Rookie programmer's code goes up in flames ... kind of This week's instalment of Who, Me takes a slightly different turn, as in the end (spoiler alert) it wasn't their fault. But what a lesson to learn, nonetheless. Our correspondent, who we'll Regomize as "Bernie", had just landed a job in the IT department of a well-known chain of grocery stores. Each store had its own central …
Bernie deployed the code to one guinea-pig store, and tested it there. It worked. Sigh of relief. "Intending to deploy to the wider network the next day*," Bernie went home.
"The next day*," Bernie found unhappy faces all around. Red flags were popping up all over the system since the prior night's update, and questions were being asked: What did you update? Did you test the code? Was it compiled correctly?
Am I missing something obvious? It happens.
Presumably they knew that the guinea-pig store had been given the update.
I'm guessing the red flags were mostly "this entire store dropped off the system" and second-order impacts from that (batches failing instead of skipping the store, maybe).
I've been accused of crashing servers after looking at, not touching, a desktop computer on the same network in the last day or so. Has happened more than a handful of times.
It seems to be a genetic flaw in humans ... We always have to find somebody other than me or us to place the blame upon. You or them works nicely, if not logically, no matter how tenuous the link.
Work in support and you don't even need to launch code.
My boss has, more than once, received calls from people saying that the reason their printer isn't working was that I was seen walking nearby! Once, I can remember showing the manager that their printer had, in big red writing, the words "out of paper" on its screen.
And we let people like that vote?
This reminded me of "School's Out" - a type-in adventure game for the 48k ZX Spectrum.
One of the objects was a guinea pig, which you have to feed beer in order for it to get drunk and stagger into a laser beam... and you'd have a hole in the wall and a fried guinea pig.
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I worked on cheque processors years ago and one of the machines had a device fitted that, if given the wrong value in its command string, would engage all it's solenoids and bust into flames.
It never happened with released code but did a couple of times with beta.
I never really found out why it was beyond the abilities of the writers of the controlware to screen out these problematic commands.
I've had that kind of situation before, as a developer in a professional setting. Also working for a well-known shop chain, as it happens.
I'd updated one bit of code. Maybe five minutes later, something apparently unrelated fell over. My supervisor told me to go take a look at my code and find out how it had caused the issue. To start with, I agreed. It is a reasonable inference to make off the cuff.
An hour later, I reported back and said that I couldn't find any link. I was told to go back and look again.
A further hour later, I reported back with the same. Once more I was told to go back and continue looking, as my supervisor didn't believe in co-incidences. I pushed back, saying that if there was a link I can't find it, someone with better knowledge of the system needs to take a look.
He took a look. My change hadn't caused the issue - someone else had uploaded a change at the same time and had been keeping their head down the entire morning. Fair play to my supervisor, he did apologise.
I was less fortunate, I could show that not only did the change I make have nothing to do with the issue but that the error message was misleading as it did not describe the real problem (yes, I found out the real cause myself) and when told of this the team that caused the issue still pushed the blame back to me.
Despite all my evidence and the eventual correct identification of the culprits I got hauled up before HR because "I was trying to pass the blame for my mistake onto other people". The stain never left my records and was used at every opportunity to knock back any good reports from people I had done work for so I never scored better than 'low to average' at appraisal/pay rise time.
We once had a vendor come out to upgrade the OS on an instrument controller PC, the hard disc chose that moment to die and the technician got full blame from the scientists...
I ended up going over there, explaining that it was bad luck[0] and digging out a spare disc which meant he survived the day...
[0] Of course the disc wouldn't have had much longer to live and OS upgrades are IO heavy
If you think its bad now, just wait until you get married
Been there, done it, for the last 25 years.
The other scenario is when you tell She Who Must Be Obeyed <u>not</u> to do something because X will probably happen (X being something classified as Not Good). You are ignored, and inevitably X happens. You are then blamed for giving the warning. <sigh>
"I would frequently remind my late friend about how one time his wife DREAMED he had an affair and was mad at him for like a week because of it."
My first wife had such a dream, about me and one of her mates, and, a decent interval after we separated, it turned out to be prophetic.
Every company has a managers in IT that aren't very technical, they kind of get shuffled in via the BA route and then because they understand the biz procs and know how to code some basic Python they're now IT management. They're often very, very adept at making surreal leaps of faith completely unrelated cause and effect situations. "The process you put in last week failed? Hmm, well there was failure on a AD server 4 years ago right?". WTF?!
She knows she broke it, but she makes you touch it so she can blame you. Toxic. All kidding aside: Run. Run hard, run now, run silent, run deep, run like Mexican water through a first time tourist. The keyword here is: Run.
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I was scrolling through the comments as well, to see if anyone had noticed this.
It's Thanksgiving in Canada (More icon for me) & Columbus Day (Re-branded as Indigenous People's Day) in US.
My guess is the new PTB, thought they could slip this one through without anybody noticing or caring (On their side of the pond), they would have got away with it to if it hadn't been for those meddling Brits.
I think the Regoniser did rather well with Bernie, a pint for Mr Powell -->
That's too generous for simply changing the character's name from Harry - https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/01/who_me/ .
Are we now going to see a plethora of recycled stories with changed terminology for the Americas (in this case changing "supermarket" to "grocery store")?
"recycled stories with changed terminology for the Americas"
Happening everywhere, it seems....had BBC Radio 4 on for the commute home, and found myself listening to a totally American interview - both voices involved were American, as were the opinions which had sod all to do with the UK.
FFS Auntie, are you so short of Brit. content (Or lazy) that you have to re-package someone else's sound-bites? It's supposed to be 'B'BC Radio, not 'A'BC Radio!
I've got nothing against American content (In any form), as long as it's relevant to me/us on this side of the pond. I'm beginning to get fed up with having to listen to or see reams of guff about his Trumpness, or what US politician has been accused of what and by whom, of which state has enacted/repealed which law etc. If I want to find out what's happening in North America, I'll go to NA sources....
It's worth pointing out that the BBC receives most of it's funding from UK citizens via the legal obligation to obtain an annual 'TV Licence' to consume BBC visual content or any real-time-broadcast at all on the gogglebox or online. It remains mercifully ad-free (Apart from information regarding it's own services, which is fair enough I suppose).
I find lately that the visual content pushed by the Beeb, and especially the news, has IMO become biased as opposed to properly objective, now has too many opinions dressed up as facts, lots of speculation instead of facts and is increasingly less relevant to UK life.. Still, that's just my opinion - your mileage may vary. I'm still a supporter of the concept of a publicaly-funded state broadcaster, but I'm getting ever closer to doing the modern thing - if you don't like the service, don't buy it!
That last personal rant aside, the BBC still does a good job in an environment that must be very difficult to operate in.
> Are we now going to see a plethora of recycled stories with changed terminology for the Americas (in this case changing "supermarket" to "grocery store")?
The SuperMarket was _invented_ in America. And I bet very few UK towns have SUPERmarkets like we have here, as big inside as a cricket pitch (whatever that is). --edit, much bigger than a pitch.
If you don't want recycled Who, Me?s, SUBMIT! We've all had unexpected screwy events. Your full real name will be discretely Regomised. Which also means that your poor or embellished memory can't be proven false. If you can write good enuff for Commentardy, you can write Who, Me?s (if the story is good, Richard will fix gross illiteracy).
I've seen sparks shoot out the back of a PC (one I built). I've been on my way to a no-go PC and smelled burnt possum. I've maintained a server in a bathroom closet. I've written some of these for another "Ooops!" IT column. But the statue of imitations has expired so maybe I will recycle them here.
It's a bet you'd probably lose, as clearly from your opening paragraph you've not set foot outside the good ol' US of A.
In the UK space retail & housing space is at a premium, but I can think of more than a few stores as big as the ones encountered in Canada & the US in more than one city or town by one or more chains in the UK.
Another area in which the UK is thankfully deficient in is due to the lack of supersized people, they don't have to build supersized supermarkets to accommodate them in the first place.
Not long after I'd been got shot of by a previous employer I heard a tale from a co-worker still there that half a dozen or so laptops had got ruined by someone leaving the trolly they were on under an aircon unit in the computer build room, which, being old and in dire need of maintenance which they hadn't paid for, happened to freeze up and leaked water all over them. Apparently, a rather paranoid manager had quietly enquired whether I could have been behind the aircon malfunction by 'hacking into it over the internet'.
Once on a government contract, I turned an accusing look on a fellow from another company who had just done something--I forget what--when the entire network froze. It turned out to have nothing to do with him--somebody had plugged a 100-base-T device into a 10-base-T network, I believe.
A clear demonstration of the ironclad rule:
The last person to touch the system will get blamed for anything that goes wrong. Anything.
PS, you can start a fire with a computer program. At least, when I was running an unexpectedly long program (in BASIC, no less) using a Teletype terminal (yes, 110 baud, 95 db), the terminal eventually got tired of sitting there spinning its wheels, so to speak, and decided to have a quick smoke. Much to the consternation of all the other inhabitants of the erstwhile seminar room where the terminals were kept. Exeunt omnes.
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