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Lockback posted:I'd bet money AI is in the mix of apple coring and banana peeling. Nothing makes people lose their minds on regular software delivery like AI. Hah, no, it's pretty mundane stuff, although CEO cofounder is extremely hype for getting LLMs to do absolutely everything. Thankfully we've managed to keep it out of the actual product - at least for the moment. The real issue is that he started this company as a solo couch hacker and is having a lot of trouble understanding that the company has grown to a size that he can't keep the whole thing in his head. He knows that customers want banana peeling, he somehow got it in his head that apple coring would peel bananas, and it never occurred to him that he would be mistaken about anything going on at the company. We usually see this in how he seems to think that every bug he reports starts being worked on immediately. (By whom, man? What do you think those people were doing before your bug report?) This version is just more dramatic.
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Jan 19, 2024 05:22
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It's funny that I work at a company where a big part of the product is providing hardware for datacentres/AI but using any AI tools in the office? GOD no! For one that costs money! For another it's insecure and we have to have everything on prem! It's just kind of funny to me, I'm fine with it though
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Jan 19, 2024 07:03
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priznat posted:It's funny that I work at a company where a big part of the product is providing hardware for datacentres/AI but using any AI tools in the office? GOD no! For one that costs money! For another it's insecure and we have to have everything on prem! The people who make the money in a gold rush sell shovels. 
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Jan 19, 2024 07:53
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“Hey Beefeater1980, great job in 2023. For 2024 we would like you to do job X. There is another team in another vertical that is also doing X but they’re doing it badly / suboptimally from the perspective of our vertical. You can have new headcount for this but you have to figure out what to call them because if you use an accurate description #teamsuboptimal will be upset. Yes this extends to the titles for the people you will hire, so they will all be confused. Yes it’s going to be your fault personally when all this turns into an awful quagmire and X is completely messed up. Any questions? No? Good.”
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Jan 19, 2024 08:26
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Midjack posted:The people who make the money in a gold rush sell shovels. Yeah that's pretty much how I describe what we make to laypeople 
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Jan 19, 2024 09:24
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priznat posted:It's funny that I work at a company where a big part of the product is providing hardware for datacentres/AI but using any AI tools in the office? GOD no! For one that costs money! For another it's insecure and we have to have everything on prem! They're right.
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Jan 19, 2024 10:19
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Loving the Apple coring / banana peeling conversation. Is this a common language people use to speak generally or is this thread just all vibing so well they are running fast with the analogy? I may be stealing this when explaining some of the dumb poo poo my execs are asking of my team.
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Jan 19, 2024 13:53
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It just seems like a good, simple, metaphor for the kinds of situations with a pissed off sales guy screaming "why can't you do it? They're both loving fruit!" while we all try not to laugh.
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Jan 19, 2024 14:17
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Wait. It's been a metaphor? I thought raminasi worked at a company making a new food prep robot and thought it was cool as poo poo.
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Jan 19, 2024 14:23
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Arquinsiel posted:It just seems like a good, simple, metaphor for the kinds of situations with a pissed off sales guy screaming "why can't you do it? They're both loving fruit!" while we all try not to laugh. Oh yeah, I get it. Just curious if it's an established one or if OP whipped it up and it was so good everyone rolled with it since it worked so well.
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Jan 19, 2024 14:24
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Good-Natured Filth posted:Wait. It's been a metaphor? I thought raminasi worked at a company making a new food prep robot and thought it was cool as poo poo. It coule be an apple pie making robot since their new products depend on apple coring
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Jan 19, 2024 14:59
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A full year down the line we're going to learn what the client really needed was an orange juicer
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Jan 19, 2024 15:05
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And that we've come back full circle to juice as a service/jucero.
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Jan 19, 2024 15:08
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TraderStav posted:Oh yeah, I get it. Just curious if it's an established one or if OP whipped it up and it was so good everyone rolled with it since it worked so well. I can't recall ever having heard it before. It's not perfect because the two actual things are slightly more related to each other than apple coring and banana peeling, but they're not the same, we never said they were the same, and buddy, if you're complaining that they don't even sound like they're the same, that means you should know they're not the same as well! They bullied my PM into agreeing to make some kind of apologetic announcement at the next all-hands, but I'm gonna try to get her to un-agree to it, at least without a tactical reason for it. raminasi fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Jan 19, 2024 |
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Jan 19, 2024 15:29
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raminasi posted:I can't recall ever having heard it before. It's not perfect because the two actual things are slightly more related to each other than apple coring and banana peeling So apple coring and apple peeling? Or banana peeling and uh banana coring?
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Jan 19, 2024 19:28
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I keep my apple corer in the bike shed.
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Jan 19, 2024 19:52
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I can’t tell if this is an update on the old dirty “pickle slicer” joke
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Jan 19, 2024 20:30
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Project I’m working on pulled in a principal engineer to help out with a difficult problem we’re experiencing. He’s one of those people who are genuinely Very Smart and Knows Everything about this area of expertise. He’s completely derailed every single meeting we’ve had since he got involved and is a pain to work with because he’s Very Smart and Always Right. If something doesn’t immediately make sense or god forbid someone says “point-oh-two-three” he will force everything to come to a stop until he can work through it on the call. For the “point oh two three” thing he actually derailed a meeting for 30+ minutes because he just needed to clarify if that meant “zero point zero two three”.
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Jan 19, 2024 20:36
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priznat posted:I can’t tell if this is an update on the old dirty “pickle slicer” joke She retired last year.
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Jan 19, 2024 20:57
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Boris Galerkin posted:Project I’m working on pulled in a principal engineer to help out with a difficult problem we’re experiencing. He’s one of those people who are genuinely Very Smart and Knows Everything about this area of expertise. He’s completely derailed every single meeting we’ve had since he got involved and is a pain to work with because he’s Very Smart and Always Right. If something doesn’t immediately make sense or god forbid someone says “point-oh-two-three” he will force everything to come to a stop until he can work through it on the call. For the “point oh two three” thing he actually derailed a meeting for 30+ minutes because he just needed to clarify if that meant “zero point zero two three”. So a principal engineer
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Jan 19, 2024 21:20
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Lockback posted:So a principal engineer There are two types of principal engineers in the world, guys like that that are kept isolated for everyone’s benefit and ones where the bosses are trying to make into a manager/IC hybrid and end up burning out.
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Jan 19, 2024 21:41
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People in my division do something that is really funny to me. In virtual meetings, instead of sharing a PowerPoint file or even their screen with PowerPoint full screen, they share their entire desktop with PowerPoint open in edit mode. It's even funnier when they have the presenter's notes filled out 
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Jan 20, 2024 02:45
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TraderStav posted:Loving the Apple coring / banana peeling conversation. Is this a common language people use to speak generally or is this thread just all vibing so well they are running fast with the analogy? I may be stealing this when explaining some of the dumb poo poo my execs are asking of my team. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BUb0IB0LOE Apple stabbing is universal.
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Jan 20, 2024 03:25
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priznat posted:There are two types of principal engineers in the world, guys like that that are kept isolated for everyone’s benefit and ones where the bosses are trying to make into a manager/IC hybrid and end up burning out. One of my past employers had exactly 1, out of about a hundred engineers. They fired him for grossly misrepresenting the amount of work he was actually doing.
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Jan 20, 2024 04:26
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Che Delilas posted:One of my past employers had exactly 1, out of about a hundred engineers. They fired him for grossly misrepresenting the amount of work he was actually doing. The title is weird because I also originally thought that there should only be one in a company, but nope! Today I heard some fascinating stories from a colleague I’ve worked at multiple companies with, but he’s a different type of engineer so I don’t work in the same groups as him. Anyway apparently in a meeting one of the managers flung a personal insult at another manager so bad the insulted party hung up his teams call and hasn’t been seen online or in the office since, about 2 weeks ago. His manager is saying the guy is on “personal leave” now. We don’t know what the insult was but drat that is nuclear grade.
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Jan 20, 2024 04:39
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Sundae posted:I keep my apple corer in the bike shed. What colour -- and I must emphasize this is critical -- is the shed?
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Jan 20, 2024 05:47
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Trabant posted:What colour -- and I must emphasize this is critical -- is the shed? We'll let you know when get to the color phase. Our market image group is currently sitting with their morning brandy and the Pantone master guide. They'll eventually send us color swatches for few hundred demo sheds for a panel review. E: Good news, though - we've gotten the first draft of the User Requirements Specification on the shed done, though there is some quibbling over whether we need to proceduralize the definitions of "bike" and "shed" in the global definitions SOP.
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Jan 20, 2024 06:08
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New post because completely different topic. Does anyone else suffer from decision fatigue by the end of the day? I spend more time at work making decisions for other people or that impact other people than I spend doing other kinds of work. By the time I come home, even something like "what do you want for dinner" feels like a substantial obstacle to my evening. I mean, office-world-problems and all that (I could be complaining about my aching feet and that I cut myself on prep), but mannnn.
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Jan 20, 2024 07:07
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Sundae posted:New post because completely different topic. Yeah, I was just talking to a colleague about this and I'm putting some things in place to get some of my people better at making decisions. How about let's check back in in a couple hours and see what your doing? Of course it helps that nothing my team can do in two hours can really gently caress things up that badly.
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Jan 20, 2024 07:15
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priznat posted:The title is weird because I also originally thought that there should only be one in a company, but nope! That's like killing something with vicious mockery in D&D.
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Jan 20, 2024 07:16
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Lockback posted:Yeah, I was just talking to a colleague about this and I'm putting some things in place to get some of my people better at making decisions. How about let's check back in in a couple hours and see what your doing? Of course it helps that nothing my team can do in two hours can really gently caress things up that badly. Today was... 1) Continuation of Old Guy Creep and impact on the team from the event moving forward (evaluating possible outcomes to four different ways this can go). Basically, operational sustainability management when I know I won't get to replace Old Guy. Headcount--; 2) Three projects with timelines that conflict, and all three of them with moving parts that have caused undetermined-duration delays. No, we can't change any of their schedules or due dates. Yes, they're all priority #1. No, the team that determines priority isn't meeting again until February. Make it work. Get this fox, chicken and lettuce across the river, but remember that you have to charge each boat trip to your cost center. 3) Reorganization in quality group and its impact on us now that they've put aseptic/sterile/biologics QA people into our area, "learning by doing" without explaining to them first how different our area is from those. I'm teaching them about my particular scientific field and the regulatory requirements, because none of them know anything about this area. They don't even know how the process works at the most basic level, so it's a lot of 100-level teaching poo poo, too. They don't know how a tablet is made. They don't know how powder blending is performed. I had to take literal minutes to get someone to realize that we don't sterile-filter our process water because we don't use water. There is no process water. This was somehow infeasible to him. 4) VP retiring and all the senior directors getting their knives out to begin the succession rituals; I'm not part of that game, but whoever wins will inevitably reorganize, so I'm trying to figure out where to position our group for least internal impact 5) Meetings with quality teams on four different initiatives from the mothership, while I try to maneuver them to reach the conclusion I want for our facility. 6) Trying to explain to a software implementation group just how bad one of their ideas was, while fending off the head of a different group who likes their idea because it makes less work for him, even though the outcome would be against FDA guidelines and get us turbo-hosed. Specifically, a proposal that we simplify our inventory process by not using raw material geneaologies. You know, like, the only thing that lets you figure out which batch something went into in the event that there's a vendor notification of a problem with a raw material. Despite how often I get to say it, I really don't get much pleasure out of saying "SEE? I TOLD YOU." That's on top of the actual day-to-day decision making of people stopping in to ask questions about production. I also used my lunch time to edit a 130-page batch record template that was due today. I still haven't gotten around to reviewing the executed batch record we finished in late December, because I haven't had time to do it and execution review is our job per procedure, not QA's.  Really, what I'm trying to say is... priznat posted:...and ones where the bosses are trying to make into a manager/IC hybrid and end up burning out. Sundae fucked around with this message at 07:49 on Jan 20, 2024 |
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Jan 20, 2024 07:41
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Lockback posted:That's like killing something with vicious mockery in D&D. Yeah I almost don't want to know what was said, it could be like some horrible curse like in a J-horror. This was literally over arguments about randomness for formal verification (those formal v people are loving nuts and I'm scared of them after this)
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Jan 20, 2024 07:54
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Sundae posted:Get this fox, chicken and lettuce across the river, but remember that you have to charge each boat trip to your cost center. You have an OLD GUY, an INTERN, and HR, and your meeting room can only hold one of them at a time. If you leave the OLD GUY alone with the INTERN, he will give her UNWANTED AND CREEPILY PERSONAL LIFE ADVICE DESPUTE BEING WARNED. If you leave INTERN alone with HR, she will SUE. If you leave HR alone with OLD GUY he will CONFESS MORE CRIMES. As you may have noticed, there is no solution to this logic puzzle.
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Jan 20, 2024 08:01
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Atopian posted:As you may have noticed, there is no solution to this logic puzzle. >> Kick all out of meeting room. You kick them all out of the meeting room. "Hey! What's the big deal?" shouts HR. >> Lock meeting room door. You lock the door. HR bangs on the door, but is interrupted when they realize OLD GUY is already starting to creep on the INTERN. >> Open backpack. You open your backpack. There is a bottle of bourbon inside. Why is there--oh. I see. >> Drink bourbon. Congratulations! You have won! Your score is 3 out of 217. Restart?
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Jan 20, 2024 08:12
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I'm more of a Scotch man myself, so I'll be general here. The most important word in a professional's vocabulary is "no". HR wants you to make the call? "No." If they push, "That would destroy a team critical to clinical trials and would affect patient outcomes." I spent most of my years as a contractor believing that we weren't a cult. But we are. And Patient Outcomes is our god. You have a very good chance to put HR into a position where you can play the "Patient Outcomes" card. You want to keep your team functioning? Make HR be the bad guys. Not backfilling Old Guy will still make everything suck, but it'll be an "us versus them" scenario, which can be made to work for team cohesion. I'll also advocate for Lead From Any Seat. Three projects with conflicting schedules? You decide what your people will do and in which order. You tell all three project leads what you have decided, your boss, and someone in your leadership chain senior enough to make the project leads toe the line. How do you prioritize? Patient Outcomes of course. If your bosses make unreasonable changes, it's "No" again If they make changes that you can actually do, not a problem. If the difference between doing it the way your bosses want, and not doing that is the resource that Old Guy was, then there's your case for "gently caress you, backfill this role". e. Comedy option for scheduling. Invite all the stakeholders to a prioritization meeting. Do not attend. Let them fight. mllaneza fucked around with this message at 08:32 on Jan 20, 2024 |
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Jan 20, 2024 08:29
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mllaneza posted:I'm more of a Scotch man myself, so I'll be general here. I'm actually gonna take your advice on that Patient Outcomes card. You've been here longer than I have, and I can definitely see how this could work. Thank you for the advice. 
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Jan 20, 2024 08:32
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Atopian posted:You have an OLD GUY, an INTERN, and HR, and your meeting room can only hold one of them at a time. Holy poo poo I wish this could be a thread title lmao
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Jan 20, 2024 08:39
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priznat posted:Holy poo poo I wish this could be a thread title lmao Corporate Megathread: If you leave HR alone with OLD GUY he will CONFESS MORE CRIMES.
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Jan 20, 2024 09:38
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CancerCakes posted:Corporate Megathread: If you leave HR alone with OLD GUY he will CONFESS MORE CRIMES.
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Jan 20, 2024 10:46
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Corporate Megathread: You are in the conference room. A hollow voice says "plugh."
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