3 ms·

Seems like the problem is either on the authors end, or the specifics of how things were said in the meeting. He outlines a situation where a life-critical pro

by shubb 5y ago

Seems like the problem is either on the authors end, or the specifics of how things were said in the meeting. He outlines a situation where a life-critical project undergoes technical review. The reviewers raise various reasonable concerns which reflect the sort of thing that gets raised when a company gets sued after a fatal incident (e.g. a car crash caused by an ECU error). Presumably this is done to document a reasonable excuse so that they have something to tell the court after the project staff have moved on. With these excuses recorded, the project is approved, although the boss expresses concerns. The author takes the process as personally insulting, "shaking with anger and reduced to tears". I've had miserable situations where change stays in code review for weeks over disagreements on doce formatting. I've had design documents bounce of a board again and again because one board member wants his own team to have the first shot at the project and needs to hold me off until their spec is done. Those are miserable. This just sounds like a company systematically covering it's ass and doing a thorough review to avoid killing people. Concluding, I suspect the author has an ego problem, but he maybe implies that the objections raised were presented to him unpleasantly. Although I don't, for instance, see any personal insults in what he reports, so I lean towards ego issue.

bayindirh 5y ago
I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. I've gone through a similar "murderboard" experience during my Ph.D. jury. I've been put down, borderline insulted, people knowing me personally behaved like they're my enemies knowingly. I can understand my code and design decisions put through its paces. I can understand my writing is criticized. Jury is for that, and corrections are for improvements. But implying that I'm a stupid, incapable human being just because I didn't write a paragraph about something which can be inferred from a graph easily, or my code is inferior because I didn't use that library but, my code's running almost as fast as the leading code (almost: 99% of the performance) with a much easier to maintain libraries. Or to put it another way, it wouldn't hurt a jury or a murderboard to point the problems in a nice, but firm manner, both making the points more prominent and learning a lot of respect in the process. We're humans at the end, we're doing stressful things. Removing extra personal abuse and fuzzing from the equation will just improve things, across the board.

by shubb 5y ago

bayindirh 5y ago

I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. I've gone through a similar "murderboard" experience during my Ph.D. jury. I've been put down, borderline insulted, people knowing me personally behaved like they're my enemies knowingly. I can understand my code and design decisions put through its paces. I can understand my writing is criticized. Jury is for that, and corrections are for improvements. But implying that I'm a stupid, incapable human being just because I didn't write a paragraph about something which can be inferred from a graph easily, or my code is inferior because I didn't use that library but, my code's running almost as fast as the leading code (almost: 99% of the performance) with a much easier to maintain libraries. Or to put it another way, it wouldn't hurt a jury or a murderboard to point the problems in a nice, but firm manner, both making the points more prominent and learning a lot of respect in the process. We're humans at the end, we're doing stressful things. Removing extra personal abuse and fuzzing from the equation will just improve things, across the board.