Software Engineers Who Dunno Nuthin

As most of you who read this blog, you know me. As for a stranger who just happens to drop in, he might not understand the background of my content. So some of it will be provided here.

I'm a designer of a product made by my company. (vague :)) This product is sold to our customers as a stand-alone product. Sort of like your off the shelf electronics goods like cellphones or TVs. But our customers aren't the usual consumers.

The product also allows quite a lot of automation that can be done with it. So our management decided to kick off a project to create a software application to sell customers, that interfaces with my product so that users can do things they normaly do with the product from a PC environment, as well as do further value added things using the application.

The SW project has been running for quite awhile. So far, nobody from that SW project team has engaged me and asked me about my product and how to use it. I naturally assume that they're a bunch of great engineers and can figure things out themselves...

But...yes, there's always a but, or else it wouldn't be in this blog, the situation was not so. Two situations has caused me to view the team in a completely different light. I hope they don't screw up their project royally.

I was told by a colleague in my team that he was approached by a couple of guys on the SW project team to solve a problem they had. To his horror, he found out that they didn't know the difference between Watts and dBm! They also didn't know the conversion between these two units. They were doing stuff in one unit while it should be done in the other!

Then yesterday, I walked by their cubes and heard them discussing loudly about a certain operation of my product. I got curious and walked up to ask them about it. I also had to know whether they really were a bunch of idiots or not. Turns out they are. They didn't know the most basic functions of my product. All these while, they were hacking around in their code to get their SW to work with my product without understanding what is going on...When I explained it to them, it seems like they need a major architectural change to their code.

Sigh...that's just one of the many problems we have here. Technical people who don't know technical things, or not willing to learn. I'll talk about the Kirchoff's Law one next time. That's an interesting one.