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Subject:Who Gets the Crappy PC? From:"George F. Hayhoe" <george -at- GHAYHOE -dot- COM> Date:Wed, 5 May 1999 10:42:54 -0400
In response to John Posada, Chris Hamilton wrote a really
interesting post that began:
<<if I'm the leader of the doc department and I've got X
permanent employees and I have X SuperPCs and 1 CrappyPC,
and I hire a
contractor, here's what I have to do:>>
The best answer to this conundrum is that the contractor
gets the doc department leader's SuperPC.
My former boss, head of a 400-person IT organization, went
ballistic when he learned that he and his direct reports had
the best hardware in the department, while some of his
professionals had machines that lacked the horsepower to do
their work efficiently. His reason: Why should the
department's managers--who used their PCs a few hours a day
to read e-mail, draft a monthly report, and update an
occasional spreadsheet--have top-of-the line equipment,
while those whose business was crunching bits 8 hours a day
were handicapped by antique, anemic hardware?
Even in a small pubs group where the doc department leader
is a "player-coach," he or she will use a PC far fewer hours
per day than the contractor. It's a manager's job to
allocate all resources wisely, even when he or she is
inconvenienced.
