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I'm Mr Wolf. I solve problems.
Oct. 13th, 2012 10:38 pmThis week was tough - for 3 consecutive days I had to wake up at 5AM and drive to customers.
The last customer visit was this Friday and it was an interesting one. There was a very challenging problem to solve, but it was definitely beyond my humble skills. There I met a gentleman, a private consultant, who solves problems. Like Mr Wolf.
A customer reported a bug which was found in a field, when a rare combination of software and hardware conditions is met. It is very difficult to reproduce and it is almost impossible to tell whom to blame. Different parts of the platform are developed on one continent, assembled on another and used on a third one. Same for software.
My role was a simple one - if I am lucky and a problem gets reproduced while I am on site, I had to plug a measurement device to a CPU, make couple of measurements, interpret them or send to experts.
I was not lucky and there was no crash when I was near. Even going out for lunch did not help :). But when I took part in a brainstorming session, I noticed a guy who was saying very reasonable things, but he was not introduced as an employee of one of the companies involved. He appeared to be a private consultant often commissioned for this type of investigations. Later he was given a faulty device, and my colleague told me that based on the guy's track record, it is very likely that during this weekend he will reproduce and find a root cause of the bug, and earns tons of money. So ppl around were almost confident that during two days he can do what engineers from several companies are failing to do for weeks.
The last customer visit was this Friday and it was an interesting one. There was a very challenging problem to solve, but it was definitely beyond my humble skills. There I met a gentleman, a private consultant, who solves problems. Like Mr Wolf.
A customer reported a bug which was found in a field, when a rare combination of software and hardware conditions is met. It is very difficult to reproduce and it is almost impossible to tell whom to blame. Different parts of the platform are developed on one continent, assembled on another and used on a third one. Same for software.
My role was a simple one - if I am lucky and a problem gets reproduced while I am on site, I had to plug a measurement device to a CPU, make couple of measurements, interpret them or send to experts.
I was not lucky and there was no crash when I was near. Even going out for lunch did not help :). But when I took part in a brainstorming session, I noticed a guy who was saying very reasonable things, but he was not introduced as an employee of one of the companies involved. He appeared to be a private consultant often commissioned for this type of investigations. Later he was given a faulty device, and my colleague told me that based on the guy's track record, it is very likely that during this weekend he will reproduce and find a root cause of the bug, and earns tons of money. So ppl around were almost confident that during two days he can do what engineers from several companies are failing to do for weeks.
