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It came as a huge shock to all of us. Never again.
Anna ![Rose | [Rose]](https://www.codeproject.com/script/Forums/Images/rose.gif)
Tech Blog | Visual Lint
"Why would anyone prefer to wield a weapon that takes both hands at once, when they could use a lighter (and obviously superior) weapon that allows you to wield multiple ones at a time, and thus supports multi-paradigm carnage?"
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Anna-Jayne Metcalfe wrote: one of the hardware engineers on the team committed suicide
That happened to us earlier this year  . While I'm sure job stress contributed (the company is under Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings), we believe his suicide was mostly motivated by a health concern.
Software Zen: delete this;
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I'm so sorry to hear that.
Regardless of the cause, when someone takes their own life it's a tragedy that could probably have been avoided if they had the right support around them in the first place.
Anna
Tech Blog | Visual Lint
"Why would anyone prefer to wield a weapon that takes both hands at once, when they could use a lighter (and obviously superior) weapon that allows you to wield multiple ones at a time, and thus supports multi-paradigm carnage?"
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ouch! looking back I am sure you can say I saw some signs. I have been stressed but never that stressed.
To err is human to really mess up you need a computer
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We were all under severe pressure, but everyone absorbs that pressure in a different way.
Looking back it at, the engineer who took his life didn't seem to show the stress everyone else was obviously carrying around. I now know that that's a warning sign - when someone internalises severe stress, it can build up to a point where they can't contain it anymore, and something has to give.
In that position I know I'll end up crying, screaming (usually back at whoever is dumping on me) or taking it out on some inanimate object (TV remotes do make a satisfying cracking noise when you hurl them at a wall....). He did none of that - just kept taking it until he popped. 
Anna
Tech Blog | Visual Lint
"Why would anyone prefer to wield a weapon that takes both hands at once, when they could use a lighter (and obviously superior) weapon that allows you to wield multiple ones at a time, and thus supports multi-paradigm carnage?"
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Yes I agree. Politics is always the problem in Software Development.
Too bad the colleges and Uni's don't invest as much time in teaching their studuents how to manage stress, idiot project managers and hostile customers as they do the "best and most perfect" design.
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The most difficult job I've worked on in recent memory was a contract job I did on the side. We had a couple interface libraries for a piece of hardware we were using. The libraries were horribly buggy. The manufacturer supplied source code for all but the core library that handled communications with their device driver.
The code was awful. It looked like it had been written by an E.E. intern with one class in C++. We had to replace all but the core library, and that we had to develop workarounds for ridiculous bugs. The worst was having to place Sleep(1) calls after most calls to the core library. They were doing something odd with threading, and the calls wouldn't execute unless you forced a thread switch immediately after the call. We would have replaced the core library as well, but the manufacturer refused to give us their existing source code or even a spec for communicating with their driver.
Of course, all of this is happening on a job that was running behind schedule. I was lucky; I only lost $2500 on the job. The guy doing the hardware, whom I was working for, lost more.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Hahahaha, reminds me of a conveyor project I did once. The system was supposed to support 2 transactions a second and communicate them to a DEC VAX via a software package of theirs called PAMS. They claimed it was as reliable as the mail in communications.
At first they wanted the network card in my sort controller but I refused because my system was heavily interrupt driven and I had another computer specified that my program would send the transaction to through RS-232 communications and from that computer into the VAX via their interface card.
Best decision I ever made. Even though they knew the transactions were going to come in at 2 per second, their interface protocol would take 15 seconds (per transaction!) to determine if the VAX was down before they would store the transaction locally and then return control to my communications software. They disabled interrupts during that time so I couldn't use interrupts to receive my transactions, but had to resort to using the Clear To Send pin to mediate communication between my sort controller and the communications computer. It was even more hilarious when communications with the VAX was reestablished and their software seized control once again until all the backed up transactions had been transmitted. Should I be cruel and mention they did not dynamically allocate disk buffer space for the locally saved transactions but instead predefined the buffer size and locked up when it became full?
Of course DEC was not going to take the blame, instead of sending a programmer to meetings with the client, they sent a lawyer. I finally said I was willing to throw down printouts of my code for them to crawl over and tell me where I had gone wrong. Were they willing to do the same? They finally conceded that there might be a problem with their interface card.
It would have been far less of a hassle if they had let me write the communications protocol to the VAX as well, but hey, I was not an employee of the All and Powerful Digital Equipment Corporation, so what did I know?
Psychosis at 10
Film at 11
Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
modified 15-Nov-12 11:48am.
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The toughest projects are the ones where I don't agree with the original design and I am given the code to debug. I am forever thinking, I wouldn't have done it like that or If they had done it the way I suggested, we wouldn't have this problem. It is just a huge mental block because I have a biased opinion of the design.
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