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Thinning Leaves on a 14-Year-Old Tree

by André Godfrey

The average lifespan for an Urban Downtown tree is 14 years. Time to go.

Perhaps I have added little of importance to the general IT knowledge base in this column, in which I have been a contributor to for the past 14 years. But I have had fun cracking wise and looking for monthly topics that were… well…topical. Here in my last column, I will state my case as a commentator in the genre of the acerb and share favorite excerpts over the years preceded with the subject matter at hand.

On marketing: Personally, I have never been afraid of generalities. Here is one for you. I do not know if there are two groups that are generally poorer at marketing than information technology and engineering.

On chance: I find most things in life that present a 50/50 chance, are one-in-a -million. Conversely, I find that most things that are one-in-a-million, happen about half the time.

On dated social media: I noted that LinkedIn posted the work anniversary of a friend of mine asking me whether I wanted to congratulate them for the achievement. In this instance several people had preceded me and ‘liked’ the notification. Only problem was – that person had passed away.

On outsourcing: The three options that companies have are: 1. Do everything in-house. 2. Outsource everything. 3. Outsource those things that are better done by someone else.

On recruiting: I went to the U.S. Army website to learn something about recruiting. These guys are professional recruiters who must find young people who are willing to be yelled at in peacetime and shot at in wartime for relatively low pay and status. Not easy.

On hypocrisy: My personal hypocrisy has never bothered me. It is the hypocrisy of others that I find intolerable.

On women in technology:

I attended a meeting recently with several top employers in the western New York area. The consensus of the gathering and the emphasis of several presentations on technology centered on the difficulty of finding and hiring technical talents.

A short aside. There is an enormous untapped market. Women comprise only 20% of the technology workforce. Hmm…

On women in engineering: For engineers, that number is 12 percent. Let me say that again. Only 12 percent of engineers (look around you- take your time) are women.

On things that I was dead wrong about (sample): There was an old Monty Python skit (the old part is redundant) where in creating a scene from the Great Plague of the Middle Ages people in carts hawked “bring out your dead, bring out your dead”. I predict there will be a 2019 remake of that scene and the carts will be filled with iPhones.

On search engines: Despite what the Luddites might tell you, email allows you to communicate the written word a lot faster than the postal service. Have you used an encyclopedia lately? Didn’t think so. But I bet some of you are googling “Luddites” right now.

On redefining Main Street (literally).... redefine Main Street. Our new Main Street will run from what today is Main and Broad (anything west of that is West Avenue, turns right at East Avenue and continues as Main Street (nee East Avenue) to Goodman/East at which point is becomes (remains) East Avenue.

This is my farewell column. I want to thank all of you for indulging me these many years and a final thank you to Sue Costa, who was Executive Director of the Rochester Engineering Society, who passed away so many years ago and who asked me to write this column. Thank you, Sue. You were right. It was a lot of fun.

Think About IT (one last time)

André Godfrey is President, Entré Computer Services, www.entrecs.com

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