I'm a medical device consultant. My American clients want me to help them commercialize technology they have licensed. Most of it is from Europe and Australia.
My clients in China and India want to beat the EU and USA companies with better tech done cheaper. And they aren't counting on labor costs to get the cost reduction, they are counting on superior smarts.
And now I've got a company based in South Africa that wants to take a technology from Egypt and one from Cuba and develop a new surgical treatment that combines the two. Manufacturing will be in Vietnam. And I'm the only American on the team.
You don't need to read theoretical articles. Next time you download a printer driver, check out where the programming was done. American domination of the globe is a temporary abberation, soon to be remedied in the traditional manner.
Two years here and my wife and I are heading back to Los Angeles. Here, if you lose your job, you can spend six months finding another one. In LA the headhunters are still cold-calling.
Add in the fact that Atlanta is still living in the 1980s and there are almost no good sushi joints...
I can't remember the title of the Clarke novel, but in it a young man from one of the Jovian moons goes to Earth. While visiting there, in his room, he goes to access the communications network and find that there is a really old terminal. The young man is surprised to see an archaic piece of equipment, obviously kept in repair for many decades, and then it occurs to him that with the cost of raw materials on Earth the economics demand that products are built for long life.
What we see now in consumer electronics is similar to the profusion of really bad fabrics and ceramics in the early industrial revolution. This too shall pass. The bad drives out the good only when resources are cheap (labor, materials) and "features" are more important than product life.
There's only about thirty more years of petroleum and cheap labor worldwide (I just helped move a factory from India to China to cut labor costs - Africa is next, ten years at most).
With respect to features, Andy Grove (Intel) just said that they think Moore's Law may not hold out much longer. Hurray! Maybe we'll finally have time to figure out what in heck all this stuff is good for. Come one, folks, haven't we long since hit the point of diminishing gratification in consumer electronics?
Use Cases work really well once you are able to figure out what in heck the customer wants at a general level. As a solo operator, I work my way down from the general to the specific as I work my way down the customers heirarchy.
Use Cases are too specific for the tricy bit of defining the project and doing scope. Management pays me. So I work out the Functional Specification with them. This is the top level "solve the following problem with these constraints" document, and it includes all those troublesome time and money issues.
Then and only then do I go down to the supervisors and experts and work out the Technical Specification, which focuses on the requirements for the solution -- no mention of HOW the job is to be done, just WHAT conditions the results must meet (ie, Prevent deletion of records without supervisor approval by password).
Use Cases define each of the interactions between the users and the product, and I don't do any real work until I'm done with those. Use Cases are put together by interviewing users but then applying technical skill and intuition.
Since I work with medical machinery, there's a big Define-Verify-Validate loop that I have to go through, so doing things in a step by step fashion is important. Every once in a while I get stupid with an "easy" job and skip a step. This is generally a Bad Thing.
Measure twice, cut once. That's what my granpa said when we were building a barn.
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I'm a medical device consultant. My American clients want me to help them commercialize technology they have licensed. Most of it is from Europe and Australia.
My clients in China and India want to beat the EU and USA companies with better tech done cheaper. And they aren't counting on labor costs to get the cost reduction, they are counting on superior smarts.
And now I've got a company based in South Africa that wants to take a technology from Egypt and one from Cuba and develop a new surgical treatment that combines the two. Manufacturing will be in Vietnam. And I'm the only American on the team.
You don't need to read theoretical articles. Next time you download a printer driver, check out where the programming was done. American domination of the globe is a temporary abberation, soon to be remedied in the traditional manner.
Nooooo. Don't do it!
Two years here and my wife and I are heading back to Los Angeles. Here, if you lose your job, you can spend six months finding another one. In LA the headhunters are still cold-calling.
Add in the fact that Atlanta is still living in the 1980s and there are almost no good sushi joints...
I can't remember the title of the Clarke novel, but in it a young man from one of the Jovian moons goes to Earth. While visiting there, in his room, he goes to access the communications network and find that there is a really old terminal. The young man is surprised to see an archaic piece of equipment, obviously kept in repair for many decades, and then it occurs to him that with the cost of raw materials on Earth the economics demand that products are built for long life.
What we see now in consumer electronics is similar to the profusion of really bad fabrics and ceramics in the early industrial revolution. This too shall pass. The bad drives out the good only when resources are cheap (labor, materials) and "features" are more important than product life.
There's only about thirty more years of petroleum and cheap labor worldwide (I just helped move a factory from India to China to cut labor costs - Africa is next, ten years at most).
With respect to features, Andy Grove (Intel) just said that they think Moore's Law may not hold out much longer. Hurray! Maybe we'll finally have time to figure out what in heck all this stuff is good for. Come one, folks, haven't we long since hit the point of diminishing gratification in consumer electronics?
Use Cases work really well once you are able to figure out what in heck the customer wants at a general level. As a solo operator, I work my way down from the general to the specific as I work my way down the customers heirarchy. Use Cases are too specific for the tricy bit of defining the project and doing scope. Management pays me. So I work out the Functional Specification with them. This is the top level "solve the following problem with these constraints" document, and it includes all those troublesome time and money issues. Then and only then do I go down to the supervisors and experts and work out the Technical Specification, which focuses on the requirements for the solution -- no mention of HOW the job is to be done, just WHAT conditions the results must meet (ie, Prevent deletion of records without supervisor approval by password). Use Cases define each of the interactions between the users and the product, and I don't do any real work until I'm done with those. Use Cases are put together by interviewing users but then applying technical skill and intuition. Since I work with medical machinery, there's a big Define-Verify-Validate loop that I have to go through, so doing things in a step by step fashion is important. Every once in a while I get stupid with an "easy" job and skip a step. This is generally a Bad Thing. Measure twice, cut once. That's what my granpa said when we were building a barn.