666th Post: Fears and Superstitions of IT Professionals

Fears and superstitions go hand in hand with developers through life. Let's be frank - that is the fault of the bugs. Bugs are all. Some bugs are exactly children's horror stories that appeared in the distant past and have been unnaturally existed for decades. Irrational fear to meet the bug (to run into any failure) led to the emergence of amusing rituals and rituals, which will be discussed in this post. Being bagophobic is natural and not shameful, and there are a great many ways to cope with fear.

There are some bugs that are like an envelope with anthrax or an ancient box on an old Indian cemetery - a thing with a clear sign of the skull and bones. In the standard Windows notebook since 2001 there is an error that no one is going to fix. Adobe Flash is a storehouse of fundamental bugs. Critical vulnerability in the Bash command shell on older devices simply cannot be closed - a bug exists in all versions of Bash created in the last 25 years. A small bug , discovered in open-source OpenSSL, led to the appearance of one of the main vulnerabilities in recent years. And of course, the bugs that are found in the already unsupported versions of operating systems will stay with you forever.

It is believed that the update - this is the holy grail, eliminating all the problems, is not it? As luck would have it, some bugs are caused by the update. An example familiar to Apple owners. IOS 9.1 firmware arrives, and Touch ID fingerprint scanner is disrupted. This is not the first (and obviously not the last) similar case. If you are a Ubuntu user, then you know what I mean. ;) And also because of a small typo (an extra space was added) in the Bumblebee driver installer script (NVIDIA Optimus support for Linux) users have accidentally deleted the / usr folder . So the bugs are omnipresent, sometimes unavoidable, manifest themselves in an absolutely incredible way, sometimes arising from simply mystical coincidences. Such errors lead to the fact that users lose faith in the salutary update. Now you are more likely to expect that someone else will install the update, and having assessed the stability of the work, you will update yourself.
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So bugs become part of superstitions, superstitions turn into myths, and myths lead to fears. We asked our developers what fears they encountered in their work.

Dmitry Matveyev, product developer at Odnoklassniki:

My biggest fear is that I can look for a “hard to reproduce mistake” where there is none at all. That is, for example, the tester will inform me about the problem on one of the versions of the application and that the problem is not always reproduced. But I am a programmer, I understand that there must be some reasons and conditions under which it is always played. Therefore, I sit and thoroughly understand. But for some reason, either the problem is not reproduced anymore, or the fix for it does not work, but it should absolutely. It is then that some paranoia begins to creep in, “but do I even look at it at all?”, “Have I not lost my mind?”, Etc.

Recently, so with four pairs of eyes, we dealt with the problem, tried everything, it seemed, and surrendered. A very long time did not leave work so tired. And the next day, having decided that one day would be enough to cope with the problem, whatever she ended up in, she overcame her in a couple of hours. Because fresh ideas came to mind and I began to sort out the problem, where necessary, and from the other end. :)

The moral is this: the morning of the evening is wiser, and if something doesn’t work out well, you need to score on it, sleep, take a shower and try again. ¯ \ _ (ツ) _ / ¯

Alexander skvot Kitova, tester in projects Armored Warfare, CrossFire, Warface:

I have a professional - do not be afraid of anything at all. :) In fact, the most terrible thing for us is, as my colleague aptly put it, “testing by the Schrödinger method” when the task arrives. “Some patcher came here ... Something was removed by the developers, but something was added ... There are no patches, they will appear only in three days, and a deadline in two days, so please test EVERYTHING. ” From the signs that must be followed, I will single out one thing: never close the task until a successful release is released!

Alexey pifagor_mc Petrov, Mail.Ru Mail Quality Director:

I'll tell you about superstition. If the feature was launched for a long time and with multiple bugs, then after the release it is necessary to build an altar of sacrifices so that there will be no bugs on the production.

There is not enough regressions; it is better to outbid than underclass.

If the developer says: “There is a fix in one line”, then all conceivable and inconceivable tests should be carried out - practice shows that the more atomic the fix, the greater the chances of breaking everything.

During the rollout of the production build, go to the admins with a candle, pray on the charts with the words "In the name of Gender, techrind and team leader, QA!"

A tester to a tester is a friend, a brother, and "help, please drive regressions."

Andrey andrewsumin Sumin, head of client development:

Developer fear is recursion that results in self-DDoS. And when you roll the release and see the shelf on the chart. You roll back, but the regiment remains. O_o

Olga rukola Kuritsyna, head of the Mail.Ru homepage:

I am very afraid to forget the token at home. "Suddenly, war, and I'm without a token."

Andrei mamonth Tereshko, Mail.Ru Mail programmer:

I have such superstitions. Do not deploy to production on Friday night - for a sore head and a busy weekend. Do not commit without comments - to a bad mood from a release engineer.

Alexey Antropov, head of the system administrators group:

What other superstitions, I have 74 tasks in the queue and the simultaneous launch of two projects! ..

And especially for those who read only entry and conclusion in posts, we have prepared a shortened, digest version of the post in the form of a video, from which you will learn how the fears of programmers are visualized. At the end of the video, the most patient awaits a bonus: three simple things that can save an IT person from fears once and for all.



Do not judge strictly, this is our first 666th post! And he fell out on an unfortunate coincidence on Friday, the 13th. What superstitions do you have?