• my name is missing (unregistered)

    This holiday season I get Christmas Day off. That is all. Every year programmers have to work longer hours while VP and managers take 1-2 weeks off. Our shipping schedule is so hard coded that no seasonality can affect it despite not mattering at all to the actual business. And of course woe to us if some dependent system fails and we can't get anyone to fix it, or need executive approval for something without which we cannot move forward. If anything is late its our fault for sure. Have a nice holiday.

  • Robin (unregistered)

    Um, cutting more than 100% off the processing time would mean it now takes negative time. So I think TRWTF is no-one looked at what the guy was doing at that point!

  • (nodebb)

    TRWTF: No one noticed that his code didn't work until after it went into production. The story even mentions that there is a QA environment and the code went through there... yet no one noticed.

    I realize that this organization was screwed by a bad contractor... but the loss of Easter dinner is entirely their fault.

  • 🤷 (unregistered) in reply to Robin

    The contractor surely was a Time Lord and sent his code through Time And Relative Dimensions In Space.

  • Knaffhill (unregistered)

    I suspect the contractor who rewrote the workflow has screwed companies in the past and also in more recent ones.

    I also suspect the organization has been screwed by contractors before. Does sound incredibly like one I used to work for before which had a history of almost Netscape sized screw-up rewrites by contractors and former television repairmen.

  • (nodebb) in reply to 🤷

    Which explains why his workflows weren't doing anything. One of the Time Lords' rules was that they don't get involved in events.

  • (nodebb)

    Used to work for a small firm that used small servo motors to run lab equipment, and had a tradition of running Christmas parties at 2PM--on the dot--the last working day before Christmas Holiday. At some point, the production (i.e., people that out the machines together, machine the parts, and run them for some production of finished goods) goes on two shifts, so they have to return to work (because shift #2 has no holiday party), but it's assumed WE (the office / programmer / QA/QC people) get to go home early. This year, though, we're intercepted and sent back to the office to deal with a Servo gone silent. Client had returned a multi-servo box with no response from the PC program to indicate why not. [Now, I know that COM cables are common across the servo drive market, that the proprietary controls work great on long wires, and that RS-232 and RS-485 are critical to system performance--PLC drives run servos seamlessly (in our other stuff).] We were running USB multi-taps so that we could run several servos through a single PC USB port. I don't know if this was ever a thing for most people, but please, don't ever, Ever, EVER try to multi-thread serial, COM commands to/from a serial-driven motor drive, through a USB multi-tap. The program in Windows will say it has connection--because it can see the USB tap, but the servo will just sit there and stare, dully, because it hears nothing. Oh, you can TRY that hyper-terminal system tool, which allows you to type things INTO the serial port, and get the checks back, but for some reason, nothing when the program is supposed to be engaged. The programmer has quit--his beloved code is beyond our comprehension--and out only solution is to poke at the servo and the box to try to make them move--pair, un-pair, sweep the Device manager for USB ports, sweep for them again--anything. At quitting time, we give up and are forced to swap in a new multi-tap, box it back up, and pray it survives the trip to the client. I have no idea when--or if--the multi-tap was replaced.

  • MiserableOldGit (unregistered)

    Seems to me no-one was watching what this contractor was doing, and clearly the "QA" wasn't fit for purpose. People who work like that and deploy just before a break deserve to lose their lunch, sorry.

    If he hadn't done any of the events resulting from the workflows (as opposed to missing some, or implementing them incorrectly) that suggests he had not been briefed properly and (wrongly) assumed they were surplus artefacts. The fact he didn't check properly is sacking-worthy, but he shouldn't have been the only target.

  • wish = Xmas->Merry() && new(Year)->Happy() (unregistered) in reply to Jaime

    I was thinking the same - what is in your QA if the non-functional code only fails in production?

  • nasch (unregistered) in reply to my name is missing

    "Every year programmers have to work longer hours while VP and managers take 1-2 weeks off."

    Take, or are given? That is, do managers and VPs get 1-2 weeks of free holiday time that other workers don't? If so, that is seriously messed up and something I have never seen. If they're using their vacation time, then that's their choice when to use it, right?

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