It was indeed a crazy night. By saying crazy, I do not mean that this night has anything to do with thrill, or excitement, but pure pressure.
This project I’ve been working on, since I joined this company, is finally reaching its final stage to mass production, and it’s at this very particular point, things happen. For example, the manager of the sales company and the brand came to experience this car model’s features, before it is delivered to the customers, to make sure that the buyers will not have bad impressions, since this car model will be the second, or third, model this brand ever manufatured. This product, please allow me to say it this way, because what I did was to help build the Android application that will be installed on the IVI system in this car, which will provide gaming features, and other engineers are in charge of the designing of mechanic structures for gaming. Different roles, same goal, which is to make sure it can be delivered to customers safely, providing them with wonderful, distinctive features.
To me, this product is my first, because I do not have any experience in building Android software in university. Hell, I do not even major in computer science. It will be a perfect chance for me to demonstrate my progress of learning since I joined this company. I value this opportunity. However, tonight’s “experience session” became an excecution ground. By excecution, I do mean it. The game provided for experience was not responsive for nearly 2 minutes, added that it happened twice. After this horrible “experience”, I do not know if it could be called an experience after the two “blackouts”, the manager said to the people present, that if the “blackout” cannot be handled, this whole gaming feature will not enter the mass production stage. By “handled”, he meant “a permanent solution”, which we do not have. Having faced all those many problems and flaws during the past one and a half year, no flaw ever is as serious as this one, because it is death related. The manager’s requirement is just like a switch connected to this electric chair we, the whole project participants, are all sitting on. If we cannot give this solution by the end of tomorrow, the switch will be turned on, and our efforts would be in vain.
Obviously no one wants that. But what triggers my eager to write this article down is what the product manager has been talking to me for the past few months. Responsibility would be the keyword. Speaking of responsibility, what happened tonight after the “experience session” would explain pretty well on how different people think of responsibility. Quality control, in my view, does not have anything to do with responsibility, not that they do not take responsibility that should be theirs, but knowing the fact that they do not need to take the responsibility, especially when they are trying to expose more problems before this car goes into mass production. They can proudly say that they expose enough problems so that these flaws won’t be seen by customers. And us, let’s say, who are in charge of this product, should be ashamed, because those problems were not solved before going into mass productions, which would be the actual result that this feature cannot be loaded to this car. The product manager said to me, that he really wants to finish this product, because he took this position in the middle of the whole process, meaning he did not propose the initial definition of the product, nor designed the system’s framework. He could use it as an opportunity to show others that he, originally a software product manager, can also deal with this complex software-hardware-mixed car system. But after those calls made by Product Quality Management department in the middle of the night, claiming that he was not doing hard enough to solve the remaining problems, and not approving of what he had done so far to try to solve the problems, he was about to experience a breakdown, at least I think so. No one is willing to cooperate with him, besides the software engineers, which would be me and another colleague sitting right next to me, who has also been working on this project for more than 3 years now.
Now, what we can do is waiting for the result, since the department in charge of the IVI system has arranged a meeting, at the very car the manager experienced tonight, to see if the system has anything to do with the “blackouts”. They will send their specialists, while we can send no one, because there are none. Worst scenerios, we, the software engineers, along with hardware engineers and the product manager himself take the fall, excecuted on that electric chair.