{"id":2214,"date":"2016-06-23T01:28:45","date_gmt":"2016-06-23T06:28:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/?p=2214"},"modified":"2016-06-06T07:39:17","modified_gmt":"2016-06-06T12:39:17","slug":"the-catalog-readers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/2016\/06\/the-catalog-readers\/","title":{"rendered":"The Catalog Readers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>by Dwayne Phillips<\/p>\n<p><strong>We give new titles to an old profession.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Back in the last decade of the prior century, I met several people at work who had one skill:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>They could read a product catalog.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>They would read the catalogs from DEC, Sun, IBM, and even Dell. They would proclaim, &#8220;Look what is out this year? We can buy one of these, one of those, duct tape them together and have a system.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Soon thereafter, these catalog readers would proclaim themselves to be some kind of engineer because, by reading a catalog, they had designed and built a system. Wow.<\/p>\n<p>Now in the second decade of the current century, we have a new generation of catalog readers. This is what<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>systems engineers<\/li>\n<li>solution architects<\/li>\n<li>systems architects<\/li>\n<li>and others<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>They have read the product catalog end to end and then again. Except today we don&#8217;t have paper catalogs, we have websites and control consoles and such. The catalog publishers have changed: Google, Amazon AWS, Facebook, and even Apple and Microsoft.<\/p>\n<p>As a user, I describe my needs, and the catalog readers point to the glossy pages in the catalog and tell me, &#8220;We&#8217;ll get one of these, one of those, and hold them together with duct tape, and &#8230;&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Cynical? maybe, but the resemblance to the 1990s is striking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Dwayne Phillips We give new titles to an old profession. Back in the last decade of the prior century, I met several people at work who had one skill: They could read a product catalog. They would read the catalogs from DEC, Sun, IBM, and even Dell. They would proclaim, &#8220;Look what is out [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[238,83,12],"tags":[240,200,135],"class_list":["post-2214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analysis","category-computing","category-design","tag-analysis","tag-computing","tag-design"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2214"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2215,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2214\/revisions\/2215"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}