Bob Blick wrote:
> and also that the popularity of PICs has changed the
> demographics of the membership.

It's good that PICs are popular, but unfortunately that has attracted too
many people that shouldn't be there.  That in turn has caused Microchip to
cater to the masses and try to make it look like PICs are so eeeezzzzy.
"Just clickety-click on the Visual Device Initializer, use our compiler
library routines, don't ask any silly questions about how things really
work, and you'll have your nuclear power plant safety supervisor system
running by this afternoon.".  Never underestimate the power of large masses
of dumb people.

Of course it's not that easy, but by trying to make it appear so, every
moron thinks they can do a PIC project and are entitled to everyone else
helping them with it.  I am continually amazed at how bad most PIC code is
that I run into out there.  The general mistrust of consultants has also
gone up recently.  This seems to be because there are too many bad apples
out there passing themselves off as consultants, and the customers aren't
sophisticated enough to know how to tell the difference or even that there
is one.

I've got two customers right now that are large multi-billion dollar
companies that obviously got burned in the past.  The first was very
mistrusting and cautious in issuing purchase orders and authorized the work
in little baby steps.  They've largely gotten over that now, but there are
still signs of past abuse.  They were very afraid of a board respin and
didn't understand how I considered it routine until they saw it only took 4
hours of engineering time, a few hours of logistics time, the cost of a few
prototypes, and 2 weeks lead time.

The other customer was forced to use internal people to design the board an=
d
write the proof of concept code.  The concept was proven, but everything wa=
s
a mess.  It took a lot of convincing for management to let them go outside,
which is where I got envolved.  In the firmware design review a few weeks
ago, the lead engineer made point of saying in front of everyone that he wa=
s
very pleased how each new firmware version just worked and that he hadn't
bumped into any bugs yet.  Of course he was saying this as kindof a "see, I
told you so" to management, not to flatter me, but judging by the reaction
of everyone else there this was definitely not their previous experience.
The previous code was referred to several times as a "pile of crap" during
the design review.

I don't know how these people get hired, but it seems to happen all too
often lately.


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