March 18, 2004

I'll trade you two forklifts for one cherry picker.


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What's your job like? Mine is a whole lot like that picture above. I take tools (in my case they are computer programs) and use them in ways that the designers never contemplated having them used. Anything that I can do is fair game. The designer never intended me to use my forklift to pick up another forklift that was picking up industrial tanks and lifting them way, wayway higher than allowed in any of the specs? Well, if the designer doesn't prevent me from doing that I'm going to do it 'cause you can be sure as hell that eventually a user is going to try to do it (the proof is in the picture).

Of course there is one big difference between how I abuse product and the way it's being done in that picture. They're stretching the limits in an attempt to get something constructive and necessary done. If it was me doing QA testing I'd be rocking that thing back and forth until something broke or crashed.

The moral of the story: I love my job.

Another moral of the story: It's probably a good thing that I work in software and not at a forklift manufacturer.

Posted by: Jim at 08:15 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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1 I was always kind of jealous of QA. Especially when they'd find something that just made my head explode. I mean like, "How in Sam Hill did you even think of that?" I had a bug once where the tester complained that there was no limit on your ability to resize the app window--it could be sized down to a 1 x 1 pixel area. And good luck getting it back to a useful size at that point. I read that bug report and I thought, "but who would ever do such a damn stupid thing?" and then immediately, the answer came to me: my own mother would do such a thing. And then she'd call tech support and complain that her application had "vanished." Programmers bitch about QA because it pains them to admit they need QA . . . most of them more than they think.

Posted by: ilyka at March 18, 2004 09:40 PM (7zvET)

2 I get a lot of "How the hell did you come up with that?" exclamations. They give me warm fuzzies. :-)

Posted by: Jim at March 18, 2004 10:11 PM (saeHM)

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