measure, but deployed base is not merely a
technical fact to be dealt with: it's also an economic and political
fact.

On Sun, Jul 18, 2021 at 05:09:05PM -0700, Bob Purvy wrote:
>
>
>This is what someone who is not a practicing engineer would say:
>"everything is political."
>
>No, Andrew, some people just want to get the job done.

I think I rather explicitly said that I do _not_ think everything is
political.  But "just want to get the job done" is a phrase that (when
I was doing engineering work) I often found was used to suppress some
inconvenient consideration.  A lot of abuses and security
vulnerabilities have come from "just get on with it", so I don't find
such an argument to be terribly convincing on its own.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at crankycanuck.ca