On Thu, Oct 05, 2000 at 06:31:55PM -0400, Furmanek, Greg wrote:
> If you find a guy that claims he can solve a problem within
> 5 minutes I would probably not hire him at all. Problem analysis
> takes more then 5 minutes.  If it takes about 5 minute to analyze
> a problem then the problem is trivial and It should never take 
> 5 hours to solve it.

No I don't think so.  Sendmail is a good example; you either are
a guru who knows how to write the config files or else you end
up spending the 5 hours reading the manual trying to find 
something relevant.

Another example - at work last week the admins reformatted the
hard drive on my Ultra5 and started over, because it needed some
repartitioning anyway.  (Suns have this neat firmware 
feature that allows them to install a complete filesystem
via the network; no mucking around with boot disks.)  Afterwards
I could no longer ftp into the system.  I scratched my head for
a while, checked everything I could think of, and had to ask an
admin for help (which is a little embarrassing, because I've been the 
thorn in their sides many times for being control freaks, and espoused
the viewpoint that a software engineer should have root on his
own box, for crying out loud.)  The problem was that my shell is
bash, and ftp only accepts connections for users whose shells are
"blessed" as being OK, by having them listed in /etc/shells.  
(The admins all use korn shell, the masochists, so they don't have
this problem.)  (And if korn shell can do command history, filename
completion etc. they don't know how... which makes me wonder why
they keep putting up with it.  But by golly, freeware is untrustworthy
so they won't use it, and they begrudge me using it too.)  Anyway... 
the admin remembered how to fix this problem, and I didn't, despite 
the fact that it had occurred about a year ago and was fixed the 
same way; so for him it only took a minute to fix, and I would have 
been taking a lot of guesses and trying things to see what works, or 
trying to find useful error messages in log files, if it'd been me.  
Or maybe something would have jogged my memory, hard to say.  The 
problem was trivial but not all people are good at memorizing little 
details like this.
> 
> I have not found 2 identical problems yet.  If they are identical
> then I probably have the solution archived somewhere and it probably 
> takes about 5 minutes to find it.

Well I guess if you are that organized as to be able to find old
notes so fast, it would help.  (Which reminds me I should put some
features into nettebook to facilitate it.)

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