Robiticjockey

Sometimes you have to. There is a political reality that Americans aren't going support increases taxes. He may have had only a few limited budgets or amendments to vote on, and there are sometimes rules in place about funding.

Edit: I didn't feel it was a false dichotemy. These were three particular budgets or amendments voted on over his career that happened to cut NASA funding. He honestly said that while he likes NASA, given budget constraints and options to vote on he might support bills that support programs he is more interested in. I felt like given the constraints of an AMA, and the lack of context in the question about what those bills were about, it was a fair response.

They have pretty bad weather. They also tend to invest with their oil find in long term programs rather than use it as a crutch to avoid taxes - because they know the oil will run out some day.

Exit: mentioned weather because maintaining roads in icy conditions is a massive pain. They basically have to resurface almost every year, and they have a low population density.

The difference between successful small (and even sometimes big) software producers and ones that fail is often the ability to know when to step back and do a complete re-write, and when to patch/improve the existing code base to meet deadlines.

Apple and IBM have both proven effective at this. Apple often decides to not care about backwards compatibility (see OSX) which allowed them to do a rather large re-write and produce more efficient code. Microsoft has a lot of overhead and other financial issues with each release because corporate users put so much pressure on them to keep things compatible.

IBM has been incredibly effective at abandoning whole efforts to focus on the new hottest things. It's why they've survived from being a typewriter company to what they are today.

A year earlier you may have had other deadlines and staffing issues. That's always been one of my biggest problems as I've moved in to management. Younger me thought management was clueless because the decisions they made - when to use exisiting technology, older technology, or newer technology - didn't always make sense.

Now I understand there are times when a product 100% has to work by a particular deadline, if that means I've got to use code from a decade ago that has been field tested and hardened for sections, even if in theory a re-write in C++ or python could provide the same service in much slimmer and better documented code, I've still got to use the resources on the old code. Because I know it works.

When I get things with semi-flexible deadlines, or a contract where field failure with follow-up servicing is acceptable, then I push for the new things. Generally they work, but with some customers - who generally pay the bills - failure is simply not an option.

Of course anymore I'm writing reports and figuring out budgets, and only get to spend about half my time doing engineering. I wonder what the young guys think of me...

Are you managing a team of coders or still mostly a one man shop?