This is Hooovahh

[thoult]

I bought myself a copy of Death March by Edward Yourdon (by which I mean I got someone at work to buy it for me) to see what I glean from others' experiences of being in similar ridiculous projects.

"How long will this take?"

"Two years, if you provide the necessary resources."

"OK...you've got nine months and half as many people as you asked for. Go!"

I can always try to work smarter, and most people can probably work harder, but...eugh.

[crossrulz]

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@thoult wrote:

"How long will this take?"

"Two years, if you provide the necessary resources."

"OK...you've got nine months and half as many people as you asked for. Go!"

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That is why I have a tendency of multiplying my estimates by 4.  The first doubling is to account for things that come up.  The second doubling is because I know management will cut my budget in half.

[Hooovahh]

Years ago I was working at a company where there was a competitive bit between other companies to try to win a program from a customer to make a test system.  The sales team came to engineering and asked for estimates based on the "requirements" from the potential customer.  We went back and forth, looked at the time and effort for similar sized programs, taking into account the technical skills, and pay grades of the engineers needed, made a preliminary design, drafted up designs with hardware selection, and costs for each piece.  The sale team came back and told us the numbers were too high and to take out all padding and redesign it to be cheaper.  

So after several weeks of back and forth trimming away at the costs, they announced to the company that we had finally been awarded the program.  And what was the cost the sales team put out in their quote?  Half of what we estimated.  We had half the hours, and half the budget.  Why even ask engineering for their opinion and waste our time if you were just going to throw out a number anyway?  It worked out and the customer didn't really need all the requirements they asked for, but it always bugged me that sales were more concerned with winning a program, than being capable of executing it.

[JÞB]

Pi. we just multiplied by pi.  Much more convenient than 4 

Then some sales guy sold a theory. Eg.  It might be possible to predict that hail is occurring in a storm from the sphericity of the radar targets.  Well, that theory has been proven.  It really sucked implementing it though.

[Hooovahh]

Stole this one from Fabiola but it so perfectly states what I've been thinking when someone tells me that they have been doing LabVIEW for 15 years and don't need to improve.

"You don't really have 15 years of LabVIEW experience, you have 1 year of experience repeated 15 times."

[jcarmody]

I've got three years of expereience, repeated three times.  I'm on the fourth, but I'm determined to break the cycle! 😄

[JW-JnJ]

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@Hooovahh wrote:

Stole this one from Fabiola but it so perfectly states what I've been thinking when someone tells me that they have been doing LabVIEW for 15 years and don't need to improve.

"You don't really have 15 years of LabVIEW experience, you have 1 year of experience repeated 15 times."

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Hah, so couldn't you also reply "So you still use LabVIEW 6.1?"

Either way, I'm stealing that one too.

[JÞB]

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@Hooovahh wrote:

Stole this one from Fabiola but it so perfectly states what I've been thinking when someone tells me that they have been doing LabVIEW for 15 years and don't need to improve.

"You don't really have 15 years of LabVIEW experience, you have 1 year of experience repeated 15 times."

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Let's get that in context Brian.  (Yes, I thought Fab's comment was insightful too)  

One problem with the NI Platform is that it is so approachable to many scientific and engineering disciplines.  Most users of LabVIEW use LabVIEW to enable them to do their main discipline.  They "DO LabVIEW" about 5-10 hours per week or per month.

A year at 10 hours per week is very high and, well, less than half of a part time job.  500 hrs per year at 20 years is maybe 5 years experience (and a good portion relearning features not used for a decade or learning new features)

Contrast that with the few Developers that focus on Developing in the NI Platform around 30+ hours per week and, volunteering on the forums for several more hours.  (I could name a few persons that do exactly that - besides myself)  

I actually had a client's BizDev team lead, that was revising their web site, ask me "how many hours does our team have in developing "LabVIEW Scripts? is it like 4 or 6 hundred development hours?"

I laughed, 4 hundred development hours for LabVIEW based solutions?  I've done that every calander quarter since 2001 Q3!  LabVIEW "Scripts?"  Uhm...did you mean applications or solutions.  Scripts aren't really the same thing and LabVIEW applications are not JAVA Scripts or GREPS.

Sad

[Hooovahh]

In a discussion about how NI's is lacking on Windows 10 style controls I was having a realization that the "System Controls" are seeming less and less like your system OS especially with Windows 10 so I came up with this quote which is a modified version of a quote from Abraham Simpson.

"I used to make system UIs, but then they changed what system UIs were.  Now my UIs aren't system, and system UIs seem weird and scary to me.  It'll happen to you..."

[thoult]

I used to like System controls until I saw an app ported back to Windows XP.

We now have our own internal UI libraries for consistency's sake. If we move to NXG at any point, we can reuse our software division's WPF styles, but that is a looooong way off.