• NULLPTR (unregistered)

    (void*) 42 - 0b101010

  • hakko (unregistered)

    0637

  • (nodebb)

    He shouldn't have agreed. Never expose yourself because of someone else's incompetency. CFO or CTO can go look for somebody else to do things incorrectly. Now Chaz has no job and no satisfaction of doing things right. Weakness never pays off.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Mr. TA

    If he didn't agree, he'd still be out of a job. These C-level nutjobs think that they are geniuses and that anything they say MUST be done, or else. How on earth they ever get to be in positions of power is beyond me because almost all the ones I've met have been just clueless idiots about everything.

  • Clbuttical (unregistered)

    So this is basically another CFO-turned-CTO-makes-classic-moronic-decisions? What did you expect when a bean counter gets to decide the technical approach?

    It's always costly to Do-Things-Right(tm) the first time 'round, but that's only because they never get to see how much money they saved avoiding lawsuits, cancelled contracts and recalls/repairs. It's up to us (as the supposed 'experts') to help them see that. ('experts' due to the many WTFs we can see among colleagues)

  • (nodebb) in reply to Clbuttical

    It's up to us (as the supposed 'experts') to help them see that.

    And, of course, it is essential that we learn how to express all that stuff in terms they can understand. More to the point, perhaps, to express it in their language, not ours.

  • (>'-')> (unregistered)

    A lot of the comments here assume that people try to make decisions in the best interests of the business and its employees. This is almost never true. It's about next year's bonus, politics, downright childish power tripping, and the fact that the fasted route to "success" is to repeatedly trash-and-move-on fast enough that their legacies never catch up with them.

  • (nodebb)

    "Brilliant!" Stellan added.

    Disgraceful that such a blatant typographic error would be published like this.

  • Raj (unregistered) in reply to Clbuttical

    To be fair, the monitoring thing was maybe rushed but it looks like the CTO decision to stick with the old platform allowed them to sell a million robots.

    Would a new architecture built from scratch have been better and delivered faster? Maybe, but probably not. Full rewrites don't always end well (ask Netscape).

    Also if the guy can't write a web service that handles up to a million concurrent hits, maybe he could do like everyone else and use IoT services from AWS which doesn't take weeks to implement, you can get a hello world running before your coffee gets cold.

  • (nodebb)

    Also if the guy can't write a web service that handles up to a million concurrent hits

    The problem wasn't a million concurrent hits. It was hits arriving at more than 43000 per second continuously, probably with non-uniform distribution within each 23-second window, although depending on whether the app did it every 23 seconds or 23 seconds after the previous call terminated, the distribution might have had a tendency to even out.

    But yeah, it was probably heavily under-provisioned as well.

  • Doofang DeLoshming (unregistered)

    TRWTF is that he didn't CYA.

  • Brian (unregistered)

    "CTO insists on cutting-edge development with ancient platform" - Yup, been there. I once worked for a startup whose CTO had developed this custom C++ library (I say C++, but it was really just a C++ veneer on a whole pile of C-style coding) 20 years ago while working at another company, then carried it along with him to all his subsequent jobs. So here's this startup, trying to build a fancy new application on a library that was older than some of the employees. And of course, we couldn't use any modern languages (or even "modern" additions to C++ like, say, STL) that would have made the work much faster and easier, because his entire career was basically built on this lib. It's what he knew, therefore it's what we used.

  • (nodebb) in reply to DocMonster

    Either the CTO faced with the stark resistance would've acquiesced and allowed Chaz to do things correctly, or Chaz would've found another place to work on his terms, not after being let go. In both cases, Chaz maintains his self esteem and a satisfying job. Obviously one has to pick their battles, but a crucial product launch with software which is known to be faulty, is reason enough to have an inflexible position.

  • 🤷 (unregistered) in reply to Mr. TA
    He shouldn't have agreed. Never expose yourself because of someone else's incompetency.

    This. Always make it a requirement to have those things in written form, so that you can respond with your concerns. Then, if someone tries to shift blame on you, you can point out that you had concerns about this from the get-go.

  • Get Off My Lawn! (unregistered) in reply to Steve_The_Cynic

    Too true. I always feel helpless when these "business thinkers" insist that I can only communicate in terms they can understand, and they are totally unwilling to meet the technical thinkers halfway and TRY to understand enough about the systems and challenges to at least have some better understanding than "series of tubes". Instead they hide behind their own ignorance.

    There are no "business speak" words to communicate "technical debt", "You're making it way harder than it needs to be" and "Your idea is impossible/ridiculous/immoral/unethical/illegal". Usually the only business speak they will hear is "This will get you a bigger bonus" and any other phrase gets a response "You are not explaining the problem in terms I can understand: Go away!.

  • I can be a robot if you want me to be (unregistered)

    So what sounds like a large company with an important product, and yet there was no project manager?

  • (nodebb)

    Request address (According to Canada Post) Santa Claus North Pole H0H 0H0 Canada

    Stellan's address after the other C-level people are done with him: Stellan, Former-CTO North Pole H0H 0H0 Canada

  • Bubba (unregistered)

    Lord preserve us...a notremy posting!

  • Bubba (unregistered)

    "Chaz and the devs"

    Best folk-rock band name evah....I'm callin' it.

  • Kashim (unregistered)

    If someone else brings something up in a meeting, then respond to it in the meeting. Never hold stuff like that in. It doesn't matter who else is in the meeting. If you get flak for voicing your concerns publicly, then just fire back that you weren't the one who brought it up, and if the person who brought it up didn't want it to be discussed, then they shouldn't have brought it up in a meeting.

    How someone got to Architect without knowing that is beyond me.

  • James (unregistered) in reply to Kashim

    That only works when you work with people who are 1) More reasonable than they are petty and vindictive and/or 2) Where managers can't just fire someone and tell HR "he was insubordinate or I can't work with him" but are asked to provide something concrete, in other words better managed organizations with policies that are actually followed rather than cult leaders that have everyone cowed.

    There is no indications these properties were present here.

  • Friedrice the Great (unregistered) in reply to (>'-')>

    Gee, "trash things and move on fast" sounds a lot like the startup world's "move fast and break things". ;)

  • L, or was it N? (unregistered)

    Regarding the "Chaz should have" comments: Going through with those things requires a good deal of self-esteem and social competence. Neither is a given, and even if you manage to, depending on your character the open conflict can leave you exhausted.

    In some ways saying "Chaz should have gone for the open conflict" is like asking an economics major to rewrite the Linux Kernel.

  • Dlareg (unregistered) in reply to Raj

    But sometimes it does. ask Altium ( https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/alu.ax?ltr=1 )

  • tlhonmey (unregistered) in reply to 🤷

    For everyone saying he should have gotten it in writing: That doesn't help. In a truly dysfunctional workplace like this one there is nobody in management competent enough to understand his concerns. Were he to have it in writing that he'd thought the approach was a bad idea to start with, that would have been seen as evidence that he'd deliberately sabotaged the project to make his manager look bad.

  • badwiring (unregistered)

    I've been in this position over and over and over. If I speak my concerns I'll be the Negative Guy. If I don't then I start down a path where bad things will happen and it will all be my fault. The decision is all about trust (which is unfortunate because I'm too trusting.) Generally I lean towards speaking up. It's never impossible. "I have concerns." And I send it in an email.

    I'm not negative. There's just a strong tendency toward the wrong person making the wrong decision to do the wrong thing the wrong way for the wrong reasons in the wrong amount of time. And we repeat.

  • doubting_poster (unregistered)

    The guy was a former CFO right? Should have put it simply: Data tracking is out of scope. If you want to include it in the project, get approval from the current CFO for going over-budget.

    And if the request survives the CFO, set the estimate for 2 months after launch.

  • Decius (unregistered)

    Why would you upload the data every 23 seconds, rather than collect it locally and upload when the session is over?

  • Andrew A. Gill (unregistered)

    I'm sorry, the TRWTF is Chaz's here. Chaz should have known how many units the company was producing for the initial launch. He programmed into these devices the frequency and payload of the data that he was collecting. From that, it is trivial to calculate the maximum bandwidth and records processed per second that the web server should have been able to handle. The fact that he did not is a failure that Chaz has to own, and that's only the FIRST of his WTFs.

    The second WTF is that he didn't code the devices to gracefully fail when the queues were congested. I'm reminded of the WTF here: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/paper-size-please . If you can't communicate your data back to the server, you have to gracefully dump it, and you absolutely cannot queue stale instructions for after the data gets correctly processed. This is all poor design on the part of Chaz. Certainly not a firing offense (especially given the bind that management put him in) but not his shining moment there.

  • Andrew A. Gill (unregistered) in reply to Decius

    You'd do that because you don't have enough storage space locally to house that data... except that he clearly had enough local storage to keep the instructions that made the robots "go crazy"

  • aalien (unregistered)

    All this talk about the North Pole has been invented by Hollywood. The real Santa's post office is in Finland: https://my.posti.fi/en/santa-claus-main-post-office

  • new_coder (unregistered) in reply to 🤷

    Totally agree. There is no such thing as the truth. There ONLY what you can prove -esp in written form. If after outlining his concerns to the CTO and the CTO chooses to ignore him. So be it. He was warn and there is proof .

  • 🤷 (unregistered) in reply to tlhonmey

    In a truly dysfunctional workplace like this one there is nobody in management competent enough to understand his concerns. Were he to have it in writing that he'd thought the approach was a bad idea to start with, that would have been seen as evidence that he'd deliberately sabotaged the project to make his manager look bad.

    This may be true, but ask yourself: Would you want to work in a "truly dysfunctional workplace like this"? Chaz should be glad he was fired (with a nice bonus).

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