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Workplace Chronical: Bug-Fixing for Fun and Profit.

(2021-05-14 08:41:27) 下一個

 

"Those soldiers who are not willing to be a general are not good soldiers."

--Napoleon

 

Indifferent to the on-going pandemic, Bill is growing older like everyone else.

These days, he finds himself prefer things the way they are instead of hoping

for change. After all, he's spent the first half of his life learning lessons

and wanted to hold onto what's learned for a while.

 

Three months ago, the DMV urged him to upgrade his expiring driver's license to

a new Real ID that he could use to board an airplane. He immediately set out to

search on their Website for a way to downgrade, maybe, to a Fake one. In the

end, he had to settle with something inbetween, which was of the exact kind of

DL that he's used for the past 16 years.

 

At work, he used to hate changes in the code except for his own. Sometimes, he

had a good reason: the major module he contributed has stood the test of time

and given no problems. This gave him the right to be bitter for a while that

the author of the code replaced by this work got promoted to architect and yet

Bill himself had stuck at the position of a senior engineer.

 

But nowadays, he has come to terms with others' code. He even can appreciate the

buggy. For one thing, aging has seemed to improve his immunity to headaches, and

he no longer feels pressure from work no matter how serious or urgent a problem

looks. He has started to see bugs as the reason for an older and more experienced

programmer to stay engaged with the world.

 

Among bugs, performance issues are often hard to fix. The software works

correctly, which is expected, but just not fast enough, which is intolerable as 

it makes the product look bad compared with competition. Pressure would trickle

down the food chain from Wall Street (read the god of greed and fear) to

customers to vendors and to managers and eventually, the buck stops at a few

programmers.

 

Recently, Bill was drafted from his little forgotten corner to help put out fire

before the release. He and the team lead both worked on a tough bug.

 

From the beginning, he made the mistake by digging at the wrong part of the

code and got nowhere. It was more revealing that after he showed what

he had done so far, no one could point out the flaw in his assumptions. At this

level, the corporate heirachy was useless at best and often harmful. Following 

managers or higher-ranked engineers, one could end up just as clueless.

Everyone was created equal before the sphaghetti code that defied human

understanding.

 

Following nobody and rejecting input from others was Bill's forte. He was not

quick enough to question his own premises, though. Instead, a false confidence

took hold of him as he approached his task with aplomb like never before.

 

Two weeks of intense collective theorizing and scrutinizing passed in a blink 

and at the end of a Wed when they checked, the program miraculously sped up!

Everyone was happy and eager to accept that the last change just made by the

team lead gave the boost and to leave the matter behind.

 

Everyone but Bill. To him, the last change did not click and it felt worse not

knowing the root cause of a fix than that of a bug. Besides, he was keener on

stabbing at others' balloons than his own. Again ignoring the rest, he spent

another day to find out what really happened: it was fixed by accident by an 

inexperienced programmer working on a totally different issue and his change

was committed earlier that Wed!

 

No one cheered the finding. In fact, the truth might have underwhelmed some but

to Bill, it was like a Sherlock Holms story and finally the puzzle was complete.

Moreover, this time he had fun by focusing on the task and never letting ego get

in the way, which felt even more winning than solving problems outright.

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7grizzly 回複 悄悄話 回複 '暖冬cool夏' 的評論 : Thank you, 暖冬, for reading and your kind comment.

And indeed soft skills are very important and Bill was only able to grow these skills after he stopped fearing. It was like that scene at the end of The Matrix where Neo saw the Agents as they were, a bunch of computer code.
暖冬cool夏 回複 悄悄話 What a mastery of English language...
Also, "passed in a blink" is definitely a better expression than "Time does fly!":))
暖冬cool夏 回複 悄悄話 What a mastery fluent piece, unfolding a common work place story in a vivid way!
"Everyone was created equal before the spaghetti code that defied human understanding."-- While this is a visible hard skill test, soft skills are mostly utilized in an invisible, unfair or even dirty way.
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