Just like the professionals

This veteran was on his company for decades, and practically everyone appreciates. "Everyone calls him from time to time," says a pilot fish who work there. "While he is a specialist in one area, his experience makes him an invaluable troubleshooter.

"A few years ago, has written a small Visual Basic application for one of our production lines that tracked some scanners and would enable legacy conveyors and automated weapons to forward packets to the right place. He wrote the app pretty quickly and worked well enough that the Manager of the Group wanted to make improvements to the app to communicate with other systems.

Enter a new guy in the IT Department. For some reason he doesn't look like the old generalist and he doesn't like the application scan-and-forward, which he called "amateurish".

He wants to investigate the construction of a real system that successfully automate the process, and he convinces his boss to let him take on the project.

Then he goes to work. He brings in suppliers. He extracts products. He flies out to Florida and Colorado to visit companies with similar systems to see what they did.

Finally, after a year of investigation, he presents his proposal.

"To have the system works well, he would rip off all the legacy (translation: get paid for) equipment and replace it with the new equipment that connect to the network," says fish. "And write a new system that would require a full-time staff of three to run it.

"Everything at a cost of $ 1 million, not counting the new staff.

"Three weeks later, the new guy was no longer with the company and the manager once again came to our contributor and asked him to make changes to its little VB app to communicate with other systems--which he did."

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