When I was in college and learning programming, I believed that anything could be programmed. Anything was possible if you were good enough at programming. Then I joined the industry and learned just how stupid requests from product managers are.
My favorite, and I have told this story dozens of times on the internet: we just got our first test board back from the manufacturer. It was our first product with a 64 bit processor. We get called into a meeting because the product manager read an article on the internet about how 64 bit processors can reduce battery life. Without any further info about under what conditions, if our use case meets those conditions, and by how much battery life could be reduced, the product manager asked me to write some code to emulate a 32 bit CPU on the 64 bit CPU so we aren’t affected by this battery life issue. Ignoring the fact that I am a Java developer that writes appcode and have no fucking clue about anything this close to the hardware, even if we did successfully emulate a 32 bit processor, there’s absolutely no guarantee that it would actually fix the issue, because at the end of the day, the hardware is physically a 64 bit processor, and since I didn’t read the article he was talking about, I have no clue what about the 64 bit processor might cause what was described. It could be something inherently about the hardware, I have no clue. I wouldn’t even be surprised if it was just a clickbait article and only in very specific situations your battery life could be reduced by 0.1%. Anyway, I told him I was pretty sure that was impossible, but I’m far from an expert in this field. He told me to do some research on it. So I played with my phone for the rest of the day and in the follow up meeting the next day, I told him I did a ton of research and that it was impossible.
In-flight magazines really have a lot to answer for ( 'cos we all know shitty CFOs won’t actually take any responsibility for their shitty ideas they got from the bathroom wall)
When I was in college and learning programming, I believed that anything could be programmed. Anything was possible if you were good enough at programming. Then I joined the industry and learned just how stupid requests from product managers are.
My favorite, and I have told this story dozens of times on the internet: we just got our first test board back from the manufacturer. It was our first product with a 64 bit processor. We get called into a meeting because the product manager read an article on the internet about how 64 bit processors can reduce battery life. Without any further info about under what conditions, if our use case meets those conditions, and by how much battery life could be reduced, the product manager asked me to write some code to emulate a 32 bit CPU on the 64 bit CPU so we aren’t affected by this battery life issue. Ignoring the fact that I am a Java developer that writes appcode and have no fucking clue about anything this close to the hardware, even if we did successfully emulate a 32 bit processor, there’s absolutely no guarantee that it would actually fix the issue, because at the end of the day, the hardware is physically a 64 bit processor, and since I didn’t read the article he was talking about, I have no clue what about the 64 bit processor might cause what was described. It could be something inherently about the hardware, I have no clue. I wouldn’t even be surprised if it was just a clickbait article and only in very specific situations your battery life could be reduced by 0.1%. Anyway, I told him I was pretty sure that was impossible, but I’m far from an expert in this field. He told me to do some research on it. So I played with my phone for the rest of the day and in the follow up meeting the next day, I told him I did a ton of research and that it was impossible.
In-flight magazines really have a lot to answer for ( 'cos we all know shitty CFOs won’t actually take any responsibility for their shitty ideas they got from the bathroom wall)