[TUHS] DEC and Dave Cutler (was Re: The John Snow's of the UNIX family)

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Jan 16, 2019 at 12:14:30PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> DC's magic was getting to the
> nut of the problem and getting what people cared about implemented quickly
> and out for users to try it.  The problem was his scheme, was that he was
> never part of the team that fixed it later.    I think I would have had
> more respect if he had quickly gotten the product out and then said, 'ok,
> we took these short cuts.  Let's fix them'  But as you pointed out, Dave
> never seems to see them as short cuts.  He was 'done.'

Ah, yes, the 1.0 person.  That's a nice gig if you can get it, but it is
rare that a company will put up with it.  The fact that DEC did sort of
indicates a broken engineering culture.

Sun, at least when I was there, would never put up with that.  If you
pushed something out the door you were expected to stick around and 
do the dot dot releases that fixed it before you got to move on to 
the next thing.  That was just part of the culture when I was there,
I sort of thought they over did it and people sort of polished the
turd forever.  I escaped that by focussing on performance, that let
me bounce all over the place, which was fun.

--lm