Still, Condit was well liked by many Boeing employees, especially after the merger with McDonnell-Douglas. Machinists, engineers and technicians saw him as the representative of Boeing’s traditions against the more cut-throat McDonnell-Douglas, which was represented by the chief operating officer (and, later, CEO) Harry Stonecipher.

Actually, as one of the grunts– no. GTA (graduate teaching assts) are a separate job category from adjuncts. Most adjuncts teach semester to semester, but forever. I’ve worked with teachers who have been adjuncts for 20 years– $1700 a section, so maybe if they kill themselves and teach at 3 different schools, as David suggests, they might make $24K a year, no benefits, and I mean NO benefits. They do amazing work. Most freshman comp courses, most freshman courses in every discipline at state universities, are taught by adjuncts. I get — you’ll laugh at this– a desk for 2 hours a week, and a file drawer. 500 copies on the copy machine every semester. No secretarial help. I have probably 15 hours of “required” meetings I have to attend every semester without any compensation, not to mention the “orientation” of 8 hours or so at the beginning of every semester. Not a penny extra. And the “senior faculty” (the tenure-track and tenured ones) ignore us, because they know each one of them would pay for 4 of us, so they’re scared, and well they should be– the universities are getting addicted to instructors who make less than janitors, and pretty soon, the faculty will be 90% unbenefitted (”part-time” is actually a misnomer, as so many adjuncts teach 4 or more courses– one school I teach at — I teach at three– allows adjuncts to teach SIX courses a semester, which is twice as many as my father, the tenured professor, ever taught).

And the adjuncts are very quiet about this, because they all love to teach, love the school, love the students, and are afraid they’ll be fired, or “unrenewed”.

Bob: “So what organization do you represent?” Ray begins: “Slow…” (long pause) (Bob fills in “talkers of America”) …. Ray: “talkers” (Bob: “of America”) …. Ray: “of” (Bob, exploding, “America”) Ray: “America.” Bob: “aggggghhhhhh. Stop the interview. Get this guy off the air.”

or words to that effect….

Part of the problem is that the cycles for IT projects are so long.

My best theory on this is that corporate America was furious with the IT industry over the Y2K compliance spending – most of the rest of the world spent nothing and had no problems. Broadband to Bangalore came on line at about the same time. US business proceeded to gut the IT workforce. (Sadly, a lot of them went into real estate.) Now, the Bangalore cohort if projects are failing on an epic scale, and with no real cost savings on all but the most trivial of applications. And no one wants to be a programmer anymore. Anyone smart enough to be a “core” programmer is also smart enough to be a Wall Street analyst, high end lawyer, or some other such position which affords a much more pleasant lifestyle.

The very idea of Microsoft “superstars” is a little amusing. The Microsoft-nurtured mythology concerning its own capacity for innovation and excellence is instead a source of ridicule in much of the the software world.

Perhaps the only way to sustain the internal mythology of superstardom is by having a mass of drones to despise…