Off Topic > The Pub
What do they teach them these days?
mrcharly-YHT:
I-am-not-an-engineer
I have multiple engineers tasked with providing me with information.
One was tasked with running up a sample program, small enough that all the code could be pasted on one side of A4, and writing instructions for running up QEMU and debugging sample program with GDB. Instructions had to use specific architectures and builds.
That was on Fri. Didn't hear back. So I emailed said engineer to ask about progress. The response was that they'd looked into it and as far as they could tell, GDB could only be used with QEMU to debug Linux userland.
They've had this task since Fri morning.
It took me 45seconds to find instructions for how to do this, in detail. 45 seconds. I could have written the sample C program, worked out the compile options, worked out the build, QEMU options, tested it and written it up in probably half a day. And I'm not a sodding programmer and this is a specialist build & example type.
Earlier in the day I tried running a setup script for a system. It failed, with multiple syntax errors. I fixed the first two, took me a couple of minutes.
And I'm not a sodding programmer.
What do they teach them these days?
Beardy:
I believe that there is a module on how to wind up project managers and avoid doing what they asked for.
ian:
It's a good question. I'm mostly useless at anything other than kittens and giraffes (working on otters) but someone who ought to know stuff told me the other day that some task wasn't possible. Nope, we couldn't do it and if we did, it would take forever.
So one baby-I-can-Google later, I downloaded a script and despite having zero programmatic knowledge (OK, once-upon-a-time VBA, but we don't talk about that), I made it work on my computer. Took about 35 minutes from search to having a CSV file full of allegedly impossible results.
Oh, we wouldn't do it that way was the response. Well, yes.
Ben T:
You asked him to write instructions? As in, documentation, for a human, rather than machine instructions? IF so, that's possibly where you went wrong.
mrcharly-YHT:
I didn't ask for instructions - I just wanted the commands. Very specifically the commands.
Not a 'him', btw, ben
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