When I posted it, it said 10, 9, 8, etc... hmm...
JHolland
@JHolland
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RE: Top 10 things likely to overhear if you have a Klingon on your Software Team
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Top 10 things likely to overhear if you have a Klingon on your Software Team
- This code is crap! You have no honor!<o:p></o:p>
- A TRUE warrior does not comment his code!<o:p></o:p>
- By filing this bug report you have questioned my family’s honor! Prepare to die!<o:p></o:p>
- You question the worthiness of my code? I should kill you where you stand!<o:p></o:p>
- Our competitors are without honor!<o:p></o:p>
- Specs are for the weak and timid!<o:p></o:p>
- This machine is a piece of gagh! I need dual ClearPath A-Series processors if I am to do battle with this code!<o:p></o:p>
- Perhaps it is a good day to die! I saw we ship it!<o:p></o:p>
- My program has just dumped Stova Core!<o:p></o:p>
- Behold, the keyboard of Kahless! The greatest code warrior who ever lived!
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RE: Meeting "customer demand"
Making the progress bar pop up earlier would have been hard(er).
I could have done that, or done something else similar, but I had more
important work to do on the software like adding real new features for
non-idiot customer.
And please note I am not the one who scammed the customer. The
company president (who knew why I had added the fake delay in the first
place) told me to cut it in half when the customer asked for the
algorithm to be optimized. He was careful to tell me not to take
it out altogether lest we tip back into the "WAY too fast and CAN'T be
right" zone.
Afterwards (a couple of months later, actually), I found out that he had charged the customer for the "upgrades". -
Meeting "customer demand"
This is not really a programming WTF, but more of a customer WTF.
Also it's just a funny story. Maybe we've all done this?
At my previous job, I worked on a team that built automated scanning
systems. The software controlled a motor that moved the scanning
head over the piece of material, took data points in a grid pattern,
and fed the results into the data acquisition module of the software.
I was responsible for the data analysis and flaw detection portion of
the system. Once we had scanned a piece of material, I ran
through the data points, compared each to a set of criteria, marked
them good or bad, and as a last step, determined whether there were
enough bad points in a small enough area to constitute a reject.
While the software was doing this analysis, it popped up a window that
said "Analysis working..." and counted down a progress bar. When
it was done, it closed that window and popped up the results
window. Initially it took about one minute, depending on the
parameters the customer set up and the size of the data array, which
depended mostly on the size of the part being scanned. Customers
commented on the slowness, and I realized that I could do most of the
analysis during the scan, when the processor had a lot of free
time. I reworked the software to do "real-time flaw detection",
working on each line of data as it was acquired. Once the scan
was done and the progress window popped up, the analysis routine only
needed to consider the final line of data and then was done, so the
progress window disappeared very quickly and the results were
displayed. I was happy with my code, and our customers were
pleased.
Except one.
The customer complained that the analysis was "WAY too fast" and "MUST
be broken". They were especially concerned because the analysis
appeared to take the same amount of time no matter how much data was
collected. I tried explaining the changes I had made but they
were unshakeable in their belief that the analysis "couldn't possibly
be that fast." They couldn't seem to understand that the analysis
was taking place WHILE the scan was going on.
Just to be on the safe side, I spent a couple of hours verifying that the analysis worked the same as before.
The solution, naturally, was to add a delay in the progress bar (for
that customer only) so it spent a full ten seconds counting down,
longer for a big data array. Now they were happy!!
Six months later, they complained that the analysis was taking too long
and could we speed it up. I cut the fake delay in half and they
were overjoyed. It was not MY decision to charge them $5,000 for
"optimization and refinement of algorithms".