| I used to work at Xerox as a software developer, about 15 or so years ago, as a fresh young graduate. It was interesting, but also at the same time kind of weird. You noticed that there were lots of young graduates, but also lots of old staff. With very few people in-between that age range. You'd then realise they'd get graduates and utilised them until they left. While the older staff generally got to a certain salary band, were satisfied and then stuck around until their generous pension could mature. It was like working in a Dilbert strip with a huge amount of bureaucracy and process, with cargo culting thrown in. All the processes were internal to Xerox too and had acronyms prefixed with X as it was stuff like "Xerox Process Improvement Process". At the other end of the scale the amount of research I heard about was amazing. They had numerous patients on e-ink displays way before ebooks like the Kindle came to market. But they never seemed to actually make something marketable apart from printers. I remember being told about a room they had in the R&D labs (again 15 years ago) and it was all white boards. On the ceiling of the room was a camera that scanned all the whiteboards. You could write on the white boards a p in a square [P] and it would send the contents of that wall to the printer, or an e in a square then an e-mail address and it would then send it off as an e-mail instead. |