The empty words in the response letter are very telling. Upper management can't see the forest for the trees. They remind me of Kevin Bacon in Animal house when the riot is going on . "ALL IS WELL! REMAIN CALM!"
The RIM ship is sinking. RIM is losing huge chunks of market share left and right. It will come as no surprise in the coming months as more and more of the best and brightest among their teams get out while they can. And this will put RIM in a downward spiral. As more and more real talent leaves, the capability to deliver will plummet. Things will keep getting worse and worse until they go under.
This company is going to get managed right into the ground by a management team who only wants to surround themselves by yes-men. My advice to every single person at RIM is to get out while you can. It's not a matter of "if", it's a matter of "when".
Who wants to be that the anonymous letter writer will identify himself in the upcoming months, right after he accepts a position at another company (like Google or Apple)?
As long as there were riders in the contract stipulating that any significant change in the project requirements would extend the contract or result in a renegotiation of the contract, you might have something there. Of course, the initial requirements would have to be written into the contract to ensure the scope of work doesn't change. And if whole parts of work already done have to be scrapped, the customer absolutely needs to be responsible for those costs. It's not the contractor's fault that they did work in good faith that the customer didn't feel like buying when it was already done.
Even so, you may end up with a situation where you get huge overruns because the whole contract negotiation and follow up was a huge fuster cluck. And at some point the company will just fold up their tents and walk rather than deal with excessive penalties. It's not hard to declare bankruptcy and walk away from your obligations. If the company knows of the potential for serious penalties, they'll structure themselves just for that contingency ahead of time.
Sadly, there is no real solution. Governments want 10 times as much for less than half the cost. The only way to get the contract is to under bid everyone else who is also under bidding. If you don't do it, you don't get the contracts and you go out of business. Penalties don't really work when the company can just dissolve rather than paying them. And then you're stuck with no money and no deliverable Holding anyone on the government side accountable just isn't going to happen. Government flunkies are never truly held accountable for their failure because they have the company to blame. There's just no way to win here. It's why I got out of government contract work and will never go back if I can help it.
Make lawsuits for budget overruns SOP, and that practice completely disappears.
Seriously. Put it in the state constitution that all government contracts will be completed on time and under budget or we get our money back.
So you basically want to guarantee that not one company ever bids on a government contract ever again? BRILLIANT!
I suppose you'd find the odd contractor who would make an estimate and multiply it by a factor of 20 so they would have a hope of finishing it under budget and on time. So with a lot of margin like that, you'd virtually guarantee that the work would be padded to exactly wring out every last dime. But then you'd still have to deal with the government types constantly changing requirements up to the last minute and expecting you to be on time or face huge lawsuits.
Yeah, I think you'd find more people at an Art Garfunkel comeback tour show than you would find people to bid on government contracts. Absolutely brilliant solution there my friend...
I'm not going to defend SAIC at all. However, if you're going to call out the company on the overruns, you also need to call out everyone else responsible as well.
The reason it's SOP to underbid the contract is that it's the only way to actually win the contract. Government entities award the contract based on the bid. They don't care that there's no way in hell their sprawling (and ever changing) requirements will drive the cost well past the original bid by several orders of magnitude. They don't care, and I doubt they even know, what it really takes to build a large and complex computer system like that.
Sure, there's probably a lot of waste in that cost overrun. And I'm sure it has its share of incompetence among the development staff. But the real incompetence starts with the customer who doesn't have a clue what they're asking for or how much it's really going to cost to make it. And then half way through the project, some other bureaucrat shows up and has to change everything that the previous stuffed shirt asked for so they can have it their way, completely wonking up the schedule.
Didn't Vista spam everyone with "are you sure?" messages every time they wanted to do anything? Adding validation prompts to operating systems will just annoy the users who are bound and determined to circumvent security.
Most newer operating systems have disabled autorun on removable media. Virus scanners can pick up a significant percentage of malware when you insert the drive. That catches a lot of it. Still, all you have to do is embed a new virus that hasn't been found by the scanning tools yet in a video of a cute kid or pictures of kittens. Half the people who insert the drive won't be able to resist the urge not only to look at it but to pass it on to the rest of the clucking hens in the office, who will put it in an email to all of their friends...
The root of the problem is that security for computers is often diametrically opposed to what makes them useful. Lock down the security too much and you can't get anything done. Open it up so it's useful and you have all sorts of vectors for attack. And, as was shown by this demonstration, the biggest vector for attack is the ID-ten-T interfacing with the computer in the first place.
Dropping a few hundred of these in a city would spread a decent amount of terror. You'd only be able to do it once, the public would learn not to trust the USB drives they find.
The same people who have trouble following an entire reality TV season aren't going to remember a lesson like that for long, if they learn it at all.
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The empty words in the response letter are very telling. Upper management can't see the forest for the trees. They remind me of Kevin Bacon in Animal house when the riot is going on . "ALL IS WELL! REMAIN CALM!"
The RIM ship is sinking. RIM is losing huge chunks of market share left and right. It will come as no surprise in the coming months as more and more of the best and brightest among their teams get out while they can. And this will put RIM in a downward spiral. As more and more real talent leaves, the capability to deliver will plummet. Things will keep getting worse and worse until they go under.
This company is going to get managed right into the ground by a management team who only wants to surround themselves by yes-men. My advice to every single person at RIM is to get out while you can. It's not a matter of "if", it's a matter of "when".
Who wants to be that the anonymous letter writer will identify himself in the upcoming months, right after he accepts a position at another company (like Google or Apple)?
I think there's more hope for Middle East peace than a government project that doesn't have changes in requirements.
As long as there were riders in the contract stipulating that any significant change in the project requirements would extend the contract or result in a renegotiation of the contract, you might have something there. Of course, the initial requirements would have to be written into the contract to ensure the scope of work doesn't change. And if whole parts of work already done have to be scrapped, the customer absolutely needs to be responsible for those costs. It's not the contractor's fault that they did work in good faith that the customer didn't feel like buying when it was already done.
Even so, you may end up with a situation where you get huge overruns because the whole contract negotiation and follow up was a huge fuster cluck. And at some point the company will just fold up their tents and walk rather than deal with excessive penalties. It's not hard to declare bankruptcy and walk away from your obligations. If the company knows of the potential for serious penalties, they'll structure themselves just for that contingency ahead of time.
Sadly, there is no real solution. Governments want 10 times as much for less than half the cost. The only way to get the contract is to under bid everyone else who is also under bidding. If you don't do it, you don't get the contracts and you go out of business. Penalties don't really work when the company can just dissolve rather than paying them. And then you're stuck with no money and no deliverable Holding anyone on the government side accountable just isn't going to happen. Government flunkies are never truly held accountable for their failure because they have the company to blame. There's just no way to win here. It's why I got out of government contract work and will never go back if I can help it.
Make lawsuits for budget overruns SOP, and that practice completely disappears.
Seriously. Put it in the state constitution that all government contracts will be completed on time and under budget or we get our money back.
So you basically want to guarantee that not one company ever bids on a government contract ever again? BRILLIANT!
I suppose you'd find the odd contractor who would make an estimate and multiply it by a factor of 20 so they would have a hope of finishing it under budget and on time. So with a lot of margin like that, you'd virtually guarantee that the work would be padded to exactly wring out every last dime. But then you'd still have to deal with the government types constantly changing requirements up to the last minute and expecting you to be on time or face huge lawsuits.
Yeah, I think you'd find more people at an Art Garfunkel comeback tour show than you would find people to bid on government contracts. Absolutely brilliant solution there my friend...
I'm not going to defend SAIC at all. However, if you're going to call out the company on the overruns, you also need to call out everyone else responsible as well.
The reason it's SOP to underbid the contract is that it's the only way to actually win the contract. Government entities award the contract based on the bid. They don't care that there's no way in hell their sprawling (and ever changing) requirements will drive the cost well past the original bid by several orders of magnitude. They don't care, and I doubt they even know, what it really takes to build a large and complex computer system like that.
Sure, there's probably a lot of waste in that cost overrun. And I'm sure it has its share of incompetence among the development staff. But the real incompetence starts with the customer who doesn't have a clue what they're asking for or how much it's really going to cost to make it. And then half way through the project, some other bureaucrat shows up and has to change everything that the previous stuffed shirt asked for so they can have it their way, completely wonking up the schedule.
So find the cheapest, most obsolete computer you have. You don't want to short circuit your best computer.
Ok. got it.
Disconnect anything corruptible (hard-discs, USB drives, etc.) from the computer.
Well, I guess I can unplug the cassette player.
Disconnect any networks from your computer, you don't want any hacker software on the USB to bring the "men in black" knocking on your door.
No network plugs...
Boot from a live CD.
Where do you put a CD on a TRS-80?
Didn't Vista spam everyone with "are you sure?" messages every time they wanted to do anything? Adding validation prompts to operating systems will just annoy the users who are bound and determined to circumvent security.
Most newer operating systems have disabled autorun on removable media. Virus scanners can pick up a significant percentage of malware when you insert the drive. That catches a lot of it. Still, all you have to do is embed a new virus that hasn't been found by the scanning tools yet in a video of a cute kid or pictures of kittens. Half the people who insert the drive won't be able to resist the urge not only to look at it but to pass it on to the rest of the clucking hens in the office, who will put it in an email to all of their friends...
The root of the problem is that security for computers is often diametrically opposed to what makes them useful. Lock down the security too much and you can't get anything done. Open it up so it's useful and you have all sorts of vectors for attack. And, as was shown by this demonstration, the biggest vector for attack is the ID-ten-T interfacing with the computer in the first place.
Dropping a few hundred of these in a city would spread a decent amount of terror. You'd only be able to do it once, the public would learn not to trust the USB drives they find.
The same people who have trouble following an entire reality TV season aren't going to remember a lesson like that for long, if they learn it at all.