Posts by trevorde 845 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jun 2015
Worked on a product many years ago which supported various stereoscopic goggles. I took a support call from one vendor of these goggles that they no longer worked with our product. I forwarded it on to our graphics guy, who quickly found and fixed the issue. He said the functionality had been broken for about 4 years (!).
Went to a timber mill where the manager was complaining about the SCADA PC being a little unreliable. It was an ancient 286, back when Pentiums were commonplace, so it was probably getting to the end of its life. Opened it up and it was chock full of sawdust! How it didn't catch fire was beyond me. Spent 10 mins with a vacuum cleaner, wiped all the dust and it ran perfectly. I suspect it will still be running at the heat death of the universe.
All companies get to a certain size and then decide: "Of the thousands of CRM systems on the market, our business is so unique that *none* of them are suitable. However, this one from [insert CRM/ERP vendor here], does most of what we need. In fact, they have assured us that, with some minor customisation, it will do *exactly* what we want."
Software companies are even worse because they say: "We have all these highly paid developers, just sitting there, doing nothing. Why don't we get them to do it? It's just 'software'. How hard can it be?"
Unless your core business is being a CRM vendor, you're better off changing your business to suit one of the many CRM systems. It'll be cheaper, quicker and less hassle.
uplift = price rise
Resource Action = redundancies
workforce rebalancing = mass redundancies
rightskilling = redundancies for those doing the work
redeployment = relocating people until they resign
early professional hire = cheap, clueless graduate
nearshoring = cheaper for IBM but in a timezone close to customer
offshoring = even cheaper for IBM but in a timezone far from customer
dinobaby = anyone over 35
Worked at a company where my manager was in back to back meetings 8hrs a day, 5 days a week. I suggested the idea of a 'meetings tax':
* 10% of your salary is allocated as a 'meetings allowance'
* any meetings you attend are charged at £100/hr from your allowance
* first 15 mins of a meeting are free, after that it is chargeable
* you can leave a meeting at any time
* all meetings are optional
* if you absolutely require someone at a meeting, you have to pay for them
* at the end of the year, you get to keep anything in your 'meetings allowance' as a bonus
The idea is to incentivize:
* short, focused meetings
* emails not meetings
* only going to meetings if you can contribute or get value
* only call meetings if absolutely necessary
He thought I was joking. I wasn't.
They rolled out PCs a while ago at my brother's work. Some of the older typists had never seen a computer before, let alone used Windows. After a few beers on a Friday night, one of the blokes changed a few of the screensavers to scroll text across the screen: "KILL THEM ALL!" Really freaked out some of the women on the Monday!
[Larry Ellison to engineer] Did you say 850 *billion* lines of COBOL to be converted to Java?
[engineer] Err, that's right. All the banks, public utilities and mission critical apps are using it.
[LE] ... and they want to convert it *all* to Java?
[eng] Err, that's right...
[LE] I'M MINTED!
Worked for a company which had a product which did exactly this. It extracted the image from a car's ECU and listed all the variables and functions. This was then imported into Matlab where you could then replace the functions with your own or define a function to replace a variable. You could then press the magic button and it would reflash the ECU.
I looked under the covers and it was an unholy mix of Matlab, gnu disassemblers, assemblers and string replacement. They told me it was written by the bloke who developed the bit-torrent protocol. Three hundred years ago he would have been burnt at the stake for witchcraft.
Worked on a system where we had redundant failover servers, both quite well specced. Only problem was our software was so flaky we had to have a separate watchdog timer to reboot the system when our software stopped heartbeating. This happened a lot. The most reliable part of the system was the 'database' which was a set of text files, kept on a shared network drive (no sniggering at the back, please).
Worked on a product which was localised into something like 14 (!) languages. The reality was that it was comprehensively tested on US/UK English, minimally on French + German, and untested on the others. We had a release where one Korean string was missing. The result was an instant crash when accessing a menu when running in Korean. Cue an emergency hotfix for Korean users only.
https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-cybertruck-issues-delayed-development-leaked-report-2023/
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/a-leaked-tesla-report-shows-the-cybertruck-had-basic-design-flaws
https://cleantechnica.com/2023/06/09/does-the-tesla-cybertruck-has-serious-problems/
ESN is based on an international standard which layers functionality over an existing 4G network. It only uses 4G as a data carrier & does not use much/any carrier specific functionality.
From a personal perspective, having worked on integrating ESN into a previous company's product, the main reason for the delay was the quality, or lack thereof, of the Motorola ESN implementation (Kodiak). It was supplied as SAAS ie something 'in the cloud', and was the most flaky, unreliable and inconsistent product I have *ever* used in 30 years of professional development. We were also provided (Android) handset software for testing/integration which was a bit more reliable but still beta quality.
Motorola's Kodiak is one implementation of ESN but there are others by Ericsson et al. Unfortunately, each implementation has its own quirks (think html rendering) such that changing implementations would require a huge amount of testing and bug fixing. Motorola walking away from the project effectively means everyone has to restart.
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