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Here's the thing... It is not in a military contractor's best interests to properly document and mothball any knowledge or capability so well that it can be ha

by beloch 13y ago

Here's the thing... It is not in a military contractor's best interests to properly document and mothball any knowledge or capability so well that it can be handed over to the government, stuck in a warehouse for decades, and be dusted off by someone completely different without difficulty. Doing so is tedious, expensive, and makes the contractor instantly replaceable. Failing to do so is cheap, fast, easy and improves their odds of getting future business! The flipside is that it's impractical to pay companies to maintain the capacity to build everything they've ever built for all time. Imagine what it would cost IBM to keep people trained in building new versions of every product they've ever invented! If it costs billions to adequately document and mothball the construction process for every wheel you've ever made, but it only costs millions to reinvent the occasional wheel, what do you do?

Amadou 13y ago
The flipside is that it's impractical to pay companies to maintain the capacity to build everything they've ever built for all time. The defense contractors handle that problem by putting those people on other projects. Sometimes it is productive work, sometimes it is just any project with a budget surplus. Their intent is to maintain institutional memory even if the project itself has been mothballed. That's what I saw happen to people numerous times while working as a consultant to a couple of DoD contractors. I billed a crazy-high rate and they even shuffled me off onto a peripheral program in order to keep me around as a sort of security blanket for the original program that was (slowly) spinning down.
Nursie 13y ago
>> Imagine what it would cost IBM to keep people trained in building new versions of every product they've ever invented! There's a reason the mainframe forward-compat date is 1964, it's so they don't have to!

by beloch 13y ago

Amadou 13y ago

The flipside is that it's impractical to pay companies to maintain the capacity to build everything they've ever built for all time. The defense contractors handle that problem by putting those people on other projects. Sometimes it is productive work, sometimes it is just any project with a budget surplus. Their intent is to maintain institutional memory even if the project itself has been mothballed. That's what I saw happen to people numerous times while working as a consultant to a couple of DoD contractors. I billed a crazy-high rate and they even shuffled me off onto a peripheral program in order to keep me around as a sort of security blanket for the original program that was (slowly) spinning down.

Nursie 13y ago

>> Imagine what it would cost IBM to keep people trained in building new versions of every product they've ever invented! There's a reason the mainframe forward-compat date is 1964, it's so they don't have to!