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Balkanization is about right. In my experience developing driver assistance systems, there are enormous efforts spent on political turf wars instead of proper d
by dognotdog 7y ago
Balkanization is about right. In my experience developing driver assistance systems, there are enormous efforts spent on political turf wars instead of proper design and engineering.
This is not surprising, as the team structures, at least as of a few years ago, were traditionally set up with tradtional manufactirng in mind, around parts and control modules, while the functionality exploded (within 1 or 2 generation of cars) and crossed those boundaries without adequate processes in place properly architect the interactions from a bird's-eye view, creating major computing power, network bandwidth, and most importantly to OEMs, cost bottlenecks.
And as cost is king, nobody wants to budge on increasing cost on their own module, and critical architectural decisions aren't made as much as put off until there isn't any other choice left except to hacking in the most critical bits with one eye closed and hoping somebody else's jenga tower falls first.
That, I imagine, is how you get that GPS time thing, I can see how it all started: "Oh, I can save $.30 on my module if I don't put in an RTC, that'll get me a nice bonus for cost saving, GPS is going to have one anyway ..."
- castratikron 7y agoI've worked in that environment before. It doesn't help when upper management has no software or hardware background whatsoever (e.g. MBA or "sales" or whatever) and in that case the only way they see things is in terms of dollars. One time I was working on a new project and I wanted to put an SD card on the board so that we could have a log. I was asked how much the log was "worth" so that they could justify the cost of the extra hardware.
- cameronbrown 7y ago> One time I was working on a new project and I wanted to put an SD card on the board so that we could have a log. I was asked how much the log was "worth" so that they could justify the cost of the extra hardware. Very much like testing. Incalculable if you need it (and you certainly do), but managers who don't understand, just assume that you're doing something wrong if you need to "waste time" reading logs or writing tests rather than adding features.
- TwoBit 7y agoseems like a reasonable question to me.
- Gibbon1 7y ago> I was asked how much the log was "worth" so that they could justify the cost of the extra hardware. You answer that question with a question, how much is a one month delay in shipping worth to you?
- asdfman123 7y agoI think you described exactly why writing good software is hard. Not because writing good software is an intractable problem, but because politics often takes precedence over it. In the business world there is a lot of room for BS so people get away with it. But in software, it can doom a project.
- theseadroid 7y agoWriting large scale software is more of an organizational/social problem rather than an engineering problem.
- Zhenya 7y agoYou ship your org-chart. You feel that in today's infotainment and electronics integration in vehicles.