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Had to share a portion of this email that just came to a developer group that I'm a part of. The broad topic, that of directors' attitudes toward subordinates, has been a daily piss-off for me for a while now, so the following put my back up perhaps a little more than it otherwise would have.quote:I have an open Statement of Work for two front-end resources for a major project. Resources need experience with SDLC or similar methodology, knowledge of JQuery, and JavaScript techniques including closures and self-executing anonymous functions. Experience with internationalized applications or content management systems is a plus, as is experience with Velocity templates and/or JSP syntax. Resources. They can't stop using that word! I don't know if it's just me, but that word seems pretty dehumanizing in this context. I had to restrain myself from replying with something sarcastic or with just links to programming books at Amazon. Yeah, I know, a lot of executive types don't really see their employees as individual human beings with wills and thoughts and lives of their own, but this email was sent directly to potential candidates. From the president of the company. I can't help but translate this to: "Attention proles: come work on my code assembly-line and be judged on the number of widgets (lines of code) you output." Did this person even think for an instant about the wording they chose and the message it sends? These people don't have to loving dote on us and treat us all like super awesome special snowflakes the likes of which they never hoped to meet. Just, try to at least pretend that we're individual people. Make a loving effort. Gah! - That said, this IS a job posting. While I'm not interested, I'd be happy to forward the details on to anybody interested (I don't have PMs though). It's not directly stated, but from context I'm guessing it's a Portland, OR area job. Also appears to be a very short contract (until end of December). 
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Oct 15, 2013 04:31
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Rhymenoserous posted:My pet peeve of the week is my manager using ASAP for every single thing she wants me to do. Look if everything needs to be done ASAP then nothing does. You're looking at it all wrong. If your manager is telling you to do everything as soon as possible, that means they trust you enough to manage your own priorities and schedule. It's a show of respect! 
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Oct 15, 2013 21:52
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Filthy Lucre posted:My network engineer only learned how to design TDM and refuses to learn IP or Ethernet. I have to double check every circuit he designs because he doesn't understand the concept of trunk ports or what spanning tree does. When you say "your" network engineer... does that mean you can fire his uncooperative rear end? Because if so, all you have to say is, "Learn IP and Ethernet within <timespan> or you're fired."
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Oct 23, 2013 03:00
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eithedog posted:Thing pissing me off today - the existence of any other forms of communication. Why the gently caress do you use Skype, email if you don't even check the responses. This is not about the communication medium. This is about you being GIVEN A DIRECT ORDER and being expected to FOLLOW ORDERS, MAGGOT. Your boss doesn't work with you to accomplish a task for the betterment of the business, he tells you what to do and you loving do it; realities of the situation are irrelevant. It always blows my mind that this is how some people think.
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Oct 23, 2013 12:25
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Hi eithedog, can you do xxxx for me?
Sure, just send over the file.
(comes to my desk) Why the gently caress haven't you done this?
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luminalflux posted:Pissing me off: conference for devs kicking off at 8:15 Hmm, clearly a conference staffed by people who have never been developers in their lives. Which means it's probably all cargo cultists and people who read an article about <thing> one time.
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Oct 24, 2013 09:34
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Khisanth Magus posted:Things pissing me off...my manager thinking of scheduling mandatory meetings for both days this weekend despite about 75% of the team literally having no work to do this week because all of our poo poo is already fixed and no more bugs are being found in it, and repeated offers to help others have been ignored. Because I love having to wake up early on a weekend to call in to a meeting where I will say nothing because I have nothing to say. I always seem to have plans involving me being out of town and unreachable when mandatory unpaid meetings on off time are scheduled.
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Oct 24, 2013 23:47
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nitrogen posted:Nothing kills that warm feeling for your employer like being asked to work over a weekend so that a client can get an environment that it absolutely must have on Tuesday... Is your manager (not your PM) reasonable, someone you can talk to about problems? Ask him to schedule a short 1 on 1 with you and tell him how you feel wronged by the situation. They basically just used you like a tissue and then told you that your sacrifice not only will result in no thanks, but they also have no respect for you by not delivering the product by the supposed hard deadline. Ask him what he thinks that does to your motivation? I know what it does to mine: kills it. Be a team player and get kicked in the nuts for it, I don't want to be a team player anymore. Ask him what he thinks he can do to restore the trust that has been broken here. You don't have to be aggressive or threatening about this, just, make it clear that this has severely damaged your relationship. Also, as an employee working for a company, I don't give a flying poo poo gently caress who pays when and how much. My employer asked me to go above and beyond, and I did, with the understanding that they would reciprocate. My time is gone. Now it's time to pony up, or watch my output drop to barely minimal levels. This is not something I do consciously; my motivation simply dies if I know my work and time is neither appreciated nor respected. Che Delilas fucked around with this message at 09:23 on Oct 26, 2013 |
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Oct 26, 2013 09:20
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DGK2000 posted:If people ask me to fix poo poo when I'm on lunch, I tell them I'm on lunch. If they press it, I tell them to get hosed because I'm on a federally mandated lunch. Lunch is a "safe place" for me. I don't bring up anything work related unless I'm in the dead middle of a discussion with someone, and even then it's rare to continue once food starts getting shoved into appropriate holes. Hell, the mental down time is often vital to get my subconscious to chew on a problem that I haven't been able to solve with my conscious mind. And if someone does, I react pretty much the same way you do, as politely as possible. CF, I hope you throw this incident back in your supervisor's face when he comes to reprimand you about customer complaints about you. I'm not polite when someone vomits their flagrant hypocrisy all over me. Che Delilas fucked around with this message at 12:31 on Nov 2, 2013 |
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Nov 2, 2013 12:28
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D34THROW posted:Regardless, you gotta love the way he handled it by making it as painful as possible for the higher-ups that were squeezing him. "Go fetch my mail, random plebian I encountered in the hallway." poo poo rolls downhill. The higher ups were not inconvenienced.
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Nov 3, 2013 00:36
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Walter_Sobchak posted:Story time. Alternatively, not story time ever.
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Nov 4, 2013 12:50
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Daylen Drazzi posted:I'm not totally ignoring the problem, but I'm definitely taking note of things in case this crap goes on . I'm all for overlooking minor annoyances in the interest of team harmony, but maybe I'm being a bit too naive about the situation. By "take note" I assume you mean you're actually documenting incidents with dates and times. Have you addressed this with the TL directly? Tell him you take exception to phrases like "figure out your head from your rear end" (did he really say that?)? I mean, sometimes these people don't realize they're being abrasive and unprofessional, and that you don't respond well to that style of "leadership." When you haven't done anything wrong, it's inappropriate to treat you as if you had.
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Nov 5, 2013 03:39
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T-Shaped posted:"I just have to fit it in with my other duties". quote:..I'm chewed out for being "brusk" with other employees and told I should be nicer. I reiterate. No, thanks.
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Nov 6, 2013 00:06
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Maniaman posted:I despise web developers that don't know the difference between POST and GET and when you should use each. A page that someone may want to link someone else to? Lets use POST for the query instead of GET! Surely nobody will want to copy the url to a friend to pull up this posting! It's funny to me that you picked the annoying example, rather than the reverse situation that can allow a malicious user to destroy or poison your data.
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Nov 7, 2013 03:37
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:"hey uhh dilbert, I dug myself into a hole. Can you get me out of my hole and then help me complete $task$, oh and the deadline is in 4 hours..." Nope! 
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Nov 7, 2013 06:35
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Misogynist posted:It's cool, we'll be just as incompetent in something new that we don't understand once we get up there in years. This is not bad in and of itself. But see, here's the difference. If I have a job where someone pays me money, and this job involves using some kind of tool, I will learn how to use that tool. Because that's my job. Staff whose job it is to notify the whole company about policy changes and events and mandatory meetings should know how to send an email without causing the exchange server to catch fire, is all I'm saying.
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Nov 8, 2013 05:17
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Volmarias posted:God help us all No, your auto repair analogy is fine. Notice that in pretty much all of those examples, people are actually listing symptoms of actual problems they are having. "Bad smell, car wants to die at stop lights," "dark, burned out headlights," "engine fell out." These are specifics that can be homed in on by experts and tested. None of them are simply "it's broken." Keep using those car analogies, they're by far the best tool I've found to explain to laypeople why they should or should not do a computer thing, or why something is happening. Now the causes of these problems are silly as hell. But at least they're describing the drat problems.
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Nov 9, 2013 07:13
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Misogynist posted:Now ask the same person to describe their problems to a mechanic who continually interrupts them to give them a condescending frown, and tell them how their explanations aren't good enough and demonstrate a really serious misunderstanding of how cars work. Do this over and over and over, every week, for years. Then, see if you get the same quantity of words coming out. Misogynist posted:I don't mean to imply that most people in the industry are unprofessional to the point of reprimand. I would argue that the scenario you described is way past the point of reprimand in a well-managed IT department. It would go something like, "Hey Che, we've had complaints about you from every person you've serviced a ticket on for the last 2 weeks, that you're being condescending and unapproachable, and instead of determining and solving their problems, you're telling them how stupid they are when it comes to computers. Let's talk about basic manners and politeness." And no, I don't give users a free pass just because their computer-savvy teenage neighbor may have talked down to them and now they have PTSD. When you say "it's broken" and the tech responds with "what is not happening that should be, and are there any error messages that pop up?" and the user says "JUST FIX IT!" that is not the technician being difficult. That is the user being lazy.
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Nov 9, 2013 20:22
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Khisanth Magus posted:I'm one of the developers who know how computers work, have built more computers than I can count, and could probably manage to land at least an entry level DBA job, and I still called tech support one time for something not being plugged in. Oh child, you haven't Become. You have merely taken the first step. Spun the first thread of your chrysalis. Soon more threads will follow, as you hinted at: Lying about following troubleshooting steps. Describing your problems in vague terms like "internet is down!" Refusing to describe your problems at all. Demanding tech support Just Fix It! CCing management when complaining about a problem to 1st tier support. Dropping your devices into the sink and demanding an upgrade to the latest version to replace them. At the end, you will emerge from your metamorphosis, a beautiful, ignorant office worker. Watcher of CNN or Fox News, credulous of politicians and radio personalities. Doing the task to which you are assigned, and no more. But you will be happy, child. You will be happy.
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Nov 11, 2013 19:52
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Bhodi posted:Furthermore, without a foundation operating systems, I was unable to explain the intricacies of common system functions, much like I'm not qualified to evaluate database architecture decisions. I wish more of us ("us" being I.S. professionals of all specializations) would get over ourselves and realize that the other specializations all bring unique and valuable knowledge and skills to the table. I'm a developer. I'm not better than the network admins, I'm not better than the DBAs. I just know different poo poo. I couldn't set up or manage a network of any size worthy of the name, virtual or otherwise, and while I'm sure I'll pick up a few things as I get on in years, I'm going to want to continue to trust the network people to do network and the database people to do database. jim truds posted:I work in the pettiest environment. This is the same environment everyone else works in when everyone isn't personally invested in whatever the company is doing (e.g. anything that isn't a startup). It is an environment full of failures and broken dreams, where the only measure of self-worth some of them ever get is getting one up on someone else. They have no power in their own lives. So they must try and take it from yours in any way they can. This was my last boss, which is its own special level of hell compared to just another employee who doesn't have any direct authority over you.
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Nov 23, 2013 07:16
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Ghost Cow Goes Boo posted:My manager hired a guy to a senior developer position without consulting the lead or anyone else in the team, and skipped giving him our standard written test because he was "so good he would have been insulted". Flash forward two weeks and SURPRISE! Guy doesn't know poo poo. Now I'm spending half my days explaining C#/PHP 101 to a guy who's supposed to have 6 years experience and has been hired as at least my equal. Our probationary contracts mean we can ditch him whenever we want, but that won't happen because it would show my manager up for the idiot he is. Somebody knows somebody.
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Nov 23, 2013 14:58
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Humphreys posted:And dodging the "Seeing as your performance is terrible, we are going to fire you and you don't get any benefits" So wait, you get a severance package for quitting, but not if they find a reason to fire you after you've put in your official and documented notice of resignation? None of this makes any sense to me. Where do you live? It's like the opposite of that here. If you quit, you get jack poo poo, but if they fire you during your notice period you have a case for applying for unemployment benefits at least.
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Nov 25, 2013 08:16
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Lord Dudeguy posted:It's a US thing. In the perfect world, the concept is that if you give two weeks notice (varies on HR policy), and they can find no terminable fault during that time, you get to cash out your Vacation/PTO in the final check. That way, you don't just slack off/float for the next 2 weeks and actually help the company during the transition time. Ah, I didn't think about cashing out vacation. I'm actually in the U.S., but my last job's policy was that you have to have at least 80 hours left after the cash out. So I basically just burned up all my vacation before I left.
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Nov 25, 2013 22:02
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Caged posted:What the gently caress is it with contractors and just chopping through anything that looks a bit in their way. On what planet is it acceptable to cut through stuff without asking whoever's booked you to do a job? On the planet where it's cheaper by far to just repair the damage they cause than it is to fight them in court. Either you sue them for damages, or you refuse to pay them for their work, at which point they sue YOU (or put a lien on your building, I'm not sure how this works with commercial property). Either way you're going to get lawyers involved, and after about 5 minutes of that you've already lost more money than you'll ever hope to recover. Accountability, reputation, ethics, integrity, none of this matters in the world of American business. The only thing that matters, the ONLY thing, is the number on the quarterly earnings report. Because of this, nobody is willing to go after lazy shithead contractors who just sawzall through anything in their way, so they have no reason to not be lazy shitheads. 
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Nov 26, 2013 01:15
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eithedog posted:I think I'm starting to develop "have issues how you do stuff" syndrome. If this is your only example, you don't have a syndrome. You have knowledge of the only appropriate way to format sub-categories.
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Nov 27, 2013 18:49
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Simpleboo posted:God I know how this feels. While our company isn't expanding faster than the IT budget I have a bunch of old desktops that are organ donors for systems that need parts. When you harvest one of them, do you call it "sending it to The Island"? Why not?
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Nov 30, 2013 02:34
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Daylen Drazzi posted:FTFY I blame this on modern stockholders(or brokers). If you are a far-sighted CEO and/or Board, and you invest in a long-term project that is going to put your company in the red (or even not as far into the black) for even a single quarter, you're likely to be ousted because your share price is dropping. Stockholders don't care about a company, they care about the numbers, and when something threatens their precious numbers in the short term, they're likely to abandon ship. I'm not usually one to defend managers, but in this case the problem is intrinsic to the system within which managers have to work. gently caress corporations, basically. That's the reason I'm actually excited that Dell went private. They've been on a steady decline in quality of product and support for the last decade, and I'm interested to see if they can turn it around now that they answer to buisness people instead of clueless investors.
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Nov 30, 2013 18:59
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Misogynist posted:The investors aren't clueless, they know exactly what they're doing. Yeah, I worded that poorly. I meant clueless in terms of knowing how a company's short-term loss will result in a long term gain because they don't know enough of the plan and/or the industry and what the implications of a decision might be. But the rest of your post underscores my point. It's the stockholders that aren't interested in the long term, thus the businesses must have the same mindset or lose investors. That's why I blame the stockholders. This is a generalization of course.
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Nov 30, 2013 23:58
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SEKCobra posted:A lot of courses and stuff are part of this job and I need those to stay in my position. Also its not like everyones against me, just that my boss doesnt want to deal with problems and is really short sighted, as well as some of his pals that now work under him being really horrible people. There is no reason not to look for something else right this second. None. Certifications are not an absolute requirement every IT job, if that's what you're talking about, and staying in a job that is obviously this stressful is not worth whatever education you may get out of it. If you signed something agreeing to pay back the cost of the courses if you leave early, that was a mistake, but you're going to just incur more debt the more classes you take. But this means is that you have an additional item to discuss during salary negotiations with your new company: you need some kind of signing bonus that will allow you to cover the money you're responsible for when you leave your current company. It might be harder to come to an agreement, but it's no reason not to look. Even if a job hunt doesn't go anywhere, the fact that you're doing something, anything, to change your situation for the better will help your mood, which is sounding pretty depressed right now. If the courses are "part of the job," as in you're required to take them to have the job, then they don't have a legal leg to stand on according to the FLSA.
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Dec 5, 2013 22:03
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guppy posted:Just a note, if I remember right he's said before that he's in... Korea, I think? Somewhere FLSA doesn't apply, anyway. Ah, did not know this. Good luck then!
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Dec 6, 2013 03:25
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Sirotan posted:So I just had my annual review (only 6 months late!) and was told how wonderful I am with the exception that I need to work on "polishing" my interactions with upper management. Apparently some VP complained that I wasn't kissing rear end enough?? That's how I read it anyway... Re-posting part of the last interaction I had with my old boss about similar themes:  (knowing that I've been very unhappy there for months) You're doing great work and if you leave we're going to lose at least 6 months on this project; what can we do to keep you here? I told you what you can do to keep me here months ago; give me a decent raise and some flexibility. You don't deserve any of that because you're doing the bare minimum.So yeah. Talk is cheap.
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Dec 10, 2013 22:03
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Simpleboo posted:At that point shouldn't you just walk away? If they really do want you on that project they will have to fold and offer you the money and flexibility you want. He didn't really think it would have put them 6 months behind (even though that's true if they wanted to do everything with the project that they originally said they did). Telling me that was just another manipulation tactic. And you're right, the right response was to leave, which I did not long after. They pushed my development duties onto my colleague (the DBA) and as of yet no disaster has struck.
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Dec 11, 2013 01:31
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GoatShaver posted:...got pulled aside and told I was doing a terrible job while boss was gone (multiweek vacation) and basically asked "what do you do here?" Luckily I had a lot of people come out of the woodwork and pump my tires which calmed people down. That's when I have the almost irresistible urge to say something like, "Tell you what, I'll stop doing what I do here and we'll see how long it takes for things to fall apart," even though I know that I'm not really that invaluable. It's a pretty big drat coincidence how everything starts taking longer to do and at worse quality though, once some manager says something like that to me. quote:Can't help but feel like its about that time, though. My department consists of two people, we have something going on tonight at our stadium, and i'm the only guy here, which I don't mind necessarily, but give me a loving day off. Time to start calling in "sick." Those rapid-onset, rapid-recovery 24-hour colds sure are a bitch this time of year, eh?
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Dec 19, 2013 04:48
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CitizenKain posted:So work is trying to encourage people to jump on the BYOD plan for cell phones, with them paying a portion of the bill. I've been avoiding doing this since I like having a divide between work and home, but since they've started this push, they've stopped upgrading company phones. I've got an ancient BB Curve 8830 that seems to be on its last legs, but they don't want to replace it. Which seems kinda silly that I'm expected to have a tool for work, but they don't want to pay for it. Anyone else going through something like this? Gee boss, it sure is going to be tough for me to do my job if the company isn't going to provide the tools I need to do it.
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Dec 23, 2013 06:50
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MrMoo posted:having to list lifetime lines-of-code per language written. I feel like this isn't getting enough attention and derision. This is what we call a deal-breaker.
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Jan 5, 2014 09:44
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Volmarias posted:It is definitely a silly thing, but I'm curious how seriously they take it, and whether it's there to weed out "Expert" Java devs who have written upwards of 1000 lines. Pretty much my only response to that question is going to be some variant on "are you serious?" so I guess I would find out pretty quick. I mean, in the purely hypothetical world where I bothered to apply at all to a company that asked that question.
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Jan 5, 2014 20:38
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rolleyes posted:"I already donate privately to the charities which mean something to me." This is exactly what I do, every step, though I haven't dealt with too many pushy ones. Usually a polite refusal is enough for most people. I had an internship once where everyone in IT had to wear dress pants/button-down and tie, minimum. We had to do this because executives actually had to walk by the whole IT department to get to their offices, and they were all older and had more traditional sensibilities, which translates to "you're naked if you aren't wearing a tie." It was 100% internal IT, too, we never even came within line of sight of customers, so this was solely for the benefit of the old dinosaurs. When I was there, they instituted a casual Friday. This involved dress pants and shoes, but you could wear a polo shirt! Your options for the polo shirt were: 1) A polo shirt with the company logo on it which you could purchase from the company for $20, and 2) There is no 2. If you didn't want to shell out, full business dress for you. Assholes.
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Jan 8, 2014 21:19
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cyberia posted:*snip* At my last job, the psychopath director decided that the whole department needed to have a "team-building dinner" with all the usual bullshit that you've heard about like team-building "games" and circle jerking about all the stuff the department got done that year or whatever. Essentially it was just another way that he could get an erection by being a puppetmaster and talking about all the great stuff HE did and how awesome everything was now that HE was in charge. I'm not opposed to team-building exercises on principle, they can be a way to get people to loosen up and giggle and connect a little, which is important. Oh, it's mandatory. Well now that I'm being forced into it when I do have all this real work to get done, I'm a little miffed, but whatever. Oh, it starts at 4:30PM and goes until 7, and my work day normally ends between 5 and 5:30 so I'm no longer being paid for this waste of time? gently caress. YOU. I called in sick.
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Jan 9, 2014 09:05
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Caged posted:Cheaper than paying out for injury claims Right but the shocking part is that it was someone from HR that figured this out.
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Jan 13, 2014 17:26
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Varkk posted:A lot of the hate for Java early on was because of the need for the runtime. A smart arse 1st year comp sci major would make a hello world app in java and run a memory profiler on it and see the JRE using about 40mb of the 256mb RAM in their awesome P2 gamebox. Compared to their optimised hello world written in C Java was a huge memory hog and is bloated etc. This reputation stuck with Java for a long time and people still complain about Java using up their precious RAM. Ah, for the days when resource scarcity was the biggest problem with java.
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Jan 16, 2014 23:33
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dogstile posted:What bothers me about Java isn't Java, its the devs. My company supports a program that needs a certain version of Java to run. They're bringing out a newer version that won't run on the old version and the old version isn't going to be updated. That's going to be fun to support when clients end up getting both. Like it or not, developers are going to use inadvisable methods to get the job done in whatever language they are using. Lum I think said this before: there is something in Java itself that allows bad devs to gently caress things up in ways that .Net does not allow. Bad developers are everywhere, and even good developers are going to find strange and stupid ways to do things if the platform lets them. .Net seems more bulletproof in this regard. Full disclosure: I am a .Net developer. Also, to be completely fair, I have run into one instance of a .Net application that would throw a framework not found error if you did a fresh install of .Net 4.5 Framework without installing 4.0 first. So big minus points for Microsoft there, especially since 4.5 completely replaces 4.0. At least it says it does, but it obviously leaves out some kind of registry entry that 4.0 creates, or something.
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Jan 17, 2014 12:48
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