BreakPoint
This is Hooovahh
"Nidiface Rex!"
- Script note:Special effects-- The wires sling all of the attacking race conditions dead.
" Go forth now, all ye Certified LabVIEW Professionals, and smite software bugs likewise!"
I LIKE That!
Two today, the first from an ex-coworker.
"There is no hope I can manage this program. I have all of the responsibility but none of the authority."
Manager: "This is easy and should be simple for someone like you."
Hooovahh: "Simple, but non-trivial."
I find it annoying when someone who has never done my job, and doesn't work with me, makes assumptions about the effort involved in my tasks. This was years ago by the way and that manager no longer works there.
Hooovahh wrote:
Manager: "This is easy and should be simple for someone like you."
Funny, I tend to get the opposite:
Them: "LabVIEW can't do that. It isn't a real programming language."
Me: "Watch and learn."
Customer: "Nice!"
In a recent interview I was asked about if I would ever be interested in becoming a manager, by a manager. Here was my response.
"Where I am today I never want to become a manager. I don't mind the idea of being a supervisor but honestly I don't like the idea of not getting work done. I always think of a manager as a person who gets to see others accomplish things that they wish they could be doing."
I don't think the manager I was talking appreciated my phrasing. Suggesting that they don't get work done.
Hooovahh wrote:
I don't think the manager I was talking appreciated my phrasing. Suggesting that they don't get work done.
In my previous company, that was not far from the truth. Even in my current company, the management is so bogged down with proposals, personel issues, etc that, if they are lucky, can spend 50% of their time doing engineering work.
My personal point of view, I do not ever want to have people under me. I would be a horrible manager. But I am apparently a very good technical lead. So let me stay in the technical lead role and let's keep everybody happy and successful.
Something about promoting to the highest level of incompetence. Totally agree.
Also I knew a previous manager who was frustrated with not being able to get work done. So he put on his calendar 5 days a week from 8am to 10 am a meeting where he was "Working" and a meeting from 3 pm to 5 pm where he was "Working" and if you scheduled a meeting during that time he would decline it. This is something similar to the Maker vs Manager schedule. It was great for him because he finally got work done. But it was bad for those trying to schedule meetings with him because he was booked for several weeks out.
I also heard a new quote today worth mentioning. Some software was written by an outside vendor, and in the drop down for power supply voltage control it had the following options: 9V, 12V, 16V, and Ambient.
Co-worker: "I don't know how you can set a power supply to ambient...ambient voltage? I'm not sure what it is going to do."
Turns out they didn't mean ambient at all but I just like the thought of my co-worker trying to understand what level ambient would be.
After spending days training a new guy on the high level software architecture for a pretty complicated system with many database calls, multiple dynamic UIs, modeling, sequencing, configuration, synchronized DAQ, multi-head testing, report generation, file transfer, and other general craziness, I had this interaction:
Hooovahh: And this is where all 12 actors are started up in parallel, and here is the messaging communication between them all.
New Guy: This seems complicated can't you just do this in one VI?
Hooovahh: ...uh...I'm paid by the VI, so I wanted to make it as complicated as possible.
Ex-coworker: "They pay me way to much to work here, unless there is a reddit division I don't know about."
Full disclosure, I don't browse reddit at work, but I do browse NI's forums 
