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Geisladisk
Sep 15, 2007

I'm a software developer. My team is supposed to be working on a pretty substantial new feature.

We have a project manager who is just the most incompetent and toxic shitbirds imaginable.

We have a pretty good workflow that we are supposed to follow - When new issues come in, they are submitted to the team, which creates stories for them, estimates them, and breaks them down into appropriately sized tasks. They are then put into two-week sprints. If critical bugs or issues come up, the PM should create a story or bug for it, submit it to the team, who should then analyze and estimate the issue before putting it into the current sprint. This should only ever be done for things which absolutely cannot wait for the beginning of the next sprint - Breaking bugs and the like.

I'm sure this is all familiar to anyone who has worked in software development.

Now, when our dear PM started twenty years ago, no process like this was in place. It was a small handful of programmers working in a small company. Our software development team is now about 150 people, so gee I guess we might need some processes now.

The PM refuses to engage in any of that, which he sees as red tape and a waste of time. His idea of how he should submit a task to the team is this: He walks up behind someone at his desk, tells him that this needs doing, and expects them to immediately drop whatever they were doing and do it immediately.

He has absolutely no understanding of the fact that if you constantly tell people to drop everything and do whatever you want them to do now just loving obliterates productivity. Every minor bug that comes in he wants immediately put into the current sprint at the highest priority.

Every minor piece of feedback he gets from a client? You guessed it, top priority, someone better start doing this poo poo immediately. When we push back and tell him that only critical bugs and issues can be dumped mid-sprint like this, his standard answer is "well I'm the PM and I decide what is critical", no matter how trivial the issue is.

Oh, and once every little bug or improvement is done, guess what, it is immediately going to be pushed to the clients in an update.

The result is that we barely get any progress done on the project we are actually supposed to work on. On most sprints, over half the issues that end up getting completed are things he dropped in mid-sprint.

He routinely complains about tasks taking too long to complete, despite the fact that we are pretty good with estimates and they usually are more or less met. This is usually accompanied by snide comments about how he could have done this in a couple of hours at most and how simple these issues are. Again - He hasn't touched code in a decade.

When we complain about this, and how our deadlines are looming ever closer, he casually responds that we're just gonna have to do overtime and crunch to get things done. When we tell him that absolutely isn't going to happen, he scoffs and regales us with tales from the olden days of how he would often work 70 hour weeks when a deadline was looming.

The only light at the tunnel seems to be that our incessant complaining about this idiot seem to have been heard. Our program management lead popped into one of our planning meetings to ask about the state of the project and expressed worry about it's progress, to which the PM got surly and passive aggressive and blamed the team for being "uncooperative" and "not working hard", which the PM lead flat out told him doesn't seem to be right.

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Zarin
Nov 11, 2008

I SEE YOU

mindstorm posted:

Seriously though this poo poo sucks. I've tried to get people to engage with me more over MS Teams chat because it wastes the least amount of time with person-to-person communications. Emails always end up becoming formal letters. Phone calls get filled with endless derailing chitchat.

I try and keep a personal rule that "an email means you can answer this at your discretion; an IM means I need an answer now please kthx"

Queen Victorian
Feb 21, 2018

Prism Mirror Lens posted:

When all the open source projects started having codes of conduct, one of them (which was frequently shared by people with good intentions) had a section on how you shouldn’t use emojis in code reviews in case someone takes them the wrong way. In both these cases I’m just left wondering, what kind of situation must have happened in the past for them to NEED emoji rules?!

I find this extra funny and ironic because emoticons were literally invented to denote context (namely humor) that wasn’t immediately apparent in plain text communication so that folks wouldn’t misinterpret something and take it the wrong way.

In other news reading this thread makes me thankful I managed to escape from my old job and am now in a good job that doesn’t pull any poo poo dumb enough for this thread.

hot cocoa on the couch
Dec 8, 2009

Zarin posted:

I try and keep a personal rule that "an email means you can answer this at your discretion; an IM means I need an answer now please kthx"

Yeah and in addition to that I personally only use email for sending a formal message to multiple people. Otherwise I'll just use teams or like... walk up to them and talk to them (intercompany, obviously. Suppliers/customers only get emails).

Volmarias
Dec 31, 2002

EMAIL... THE INTERNET... SEARCH ENGINES...

Tarkus posted:

I'm genuinely convinced that office work is an unintentional work program developed by MBA's and other useless 'professionals' to circularly perpetuate an ever growing 'manager' class. This 'manager' class is supported by the 20% or so of people who are doing actual work on top of the blue collar workers that may or may not work at the company. The two times I have worked in an office setting are the only times I have been kept so busy doing such complete non-work and endless meetings about loving nothing.

You may enjoy this thesis on the subject.


Why does eng, the larger division, not simply eat product, the smaller division?

That really does sound awful though. I'm assuming this guy isn't your actual manager, you should probably bring it up with whoever that is too.

ultrafilter
Aug 23, 2007

It's okay if you have any questions.


Tarkus posted:

I'm genuinely convinced that office work is an unintentional work program developed by MBA's and other useless 'professionals' to circularly perpetuate an ever growing 'manager' class. This 'manager' class is supported by the 20% or so of people who are doing actual work on top of the blue collar workers that may or may not work at the company. The two times I have worked in an office setting are the only times I have been kept so busy doing such complete non-work and endless meetings about loving nothing.

Read up on Bullshit Jobs.

e: f; b

champagne posting
Apr 5, 2006

YOU ARE A BRAIN
IN A BUNKER


Be careful you don't self radicalize like I did and start taking notes on where your coworkers fall

Like my job which is at least 10% box tickers

Charles Bukowski
Aug 26, 2003

Taskmaster 2023 Second Place Winner

Grimey Drawer
I think a pretty sweet job would be listening to podcasts and chopping wood. No politics, just a splitting maul and a fine hard stump for your base.

FoolyCharged
Oct 11, 2012

Cheating at a raffle? I sentence you to 1 year in jail! No! Two years! Three! Four! Five years! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!
Somebody call for an ant?

ultrafilter posted:

Read up on Bullshit Jobs.

e: f; b

reception posted:

The reviewer maintains that while "managerial feudalism" can explain the existence of flunkies, Graeber's other types of bullshit jobs owe their existence to competition, government regulation, long supply chains, and the withering of inefficient companies—the same ingredients responsible for luxuries of advanced capitalism such as smartphones and year-round produce.[2]

One of the reviewers got salty about being called useless :roflolmao:

mindstorm
Jan 28, 2011

Smellrose

Zarin posted:

I try and keep a personal rule that "an email means you can answer this at your discretion; an IM means I need an answer now please kthx"

Yeah, this is the way it should work in most sane positions.

My employer didn't have collaborative software before covid happened and we all had to telework. No chat software, just email, a desk phone, manually sharing files to edit them - even our screen-sharing system went down for literal years before they fixed it. So everything was an in-person interruption, a phone call, and sometimes an email. Sometimes it was 11x17 printouts dumped across my keyboard/in my chair (answer my question first!). I do criteria/QA work and, for my niche field, if people ping me via chat I can answer quickly or reassure them about something. Instead, they've been letting things snowball or just assume somebody knowledgeable has approved it. They do this even when they are the licensed professional assigned to support the discipline of civil engineering (or structural, architecture, etc) for a project. Whole teams of people are doing this.

Now that we're teleworking, they haven't pushed for more aggressive digital engagement outside of an email once a day to check in. No codified procedure for "use this software we gave you to communicate and stay logged in on it so people can get in touch with you, respond to chat messages within 1 business day." So without pushing people to do those office interactions via the messaging software they provided, I end up having to sound the alarm when the project is halfway through design that "you can't ignore all these code requirements just because you don't like them" and it takes a shitload more time. We're so close to getting it right but logging in and collaborating is :effort: or outside of boomer/xoomer comfort zones.

e: I have a bullshit job as a duct taper, basically. Sometimes I tick boxes too.

Full Metal Jackass
Jan 22, 2001

Rabid bats are welcome in my home
To work through a specific process at my job, you need no less than 4 procedures open that guide you through the administrative part and requirements for the final documents. You need more open if working on slight variations of this process or if it's more complex, which is common. The procedures are complicated and intertwine steps between one another both directly and indirectly. They randomly get revised to fix issues or change requirements so you have to follow through the latest revisions each time closely. The people that own and write these procedures haven't done the process in many years so this ends up with conflicting procedures or steps that simply won't work.

This year we are adding a new procedure to the mix.

Efficiency is not the name of the game.

wa27
Jan 15, 2007

Our boss is constantly finding publications, annual reports, etc. online and expecting us to be able to replicate them for our own documents. They're always things put out by Fortune 500 companies and were clearly made by professional design firms. We're not allowed to pay someone to make stuff for us.

The current example is, we're making an internal handout that gives a rundown of our benefits package for new staff. We made a packet that was maybe four pages long, giving a nice breakdown of everything from PTO to all our insurance options. This was using a format modeled after one we found online, which the CEO said she liked.

Anyway, this was finished a couple weeks ago and the CEO just sent us a pintrest link and told us to scrap everything and make it look like that. Mind you, we're a non-profit with about 60 staff, and this brochure will only be used internally for new hires (of which there is maybe two per month). None of us are graphic designers. I have the most experience with Publisher and Photoshop so I usually get stuck with working on these, but I have a terrible eye for design so it takes me forever to get things looking nice.

Look, I'm all for making our agency look great, but we should budget for this stuff and pay actual professionals to do it for us, and that's simply not possible here.

Inept
Jul 8, 2003

FoolyCharged posted:

One of the reviewers got salty about being called useless :roflolmao:

lol year-round produce thanks to the CIA murdering half of the politicians in Central and South America

InternetJunky
May 25, 2002

You guys are making me feel super self-conscious about my emailing now.

A Wizard of Goatse
Dec 14, 2014

My first real office job was a midsize nonprofit that ran everything - member records, internal forms, the website database - through a single 3GB MS Access file. One person could have it open at a time, so if someone in records was updating someone's account info the communications team would be locked out from updating the website and vice versa, and people forgetting to exit out properly when they were done lead to some vicious interdepartmental drama. Since Access was never designed for bullshit like this and people would routinely do poo poo like email the entire database back and forth to get around a firewall, the archive would get corrupted on a roughly monthly basis and have to be restored from backups, destroying whatever work had been done in the meantime. There was one extremely nice, extremely unlucky software engineer who'd been hired to bring everything over to a new SQL-based system and promptly stuck in a closet where nobody else ever talked to her, who quit shortly after I joined.

I'm not sure... exactly how this whole situation had come to pass, but the CEO who'd come up from fooling around on her family estate approximately one week out of the month to demand updates from all the department heads, announce she didn't like or understand what was going on, and tell everyone to stop what they were doing before loving off back to the farm for another three weeks probably had some thing to do with it

A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Feb 15, 2021

Full Metal Jackass
Jan 22, 2001

Rabid bats are welcome in my home

InternetJunky posted:

You guys are making me feel super self-conscious about my emailing now.

Just don't end emails to coworkers with "respectfully yours" or I'll think you're a dumbass.

InternetJunky
May 25, 2002

Full Metal Jackass posted:

Just don't end emails to coworkers with "respectfully yours" or I'll think you're a dumbass.

Dear Full Metal Jackass,

I'll keep that in mind.

Cheers and thanks,
InternetJunky

AHH F/UGH
May 25, 2002

I mean it takes like literally 2 minutes to set up a simple and good enough "Hello," salutation and a "Best, (you name)" signature so there's not a great excuse for doing it if that's kind of the standard protocol at your company

Mine is filled with boomers so it's mandatory and was part of training

hot cocoa on the couch
Dec 8, 2009

First email, several cc's involved:

Hello James,

We're having some difficulty implementing the design as originally pitched to your firm. One of the challenges is that the geometry of the part is causing the accumulator to overflow early, due to the requested chute layout. We were wondering if we could change the design as follows, and we'll follow up with a sealed drawing:

[drawings, formal engineering jargon]

Regards,
<full company signature>




Twelfth email, cc's have fallen by the wayside:

jim i think i hosed up earlier, check this poo poo out:

[ms paint on a janky solidworks screenshot]

<no sign off but full company sig anyway cause its automatic>

carry on then
Jul 10, 2010

by VideoGames

(and can't post for 10 years!)

Full Metal Jackass posted:

Just don't end emails to coworkers with "respectfully yours" or I'll think you're a dumbass.

Yours in Christ,

Code Jockey
Jan 24, 2006

69420 basic bytes free

AHH F/UGH posted:

I mean it takes like literally 2 minutes to set up a simple and good enough "Hello," salutation and a "Best, (you name)" signature so there's not a great excuse for doing it if that's kind of the standard protocol at your company

Mine is filled with boomers so it's mandatory and was part of training

This poo poo is just mind boggling to me, and I suppose this is just me being fortunate enough to work around IT people and business stakeholders who didn't give a gently caress about it

But I just cannot comprehend having to throw this extra pointless bullshit into emails because someone's going to get irrationally angry that you didn't, because... not doing so is disrespectful? I see that stuff myself and I know it's just templates, automatically inserted, so who cares? And it's kind of annoying when every single email from someone starts Dear CodeJockey, and ends with their signature thing, and not just the first one kicking off the conversation. I guess that's just me though.

I can see it if you're in sales or marketing and your entire job is to kiss up to external people, but for people internal to the company to demand you put this in communications to them, that's just nuts to me. Don't get me wrong, I'm always really friendly and polite in my intercompany and outside emails, taking this specific aspect of that so seriously as to mandate it just is weird to me.

NapalmWeasel
Aug 10, 2012

Zarin posted:

Something similar happened to my brother. "We told the local government that we'd maintain a certain headcount here; I can't let you go because we're in a hiring freeze right now."

A couple calls to recruiters and a month later, he was outta there for a place that offered him a 50% bump.

Seriously, what does management THINK is going to happen if they say something like that? smh

64% increase. Ended up being a substantially lower-stress environment, up until they decided to outsource all of IT infrastructure to the place I just left. Luckily I saw that coming and bounced before they announced it, got another cool 25% salary increase and paid relo.

AHH F/UGH
May 25, 2002

Code Jockey posted:

This poo poo is just mind boggling to me, and I suppose this is just me being fortunate enough to work around IT people and business stakeholders who didn't give a gently caress about it

But I just cannot comprehend having to throw this extra pointless bullshit into emails because someone's going to get irrationally angry that you didn't, because... not doing so is disrespectful? I see that stuff myself and I know it's just templates, automatically inserted, so who cares? And it's kind of annoying when every single email from someone starts Dear CodeJockey, and ends with their signature thing, and not just the first one kicking off the conversation. I guess that's just me though.

I can see it if you're in sales or marketing and your entire job is to kiss up to external people, but for people internal to the company to demand you put this in communications to them, that's just nuts to me. Don't get me wrong, I'm always really friendly and polite in my intercompany and outside emails, taking this specific aspect of that so seriously as to mandate it just is weird to me.

I guess to our company it's a inter-member professionalism thing, one of those small things that if you let it slip, it becomes a slippery slope and soon enough you've got people accidentally CCing 300 people in the building about the best types of ammo to buy to shoot [thinly veiled BLM/Antifa/Democrats words] with. This actually happened in my company and this dude was fired the same day lmao.

It's a discipline thing I suppose - not in the punishment sense but more in the... I dunno, Japanese office business manners-n-bullshit sense? I guess that if I didn't do it or receive it that way, then communicae would feel sort of lazy or unimportant.

Obviously this is all subject to how new your company is, how large, public/private, blah blah blah

Tarkus
Aug 27, 2000

One thing I hate is when people make their email signature a page long like putting announcements for deals and stuff from their company along with 15 forms of contact. Some mail clients hide the signatures properly, some don't, so sometimes I have to see the see the same page of text over and over again as a scroll through a thread. Name, Company, position and 2-3 forms of contact at most is all that's needed. Oh and wildly varying colored text and fonts bug me too.

Zarin
Nov 11, 2008

I SEE YOU

Tarkus posted:

One thing I hate is when people make their email signature a page long like putting announcements for deals and stuff from their company along with 15 forms of contact. Some mail clients hide the signatures properly, some don't, so sometimes I have to see the see the same page of text over and over again as a scroll through a thread. Name, Company, position and 2-3 forms of contact at most is all that's needed. Oh and wildly varying colored text and fonts bug me too.

Yeah, mine is all plaintext with basically my contact info. I figure it's for if/when someone prints out an email and needs to get ahold of me about it or something.

It was much more common when I was working on/adjacent to the machine shop floor, and Grizzled Vietnam Vet needed to pick up the phone and ask me something about something I wrote (because lmao if he's gonna send an email; highly likely he didn't even have an email account tbh).

I guess that no-nonsense setup just stuck with me :shrug:

Edit: I was always amused by the people that had, like, Harley-Davidson logos and stuff in their email signature. WE AREN'T H-D, OR EVEN ASSOCIATED WITH THEM, WHAT ARE YOU DOOOOOOING. Somehow they never seemed to get in trouble for doing stuff like that, though. It always struck me as EXCEPTIONALLY unprofessional to use another company's logo in your (internal) emails, just wtf :psyduck: Yes, we get it, you like motorcycles. Chill brah.

Zarin fucked around with this message at 20:44 on Feb 15, 2021

Full Metal Jackass
Jan 22, 2001

Rabid bats are welcome in my home

Tarkus posted:

One thing I hate is when people make their email signature a page long like putting announcements for deals and stuff from their company along with 15 forms of contact. Some mail clients hide the signatures properly, some don't, so sometimes I have to see the see the same page of text over and over again as a scroll through a thread. Name, Company, position and 2-3 forms of contact at most is all that's needed. Oh and wildly varying colored text and fonts bug me too.

What about people with multiples quotes in their signature? Or the admin who makes her email background a watermark of flowers. Then that flowerly background stays for subsequent replies and pretty soon you have a director sending emails with flowery backdrop lol

Lazyfire
Feb 4, 2006

God saves. Satan Invests

Zarin posted:

Edit: I was always amused by the people that had, like, Harley-Davidson logos and stuff in their email signature. WE AREN'T H-D, OR EVEN ASSOCIATED WITH THEM, WHAT ARE YOU DOOOOOOING. Somehow they never seemed to get in trouble for doing stuff like that, though. It always struck me as EXCEPTIONALLY unprofessional to use another company's logo in your (internal) emails, just wtf :psyduck: Yes, we get it, you like motorcycles. Chill brah.

I've worked with people who had poorly rendered bald eagles and bible verses in their signatures. There was one that was "NEXT TIME YOU SHOULD CALL ME, INSTEAD" in giant red font. I got an email from a supplier with a blue lives matter Punisher skull last week, which is the current king of dumb signature poo poo, though.

Code Jockey
Jan 24, 2006

69420 basic bytes free

Full Metal Jackass posted:

What about people with multiples quotes in their signature? Or the admin who makes her email background a watermark of flowers. Then that flowerly background stays for subsequent replies and pretty soon you have a director sending emails with flowery backdrop lol

lol I love when this happens

Sarah Problem
Sep 24, 2002

Because, if you confess with your mouth that Witten is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved

Before covid last year I was forced to attend a meeting to help build our new slogan/goals for the coming fiscal year for our department with a bunch of other “highly regarded” coworkers. My director is leading the meeting and is this old army vet guy who is a curmudgeon but is mostly tolerable on the previous interactions I’ve had with him. He is a history nerd and likes to do ice breakers like “Talk about your favorite historical figure.” Unfortunately this is the day I learned that I have a literal “Hitler had some good ideas” idiot in the room with us and then my director agreed. As soon as the guy said “I know some people don’t like this, but Hitler really had some good ideas that helped Germany.” I had a shocked expression on my face that apparently was noticed by my director who then went on to lament how history glosses over the good things he did. I couldn’t believe this and just sat dumbfounded the rest of the meeting and didn’t participate at all. Why do people do this? Covid has been a blessing for me because now I WFH and never have to interact with my now not so secret nazi coworkers. To no one’s surprise they are both big Trump supporter libertarians.

Outrail
Jan 4, 2009

www.sapphicrobotica.com
:roboluv: :love: :roboluv:
Having made the jump from the worker to the manager, I can safely say that workers are every bit as infuriatingly dumb and short-sighted and unwilling to compromise as managers.

I think the problem is people. People are just the loving worst. Or I'm the worst. Or it's both and I am also a person. God.

A Wizard of Goatse posted:

My first real office job was a midsize nonprofit that ran everything - member records, internal forms, the website database - through a single 3GB MS Access file. One person could have it open at a time, so if someone in records was updating someone's account info the communications team would be locked out from updating the website and vice versa, and people forgetting to exit out properly when they were done lead to some vicious interdepartmental drama. Since Access was never designed for bullshit like this and people would routinely do poo poo like email the entire database back and forth to get around a firewall, the archive would get corrupted on a roughly monthly basis and have to be restored from backups, destroying whatever work had been done in the meantime. There was one extremely nice, extremely unlucky software engineer who'd been hired to bring everything over to a new SQL-based system and promptly stuck in a closet where nobody else ever talked to her, who quit shortly after I joined.

I'm not sure... exactly how this whole situation had come to pass, but the CEO who'd come up from fooling around on her family estate approximately one week out of the month to demand updates from all the department heads, announce she didn't like or understand what was going on, and tell everyone to stop what they were doing before loving off back to the farm for another three weeks probably had something to do with it

This is my life only instead of the luxury of an access database the information is spread over a dozen or more excel files and google sheet documents and random websites. There are two websites that house our member records and the current SOP to send out a newsletter is: Export from one website to csv, upload to other website, send out newsletter. Any other email is sent from the first website. This means people need to unsubscribe from two email lists and sometimes the unsubscriptions don't work. Everything is a bandaid on top of a cludge on top of virtual ductape. I'm trying to fix it but there's so much to fix I'm forced to do cludge job to keep things ticking along while I put out some other fire. Kill me, please.

Outrail fucked around with this message at 21:10 on Feb 15, 2021

honda whisperer
Mar 29, 2009

My favorite is when you work next to the person and their signature is a ton of made up bullshit to sound cooler than they are.

You're not the "lead cam programmer" or the "cnc department head"

Those aren't positions that exist here! You're sending 99% internal emails! Why are you emailing me this! We have a shared drive in the server for this reason, I can see you! Oh gently caress now he's texting me that he sent me an email.

"My hard drive crashed"

Sincerely
Some guy from work
Lead cam programmer
Cnc department head
Someguyfromwork@businessname.com
555-555-5555

~*inspirational quote*~

Narrator: his hard drive was fine, he closed an error message unread and restarted his machine.

teen witch
Oct 9, 2012

Lazyfire posted:

I've worked with people who had poorly rendered bald eagles and bible verses in their signatures. There was one that was "NEXT TIME YOU SHOULD CALL ME, INSTEAD" in giant red font. I got an email from a supplier with a blue lives matter Punisher skull last week, which is the current king of dumb signature poo poo, though.

I once had to contact someone in Sweden (where I’m based as well) who had a really off the wall Eisenhower quote as his auto reply, justifying not answering emails promptly and ~at his leisure~. I then emailed him again in Swedish a few days later and he got back to me in under ten min. It was genuinely urgent, drå åt helvete Eisenhowerjävel.

teen witch
Oct 9, 2012

honda whisperer posted:

My favorite is when you work next to the person and their signature is a ton of made up bullshit to sound cooler than they are.

You're not the "lead cam programmer" or the "cnc department head"

Those aren't positions that exist here! You're sending 99% internal emails! Why are you emailing me this! We have a shared drive in the server for this reason, I can see you! Oh gently caress now he's texting me that he sent me an email.

"My hard drive crashed"

Sincerely
Some guy from work
Lead cam programmer
Cnc department head
Someguyfromwork@businessname.com
555-555-5555

~*inspirational quote*~

Narrator: his hard drive was fine, he closed an error message unread and restarted his machine.

aaaaAAAAAA you have no idea how much this bugs me or they’ll change the signature to appeal to someone externally.

OR if I’m introduced to an external contact from someone internally, they’ll make my title into “Senior [title] Manager” to make it sound more important. Like I’m the only one with my title so yeah I’m senior, I’m junior, I’m every woman, it’s all in me.

Volmarias
Dec 31, 2002

EMAIL... THE INTERNET... SEARCH ENGINES...

Tarkus posted:

One thing I hate is when people make their email signature a page long like putting announcements for deals and stuff from their company along with 15 forms of contact. Some mail clients hide the signatures properly, some don't, so sometimes I have to see the see the same page of text over and over again as a scroll through a thread. Name, Company, position and 2-3 forms of contact at most is all that's needed. Oh and wildly varying colored text and fonts bug me too.

I am extremely glad that my team is internal facing clients only

teen witch posted:

aaaaAAAAAA you have no idea how much this bugs me or they’ll change the signature to appeal to someone externally.

OR if I’m introduced to an external contact from someone internally, they’ll make my title into “Senior [title] Manager” to make it sound more important. Like I’m the only one with my title so yeah I’m senior, I’m junior, I’m every woman, it’s all in me.

It's the "VP Of The Bank" scenario, they want the external person to think that you're actually a Very Important Person, and you've been specially attached to their case because of how important they are!

Which I'm sure you already know. The important thing, though, is that that's the title that now goes on your resume!

kntfkr
Feb 11, 2019

GOOSE FUCKER

teen witch posted:

I once had to contact someone in Sweden (where I’m based as well) who had a really off the wall Eisenhower quote as his auto reply, justifying not answering emails promptly and ~at his leisure~. I then emailed him again in Swedish a few days later and he got back to me in under ten min. It was genuinely urgent, drå åt helvete Eisenhowerjävel.

Am I confusing you with someone else or aren't you from Long Island? How'd you get to Sweden?

DrunkMidget
May 29, 2003
'Shag'd Wo'bram?" -Borra

Code Jockey posted:

e. and here's one for my brothers and sisters who do programming / database work: the site configuration records were stored primarily in a single table, in an Access database backend. Think that's bad in itself? Each column in this table contained multiple parameters separated by linebreaks and commas. So a single column might contain something like:

WebsiteTitle=My Dumb Website,
BackgroundColor=#ffffff,
BackgroundImage=hello.jpg,
SomeFeatureAEnabled=true,
SomeFeatureBEnabled=false,
ContactEmail=hurr@duh.org

... all of that in a single DB column, which we'd then need to read, break apart, parse into the right variables, and hope to god it didn't blow up. Multiple columns like this for each site. That still haunts me. I do not know why they did this, but the idiot president was really proud of this platform. Classic ASP sitting on top of Access with data structured like that.
As a professional database toucher, this makes me way angrier than it should. There's cases for denormalizing data (data warehousing), but this isn't even denormalized in a heap, it's just unstructured poo poo.

Outrail
Jan 4, 2009

www.sapphicrobotica.com
:roboluv: :love: :roboluv:

teen witch posted:

aaaaAAAAAA you have no idea how much this bugs me or they’ll change the signature to appeal to someone externally.

OR if I’m introduced to an external contact from someone internally, they’ll make my title into “Senior [title] Manager” to make it sound more important. Like I’m the only one with my title so yeah I’m senior, I’m junior, I’m every woman, it’s all in me.

I think this is pretty normal in some industries. We'd constantly our titles to better fit whatever task we were doing or people we were talking to. Ecologist, Biologist, Environmental Scientist, Program lead, project manager. As long as it's true if it gives you an edge in getting whatever contract you're going for who cares? If they're not impressed by titles they'll ignore it and if they are impressed by titles they'll lap it up.

teen witch
Oct 9, 2012

Volmarias posted:

I am extremely glad that my team is internal facing clients only


It's the "VP Of The Bank" scenario, they want the external person to think that you're actually a Very Important Person, and you've been specially attached to their case because of how important they are!

Which I'm sure you already know. The important thing, though, is that that's the title that now goes on your resume!

Putting “idiot king” on my resume will score me a sweet six figgy

Something Awful
2020 - Present
Idiot King
• assisted in the maintenance and upkeep of a Reddit shitposting thread
• leveraged a new transfer of ownership from previous cookie incapacitated owner to new mysterious Jeff
• resolved inbound goatses from clients

AHH F/UGH
May 25, 2002

Side note - someone on the mod team should mail Jeffrey a box of Goldbelly cookies as a joke

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titty_baby_
Nov 11, 2015

My title is something like Geographic Informations Systems/ Plant Science Specialist and what i really do is apply for grants and mow lawns

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