Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1590

says...

I don't know. In the early days, the company was too small to have a bureaucracy to convince one way or the other. Later, I suspect that a track record of making schedules, and not having the support lines ring off the hook afterward may have helped a great deal with the waves of middlemen that were brought in. That, and simply invoking the first name of the big boss in a sentence was usually enough to make them wet their pants in fear. :-)

Having an atbreastude that products were ready to ship after engineering was happy with them, which in our case was a much more stringent metric than that the contract testers in the separate support organization, or the usual "beta sites" among selected customers would apply and always finding more serious bugs ourselves helped them realize that our goals were on the "path to righteousness".

I don't mean we shipped before other groups were ready, I mean that we help up schedules if necessary AFTER other groups proclaimed them ready, because we knew there was something left to wring out first. *That* will put a kink in the knickers of a manager if nothing else will.

Having a badge number only a few numbers away from that of the CEO didn't hurt matters either. :-)

The point is, if you can back it up with results, it becomes a non-issue. If you are still being faced with this sort of harbuttment despite those things, it's time to find someplace else to work.

Understand. I can remember one specific case where it took the FNG less than one full day (back when a full day was maybe 18 hours) to achieve this status after being hired. He came in in the middle of a hot development cycle, and asked the "well, where can I help out?" question.

Being busy, somebody jokingly set them on the most serious problem on the issue list, one that had been very problematic to find and stamp out up until that point. The idea was that would keep him busy until we finished the project, then we'd have time to "mentor" him. Hah! Three or four hours later he had the monster bug fixed; all he had pointed out to him was the problem description and the root login on the machine with the source. Nobody underestimated him after that. He is still working miracles daily.

That individual turned out to be the person I think of when someone says "bit god". You could walk into his office, say "we just saw this strange issue in the lab with the frobnicator issuing spurious snarks on the I-O bus..." By the time you finished the sentence, he would have the suspect source file open on his terminal and point out the likely source of the problem to you. It sounds like BS, I still find it hard to believe myself, but I have witnesses that can verify this being a regular occurrence. AFAIK, he has no peer. Off the charts brilliant. Makes other bit gods quake in terror and reach for their +10 protection from embarrbuttment spell.

-- Randy Howard (2reply remove FOOBAR) "For a recent Halloween party, if you must know, I cross- dressed as Susan Sontag in a grey wig and black tights, and a guy called me 'beautiful'. --EGN