> 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?"

An extremely valuable skill of any specialist is the ability to explain 
stuff to non-specialists in a way they understand.  Telling your manager 
that it's compute bound on 4 threads and is proven to not run any faster 
than the O(n^3) algorithm you are using is not going to work too well... 
(unless your manager is also a "specialist").

> After the consultants laughed and told them it was impossible, they made a 
> stroppy retort
*

> 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.

And it's people like that on both sides that cause the problem, which just 
leads to the problem getting worse.  On the one hand you have stroppy 
companies who have no clue about computers, but refuse to believe what they 
are told.  On the other hand you have supposed "specialists" who actually 
don't know what they are talking about.  Who's going to believe who anymore?

> 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.

Hahahahahha.  I take it you've never worked as an Engineer on a project 
then?  Almost every problem is due to the customer saying "I want X" and the 
Engineers saying "ermm we can't really do that".  Of course the customer 
usually forces the way they want, but then other things need changing or go 
wrong later.

A recent example is the LCD that goes in the instrument cluster of some car 
to be launched soon.  It goes behind a dark glass cover so that the driver 
cannot see anything behind, the display just kind of "glows" through it 
(like some Sony MP3 player i saw the other day).  Anyway, near the end of 
the design phase of the project, they told us they wanted it about twice as 
bright because they had made their dark glass darker than before.  We told 
them this was a bad idea as there might be problems with overheating etc. 
Of course they forced their way and told us they'd done tests etc and it was 
ok.  So guess what, we made it brighter, and now it shuts off during the 
high-temperature test because of overheating...  And as usual this is a 
"problem" with our design and we have to fix it at our expense asap....

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