h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Thats was excellent and its somehow soothing to know I'm not the only one. If I ever write an autobiography that there's chapter three. Just a small point nothing to take serious but you never mentioned demonstrating your software to higher management, the one true way to descover unforseen bugs.

The way in which, regardless of the amount of debugging and retesting, when you show higher management your software it's a sure fire bet you'll discover the daddy of all bugs, leaving you in a sheer state of distress and your managers in a untrusting one.

thanks!

You're perfectly right, presentations to superiours is *the* moment when all the severe bugs have their coming-out . I suspect that's another manifestation of Murphy's law .

But - there's one thing you can do: show them their initial timelines and feature list. Then show them how, over time, the timeline was shrunk, the feature list extended, and the staff list reduced

You certainly do know the way of Manager, I generally just blame it on the operating system, or even better on an version issue caused by an out-of-date embedded DCOM OLE server which must have been installed into the wrong registry key but can be easily fixed by changing the reference function call in the relevant API dynamical linked libary.

Once I say that I can generally stroll out the room, with my chin held high, to the sound of violent applause from all the chief executives. Suckers !!!

Sometimes you know I love my job !!!!

great idea

Once I played with the idea of putting a message behind those late-in features:
>>implementation of this feature is (and always was) the responsibility of Bob Remmargorp.
Bob was laid off right when he had written the curly brackets that follow after "function main()". <<

Of course you'll have to make sure that no customers are around during the presentation

Now there's a good idea that must have been around since the begining of time, but I have yet to use it in my career, I will now, I will blame it on someone else. Actually I work beside a load of mechanical engineers and chemists, to blame someone else will be easier than a rubix cube. I am learning from a true master

Mechanical engineers are very easy prey for assaults like these

Yeah mechanical engineers are easy prey, it's the long words that do it to them...integrated enviroments is a prime example, as soon as you say it they're eyes gloss over and they stare past you as if in a trance... does your ego no harm at all, at all

And you can play nasty tricks on them. Like: Visit their lab or workbench or wherever they are playing around. See to it that you're alone behind some bulky piece of equipment, then ask loud, but in an innocent voice: "Hey, is it really necessary to have smoke come out of this device here?" Then step aside, to avoid getting overrun by a stampede...