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A quick take on the project. Software Architect: "Hello sir! As you know, it has taken millions to billions of dollars and years of time to develop your proj
by vlad 14y ago
A quick take on the project.
Software Architect: "Hello sir! As you know, it has taken millions to billions of dollars and years of time to develop your project. We are ready to launch! As you know, it will take a year to actually deploy it in production, during which point a bug or misconfiguration of the software during the transfer, installation, or activation stages would cause it to fail. If a failure happens, we will need millions of dollars and lots of time to rebuild the project, as well as to figure out what went wrong and to try again. However, if we do succeed in installing the project as we hope, we expect will be able to run for ten years without updates. If you do need an update or if an error is encountered or the hardware deteriorates (such as because of a memory error, hard-drive crash, etc.), then parts of the application never work again. Also, as a reminder, the user will have to wait many hours after submitting input before receiving acknowledgement from the system, and many days to receive even partial results."
Customer: "Thank you for your report. It sounds great. I have one suggestion. Lets make sure that when ask the system for an image, we use the .BMP format to increase the file size. This way, we can please the media with numbers about how much raw data we have obtained."
Software Architect: "This will take additional time and millions of dollars and not be much of a benefit."
Customer: "Ok, fine let's skip that."
- raldi 14y agoIs that BMP thing based on something that actually happened?
- vlad 14y agohttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4368013 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4368013
- Sharlin 14y agoWhat's the relevance of this? Since they're bandwith limited, using a more inefficient compression scheme wouldn't gain them any extra transmitted bytes, only less actual data.
- vlad 14y agoMy point was that delaying an expensive and years-long software project that's already prone to failure, just to replace a perfectly adequate feature with another whose only benefit is to impress the media, would probably be considered stupid. In my example, it would be to receive images as BMP files just to be able to brag to the media how much data was received. (Maybe I shouldn't have used images in my example software project since it confused people, but I blame Hacker News for going offline before I could make improvements.)
- InclinedPlane 14y agoYou are clueless, NASA uses lossless and lossy compression on its image data.
- vlad 14y agoI posted an update: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4368013 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4368013
- wlievens 14y agoWhat are you talking about?
- vlad 14y agoHacker News went offline before I could finish editing the introductory sentence. The point was that a software project with the same time and cost requirements would also have interesting constraints: once it's launched, it can't be patched, and has to run for ten years. Would you as a manager really risk a failure? Don't forget that the software can fail at any time during the year it takes for the software to install, too. Any failure before installation or after would require the project to be rebuilt for millions of dollars and months of delays. Given that receiving a confirmation that your input was accepted already takes hours, and that returning output as textual data will serve the project's purpose for the next ten years, then the company should probably not delay the launch of the project even further just to be able to return .BMP screen shots of the text files, just to impress the media with how much raw data was found.