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Comment by bdamm | Hacker News Reader

The amusing but strange sub-story here is the build engineer claiming that the product may never be built. That is a type of endemic first class whining the type of which I am sick, sick, sick of.

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To me, that appeared to simply be effective communication. Raising a potentially serious issue early rather than waiting until all options have been exhausted and giving the security lead no time to react. Had they not been able to succeed, the advance notice could help in getting other resources moving in advance of the internal or external deadline.

Inability to power on a build machine is not a serious issue. It is a temporary problem with many solutions. To suggest that the build may never happen would imply a much more serious problem. That does not seem like effective communication, it seems like reckless panic to me. Perhaps they thought the motherboard was fried. Even then it would be irresponsible to suggest that the build could not happen. Certainly communicating that there is a problem is a good thing, but offering up the possibility of no resolution when the diagnostic is only just beginning is not.

And if the issue was that the machine ate a power surge at some point and the hard drive (+other components) was fried? It may have no longer been practical to recreate and QA that build machine...

Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here, and especially not ragey ones.

You could make a good comment out of this by replacing the second sentence with some more specific observations.

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