I have daily skirmishes at my company with our CTO and his subordinates who constantly want to believe snake oil salesmen because they’re looking for simple ways outs of hard problems. It’s really sad.
For some it seems easier to -_trust_ a dude with a power point presentation and no real experience over good engineers telling the truth and trying to help them for real.
I now think it’s madness for anyone to be in charge of anything if they don’t have relevant experience in the relevant domain. Nice people or not, they’re susceptible to bullshit.
This.
In support of that idea, here's C.A.R. Hoare, from 'The Emperor's Old Clothes', the 1980 Turing Award lecture:
'At last, there breezed into my office the most senior manager of all, a general manager of our parent company, Andrew St. Johnston. I was surprised that he had even heard of me. "You know what went wrong?" he shouted--he always shouted-- "You let your programmers do things which you yourself do not understand." I stared in astonishment. He was obviously out of touch with present day realities. How could one person ever understand the whole of a modem software product like the Elliott 503 Mark II software system? I realized later that he was absolutely right; he had diagnosed the true cause of the problem and he had planted the seed of its later solution.'
He then discusses how the problems there led to his thinking on CSP, and, eventually, formal methods.
But, go read the speech, it's much more wonderful than any summary thereof: http://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/cs422/2010/bib/hoare81emperor...
As programming and systems engineering slowly formalizes, it seems to me that's getting harder to do. I see fewer self-taught folks in their early-mid 20s these days at least, although I could be observing my personal bias from aging. Anyone else have an idea?
But a person like that can very lucratively sell actual products that already exist, so why would they want to sell this mysterious X?
a) employs enough scientists who know what they're doing and lawyers who know what they're doing to file relevant and defensible patents; and
b) has enough entrenched relationships that they can pay for a sales force what knows what they're doing; but
c) doesn't employ enough engineers who know what they're doing to develop actual competitive products around those patentable ideas.
The engineers at IBM were probably separated from the problem by many layers of bureaucracy (meetings, project managers, technical specs).
Even working inside a company, without access to the right data and the right people you aren’t going to get anywhere.