« Run Log | Main | So cheap (dumb?) it hurts »
February 11, 2009
Why hours are wasted at my workplace...
Slightly frustrated, so going to blog. :)
Sometimes, being the "oldest" (e.g., having been here the longest) member of a team SUCKS BALLS. Especially when any bug is filed for something that is "slightly older" code gets assigned to you.
I just spent the entire afternoon looking at a bug that was filed against a generated graph, of which the code was written over 4 years ago, the person who wrote it left, and we haven't touched that piece of code in like, 2 years. (So, likelihood of THAT being the problem are highly suspicious to me).
But anyway, there was a problem: the client looked at the graph, saw that "Hey, the XXX is really high and it shouldn't be" and so called tech support. Since XXX is a statistic generated by other engineers, those engineers were quick to say "oh, it looks ok from xxx log file" (of which the graph is not even generated from?). And then another engineer says, "I looked at this report and it shows the correct values (that xxx is not high), so it MUST be a graph problem!" So over to my side it went.
EXCEPT. I KNOW VERY LITTLE OF THIS GRAPH. I know very little about what the hell we are trying to plot, and how the heck we get this data. But believing what the engineers previously had said, I dug around through the graph code, figuring out what I needed to (to discover that engineer 1's statement about the log file was useless and that engineer 2's statement was a blatant LIE because the report he mentioned wasn't even valid for the time period the customer was talking about). And right when I had spent gobbles of time and was about to prove so (by pulling up the correct report), engineer 1 had apparently still been working on it, and finally disclosed that "Hey, it IS our problem and not the chart!"
FANTASTIC.
Posted by szujin at February 11, 2009 04:18 PM