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Let me tell you about the time I was called in as an architect to a technical meeting. Two teams were baffled why their systems weren't integrating properly, an
by phlakaton 7y ago
Let me tell you about the time I was called in as an architect to a technical meeting. Two teams were baffled why their systems weren't integrating properly, and each was heatedly pointing the finger at the other.
Annoyed, I pulled up the code for the system call that was failing, and within a few minutes I found an int64 that was getting truncated incorrectly.
I pointed it out to the team in the room. The shouting match suddenly grew very quiet, and I strolled out the door in satisfaction.
Sometimes, on rare occasions, it is a mate-in-one.
- regulation_d 7y agoSometimes you need org-level rubber-ducking.
- alexeiz 7y agoI noticed that oftentimes software developers on senior levels (and "architects" too) when faced with a problem, would start speculating about solutions without gathering the necessary information about the problem first. They would theorize that the problem is likely caused by something or maybe something else, then the solution should be some other thing, etc, etc. And they can go on and on along that path, because they have enough experience to do so. But in reality, all such speculations are bullshit. They should have realized that they missed some key information and instead of speculating, gathered the missing information first. Doing so would have saved them a lot of time and unnecessary meetings. I consider this a skill: to understand that there is a missing key information/knowledge without which all speculations are of little value, and what needs to be done to obtain that missing knowledge.
- rjzzleep 7y agoI had something similar but unlike you I was freshly in the company and it was a room full of people close to retirement. When I saw the suspected error before the meeting I spoke to one of the guys. He said I absolutely cannot mention the issue right away. He helped me workout a couple of questions I could ask to nudge them in the right direction. When the meeting started the Director of Infrastructure, some people of the accounting department and a couple of the IT people supporting them were shouting at each other and trying to find the one responsible for the fault(this bug actually cost them a couple of millions). I interrupted them by saying I don't care who's responsible and asking the questions I rehearsed. The director of infrastructure who was supporting the accounting people then found the issue(he retired a year later and yes weird structures in that company). Anyway, the guy was really proud and the accounting department was praising him and the blame each other games stopped until ... ... I had my 1on1 a while later and the CIO told me that he heard I was yelling at people in that meeting.
- kragen 7y agoSometimes you can achieve a lot if you don't care about getting any credit.
- rjzzleep 7y agoYeah, but sometimes it gets you fired. Different company, different situation. Careful with this kind of advice. People like to think that the world is this magical place where in the end you get what you deserve when you collect enough good karma and do the right thing, but it isn't really the case.
- bennysaurus 7y agoThere's knowing to ask the right question, and then there's asking the right question in the right way. That situation is tough though as you're working through both ego and office politics.
- camel_gopher 7y agoIt's a dysfunctional company where the developers probably could have solved that if they had good management which left them alone to code.
- phlakaton 7y agoObviously there was dysfunction here, but not just with the managers. It was the engineers in this case, on both sides, that were convinced the other engineers had screwed things up, and they were kicking in their heels as hard as they could rather than trying to debug it.