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> they have had little success in understanding how we implemented the projects we were involved in I don't think I've ever had trouble helping people to grok

• oldandtired 9y ago
  What I actually found was that they were unable to think outside of the box they were stuck in. They were in a position of "you can't do that" when the problem at hand required that "you need to do that" so find a way to do it. I think one of the problems of today is the limited education that many in technical fields have. They are taught how to do something in one language or system and they do not get to see that other ways are possible in other languages and systems. One of my former colleagues (from decades ago) was a brilliant programmer. We had a particularly pernicious problem to solve. He had spent some hours programming a solution around the problem and had written about half the code needed. In discussions with him, I brought up that old chestnut of Karnaugh Maps and Don't Cares. He had never heard of either. Once explained to him, he fixed the entire problem with 5 lines of code, throwing away all the previous work. He was very capable of thinking outside the box. I have worked with many very capable Australian technical people over the years and they have been less valued than foreign people even though the Australians were vastly superior to their overseas counterparts.