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You picked the wrong engineer to argue with

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  • You picked the wrong engineer to argue with

    *background* SC works for a fairly large bank and is in charge of their computer storage. (Fun Fact: He's a "Vice President" at the bank. But at banks and insurance companies, just about everyone is; title inflation is rampant.) In a previous life, he was a semi-technical big-shot a storage networking company. Recently he was a consultant for another one of my customers and he was an SC there too. (The other customer realized what a useless biased ass he was and pushed him out.) He probably got his current job through the 'ol boys network, since it can't be because he has any freaking clue what he is doing.

    I tangled with him at his last employer, and now I get to deal with him again.

    *end background*

    SC is having performance problems. While there *may* be a bug somewhere in our gear, we *know* that he is overloading his disk drives. Badly. However, he is convinced that *the* problem is with his networking equipment made by *Vendor* but sold by us.

    He thinks, because he was familiar with the protocols years ago, he can B.S. his way into... well, I don't know what his goal is. He's trying to score points by trying to invent scenarios he thinks we won't understand, or at least won't know enough to disprove. (i.e. Well, if the blargle bit is shifted left by three, the foozlebat latency increases by a factor of two on the mumblefratz command stream.)

    He picked the exact WRONG Engineer (yours truly) to argue with about this. I know enough that when I presented my conclusions to the other people working the issue, the vendor pretty much said: "Um... Yeah, whatever SirWired said." I know more about troubleshooting this particular corner of the protocol stack than just about anybody else in the entire industry, no matter who they work for.

    I'm REALLY looking forward to taking this guy apart on Monday. I don't think he remembers my name from the last time I made him look like an idiot. I give it a 50/50 chance that he still won't believe me, and will request more evidence (which I would already have if he had done his job properly), and I'll get to use said evidence to make him look even more stupid.

    SirWired

  • #2
    I think he'll remember you once you start taking his position apart, throwing the pieces on the ground and spitting on them.

    The dawning look of recognition on his face will make it all worthwhile.
    I have a map of the world. It's actual size.

    -- Steven Wright

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    • #3
      So, is there a juicy update to this, now that Monday has come and gone?

      ^-.-^
      Faith is about what you do. It's about aspiring to be better and nobler and kinder than you are. It's about making sacrifices for the good of others. - Dresden

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      • #4
        Ah, hello! The call got delayed until yesterday. I think my IQ points have dropped by half after arguing with that moron for two solid hours. The call was so bad that *vendor* literally told him that he was downright offended by the presentations SC has been making (because he is blaming *vendor* for problems of SC's own making), and that after 2500 hours of wasted engineering time, they want to stop working on these issues.

        He knows he is full of the most steaming pile of bullshit, and that I am NOT somebody he can bluff his way past, and yet he managed to ignore and/or mis-construe everything I said when he was detailing his New Improved Action Plan on today's call.

        Sample:
        Me: During the worst part of your 20-second line trace during the busiest time of day, we see a single 9 millisecond period where we add 16 microseconds of latency to each frame, causing some unknown (but likely insignificant) quantity of bandwidth throttling over this short period. We do not anticipate that removing the source of this latency would have any real-world performance impact.
        SC Translation: All traffic came to a screaming halt for 9ms, causing disaster to befall the world. If we don't fix this THIS WEEKEND, (while we are also changing a bunch of other stuff), we will never solve any of our problems.

        The kicker is that every single one of his CWs understands what I am saying perfectly and thinks SC is going to be doing some pointless crap. I also found out from one of my CWs that he has been "pushed to the side" at the customer as he no longer manages any people, despite his title, (at my company, we call this being "Penalty Boxed".) I was also told that his 2nd line manager was listening in on the call.

        I guess whether or not he gets fired here too depends on how good his ass-kissing is with the executives there.

        I do have to admire SC's skill in worming his way out of a corner we've boxed him in to. He continues to insist that the network is the problem, but he's mixed in his "fix" in with a bunch of other changes this weekend that we *know* will help his problems. When his problems get better, he'll call himself a hero because he'll be convinced it was his "fix" that deserves all the credit, when in fact it was all the other changes that did the trick.

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        • #5
          Ooooh... Is there any way to "forget" to do his fix, or run out of time on it, or something so that when he starts crowing about how great his fix helped, you can apologize for not being able to implement his fix at all?

          ^-.-^
          Faith is about what you do. It's about aspiring to be better and nobler and kinder than you are. It's about making sacrifices for the good of others. - Dresden

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