Jon Stewart’s Rockin’ Shutdown Eve


The Daily Show has the segment Jon Stewart’s Rockin’ Shutdown Eve.

If President Obama can make a deal with the most intransigent mullahs in the world but not with House Republicans, maybe he is not the problem.  (07:20)

I don’t necessarily agree with the disparagement of the mullahs, but I do agree with the assessment of the Republicans.


I also agree with Jon Stewart’s stand on firing all the people in the Congress because one side is being intransigent.

If we refuse to determine which side we think is right and which side we think is wrong, then we are failing to do our job as citizens just as badly as the side we think is wrong is failing to do their job.

I had a situation in my career where I was managing a group where the young technical lead of a project wanted to take the project in one direction and a very senior technical member of the project wanted to go in another direction.

There was no compromise between the two sides and the project would have ground to a halt if no decision was made. I don’t claim to even be a good manager, but I chose the technical lead’s position as the one I thought was right. The other engineer would just not let it go. He would not stop his campaign to make the project go in the direction he wanted. He went up and down the chain of command trying to get the decision changed, all to no avail. He became pretty marginalized in the project even though the very foundations of the project used many key techniques he had developed, just not the one that he was so adamant about.

I would have been shirking my duty and harming the project and the company if I had just decided to fire both of them because they couldn’t agree. We were not going to find out which path was right and which wrong by standing still and arguing over it. We had to move in some direction. If it turned out to be the wrong direction, it would become more obvious as the project proceeded. We could always change direction, although it would have been very painful, had we made the wrong decision.

I don’t claim to any genius for having made the right to decision. It turns out that the technical lead was ahead of the industry by many years. His way has been universally adopted by all the modern day purveyors of that type of software.

In a dynamic industry and in a dynamic world, you just cannot afford to keep arguing. You have to pick a direction, and move forward.

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