Warp wrote:

>   And of course these employers completely lack the notion that a program
> can be inefficient and that more efficient solutions might be possible.
> If a program takes 2 minutes to perform some task, that must be because
> the task really requires 2 minutes to compute. It never crosses their
> minds that maybe, just maybe, it's taking 2 minutes because the program
> is crap.

Oh, I've seen reports of managers who won't believe that a particular 
task actually takes 20 minutes, and "can't you just change it to only 
take 3 seconds?"

I'll never be able to find the link now, but there was one company who 
phoned up some web design consultants and said they wanted them to build 
a website that shows DVD-quality fullscreen video but loads in under 1 
second on a 56k modem.

"Gee, what an awesome idea! I'm sure you're going to corner the market 
with that one. Good thing nobody else has thought of this revolutionary 
idea... Oh wait, they have, and they found out it's impossible. Oh well, 
I'm sure being impossible is no obsticle for visionaries like yourself."

After the consultants laughed and told them it was impossible, they made 
a stroppy retort and threatened to "take their business elsewhere". The 
consultants said they were perfectly happy for that to happen. 
(Unsurprisingly, really.)

I guess the root of all this is people who have no concept of what is or 
isn't possible with a computer. But it's more than that - people who 
have no clue but *think* they do. I mean, if a bridge was being 
designed, you wouldn't presume to know enough about structural 
engineering to make decisions about how long it should take or what the 
best way to do it is. And yet people who know nothing about computers 
seem to think they can do this with software engineering...

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