11am: Arrive at work, check out crack pipe from inventory
11:05am – noon: Read online forums, cackle at victims; crack pipe
Noon – 1pm: Read latest standards documents; write code that is in technical compliance but to any sane observer appears screamingly inept, baroque, buggy, unusable and downright dangerous
1pm – 2pm: Lunch with friend from International Tax Code Writers’ Union; compare notes
2pm – 3pm: Review usability testing results; remove all discovered usability
3pm – 3:30pm: Bonghits
3:30pm – 4:00pm: Reading – “Transparency, The Apple Way (S. Jobs)”
4:00pm – 4:30pm: Notice latest production firmware code does not include enough potential bricking bugs; run random bug generator
4:30pm – 5:00pm: Notice company has minor hardware revision upcoming; write entirely new firmware implementation for it for no apparent reason
5:00pm: Home, with a warm fuzzy feeling of achievement
5:30pm – 11:30pm: Tease dog by pretending to throw ball
11:35pm: Watch Leno
A Day In The Life Of A Firmware Engineer
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See that crazy man across the street watching you right now? He’s a firmware engineer.
Run, Adam. Run
It’s okay. They can never shoot straight. All the crack, you know.
You forgot the time delayed and time dependent bug that randomly fails on even numbered days.
I was believing it until the “Leno” part..
leslie: no I didn’t; those are what come out of the Random Bug Generator 🙂
He forgot to pack it into random cab file to prevent accidental extracking by someone who only needs *usb and *inf without Yahoo toolbar and product registration.
I read this a while ago and laughed. So funny. But I’m not laughing this weekend after I did an Ubuntu update which, while attempting to be helpful, updated my NVRAM to set the UEFI boot options. Now my Dell Latitude firmware can’t boot anything, and better yet, it doesn’t even let me enter setup (F2) or the once off boot menu (F12). No sir, I assume that’s because it doesn’t understand an NVRAM entry Ubuntu kindly inserted. It’s stuck trying to enumerate boot options and it does this before attempting to display the settings sigh… To fix the boot options, I’d have to get into setup, so that special chicken stepped on the damn egg.
Hum, that sounds odd. Assuming it still boots Ubuntu, though, you can just use
efibootmgrto delete the offending entry?Thanks. Sadly, it wouldn’t boot into anything at all post the update process. I got Ubuntu to boot when I took the drive out and installed it into another laptop. UEFI secure boot with both Ubuntu and Windows 10 works just fine, but the original laptop’s firmware now has it’s knickers in a serious knott.
“write code that is in technical compliance”
Bahahahahahaha. Find me one UEFI implementation that doesn’t have dozens of critical bugs.
Also,
I think your problem is you believe there is such a thing as a firmware “engineer”. Engineering implies thinking ahead, designing the general structure of the software, doing some testing, etc. I’m pretty sure hardware companies simply find the cheapest code monkeys they can, give them some specs, and take whatever they produce as long as it seems to work.
I assume that’s because it doesn’t understand an NVRAM entry Ubuntu kindly inserted
I really like and appreciate your work. The points you have mentioned in this article are useful. I must try to follow these points and also share others.
I would presume that Sendmail has analogs to the various sanity checks described for Postfix.
Very eye catching blog