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Jamus posted:I used to work with a guy who'd somehow always run into absurd problems nobody else did. Not out of lack of technical ability, just really bad luck? I could never figure it out. He was curious enough and driven to solve his own problems eventually. I got into the habit of making him run my stuff on his machine just to shake out some fresh interesting bugs/documentation problems It was probably something about his work flow or preferences in workstation configuration that would shake out the weird stuff. Like "software works great until you change the locale to Turkey and all hell breaks loose" localization shenanigans. Honesty though 90% of our job is curiosity and drive. That's what made me stop participating in stack overflow, it's almost entirely questions that can be answered by carefully reading readily available documentation, but the gamification heavily rewards asking and answering low-effort poo poo questions, so it just drowns in garbage from people with no curiosity or drive.
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Jan 17, 2023 05:56
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The one that's gotten me recently is just claiming they need "more information" until they're just a human shell window being told each key to press for everything.
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Jan 17, 2023 06:49
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:The one that's gotten me recently is just claiming they need "more information" until they're just a human shell window being told each key to press for everything. I would just ghost a dev if they did that. It isn't the nicest thing to do but you only have so much time in a day, and hey, perhaps they'll figure it out themselves.
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Jan 17, 2023 09:30
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I think I posted this pet peeve before, but I hate developers who say that a bug was caused by "some reason", they poked a bit and introduced some debug logging and now "for some reason" the bug doesn't manifest itself anymore. I mean, FIND THAT REASON. If an intermittent bug doesn't show for a while, but you didn't change anything meaningful, then you KNOW you didn't fix it. Sigh.
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Jan 17, 2023 09:43
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I've got a backlog of 30+ tickets to work through, I'm not spending 5 hours figuring out why someone is suddenly working.
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Jan 17, 2023 09:54
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"MEGA COMRAAAAAAAAADE!" 
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Jan 17, 2023 10:02
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I enjoy it when they come back a few months later. "Oh hi little guy, I remember you. I'm gonna find you this time! -- some time later "oh evaded me again you little scamp, well see you in 3 months" --ticket rejected , cannot reproduce.
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Jan 17, 2023 10:59
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:The one that's gotten me recently is just claiming they need "more information" until they're just a human shell window being told each key to press for everything. We own this domain and all of its components, so only we can decide and approve the solution design for your use case. ... As for implementing the design we just approved, though, we will use the inner sourcing model for that because we don't have capacity. Of course, only we can review and approve your code changes. Also by the way there is no documentation for the design we just approved. We only talked about it in some meetings, so you will also have to write that document as well. You can't start the coding until we approve it.
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Jan 17, 2023 16:50
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Me, a cursed first day at another job: "hey, for some reason the source control server isn't being found on my machine, is the documentation out of data or what?" Lead dev: "ugh, something else is on fire, I'll deal with this later" The server couldn't be found because the server was (inadvertantly) set up on a temporary VM that was finally recycled on the day I started.  Fortunately another dev actually had the entire project source locally to create a new repo, or it would have been a very fun first week.
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Jan 17, 2023 17:55
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Nothing is more permanent than a temporary machine
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Jan 17, 2023 17:58
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I feel like I've fallen into the trap of being a "leopards eat your face party" supporter. Two women on my team had issues with a male coworker not paying enough attention to misogyny in the workplace. I backed them up 100% and the coworker was eventually removed from the team - I continued to distribute my opportunities to others so everybody had chances to succeed and be recognized. Recently they've been turning on me. If I ask a coworker in my time zone a question, I'm being exclusive for not waiting for a time where everybody was available. Brainstorming is a total poo poo show because if I even slightly interrupt (waiting for a thought to finish but not giving air before jumping in) I'm being dismissive and controlling. I've talked directly with both women and while they agree I'm mindful and progressive, I'm still the target of their ire when they don't like what happens in the company. Every little mistake is viewed through the lense of negative intent and blown up to the team-wide level with managers involved. I've tried taking a backseat route to avoid offense, and was called out for "leaving the glue work to the women, something that often happens to belittle their contributions as engineers". I love working with women and pushing gender, race, and age equality in the workplace. I can't stand having everything I do monitored without a sense of trust or positive intent day in and day out.
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Jan 17, 2023 18:02
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Macichne Leainig posted:Nothing is more permanent than a temporary machine 
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Jan 17, 2023 18:35
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Judge Schnoopy posted:I feel like I've fallen into the trap of being a "leopards eat your face party" supporter. That's a thorny one. You could take your perspective to HR; they're most likely to take the idea seriously. You could step down as manager and let someone else jump on the grenade. Or you could start polishing your resume and applying for jobs because you are a calendar.
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Jan 17, 2023 18:37
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Judge Schnoopy posted:I love working with women and pushing gender, race, and age equality in the workplace. I can't stand having everything I do monitored without a sense of trust or positive intent day in and day out. Think of the two women as two individuals who happen to be assholes, not as representatives of a larger group.
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Jan 17, 2023 18:48
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Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:Think of the two women as two individuals who happen to be assholes, not as representatives of a larger group. Oh for sure and I hope I don't come off as grouping anybody. Most of my bosses in my career have been women and they've been guiding forces for me to be a better person. I strongly think there should be more women and trans women in the career field in general to break down toxic bullshit that has festered for generations. Also want to be clear that I'm not a manager, nor do I outrank anybody - we're at the same title.
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Jan 17, 2023 19:01
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Judge Schnoopy posted:Also want to be clear that I'm not a manager, nor do I outrank anybody - we're at the same title. Then I suppose you have a better argument for feeling targeted if you bring it to HR, since it's really not in your job description to manage other people's egos. The important thing is to get your point of view out ahead of time before you get scapegoated, because nobody's going to listen to you when you are on the chopping block, just like you didn't listen to that guy who didn't pay enough attention to misogyny. You need to start putting complaints in writing that you are being harassed before your culture fit is in question.
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Jan 17, 2023 19:24
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Me, defending a cursed senior engineer: Week 1: Yeah, he had some trouble finding and signing all the HR paperwork, but we're past that now Week 2: We worked through his email and log in issues, so he should be able to get moving on his first project Week 4: He had some trouble with our standard build system, so he setup his own, but once he gets his project working we'll integrate it in with the other stuff Week 8: He's been running into some trouble, apparently that project isn't well documented, but it will be worth it if he finishes Week 16: Still on the same project. Hasn't been going smoothly Week 20-26: This guy is an incompetent rear end in a top hat, the only person I hate more than him is me on week 1 The guy had a lot of good qualifications and definitely knew how to code, but was absolutely useless at actually producing anything. Judge Schnoopy posted:I feel like I've fallen into the trap of being a "leopards eat your face party" supporter. Working through brainstorming is probably tricky, and may be worth just dropping. That's a very delicate art to get right.
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Jan 17, 2023 19:27
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StumblyWumbly posted:The guy had a lot of good qualifications and definitely knew how to code, but was absolutely useless at actually producing anything. Oh cool we worked with the same guy, glad you went through the "wow this dude is useless let's turf him" discovery faster than we did
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Jan 17, 2023 20:51
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I didn’t know you were my coworkers 
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Jan 17, 2023 22:14
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Judge Schnoopy posted:I feel like I've fallen into the trap of being a "leopards eat your face party" supporter. As an engineering manager this is one you must take to your manager,and or hr , as soon as you. If it is like you present they’re creating a classic hostile working environment just with a new spin on it. You need to insulate yourself from it before you get shuffled off with potentially career ending rumours, at least at that company. It’s one of those really difficult situations,but a situation that your manager is paid to deal with.
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Jan 17, 2023 22:41
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Love Stole the Day posted:We own this domain and all of its components, so only we can decide and approve the solution design for your use case. ... As for implementing the design we just approved, though, we will use the inner sourcing model for that because we don't have capacity. Of course, only we can review and approve your code changes. Also by the way there is no documentation for the design we just approved. We only talked about it in some meetings, so you will also have to write that document as well. You can't start the coding until we approve it. Like I know you're giving some counter example here, but the most recent case I dealt with had me giving the guy 30 pages of documentation and 30 minutes a day for three weeks to go over stuff. One of his goals was to migrate a single project build from Gitlab to Jenkins. He couldn't even get started on a hello world example in Jenkins to just kick the tires. He needed "more information."
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Jan 17, 2023 23:47
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Aramoro posted:As an engineering manager this is one you must take to your manager,and or hr , as soon as you. If it is like you present they’re creating a classic hostile working environment just with a new spin on it. You need to insulate yourself from it before you get shuffled off with potentially career ending rumours, at least at that company. It’s one of those really difficult situations,but a situation that your manager is paid to deal with. 
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Jan 18, 2023 00:41
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:Like I know you're giving some counter example here, but the most recent case I dealt with had me giving the guy 30 pages of documentation and 30 minutes a day for three weeks to go over stuff. One of his goals was to migrate a single project build from Gitlab to Jenkins. He couldn't even get started on a hello world example in Jenkins to just kick the tires. He needed "more information." I've seen that situation where the guy has a lot of anxiety and would rather fret about making the wrong move instead of doing nothing, and its frustrating because they end up justifying it as a problem with the world around them instead of a problem with themselves. I have more sympathy for people like that instead of folks who are just too lazy to do anything, but unless you give them a lot of therapy the end result is the same. Saying it like this, I guess it does imply the solution is that they need comfort more than knowledge, so... let me know how that works I guess?
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Jan 18, 2023 03:21
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Judge Schnoopy posted:I feel like I've fallen into the trap of being a "leopards eat your face party" supporter. I disagree; it sounds like you were trying to support them to do the right thing, not support someone doing the wrong thing because they were doing it to someone else. Leapords can be very subjective, you see. As an intellectual, I
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Jan 18, 2023 03:45
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smackfu posted:(“Cursed” is the people who run into problems every time they check out a new project that works fine for everyone else.) IME it was always an issue with line endings. In any group of ten programmers there was always one person whose commits were filled with CRLF LF changes, and they had no idea why. I think that problem is fixed now, with IDEs and git being configurable to notice and fix line endings. At least I haven’t noticed it in a while.
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Jan 18, 2023 16:43
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Aramoro posted:As an engineering manager this is one you must take to your manager,and or hr , as soon as you. If it is like you present they’re creating a classic hostile working environment just with a new spin on it. You need to insulate yourself from it before you get shuffled off with potentially career ending rumours, at least at that company. It’s one of those really difficult situations,but a situation that your manager is paid to deal with. Thanks to everyone who posted a similar sentiment and giving me a gut check that this isn't an ok environment. poo poo boiled over today while my manager and director were on the call, so they have a first hand account of what I'm talking about. I was essentially told to not have conversations with coworkers before Pacific coast is online, and that continuing to do so is impairing the success of others who can't join the conversations. I feel it boils down to me having good ideas and if my coworker can't be in the room, she can't be part of the crew getting credit for the idea, so we need to wait for her. I keep going back to the fact that nobody is keeping score or assigning credit to people like that, so stopping me from talking for 4 hours a day is directly impacting the company's productivity for no reason at all. My manager says he gets it and agrees with me but does nothing when she rants in team wide meetings about it. I've also asked for a transfer to another team that will better enable me to be productive all day, instead of Pacific coast hours. Gotta plant those seeds early...
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Jan 18, 2023 21:40
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Good first step, hopefully you get the transfer and that's the end of it (for you).
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Jan 19, 2023 01:21
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lifg posted:IME it was always an issue with line endings. In any group of ten programmers there was always one person whose commits were filled with CRLF LF changes, and they had no idea why. Me: why did your commit have random formatting changes in files you didn’t change? Them: I don’t know, the IDE just did it.
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Jan 19, 2023 01:32
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IIRC git just silently converts \r\n to \n in text files, and silently converts it back on windows, so as far as people working on things are concerned it's always been with that new line scheme regardless of if it's Windows or not. Actually, it's been this way for some time, I want to say a decade at this point
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Jan 19, 2023 03:28
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Once in awhile I checkout/pull a branch and VS complains about mismatched line endings, asking if I want to normalize them. Happens to my teammates too. We’re all running the same (latest) version of Visual Studio, on either Windows 10 or 11, haven’t figured out why but it only happens at most once a month, just infrequently enough to squint, shrug, and ignore.
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Jan 19, 2023 03:53
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Judge Schnoopy posted:Thanks to everyone who posted a similar sentiment and giving me a gut check that this isn't an ok environment. poo poo boiled over today while my manager and director were on the call, so they have a first hand account of what I'm talking about. How do you not laugh in her face for being stupid? Unless your timezone was explicitly hired to work in her timezone, tz mismatch is just a thing that exists in remote companies.
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Jan 19, 2023 09:42
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Xarn posted:How do you not laugh in her face for being stupid? Unless your timezone was explicitly hired to work in her timezone, tz mismatch is just a thing that exists in remote companies. I think it probably because the colleague in question has already learned how to weaponise disagreements to the point someone already got shuffled off and the manager is unwilling to people manage. It's time for the skip level meeting to discuss your transfer with your bosses boss.
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Jan 19, 2023 09:59
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What do you call the type of developer who thinks they're not allowed to touch anything? Every status update is just a list of all the things that annoy them about the code surrounding what they're working on, but it never occurs to them to change it. E.g., "I lost a lot of time this week because the config doesn't expose this parameter I was working on, so I had to rebuild the image every time to experiment with new values." Even sometimes adding "It would be great if you could pass in any parameter" but not making the final leap of recognizing that they could actually make that happen. I've said so many times something like, listen, these things aren't set in stone, and there's no one external managing that for you that we can go complain to. You/your team has full ownership of that so please, don't hesitate to make the changes you need to make your life easier. Or if it's a larger change you see as out of scope and easier to work around for now, then at least make a proposal. At the moment you're the one with the best possible insight on how it could be improved. And if you need more context to understand better why it's setup that way, ask your team who can give you a walkthrough. To me, the biggest distinction between a good and bad developer is how they respond to this kind of message. I've had some developers where this sets off a lightbulb and soon everything they touch starts improving, but just as many who cannot take initiative even if its for their own benefit. I guess there's a third type, the juniors who go a little overboard trying to improve things around them and get completely distracted. But seems there's more hope for them.
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Jan 19, 2023 12:37
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You call them a Junior.
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Jan 19, 2023 12:46
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Lazy
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Jan 19, 2023 13:00
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Some people just like to complain.
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Jan 19, 2023 13:52
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Iunno, I’ve been in that position before. It goes both ways sometimes. It’s not only a lack of interest in taking ownership of a codebase or project (though I’ve dealt with that too), there’s also the case where the individual does not feel free to make such changes without criticism or rejection. Like for example, there’s all sorts of changes I want to make to my current team’s codebase that I don’t. Either because I can’t due to our constantly changing priorities, or don’t feel comfortable doing based on previous developer feedback. I’ve had to rework PRs before that were relatively innocuous because another dev stonewalled QOL changes in a manner that eventually convinced me that they found it too worrisome or dangerous to change our code in any non-minimal way. “Why is this change included”, “do we absolutely need this”, the codebase is too fragile to handle changes like these”, etc. (The obvious response is “then let’s add more tests and be more rigorous in its design” but as much as I’d like that, management has different priorities.) If the team you work with doesn’t value that kind of gradual improvement and investment, then you’ll internalize that behavior and bring it to other teams and projects. 
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Jan 19, 2023 15:26
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Pollyanna posted:Iunno, I’ve been in that position before. It goes both ways sometimes. Imo if they’re giving these kinds of responses to the dev then they’ve done as much empowering speeches as can really be expected outside of outright saying, “okay we’ll give you another 2 days and you MUST fix this”. Which, I wouldn’t want to do that either because it’s an order to do QoL stuff which seems like a shortcut to making someone annoyed about doing it  quote:I've said so many times something like, listen, these things aren't set in stone, and there's no one external managing that for you that we can go complain to. You/your team has full ownership of that so please, don't hesitate to make the changes you need to make your life easier.
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Jan 19, 2023 16:05
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Pollyanna posted:they found it too worrisome or dangerous to change our code in any non-minimal way. “Why is this change included”, “do we absolutely need this”, the codebase is too fragile to handle changes like these”, etc. (The obvious response is “then let’s add more tests and be more rigorous in its design” but as much as I’d like that, management has different priorities.)  Most recent example here is being told by the owners of a domain that using a design pattern to save hundreds of lines of code (edit: to support new use cases) and be more DRY is "adding contextual complexity to the project". Of course, none of these imaginary coding standards are documented anywhere at all but that won't stop them from trying to influence others with their opinions because that's what Staff levels are supposed to do. Love Stole the Day fucked around with this message at 16:27 on Jan 19, 2023 |
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Jan 19, 2023 16:24
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If I had a nickel for every time I saw a coworker lament an obnoxious process repeatedly without doing anything about it, I wouldn't have to create obnoxious processes for them to bump into repeatedly for a living! Edit: Though I did finally have a user report one such obnoxious process. Only problem was that when I asked how they would like me to change it to fix it, they replied, "I don't know."
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Jan 19, 2023 17:00
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