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.
I am a Machinist, In a small shop of a larger complex run by non-machinist folks who love to come in and tell me how to make parts, or that I should be using a different tooling setup, or that Im not allowed to do the processes on the job sheet THEY wrote. Complaining about how when they ask me to remove a few thousanths of material from a surface it also removes the cadium coating on top of it and they have to get it re-coated. I had someone report us because we “make to much swarf” when we machine parts. Called it wastefull usage of material. Well, when you you want a 3” bore cut into a block and the entire stock that you ordered is oversized, we have to remove all the extra stock for the part to come out to spec? Complaints of hazmat usage (machine coolant and tapping fluid) and our shop rags being contaminated with it (you want clean parts out at the end right?) Then the building managers come in and take away our beautiful, perfect, meticulously maintained Monarch lathe and give us a used, beat up, Tiawanese lathe instead…… Oh, and then complained about the money spending because none of our toolposts and tooling worked with the “new” lathe and we asked for tooling. And the scrap bin is off limits but gets thrown in the dumpster.
Nearly got hit this morning by a guy talking (to himself? wireless cell phone?) as he blew through a stop sign from a cross street onto the main street we were driving on, making a left turn across our path. He cussed us out for honking the horn as we screeched to a halt and let him have both sides of the street. Ungrateful!
Lucky you weren’t hit. Many years ago I was t-boned by a woman who ran a stop sign like you and was gabbing away on a cell phone. Had my 3 kids in the car and fortunately I saw her out of the corner of my eye and skidded my car sideways so that she only hit us with a glancing blow (although it totaled my car). To top it off she had no license and no insurance. Police wouldn’t even come to the site because it was only a traffic accident with no injuries (that’s San Francisco for you).
In the end none of us were injured so that was the important thing.
That’s why lots of companies are and have been going to off-the-shelf software solutions when possible. Might not be as full-featured as in-house software but it’s often better quality, cheaper, and offers cleaner upgrade paths. I wrote securities valuation and pricing programs so it was not something that could be purchases, fortunately for me
