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Breetai posted:Dude at work writes email as E:MAIL and I don't know why it makes my eye twitch but it does. I work......... with a guy........ who writes......... all his emails............ like this......... You think you've endured eye twitching?
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Apr 28, 2021 14:42
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I love being in a meeting going over the technical requirements of a new feature and derail into a 30 min discussion of whether or not the word "and" or "or" should be in a hardcoded popup message that the enduser is going to gloss over. This is the caliber of invaluable contribution as pointing out I could switch the operands in a ternary operation so we could save a single ! character.
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Apr 28, 2021 16:08
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Volmarias posted:because someone had successfully made the pitch to create the office of whatever the gently caress to increase the size of their fiefdom. Oh man, maybe 8 years ago we had a mega-project to change the software used by another dept that was a nine figure effort. As a part of this a dept was created to help teams that use the software manage the change. Ok, makes sense as many people would have questions and a dedicated team would have a lot to do. This project is long over but this team still exists with over 30 people (!) despite their original purpose being long gone and nothing replacing it. I think they are supposed to help with other modernization projects but those are few and far between. We work near them and they often spend 8 hours a day in meetings or trying to learn mediation practices. I think they are still around because of a mix of a VP not wanting to lose headcount, and their director and managers being unwilling to admit they have no purpose and risk being dissolved and losing their cushy roles.
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Apr 28, 2021 16:35
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It’d be kind of awesome to be on a team that no longer has a purpose if I could just dink around all day making tons of money. But having no purpose AND constant day long meetings? Surprised nobody’s killed themselves.
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Apr 28, 2021 16:42
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Those sorts of teams normally close themself down out of attrition because they are dead ends once any substantial project ends. At best it's dead end help desk style work waiting to maybe one day (realistically never, it's going to a new team) get a budget for a new project. At worst it's finding make work and training to not die of occupational boredome or end up laid off with no useful experience from a truly slacker job.
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Apr 28, 2021 16:49
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Gin_Rummy posted:I work......... with a guy........ who writes......... all his emails............ like this......... This but remove the spaces after the periods. I've worked with someone who did this. Maddening, but he was a pretty swell guy this aside so I just let it be. Armitag3 posted:I love being in a meeting going over the technical requirements of a new feature and derail into a 30 min discussion of whether or not the word "and" or "or" should be in a hardcoded popup message that the enduser is going to gloss over. This is the caliber of invaluable contribution as pointing out I could switch the operands in a ternary operation so we could save a single ! character. "Hey, this is important but can we please take this offline and move on? We have a lot of other things to cover and I think we need to stay on track." I have become corporate, a Brundlefly of learnings. Kill me.
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Apr 28, 2021 17:00
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Gin_Rummy posted:I work......... with a guy........ who writes......... all his emails............ like this......... I work with someone who cannot communicate anything without writing a novella length email: it takes a good five minutes to read even the simplest requests, and often it could be summed up as “let’s offer customer x this price, can you approve?”
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Apr 28, 2021 17:09
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Scientastic posted:I work with someone who cannot communicate anything without writing a novella length email: it takes a good five minutes to read even the simplest requests, and often it could be summed up as “let’s offer customer x this price, can you approve?”
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Apr 28, 2021 17:24
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Armitag3 posted:I love being in a meeting going over the technical requirements of a new feature and derail into a 30 min discussion of whether or not the word "and" or "or" should be in a hardcoded popup message that the enduser is going to gloss over. This is the caliber of invaluable contribution as pointing out I could switch the operands in a ternary operation so we could save a single ! character. ahahaha this reminds me of that "genius" engineer we had at helljob. He argued with us about structure of our code sometimes, recommending absolutely ludicrous and unreadable code because less characters == faster. buddy the code wasn't slow because of the character count e. Also, question to Office365 / Outlook admins. I presume even if I have a calendar appointment marked as private, administrators can still see it / see the contents, right? Or does private actually mean totally private except for me?
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Apr 28, 2021 19:10
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Scientastic posted:I work with someone who cannot communicate anything without writing a novella length email: it takes a good five minutes to read even the simplest requests, and often it could be summed up as “let’s offer customer x this price, can you approve?” I just received a response to my multi-paragraph novella/email: 'Thanks so much for the informative email. Looks great.' I am the dumb poo poo. It's a legit strategy though. The first few interactions go completely over the top crossing the T's and addressing every aspect above and beyond what's needed. Pretty quickly people will learn to ignore your emails and just agree to anything you say, because hey that guy is so thorough and does everything correctly whether they have to or not. Then you can start taking liberties.
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Apr 28, 2021 19:44
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Armitag3 posted:I love being in a meeting going over the technical requirements of a new feature and derail into a 30 min discussion of whether or not the word "and" or "or" should be in a hardcoded popup message that the enduser is going to gloss over. This is the caliber of invaluable contribution as pointing out I could switch the operands in a ternary operation so we could save a single ! character. I got into semantics arguments at my previous job, and the worse and more toxic that job got the more frequent and vicious they became. My role had been so degraded and diminished that semantics was literally the last area where I felt I had any special expertise or sway (I wrote all the documentation and did other technical writing adjacent tasks), so I got vicious about it (in a desperate wounded animal sort of way). One that I recall was "remove" vs "delete". Similar words, but very different implications in a software interface. We had these widgets you managed on a dashboard. One of the things you could do was add a widget to a blacklist (in case it got compromised or something). Naturally, you could later remove it from the blacklist. I set up the interface and form in the context of the action being adding/removing widgets to/from this list. Lead dev, who was all backend/API, objected to "remove" and insisted on "delete". I explained that no, you aren't deleting the widget when you take it off the blacklist and that it was confusing and misleading because it gave the user the impression they were destroying the widget when they were just taking it off the list. Lead dev argued that it should be delete because the way it works in the database is that the blacklist status flag entry for that widget is deleted from the blacklist status table. I had to explain that sometimes in UI design you have to use "syntactic sugar" to make a concept easier to grasp and better align with how the user will think about performing a task because sometimes it's different from how the thing actually happens under the hood. The user isn't going to be thinking about deleting an entry from a database table, they're just going to want to remove it from the list. I think I won that round, but holy gently caress it was all so exhausting and I don't know why he cared so much because he was not a UI person and my implementation didn't affect how his poo poo worked in the backend one bit. At least this poo poo didn't happen in meetings. Dumb poo poo my old work did: had me do all the technical writing tasks and then gave me huge amounts of poo poo about which words I used in the UI that I chose to make the UI more understandable because that was my job. At least nominally.
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Apr 28, 2021 21:21
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Queen Victorian posted:I got into semantics arguments at my previous job, and the worse and more toxic that job got the more frequent and vicious they became. My role had been so degraded and diminished that semantics was literally the last area where I felt I had any special expertise or sway (I wrote all the documentation and did other technical writing adjacent tasks), so I got vicious about it (in a desperate wounded animal sort of way). One that I recall was "remove" vs "delete". Similar words, but very different implications in a software interface. We had these widgets you managed on a dashboard. One of the things you could do was add a widget to a blacklist (in case it got compromised or something). Naturally, you could later remove it from the blacklist. I set up the interface and form in the context of the action being adding/removing widgets to/from this list. Lead dev, who was all backend/API, objected to "remove" and insisted on "delete". I explained that no, you aren't deleting the widget when you take it off the blacklist and that it was confusing and misleading because it gave the user the impression they were destroying the widget when they were just taking it off the list. Lead dev argued that it should be delete because the way it works in the database is that the blacklist status flag entry for that widget is deleted from the blacklist status table. I had to explain that sometimes in UI design you have to use "syntactic sugar" to make a concept easier to grasp and better align with how the user will think about performing a task because sometimes it's different from how the thing actually happens under the hood. The user isn't going to be thinking about deleting an entry from a database table, they're just going to want to remove it from the list. I think I won that round, but holy gently caress it was all so exhausting and I don't know why he cared so much because he was not a UI person and my implementation didn't affect how his poo poo worked in the backend one bit. You're absolutely right because UX is a thing and the enduser isn't (and shouldn't) going to care about what happens under the hood. I see this disconnect between techies and non-techies all the time where these groups speak entirely different languages and I feel like a daywalker when my peers go on about the classes and methods they're working on and the people around them politely smile and nod and look at their fingers praying that the nerd shuts up.
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Apr 28, 2021 21:34
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Queen Victorian posted:I got into semantics arguments at my previous job, and the worse and more toxic that job got the more frequent and vicious they became. Truth. I had a particularly toxic person in the hierarchy above me sit and explain that items that were not in the list of items to scan that had quality X were false negatives if they had quality X.
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Apr 28, 2021 22:22
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As the old saying goes, arguing with an engineer is like wrestling with a pig. Both are going to get you dirty, and both are going to enjoy it. Now, arguing with an engineer pig? I don't know if I've ever heard of that one.
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Apr 29, 2021 01:34
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I once had a job teaching English in Japan. It may not surprise you to learn that the vast majority of people doing this job don't really care about it and are just using it to explore a different country. Most people work for giant chain companies that contract out to schools where a low level of effort is perfectly fine. For a year I worked at a small private company that ran things like an actual company and had actual expectations of us as employees. Every month there would be an all hands meeting where we;d go over the new curriculum and such. A lot of our clients were kindergartens so there were a bunch of songs for each topic that we had to sing with the kids. We rotated around, so each school had different teachers come in on different days. All these songs we were singing had various actions and for some reason, the people running the school were really concerned that every teacher use the exact same actions. So we would have these meetings to standardize exactly how we were to wave our hands and stomp our feet while singing children's songs. These meetings always became weirdly heated and confrontational. No lie, I once saw two fully grown adults screaming at each other about whether it was better to point at your head with one hand or two, while singing "head, shoulders, knees and toes."
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Apr 29, 2021 01:59
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Dr_Amazing posted:I once had a job teaching English in Japan. It may not surprise you to learn that the vast majority of people doing this job don't really care about it and are just using it to explore a different country. Most people work for giant chain companies that contract out to schools where a low level of effort is perfectly fine. drat I want to teach ESL now
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Apr 29, 2021 02:03
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Dr_Amazing posted:I once had a job teaching English in Japan. It may not surprise you to learn that the vast majority of people doing this job don't really care about it and are just using it to explore a different country. Most people work for giant chain companies that contract out to schools where a low level of effort is perfectly fine. Two hands. Next question
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Apr 29, 2021 05:31
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Mojo Jojo posted:Two hands. Next question One for singular, two for plural.
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Apr 29, 2021 07:33
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English is a loving disaster and the fact that it is the lingua franca of this gay dead Earth is proof that there is a god who hates us.
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Apr 29, 2021 07:47
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A Festivus Miracle posted:English is a loving disaster and the fact that it is the lingua franca of this gay dead Earth is proof that there is a god who hates us. Basically everything else except maybe Italian and Esperanto is worse so good luck with overhauling it
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Apr 29, 2021 08:18
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I'm currently laid off due to another lockdown after only being back at work a month from the previous lockdown. It's a retailer (that wants to be called "the working and learning company"). The latest from corporate is that they want the overstock -- the extras that won't fit on the shelves -- to look fresh and neat. This wouldn't actually be that bad if it weren't for the fact that they're spending a great deal of money renovating all their stores to look 'fresh and neat'. This was the plan before the pandemic. This is the plan they are continuing to do during a pandemic. This is on top of the pressure to squeeze more out of the employees that are there, despite the fact that some are inexperienced kids who only get a single shift a week and thus don't have the work experience to really know their job. The chain got bought by a company that buys companies in trouble and tries to 'flip them', which means even on the remote chance that their efforts actually pay off in turning sales around it's not likely to be sustainable. The real warning signs are the fact that they've basically made up a target demographic called "the Curious Achiever". The "Curious Achiever" is described entirely in ideologies written by out of touch marketing people without any demographic information. No information about possible age, industry, income range, or even income sources, but apparently they know these people "turn to retailers for inspiration" and they share the special traits of wanting stuff in stock and employees who know what they're talking about. Y'know, the same thing everyone wants from a store. That's not when they're "enjoying the journey, not the destination". I used to work in marketing (towards analytics and data) before my wife passed suddenly and all my hopes and dreams for the future died with her. I know exactly the kind of words marketing people use when they have no clue of what to do. It's the same kind of bullshits academics use to pad out a paper when they have very little idea of what they're talking about. Oh, and apparently someone in management really pissed off our lead salesperson. He was sharp, supportive and liked his job and he left during the beginning of corporate's changes. I'm not drinking the kool-aid and I'm letting them know I'm not, which is probably why I've not don't get hours. (but they never give me enough hours to live off of unless a key person's on vacation) Officially they tell me I don't get hours because my performance doesn't measure up (which is of course why I've had multiple co-workers mistake me for having manager abilities). I asked if that was the case, why hadn't I been fired and they told me they don't have a policy of firing people for poor performance. That excuse is either bullshit as well or positively insane. What really kills me is that the staff seem to be real team players and a lot of them deserve better than this.
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Apr 29, 2021 08:27
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They should rebrand from "The working and learning company" to "The only place you can send a fax from anymore" and their target demographic should be "the Desperate Faxer".
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Apr 29, 2021 08:46
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On the opposite end I had a client give a marketing target so specific in a database with 100k+ people in it less than 10 over the entire last decade fit the criteria so I offered to save the client money and just call those people myself.
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Apr 29, 2021 09:22
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McGavin posted:They should rebrand from "The working and learning company" to "The only place you can send a fax from anymore" and their target demographic should be "the Desperate Faxer". I just googled this and holy lmao how the mighty have fallen
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Apr 29, 2021 11:50
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Smik posted:It's a retailer (that wants to be called "the working and learning company"). Well Dwight, maybe you should focus on your rustic farmhouse bnb project. This one sounds unfun. In other news, we had a diversity and inclusion lunch n learn about Asian-targeting hate crime because of recent happenings. When QnA opened someone asked "Hey, why are the only asians on the screen paid consultants?" That went over like a fart in an all day Kaizen meeting 
Samuel L. Hacksaw fucked around with this message at 12:38 on Apr 29, 2021 |
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Apr 29, 2021 12:34
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McGavin posted:They should rebrand from "The working and learning company" to "The only place you can send a fax from anymore" and their target demographic should be "the Desperate Faxer". I think of the last panel of this any time a place needs, needs me to send a fax. 
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Apr 29, 2021 12:56
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Following up on my earlier posts about management wanting to raise everyone's pay to more equal levels, today they revealed what the monetary values of individual pay bands are. It appears that while I am currently being paid more than company-determined average for my role & experience, it's unclear if I'd have to be promoted twice just to receive any significant increase or not.
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Apr 29, 2021 13:03
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Queen Victorian posted:I got into semantics arguments at my previous job, and the worse and more toxic that job got the more frequent and vicious they became. My role had been so degraded and diminished that semantics was literally the last area where I felt I had any special expertise or sway (I wrote all the documentation and did other technical writing adjacent tasks), so I got vicious about it (in a desperate wounded animal sort of way). One that I recall was "remove" vs "delete". Similar words, but very different implications in a software interface. We had these widgets you managed on a dashboard. One of the things you could do was add a widget to a blacklist (in case it got compromised or something). Naturally, you could later remove it from the blacklist. I set up the interface and form in the context of the action being adding/removing widgets to/from this list. Lead dev, who was all backend/API, objected to "remove" and insisted on "delete". I explained that no, you aren't deleting the widget when you take it off the blacklist and that it was confusing and misleading because it gave the user the impression they were destroying the widget when they were just taking it off the list. Lead dev argued that it should be delete because the way it works in the database is that the blacklist status flag entry for that widget is deleted from the blacklist status table. I had to explain that sometimes in UI design you have to use "syntactic sugar" to make a concept easier to grasp and better align with how the user will think about performing a task because sometimes it's different from how the thing actually happens under the hood. The user isn't going to be thinking about deleting an entry from a database table, they're just going to want to remove it from the list. I think I won that round, but holy gently caress it was all so exhausting and I don't know why he cared so much because he was not a UI person and my implementation didn't affect how his poo poo worked in the backend one bit. I'm a tech writer/documentation guy for a software company and you wouldn't believe how many times I've been asked to write an error message and it ends up completely derailing the workflow/design from its origin just because the simple process of reviewing how a user can make an error and then how we tell them about said error points out serious flaws in the workflow. We're talking devs coming to me for a simple 2 minute sentence tweak turning into full blown feature redesign
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Apr 29, 2021 13:53
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Do they fight you every step of the way or are they enlightened?
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Apr 29, 2021 13:56
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Does anyone else have the customer/coworker who is perfectly lucid in emails but keeps wanting to video call you so that they can say things like “I have a question, um, when I - when I - you know, like - when I *gestures wildly* why does it - like - why does the thing - um - what I mean is when I do this, it like, doesn’t, like, you know, do what I want, if that makes sense?” I want to help but PLEASE just email me for gods sake
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Apr 29, 2021 14:10
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goatface posted:Do they fight you every step of the way or are they enlightened? Devs listen - Project Managers don't.
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Apr 29, 2021 14:44
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What good UIX actually does: input from beginning to end of how user flow meets program flow What PMs think good UIX does: copyedit buttons and error messages to hide the raw contempt the lead developer has for users ruining his perfect program.
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Apr 29, 2021 14:50
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Samuel L. Hacksaw posted:Well Dwight, maybe you should focus on your rustic farmhouse bnb project. This one sounds unfun. I don't care how noble the reason is, seminars should not be held during lunch hour and holding them over zoom where you can't even get free food is inhuman
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Apr 29, 2021 15:10
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Which is more aggravating while working tech helpdesk: a user instant messaging the word "hi" and nothing else, or asking a user a very simple yes or no question that your troubleshooting will hinge upon and then watching the message bubbles for 10 minutes while they either type an answer that is ambiguous, or suddenly stop and go offline for the day before sending?
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Apr 29, 2021 15:13
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Prism Mirror Lens posted:Does anyone else have the customer/coworker who is perfectly lucid in emails but keeps wanting to video call you so that they can say things like “I have a question, um, when I - when I - you know, like - when I *gestures wildly* why does it - like - why does the thing - um - what I mean is when I do this, it like, doesn’t, like, you know, do what I want, if that makes sense?” I want to help but PLEASE just email me for gods sake It's me except regular calls, but I only do it to one person because they block all of my work from getting done until they clear things on a daily basis, and they don't acknowledge emails or Slack messages they say go through to notifications for days at a time. I'm not very eloquent and really prefer written communication of whatever sort, but some people are just unable to respond. I try to keep things focused and quick.
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Apr 29, 2021 15:22
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Saying Hi in a 1:1 chat is whatever. But someone keeps posting "is anyone there" in our managed help Teams channel where someone is always there and one of these times I'm gonna end up posting a link to Pink Floyd.
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Apr 29, 2021 15:24
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That Wall track will probably be unironically the most cultured thing they have ever heard Most people like that are tea drinking cat ladies or chud mommas who watch America’s Got Talent
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Apr 29, 2021 15:27
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nexus6 posted:Following up on my earlier posts about management wanting to raise everyone's pay to more equal levels, today they revealed what the monetary values of individual pay bands are. It appears that while I am currently being paid more than company-determined average for my role & experience, it's unclear if I'd have to be promoted twice just to receive any significant increase or not. The place I currently work at introduced a pay band structure. They may have... misjudged things, in that all of the people with both experience and skill are leaving in the next ~2 months. This will raise their 2-year turnover to >95% for employees below management level. In that there will be two of the original staff left, out of ~60.
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Apr 29, 2021 15:32
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Got a project request in our team inbox from our MegaCorp's HR for something they consider high priority but doesn't matter much. The last time I took the initiative to help them with a simple project it became their senior VPs pestering my manager for updates and constant handholding to generate basic reports each day for them to obsessively track number go up. As it's not my role to always volunteer for this type of task and I have plenty of other stuff to do, gonna go ahead and ignore this as ostensibly there are several other team members who are supposed to follow up and respond. In practice they won't, but oh well.
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Apr 29, 2021 15:36
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Oh hey and immediately after that last one I get informed that I'm getting moved projects again from the one that I am comfortable and effective in and my performance gets regularly praised, to one that I know is a complete shitshow that cannot be fixed (and happens to use software that rejects my physical accommodations in a manner I can't get around through hardware or software) and has the current main user for it working overtime every day for a decade. With very little warning. While finding out someone is getting hired to do what I do now (... just hire someone to work with them?) and another one to work on a glorified vanity project, the combined pay being significantly higher than it would be to hire someone to unfuck our systems so we didn't NEED two more people to operate them. Priorities, not even once - motto of management, I guess.
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Apr 29, 2021 15:54
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