Still working for Amazon
Sexism, cronyism and a toxic work culture - Blue Origin is no different
Posts by trevorde
994 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jun 2015
Blue Origin employees complain of sexist culture that ignores safety concerns
If it's going to rain within the next 90 mins, this very British AI system can warn you
Kyndryl, the artist formerly known as IBM's Global Technology Services, names 10-person board
Frustrated dev drops three zero-day vulns affecting Apple iOS 15 after six-month wait
Check your bits: What to do when Unix decides to make a hash of your bill printouts
Senior IBMer hit with £290k demand from Big Blue in separate case as unfair dismissal claim rolls on
Kali Linux 2021.3 released with new tools
I would drive 100 miles and I would drive 100 more just to be the man that drove 200 miles to... hit the enter key
Monday 20th September 2021 13:37 GMT 
Taken literally
Many years ago, I had to remotely support a DOS/Windows laptop. The laptop was in the USA and I was in Australia, so the only way to do this was via fax.
The person with the laptop was about as computer literate as your great grandfather, so typing in commands was going to be a *real* stretch for them:
Me: type in "some command <enter>"
USA: I've typed that in, both with and without the quotation marks, but it just sits there doing nothing!
It took about 4 rounds of faxes to find out he actually typed in '<enter>' and not the 'Enter' key.
I was just glad there were no 'Press any key to continue' dialogs.
Amazon UK business swelled by 50%+ in 2020, and taxes soared. Lol, no, it means those paid by its staff
OpenSilver throws Microsoft Silverlight devs a lifeline as end of support looms – or you could forget it ever happened
Oracle sets its own JDK free, sort of, for a while
Cloud is fundamentally more profitable than on-prem, says Oracle's Safra Catz as revenue misses mark for investors
Linus Torvalds admits to 'self-inflicted damage' with -Werror as Linux 5.15 rc1 debuts
Tuesday 14th September 2021 12:45 GMT
No good work goes unpunished
Worked on a product where we decided to fix all the warnings. One dev slaved away for a fortnight and fixed *most* of the warnings. He found a few errors, so it was actually worthwhile.
The only place he couldn't fix the warnings was in some test code which achieved 100% code coverage on what it was testing. We decided to just disable 'warnings as errors' on that test code and chalk it up as a win overall.
You want us to make a change? We can do it, but it'll cost you...
Monday 13th September 2021 11:46 GMT
Lines of Code
Inherited a codebase at a previous company which had been done by a well known outsourcing company in Asia. It was the WORST code I had ever seen in my 20+ years of experience and, believe me, I've seen (and written) some stinkers. It had every anti-pattern and bad practice you can think of and a few new ones to boot.
Turns out the developers were penalised if they didn't write at least 200 lines of code per day. Their motivation was not to write good code but to write 200 lines of code. They weren't paid on quality but on volume. We brought the development inhouse where our developer's motivations were the exact opposite.
Never get mercenaries to defend your castle.
Monday 13th September 2021 11:34 GMT
Less than one character per week
One of the last bugs I fixed before I left a previous company was deep in the bowels of the Qt printing code.
Most printing issues can be reproduced using a virtual, PDF printer driver. This one could only be reproduced using a large format, physical printer. Each change/test required sending a print to said printer and examining the physical output. I managed to burn through a roll and a half of the printer paper (at £80/roll) over the course of three weeks of investigation. Management were horrified but I pointed out the cost was insignificant compared to my time.
In the end, the problem was a bug in the HP plotter driver. As far as I could tell, the plotter driver tiled the output and was running out of memory during the tiling process. The solution was to halve the size of the tile.
Thus, after three weeks of solid effort, the sum total of my efforts were something like:
tileSize = (previous code to calculate tile size) / 2;
That's right - three weeks of concerted effort for two characters!
'It takes a hell of a mental toll' – techies who lost work due to COVID share their stories
Tuesday 7th September 2021 11:00 GMT
One of the lucky ones
Was sacked from my (software developer) job the day before the first lockdown in the UK. Ironically, it was because I wanted to self-isolate and the owner didn't want to support that. I was one week away from completing my 6 month probation. It was really a blessing in disguise as the role wasn't panning out and I was looking to leave anyway.
Unfortunately, just about every company immediately froze recruitment, so there wasn't a lot happening. At least the sun was shining and I was able to spend time with my family. Even managed to learn some new skills in between applying for jobs.
After a month, I managed to get 3 offers and took a 100% remote job with a great company, working on an interesting product with some really nice people. Almost 18 months on and I still haven't been into the office. My wife is loving having me at home, I get to walk my daughter to/from school and my daily commute consists of walking into the spare room.
Every day we give thanks that we are in such a fortunate situation as there are so many people who have struggled to get by.
I still get calls from recruitment agents now the economy has picked up but I'm fairly settled for the moment.
Epilogue:
Looked up my previous company and they're still looking for my replacement as well as losing another developer
BRICS bloc deepens collaboration on ecommerce and selling services across borders
VMware shreds planned support for 'cheese grater' Mac Pro
Gartner Gartner on the wall, which is the hypest cycle of them all?
Git 2.33 released with new optional merge process likely to become the default: It's 'over 9,000' times faster
Pi calculated to '62.8 trillion digits' with a pair of 32-core AMD Epyc chips, 1TB RAM, 510TB disk space
Microsoft emits last preview of .NET 6 and C# 10, but is C# becoming as complex as C++?
The web was done right the first time. An ancient 3D banana shows Microsoft does a lot right, too
Google hits undo on Chrome browser alert change that broke websites, web apps
Chromebooks fighting for mind share at PC makers with higher-margin Windows 11 machines in the lead, says IDC
NHS England's £200m ERP replacement misses another deadline as procurement runs 2 years behind schedule
Bill for HMS Vanity Gin Palace swells by £50m in two months
NFT or not to NFT: Steve Jobs' first job application auction shows physically unique beats cryptographically unique
Security breaches where working from home is involved are costlier, claims IBM report
What is your greatest weakness? The definitive list of the many kinds of interviewer you will meet in Hell
Monday 26th July 2021 13:34 GMT
Why Symbian failed
For those old enough to remember and care, 'Symbian' was the operating system for Nokia phones.
Anyway, I had an interview with Symbian which turned out to be a *very* detailed technical interview around C++. I cut my teeth on C/C++, so it wasn't anything I hadn't encountered before. The interview went really well and they said "They'd get back to me". I had a lot of other irons in the fire and ended up accepting a role elsewhere.
Fast forward 3 months later and I get a phone call from Symbian: "Are you still available?" WTF? Anyone who could answer those questions would be snapped up straight away. The only people still on the market after that time would be those that couldn't get a job anywhere (except Symbian).
Epilogue:
Bumped into a Symbian graphics dev at a party a few years later. He said the OS was a POS and his development builds were broken most of the time.
Monday 26th July 2021 10:08 GMT
Interview 2.0
Interviewed at a company where one interviewer asked me:
"How would you work out the tidal flow volume of the Thames Estuary?"
WTF? I asked him how this was relevant to the company (they did inkjet printers). He admitted it wasn't relevant at all. I then asked *why* he was asking me this. He answered he wanted to 'see how I thought'.
Luckily, I was a mechanical engineer in a previous life and decided to have a bit of fun with him. Turned out he didn't know *why* he wanted the information or *what* he was going to do with it. I pointed out that I could simply make up a number and he'd be happy.
They ended up offering me the job but I'd found something more interesting.
Is it broken yet? Is it? Is it? Ooh that means I can buy a sparkly, new but otherwise hard-to-justify replacement!
Friday 23rd July 2021 13:48 GMT
Immortal
I have one of the original Amazon Kindle Fire HD tablets from 2012. There are no apps for it, a lot of websites don't load properly due to the browser not supporting javascript and FireOS has not been updated in many years. The screen is still crisp, email still works and the battery still holds a charge. I **hate** it because it refuses to die. It's keeping going to spite me from getting a new Android tablet.
Windows 11: What we like and don't like about Microsoft's operating system so far
Where on Gartner's Hype Cycle is Gartner's Hype Cycle?
IBM's 3% sales growth may not seem like much but it's the biggest it's had in three years
Imagine a world where Apple shacked up with Xerox in the '80s: How might it look today?
Wednesday 14th July 2021 13:08 GMT
Alternate, alternate history
* Intel sticks to making calculators which eventually consume more power than a kettle
* Bill Gates stays at Harvard, graduates magna cum lauda in maths and ends up writing Excel for Intel's calculators. The Intel Pentium floating point bug causes the global financial crisis of 2008. Gates is sued and goes bankrupt. He never writes software again.
* IBM buys CP/M from Gary Kildall but cannot market it successfully. It finds a niche in ATMs (automatic teller machines).
* GNU Hurd releases a kernel which works surprisingly well
* everyone ignores Linux, favouring GNU Hurd (inspite of RMS's weirdness)
* Linus Torvalds ports Linux to calculators for Intel
* Larry Ellison releases Oracle as open source, so super yachts never become a thing. He ends up living on the streets of Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs ignores him.
* Jobs doesn't screw over Wozniak and the two still exchange Xmas cards right up until Jobs' death
* Jobs acknowledges paternity of his daughter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Brennan-Jobs)
OK - the last two are a bit of a stretch
Ah, I see you found my PowerShell script called 'SiteReview' – that does not mean what you think it means
Suck on this: El Reg forces dog hair, biscuit crumbs, and disconcertingly sticky stains down two mini vacuums
Kubernetes a black hole of unpredictable spend, according to new report
Huawei dev flamed for 'useless' Linux kernel code contributions
Monday 28th June 2021 12:55 GMT
Rewarding the wrong metric
Worked on a product where the code was written by an outsourced agency. So the story goes, their devs had a KPI to write 200 lines of code per day. Thus, their motivation was not to write good, clean, extensible code but to hit their target number of lines of code. Needless to say, it was a complete and unmitigated disaster. The code had every anti-pattern you can think of and even a few new ones. You should never get mercenaries to defend your castle.
AWS launches BugBust contest: Help fix a $100m problem for a $12 tshirt
Treaty of Roam finally in ashes: O2 cracks, joins rivals, adds data roaming charges for heavy users in EU
Chromebook boom won’t outlive COVID-19 pandemic, says IDC
'Set it and forget it' attitude to open-source software has become a major security problem, says Veracode
Wednesday 23rd June 2021 10:43 GMT
Fix one thing, break two others
Just an update from down in the trenches:
Updating a third party library, for whatever reason, brings in the risk of regressions. Retesting the software is time consuming and expensive, so updating is avoided.
Quite often APIs also change, so it can be a large engineering effort to reintegrate libraries (I'm looking at you: React, .NET, Swashbuckle ...)
Oracle introduces frequent clouding points loyalty scheme
Utopia? Echoes of Delphi and Dreamweaver in new visual editor for React
Mark it in your diaries: 14 October 2025 is the end of Windows 10
Debian's Cinnamon desktop maintainer quits because he thinks KDE is better now
Do you come from a land Down Under? Where diesel's low and techies blunder
Monday 14th June 2021 10:51 GMT
Collect your printouts!
Worked at a company many years ago where the sysadmin had a *very* liberal attitude to content filtering ie there was none. He believed in treating people like adults and letting them have 'personal responsibility' for their web surfing. This worked very well until he had to have a talk to one of the guys:
[name redacted], you know I don't look at the firewall logs for your web browsing and, frankly, I don't care. But if you do print things out, for Christ's sake please collect them from the printer!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
