everyone with any interest in the AK-47 should read http://cjchivers.com/aboutthegun (The Gun, by CJ Chivers). Although it spends a lot of time examining historical contexts for machine guns, and assault rifles in general - the AK-47 stuff is great.
The comparison with the M-16 in particular is pretty brutal.
For people who's departure causes significant external ripples, it's never really couched as firing though, is it? There is a carefully coded message (perhaps even internally) about departing for other startups as yet unspecified, or of pursuing different opportunities or of spending time with the family.
In many cases, will we even know if it was mutual or just an understandable need for a change of scene? Contrast the departures of Bret Anderson from Facebook, Naveen Selvadurai of Foursquare and Marco Arment from Tumblr [and these are just CTO/co-founder examples]
they need constant care and monitoring - especially after heavy storms or bad weather of any sort, really.
The tree lined boulevards in my city routinely disrupt traffic after monsoon rains - most are close to 40 years old, and every so often will shed a branch or three onto the road.
By and large, I've had the opposite problem making a lasting switch from Perl to Ruby.
I know Perl better than most other languages in my toolbox, and it's my default prototyping and one-off utility language. I don't find a lot of niches (for my typical uses, of course) that are served better by Ruby, so it's been really difficult to switch away from Perl.
Yet the problem now is if you spend all that time communicating, you still can't know for sure if everyone was listening or tuning you out half the time. More so if other people around you undercommunicate instead of overcommunicate.
Perhaps it is not the norm but I've seen this response to a few leaders who spend a lot of time communicating. Wonder if it is worth it, always
Despite the last paragraph in the article, another reason for refusing to upgrade is the costs involved in service pack upgrades. IE 7 is only available for Windows XP SP2 and higher. Upgrading to SP2 was traumatic for many organizations, so quite a few did not roll it out.
No upgrade from SP2? Well, IE 6 and only IE 6 it is then.
A related issue: IE 8 offers the ability to run in IE 7 compatibility mode, with the inclusion of a header in the source web page. Despite dire warnings to the contrary, some website developers for UK government insist on setting the header and declaring that IE 8 compatibility has been achieved. I can't wait to see how that will end, to be honest.
At least one of the problems, IME, is that salary ranges are rigidly determined by the employee tier.
The tiering system goes something like this:
Software Engineer -> Lead -> Architect
Without advancing through the ranks, it is well nigh impossible to get reasonable increases in pay; so people (even those who may wish to write more code) strive to climb up the ladder.
Not saying it makes perfect sense to everyone, but there is some logic to making sure people climb up the ladder quickly (if they are capable) in large corporations.
even when everyone dials in, the people using a cellphone or joining conference calls while travelling are at a distinct disadvantage. Any number of calls I join have at least one guy having to drop out and come back in because the signal keeps fading.
The other thing I've noticed with a large number of dial-in participants is that there can be a lot of silent attendees and very few people talking. YMMV
actually, I feel you may have made the case for outsourcing.
In your example - it was a single task. Working with the assumption that domain expertise can be acquired on the job, the costs of doing subsequent jobs will be lower for the outsourced engineer.
The more times the same task needs to be performed by the engineer, the cheaper outsourcing becomes. Your example just accounted for the startup cost, which can be assumed to be a one-off*
*Is it that way in practice? at least in some projects, it is.