When I was in college and learning programming, I believed that anything could be programmed. Anything was possible if you were good enough at programming. Then I joined the industry and learned just how stupid requests from product managers are.
My favorite, and I have told this story dozens of times on the internet: we just got our first test board back from the manufacturer. It was our first product with a 64 bit processor. We get called into a meeting because the product manager read an article on the internet about how 64 bit processors can reduce battery life. Without any further info about under what conditions, if our use case meets those conditions, and by how much battery life could be reduced, the product manager asked me to write some code to emulate a 32 bit CPU on the 64 bit CPU so we aren’t affected by this battery life issue. Ignoring the fact that I am a Java developer that writes appcode and have no fucking clue about anything this close to the hardware, even if we did successfully emulate a 32 bit processor, there’s absolutely no guarantee that it would actually fix the issue, because at the end of the day, the hardware is physically a 64 bit processor, and since I didn’t read the article he was talking about, I have no clue what about the 64 bit processor might cause what was described. It could be something inherently about the hardware, I have no clue. I wouldn’t even be surprised if it was just a clickbait article and only in very specific situations your battery life could be reduced by 0.1%. Anyway, I told him I was pretty sure that was impossible, but I’m far from an expert in this field. He told me to do some research on it. So I played with my phone for the rest of the day and in the follow up meeting the next day, I told him I did a ton of research and that it was impossible.
In-flight magazines really have a lot to answer for ( 'cos we all know shitty CFOs won’t actually take any responsibility for their shitty ideas they got from the bathroom wall)
I had a feature request come down the pipeline that said, “We need this computer to send a notification out to other nodes on the network in the event it loses power.”
I thought it was just a poorly worded health polling feature. I was wrong. They literally wanted a dead computer to send out a message.
It took me asking them to send me a text message after turning off their phones before they realized the issue.
That was an extremely good way to pose your analogy. It’s important, as a technical worker, to realize that things that are obvious to you aren’t as obvious to everyone else.
I probably don’t know the full context. A cheap uninterruptible power supply (UPS) costs like $50 to $100 and does exactly what they asked for, doesn’t it?
Oh my sweety, the client has refused to buy a UPS or make any change whatsoever to make the solution viable, because they are dicks.
I’m considering an entire career change so I don’t have to deal with shit like this anymore.
Based
MQTT has a last-will-and-testament feature.
This calls for a warrant canary on a remote server.
a “hearsay” effect
“i HEAR that [someone] SAY it do able”
that someone, turn out to be their “computer genius” nephew in highschool that fix their internet (browser shortcut) connection.
Mostly unrelated but I had a client who balked at our price to make changes to their conference website (a week before the event). They suggested their high school son could be given administrative access and make the updates.
As a high schooler at one point and therefore representative of every high schooler ever: we should at least be able to turn off the adware, there’s maybe a little more competence in there
Spot on! This made my day heh.
Just do the Tesla MO. Say it’s almost ready, just needs a few optimisations and will be rolled out next year
You forgot the “charge 10k to start, rollout garbage, then charge 15k as you miss milestone after milestone.”
There are some toxic companies where you’re just fucked… but assuming you work at a company that doesn’t love failure it’s our job (or maybe one of your senior’s jobs) to step in with a reality check and make sure product knows the scale of cost of a feature.
I’ve worked with extremely good and responsive PMs and I’ve worked with assholes. If you have yourself an asshole that doesn’t learn send estimates or comments in emails so you have a paper trail for the post mortem.
Tfw the CIO is the project manager, you’re 26 months into a 6 month project, and he’s still lying to the board that it will be done within 3 months, whereas the team know it’s at least 2 years away (if ever) because of vendor indifference and incompetence.
My life in a nutshell
