Sometimes I’m forced to question the sanity of my cow orkers. If you run our setup program and choose the option to set the time and date, you are presented with a string like “062716452005.40” As near as I can figure, that’s DDMMHHmmYYYY.SS, or translated into English, day, month, hour, minute, year, period, seconds. Besides the utterly moronic order of the elements in the string, the input routine has absolutely no flexibility in what you can enter and no error checking. Get one character wrong or miss a column, and you’re going to get a date and time that are utterly unlike what you expected, and you won’t find out until you exit the setup program and type “date”.
Category: Job Experiences
Woo hoo!
This is your digital cinema system: Some Tinseltown ‘Star Wars’ shows in new Kodak digital
This is your (competitors) digital cinema system on Windows: Midnight EP3 Horror Story in Maine
Any questions?
Not my fault, I hope!
Computer Problem Causes False Stock Quotes
I spent nearly two years working for a company that made the software that, at the time, was responsible for over 75% of all the trades that took place on NASDAQ. My bosses attitude towards quality assurance and testing would have been laughable, if it wasn’t the fact that they could have cost people millions of dollars, and the fact that when I was working there we were losing market share hand over fist to a company that made a product that was faster, easier to use, and didn’t crash all the time.
I’m torn between hoping this failure wasn’t the fault of any of my friends still working there, and hoping that the people in charge will some day get what’s coming to them.
Most of our customers were “market makers”, which is a large step up from stock broker in the heirarchy. A lot of our customers, and three of the people in our company, were at work in the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001. One person from our company got out. The other two didn’t. One of the people who died was somebody whom I was scheduled to have a conference call later that day when she got back from WTC. I think about Julie a lot when 9/11 comes up in conversation.
Bad Job Experiences, Number 9 in a Series
With the writing on the wall at Kodak, and Vicki and I were married so I now I had a green card, so I started looking for a full time gig. Not that I have any great preference for full time over contract, but I thought I might get a better gig this way.
And I was mostly right.
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(Not So) Bad Job Experiences, Number 8 in a Series (continued)
You know, Ed was right. When I posted Number 8, I left off the stupidest thing that Kodak did to the Cineon project.
Continue reading “(Not So) Bad Job Experiences, Number 8 in a Series (continued)”