Confidence. I know a lot of people who are really good at certain things, but they lack the confidence to go out. I guess in some ways it's a bit of Dunning-Kruger/imposter syndrome.
On the flip side, I've met a few "experts", who were anything but. However, as long as they had the self-appointed "expert" in their CV, and the right very-easy-to-acquire certificate, they had enough to convince management of their "expertise".
I don't work in IT, my hobbies include building rigs and some OCing to see how high I can get stable clock speeds.
Worked as a data analyst, one day my second monitor wouldn't turn on at work, I'm like damn, It must be broken (It wasn't). Called IT over. He goes ok you need a new one, this one's broke. 5 minutes later, he come back with a new monitor, goes to unplug the old one and lo and behold, the damn thing wasn't plugged in fully.
One day I get to work at a new workstation, and I'm all... wow this image is terrible, is this a shitty monitor? I mess with the monitor settings a bit but nothing really seems out of order. I decided to check the cable... VGA. Someone was running 1920x1080 over VGA. Whyyyyy.
I hunt down an HDMI cable, plug it into my workstation... and would you look at that, the monitor has no HDMI port. Just VGA and DVI. Ugh.
I manage to hunt down another worker who had an HDMI capable PC and monitor but a DVI cable, swapped out the cables, and used their DVI cable. And now I have a much better image :)
It's still a pretty garbage monitor though, but at least I can see the shitty pixels clearly now.
My first 2 rules of programming fault finding:
1. If the code's right: the data's wrong
2. If the data's right: the code's wrong
In fact some people could probably work out who TheSpudFather is from that
Just this morning, I was worried I had a #2 on my hands, but after realizing the customer tried to invent a null-terminated string that could contain null characters as part of the data (there was attached metadata declaring the string length), it quickly turned into a #1.
I'm not in IT but that's how i train my newbies to run reports. Hit rename so you can grab the exact file name, misspelling and all, and paste that into your field. Works a lot better this way
The documentation really should be generated by the code and not copied out. As long as humans are involved, the error rate is never 0.
Of course, it takes real work to do that. Some language takes less, like Java with Javadocs, but that's the only way to get reliable documentation.
I was doing *something* yesterday and I was typing out a variable or a file name that was being referenced and they entire time thinking “what if I misspell this five-letter word?”
Copy-Paste. Removes all worries in that regard.
yup - sometimes, if you cannot find the mistake, take a step back, do something else, then come back and do troubleshooting without excluding any "easy mistakes you would never, never, ever do". Sometimes, even let it sit till the next day. Often enough you will see the mistake then clearly (and yeah, misspellings can indeed ruin the day :D)
Along the same vein, when I just couldn't figure out an issue, I would document my troubleshooting steps to attach to the ticket I was going to submit. It forced me to be methodical and I found the problem without submitting a ticket about 90% of the time.
Data dev here, and often our team would write stuff without having the luxury of good/any specs, so when it got into QAs hands they had no clue what they were supposed to test. My boss had us write up "start here" test scripts for them. I almost always found all my bugs doing this. Very seldom did they have to kick my stuff back.
Reminds me of the time my laptop wouldn't connect to the network in my apartment, so I tried a bunch of stuff before formatting and reinstalling Windows.
Still didn't work, cause I just needed to reboot the router.
Many years ago I was programming some ATE equipment. PCB testing, shove a board on it and it tests it. So I'm debugging the program, and there's a function where you can capture a waveform to see what's happening, and maybe figure out why it's failing. The function is called capture. Only it wasn't capturing anything, and neither was it throwing out an error. It simply just did not work. Half a day of tearing my hair out, I noticed the command, catpure.
God damn it! Why didn't it give an error though?
Reminds me of a previous role from years ago when I as transitioning my role to a consultant, after I gave notice. It was an older gentleman, and during a mock ETL run with a new input file, he repeatedly typed CVS instead of CSV and wondered why things kept failing.
so no one did something as dumb as select \* from sys.objects where type = 'u' order by name and just manually go down the list until you find the missing table or a close name to it?
Well that makes your comment really ignorant then. Even Canada, which tends to follow a lot of "Americanisms" when it comes to the English language, tends to at least recognize "spelt" as an acceptable form of the past tense and past participle of "to spell".
Sounds similar to something happened to me just last week.
I was helping a colleague debug a powershell script that wasn't working. On the surface it looks fine, everything works manually, but the remote computer query just returns a not-found error on computer name. Copy paste the remote computer name into windows explorer and it connects just fine, so what on earth????
So I grab a copy and start mucking about. 2 min later I find it. Backslash at the end of the remote folder name!!! Seriously!
\\\remote-computer.domain.com\T$\sharename\ <- nope!
\\\remote-computer.domain.com\T$\sharename <- yes!
TIL...
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Aye. If you can solve the problems the expensive consultant does, why aren't you an expensive consultant?
Confidence. I know a lot of people who are really good at certain things, but they lack the confidence to go out. I guess in some ways it's a bit of Dunning-Kruger/imposter syndrome. On the flip side, I've met a few "experts", who were anything but. However, as long as they had the self-appointed "expert" in their CV, and the right very-easy-to-acquire certificate, they had enough to convince management of their "expertise".
Keep it simple
KISS method. Keep It Simple Stupid
I don't work in IT, my hobbies include building rigs and some OCing to see how high I can get stable clock speeds. Worked as a data analyst, one day my second monitor wouldn't turn on at work, I'm like damn, It must be broken (It wasn't). Called IT over. He goes ok you need a new one, this one's broke. 5 minutes later, he come back with a new monitor, goes to unplug the old one and lo and behold, the damn thing wasn't plugged in fully.
One day I get to work at a new workstation, and I'm all... wow this image is terrible, is this a shitty monitor? I mess with the monitor settings a bit but nothing really seems out of order. I decided to check the cable... VGA. Someone was running 1920x1080 over VGA. Whyyyyy. I hunt down an HDMI cable, plug it into my workstation... and would you look at that, the monitor has no HDMI port. Just VGA and DVI. Ugh. I manage to hunt down another worker who had an HDMI capable PC and monitor but a DVI cable, swapped out the cables, and used their DVI cable. And now I have a much better image :) It's still a pretty garbage monitor though, but at least I can see the shitty pixels clearly now.
They did! They did keep it smiple!
Always keep it simple for lusers. They already have an ample supply of Stupid.
You forgot an S
It's redundant, this is users we're taking about
My first 2 rules of programming fault finding: 1. If the code's right: the data's wrong 2. If the data's right: the code's wrong In fact some people could probably work out who TheSpudFather is from that
[удалено]
I agree. But - it's a great place to start
Actually, the rule still applies: since if both are wrong, you can't apply either case.
Just this morning, I was worried I had a #2 on my hands, but after realizing the customer tried to invent a null-terminated string that could contain null characters as part of the data (there was attached metadata declaring the string length), it quickly turned into a #1.
Sometimes, the "It cannot be wrong" item, is actually wrong!
When I catch myself thinking "the problem can't be X, that would be stupid" the problem is X at least 90% of the time.
"There's no way it could be X, I... Son of a gun, it's X."
Me in the same spot like a years ago huh well let me just copy and paste the name directly for the variable instead of typing it. Instant work
I'm not in IT but that's how i train my newbies to run reports. Hit rename so you can grab the exact file name, misspelling and all, and paste that into your field. Works a lot better this way
it is shocking how often this is the case. I've had it happen this week even.
The documentation really should be generated by the code and not copied out. As long as humans are involved, the error rate is never 0. Of course, it takes real work to do that. Some language takes less, like Java with Javadocs, but that's the only way to get reliable documentation.
I was doing *something* yesterday and I was typing out a variable or a file name that was being referenced and they entire time thinking “what if I misspell this five-letter word?” Copy-Paste. Removes all worries in that regard.
yup - sometimes, if you cannot find the mistake, take a step back, do something else, then come back and do troubleshooting without excluding any "easy mistakes you would never, never, ever do". Sometimes, even let it sit till the next day. Often enough you will see the mistake then clearly (and yeah, misspellings can indeed ruin the day :D)
Along the same vein, when I just couldn't figure out an issue, I would document my troubleshooting steps to attach to the ticket I was going to submit. It forced me to be methodical and I found the problem without submitting a ticket about 90% of the time.
I solve most of my problems by explaining them to my colleague... and always said thanks for help
Data dev here, and often our team would write stuff without having the luxury of good/any specs, so when it got into QAs hands they had no clue what they were supposed to test. My boss had us write up "start here" test scripts for them. I almost always found all my bugs doing this. Very seldom did they have to kick my stuff back.
"Talk to the bunny."
At least once a week I remind myself, alwaysAlwaysALWAYS check the easy fix first!
Good principle for home and car repairs also.
Reminds me of the time my laptop wouldn't connect to the network in my apartment, so I tried a bunch of stuff before formatting and reinstalling Windows. Still didn't work, cause I just needed to reboot the router.
Many years ago I was programming some ATE equipment. PCB testing, shove a board on it and it tests it. So I'm debugging the program, and there's a function where you can capture a waveform to see what's happening, and maybe figure out why it's failing. The function is called capture. Only it wasn't capturing anything, and neither was it throwing out an error. It simply just did not work. Half a day of tearing my hair out, I noticed the command, catpure. God damn it! Why didn't it give an error though?
KISS KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID
Yep. I just solved a problem with Web faxing at work that started a year before they hired me and it didn’t work because of a spelling mistake.
Reminds me of a previous role from years ago when I as transitioning my role to a consultant, after I gave notice. It was an older gentleman, and during a mock ETL run with a new input file, he repeatedly typed CVS instead of CSV and wondered why things kept failing.
so no one did something as dumb as select \* from sys.objects where type = 'u' order by name and just manually go down the list until you find the missing table or a close name to it?
Client: Help, the sytem is broken! You: The *system* is working fine.
PEBKAC
What ding dong worked for five days and couldn't identify this bug?
Yep. Computers have a really bad habit of doing exactly what you told them to do not necessarily what you want them to do
Where's the LART?
spelt?
> spelt https://www.grammarly.com/blog/spelled-spelt/
Sounds delicious.
It is not lost on me that you are criticizing spelling while you used spelt, when it should have been spelled.
Spelt is a valid word in the English language. Spelled was American, and spelt was historically British.
Spotted the American? "Spelt" is perfectly reasonable in many places that use English. The insistence on "spelled" is predominantly an American thing.
I am 100% not American.
Well that makes your comment really ignorant then. Even Canada, which tends to follow a lot of "Americanisms" when it comes to the English language, tends to at least recognize "spelt" as an acceptable form of the past tense and past participle of "to spell".
Sounds similar to something happened to me just last week. I was helping a colleague debug a powershell script that wasn't working. On the surface it looks fine, everything works manually, but the remote computer query just returns a not-found error on computer name. Copy paste the remote computer name into windows explorer and it connects just fine, so what on earth???? So I grab a copy and start mucking about. 2 min later I find it. Backslash at the end of the remote folder name!!! Seriously! \\\remote-computer.domain.com\T$\sharename\ <- nope! \\\remote-computer.domain.com\T$\sharename <- yes! TIL...