Re: What folks today don't know...!

Subject: Re: What folks today don't know...!
From: "Peter Neilson" <neilson -at- windstream -dot- net>
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Date: Sat, 02 Aug 2014 21:04:49 -0400

On Sat, 02 Aug 2014 17:14:32 -0400, Steven Jong <stevefjong -at- comcast -dot- net> wrote:

When you think about practitioners today, what do they need to know that they don't seem to know?

Technical details of production of printed books. In particular, some kinds of printing have relatively long lead times, and it can be necessary to inform the Engineering staff that even though changes are trivial in the shippable binaries of code, and perhaps not really difficult in a PDF of a book, a real printed book may need to go to the printers up to ten weeks ahead of shipment. It's also necessary to look at the result from the printing shop, because it may be wrong in some bizarre and unforeseeable way. The Prime Computer books that were bound in Digital Equipment covers is one striking example. The printing shop swallowed a big loss on that one.

And yes, some printing still happens. It's not completely "on line" PDFs, and never will be.


I am thinking about both young practitioners just entering the field, who might not know some useful things that experienced practitioners know about, and experienced practitioners who don't know some current or new skills that young practitioners know.

Young writers will occasionally have a "warts and all" approach, not unlike posting one's selfies all over ScalpBook, and many experienced writers will be aghast at producing anything like that. Which attitude is right? Well, what does management want? Does the CEO put pictures of his own smelly feet and his ugly dog on all the social media? Does he contribute to blogs that mostly trash his chief software product? Perhaps warts-and-all is desired. (I'd probably quit first.)

I have some thoughts myself, and I am thinking about knowledge transfer that might flow in both directions. But I'd like to hear from you. What do you think?

I think my curmudgeonly position is obvious.

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References:
What folks today don't know...!: From: Steven Jong

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