Bugs and The Lonely Programmer
At work, I’ve become intimate with a certain piece of surveying software. It’s developed by a small team and it appears that the engineering, QA, and tech support are handled by the duo of developers. It’s also a terribly buggy piece of shit and I can’t count the number of times I’ve called the developers to find out why the software has problems doing things like iterating through a list of email addresses in a linear fashion (that means not skipping around and sending out a half-dozen duplicates), remembering settings, not crashing if the FTP connection is interrupted, etc. I’m on a first-name basis with the guy handling my tech support calls. He recognizes me by voice when I call. We play games with the valedictions on our emails; we’ll go through great pains to sound terribly polite becoming repetitive. It doesn’t sound like much of a challenge until one tries to stop using the same old “Best”, “Cordially”, “Cheers”, and so on.
It would all be great fun if it weren’t for the part where the poor quality of the software makes my job a lot more annoying. So I thought about it: perhaps this guy is exceptionally lonely and introducing bugs either deliberately or through a lack of QA is his way of making friends. My interactions with the software and with the person have been mollified by the image I have of the saddened, lonesome programmer locked up in some crass modern architecture on the outskirts of Silicon Valley.