Re: not enough real programmers? (was Re: Byte Magazine: 18 Vintage issues, 1985-1986)

[Charles Eicher <ceicher@inav.net>]

In article <qhbtcoausu.fsf_-_@ruckus.brouhaha.com>, Eric says...
>
>>> "Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers
>>> and deluge the hobby market with good software."  -- Bill Gates, 1976
>
>> So I guess Bill hasn't been able to hire ten "real" programmers yet...
>
>Or perhaps he hired *too many* real programmers, which is another
>well-known method for obtaining suboptimal software.  See
>_The Mythical Man Month_ by Fred Brooks.  There's a nice 20th anniversary
>edition with new material, but almost all of the original material has
>held up quite well.  Hard to believe that so few people have learned
>anything from it.

Oh geez, I thought this was going to be another of those threads about the
shortage of programmers, which is the excuse for companies importing cheaper
talent from abroad. I was going to chip in my usual retort, that there is no
shortage of programmers, there's just a shortage of programmers that will work
for almost nothing.

But this thread isn't about that, so I don't have the opportunity to flail on my
pet peeve.

>Or, perhaps more likely, the people that *have* learned from it refuse to
>manage the impossible-schedule megaprojects, so the companies that need such
>things done are forced instead to hire the PHBs [*] that claim to be able to
>do it.
>
>Eric
>
>[*] I've seen them called PHBs or PHMs.  Don't confuse them with PhDs,
>although some holders of the latter also happen to be the former.

Huh? What's a PHB/PHM? I know what PhD means (Piled Higher and Deeper) but I
never heard the other two acronyms.