When you get semi talented individuals or people with more reputation than skill things get like this.
Another problem is promotion by incompetence.
That VME system I was describing was a classic case.
That was a cluster fuck beyond the words cluster fuck.
I was the senior design engineer for a company contracted by a major multinational to do development work.
Because we solved some pretty long standing issues we attracted the attention of the people at the top.
I was asked to interface with some equipment they had prototyped. They sent in three or four units. Big fuckers.
I interfaced to one which was a total nightmare as it's documentation was in Japanese. So I reverse engineered it.
They took that unit for testing and asked me to more for the rest of the units.
That's when the problems really started.
Each unit was different. Not only different in software but had various versions o custom hardware as well.
When I told them this (with the required proof) they re-negotiated the contact to have me reverse engineer each unit individually.
yes, that's right. They paid me to reverse engineer their own prototypes.
It gets worse.
Some of these ran a completely different protocol. Since there was no interfacing equipment (that's what I was developing), I couldn't see any data streams and that meant reverse engineering is near impossible without major investment. So they found some documentation that might help. Thousands of pages long and sent it to me. Um, I did mention this was in Japanese. I tried to be polite. I really did.
I asked for a translation and they tell me to let them know which parts I want translated and they would do it, because translating the whole thing was going to take too long.
Time kept ticking and this was an urgent job so I basically said to them, how the fuck am I meant to know which parts in the 2000 or so pages are relevant to me making this work considering I can't read any of it.
Their solution was to send an engineer from Japan to be there live to translate anything I might need. So I basically told him what I was doing and what I needed to do and he would find anything that related to that and translate it. He read motor bike magazines for near a month with the occasional bit of translation. That was a pretty good compromise.
Then he noticed the VME system crashing he asked why it was crashing. I told him it could be anything that affected the system. Even data cables introduce artifacts that can cause errors. At that point he was authorized to contract me to research into making an error free cable. I could have been rich...if only I was a greedy narcissistic asshole willing to siphon money knowing knowing it was futile.
But wait, there's more!
So like I said, we attracted the attention of the men at the top. I mean the real top. For some god knows reason, the CEO had pet project he was working on. A contact less method to read high currents by the use of
the Faraday effect that changes the polarization of light in a material dependent on the magnetic field.
So he came from Japan with his entourage to discuss it with our company.
The meeting was between the Japanese crew and my boss, the owner of the company I was working for.
When it became clear that this was getting out of his depth I was called in to give my advice.
I learned several things that day. The first, it matters not some much what you say to a high ranking Japanese person , but how you say it.
He wanted to use a 24 bit ADC directly to read the uV signals in order to sample the light incidence and thus the current flow.
I said that it wouldn't work and had too many issues at the conception stage including the cost of a 24bit ADC (this was 30 years ago and these things were not cheap at that time). The resolution would be limited to the last few bits, the missing codes, linearity, quantization noise would all mess the readings up and they would have to over sample to make up for the low resolution which would mean a faster ADC and at the time that may prove to be near impossible to get and might spark a research problem on it's own etc etc.
Basically highlighted the stupidity of the approach when a cheaper and far more robust alternative was easily available in the way of a low noise op-amp coupled with a high speed 8 bit ADC and over sample that to achieve how much resolution you want.
Now, I wasn't actually rude but I didn't hold back at describing the futility of his proposed approach.
The six or so little Japanese guys orbiting the CEO looked like they were about to pull out their swords and slice me up for this great insult!
lol
Needless to say, they didn't do anything with that project.
Or if they did it didn't work unless they used my approach (or another equally viable one).
I should check to see if someone managed to get it done. It's been 30 years now.
Maybe they learned something.
I'm however still poor lowly engineer so clearly I've learned nothing...
[/NMI]
