AgentDenton
@AgentDenton
Have seen / inherited plenty of WTF code in my career, and will keep trying to sort that out :-D
Best posts made by AgentDenton
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
@hungrier Saw this in my country (South Africa).
It's even funnier when you realize just how unfortunate the CUM name is. It's an acronym for the Afrikaans name "Christelike Uitgewers Maatskappy" (Christian Publisher Company). As in the religion. Bibles and all sorts of related books
How they haven't changed their name in the last 20-odd years is beyond me
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RE: What the forward?
More companies are ditching anxiety-inducing corporate lingo for what they see as gentler terms.
Brilliant. Swap one anxiety-inducing term for another anxiety inducing term in future. Pat yourself on the back, we solved the workplace
I'm sure that in a few years "feedforward" will be replaced by another inane term because "feedforward" would be the bad word.
It really irks me when people think this is the solution instead of actually treating the underlying problem (but that would take much more work than changing the subject line in an email / meeting request). If your manager doesn't have the people skills to not be the source of anxiety (or worse, if they thrive on that sort of thing) then no amount of changing the terms would fix that...
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
@Benjamin-Hall I recently had a client who would cut me off mid-sentence and carry on with incorrect inferences and starts talking about how incorrect my logic / approach is. Then she would ask a number of questions, and for each of those this whole process is repeated.
Ironically, if she would just let me finish my statements, then it would make her understand the big picture, and also cater for the next 5 questions she would've had
Among other things, this client of mine really tested my soft skills, since I eventually got through to her and made her listen to the whole statement. She still does that to one of my colleagues, though
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RE: What users say versus what they mean
"Windows / $application suddenly stopped working" => "I changed something but conveniently forgot what, and now I need you to hunt down what I did"
Bonus points if you point the change out to them and they remember it like "Oh yes, of course, I did that."
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RE: Outlook being Outlook
Don't you just love it when an application has a dark mode, yet forgets about it when they have to display an error?
Fortunately you can select and copy the text, but that's beside the point
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RE: The nerdy jokes thread (bonus original title mode!)
Seven has the word "even" in it, which is odd...
Latest posts made by AgentDenton
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RE: Outlook being Outlook
Don't you just love it when an application has a dark mode, yet forgets about it when they have to display an error?
Fortunately you can select and copy the text, but that's beside the point
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RE: What the forward?
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in What the forward?:
@AgentDenton said in What the forward?:
@jinpa said in What the forward?:
I place more importance on the boss's character/honesty/integrity than on their people skills/personality.
In my opinion positive character / honesty / integrity goes hand-in-hand with better people skills / personality. Exceptions apply, sure, but my point being these aren't mutually exclusive.
: HEY! Quit being an asshole and do your fucking job!
Assuming that the engineer that is talking to is actually doing his job poorly, is demonstrating honesty and integrity.
In most workplaces, though, that's bad people skills.
Sure, that's an extreme example and in almost all cases, there's a more euphemism-y way to phrase that criticism that would be better.
This is in the realm of Dr House where being right is the justification for being rude. However I do agree that it is extreme and most would even think twice before they do it that way (even if it is what they want to do).
But there are a group of very fragile people in the workplace who can't take criticism at all unless it's couched in very, very heavy euphemisms. (This isn't a generational thing. I'm having a problem with the guy I share an office with. He's like this, and he's my father's age.)
Yeah, I have seen this from all of the generations I've worked with. The older generations probably have some sort of trauma response from previous experiences where it went bad (often for no good reason). That's the kind of stuff that sticks with you for years and years. The younger ones can probably be explained by the uncertainty of inexperience (it's the first time this has happened).
It sucks, but ultimately HR has to threaten people's jobs sometimes if they're fucking up. If they've got to call it "feed forward" to get the point across - I mean it sounds dopey to me, but I'm not the one getting called to HR for being a fuckup.
Yeah, when HR gets involved like that it has reached the extreme point which is not pleasant for anyone involved. And some people do need the wake-up call that this is. Generally in the places I've worked at this is called "Performance Management" and it is as serious as it sounds. "Feedback" would already be the euphemistic term to me, but it might belie the severity of the situation.
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RE: What the forward?
@jinpa said in What the forward?:
@AgentDenton said in What the forward?:
In my opinion positive character / honesty / integrity goes hand-in-hand with better people skills / personality.
I could not disagree more. Character and personality are orthogonal. There are pleasant people with low character and unpleasant people with good character.
Fair enough. This has not been my experience, but that is the beauty of discourse like this where I can learn things from multiple points of view
I do imagine that the "unpleasant people with good character" is only temporary. One or the other runs out soon. To me it takes a lot of effort to be unpleasant (and I would not even consider my character "good", more like neutral), so it's hard for me to fathom how one can sustain this. Not to mention, this might even just be situational (they are like this with colleagues but outside of the workplace they are totally different).
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RE: What the forward?
@Benjamin-Hall Every so often I am reminded that I live in naive-ville, and I forget about the fact that people aren't always neutral / good. Sometimes there are bad actors
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RE: What the forward?
@jinpa said in What the forward?:
I place more importance on the boss's character/honesty/integrity than on their people skills/personality.
In my opinion positive character / honesty / integrity goes hand-in-hand with better people skills / personality. Exceptions apply, sure, but my point being these aren't mutually exclusive
I do agree that it is a fundamental problem. A friend of mine pointed out to me that many people promoted into management don't get the necessary soft skills training, and it really did make it make sense to me why the fundamental problem exists...
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RE: What the forward?
More companies are ditching anxiety-inducing corporate lingo for what they see as gentler terms.
Brilliant. Swap one anxiety-inducing term for another anxiety inducing term in future. Pat yourself on the back, we solved the workplace
I'm sure that in a few years "feedforward" will be replaced by another inane term because "feedforward" would be the bad word.
It really irks me when people think this is the solution instead of actually treating the underlying problem (but that would take much more work than changing the subject line in an email / meeting request). If your manager doesn't have the people skills to not be the source of anxiety (or worse, if they thrive on that sort of thing) then no amount of changing the terms would fix that...
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
@topspin said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
if (foo == true)
In my very early days of coding I used to be that guy. Then, one day one of the seniors in the team simply explained that at runtime I'm basically asking
if (true == true) or if (false == true)
and it just clicked. I have not written it like that ever since (now nearly 15 years later)...
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RE: Care to explain your avatar?
Mine is from the 2000 video game Deus Ex, a character named Daedalus. In the era when AI was still just science fiction, this was one of my favorites. The face, the voice, the way it was introduced to you in-game, somehow it just stuck with me all these years
And now I have to install it again