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Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)
21–30 of 52 posts
Re: Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)
#22I could have sworn that I read this before, on a different website. Turns out that I was right according to my notes. https://web.archive.org/web/20111228105122/http://wrttn.in/0... Previous discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3390719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3311015
And here I was wondering what the odd title meant, but with your hint it totally makes sense. From the page:
wrttn:04af1a
I'm writing a book on computer history. You can look at my mirror of stuff I found elsewhere on the web, or the scans of stuff I found at garage sales and such.
Apologies for those who lose hours if not days to the rabbit hole therein.
Re: Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)
#23It is great that the URL for this website is:
https://landley.net/history/mirror/institutional_memory.html
In other words, it is in the "history/mirror/" sub-directory, being preserved for future corporate archeologists.
Re: Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)
#24I love when I run across minor versions of these sort of archeology projects in the course of my job. Git makes it a lot easier though.
Git is only 19 years old, I suspect the bigger problems in this area are more likely to be 30+ year old, as most of the people who built such systems are likely to be retired.
Re: Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)
#25This reminds me of the Saturn V. If I remember correctly, no one knows how it works anymore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V
Lol, NASA literally left an instruction manual on how to go to space, and return safely. The contributions those folks have made over the years is related to just about everything you depend on these days. People just choose to ignore the documentation, as there is less political mileage in throwing money into space these days. =3
NASA wastes billions and billions of dollars on space projects that will likely never fly. Rest assured, there’s still plenty of political mileage to be had from space money.
Re: Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lol, NASA literally left an instruction manual on how to go to space, and return safely. The contributions those folks have made over the years is related to just about everything you depend on these days. People just choose to ignore the documentation, as there is less political mileage in throwing money into space these days. =3
NASA wastes billions and billions of dollars on space projects that will likely never fly. Rest assured, there’s still plenty of political mileage to be had from space money.
Is Artemis really that upsetting... =3
Re: Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)
#27A while back there was a discussion about employee retention and churn, with some parties claiming a complete staff turnover over some period was a good thing, and that documentation could serve as the complete institutional memory. I hope they read this.
Three problems with documentation. Sometimes it doesn't exist, sometimes you can't find it, and sometimes you don't read it.
Well I guess the fourth problem is it could be wrong, but that just comes with the territory.
Re: Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)
#28If someone wanted to be such an archeologist but instead for figuring out how some code or project worked (where perhaps the only remaining thing was the compiled code and some limited documentation), what sort of role/position would that be? To my mind it just seems like something one would get assigned or throw into when looking into improving a process similar to the company in this story, but perhaps I am missing…
>what sort of role/position would that be?
Go work a normal engineering job for a bank or government on something close to whatever was the core system 30 years ago. You should see the signs when you get close enough.
Re: Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)
#29"[...] our group was a mix of people over 55 and under 35, with few in between." We will be seeing this with nuclear soon. The only people I know that studied nuclear engineering or related fields are in their 60s. The renaissance of nuclear will put these people in high demand and a fresh cohort of young people will be drawn into it.
no - for a specific example, plenty of math majors at UC Berkeley got pulled into Nuclear Physics more than ten years ago.. William Gates was pushing some money around.. graduate students are pulled in via backdoor channels perhaps?
Re: Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)
#30>Unfortunately, the internal team doesn't know what the secrets are, while I do. I even invented a few of them, and have my name on some related patents.
I'm confused about how something can be both a secret and patented. Isn't the point of a patent that it is public and no longer secret?