• TheCPUWizard (unregistered)

    The comments about there being significant differences when dealing with teams from different cultures are quite important.

    Companies which to not understand these difference in depth are bound to run into problems.

    However, unlike many of the previous posters, I do NOT consider this to be a "fatal problem" or do I believe this to be that "the other cultures are idiots".

    Rather I am convinced that the majority of the problem resides with the "primary" company [usually USA or Westr Europe based] having too big of an EGO, having a delusional view (or at least naive) believing that others should inherently work the same way that they are used to.

    And, just for reference, I am a native New Yorker (at least 5 generations in "The States") and have run a software consulting firm here in Manhattan for over 25 years. Not only are diffeent general approaches needed when dealing with off-shore resources, the exact local must also be taken into account.

    There are significant differences betwen "India", "Eastern Europe" and "Orient" work cultures; each of these typically requires a different approach both in requirements and expectations.

    "Cavat Emptor" is the phrase that most often comes to mind. If the buyer of the services does not do the proper research, have realistic expectations (will the off-shore team deal with a spike in workload by adding more workers or by having existing stass work longer hours?), and institute a very well defined feedback mechanism, then the "blame" can only rst with them.

  • (cs)

    Indian schools teach in this manner: rigorous lists of steps to walk through any process. All of the devs I worked with who grew up in India used this method of learning. If they came to your desk to learn something, they would bring a pad of paper and write down in excruciating detail each move that you make to finish some task.

  • (cs)

    In other words, today's story is the programming equivalent of that classic old joke:

    You: "Say hello, Steve."

    Steve: "Hello, Steve."

  • TheCPUWizard (unregistered) in reply to WhiskeyJack
    WhiskeyJack:
    In other words, today's story is the programming equivalent of that classic old joke:

    You: "Say hello, Steve."

    Steve: "Hello, Steve."

    Not exactly. By adding punctuation the proper response from Steve would be Hello. On the otherhand, "Say - Hello Steve" should prompt a response of "Hello Steve" from all listeners.

    It is when this is done verbally, where the meaning can quickly become unclear....

  • schmitter (unregistered)

    why not just have an instruction, create directory c:\directorynoonecouldthinkofrandomnumberhere, then in all of the next steps, your instructions could just refer to c:\directorynoonecouldthinkofrandomnumberhere? Don't ever let a user pick anything.

  • Tolkein Fan (unregistered) in reply to Matt Westwood
    Matt Westwood:
    We have regular arguments as to exactly how explicit we need to make our instructions. The slightest ambiguity is anathema. The bottom line is: if your instructions are too complicated to follow, you need a wizard.
    I vote for Gandalf because Saruman can't be trusted.
  • A Gould (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    A lot of people will defend the drones for just "following orders"
    That's because in the corporate world, "following orders" is the safest thing to do. It royally sucks, but it's generally safer to do the stupid thing your boss told you to do than to do the right thing your boss doesn't want you to do.

    Take those folks - if they go off-script, and it causes some minor issue down the road, they're now on the hook because they didn't follow directions. (And everyone would be kvetching about those off-shoring idiots that can't follow directions).

  • Anon (unregistered)

    Of course, if the instructions had actually intended that the config file contain:

    ' Environment variable for test provider
' 
set PATH_TO_TST_ENV=Path to the test environment (absolute, such as C:\TestEnv)

    In other words, what the instruction literally said, we'd be reading a WTF about how the testers ignored the instructions and put their own path in.

  • Thorsten M. (unregistered)

    If the installation instruction explicitly copy the content "precisely as listed below", there is no room for interpretation. Of course the offshore team could (and probably should) still have asked to clarify this point ...

    But there are some other WTFs in this article:

    • As many others mention: Why does the installation need 85 manual steps? The main point of computers is to automate dull manual work!
    • Why is no meaningful error message / logfile generated?
    • Why did noone just record the desktop and send a video file the failed installation process? Is Julien so keen on night shifts?
    • Why did noone recognize before that the test specification were not ... well ... specific?

    For me this kind of incidents would rather damage the reputation of Juliens employer than that of the subcontractor. (Also it is of course true that when companies are not used to be specific in writing, offshoring is a disadvantage, since it makes it harder to iren out this kind of glitches; OTOH the company might also benefit from learning to be more specific...)

  • Yawn (unregistered)

    Why oh why is it always Ravi?

    Captcha susipit A hole in the jail floor, in earlier times called a dungeon.

  • Thorsten M. (unregistered) in reply to Not A Duhveloper
    Not A Duhveloper:
    Try installing SAP or Peoplesoft or Oracle Financials with only 85 steps. You won't even be 1% in.

    Interview for Oracle Financials position:

    Candidate: "Then I applied over 1000 patches" Me: "When did you apply the rest of them?"

    And you would do that manually? No Skript or something? OMG

  • Beta (unregistered)

    "Common sense" is all very well, but too often I've seen it used as an excuse for sloppy documentation. I have a coworker who has become the default czar of a major piece of software because 1) her installation procedure is not at all robust, 2) her documentation is full of errors (27 steps, some of them with 5 or 6 sub-steps) 3) she has a success story of a user getting it to work without help, and 4) her boss protects her from punishment. So all it takes is common sense, anyone who can't do it is an idiot (she is quite vocal on this point), and you'd better stay friends with her.

    And if you're going to have an installation procedure anywhere near this complex, scripted or unscripted, it should have diagnostic tests all along the way so that if it crashes on step 32, you can at least be sure that everything was correct as of step 31. (Corollary: anyone who writes software to temporarily survive a fatal condition should be run out town on a rail.)

  • Kenny (unregistered) in reply to Nibh
    Nibh:
    There is no excuse for an 85 step setup process. None. You are begging for problems like this, even with smart and competent people on the other end.

    Not everybody works on point and click windows software. Or even a single application, some people develop complete systems.

    What's the install procedure for your companies mail server? web server? domain server? is it a single step? Do you even HAVE one?

    I'm sure installing a Facebook/Twitter/Google/[Insert other random web service here] server wasn't one step when they first started, and at some levels - when you're not installing multiple a month - it doesn't make sense to spend the time to automate the procedure. Lets not go into if the systems are running Windows servers, with software such as Oracle and VMware Virtual Center - apps were not designed to be scripted to be installed.

  • (cs) in reply to frits
    frits:
    We're not ready to see you yet 85 ways to die
    +1(4)
  • abitslow (unregistered)

    Bet they are CMMI level 5 though

  • verto (unregistered)

    Page and a half of whining about improper documentation and lengthy installation procedures, and no one mentions the abominable wall-of-text Mark bowytched up again?

    ...

    Suspiciously absent are the complaints agin thy story-telling... Not haunting the boards again, are ya, Bowtyz? Deleting such as offend thee?

    TRWTF is your abysmal failure as a writer.

    I think you both the point of the story, and half of the words:

    but you found out that, due to budgetary constraints, you couldn't personally do any of those things and could only focus on coding, you probably wouldn't complain.
    and send them back to with details of how the problem was recreated
    And threw in a few logical writing fails:
    It wasn't all too difficult, as installing the application on a local workstation was often the first task given to newly-hired developers.
    "newly-hired", not "newbs-we-hired".
    Test plan development. Regression analysis. Systems documentation creation. Test case execution. Regression testing. If you're anything like me, then those words may as well have been boring, tedious, mind-numbing, tiresome, dreary, and the-worst-thing-in-the-world
    Thank #DEITY, no. I'm not. Not only do i see them as necessary, (to your credit, you at least *claim* the same), but i enjoy both the increased understanding of the system that i get from establishing the business facts, and the act of codifying them. BEFORE the system is gargantuan and treacherously unstable.

    With any luck, concepts such as TDD, pride in my work and personal/developer responsibilty will prevent our Venns from ever intersecting. Let alone our paths.

    TL;Deleted: Let Halcyon do the story-telling, and go back to posting Error'ds....

  • (cs) in reply to Quirkafleeg
    Quirkafleeg:
    I'm presently too busy staying on the path and watching for snakes to comment on this.
    <ThumbsUp/>
  • Benny B (unregistered) in reply to Matt Westwood
    Matt Westwood:
    That's Amelia Bedelia. Thought I was the only person in the world to have heard of her.

    Are you kidding? That makes at least 3 of us now. I'm sure there are more that can remember back to, eh, 3rd grade?

  • dbp (unregistered)
    verto:
    I think you both the point of the story, and half of the words:
    Before declaring someone an abysmal failure as a writer, can you please make sure your post doesn't mark you as an abysmal failure as a writer? Because, you really bothed that one up...
  • verto (unregistered) in reply to dbp
    dbp:
    verto:
    I think you both the point of the story, and half of the words:
    Before declaring someone an abysmal failure as a writer, can you please make sure your post doesn't mark you as an abysmal failure as a writer? Because, you really bothed that one up...
    I think you accidentally the meme, there, buddy. WHOOOOOSH.
  • sino (unregistered) in reply to dbp
    dbp:
    verto:
    I think you both the point of the story, and half of the words:
    Before declaring someone an abysmal failure as a writer, can you please make sure your post doesn't mark you as an abysmal failure as a writer? Because, you really bothed that one up...
    Holy sweet fail, batman. You Muphry'd it. Twice.
  • Somebody (unregistered)

    If Julian had to ask them to scroll up, who was TRWTF?

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Kenny
    Kenny:
    Nibh:
    There is no excuse for an 85 step setup process. None. You are begging for problems like this, even with smart and competent people on the other end.

    Not everybody works on point and click windows software. Or even a single application, some people develop complete systems.

    What's the install procedure for your companies mail server? web server? domain server? is it a single step? Do you even HAVE one?

    I'm sure installing a Facebook/Twitter/Google/[Insert other random web service here] server wasn't one step when they first started, and at some levels - when you're not installing multiple a month - it doesn't make sense to spend the time to automate the procedure. Lets not go into if the systems are running Windows servers, with software such as Oracle and VMware Virtual Center - apps were not designed to be scripted to be installed.

    Thank you.

    Right now I'm involved in setting up (and documenting the procedure for) several web and DB servers. So I'm looking at Apache, PHP with a selection of Pear libraries, Postfix redirection, MySQL, Postgresql, IPTables, backup scripts, configuring other servers that connect to the new ones, etc.

    85 steps would make my job much easier.

  • (cs) in reply to Benny B

    Further WTF: why did nobody say something like...

    "It buggers up when I copy/paste this one line in step 32" "Oh, whoops, yeah you were supposed to actually go copy/paste this other previous thing you used..."

    Step 32? 45%?

    There is easily enough information there to figure out where the bug is, was there really nobody involved with the bug-testing capacity to pinpoint the problem to this one instruction? They even told the people who wrote the thing roughly where the mess-up was, nobody on the coding side could go "okay 45% of the process would be about... here."?

    But TRWTF is that our world is based on a system where these offshore workers are paid and trained to be drones.

  • Rookierookie (unregistered)

    Better have predictable fools than erratic fools. I will take the drones over "coder knows best" any day.

  • Jay (unregistered) in reply to gus
    gus:
    Not long ago I sent an e-mail to a PhD, something like this:

    Hi Grace, Hope things are fine at your new place at the big U.

    Your new password to login back to your files here is "the first name of your Indian TA" followed by "your old office number".

    She wrote back:

    I can't log in. Could you change the password to something shorter than 8 words?

    Sorry. Passwords are required to be a minimum of 32025 characters long.

  • It's not a simple user app.... (unregistered)

    To all those complaining about the 85 step installation.... You clearly have never worked on large-scale systems before. You can't exactly script installing Oracle, restoring a database, installing middleware, configuring connections, installing application layers, etc, etc, across many different tiers of hardware. My department is currently working on creating a completely new testing environment and the project is expected to take six months. It involves mainframe regions, Oracle and SQL server databases, middleware in Java, applications in .NET, etc. All told about 18 different interfacing systems. That doesn't even get into the hardware setups, network routing, etc, etc. Only 85 steps and a day would be a dream!

  • ClaudeSuck.de (unregistered) in reply to frits
    frits:
    As noted by others, this is not nearly as much a failing of the offshore testers as it is a failing of the crap installation procedure. It is ridiculous to say an 85-step manual installation (including editing files) is "not too difficult". While each step may not be difficult, expecting all steps to be completed with repeatable results is asinine. The location of these testers (engineers, if you will) is irrelevant.

    I totally agree. And I'm sure this application was written in VB.

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Kenny
    Kenny:
    Nibh:
    There is no excuse for an 85 step setup process. None. You are begging for problems like this, even with smart and competent people on the other end.

    Not everybody works on point and click windows software. Or even a single application, some people develop complete systems.

    What's the install procedure for your companies mail server? web server? domain server? is it a single step? Do you even HAVE one?

    I'm sure installing a Facebook/Twitter/Google/[Insert other random web service here] server wasn't one step when they first started, and at some levels - when you're not installing multiple a month - it doesn't make sense to spend the time to automate the procedure. Lets not go into if the systems are running Windows servers, with software such as Oracle and VMware Virtual Center - apps were not designed to be scripted to be installed.

    And you say that like it's a good thing. It's not a badge of honor to have created some horrendously complicated setup procedure. And I'm sure Facebook/Twitter/whatever was a complicated setup the first time, but I sure as hell bet it isn't that complicated anymore. Once you've worked out the kinks you should be able to simplify.

  • (cs)

    To all those complaining about people complaining about too many steps:

    1. I'm sorry you have super-hard jobs requiring so many installation steps.

    2 Why haven't you ever tried to automate your job as much as possible?

  • ClaudeSuck.de (unregistered) in reply to apaq11
    apaq11:
    I always use the format for these steps like the following:

    Variable=<ThisVariable> -Where <ThisVariable> is the result from step X

    I find that it prevents confusion as to what needs replaced and what it should be replaced with.

    My experience with outsourcing is that you have to define things so well that in the end you write "meta-code" and instructions and it would be faster to make it yourself.

  • (cs) in reply to savar
    savar:
    Indian schools teach in this manner: rigorous lists of steps to walk through any process. All of the devs I worked with who grew up in India used this method of learning. If they came to your desk to learn something, they would bring a pad of paper and write down in excruciating detail each move that you make to finish some task.
    This is the unfortunate result of rote learning. RPF has explained it long ago. I find that his account is universally applicable, and you see this happening world over, over and over and over again. Just realizing how much time people waste doing this "learning" is making me sick. Here it goes:
    Richard P. Feynman:
    In regard to education in Brazil, I had a very interesting experience. I was teaching a group of students who would ultimately become teachers, since at that time there were not many opportunities in Brazil for a highly trained person in science. These students had already had many courses, and this was to be their most advanced course in electricity and magnetism - Maxwell's equations, and so on.

    The university was located in various office buildings throughout the city, and the course I taught met in a building which overlooked the hay.

    I discovered a very strange phenomenon: I could ask a question, which the students would answer immediately. But the next time I would ask the question - the same subject, and the same question, as far as I could tell - they couldn't answer it at all! For instance, one time I was talking about polarized light, and I gave them all some strips of polaroid.

    Polaroid passes only light whose electric vector is in a certain direction, so I explained how you could tell which way the light is polarized from whether the polaroid is dark or light.

    We first took two strips of polaroid and rotated them until they let the most light through. From doing that we could tell that the two strips were now admitting light polarized in the same direction - what passed through one piece of polaroid could also pass through the other. But then I asked them how one could tell the absolute direction of polarization, for a single piece of polaroid.

    They hadn't any idea.

    I knew this took a certain amount of ingenuity, so I gave them a hint: "Look at the light reflected from the bay outside."

    Nobody said anything.

    Then I said, "Have you ever heard of Brewster's Angle?"

    "Yes, sir! Brewster's Angle is the angle at which light reflected from a medium with an index of refraction is completely polarized."

    "And which way is the light polarized when it's reflected?"

    "The light is polarized perpendicular to the plane of reflection, sir." Even now, I have to think about it; they knew it cold! They even knew the tangent of the angle equals the index!

    I said, "Well?"

    Still nothing. They had just told me that light reflected from a medium with an index, such as the bay outside, was polarized; they had even told me which way it was polarized.

    I said, "Look at the bay outside, through the polaroid. Now turn the polaroid."

    "Ooh, it's polarized!" they said.

    After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn't know what anything meant. When they heard "light that is reflected from a medium with an index," they didn't know that it meant a material such as water. They didn't know that the "direction of the light" is the direction in which you see something when you're looking at it, and so on. Everything was entirely memorized, yet nothing had been translated into meaningful words. So if I asked, "What is Brewster's Angle?" I'm going into the computer with the right keywords. But if I say, "Look at the water," nothing happens - they don't have anything under "Look at the water"!

    Later I attended a lecture at the engineering school. The lecture went like this, translated into English: "Two bodies . . . are considered equivalent . . . if equal torques . . . will produce . . . equal acceleration. Two bodies, are considered equivalent, if equal torques, will produce equal acceleration." The students were all sitting there taking dictation, and when the professor repeated the sentence, they checked it to make sure they wrote it down all right. Then they wrote down the next sentence, and on and on. I was the only one who knew the professor was talking about objects with the same moment of inertia, and it was hard to figure out.

    I didn't see how they were going to learn anything from that. Here he was talking about moments of inertia, but there was no discussion about how hard it is to push a door open when you put heavy weights on the outside, compared to when you put them near the hinge - nothing!

    After the lecture, I talked to a student: "You take all those notes - what do you do with them?"

    "Oh, we study them," he says. "We'll have an exam."

    "What will the exam be like?"

    "Very easy. I can tell you now one of the questions." He looks at his notebook and says, " 'When are two bodies equivalent?' And the answer is, 'Two bodies are considered equivalent if equal torques will produce equal acceleration.' So, you see, they could pass the examinations, and "learn" all this stuff, and not know anything at all, except what they had memorized.

    Then I went to an entrance exam for students comin g into the engineering school. It was an oral exam, and I was allowed to listen to it. One of the students was absolutely super: He answered everything nifty! The examiners asked him what diamagnetism was, and he answered it perfectly. Then they asked, "When light comes at an angle through a sheet of material with a certain thickness, and a certain index N, what happens to the light?"

    "It comes out parallel to itself, sir - displaced."

    "And how much is it displaced?"

    "I don't know, sir, but I can figure it out." So he figured it out. He was very good. But I had, by this time, my suspicions.

    After the exam I went up to this bright young man, and explained to him that I was from the United States, and that I wanted to ask him some questions that would not affect the result of his examination in any way. The first question I ask is, "Can you give me some example of a diamagnetic substance?"

    "No."

    Then I asked, "If this book was made of glass, and I was looking at something on the table through it, what would happen to the image if I tilted the glass?"

    "It would be deflected, sir, by twice the angle that you've turned the book."

    I said, "You haven't got it mixed up with a mirror, have you?"

    "No, sir!"

    He had just told me in the examination that the light would be displaced, parallel to itself, and therefore the image would move over to one side, but would not be turned by any angle. He had even figured out how much it would be displaced, but he didn't realize that a piece of glass is a material with an index, and that his calculation had applied to my question.

    I taught a course at the engineering school on mathematical methods in physics, in which I tried to show how to solve problems by trial and error. It's something that people don't usually learn, so I began with some simple examples of arithmetic to illustrate the method. I was surprised that only about eight out of the eighty or so students turned in the first assignment. So I gave a strong lecture about having to actually try it, not just sit back and watch me do it.

    After the lecture some students came up to me in a little delegation, and told me that I didn't understand the backgrounds that they have, that they can study without doing the problems, that they have already learned arithmetic, and that this stuf f was beneath them.

    So I kept going with the class, and no matter how complicated or obviously advanced the work was becoming, they were never handing a damn thing in. Of course I realized what it was: They couldn'tdo it!

    One other thing I could never get them to do was to ask questions. Finally, a student explained it to me: "If I ask you a question during the lecture, afterwards everybody will be telling me, 'What are you wasting our time for in the class? We're trying to learn something. And you're stopping him by asking a question'."

    It was a kind of one-upmanship, where nobody knows what's going on, and they'd put the other one down as if they did know. They all fake that they know, and if one student admits for a moment that something is confusing by asking a question, the others take a high-handed attitude, acting as if it's not confusing at all, telling him that he's wasting their time.

    I explained how useful it was to work together, to discuss the questions, to talk it over, but they wouldn't do that either, because they would be losing face if they had to ask someone else. It was pitiful! All the work they did, intelligent people, but they got themselves into this funny state of mind, this strange kind of self-propagating "education" which4is meanin gless, utterly meaningless!

    At the end of the academic year, the students asked me to give a talk about my experiences of teaching in Brazil. At the talk there would be not only students, but professors and government officials, so I made them promise that I could say whatever I wanted. They said, "Sure. Of course. It's a free country."

    So I came in, carrying the elementary physics textbook that they used in the first year of college. They thought this book was especially good because it had different kinds of typeface - bold black for the most important things to remember, lighter for less important things, and so on.

    Right away somebody said, "You're not going to say anything bad about the textbook, are you? The man who wrote it is here, and everybody thinks it's a good textbook."

    "You promised I could say whatever I wanted."

    The lecture hall was full. I started out by defining science as an understanding of the behavior of nature. Then I asked, "What is a good reason for teaching science? Of course, no country can consider itself civilized unless . . . yak, yak, yak." They were all sitting there nodding, because I know that's the way they think.

    Then I say, "That, of course, is absurd, because why should we feel we have to keep up with another country? We have to do it for a good reason, a sensible reason; not just because other countries do." Then I talked about the utility of science, and its contribution to the improvement of the human condition, and all that - I really teased them a little bit.

    Then I say, "The main purpose of my talk is to demonstrate to you that no science is being taught in Brazil!"

    I can see them stir, thinking, "What? No science? This is absolutely crazy! We have all these classes."

    So I tell them that one of the first things to strike me when I came to Brazil was to see elementary school kids in bookstores, buying physics books. There are so many kids learning physics in Brazil, beginning much earlier than kids do in the United States, that it's amazing you don't find many physicists in Brazil - why is that? So many kids are working so hard, and nothing comes of it.

    Then I gave the analogy of a Greek scholar who loves the Greek language, who knows that in his own country there aren't many children studying Greek. But he comes to another country, where he is delighted to find everybody studying Greek - even the smaller kids in the elementary schools. He goes to the examination of a student who is coming to get his degree in Greek, and asks him, "What were Socrates' ideas on the relationship between Truth and Beauty?" - and the student can't answer. Then he asks the student, What did Socrates say to Plato in the Third Symposium?" the student lights up and goes, "Brrrrrrrrr-up" - he tells you everything, word for word, that Socrates said, in beautiful Greek.

    But what Socrates was talking about in the Third Symposium was the relationship between Truth and Beauty!

    What this Greek scholar discovers is, the students in another country learn Greek by first learning to pronounce the letters, then the words, and then sentences and paragraphs. They can recite, word for word, what Socrates said, without realizing that those Greek words actually mean something. To the student they are all artificial sounds. Nobody has ever translated them into words the students can understand.

    I said, "That's how it looks to me, when I see you teaching the kids 'science' here in Brazil." (Big blast, right?)

    Then I held up the elementary physics textbook they were using. "There are no experimental results mentioned anywhere in this book, except in one place where there is a ball, rolling down an inclined plane, in which it says how far the ball got after one second, two seconds, three seconds, and so on. The numbers have 'errors' in them - that is, if you look at them, you think you're looking at experimental results, because the numbers are a little above, or a little below, the theoretical values. The book even talks about having to correct the experimental errors - very fine. The trouble is, when you calculate the value of the acceleration constant from these values, you get the right answer. But a ball rolling down an inclined plane, if it is actually done, has an inertia to get it to turn, and will, if you do the experiment, produce five-sevenths of the right answer, because of the extra energy needed to go into the rotation of the ball. Therefore this single example of experimental 'results' is obtained from a fake experiment. Nobody had rolled such a ball, or they would never have gotten those results!

    "I have discovered something else," I continued. "By flipping the pages at random, and putting my finger in and reading the sentences on that page, I can show you what's the matter - how it's not science, but memorizing, in every circumstance. Therefore I am brave enough to flip through the pages now, in front of this audience, to put my finger in, to read, and to show you."

    So I did it. Brrrrrrrup - I stuck my finger in, and I started to read: "Triboluminescence. Triboluminescence is the light emitted when crystals are crushed..

    I said, "And there, have you got science? No! You have only told what a word means in terms of other words. You haven't told anything about nature-what crystals produce light when you crush them, why they produce light. Did you see any student go home and try it? He can't.

    "But if, instead, you were to write, 'When you take a lump of sugar and crush it with a pair of pliers in the dark, you can see a bluish flash. Some other crystals do that too. Nobody knows why. The phenomenon is called "triboluminescence."' Then someone will go home and try it. Then there's an experience of nature." I used that example to show them, but it didn't make any difference where I would have put my finger in the book; it was like that everywhere.

    Finally, I said that I couldn't see how anyone could he educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything. "However," I said, "I must be wrong. There were two students in my class who did very well, and one of the physicists I know was educated entirely in Brazil. Thus, it must be possible for some people to work their way through the system, had as it is."

    Well, after I gave the talk, the head of the science education department got up and said, "Mr. Feynman has told us some things that are very hard for us to hear, but it appears to he that he really loves science, and is sincere in his criticism. Therefore, I think we should listen to him. I came here knowing we have some sickness in our system of education; what I have learned is that we have a cancer!" - and he sat down. ..That gave other people the freedom to speak out, and there was a big excitement. Everybody was getting up and making suggestions. The students got some committee together to mimeograph the lectures in advance, and they got other committees organized to do this and that.

    Then something happened which was totally unexpected for me. One of the students got up and said, "I'm one of the two students whom Mr. Feynman referred to at the end of his talk. I was not educated in Brazil; I was educated in Germany, and I've just come to Brazil this year."

    The other student who had done well in class had a similar thing to say. And the professor I had mentioned got up and said, "I was educated here in Brazil during the war, when, fortunately, all of the professors had left the university, so I learned everything by reading alone. Therefore I was not really educated under the Brazilian system."

    I didn't expect that. I knew the system was bad, but 100 percent - it was terrible!

    Since I had gone to Brazil under a program sponsored by the United States Government, I was asked by the State Department to write a report about my experiences in Brazil, so I wrote out the essentials of the speech I had just given. I found out later through the grapevine that the reaction of somebody in the State Department was, "That shows you how dangerous it is to send somebody to Brazil who is so naive. Foolish fellow; he can only cause trouble. He didn't understand the problems." Quite the contrary! I think this person in the State Department was naive to think that because he saw a university with a list of courses and descriptions, that's what it was.

  • Dick Fartman (unregistered) in reply to Kuba

    Nice read. Can you please explain Flatuluminescence to me?

  • (cs) in reply to Thorsten M.
    Thorsten M.:
    The main point of computers is to automate dull manual work!

    What? Don't be ridiculous! The main point of computers is to play video games. Don't you know anything?!?

  • myself (unregistered) in reply to AT

    These days "PhD" and "FUD" are virtually synonymous

  • David F (unregistered) in reply to gus
    gus:
    Not long ago I sent an e-mail to a PhD, something like this:

    Hi Grace, Hope things are fine at your new place at the big U.

    Your new password to login back to your files here is "the first name of your Indian TA" followed by "your old office number".

    She wrote back:

    I can't log in. Could you change the password to something shorter than 8 words?

    Umm....shouldn't this be 11 words?

  • jugis (unregistered) in reply to It's not a simple user app....
    It's not a simple user app....:
    To all those complaining about the 85 step installation.... You clearly have never worked on large-scale systems before. You can't exactly script installing Oracle, restoring a database, installing middleware, configuring connections, installing application layers, etc, etc, across many different tiers of hardware. My department is currently working on creating a completely new testing environment and the project is expected to take six months. It involves mainframe regions, Oracle and SQL server databases, middleware in Java, applications in .NET, etc. All told about 18 different interfacing systems. That doesn't even get into the hardware setups, network routing, etc, etc. Only 85 steps and a day would be a dream!
    Umm, yes. yes, you can. I do it all the time.

    In fact, until i heard about it, freaked the fuck out and automated the deployment of the system i currently work on, it took our QA LEAD nearly a full day just to deploy the code of a "daily" build to the "already set up" (read: unknown mish-mash state of previous "upgrades") QA lab.

    Now it takes under an hour (and happens automatically, during off-hours), INCLUDING: wiping the machine, restoring databases from production backups, installing required services from scratch, installing AND CONFIGURING third party systems, and deploying the code that used to take the entire day.

    If you're not using your computer that way, you're doing it dumb.

  • coyo (unregistered) in reply to AT
    AT:
    gus:
    Not long ago I sent an e-mail to a PhD, something like this:

    Hi Grace, Hope things are fine at your new place at the big U.

    Your new password to login back to your files here is "the first name of your Indian TA" followed by "your old office number".

    She wrote back:

    I can't log in. Could you change the password to something shorter than 8 words?

    A PhD in what? Feminist studies? Elementary education? Certainly not in any meaningful discipline!

    Doubtful. That smacks of the pedantry of something mathy. Either that or the person tended towards Aspergers or autism.

  • Agitprop (unregistered)

    First off: to those with the thought that an installation process should be "single click simple" let me illustrate a recent installation of MS Outlook that we broke down into two simple steps:

    • Step 1: Install and configure MS Exchange
    • Step 2: Install and configure MS Outlook

    So how simple is that then? Or perhaps I missed some steps? </sarcasm>

    Second off: Process driven individuals don't always exist in places with foreign accents, but its WAY more likely. A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of dealing with an individual that live in Bawstun who was as process oriented as the person illustrated in the article.

    That is dealing with someone who is 430 miles away, yet I can call up the FSL Farsi accented Francophone in Montreal who interprets what I say and gets it right. (But that's only 330 miles.)

    Third off: Why wait? In this case a little sacrificial initiative would have solved this much quicker.

    I define a competent value-added reseller as someone who comes in to the office to watch me do the installation of the hardware/software I've purchased and help me understand and avoid pitfalls. An incompetent reseller just provides me with a link to a download. A reseller looking for a punch in the mouth tries to take over.

    The worst installation process I have ever come across was Accpac 4.x before we started using integrated authentication, especially the application of updates and service packs. The instructions were a scanned image of a handwritten fax pasted into a Note in Outlook which didn't include updates to datastore location changes or definitions of particular folders. We didn't change the documentation because it was an excellent tool for testing the competence of the IT employees we hired. If you could retain the information for 3 weeks and do a successful installation it was worth a beer.

    I now work for americans and don't get free beer.

  • Herby (unregistered)

    Example: "Press any key to continue"

    Response 1: "Where is the 'any' key"?

    Response 2: "I keep pressing the shift key and nothing happens"!

    My experience: Being told that a requirement in the installation book needed to be followed (the sector size of the SP area must be the same as the BT area) after I had already gotten around the problem. It was the mid 70's and I had just gotten a new "supervisor" who liked to read the installation manuals. He didn't understand the reason for the limitation, and how I had gotten around it (SIGH).

  • Agitprop (unregistered) in reply to jugis
    If you're not using your computer that way, you're doing it dumb.

    If you're doing it that repetetively then yeah, a script is well and good. But -

    • How long did it take to test and debug that script?
    • How long would it take to test and debug if three steps changed or if a new environment was build to use in conjunction that didn't require two of the steps?
    • How long would it take to test and debug that same script if you had to run it in Windows and make it submit CLI level commands to VMWare on a remote server? (practical question actually, I'm lazy enough to not want to do it for ourselves).

    It is nice (and I have managed to do it) to have scripts that simply say

    • hey lUser - insert CD marked 3 and press Ok
    • hey lUser - insert CD marked 17 and press Ok
    • hey lUser - insert CD marked 3 and press Ok
    • hey lUser - write down this resultant environment string to keep for step 12 and so on.

    Sometimes your system is isolated, sometimes the installers don't understand working from remote shares, sometimes your installation process requires the resultant of an environmentl varialbe only available after the restart of the system with nothing running in memory aside from the CLI, sometimes your security gurus won't allow the installation of third party drivers that allow reading ISOs. (basterds - oh wait, that's my rule).

    sometimes you aren't doing it silently sometimes the system is too stupid to be convenient - like a subway rider standing in the doorway. (You know who you are, I'm pointing right at you!)

  • SAP saps you (unregistered) in reply to ctardi

    In only several months? How did you get it done so quickly?

    CAPTCHA: ASCI when ASCII is more than you need.

  • Morry (unregistered)

    Most people are missing the point here that these "the world-class, high-quality engineers" can't even recognize a configuration file and make the startling difficult leap of logic that pasting the line verbatim is NOT the proper way to update the config file. I work in mainframes and assembly, never never worked in windows or linix or web development and I know what the hell a config file looks like. I'm obviously universe-class. Gonna put that on my next resume.

  • (cs)

    Sometimes people can be too literal no matter who they are. I work in the electrical field. I had the fun one day of watching one of my coworkers "strictly follow the procedure" as the boss had told him. Nowhere in the procedure did it call for him to disconnect the $1500 test equipment before he turned on the 208VAC. Of course the poor 5VDC test gear went up in a puff of magic blue smoke. My fellow tech had tested hundreds of these units before and never had a problem, until he "strictly" followed the procedure.

    I also, when having just started at this job, almost killed the same tech by accident because I literally followed his instructions for wiring a 208VAC unit. I had at least thought to ask the question of how to wire the unit, but he had given me the wrong instructions. Followed exactly his instructions put 208 on the (metal) chassis. Caused quite the stir.

    What did I learn from all that? Be careful when you write (or speak) instructions, because you never know how closely someone will follow them.

  • Sanjay (unregistered) in reply to Mason Wheeler
    Mason Wheeler:
    Thorsten M.:
    The main point of computers is to automate dull manual work!

    What? Don't be ridiculous! The main point of computers is to play video games. Don't you know anything?!?

    What? Don't be ridiculous! The main point of computers is to watch porn. Don't you know anything???

  • coyo (unregistered) in reply to Sanjay
    Sanjay:
    Mason Wheeler:
    Thorsten M.:
    The main point of computers is to automate dull manual work!

    What? Don't be ridiculous! The main point of computers is to play video games. Don't you know anything?!?

    What? Don't be ridiculous! The main point of computers is to watch porn. Don't you know anything???

    Ooo, look at the pixels on her!

  • ClaudeSuck.de (unregistered) in reply to That Guy
    That Guy:
    My company uses offshore developers to work on the GUI interface, so I have to correct a lot of things like:

    status = createSimulatedMediaError(drive); if (status == SUCCESS) logMessage("Successfully can able to create media error on drive."); else logMessage("Successfully not able to create media error on drive.");

    FTFY

  • D'oh! (unregistered) in reply to gus
    gus:
    Not long ago I sent an e-mail to a PhD, something like this:

    Hi Grace, Hope things are fine at your new place at the big U.

    Your new password to login back to your files here is "the first name of your Indian TA" followed by "your old office number".

    She wrote back:

    I can't log in. Could you change the password to something shorter than 8 words?

    Why the person should have clued in, you didn't help matters with the poor punctuation. By enclosing "the first name of your Indian TA" and "your old office number" in quotes you're saying that's the literal words to use. If you had just omitted the quotes I imagine it would have been easier to understand.... Still you gotta wonder why the user still didn't take a minute and figure this out themselves....

  • ClaudeSuck.de (unregistered) in reply to Kensey
    Kensey:
    As someone who has had to write long multi-step install instructions, I would be royally pissed if I found out somebody was substituting their own "best guess" for what I wrote. If I wrote "set PATH_TO_TST_ENV=Path to the test environment (absolute, such as C:\TestEnv)" then by God, that had better be exactly what is in the finished file, especially with a header explicitly instructing that.

    I have often told recipients of my instructions "I will never be mad (except at myself) if you do exactly, literally what I tell you and it fails." Julien is the one getting paid to do the thinking, not the testers.

    The error is the more inexcusable since we're talking about a from-scratch install, so Julien can easily dictate that they create a directory with a specific name and use that -- no need for variable parsing.

    Yes, and why wouldn't you write a batch file that does the entire installation interrupted by some PAUSE commands. Then the offshores can push <ENTER> some times.

  • Beta (unregistered)

    neosenshi: "I work in the electrical field."

    That must be hair-raising.

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