Timesizing^® vs. Downsizing^TM
© 1999-07  Philip Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622 Cambridge MA 02143 USA 617-623-8080 - HOMEPAGE

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Audiences and Markets

1. They got degrees in computer science thinking it was a secure career, and now, after working for some dot.com startup or high-tech behemoth (like IBM, DEC, Compaq, HP, Gateway...), they've been downsized and after sending out 100s of resumes they still can't find a job, at least not one that pays anything like the one they had before.
2. They've been working 24/7 in high tech on work saving programs, sleeping under their desks, coming in weekends, - and now that they've been laid off, they're asking basic questions like, Why have I been working in burnout mode on worksaving technology??? Aren't the fruits of my labors supposed to make things easier for people, including me, to earn a good living and support themselves, not harder? What went wrong?! When's the payoff? When do I get the promise of technology. (Quick answer: what went wrong is that CEOs have responded to technology by downsizing instead of timesizing and we don't get the promise of technology until we stop straining to create enough artificial government-subsidized jobs to maintain a frozen 40-hour workweek and start implementing timesizing, meaning sharing the vanishing natural market-demanded work. We also need to plug a few leaks like offshore outsourcing and - when and only when it suits the well-connected - so-called inevitable, inexorable, irresistable, irreversible, and funniest of all, "free"-trade globalization, regardless of steel tariffs and sneaky subsidies for mining, agrobiz, big sugar, big tobacco, etc. etc. = tariff substitutes that only the EU has the money and clout to identify and protest.)
3. While the general public has lots of patience with problems and none with the solution process, programmers are impatient with the immediate problem - they're used to jumping in and solving the it on the spot, and then having lots of patience with the solution process as they discover unintended consequences ricocheting through the rest of the code.

• people who can't believe we're in the 21st Century, the Third Millennium A.D., yet we're still in the Dark Ages on sooo many fronts, particularly in the USA, the self-proclaimed Leader in Everything, but nowhere on healthcare, prisons, 'disabled' population, suicides, poverty, hunger, homelessness, unemployment, not to mention forced early retirement and interrupted retirement, forced self-employment regardless of lack of clients, forced one-job and multiple-job part-time, forced withdrawal from the job market plain & simple (ha)....
• people who are embarrassed for the human race in general and W.'s America in particular - or for that matter, Clinton's America when we were just deteriorating less swiftly but still goin' down....
• people who expect better, MUCH better of a self-styled "intelligent species" than to still be churning out sci fi that depicts the future merely as hi-tech battles, wars, and violence (e.g., Star Drek oops Trek, Star Wars, Battleship Galactica and all the other unimaginative slop - "Rick Berman is sooo 20th century!"....).

*We define real human progress...