4 ms·

Mine was pretty surreal also. I wrote software for the control room of nuclear power plants. Went with the crew that installed the hardware and software in the

Mine was pretty surreal also. I wrote software for the control room of nuclear power plants. Went with the crew that installed the hardware and software in the first plant. Turned it on, and the first words out of the plant managers mouth was "that can't be right".

texasbigdata 5y ago
Did you fix it????
- intrasight 5y ago
  First - he was being hyperbolic. But I did look around for the nearest exit;) There was nothing wrong with our software. It was just that they had never had such a fine-granular view into the status of the plant before.
ghosty141 5y ago
There is a talk by german software engineer (fefe) who mentioned this scenario (kind of). It goes something like this: I never wanted to write software for nuclear power plants or the likes where many lives depended the correctness of my work. Then a few years later I met a guy who was quite lax when it came to software security etc. When we talked he mentionend he worked writing code for nuclear powerplants.
- exikyut 5y ago
  And then of course there's the old stereotype (I'm remembering from Idiocracy) of it being the smart people that don't want to have kids, while the dumb people, uh... end up with kids, and that the human race thus became dumber and dumber.
- intrasight 5y ago
  "security" was provided by those guys with machine guns at the entrance. This was effectively before the internet, so there was no cybersecurity threat.
exikyut 5y ago
And this was your first developer job...? I am very curious how you wound up there. The other comments are talking about minimum safe paranoia levels from the perspective of the applicants, but there's also the facility to consider: it would be reasonable/expected/etc to require everyone signing off on significant work to have maybe 10-15 years experience or so. I take it this wasn't happening?
- intrasight 5y ago
  Yup - right out of engineering college. Westinghouse. They hired me because I said that I knew my way around a TCP/IP stack. They had no way of verifying that -but I did in fact have such skill, having written a networked multiplayer game (standard course project for CMU's "Operating Systems" course). As for "experience", these were different times (1989) where a) people were rational about such things, b)I was more experienced than any of the mid-career engineers on some critical tech, c) Westinghouse was the place one got nuclear experience. Finally, I'll say that it was the best job experience of my career. I worked with an amazing team of dedicated engineers. And unlike today, they were all engineers.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

texasbigdata 5y ago

Did you fix it????

intrasight 5y ago
First - he was being hyperbolic. But I did look around for the nearest exit;) There was nothing wrong with our software. It was just that they had never had such a fine-granular view into the status of the plant before.

ghosty141 5y ago

There is a talk by german software engineer (fefe) who mentioned this scenario (kind of). It goes something like this: I never wanted to write software for nuclear power plants or the likes where many lives depended the correctness of my work. Then a few years later I met a guy who was quite lax when it came to software security etc. When we talked he mentionend he worked writing code for nuclear powerplants.

exikyut 5y ago
And then of course there's the old stereotype (I'm remembering from Idiocracy) of it being the smart people that don't want to have kids, while the dumb people, uh... end up with kids, and that the human race thus became dumber and dumber.
intrasight 5y ago
"security" was provided by those guys with machine guns at the entrance. This was effectively before the internet, so there was no cybersecurity threat.

exikyut 5y ago

And this was your first developer job...? I am very curious how you wound up there. The other comments are talking about minimum safe paranoia levels from the perspective of the applicants, but there's also the facility to consider: it would be reasonable/expected/etc to require everyone signing off on significant work to have maybe 10-15 years experience or so. I take it this wasn't happening?

intrasight 5y ago
Yup - right out of engineering college. Westinghouse. They hired me because I said that I knew my way around a TCP/IP stack. They had no way of verifying that -but I did in fact have such skill, having written a networked multiplayer game (standard course project for CMU's "Operating Systems" course). As for "experience", these were different times (1989) where a) people were rational about such things, b)I was more experienced than any of the mid-career engineers on some critical tech, c) Westinghouse was the place one got nuclear experience. Finally, I'll say that it was the best job experience of my career. I worked with an amazing team of dedicated engineers. And unlike today, they were all engineers.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]