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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I do this alot but I alway follow up with “Do you know what blah is?” and depending on age/experience/acronym or term I ask them to explain it.

    Sometimes I get assigned work with a senior engineer(where I learn) and sometimes I get asked to help a new person. For example right now I’m in a project being driven by a senior engineer but was asked to assist a professional development program employee(or pdp) to actually execute the project. As a result this is the habit I developed to 1. Make sure I don’t confuse people with random acronyms or terms 2. Ensure we are on the same regarding definition(and they are not just saying yes I know when they don’t).



  • Hold up… You thought maybe you downloaded malware (which in this case that was not the only cause) so you took it upon yourself to reinstall windows on a company issued laptop?

    1. Why are you trying to fix it? Submit It ticket and it’s their problem.

    2. If you suspect malware alert it security immediately. Many malware act as a gateway to lock other systems. Yes you might get in trouble but I’d rather be yelled at for downloading something then yelled at for infecting my company servers will ransomware/malware.

    3. Atleast in my company a computer connecting without a company supplied image of windows will be denied. Completely understand you not connecting to the internet.

    4. This problem was not caused by you but could of been… Take this as a lesson to be more proactive in the future.





  • I’m also a software engineer (at least in title). I agree with the social skills but a different thing came to mind. The ability to actually watch and understand what people are trying to do. I’m lucky as all my software is internal to my company. I don’t make what we sell, I make what tests the products we sell. And yes I test the tests and also test the test’s tests 😭.

    I’ll give an example. I have an operation where the operator is to scan a number off a paper before testing. That number is for traceability we need to know which test results are for which unit. Previous engineer said since it’s scanned off the unit it will never be incorrect as long on the printed barcode is correct(separately validated) so no need to verify format.

    I ran into an issue where units had an extra zero either before or after the number. So if number was 12345 sometimes it would be 012345 or 123450.

    I went to watch the process. The operator scanned the unit( I watched them work all day, this was 1 unit out of a whole days work) and when they put the scanner down the scanner’s corner was on the 0 button of the keypad.

    We did a 2 phase remiduation. Stage 1. Operator instructed to log in and then place keyboard on shelf away from workplace. Stage 2. Verify the number is in correct format in code. Yes the code update is simple but in our field needs weeks of work to test, validate, and release.

    Actually watching the operator closely identified the problem. The code was not the issue, the code passed all requirements and tests. The issue was the tests and requirements did not match the user’s experience but if I stayed in my cube as for weeks I would not of been able to find the bug.



  • vrek@programming.devtoxkcd@lemmy.worldxkcd #2932: Driving PSA
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    6 months ago

    So one of the reasons I’m moving is to get away from this. I have this intersection by my apartment. A few hundred feet behind the assassin is a highway intersection, and the road the victim is coming from has 4 huge apartment complexes.

    There is no light. Making a left there(which leads to a outdoor mall) during rush hour requires atleast 3 virgin sacrifices…






  • Long story short… Most of the money the company earned was from the credit union. I went through a depression phase and tried to kill myself (I’m doing better now) so I was inpatient in a mental ward for about a month.

    The credit union got a computer security audit from the ncua(similar to fdic but for credit unions). My boss could not access any system. No servers, no firewalls, no intrusion detection systems, nothing. I had the passwords but was unable to be contacted and “documentation was a waste of time”.

    They failed the audit. Credit union basically asked “we pay you for computer security, we failed an audit for computer security, so why do we pay you?”

    Contract was lost and company went under shortly afterwards.


  • Ok, I’ll give my experience. I was hired as basically a paid intern. I was in high school, I “knew” computers like a nerdy teenager knows computers… Not real knowledge of their workings but I played with some programming(I got hello world to work using perl) , I could install linux(in the early 2000s, I bought copy of Debian Linux on 7 cds). I was basically told I would be an assistant to the other computer technician.

    A week after I got hired, he got fired. For the next several months people got hired and fired after a 2-3 weeks. The company was 3 people, myself, the owner, his wife did the accounting. I didn’t know what I was doing, googling what I could to figure stuff out(i now know that’s normal but also now know how to Google correctly). I leaned on the owner to figure out things. I don’t know if your job is in computers but these are things I learned later were absolutely idiotic.

    1. If a computer came in with a suspected virus, standard protocol was no research or investigation… Format and reinstall.

    2. We had corporate clients (main client was a credit union), we gave the windows CD and license code to each teller with no record of what they were. He sold the license at the price he bought then for from staples.

    3. All servers had local admin accounts. All local admin accounts had similar passwords. I was the only person who knew what those passwords were.

    4. My boss thought time spent documenting was time wasted.

    Anyways I stayed there for 4 years. It was not perfect and I learned so much wrong stuff. It was a decent job, my boss had really weird rules(why so many people got fired), and my time would of been spent better learning correct information.

    That said I ended up causing the company to go bankrupt and the owner and his wife are now Christian consulers…



  • I’ve done some gcode but moved onto other programming(mostly c# so completely different. One thing I HATED about gcode, I don’t know if it was just my machines or gcode in general(most of mine were based on fanuc cnc controllers typically seen as top of the line) , we were not able to name variables.

    I create a variable and assign it #315. What does #315 do? What does it mean? Who knows… Better have notes or comments to explain or your fucked. I can’t say variable x_offset_tool_15 nope…just #315.