Are engineers living on another planet? Don’t they use their software?
Ok, I admit it. I spent 17 years as as engineer before going to business school and becoming a dyed-in-the-wool non-techie. It’s hard to remember the years as a programmer, rather like trying to remember early childhood. My brain was just too different back then. My brain of today won’t process that way any more.
Today I purchased an upgrade to my video editing software. Being an upgrade, it requires you to have the previous version installed already. But there’s a problem: my disk isn’t big enough to hold both the upgrade and the original.
With a small program of only a few megabytes, this oversight can be forgiven. After all, one can usually free up some space with a little detective work. But when the install is multiple gigabytes, it’s sheer sloppiness not to think through the issue of an install that eats up so much of the drive.
I like to think I was never that sloppy as an engineer. I like to think I used my own products and made sure they at least installed and ran smoothly. And since my whole goal today is to bitch about my frustration with Studio’s inability to install, my memory paints only a glowingly happy memory of being such a responsible, user-oriented programmer. And lost in my haze of manufactured memory, I can feel as self-righteous as ever, as I wait on hold (20 minutes and counting) for tech support to bail me out of this mess…
Categories: Computer rants
What the heck? Engineers don’t decide about features of the product they have to develop. What you are speaking about is definitely a feature, with clear definable cost and profits. Some manager has decided profits wouldn’t cover the cost.
by diggit on Apr 27, 2006 at 6:32 am
I disagree. I don’t think marketing departments can be expected to think through technical issues like how an upgrade should work. There’s no technical reason why you shouldn’t be able to upgrade-in-place, deleting the old installation before overwriting it with the new one. But they didn’t give that option. It didn’t detect the presence of the old version (except to verify my eligibility for the upgrade) and offer to upgrade it; it simply went ahead and installed into a new location. Upgrade-in-place is an engineering decision, not a marketing decision.
by Stever on Apr 28, 2006 at 3:03 pm
The engineers had bigger hard drives than you do. Seriously… it’s something they SHOULD have thought of, but probably just never encountered because development so often happens on the latest and greatest hardware.
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by Edward Kalanje on Sep 7, 2009 at 3:58 am