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by creeble 3264 days ago
Man does that ring true on this Friday morning.

I'm working with an intern who's implementing a "proof-of-concept" for voice control using both Alexa and API.AI (Google). He's a CS freshman. It's amazing what he's gotten working so far, but his code is unreadable noise. Like he never learned what a subroutine is for.

But he's giving a demo to the CEO today, and said CEO will undoubtedly say "Nice, finish it and let's ship!" when it's probably not even usable code in any way. The hard part -- connecting thousands of users through a db and thousands of persistent cloud connections from individual IoT devices, hasn't even been sketched yet.

So he looks like the hero (with a demo that does something amazing), and I'm going to look like the can't-get-it-done idiot because no one in the organization understands the complexity of going from that proof-of-concept to a working product, or even a next-level demo that uses actual connections from actual devices.

Of course, that's when you're supposed to quit, I guess.

1 comments

Eerily similar circumstances here: intern, alexa, demo this morning. First round is on me...