Thursday, December 21, 2006

F*CKING IDIOT!

Something happened in the office today that has agitated me enough to blog. I was busy for a while and then lost my focus. I'm back. Apologies to my loyal readers.

There is this applications engineer who is supposed to do a competitive analysis of our product against a competitor. He was supposed to compare the measurement rate the two products. Ok, I will now disclose some information related to my company. Yes, I'm pissed off enough to lose some anonymity. I'm a designer of measurement instruments.

He collected a bunch of data from an experiment he designed, and placed the data into a table and slide-set, and presented it to us. His data was bloody meaningless. His method was all wrong. He didn't know what he was doing and just collected a bunch of useless data.

The data he collected was in log-scale. Electrical Engineers like to convert many things into log-scale. dBm, dBc, dBW, dBV and etc. He took the average and standard deviation of all his data in log-scale! I mean, WTF! I told him the first time he showed me the data that that means nothing. It has no units, no physical meaning. And he did it a SECOND TIME!

I also explained it to him the first time that the measurement rate (the time it takes to take 1 reading) is a function of the number of averages you tell the instrument to do. A simple example will be, if it takes 1 second to take 1 reading for a measurement average of 1, then it will take 5 seconds to take 1 reading for a measurement average of 5. He failed to understand this SIMPLE fact and got his data all wrong. He got a bunch of time measurements which does not follow this trend.

I've screwed him twice in two meetings. If he does it the third time, I'm no longer giving him face. Tell me what I should do.