This is Hooovahh

[crossrulz]

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@Hooovahh wrote:

Manager: “Well <Employee1> will get it working. I gave him a deadline of Tuesday at noon.”

Hooovahh: “What do you mean?  What happens if we don't meet that deadline?”

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At this point, I was expecting "We won't meet our quarterly goals and I will have to explain it to the company president".

[Hooovahh]

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@crossrulz wrote:

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At this point, I was expecting "We won't meet our quarterly goals and I will have to explain it to the company president".

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The real answer was if we didn't make the deadline, the manager would be made into a liar (again) to the customer.  They likely promised they would get task completed by some date, never knowing what the actual task would be, or consulting the proper engineers to get estimates on what it would take, and their availability.  Can you get this done by Tuesday?  We sure can no problem, what is it we need to do again?

[crossrulz]

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@Hooovahh wrote:
Can you get this done by Tuesday?  We sure can no problem, what is it we need to do again?

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"Everybody, we need you to work 12 hours/day over the holiday break so we can get this done on time.  If you need me, I'll be on my boat."

Spoiler

Ok, I may still be a little bitter from my earlier story which has similar roots.

[JW-JnJ]

I assume I can hijack this a little for LabVIEW conversation gems. Thought I would share a few from the current Python vs LabVIEW going on over here. I tend to stay out of it because each tool has it's own purpose and each coder has their favorite. However, occasionally someone decides LabVIEW (and it's coder) is always the problem...

LabVIEW Hater: "LabVIEW has too much overhead for what I'm trying to do"

Me: "Why do you say that?"

LabVIEW Hater: "The installer you gave me is 256MB. That's too big."

Me: "That installer is only that big because I always include all of the dependencies to make things easier for you to port to a new computer. If you look at the actual executable, it's only 4MB. It's a simple program and LabVIEW compiles to binary."

LabVIEW Hater: "Oh"

LabVIEW Hater: "I want a python library to directly access DDS data for myself instead of using your program."

Me: "Ok, sure, I can see wanting to simplify your script. Fair warning, DDS is actually pretty hard."

2 weeks later and using another python coder's time

Python coder: "I tried to make a Python DDS library, but threading in Python is hard and I couldn't get it to work in time."

LabVIEW Hater: silence

Me: "That stinks, threading is pretty easy in LabVIEW."

LabVIEW Hater: "Your program is losing data. See?" points to my program on his laptop

Me: after looking at it running for a few seconds "The data is in a buffer or queue and is therefore never lost. Look, it catches up after a few seconds. What you're seeing is my program lagging because you wanted a sound played when this digital data changes value. That value is flip-flopping back and forth really fast, which it shouldn't be doing. My program could never keep up with trying to play new sounds that quickly while plotting plot on a laptop with 6 other programs running"

LabVIEW Hater: "Oh"

(these are fairly distilled down by memory and probably a smidge unfair to the hater, but the gist is still there)

[JÞB]

LabVIEW Knight
I hate to say you can't do that with LabVIEW, because when I do someone's going to post a response with an example. Let's try

Me

Ben OK -2 minutes on a cross post, not bad

[Hooovahh]

Wait are you divorced?

I was talking to a younger female coworker who was getting ready to be married soon, and all the work that was going into it.

Co-worker: We decided to go with hand made invitations and it was just so much work. If I were to do it again I would do something else.

Hooovahh:  If I were to ever do it again...I WOULDN’T!

Co-worker: Wait...I don’t understand, are you divorced?

Hooovahh: Uh… No I'm just so comfortable with my marriage I don't mind joking about divorce.

After that I had to remind myself my brand of humor might not be right for everyone.

[Hooovahh]

What are we being asked to do?

There was a meeting where headquarters was asking us to do some ridiculous things and changing their mind every day.  I heard someone on a phone call with a recently new employee and all I heard was half of the conversation.

“How long have you been with the company?  Is this the first time you've seen this?  This is not the first time we have done something completely stupid that costs a ton of money.  It's not how I would run a company.”

...

“I tell you what I do, I intentionally procrastinate.  They change their mind so often I just drag my feet until they make a real decision instead of trying to follow whatever they want to do that day."

This is now my work strategy.  Don't work on anything, until I've been asked to do it twice.  My boss knows this and will often ask me to do something twice in the same conversation.

[wiebe@CARYA]

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@Hooovahh wrote:

This is now my work strategy.  Don't work on anything, until I've been asked to do it twice. 

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Yeah! Room for pet projects!

[Hooovahh]

Oh S*** Stop the bus

I wasn’t involved in this one but saw the development, and repercussions of what followed.  A test system was made to test the braking system on a bus.  This test system worked on the brake system and would use a load cell to measure if the brakes were working or not.  The customer wanted a very simple user interface with a single button for testing, and a green or red light on the status of the brake.  Obviously behind the scenes we needed to develop several VIs to test out the various features of the software from controlling power supplies to measuring loads, to controlling the brake itself.  One of these test VIs was developed by an engineer and created several controls for testing various things.  One button he made would turn off the outputs to everything in the system as a sort of failsafe so that the system would become inert quickly.  It was a single boolean and he made the boolean text “Oh Shit Stop the Bus”.  This UI would of course never be seen by the user, or the customer since they were being provided with just an installer and not the source code.

The system was delivered, and the customer was happy.  A few months later the customer came back and asked that they have a debug panel for controlling the various aspects of the software.  They knew we had a debug panel and requested we just enable that UI for them to use.  So a quote went out for a software change and a new developer enabled a button which would show this debug UI.

Well the customer got the EXE, and wasn’t happy at all about the profanity or the implications that they had a runaway bus.  Code reviews were held, and VI scripting code was written to find profanity in all VIs in all of our source code control system.  But from then on the “OSSTB Button” was referred to as a button needed to just turn everything off, or indicate that everything needed to be turned off.

As a side note it was interesting to have to go to the internet to find a list of profanity words that the LabVIEW scripting VIs would look for.  I had to Google some of the terms because some of them were regional.

[altenbach]

This reminds me of an error message I got in a drawing program shipped with SGI IRIX ( Personal Iris 4G/35, early nineties.) 😮

I am sure we can come to a better translation of the OSSTB acronym. 😄

"Override Safety Settings To Best", or similar. 🙂