Can someone who works as a software engineer/computer programmer tell me about...
Can someone who works as a software engineer/computer programmer tell me about one job assignment that your boss gave you?
Sure, one time when I was working in OS development, almost 15 years ago, they routed a bug report for me to look at; one major telecom client was complaining that one thread out of about 350 they ran would stop making progress every three to six months, even though it appears to be "running" in the ps output.
They were able to set up a heavily overloaded rig that reproduced it once a month, so I told them to call next time it happens, and when it did, I came over, entered the kernel debugger and walked all over internal data structures for an hour or two to find out what was happening (the thread was indeed marked runnable, but not actually present in any of the scheduler's queues, it was lost). I ssh'd into work, looked at the source and all the code paths that deal with scheduling and wrote a small patch that created extra data for me to look in the debugger next time it happened (but careful not to distort the timing as much as possible). Compiled a new kernel at work, downloaded to the client, and told them to call again next time it's hit.
Next time there was enough information in my stash to locate the race condition (it was a very unlikely one, one kernel thread interrupted another in just the wrong time, but it was safe on its own, yet a third thread interrupted that one also in just the wrong time). I made a patch, gave it to the client, and went back to work on simpler bugs like bad output formatting from df.
Boss's part in that was to say okay when I said I need to go on-site. I haven't had a job where some specific boss would literally "give" a "job assignment".
They were able to set up a heavily overloaded rig that reproduced it once a month, so I told them to call next time it happens, and when it did, I came over, entered the kernel debugger and walked all over internal data structures for an hour or two to find out what was happening (the thread was indeed marked runnable, but not actually present in any of the scheduler's queues, it was lost). I ssh'd into work, looked at the source and all the code paths that deal with scheduling and wrote a small patch that created extra data for me to look in the debugger next time it happened (but careful not to distort the timing as much as possible). Compiled a new kernel at work, downloaded to the client, and told them to call again next time it's hit.
Next time there was enough information in my stash to locate the race condition (it was a very unlikely one, one kernel thread interrupted another in just the wrong time, but it was safe on its own, yet a third thread interrupted that one also in just the wrong time). I made a patch, gave it to the client, and went back to work on simpler bugs like bad output formatting from df.
Boss's part in that was to say okay when I said I need to go on-site. I haven't had a job where some specific boss would literally "give" a "job assignment".
Sure, I'll tell you one from last week. I work for a service software company, we make appliance repair/general repair based software.
I'm the iOS/Android/New Desktop dev (what a job description eh?) but before I got here they outsourced the iOS work to a programming professor out of state, nice guy, but I'm sure being a professor didn't help his code quality much. Well last week we realized that price hiding on tickets was broken. You push "Hide Part Pricing" and it... doesn't hide part pricing. Neither does anything else hide what it is supposed to hide.
So I ran through the code in a debugger, watched which variables changed to what and wrote down the results. Then went to the end portion of the code to see what is hidden by what variables and changed all of the things. Took me like 20 minutes and everyone was happy :)
I'm the iOS/Android/New Desktop dev (what a job description eh?) but before I got here they outsourced the iOS work to a programming professor out of state, nice guy, but I'm sure being a professor didn't help his code quality much. Well last week we realized that price hiding on tickets was broken. You push "Hide Part Pricing" and it... doesn't hide part pricing. Neither does anything else hide what it is supposed to hide.
So I ran through the code in a debugger, watched which variables changed to what and wrote down the results. Then went to the end portion of the code to see what is hidden by what variables and changed all of the things. Took me like 20 minutes and everyone was happy :)
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