And so but anyway, did I ever tell you about my most humiliating experience as a skilled and successful computer programmer?
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@GeePawHill This was an amazing read, thank you!
@GeePawHill It also reminded me of the gorgeous icebreakers I saw in Helsinki a few years ago.
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Man, I had some fails in my time, but this one wasn't just a fail, it was fucking *embarrassing*.
"Build a special custom icebreaking display using the hardware on the ship, it'll be brilliant!"
The hardware doesn't work in the ice. Any actual icebreaker captain could have told me -- us -- that, had we -- they -- ever actually consulted one.
@GeePawHill there was a story about a couple of scientists in WW2 assigned to improve U boat detection and destruction rates. 1 read reports and did calcs at a desk. The other went out on patrol and saw how hopeless reports were at conveying reality. It is a danger all disciplines of engineers can encounter and we often need to go and visit the 'workplace' to understand how the work is done and the reality of any equipment and automation. Oh, and add on human factors too.
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And, for the record, I have been a successful professional programmer, an independent, for 45 years. I've failed more times than most people have even tried.
Some days you get the bear.
Some days the bear gets you.
Find joy in it. Without joy, why are we even doing this shit?
@GeePawHill The challenging part for using PC hardware for icebreaker navigation (in the 1980s) was the amount of physical shock computers have to continuously survive. It is about the same if you have ~1000+ kg piece of metal on a long stick and drop that to swing down (from a side) to a box of PC hardware. First times the PC goes to the wall in pieces, because it can't last the impact. It takes a lot of engineering to make a PC case that can survive that amount of stress. It was done back in 1980s, with the hardware of those days (with traditional HDDs).
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And so but anyway, did I ever tell you about my most humiliating experience as a skilled and successful computer programmer?
@GeePawHill This is a great story. Thanks for sharing.
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Not, I repeat, my only great failure as a geek.
But, *damn*, that was humiliating.
I wrote an *excellent* program that *brilliantly* displayed data coming from hardware that didn't work.
It was a gig. I got paid. That's not the point. I was a pro, and pro's deliver *value*.
All I delivered was a good laugh.
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social Reminds me of a german engineering proverb "Wer misst, misst Mist", roughly "Measure and you shall have crap measurements".
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@GeePawHill there was a story about a couple of scientists in WW2 assigned to improve U boat detection and destruction rates. 1 read reports and did calcs at a desk. The other went out on patrol and saw how hopeless reports were at conveying reality. It is a danger all disciplines of engineers can encounter and we often need to go and visit the 'workplace' to understand how the work is done and the reality of any equipment and automation. Oh, and add on human factors too.
@GeePawHill by human factors I mean things like records. Relying on manually logged data for a process where staff are very busy is fraught with the danger that they may just have written the numbers at the end of the shift. If they don't value them or see the end use ...
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@GeePawHill by human factors I mean things like records. Relying on manually logged data for a process where staff are very busy is fraught with the danger that they may just have written the numbers at the end of the shift. If they don't value them or see the end use ...
@GeePawHill
I remember seeing data being added for a gas network from paper forms. There was a box for pressure reducer (added in feed to house when connecting to a higher pressure system rather than the normal low pressure network), supposed to be yes/no, but the technicians would often write in the size thinking that was helpful. Meanwhile in the office if the entry was not a straight tick yes, then they entered no. Important information lost. -
@pozorvlak @GeePawHill Sounds like quite a man.
@RFDave thank you. He really was. @GeePawHill
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Not, I repeat, my only great failure as a geek.
But, *damn*, that was humiliating.
I wrote an *excellent* program that *brilliantly* displayed data coming from hardware that didn't work.
It was a gig. I got paid. That's not the point. I was a pro, and pro's deliver *value*.
All I delivered was a good laugh.
@GeePawHill
It's what my spiritual master says in one of their talks: " What do they say in the computer industry? Garbage in, garbage out". -
So, for my juniors, when I tell you "typing is not the bottleneck", I know what I'm fucking talking about.
It took me a couple of weeks to re-create 4 months worth of work. If I had to bet, I'd bet my second edition was *better* than the edition I lost.
So we come down to the day, and I am ready.
@GeePawHill
It's a terrible thing to experience when it happens, but this is exactly my experience too.And it's probably a variant on Fred Brook's "throw one away".
Coding is primarily a way to come to understand the problem, and so to understand what the solution/program should look like.
Once you know, the typing usually isn't the bottleneck.
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Man, I had some fails in my time, but this one wasn't just a fail, it was fucking *embarrassing*.
"Build a special custom icebreaking display using the hardware on the ship, it'll be brilliant!"
The hardware doesn't work in the ice. Any actual icebreaker captain could have told me -- us -- that, had we -- they -- ever actually consulted one.
@GeePawHill I'm confused, weren't all 3 input systems already in place? Did each have its own display? Were they just being completely ignored because they didn't work?
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@GeePawHill the only safe way to see a polar bear. If you see one NOT from a distance, something's gone wrong, right?
@dtwx I read (from Jon Turk, who traveled extensively in eastern Siberia) that walruses are scarier than polar bears!
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And the other Royal Navy tradition: Captains are inviolate commanders, at all times in all settings. They present "serious". They eat and drink separately from the crew. They have only three or four other officers that they ever get to, comparatively, relax with.
So, you have a comedy officer, and you have a captain, and the captain simply looks the other way when the comedy officer is up to their hijinks.
He *knows* the hijinks. He *sees* the hijinks. But he pretends not to.
@GeePawHill Have you read the Aubrey/Maturin series? It’s partly an extended essay on the knife’s-edge dance between the corrupting effects of inviolate power and being a social animal. And power due to position vs. power due to individual accomplishment.
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R relay@relay.infosec.exchange shared this topic
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Man, I had some fails in my time, but this one wasn't just a fail, it was fucking *embarrassing*.
"Build a special custom icebreaking display using the hardware on the ship, it'll be brilliant!"
The hardware doesn't work in the ice. Any actual icebreaker captain could have told me -- us -- that, had we -- they -- ever actually consulted one.
Man, and at one company I was unusual for walking 50 feet down to the data center and actually talking with the folks who were the day-to-day users of our programs.
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@GeePawHill the only safe way to see a polar bear. If you see one NOT from a distance, something's gone wrong, right?
@dtwx @GeePawHill from my understanding, there is no difference between feeding a polar bear by hand and feeding a polar bear a hand.
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@GeePawHill the only safe way to see a polar bear. If you see one NOT from a distance, something's gone wrong, right?
@dtwx @GeePawHill I was told by Quebec Parks staff once "if you see a polar bear, you'll be lucky; if you see a polar bear up close, you'll be very lucky". (And survive?)
We did not see any polar bears.
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And, for the record, I have been a successful professional programmer, an independent, for 45 years. I've failed more times than most people have even tried.
Some days you get the bear.
Some days the bear gets you.
Find joy in it. Without joy, why are we even doing this shit?
@GeePawHill amazing story for multiple reasons (we have comedy officers!?!) — wonder if you ever read Madeleine Akrich? Her 1992 "The de-scription of technical objects" was an enormous influence on my field of STS, basically from the same story of good-idea-at-the-time design failing to inquire about local conditions of use. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242461431_The_De-scription_of_Technical_Objects
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And, for the record, I have been a successful professional programmer, an independent, for 45 years. I've failed more times than most people have even tried.
Some days you get the bear.
Some days the bear gets you.
Find joy in it. Without joy, why are we even doing this shit?
@GeePawHill fantastic story thanks for sharing!!
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Upside: I saw many many seals, and a polar bear from a distance. The comedy officer was actually the helicopter maintenance guy, and I got a helicopter tour of an iceberg. All of that was rather awesome.
@GeePawHill from a distance is, I gather, the best way to see a polar bear.
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So, for my juniors, when I tell you "typing is not the bottleneck", I know what I'm fucking talking about.
It took me a couple of weeks to re-create 4 months worth of work. If I had to bet, I'd bet my second edition was *better* than the edition I lost.
So we come down to the day, and I am ready.
A similar anecdote (on a much smaller and trivial scale) happened to me in college. I had been working on a home assignment (implementing matrix multiplication algorithms) for a few weeks, and a few days before turning it in, I fucked up the tar command that I was using to do regular backups - effectively overwriting the working, painfully debugged version, with a much older one. Out of frustration I ended up rewriting It entirely from scratch and it took me just a couple of days to get back to where I was, and obviously it was of much better quality than the original!
