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As somebody currently working at an automaker on software systems, the amazing thing to me is that a mess up of this level doesn’t happen weekly. It’s rough out
by aaronbeekay 3y ago
As somebody currently working at an automaker on software systems, the amazing thing to me is that a mess up of this level doesn’t happen weekly. It’s rough out here.
- bozhark 3y agoWhat's the priority then, telemetry data? Why is it rough out there?
- reactordev 3y agoProbably due to fires, failures, and fatigue.
- firtoz 3y agoGames have AAA, autos have FFF
- jacquesm 3y agoRelatively crappy pay, complex toolchains, long build times, layer upon layer of (really bad) legacy code, badly specified (if they're specified) protocols between subsystems, subsystems that are completely opaque (no source code provided), homegrown OS's or older RTOS's, subset-of-C to keep it safe(r), tricky debugging environments and if you're really unlucky anemic hardware. I hope I didn't miss anything but I wouldn't be surprised if I did.
- ahartmetz 3y agoYeah, I think you missed something. The "software architects, heavy enterprisey tooling, and minions" approach to development where some of the architects could be good developers, but they don't develop, and the minions are often not that good and also not given any autonomy, so they are in a state of learned helplessness and just do what they're told without much thinking or initiative. It results in over-abstracted, over-complicated, slow, unreliable, and sometimes just stupid code.
- jacquesm 3y agoFair enough, yes. That's hopefully not all of them though but I don't doubt that many of the older companies work like that.
- ahartmetz 3y agoMost car companies are, in fact, quite old. Their big suppliers (who are often even worse at software, if you can believe that) are also quite old.
- foobiekr 3y agodo you guys not have confirmed boot and swizzling to fallback images?
- AlotOfReading 3y agoAutomotive varies widely between "basically modern Linux systems with proper updates" and the most janky, home-grown update systems imaginable, sometimes even within the same components and teams.
- foobiekr 3y agoYah, I know from friends at ford and vw that there's still vxworks and qnx, but even there, good grief, a-b with confirmed boot is about as basic as you can get. I confess I've seen incredible sloppiness about when a confirmation is done (too early, including in the initial init stages which is way too soon) and watchdogs (spawn off a process that has a while loop stroking the wd - just absolutely pointless).
- jacquesm 3y agoThank you. At least you're honest about it, the other day someone was trying real hard to convince me that software developers at automakers are made of magic fairy dust.