How much distance? Oh, about as long as it would take to do a POST on boot up. Imagine, come in Monday morning, power up, by Friday afternoon the RAM test is finished, and you have just enough time to check your email before shutting down for the weekend.
I am *so* glad I didn't pursue work with Anderson when I graduated in the 1980's, my IT life has been an interesting and hellish experience without that crap.
Okay, imagine a small startup of 15 people, all under the spell of "magic bullet" techniques like eXtreme Programming. They toil away for about 2.5 years, resulting in 500,000 lines of C++ code. No refactoring. My job is to port the lot to an small embedded Linux device. Sound cool? Yes. Are there any debug tools? Not as such. Oh, and while I'm doing the port, 15 other developers are now checking in MS C++ changes which break my gcc build. Now I'm the clown with the bucket and shovel cleaning up after the elephants in the parade.
This exercise in futility finally pays off after a year of stress and daily "how's it going" management when I finally get it working. Next week, we are told that they can't make the payroll because investors got cold feet. D'oh!
Now for the punchline: this year of solid work was supposed to take only 4 weeks by someone's measure, and this is the figure reported to the bosses in Europe. No way to look good now.
Picture Krusty the Clown (okay, Dark Clown by this point) with an arm covered in nicotine patches, shovel in one hand....
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How much distance? Oh, about as long as it would take to do a POST on boot up. Imagine, come in Monday morning, power up, by Friday afternoon the RAM test is finished, and you have just enough time to check your email before shutting down for the weekend.
I am *so* glad I didn't pursue work with Anderson when I graduated in the 1980's, my IT life has been an interesting and hellish experience without that crap. Okay, imagine a small startup of 15 people, all under the spell of "magic bullet" techniques like eXtreme Programming. They toil away for about 2.5 years, resulting in 500,000 lines of C++ code. No refactoring. My job is to port the lot to an small embedded Linux device. Sound cool? Yes. Are there any debug tools? Not as such. Oh, and while I'm doing the port, 15 other developers are now checking in MS C++ changes which break my gcc build. Now I'm the clown with the bucket and shovel cleaning up after the elephants in the parade. This exercise in futility finally pays off after a year of stress and daily "how's it going" management when I finally get it working. Next week, we are told that they can't make the payroll because investors got cold feet. D'oh! Now for the punchline: this year of solid work was supposed to take only 4 weeks by someone's measure, and this is the figure reported to the bosses in Europe. No way to look good now. Picture Krusty the Clown (okay, Dark Clown by this point) with an arm covered in nicotine patches, shovel in one hand....