The Blog of Harald

From Teal Sunglasses: It pays to pay well.. As usual Chuq nails several interesting ideas. But I particularly liked this quote, only slightly out of context:

bq. ask anyone who works for any company that builds things and deals with finances about the joy of figuring out who is responsible for warranty costs. Is it ever the group responsible for building reliability into the product in the first place? Nope. Want reliable products? Take warranty repair costs out of your development budgets, not your support budgets. and watch your development managers have big, ugly, purple cows…

Ouch, says I, wearing my CPE hat! CPE -> Current Product Engineering; my team fixes software that has already been released to customers. Software is different than hardware; repairing or replacing hardware is more expensive than patching software. Anyway, the costs for my team _do_ come out of the development budget. We also have a separate customer support hierarchy, responsible for all of the day-to-day handholding that customers need. Theoretically problems don’t cross into my domain until they are confirmed defects (as opposed to “controlled flight into terrain”), but in practice we end up debugging the hard problems on both sides of that line.

Anyway, it’s certainly fun and challenging work…