Re: Why does an "automated" company need so many employees?
Briefing.com and others have made a big deal about this. I certainly agree that it is a very reasonable question to ask and should be addressed seriously. I sort of knew the answer to this question, but I had to do a little research before I was able to post a reply here. Note: I have not actually spent time in Charlotte watching ALYD programmers at work, so nothing I am about to say is first-hand experience.
First of all, I and many other programmers hate the term "silver bullet" and "fully automated" because I guarantee you, I and probably every programmer reading this could write code in a second that will break any remediation system. However, I absolutely do believe extremely robust tools do exist (like ALYD's Smartcode) that can rip through well-behaved COBOL code with little of no error. The problem is, it only takes one errant program(mer) to muck up the system, hence you almost always need people to spot check what the computer does.
So, theoretically, ALYD could get by with teams of just one person. However, for quality control reasons they choose to have a maximum of five people. A good car racing analogy would be that ALYD's teams are like a pit-crew. Sure one person could do everything, but the more people, the faster things get done. You hope things go smoothly, but, if not, at least you're not necessarily out of the race when they do.
Keep in mind that ALYD's projects are not hundreds of thousands of lines-- they're tens of millions of lines. The longer the "race" the higher the chance for "complications" and thus it just makes good common sense to have a crew standing by, just in case. Most importantly, if you are the customer, I'm sure you demand to have a crew standing by to assure things get done on time. If you don't think Fortune 500 companies value a reasonable human presence, then why is IMRS also doing so well?
As briefing.com also accurately pointed out, ALYD's income per employee is not yet even close to what it should be. That's because they are still ramping up; it takes time to get the new hires up to speed. I even hear the new sales staff hosted a new qualified prospect every day last week in Charlotte.
And let's not forget that Compuware allowed ALYD to use the figure of one billion lines of potential non MVS COBOL code in announcing their partnership. And let's not forget that the RJR contract was for the Natural language, not COBOL. Once again, while other companies are claiming they can do other languages, ALYD has a signed contract with a Fortune 50 company to prove it.
All these things will hit the bottom line someday soon. It may not be tomorrow, but it won't be tomorrow for almost everyone else in the Y2K sector, either. I still believe, as Mad Monk has said repeatedly, that even pigs will fly. And I also still believe that the best ones will fly to the moon and beyond.
- Jeff |
