My previous work used two mission-critical software for continuous operation.
One was some guy’s university project written in Object Pascal and PHP and largely untouched since 2006. I tried offering fixes (I also knew Pascal), but I was rejected every time because the cumulative downtime caused by software issues was not enough to justify the downtime caused by the update (obviously this was determined by a Middle Manager (derogatory)).
The other was (I shit you not) an Excel spreadsheet with 15000 lines and 500 columns. I tried making a copy and cleaning it up, but Excel couldn’t handle the amount of data and ran out of memory.
I absolutely cannot stand this kind of logic.
“We make a shit ton of money on this very critical piece of software!”
“Then let me fix it!”
“NO! It’s making us money NOW! It only stops making us money when it’s broken. At which point then we fix it.”
“But that might be hours. We can minimize downtime if we plan properly.”
"But it’s making us money NOW!1!1!”
I shit you not I have had various versions of this conversation throughout my career, across industries, across disciplines.
True zen is achieved when you realize it’s not your problem. Even better when the thing eventually breaks and you can be smug about it.
I’m not in the industry anymore, but every time I raised an issue to the boss that got ignored, I used to like to keep a little folder where I’d print the emails or just take notes about the issue, the proposed fix, and when and why it got rejected.
Then, 8 months later when everything is on fire, I could point at the date February 12, where at 3:40 PM I raised this specific issue that got ignored.
It never benefitted me, not once, in fact I sincerely think my boss at the time thought I was a smug little prick. Which was fair, I was one. But credit where it’s due, every time I brought the folder back out, he’d get a look like he just swallowed a mug full of cold piss and tell me I was right. That’s all I really wanted out of that folder anyway.
It’s your problem when they can’t make payroll because of it. And it’s your problem when they ultimately blame you for not having the solution ready to implement.
The first has happened to me once.
The second more times than I can count.
Even better when the thing eventually breaks
You mean when it finally does become your problem?
Oh yeah, I remember the good ol’ “Our whole business Logic is within this 30 tables spread sheet, that only one person can read, and don’t you dare restarting that computer” times.
One person. Sitting in front of three monitors. In front of a spreadsheet that maxed out every resource of that computer. It was glorious.
don’t you dare restarting that computer
We had two desktop PCs on the factory floor doing server stuff for a lot of assembly machines. We couldn’t move them to proper hardware or virtualize them because the GUI and the server were built as one monolithic application (I still don’t trust any Japanese company’s developers as a result), so one computer was made the primary server for one half of the factory and the fallback for the other half, and vice versa, to solve the reliability issues stemming from the software’s dogshit design.
What it couldn’t solve was Windows’ dogshit design. One early Monday morning, when we switched on the factory, Windows decided to force-update itself, then failed and bricked both computers. We spent half the shift with our thumbs up our asses periodically checking if tech support bothered to show up yet.
I have a lot of questions for whoever set that up in the first place, first and foremost of which is: why in the everlasting fuck was that computer ever attached to the internet? At most it should be allowed internal network access only.
