thing that irk me....

I wish they had a recording amprobe to document this intermittent problem…Then again they once wired up a brand new 7.5 hp and after it just buzzed told me to go get another one.
I asked them to check the pairings… Yep, they had it paired wrong…couldn’t read the numbers well without readers…
facepalm

People

Yeah, reminds me of something my granpappy used to say.

Yeah, a bud related a union story to me. He did all sorts of odd jobs in his “career”, including roadwork.

So they get a mixer with full load inside (hot asphalt, tar, rocks, whatever’s in the mix), and it stops turning. Everyone’s sitting around doing his job (ie, nothing). He sees it’s something in the chain that spins the barrel. Either it’s fix it now, or it cools down and solidifies into black conglomerate that’d have to be jackhammered out of the barrel.

So he does a 30sec fix to unjam it and get it spinning again. Happy Day, right? Nope. Got chewed out for not sticking to His Job, and pretty much blackballed from that crew.

:person_facepalming:

For the record, I don’t like unions, and I don’t dislike unions. They simply exist. Whether they’re good or bad depends on their level of jackassery.

That reminds me of Ron Swanson.
“I used to work for a guy for 30 years, never learned his name.
Best friendship I ever had.
We still dont talk sometimes.”

Intermittent failures.

First half of my career was as a field Tech on analog photocopiers. The dreaded "intermittent failure" was always the bane of a Tech's existence.

When dealing with an intermittent problem I was unable to duplicate, I never really knew if that last thing I did fixed it or, if it just went away intermittently, until an indefinite period of time had passed.

One thing I learned from dealing with intermittent issues was, to believe the end users who were telling me what the symptoms of the failure were, however non-technically they phrased it.

After all, they don't know the equipment well enough to make up what they're saying.

slmjim

I spent a few years doing QC checks on software after the programmers reported bugs fixed.
They were never happy when I said “well, you are the only one who made any change and the bug disappeared, but this list of new problems popped up …”

I got “but the bug is gone, right?” pushback.

And I replied “Your bugfix change breaks a bunch of new things; it’s unsatisfactory.”

And once they shipped the product to the client, it wasn’t in good hands. The client had a manager who wanted to be given the correct results for every acceptance test that would be run, so he could write them down and show them to his boss as having been found acceptable.

The Volkswagen diesel testing scandal was no surprise.

And I’m living on a planet among people who build fission power plants.

Scary.

I spent 35 years writing financial software until I retired and I can assure you that most programmers are terrible at vetting their programs for bugs. Typically they just check for what they’re coding for and maybe what the users usually do rather than all possible scenarios (which actually is hard to do in some cases).

Naturally I was the exception with perfect and bug-free code :stuck_out_tongue:

Of course the Volkswagen scandal wasn’t bad coding or debugging, rather it was intentional fraud.

Wellp, if everything didn’t have to be done yesterday (even if only assigned today), there’d be more time to debug code and make sure it would be quite stable.

I did exactly that, regardless of when it was “needed”, and my boss snarkily called it “the G factor”. Ie, if it could take him 1 day to do something, it’d take me 3 days instead, at least according to him. Then again, he had no clue what built-in functions like memset() were, so he had his own function to clear string space (even if not even needed). :person_facepalming:

What I do now is ask, preemptively, “Do you want it done fast or do you want it done right?”. Answering “both” is unacceptable. If minutes count, and you need it now now now, I’ll do it fast, with emphasis on getting it done as fast as possible, with zero error-checking or sanity-checking. If you want it done right, it’ll take more time.

I’ll actually try to break it, to imagine the impossible happening, to check edge-conditions, etc. And even then, sometimes you just miss something.

Gotta admit, though, it was quite clever!

First, they designed to the test, based on the fixed and published driving cycle of the test. Then, check to see if the car’s likely on a treadmill or actually on the road.

James Kirk would be proud!

And that…. in many cases, is one of the biggest problems with unions. Common sense has left the building……

My workplace UI was updated and now it takes me more time to get my work done.

Just had a first training on our new workplace software, and it looks like everything is going to take several times as long to get done.
The focus, as always, seems to be on putting processes in place for their own sake, rather than for making things simpler and easier to achieve.

A thing about firmware and software. This was way back, so I had to dig in the depth of my little grey cells.
A long, long time ago people invented the PC, later followed by the PC-XT and the PC-AT.

These had quite straight forward mother boards, without any integrated IO, audio of video.
The standard video-cards were not very impressive. If you were into playing games, you needed a good one.
So several companies were founded, focussing on making good, better, or best, video-cards.
And pretty soon some benchmark software was introduced to test these video-cards.

Then a certain brand emerged, with a reasonable price and a staggering performance on “the” benchmark.
In real life the (games, spreadsheet, text) the performance of that video-card was rather modest.
Later they found out that video-card was primarily designed to get the best scores at “the” benchmark!
This was in the eighties. The first IT-millions were made using benchmarks and PC-magazines! Sans internet.

I would choose the word “cheating”.
This is just one from thousands examples, which shows how useless are all this fixed tests and rules.
Some EU cars had asymmetrical frame between bamper and longitudinal beams. Two spacers connected them in triangle with front angle placed in the point that devided car width in 3/5 and 2/5. It worked well for years (EU safety tests require one front crash-test with 40% cross-section between car width and crash block, this triangle helped to distribute force between two longitudinal beams perfectly), but suddenly US safety departament involved new tests with 25% overlap. And something went wrong:
https://www.iihs.org/iihs/sr/statusreport/article/47/6/1
This problem probably claimed many lives. Much more than VW diesel cheat. But it is harder to explain it with politics, so nobody is interested in such discission on tv prime time etc.

/\. Well said kiriba-ru… . :+1:

None of this stuff was visible on the flight data recorder?

yeah!

Doesn’t the FAA have some kind of “silent complaint” mechanism in place so people can report on issues that are failing to be addressed that are critical to aircraft safety? What you say scares the hell out of me… just to think of the passengers that might be on such a flight, let alone the risk to your own life. Far better to ruffle some irresponsible feathers than to attempt survival of a crash.

VW became the poster-child for a kind of practice that has been going on… “soft” corruption that escapes prosecution. I’m continually amazed at the relatively small fines that are levied against businesses when caught violating regulations. In the end, they still end up better off than had they fully complied with the law… so, they will attempt to violate regulations again, just be more clever about it.

We live in an illusion of civility. At the core of humanity is still an ugly festering cancer of hostility and treachery. People who will throw others to the wolves because they refuse to respect their fellow human being, even if they’re of a lesser status, let alone destitute/homeless. Discrimination is rampant… not just on race and gender, but on economic status and other petty social factors. It’s hard to be optimistic in this age of raging arrogant degenerative populism.

I used to be an SQA engineer and then an SQA manager. I had a knack for breaking software. I know exactly what you’re talking about, as I’ve experienced it first hand. There were some developers who were pretty good at QC’ing their own code, but others were terrible. As long as it compiled that passed a quick simplistic test, they’d throw it “over the wall” for the QA folks to test it. At times it got so bad, I had QA engineers sit with the developer and test it right then and there. That worked, but it was a drain on resources. Our schedules slipped, but at least we had better code going out.

The only way out of this mess will be when AI development studios are created that make simplistic code writing obsolete (that’ll all be generated based on models and business rules). Developers will \be required only for the more complex kinds of logic requirements that AI can’t easily handle and held to a higher standard.