BreakPoint
This is Hooovahh
I never figured it out. I feel like if someone had a boring job, and had to give unlimited free drinks to a bunch of drunks at a cheap motel, that they might make some fun out of it and see if anyone complains when they get the drinks wrong. I noticed, I just didn't care. In some cases I also thought that maybe they were just using up stuff that they had extra of. Or they already opened a can or orange juice and used half of it, might as well use the other half on the next person?
Manager: How much is this going to cost?
Supplier: $16M USD.
Manager: That doesn't seem right, are you sure?
Supplier: Oh my mistake I meant $32K USD.
Manager: That's a big difference, can I see an itemized list of the costs?
Supplier: Oh never mind, it is $200K USD.
Manager: Okay well that is also a big difference. I want to see the breakdown of how much each thing costs that adds up to that.
Supplier: Now it is $300K USD, here is the breakdown.
Item(s):1 Cost per item: $300K
Thank you, we have decided to choose a different supplier.
Drinking Foreigner
A friend of mine was from another country and he was in America for one of his first trips. While he was here he went to the bar with some friends and was drinking. Late in the night he’s getting drunk and he says to his friend:
Man, I am really getting pissed.
Why? Are you alright?
Yeah I’m fine, I’m just at the bar getting pissed.
Did someone say something to you? What’s wrong?
NOTHING IS WRONG. I’m at the bar, I’m drinking with my friends, and I’m getting pissed.
WELL NOW I’M GETTING PISSED.
GOOD!
For those that don’t know, “getting pissed” can mean getting drunk.
Another night he was drinking heavily and decided to slow down so he switched to lite beer. Apparently over there lite beer means less alcohol. Here it means lite on taste and is generally easier to drink but has the same alcohol content. He woke up very drunk the next day.
So what changed again?
We had a DUT that we tested which had a set of firmware on it. It seemed every time a DUT had a new firmware version, things in the tester would break. Most often they would change memory addresses of data, or how to talk to the device, or more things are now needed to make it happy. It was very frustrating because I would try to help the test engineers but every time it didn't work I needed to go find answers to what the changes were. Compounding the issue was the fact that the firmware was written by another division that was not in the country, didn’t speak English, and didn’t provide release notes. Still conversations like this happen with the firmware engineers.
Hooovahh: We are never told about firmware changes, and they often break our test applications. We need to be more informed about the changes so we can react in the testing environment more quickly. Our testers stop working when there is a new version of the firmware.
Firmware Engineer: Well if you want to know the differences in firmware you can just ask me.
Hooovahh: Okay, what changed in the firmware since the last revision?
Firmware Engineer: Nothing changed.
Hooovahh: ….then why doesn’t the test run unless I send this new signal.
Firmware Engineer: Oh yeah you need to send that or else the DUT won’t turn on.
@Hooovahh wrote:
So what changed again?
So I'm not the only one who has this problem!!! At least my firmware engineers are in the same building.
In a previous project, firmware was constantly changing on me (something like 10 releases a few months for a single SOM, plus 4+ other devices that needed programed). I was lucky to have an amazing senior software engineer in charge of the firmware. I found a problem in my testing, I would just go to him, we would look through the code together, and usually by lunch we found the issue. This included going through debug logs and him explaining every line of code along the way. Unfortunately, he retired.
Profoundly Pressing Parcel Processing Pronto
While I was working at a company, some big wigs from the corporate office were visiting. One of the guys got word that I was very good at software development, and asked if I could get in contact with some colleges in China who were struggling. I had already done a bunch of software development in the areas they needed and had a working demo of what they wanted. So I talked to them about their needs and emailed them some software.
A couple weeks later they came back asking if I could do some more driver development for them. The issue was the hardware they wanted to use was very new and had features mine didn’t. I was quite busy with other work at the time and just kept putting their project on the back burner. They insisted on knowing the address of where I was so they could send me this new hardware so I could write drivers for it. At 5:30PM at the end of the day I sent an email with the office address. When I came in the next morning there was a box on my desk with the new hardware in it. I was shocked. I couldn’t believe that in about 16 hours, this box made it halfway around the world and on my desk. At that point I just had to work on their stuff. The flight time alone would be about 13 hours, and they must have spent a bunch of money just to get it on my desk so quickly.
I finished up the code for them and put the hardware in a box by my desk expecting them to ask for it back, but they never did.
