[Richard Wallace]

Originally Posted by IndySam

...
You can blame the developer all you want but the buck has to stop with FIRST.

Originally Posted by dlavery

Perhaps. But I have to give them a little bit of slack when they tell the developer to make a change to the system (for which they are paying a significant price), and the developer just says "no - I won't do it. My way is so much better, and you (the customer) are just not smart enough to understand that."

Thank you, Dave, for getting this situation out into the open for all of us to see. I have understood for a couple of months now that the contractor FIRST hired has his own agenda. I think we've all been waiting for the real FIRST (the board and the GDC) to raise its voice about that.

My primary concern about the algorithm, which I expressed to my own favorite board member just after Week 1, was never that it is unfair, capricious, stupid, flawed, bogus, etc; although it is all that. My concerns were that it did not reflect the published intent of FIRST as stated in the manual, and that it in fact reflects the agenda of a software system contractor who fails to understand that role; i.e., who openly defies direction from his employer. The $20B firm that employs me would not employ such a contractor more than once.