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Ultimate engineering (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 10 months ago by yrmyli@sopuli.xyz to c/memes@sopuli.xyz
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[-] Ubermeisters@lemmy.zip 88 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Is that the engineers fault? Or is that the people who are supposed to check for usability after the engineer is done designing the functional aspects? Because it's not usually an engineer's job to do this...

Basic product testing is the foundation of manufacturing, an error like this doesn't get all the way through production and it still be just the engineers fault.

[-] Beanerrr@lemmy.world 69 points 10 months ago

Checking for usability is one of the key parts of design iteration, which is done by product engineers. Source: am product engineer

[-] Lazycog@sopuli.xyz 22 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Former mechanical design engineer checking in as well: can confirm, the engineer's fault here.

You don't just design it just to work, a hobbyist can do that.

Edit: Not saying I have never made a mistake, everyone makes mistakes. And of course in a proper (especially big) design department someone always cross checks your work, so there must've been multiple people to blame. But mistakes happen and that alone is no reason to fire someone.

In my first job a senior told me that you will experience making an expensive mistake and that it'll be a good lesson (I did).

[-] merc@sh.itjust.works 13 points 10 months ago

Yes, it's the engineer's fault. OTOH, it's QA's fault for not catching that mistake, and the company's fault for releasing a product that wasn't properly tested.

We're talking about Cisco here, a company that sells millions of units. The more units you expect to sell, the more extensive your QA procedures need to be. It's not like this is their first piece of networking gear either. Maybe they've never had this specific error before, but surely they've had errors caused by people using a variety of different kinds of ethernet cables. I would imagine they have tests where they plug a dozen different kinds of ethernet cables into every new product they make just to ensure that a cable that has given them problems before doesn't have issues with this new piece of gear.

When a problem like this is caught by QA people, it's mostly the engineer's fault for a design mistake. When these errors are caught in the wild by customers, it's the company's fault for a screw-up somewhere in their QA / test / release procedures.

[-] dan@upvote.au 2 points 10 months ago

a company that sells millions of units.

Are they still that popular, even today? From what I've seen, many enterprise users have moved towards Juniper and Arista, while small business and prosumer have moved towards Unify and Omada.

[-] merc@sh.itjust.works 7 points 10 months ago

Cisco's worth $224b USD, not all of that is hardware, they also have WebEx, ClamAV, and various other things under other brands. Don't forget that a lot of their hardware is under other brands too, for example they owned Linksys for a while, and currently own Scientific Atlanta. In total, they've acquired 243 different companies over the years, so even if something doesn't say "Cisco" it may be a Cisco product.

[-] nxdefiant@startrek.website 6 points 10 months ago

Cisco has a market cap of a quarter trillion, sadly yes, they're still around.

I like Juniper gear. Even with their current supply problems I'd probably still try to go all juniper if I had to make a decision.

[-] Rivalarrival 25 points 10 months ago

They probably reused a PCB from another model that used a paperclip hole reset. They duplicated the design, sent it for testing, and came back with "everything is great, but make the reset a push button before you ship it." Engineering probably said "ok. But it will need to go back for usability testing" and sales said "fuck that, send it"

[-] criticon@lemmy.ca 9 points 10 months ago

Or another possibility, after proto and lots of testing: "we need to move test button a couple of cm to the right, away from the corner. No further tests needed"

[-] Ubermeisters@lemmy.zip 3 points 10 months ago

That seems highly plausible to me

[-] stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca 15 points 10 months ago

Yes it is the engineers fault, but even then there should have been multiple people that should have caught such an issue along the way.

[-] MotoAsh@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

As an engineer, I agree.

You cannot be a layer of security if your attitude is, "this is someone else's problem".

The swiss cheese model of security is what I go by. Yes, no one is perfect, but that's precisely why every single person needs to actually give a damn. (and why people should be paid enough to care) The more layers of protection from catastrophe, the better.

Giving in because others are involved is literally Bystander Effect-ing your job effectiveness. Only idiots should be OK with, "this is someone else's fault."

No, this is also other peoples' fault, but make no mistake: the engineer is on that list.

[-] crimroy@sopuli.xyz 9 points 10 months ago

Probably both, but you're right, there's definitely a qa problem here

[-] Llewellyn@lemm.ee 6 points 10 months ago

It's very strange engineer, if he doesn't aware of RJ45 connector form-factors.

[-] Ubermeisters@lemmy.zip 5 points 10 months ago

Hey I'm not absolving the engineer for not doing basic interference checks but I'm saying it's also somebody else's job I'm sure, Cisco's not a small company.

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[-] Random_user@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago

Sounds exactly like something an engineer would say.

[-] Ubermeisters@lemmy.zip 3 points 10 months ago

Engineer-adjacent haha

[-] HappyMeatbag@beehaw.org 83 points 10 months ago

Some mistakes make you want the person responsible fired, but some mistakes are SO bad that you actually feel sorry for them instead. This falls into the second category.

[-] JakenVeina@lemm.ee 65 points 10 months ago

That's because a flaw like this is the result of SYSTEMATIC failure, not any one person. Who reviewed these designs? Who was responsible for usability testing? Who reviewed those plans? Was usability testing even performed?

[-] Anticorp@lemmy.ml 14 points 10 months ago

Was usability testing even performed?

If it was, it wasn't tested with every cable type or they would have discovered this issue.

[-] waspentalive@kbin.social 16 points 10 months ago

Some places don't fire unless the issue is repeated, client-facing, or willfully dangerous (like assaulting co-workers). The theory is: This is the first time this has happened - we learned from it, the engineer specifically probably learned from it. This won't happen again.

[-] gatelike@feddit.de 43 points 10 months ago

did they change careers after that? I would want to work on a farm and touch grass every day with my new friends, the animals.

[-] nkiruanaya@lemm.ee 29 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

/r/crappydesign

Oh wait, this isn't the Reddit anymore.

Did I do that right?

[-] AgnosticMammal@pawb.social 16 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Exclamation mark denotes the community, so:

!crappydesign@sh.itjust.works

!assholedesign@lemmy.ml

!assholedesign@lemmy.world

!crappydesign@zerobytes.monster

The @ is the username indicator, so you've pinged people whose usernames are those for the instance.

[-] Phazei@lemmy.ml 3 points 10 months ago

This is one of those double edged sword things with Lemmy, since there's so many places a community can be, they all end up being a little smaller. There's got to be a better solution for that. Maybe when creating a community there should be a way to automatically search a large portion of committed all at once and display it to the user.

[-] cynar@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago

What's needed is the ability to create and share 'meta' communities. A group of smaller communities can then loosely appear as a single larger community. Users can still drill down to the individual sub comunities, if they choose to. A little bit like a recursive federation.

[-] EpicFailGuy@kbin.social 16 points 10 months ago

@yrmyli

It's true https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/20/cisco_switch_cabling_error/

[-] ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 15 points 10 months ago

This reminds me of Macintosh computers from the late '80s/early '90s. The disk drive had no physical eject button and the power button for the computer was a big knob sticking out right below the disk drive. Coming from the PC world, it took me a couple of days to learn to stop turning off the computer every time I tried to eject the disk.

[-] Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com 4 points 10 months ago

Oh yeah the "hilarious" obligation to drag the floppy to the trashcan to eject it.

So intuitive...

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[-] H2207@lemmy.world 11 points 10 months ago

Ofc it's Cisco

[-] expatriado@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago

that's how you reset a product line

[-] jasondj@ttrpg.network 7 points 10 months ago

Was there a recall? I remember them sending out an advisory of the default behavior (and how to disable it), then changing the default behavior in software.

[-] dap@lemmy.onlylans.io 4 points 10 months ago

I actually, legitimately, laughed out loud at this one 🤣

[-] astral_avocado@lemm.ee 4 points 10 months ago

Cisco and Juniper need to die as entities like 5 years ago. They're single-handedly holding back all of networking from entering the modern era of computing.

[-] mcc@sh.itjust.works 17 points 10 months ago

Care to elaborate? Sounds like an interesting story.

[-] astral_avocado@lemm.ee 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Honestly can't elaborate too much as I was only a junior network guy at best and it's been a few years since that. But coming from a world of infrastructure as code and CI/CD deployment strategies, the shit we had to do to manage changes on Cisco and juniper switches was ridiculous. It was like stepping back into the stone age.

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[-] LargestDong@lemm.ee 6 points 10 months ago

You must not work in enterprise IT. Every lower level network engineer says this until they gain more skills and experience with them. Then they realize the full extent of features Cisco and Juniper support that others don't

[-] astral_avocado@lemm.ee 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Surprising opinion, I was only a junior in my brief stint at networking but all my seniors shared this opinion.

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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
1249 points (99.2% liked)

Memes

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