Tuesday 23 October 2012

Packet Loss

Just came back from (yet another) project "postmortem" on what went wrong and  I can't think of anything more apt than the picture bellow:

(I had seen an earlier version a few years back...but seems it had improved over the time...surely from the contributions of some witty volunteers!)



You'll really have to appreciate the baby-like innocence and naivity of some people:

from day one you start cutting corners everywhere...in budget, competence, time and definitely on quality...where you don't cut corners, but just leave (some of) the corners; whistle blowers are sick and tired of blowing their risk-sirens loud and clear to everyone's deaf ear.

Yet you headfastly go ahead to deliver the half (or quarter or even less) cooked things to the customers without caring a thing about the underlying technology. And then you're utterly surprised to see the resulting mess and innocently asked why!

But Cynisim apart, it's just amazing how much information is lost in transmission. As any  text book will tell you...performance will significatly be improved if you can reduce the number of hops.

May be getting rid of those Project Managers could be a good start!

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