Cutting Corners, upping the "bottom line, " and dumping USA

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I keep on wondering if I'm crazy, or if the Chinese will really buy out a badly deluded USA, which is self hypnotizing itself via just plain strange choices of things to think about on the daily "news." To me, a story like the one below, is real cause for alarm.

BEGIN STORY:

Wednesday, January 11, 2006


THE LAST IT WORKER STANDING

By Anonymous


Posted January 10, 3:00 a.m. PST Pacific Time


For most of the past 10 years I was a computer operations manager for the
R&D department at an up-and-coming pharmaceutical company. Initially it
was a small operation. But as time passed, we were gobbled up by bigger
and bigger fish. Finally, last year, we were swallowed by a Great White
Shark. My site was the most productive one in the entire company, but it
was poorly located and expensive to expand or upgrade. The Shark decided
to close it.

The first staffers to go were the scientists; they were highly paid, so
firing them would produce the biggest financial bump. More than 150
scientists were given less than two weeks to prepare their projects for
passing along to other divisions. I was asked to hang around for two
more weeks to help turn out the lights.

As those two weeks drew to an end, my VP called me in. He'd pointed out
to his superiors that a huge amount of data had been produced during
various research projects -- and that this data hadn't been documented,
backed up, or organized in any way. He suggested bringing back a few of
the scientists, but no one wanted to spend the money to do it.

Still, the Shark knew that the FDA is quite interested in documentation
and frowns on companies whose early data has "disappeared," so it hired
(what else?) a consulting company. Sadly, the consultants were much
better at moving equipment than data. These guys had never seen an
echocardiogram administered, let alone analyzed the 40GB of data that
one produced. I won't even tell you about the equally humongous data
sets produced in chemistry, biology, or genetics labs. The scientists
who understood what that data meant were already signed on with other
companies.

As the last experienced IT person standing, I did have some ideas about
how to move and organize the data, ...


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