-Kiande- posted:
Your job sounds horrendous, Accident. :[
not at all! I get paid for breaking stuff, how awesome is that?
Think about it...your whole life, you're told "be careful, don't break anything"! Well, I am EXPECTED to break stuff. I get to write code to do it, too.
I have to try not to get excited when I find awful bugs, though, because it really does suck for the poor developers who have to fix the problems. At my last place, they wouldn't let testers touch production code, but here they do, so often I pitch in to try to fix the stuff I find.
I remember one time I found a bug in an example file that locked up the entire computer, the devs couldn't even attach a debugger. They finally found a null pointer somewhere (big surprise).
Another time we were doing a final visual inspection of the master discs that were going to be copied and sent out all to customers all over the world -- I saw a URL printed on Disc 1 and said, "Huh, what address is that?" and got a 404. I think someone had assumed we'd set up a site for that URL, and no one ever actually got around to doing it.
More recently I was testing a system to register drugs. I tried to register LSD, and the thing didn't know what to do with it. Turned out it couldn't handle pyrroles at all.
I've run the system out of memory loads of times, too. Once I said, "I wonder what will happen if I search for every aliquot that has DMSO in it?" and bam, the whole thing came down.
Yeah, it's great fun, it's just that the test scripts aren't that robust sometimes...and more often than not, it's because people need to be educated in design patterns and best practices.
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I realize now I do not fear death. I fear my daughter will not be free when I die.
- NR, #iranelection
