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Graham Sutherland / Polynomial

it's pretty impressive to fail so hard that you become a worldwide internal meme at a company the size of Cisco. back when I worked there, I saw this image used in slide decks and on posters in several different offices.

17 comments
Graham Sutherland / Polynomial

(I should've really said "Cisco design engineering team" rather than just one engineer; this is very much a combination of process & oversight failures)

Tom R

@gsuberland I was about to say, blaming one person is a bit rich. The fact that it made it to production indicated a total breakdown of their processes.

Still wild though ☺

Carl Liebold 🚀

@gsuberland This is a mistake by the Product Manager. But also, it should have been caught by the test team. That said, it's a PM mistake. Stuff like this happens, and then it's all about how the team responds. Oh, and I haven't checked lately, but I don't think those boots are part of the connector standard.

BMcRaeC@mastadon.social

@VintageVeloce @gsuberland it is terrible design regardless. Having a reset button not recessed AND in a place where clumsy fingers inserting the cable could accidentally push the button is just poor conception.

Carl Liebold 🚀

@Bmcraec @gsuberland
It probably happened because of the very limited front panel space. These things are designed to get as many ports as possible in the smallest possible space... leaving little room for stuff like switches. I agree it's a poor design...

Carl Liebold 🚀

@Bmcraec @gsuberland
But my point was: don't blame the engineer. Typically the location of stuff on the front panel is a Product Manager decision and responsibility. And then a rigorous test department might have caught it as well. Actually, it's possible they did catch it, but figured no one would be so silly as to use a cable that could hit the switch like that. That would also be a PM call. lol

Baloo Uriza

@gsuberland To be fair to that team, there's an extremely good chance that when the chassis was designed, it was still before widespread adoption of those protective boots.

Graham Sutherland / Polynomial

@BalooUriza It was ~2013, so protective boots were very much a thing.

Baloo Uriza

@gsuberland Aah. I guess I didn't see them become ubiquitous until a couple years ago. I guess ethernet cables have long lives, since I started seeing them under desks before in datacenters.

Paul Schoonhoven 🍉

@gsuberland yes.. A lot of people didn't realise until the first accidents happen, I guess. 😇

B.

@gsuberland yes this is what impresses me the most. This passed the whole validation chain ! 🙄

Dr. Juande Santander-Vela

@gsuberland I was going to say just that: that this is not an individual contributors fault, is the whole process that failed. #BlamelessCulture works better for avoiding these kind of things.

JJ Krawczyk

@gsuberland Yeah how a QA process could miss this is hard to imagine.

Eat the Rich Jefferson

@gsuberland When was that? I was there from 1999-2014 (PGW-2200, BTS-10200, ISR-45xx) and never saw it... Ah, just saw the doc links- Catalyst a few years after that. Yikes. Up there with the Bevis and Butthead crash screen for sure.

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