Re: [BLACKBOX] Seasons Greetings from Linuxland

From: [at]} <Wojtek>
Date: Tue, 28 Dec 2010 10:42:02 -0500

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On Tue, 28 Dec 2010, Rene A. Krywult wrote:

>The program ran once a month, every month it crashed,
>and it took the original programmer about 1 week each month
> (with 10 hour working days!) to "fix" the bug.

A very smart guy. The purpose of life is not to write good code (or bad
code), but to stay employed and be productive for the employer. From what
you said, this programmer worked 50 hours every month on a critical
problem to enable the supermarket chain to operate. As long as the
employer is perceiving this as a critical task, the guy would have a safe
future.

I can share a similar story from my former workplace. A certain engineer
designed all control electronics for a critical part of the lab using
so-called Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). I was always curious,
why he did so, because a simple 8051 microcontroller would be up to the
task in most cases. Then I learned the answer. He is still employed, while
I am not.

The guy knew the rules. He used a tool which is so horrendously
complicated that nobody in the entire lab (500 people) would ever be able
to figure out what was going on. The code running on these devices is
complete mess (I saw it once) because FPGAs are not meant to be
used like simple microcontrollers. So the guy first sold the FPGAs to
the lab as a "modern tool", and then he quietly implemented the entire
mess using this tool. Nobody will ever dare to kick him out.

> Then he had a heart attack, and I, a newcomer to PL/I had to take
> over.....

If you were smart then you would have worked 100 hours every month fixing
the same bug over and over again. Did you? Are you still employed there?

W.

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Received on Tue Dec 28 2010 - 16:42:02 UTC