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Comment by KennyBlanken | Hacker News Reader

According to Bill Long's linkedin page he has ~25 years Fortran experience and holds "principal member" status on a Fortran committee for much of those. Describes himself as a "master" engineer.

Someone with that level of experience and recognition should be capable of either implementing the function themselves, or at the very least have the professional network to know a number of people capable of doing so for HPE.

I would also expect significantly more tact and professionalism.

The email record screams "BOFH bench warmer."

Edit: the more I think about this, the more I think he probably sold himself to HPE as being able to give them what they want from FORTRAN due to his committee membership. Which turned out to not be true, thus placing his salary at risk.

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He's even a co-author on a paper that specifically uses Fortran <-> C interop. Which is the kind of work he's asking for here.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3418084

I'm aware that sometimes you can get your name on the paper by riding the other author's coattails, but it's interesting.

This seems like a rather uncharitable take.

Cray has their own Fortran compiler, so it's quite possible that Bill is forbidden from contributing to other Fortran compilers due to IP issues.

And as you can see from the thread, he's caught in the middle, passing messages between a customer who wants this issue fixed and a team that doesn't want to fix it. That's not a fun place to be - you basically get yelled at by both sides.

Well, as a "master engineer" with 25 years of experience, maybe he should just fix it himself instead of expecting unpaid volunteers to jump for him just because he's doing work for the government.

True. Maybe he's just a slow coder and thinks it would go faster if someone familiar with the codebase tries to fix it.

The only reason "ip issues" exist is because an employer says so, and they can say otherwise at any time.

If the customer wants something, then you the vendor either give them what they want, or don't.

It's no one else's problem.

There are no "ip issues" preventing an employee from working on a competing product, only from doing so without permission which the employer is free to grant at any time.

This possible issue does not provide any tiniest bit of of excuse, and does not invalidate the critiques at all.

No one is "caught in the middle" in any way that anyone else has any obligation to care about, not even a merely "being a nice and considerate person" obligation.

If the customer wants something, the vendor can absolutely satisfy them any time they want by a number of different means. And certainly this employee is no voiceless intern, is both knowledgeable and empowered enough to inform his employer about those means. If they don't employ any of those means, it's no one else's fault and so no one else's problem.

Bill isn't stuck in the middle. Bill is providing a service.

Bill has no right or ability to compel third parties not involved in the transaction to help him provide that service.

If Bill can't get the job done, that's Bill's problem.

The buck stops with Bill.

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