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Dot-com Unhealth Benefits Other Industries
Ant wrote to us with a story from ZD talking about the flow of engineers back from the .com industry to, for many, whence they came. It's interesting to read, because I do know a number of people who left the defense industry to join in the Internet industry - but they've all stayed in the Internet industry.
<I>As a worker in a pretty stable dot com (actually, the online arm of a media group)</I>
Actually... you're not working for a dotcom, then... No other businesses. You work at the online arm of a media company.
There's the difference right there.
No one's predicting that the internet and business across the internet is fading away. Just that the internet "pure plays" of the last years' times are up. You don't work for one, so you're fairly isolated from what's occuring...
...and all the hard work we have done as individualists to get employers to respect us through our rare skills will come back to haunt us.
Well, that's the problem. Those skills were rare back in 1993, 1994, and even 1995. But as the stock market skyrocketed and computers became more accessible to the masses (a la, the introduction of Win95), the first thing that happened was a huge spike in demand for IT professionals of all sorts. Now, more and more, companies are outsourcing programming assignments to other courtries where the labor is cheaper. And as that's happening, hundreds of thousands if not millions of kids across the country are lining up for their CS degreees, clamouring towards the salaries for positions they see advertised. As more and more of them enter the market, the demand will lower and salary's will inevitably sink. I just don't think that the majority of IT skills are that "rare" per se... They're learned. And a great number of people are cabaple of being taught.
Welcome to the world of being a commodity rather than a rarity.
The tyrannical bosses will decide that all that turnover was just a fad and they really didn't have to treat IT pros with respect and fairness.
No, more like IT pro's are going to start having to have respect for their bosses once again. In the gold rush, so many of them let some idea of power seep into their heads, and they'ed make off the wall, bizarre demands for such things as salarys, work place atmospheres, time off, stock options or ownership, etc...
What's "fair" treatment to expect from your boss, versus "unfair"? Work too many hours on too low a salary? Quit, and make it known that's why you did. What other qualms could you have?
We should have formed a guild, (not a union) to pay off polititians to counter the industry and to make our opinions heard.
If you're thinking that, then why arent' you thinking of unionizing? seems the benefits would far outstrip any of those that woudl be provided by a guild. No one respects guilds nearly as much as they do unions. A guild could have made your opinions heard. A union would have made them respected.
Oh wel....
PTEEW! These MIS Boys don't even TASTE good
Here's a standard Job Interview question I ask: HOW DOES JPEG work? Very simple, and we all use JPEG images all the time. Yet I've never seen anyone that didn't have a MATH, CS (a real CS degree) or a EE degree answer this for me.
In fact, the same holds true when I hand the candidate a white board marker and ask to show (pseudocode, flow chart, or just diagram it) how LZW compression works.
While I keep an open mind, I never found a person with an MIS degree, or someone with a dotcom pedigree worth hiring.
Would this be a big deal if GW had'nt been elected?
Not quite sure what you're getting at here. Republicans strongly favor a well funded military, which means that Lockheed, McDonell (sp?), and other contractors may get the opportunity to go back to making weapons with black project funds. (Not that I have a problem with that. SR-71 was DAMN cool...)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I've been in my current job about 5 years - it's at a much different AT&T than the stuffy phone company, and unfortunately a year or so ago we managed to convince Wall Street to think of us as a high-tech company rather than a blue-chip, and rode the crash&burn of the high-tech industry stocks instead of the annoying 10% slide of the blue-chips :-)
And we're finally seeing resumes from people who left for the dot-com business interested in coming back - though that's more common in sales, where most people are more mobile than the technology side.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
There's an obvious reason for all the programmers from India. Yes, they have a rigorous educational system, but...
In the US, there are far more lucrative careers in other fields: law, medicine, investment banking, business in general. More importantly, in those fields you can stay until retirement, unlike tech, where your career life expectancy is about the same as a professional baseball player. So lots of smart people do the math, look out for number one, and walk away from science, technology, and engineering.
But an Indian lawyer who comes here can only hope to drive a taxi. And an Indian doctor has to retrain for several years before being allowed to practise. On the other hand, Indian programmers can come here and work in their field right away. Exploited H1-B by our standards, but the envy of all the folks back home. High prestige and big bucks, everyone wants their daughter to have an arranged marriage with a programmer in America.
People go into software in India for the same reason that they go into law in the US, which is the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks. That's where the money is.
Yes, there's people who program for the sheer joy of it... but they're the least likely to last in a corporate environment with either their job or their enthusiasm intact. And there's not enough of them to go around.
- The number of bachelor's degrees awarded in engineering and engineering technologies fell 16 percent between 1986-1987 and 1991-1992. It dropped another 3 percent between 1991-1992 and 1996-1997, according to the Department of Education's most recent data.
I really wonder if there will ever be enough tech workers, no matter what happens in education. The output of quality technology appears to remain constant no matter how much it is pushed in schools. The people who actually have all the great ideas and develop them appear to be immune to the vagaries of a good formal education or lack thereof (within reason). Efforts to mass produce technologists by expanding science and engineering education seems to just mean a proliferation of new names for college degrees (MIS), but not more people who know what they are doing.In the 1996-1997 school year, 61,185 bachelor's degrees were awarded in engineering, marking the lowest level since 1975.
Compared to other rich countries, the US public education system is really backward, yet the large portion of the population with an inadequate education hasn't led to a disproportionate lack of technical innovation in our society as a whole. Other countries that do give a good education to all of their citizens don't look vastly more productive when it comes to actual innovation. If this is all true, it might help if we recognized the fact and got used to it. Does the apparently large number of programmers from India contradict this hypothesis? Or does India have the the same share of geeks as every other country, but they are just more visible because of recent immigration trends? Why don't countries with exceptionally good education systems produce equally exceptionally large quantities of software?
(I'm only talking about technology workers here; education has many other purposes besides making more engineers. No, really, it does! And I also think foreigners should be allowed to live and work freely in the US with no restrictions at all, but that is another rant.)
My credentials for this post: I've worked for a few defense contractors, both as a programmer and a sysadmin.
Friend, that's because you (the collective "you" of the defense industry) don't pay worth shit. You don't let us use the tools that we want because 80% of you are retired military and therefore are both clueless and scared about free-speech software. And, most damning of all...
Every design decision is purely political. We all know that lots of decisions are political, in every computer industry subfield (games, OSes, browsers, tools, whatever). That's unfortunate, but inevitable and expected. But the defense computing industry... shiver me timbers! Technical considerations get about halfway up the ladder, and then they *all* get trampled by the Good 'Ol Boy system. It's rampant. It's like no other part of the computer industry.
It's unbelievably disheartening, watching projects get utterly horked over and over due to nontechnical concerns. It makes Dilbert look like a great place to work. The few skilled coders I know that have remained in the defense industry all A) have no military background, and B) are spinning off into more commercial groups. Everybody else has left, and all of them cited low pay and head-stuck-up-ass management.
Again, nothing against you personally, Courageous, but I seriously hope you aren't surprised with the quality of your applicants.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
After watching the internet bubble expand and pop, taking down so many businesses with it, investors will forever scrutinize the fundamentals in order to make sure such a bloodshed of money never happens to them again.
Oh, it'll happen again, it's just a question of how long it takes for people to forget. There was a nice bubble in electronics companies in the '60s; a big silver bubble in the '70s; a real estate bubble in the '80s; and back when electricity was first commercialized, there was an electricity company bubble.
The other problem is that it's not necessarily prudent to ignore these bubbles: a big problem that mutual funds faced over the past few years was that if they weren't invested in tech stocks, they would underperform everyone else, so they had to invest in tech even if they didn't consider it safe. The same applied to many other kinds of investors, including individuals. So bubbles get fed by otherwise prudent investors who don't see a good alternative. And the longer it carries on, the more people get sucked in. Sneaky, these bubbles!
Let's start from the bottom and go to the top, shall we?
Unions vs guilds or professional organizations. Unions are too corruptable and do more harm to employers and employees alike, they hamper creativity and initiative, thus they are incomaptible with IT workers. A guild would benefit IT workers and the industry as a whole by standardizing the process by which one becomes an IT professional, we could rid ourselves of the debates over vendor certifications and train the new people in real life situations with solid theories as well. As a guild we could contribut to campaigns to the polititians and general public and gain clout with the government and the employers as well.
Now for the age old fight between management and the worker. Who let power get to their heads? Who has power, the worker or the manager? Why is a fair salary a bizarre demand when we train constantly, work long hours, and suffer a high rate of burnout? Why is having a respectfull and productive work environment a bad thing? So sorry we want time off and a say in the way things are run when we have a unique perspective that managers and executives are too high with their own power trips to see.
Being a true techie is a rarity. Sure you can train most people to do the basics but they will never be as productive or as good as the people who do this work out of love for the work itself. Many of the new people comming in are in it for the supposed money and don't care to learn as much as they can about the technology and theory behind it. That's what IT is, constant learning and relearning and those who are in it for the money will never put that kind of investment in IT like I or my peers have.
Of course, PHBs would rather have a brown noser who can blow smoke up their butts while not having a real clue. Who wants someone who can do the job right because they'll just want something unreasonable like respect. We all know that the executives won't stand for that, you can't show employees respect because then they'll start wanting their fair share of the pie and CEOs don't like to share.
Just wipe that brown off your nose, your boss isn't watching you in here...
"When people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'." -Bakunin
I work as a database programmer but I've never once had anyone ask me to write out pseudocode on how a SQL parser works.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
The thing is that at Andersen, they made a policy that if you ditch for a dotcom, you're not allowed back when the dotcom fails! Companies like them knew that there'd be problems such as now, can't say they didn't warn ya...
Mike Roberto
- GAIM: MicroBerto
Berto
So if a select takes 3 days to complete, you won't have a CLUE as to how to optimize it?
I'm glad that engineers are headed back to normal companies. Granted, often large companies (Compaq, IBM, Motorola, Honeywell to name a few) have their own problems, but they usually have some corporate sense in product development, more than startups at any rate. While Dilbert-isms do occur at large companies, at least some advances have been made. If IBM hadn't decided to tinker with the PC when they did, I doubt we'd have the kind of industry we have now anyway. If Xerox hadn't designed (but not built) their GUI-based computer, we probably wouldn't have video cards with more ram than my whole computer had 4 years ago, and if Intel hadn't created the 4004 I shudder to think what computers would have become.
Small companies do contribute, look at what id did for the gaming environment, they were the first to have a popular multiplayer game in 3D available, but these are the exceptions more often than the rule. I've worked at small companies that were small because the owner wouldn't get his head out of his ass and actually let his 'creative people' be creative. Many of my friends worked for dotcoms, and they've described the same problems. Hopefully this craze will not come back in this same fashion EVER again...
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
I work in the defense industry and also happen to conduct quite a few interviews. I'm not seeing this "dot.com" flight that's being reported here, really, or if I am, it's only the worst who are fleeing. The overall caliber of all our job applicants is really very low in any case. It's quite dismaying.
"If you were building The Matrix: NT or Unix? (I thought so :)"
NT actually, so it'd be as evil as I could get it to be!
But, A/UX (Apple Unix) could be a good choice as well, if I could get it to run on anything, it also falls in to that 'twisted' category...
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
The old boy network is in effect at most defense jobs. Folks gain their position based on their rank in the military. Look at most defense companies org chart and you'll almost never find a major in a position above a general.
Having spent the past 16 years at a defense contractor, I feel qualified to comment here.
I haven't seen that seniority thing. I do know that most of the higher brass are higher up in the org chart because it makes it easier to get contracts!
In my experience, the ex-military who are hired for their military experience that don't go into management generally are hired as systems engineering. They define requirements. Remember, they're the ones who used this stuff recently, so they know what the customer wants or doesn't want. They know doctrine, and what portions of it the Army is willing to change for the advantages of digitization and decentralizaton.
And, to be honest, the (currently serving) military officers have been some of the most clueful customers I have ever dealt with. Much more clueful than the typical customer I hear about here.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Hmmmm....my experience (from startups in teh software field, NOT startups in the dot-bomb field) is that the opposite is true in project management. I've found that most startups suffer from a complete lack of project management, so no one really knows what everyone is working on.
The defense industry, the original unstable carreer.
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
What happened to the dot-coms is what happens in every gold rush; the vast majority of the pioneers get screwed, and the next generation of settlers comes in and makes themselves at home.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
The information industry partly feeds the internal demands of the computer industry, but to a large extent the dot-com boom has come from transforming business models and business relationships through increased communications and increased information storage and processing capabilities, and through building user interfaces to make it easier for people to use the increasingly affordable hardware. Face it, doing business in the paper-pushing world was unnecessarily difficult, and we're making that simpler and faster (though also making it simpler and faster to generate unnecessary paper, and making that paper or web-equivalent flashier and more decorative without necessarily being more useful - the parts of our business that are essentially the entertainment industry are remarkably pervasive
Some of the failures of the dot-coms are from unreasonably optimistic expectations about our ability to transform other industries (especially transforming them from the outside by people who don't understand them), and the usual failures due to the difficulties of fast, cheap, good (choose all three at once) execution of business models. And some are due to the entertainment-business nature of much of our industry - sometimes you succeed, sometimes you flop, and sometimes you end up as a waiter while trying to get the next performing gig. (Unfortunately, Silicon Valley rents are way too high to hang out on a waiter's salary, though tech-support and sysadmin are similar job niches for many people.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I worked at a dot-gone that is now struggling and is on the verge of collapse, one round of layoffs down and another soon to come (so I hear).
I left on my own accord and took a position at a
manufacturing based company that has been in business for a while.
Having this perspective, I can say that the biggest problem for ex-dot commers is going to be that of corporate culture.
The dot-gone corporate culture is grounded in excess; avante-guard offices and furnishings, silly toys for the employees, and excessive 'project management' meddling. The dot-gone I worked for had more project managers than people actually creating shit, and they had a blank check to write for any flight of fantasy that suited them. We spent more time in meetings with these people and it was apparent they were hired in the "grow like mad" phases of venture funding without much regard for their resumes. These people had to justify their own existence and did it in very frivolous ways. They also tended to surround themselves with hires they knew would be good patsies. So we had a ton of these "uber-geek" web developers and shticky e-commerce hucksters running around; people whose
resumes were buzz words pasted together out of Wired and were never verified for authenticity. It was disgusting, it was like romper room, so I left.
My company now has no beer bashes, no pool tables, no Ikea furnished offices and thank God, no project managers. And I am getting more done and learning more than I ever did in dot-com playland. Fortunately the things I put on my resume I can back up in an interview. But many of these people are going to have a heck of a time ahead of them because unless they can back up their "experience" with solid fundamentals, the time spent at dot-coms is going to be a VOID on their resumes that traditional employers are going to be very skeptical of.
The difference between service based an manufacturing based economies and businesses is basically that manufacturing/physical goods companies an directly account for their assets and cost of sales. There's only so cheaply that something can be made, so that cost serves as a baseline upon which educated valuations can be built.
A services based company's only costs are intangibles. Time and employee salaries. And since there's a large universe of skilled employees, each who are willing to work for less than the others, so will there be companies that will undertake projects (consulting, acting as middlemen, etc) for slightly less than the others. That's self destructive, as we've witnessed, because eventually the only way that companies can compete with one another is by absorbing huge losses, in order to have a price thats customers deem reasonable.
They then drive the price up beyond what the fundamentals of the companies can support, and soon enough, you'll be reading about how manufacturing stocks are slumping.
After watching the internet bubble expand and pop, taking down so many businesses with it, investors will forever scrutinize the fundamentals in order to make sure such a bloodshed of money never happens to them again.
The drubbing will continue. So many of the dotcoms just happened across the opportunity of selling other companies products to customers, without needing to maintain stores, and hence could sell for cheaper than brick and mortar type shops.
Now that most businesses have their own websites and fulfillment systems, there's no point in a customer to go anywhere but to the source. The "service" of selling for cheaper than brick & mortar shops is being replaced by the value of the actual product itself.
I'm involved in on brick and mortar/internet integration startup. When we went out to close our first round of VC funding we kept getting told "Why don't you just do some sort of pure play and dump all this technology creation stuff." Our answer is that we were doing what was right to address the market. We took it in the shorts to get the first round. We went out to close our sencond round after the dot-com bubble burst and now the fact that we had all this technology was seen as a big asset not the hinderence it used to be. The best thing about all this is watching the arrogant VCs who thought that we didn't know our ass from a hole in the ground getting the crap pounded out of them over all this pure play nonsense. More to the point I hope the Steve Jervetson is having a merry christmas. Tim Draper on the other hand is a good guy. Gee, this is a good use for being an Anonymous Coward.
The recent bursting of the dot-com bubble has very little to do with whether the economy is service- or manufacturing- based. The "comeback" of traditional manufacturing companies and utilities is a stock market phenomenon, and is simply a conservative investment response to uncertainty in the tech sector. It doesn't represent any kind of long term shift in the economy. Ultimately, what the stock market does, does not actually decide what happens in the economy anyway. The recent dot-com collapse proves this: the stock market attempted, in effect, to jumpstart a new industry by pumping money into it, and although it succeeded to a degree, at some point the reality of what customers actually do with their money had to take over.
Saying that manufacturing "is a more solid and sensible base" misses the point. A service economy necessarily has a base that includes manufacturing, food production, etc.
The simple fact is that dotcoms are merely margin tight vehicles for the distribution of manfactured goods.
You have an obvious strong bias towards manufacturing, but I don't think it reflects reality. You're talking about a subset of the business-to-consumer websites as though it represents the entire market. What about financial services, including banking, share trading, and insurance? What about business-to-business services, which, buzzwords and fads aside, are already big and growing bigger?
They are a symptom of the volatile worldview on Wall Street.
You got that right. One thing you can safely say about investors as a whole: they overreact, to both good news and bad news. Entire successful trading strategies have been built on this fact. But I have news for you: your message represents a fairly typical overreaction of the exact kind that drives people to buy manufacturing stocks in times like these. They then drive the price up beyond what the fundamentals of the companies can support, and soon enough, you'll be reading about how manufacturing stocks are slumping.
- "AUT 212
Advanced Electronic Transmission Diagnosis
(Prerequisite/Corequisite: AUT 210) Introduces automatic transmission hydraulic/ mechanical and
electronic diagnosis and repair. Topics include electronically controlled automatic transmission, automatic
transmission electrical and electronic problem diagnosis and repair. Contact hours: Class - 2, Lab - 3.
Credit hours: 3."
Note the similarity to a Microsoft MCSE program.This is really bad news for us technology professionals. All of the PHBs are going to be reading propaganda like this for a while to come now and all the hard work we have done as individualists to get employers to respect us through our rare skills will come back to haunt us. The tyrannical bosses will decide that all that turnover was just a fad and they really didn't have to treat IT pros with respect and fairness.
Back to the industrial age for us all as the people who left to get fair treatment lose thier backbones and crawl back to the PHBs to beg for thier old jobs at entry level pay.
We should have banned together when we could have rivaled the ITAA and other corporate interests by joining our resources for our benefit as a group of professionals. We should have formed a guild, (not a union) to pay off polititians to counter the industry and to make our opinions heard.
Is it too late? I don't know... I suppose it depnds on how long it takes most of us to realize how much this could damage us as a group of employees and how bad it can get if we refuse to do something...
"When people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'." -Bakunin
Steve Magruder
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
The average person makes 5 major career changes in their life. I guess the average dot-commer must make 7 major career changes in a week.
I am !amused.
The typical ex-DOTCOM resume I see reads like this:
- Degree in some watered-down lame-ass field like MIS
- 6 Months at GEOCITIES, and the get laid off
- 3 Months at NETSCAPES, and the laid off
- 6 months at iVillage
-6 months at "Women.com"
etc. Then they claim to have 3 years experience! BUT THEY NEVER ACTUALLY DID ANYTHING. Never shipped a product, never worked through a product cycle from beginning to end, and everything they were associated with FAILED.
But now I notice a settling. Traditional manufacturing companies and utilities are making a vengeful comeback, and the dotcoms are suffering in a financial bloodbath.
Could the economy be turning back to the traditional manufacturing model again? I hope so - it is a more solid and sensible base. The simple fact is that dotcoms are merely margin tight vehicles for the distribution of manfactured goods. The manufacturing industries are still the linchpin of our economy.
It would seem to me that these engineers have realised this, and are returning to their bread and butter, away from the papier-mache world of the internet.
They are a symptom of the volatile worldview on Wall Street.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
Just read the article. I take back that I think it's good, I didn't think techies would be going to military-type companies, for chrissakes. That's the last thing anyone needs.
may be a bit premature. Sure there's a down-turn. It can happen in any industry. It's happened in the defense industry too. But there were few predictions of the demise of the defense industry. Dot-commerce is relatively new, and there's bound to be a shakeout as the shine wears off and it becomes just another way of doing business. But it's not dead and buried.
If the defense industry needs more computer-savvy employees, it had better push for better educations programs to train them. Relying on dot-com layoffs won't cut it.
Leaving us with what we started with...
A group of people who a knowledgeable.
Plenty of projects, not enough developers...
This is good overall, I think, as most DotComs turned out to be vapour, which was semi-obvious from the start. Now all the skilled tech-types who were working for them can do something useful.
Yeah, some companies have reset the option strike prices, but ther's big debate that this must, even though it sometimes isn't, hit the bottom line as a charge to profits.
I've talked with too many people this last few years, each well pleased with their options, many of whom I soon discovered did not really understand what an option was, or that they may have traded some hard cash salary for their paper.
Just another example of bad money driving out the good (engineers from dot-coms)?
an after thought - it may be also that, in order to keep accounting liabilities low, dot-coms have only signed short contracts, even with their most valuable staff. That would leave many freer to leave than might otherwise be the case.
having worked for 3 years in the defense industry (right out of college, into the secret world of software development), I will never go back.
:)
The main reason is that the environment is very restrictive. I ran about 70 sun systems (E5500's, 4500's, etc. ) and was in a constant battle with the security folks. Want to put ssh on the system to ditch *rsh apps? Fill out this paperwork, file it, wait 6 months, resubmit for further disapproval.
Want to upgrade the version of perl on the system to fix a bug or two? Dont even think about downloading the source code and recompiling. It must be purchased from a vendor, otherwise it might have back doors in it. Lets not even talk about using any other 'free' software.
The folks in charge of the system security generally do not understand how the various parts of a computer interact and what is a security risk and what is totally benign.
But what has to be the largest source of frustration is working with former military officers who were taught that an officer is trained to take on any task whatsoever and thus they are qualified to do anything just because they were an officer. I'd rather work with a bunch of PhD's (did that in college).
The old boy network is in effect at most defense jobs. Folks gain their position based on their rank in the military. Look at most defense companies org chart and you'll almost never find a major in a position above a general.
But anyway, my current job pays better and I get to work from home
After 4 years at Lockheed(LMSC) or Lets make some cofee as we called it. I have never considered a return to any defense contractor a viable alternative .I'll put up with the layoffs .
Would this be a big deal if GW had'nt been elected?
Maybe it's time for these executives to re-evaluate their human resources practices. Maybe its time for them to share the wealth. Maybe there is a new morality amongst younger techs and they don't want to work in defence industries. Maybe they are tired of being treated like economic units and being shoved out the door at the first sign of trouble.
maybe, maybe, maybe
But the basis of this article is that people are returning to the defence industries not because they want to but because the "new economy" is in a lull at the moment. Not very healthy don't you think?
If this continues, it'll be great. As a worker in a pretty stable dot com (actually, the online arm of a media group) it'll be nice, next year, to be able to come home to my wife and for her not to ask "are we paper millionares yet?".
:)
She'll be asking if I still have a job, though.
It's probably better for everyone in the high-tech economy if the heat went; big bucks being thrown at stupid ideas only obscure the real gains to be made.