I have a car that when started the message center would display brake failure. Rather than fix the firmware, they actually have a note in the manual about restarting and if it clears, it's not a problem. They did eventually fix the firmware. That's some shit code. Would like to know the inside story how shit like this would ever make it to production.... Then again.... I think I know. 
The software that’s in that car was put together by people with at least two orders of magnitude more competence than the ones I deal with on a daily basis. I watch the world burn a little bit more every day.
True story just happened yesterday. A guy comes around once a year and his business is re-painting the house numbers on the curb if you want to pay him. I signed up and yesterday for a green background with white letters.
He came by and painted the green background rectangle and left to do other houses while that dried. He comes back in a few hours and finishes by painting the house number, which is written on the order paper. I saw him outside and went ahead and paid him for the job and went back inside. I didn't feel I needed to supervise him painting the number.
After a while I went out to get my mail and looked at the job. He'd painted the wrong number - off by 1 digit. I saw him up the street and told him and he came back and fixed it. I can't even trust a person to do a simple thing like that anymore.
I can't imagine trying to get good people for any type of complicated project. Frankly it would scare the hell out of me worrying about the job they were doing unless I already knew them.
We had a POTS service, where the phone would get noisy, & the ADSL would get slower & slower, then die, altogether.
In Jan 2013, we originally called it into our ISP as an ADSL fault.
After a lot of threshing around by the ISP, it got passed to Telstra, who sent a bloke out, who (correctly, as it happened) diagnosed the problem as a faulty lead in cable from the pit on the street verge.
He, for some reason, couldn't pull a new cable through, & had to organise a "contract crew" to do it, a week later.
We had to go away, but they wouldn't need access to the inside of the house, so that was no problem.
When we returned there was no sign the cable run had been disturbed, but everything was back to normal, so I assumed they had been very neat in their work.
Over the next
seven years, we had multiple repetitions of the "noisy line" problem, & having learnt our lesson about going through the ISP, reported a phone fault to Telstra.
I followed their Techs around like a Lab cat, trying to nudge them in the direction of the lead in.
They would fiddle around with the terminations in the pit, or where it connected to the house, & usually get it back, still a bit noisy but useable.
Looking at the ends of the cable, it was obvious that it had not been replaced back in Jan 2013, or, perhaps, ever.
In 2020, we were going to get NBN "fibre to the curb" so I decided we had better get it sorted out before Telstra handed the thing over, so called them out, as the noise level was quite high.
For once, they sent a Tech worthy of the name, who agreed the problem was the lead in cable, "bit the bullet" & pulled a new one through.
if the first guy, seven years earlier had done that, we would have been spared all that exasperation.
When Telstra was Telecom Australia, the first Tech would have pulled a new cable through,
and the job history would have been recorded.
Apparently the "Telstra way" is to regard each job as a separate entity, with no history maintained.
I have run into a bunch of people over recent years that seem to be "all at sea" doing the job they were supposedly experienced at.
Maybe they all have to "use the App" to boot their brain!
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