End of exile

Today I moved cubicle.  I moved back upstairs to the department I belongs to.  I ended my life living as an exile on loan to another department.  The physical environment is better.  The new cubicle is closer to the window, quieter and has more sunlight.  It is much better comparing to the old cubicle locating in the entrance of the aisle, which is noisy and dark.  The psychological environment is also better.  My department is much more organize and well managed than the on loan department.

It was like constantly fighting fire downstairs due to lack of planning.  The project is a disaster.  We are still finding bugs on the last day before tape out and push out the schedule.  It is very likely the manager will just say that’s enough and tape out the device once the last known bug fixed.  It is almost guarantee there will be more bugs hiding in the device if the device is in a constinous state of flux.  The device should reach a stable stage with no new bugs for a couple of weeks before tape out.  Not enough time to do testing earlier is not an excuse.  If the device is not properly tested, it is not ready to tape out.  They should either move out the tape out or put more resource in the planning phase.  Saying we will finish the tasks with best effort is just an excuse being too lazy to make a proper plan.

Once you heard the word “best effort”, you can pretty much write off quality in the work.  You can qualify the features, the scope, the priority, the schedule, but you can’t qualify what exactly is “best effort”.  At the end of day in the eye of the managers, the only measurement of “best effort” is long working hours.  It is a known fact that long working hours is not correlated to the quality of the finish product.  It is just a waste of time.  If time is tight, estimate how much work can be done, prioritize the work and do it right.  Sometimes we have to admit, we just don’t have enough time.  If we really can’t  move the schedule and we have to work over time, we should incorporate the over time into the schedule.  Be honest and say the project requires 60 hours a week to finish on time.  Don’t underestimate the work and try to sneak overtime into the schedule as a unpleasant surprise.

One thought on “End of exile”

  1. I like that you use the word ‘exile’ – you have your freedom back 🙂

    This week, I’ve experienced colleagues who got switched over to another side of the school. If people don’t have similar philosophies, it is very hard to work together – and basically any pre-made plans wouldn’t work, it is about the execution.

    I got confused in where I work too. I like what my colleague says “We are PBS-ing!” (= positive bebavior supporting), just because this is what we can do and we are supposed to do, when everything else starts to fall apart.

    CHEERS!! 🙂

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