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Comment by wrs | Hacker News Reader

Some of this post reminds me of a story I heard long ago from someone who had worked at a HW/SW company. They’d transferred an engineer from the ASIC design team to the OS kernel team, though he’d never been on a software team before. After a while the manager called him in for the following conversation:

Manager: You’re doing amazing work — zero bugs in production! I’d like you to mentor the other SWEs on how to get their bug count down too.

Engineer: We’re allowed to have bugs?

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Funny story but in my experience hardware engineers produce some of the worst software of the industry. Of course there must be some hardware engineers out there who do hood software but generally what they build are disasters.

I bet it's being organized by project rather than product. Conway's law ensures such an org will create code around projects, not products, and that always ends horribly.

I know it’s a typo, but I love the idea of “hood software” lol

Honestly, i do not blame them for that though. The whole eco-system of in C- procedurally bitbang on some registers and read on others, until some circuit that might be there is coerced into doing work - often with faulty prototypes you have to rewire yourself, whos documentation is - non-existant-complete while having deadlines within deadlines. And the project-culture is just "aggregate" a layer, wrap the problem like a pearl in shellacks as the main abstraction.

Hardware engineers call them errata ;-)

How many engineers does it take to fix a bug?

Hardware Engineers: "None. We'll fix it in firmware."

Firmware Engineers: "None. We'll fix it in software."

Software Engineers: "None. We'll document it in the manual."

Technical Writers: "None. The user can figure it out." etc.

While I get the joke, as a technical writer, you might be surprised how often I've found myself as a defacto QA engineer:

Me: This is what you said it does, and this is what it actually seems to do. Which one is right?

Engineer: Shit.

Very carefully - and I mean extremely carefully - word it so that it describes what it does, while implying what it should do without confirming that it actually does that.

Also helps if you fix the bug or change the behavior, the docs are still technically correct. I'm only partially kidding, I swear I've seen this a million times in documentation I read.

The joke is awesome.

Sadly, monospaced fonts kill sarcasm.

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