Re: Decimal versus binary arithmetic was Re: J4 - presentation/discussion on "Future of the COBOL Standard"

On Wed, 09 Apr 2008 07:53:32 -0600, Howard Brazee <howard@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:

>On Tue, 08 Apr 2008 20:39:22 -0500, Robert <no@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
>>Defensive workers initially love people who KNOW they're right, because
they think the
>>person will self-destruct. For example, when he says he can rewrite that
16 hour job to
>>run in 30 minutes, they happily assign it to him and tell the manager it
will soon run
>>like lightning. 
>
>I haven't worked with people like that.
>
>>They stop loving him when they recieve an email apologizing for the
estimation error,
>>announcing it runs in 10 minutes, as evidenced by the attached log. When
the manager asks
>>what technical trick did the magic, the answer is he removed technical
tricks others had
>>tried, then rewrote the convoluted logic the way is should have been
written.
>
>Making things work right is popular - at least when the person doing
>so doesn't try hard to make others look bad.

It doesn't matter what the person says, they think the FACT makes them
look bad. The only
way around it would be to lie about the solution. Say you used secret
Vulcan military
technology unknown to anyone in the Federation.  Some managers would know
they are being
patronized, some think programming is all black art.