I’ve always said the real moral of Jurrasic Park was “don’t fuck with IT”
He is the only one on the island but there are more developers. Hammond even says to “call his team In Cambridge”.
If I was the only onsite Devops and my professional support lived in Cambridge with an 8 hour time difference, I’d have a hard time not selling corporate secrets to the highest bidder.
I dont remember the movie well but I thought everyone left the island and this was the minimum team left behind.
Yes, Nedry owned his IT company, but Hammond was withholding Nedry’s final paycheck until debugging was done. Which had already gone over budget due to feature creep, so Nedry was doing it himself because he didn’t have money to pay his people because Hammond wouldn’t give him the money they agreed on. Hence why Nedry was looking to make some side money, he’s literally doing all that debugging and final system fixes for free on the promise that he won’t be screwed again by Hammond. IIRC anyway, its been like 30 years since I read the book… And a lot of my perspective changed as I got older and I got more experience in the industry. As a kid, I thought you took the job you should do the job, but as an adult I understand a lot better the dynamics of the situation and while I still think if you took the job you should do the job, I completely understand the feeling of getting Fucked by someone who would rather throw money at lawyers than just pay what they agreed on.
I have been in his position, and while I didn’t betray the client and get killed, I really understand his mindset and “Fuck-it” attitude. Hammond is wealthy and using his position and power to spare as much expense as possible and step on as many contractors as possible. Kind of like an Orange Cheeto I know of. I had a company I work for that had to file bankruptcy because a half-billion dollar a year company hired us then charged back their initial payment and refused to issue final payment unless we did a ton of extra work, and when we did that, they just said “thanks” and vanished. Apparently American Express lets you contest a payment 6-12 months after it was issued and their stance is if you want your money you should sue.
“I didn’t betray the client and get killed”
Betrayed the client and lived? /s
Yes, actually, I betrayed the client by preparing lots of paperwork and examples of the system working so when they went to court they would actually have to defend their position.
It didn’t help me not get laid off though because losing 4 months of payroll in a chargeback is pretty brutal for a company’s books.
And that company never came back from it. A subdivision of the company, survived, but the company lost its building, and most of its employees during the bankruptcy and restructuring. And it happened right before Christmas, so the entire company got laid off for the holidays, it was a lot of fun /s. Fuck predatory self-help companies…
Wow that missing back story really explains quite a bit. It wasn’t just greed it was revenge and getting what’s owed.
I was just thinking about this yesterday - and how it seems like one of the very few flaws with the film was how unclear they made this. Nearly everyone misunderstands this. It would have really helped if there’d been a couple more lines on it, or shots of staff clearing out, etc. Instead it seemed like there were about 10 people at the whole park.
Newman had multiple monitors before it was cool.
Was it multiple monitors or multiple systems? Can’t see if there’s another keyboard and mouse there in front of the one behind him. Though I suppose it was all supposed to be mainframe terminals (running Linux in the movie, which I’m not sure had a mainframe version, as I understand, it started as a Unix for desktops, where Unix was the mainframe OS).
Edit: the Linux thing was my own bad memory, Lex recognizes Unix, which is weird because it was an experimental unix filesystem browser UI and most kids wouldn’t have access to machines that run any kind of unix, so it wouldn’t have been a “I played with some computers in my garage” kind of thing. Though being Hammond’s grandkids, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that she did have access to a mainframe either through Hammond’s companies or from access to universities and the like.
Holy shit, this thread made me realize Hammond invited the scientists and grandkids to the island with a hurricane inbound. Not like those things just pop up like tornadoes. You know it’s coming as much as a week in advance.
Yep, but he needed to push through legal and investor complaints, so rush rush rush, damn the risk. They’re “captains of industry”, they couldn’t possibly fail!
Jurassic Park is a tale of dangers of not investing enough on IT
Samuel L was also an IT guy, right? But yes, an expense was spared
Nedry was the systems engineer, Arnold was the operations admin. One was a construction worker, the other was the architect. Neither can truly do the other’s job, but are aware of how they do it.
My friend is sole IT guy for two production lines, managing security, multiple production buildings, redundancy, sensor lifetimes, emergency concepts etc, he has one colleague managing the human IT part
Like he manages all the machines and the other one all MS-Shit
It is always very interesting listening to his stories about managing multiple production lines where it costs so much if the machine is not running for some time
It is about producing chocolate, lol
I love the redundancy on tech level, but not on the human level. I can only imagine the manager’s dashboard with risks and mitigating actions.
I contract at a place that has lost well over a million in the last 11 months in downtime that’s specifically for low voltage/comms failures. They have been looking for an electrician for 11 months and 49-65k USD is the salary range.
They could have paid triple that and saved money AND got the deliverables for the year. They won’t now.
“Guys, you don’t understand, my MBA specifically said this would work!”
Often followed by “Hmm, can we pay someone to help us solve this personnel puzzle? Let’s find a consultant. I’m no rube though, I’m a shrewd business cretin - if we don’t find a consultant with an MBA fancier than mine, we’ll just be wasting our money.”
Haha, yes
They are so fucked, if some mad lad is road raging and prevents my friend reaching his workplace
Prime raise negotiation environment
You’d think so, but it really is just like Jurassic Park.
The way I see it, they could demand the same pay as 2 people so that their boss doesn’t have the hire 3 people.
Newman.
He also had Samuel L Jackson.
Arnold was an engineer, though. He was competent in using the system and not totally lost when poking around the code, but he’s no computer scientist. Basically, he was a power user / sysadmin rather than a developer.
Stares motherfuckerly at you…
🥇 You just won my comment-of-the-day awards 👍
Yay!!!
I’m pretty sure Nedry was the engineer. Arnold was systems administrator / operator. Neither were computer scientists.
Nedry was literally a computer scientist and systems designer / programmer from Cambridge. Arnold was a theme park engineer (designing rides and control systems; some programming involved but a whole different paradigm than developing large systems).
Source: Have read the novel 50+ times.
👍
They are UNIX systems, they don’t need an entire team to be managed once installed and running.
I’m only half joking. It’s not UNIX but I’ve been working with “legacy” systems like IBM i mainframes, and those things don’t need much to run. Sure, you have to update the system and the software once every few months, manage backups, role switches, etc., but it can mostly be done by a few people. But yeah, systems like this were (are) insanely expensive so most of his budget probably went there.
Sounds about right.
Not only that, but a poorly paid and mistreated guy who volunteers to sell out major secrets.
