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Oct. 24th, 2017 10:29 pmI was basically hiding in the environmental chamber room: loud, hot, because the thermal chambers are loud and hot. I was wearing big ol' safety-orange earmuffs to reduce the sound. Coworker walks in, sits down, pulls up another chair for his feet, and proceeds to start a nearly-yelled conversation.
It is almost impossible at work to get any time to *think* about hard programming problems. I swear I'm going to take my laptop into the bathroom and take over a toilet stall. Office closed door means nothing. Going to an unused lab just delays someone finding me to talk at me.
Even the two locked rooms to which I have access (as the designated person who checks for bodies when the fire alarm goes off) both have, in a bit of really great planning, totally unlocked doors leading into them, for which the security system is a sign saying "NOT AN ENTRANCE!"
After about eight hours of that for the last two days I am so done with work. If I weren't in the middle of triage for a legitimately disastrous problem for which I am the only viable solution, I would call in sick for the next week.
Here's the issue: we have an unfixable problem that we are required to fix. Like, we designed a feature in silicon, that one of our customers hates and wants us to defeat through testing for the parts that because of natural variation in the process won't exhibit that feature.
We can't do that. It's inherent in the nature of the part.
But the customer has huge amounts of money, and is spending huge amounts of money on this project, and the high-up muckety mucks, including a guy in our company whose sole job is to interface between our company and this other company, have told us that we will come up with a production quality test that will allow us to find the parts that bias such that they don't exhibit this. Like, we're on the phone, trying to explain that it isn't possible, and the guy keeps saying "I understand that. So what screening process are you going to use to fix it?" That's what he's paid to do.
arrrrrgh.
Our ex-department-head, soon after becoming department head, went off to a technical meeting at headquarters and came back and said "I have learned that at some point in the technical world you climb up the ladder high enough that you encounter people who don't know what they're talking about but whose opinions still matter more than yours."
I don't have a test that can sort chips, but I am the only one who has a test that can reliably detect the operation of the feature we're looking for, so I'm spending a LOT of time testing parts. My coworker who keeps talking at me is the person responsible for coming up with a hardware solution that can sort chips, and he knows it's impossible, so he's not even trying. Instead he's sitting around telling me about hunting, which I have less than zero interest in hearing.
Maybe I could fake deafness.
When I come home I don't want to do anything. I just want to sit. Instead I go out to the mad scientist hut and work on the lathe because at least that's mindless and somewhat productive.
It is almost impossible at work to get any time to *think* about hard programming problems. I swear I'm going to take my laptop into the bathroom and take over a toilet stall. Office closed door means nothing. Going to an unused lab just delays someone finding me to talk at me.
Even the two locked rooms to which I have access (as the designated person who checks for bodies when the fire alarm goes off) both have, in a bit of really great planning, totally unlocked doors leading into them, for which the security system is a sign saying "NOT AN ENTRANCE!"
After about eight hours of that for the last two days I am so done with work. If I weren't in the middle of triage for a legitimately disastrous problem for which I am the only viable solution, I would call in sick for the next week.
Here's the issue: we have an unfixable problem that we are required to fix. Like, we designed a feature in silicon, that one of our customers hates and wants us to defeat through testing for the parts that because of natural variation in the process won't exhibit that feature.
We can't do that. It's inherent in the nature of the part.
But the customer has huge amounts of money, and is spending huge amounts of money on this project, and the high-up muckety mucks, including a guy in our company whose sole job is to interface between our company and this other company, have told us that we will come up with a production quality test that will allow us to find the parts that bias such that they don't exhibit this. Like, we're on the phone, trying to explain that it isn't possible, and the guy keeps saying "I understand that. So what screening process are you going to use to fix it?" That's what he's paid to do.
arrrrrgh.
Our ex-department-head, soon after becoming department head, went off to a technical meeting at headquarters and came back and said "I have learned that at some point in the technical world you climb up the ladder high enough that you encounter people who don't know what they're talking about but whose opinions still matter more than yours."
I don't have a test that can sort chips, but I am the only one who has a test that can reliably detect the operation of the feature we're looking for, so I'm spending a LOT of time testing parts. My coworker who keeps talking at me is the person responsible for coming up with a hardware solution that can sort chips, and he knows it's impossible, so he's not even trying. Instead he's sitting around telling me about hunting, which I have less than zero interest in hearing.
Maybe I could fake deafness.
When I come home I don't want to do anything. I just want to sit. Instead I go out to the mad scientist hut and work on the lathe because at least that's mindless and somewhat productive.
