1. Home
  2. Categories
  3. Side Bar WTF
  4. Neverending Management WTFery

Neverending Management WTFery

  • morbiuswilters

    @bstorer said:

    @campkev said:

     So, to sum up . . . yeah, sucks to be you guys.
    Fellow moderators: I say we ban campkev.  Clearly he does not belong here, and also I hate him.  All in favor?

    TDWTF needs voices of all kinds.  Sure, campkev might be an asshole, but his message resonates with me.  It gives me a vague, queasy kind of hope for an ill-defined, seemingly-implausible tomorrow; much like the motivational Barack Obama Quote-of-the-Day calendar my company gave me as a Christmas present.

     

    I am sure there are many in our midst who wish to permanently silence my voice.  Can you imagine what TDWTF would be like without me?  Entire threads without a single dick reference; dhromed still in the closet, successfully pretending to be a straight man; Americans and Europeans getting along in peace and harmony; mass hysteria, I tell you!

    0
  • B

    @morbiuswilters said:

    TDWTF needs voices of all kinds.
    Careful with that territory you're treading into: you're getting damn close to suggesting TDWTF needs a water-stealing redneck from Connecticut.

    @morbiuswilters said:

    Sure, campkev might be an asshole, but his message resonates with me.  It gives me a vague, queasy kind of hope for an ill-defined, seemingly-implausible tomorrow; much like the motivational Barack Obama Quote-of-the-Day calendar my company gave me as a Christmas present.
    So then we should hound campkev with demands to see his birth certificate?
    @morbiuswilters said:

     

    I am sure there are many in our midst who wish to permanently silence my voice.  Can you imagine what TDWTF would be like without me?  Entire threads without a single dick reference; dhromed still in the closet, successfully pretending to be a straight man; Americans and Europeans getting along in peace and harmony; mass hysteria, I tell you!

    Yeah, but you haven't crossed the unspeakable line: having a good job.  Because we know that you too must face the weekly employee beatings, and your boss occasionally proposes switching the codebase to Java, we are willing to put up with your faults, such as your lack of humor and infrequent posting.
    0
  • T

    @Smitty said:

    we rotate on-call responsibilities so each dev has it for a week at a time.  With as many people as we have, each dev is on call about four weeks out of a year.

    When you have that many people in the on-call rotation, it makes a mockery of on-call.

    I'm part of a four person on-call rotation.  Whenever we release a new app, we train everyone in the rotation on how to support it.  As there are four people developing new apps, and three of them are in the rotation, that training is not onerous.  As a general rule, the on-call person is thus able to support just about anything that breaks, and that happens fairly rarely.  For example, over my last three on-call weeks, I was only paged for three outages (and two were process outages, one was a server outage, none were service outages - so the helpdesk wasn't involved.)

    Our sister org has a 13 person on-call rotation, and over 20 people who at least sometimes work on installing and deploying a new app.  They don't train anyone on the new apps - they had tried for a while, but it resulted in people being in training about a third of the time.  When stuff breaks, the on-call person simply calls the primary maintainer of the app.  As a result, the primary maintainer of each app is effectively on call, all year round.  The only advantage their on-call rotation has is that the helpdesk only has 13 of the 20 people's home phone numbers.  However, the helpdesk gets to look up those numbers more frequently per on-call individual for this other org, because their stuff breaks all the time.  I can't remember hearing of anyone in their group having a quiet on-call week in the past two years.

    Interestingly enough, due to the fact that we've been focusing on having stable applications for over a decade, and keeping our support profiles similar, our group of 4 now maintains more apps than the 20 person org, as they spend most of their time on support, while we (still) spend nearly half of our time1 on development.  (Of course, thanks to meetings, documentation, training, and such, only a slim majority of our time is spent on either support or development.)

    1At my first job, I was a "programmer", and thus I got to spend about 10% of my time programming.  Most of my time was spent in meetings, training, more meetings, team building exercises, meetings, and, well, still more meetings.  Since then, I've generally been a sysadmin.  As a sysadmin, I frequently have around 60% of my time available for support and development.

    0
  • dhromed

    @morbiuswilters said:

    * And dhromed, whom I love.  He is a God amongst men and a man amongst Europussies.
     

    Aye, I am surrounded by idiots.

     

    PS

    ur a fag

    0
  • dhromed

    @campkev said:

    Let me tell you about where I work. [story]
     

    Dayum. You should quit.

    0
  • dhromed

    @bstorer said:

    What about ammoQ, whose firey essence often looms high in the night skies of Europe, blazing a trail to wisdom for the filthy vagabonds that inhabit those lands
     

    At night, he becomes.... auroraQ borealis!
    O brightest purveyor of insight and justice!

    0
  • dhromed

    @tgape said:

    [big story]
     

    cliffnotes:

     Write better software, you git.

     

    Am I correct?


    0
  • H

    @bstorer said:

    A stupid manager ... a smart manager ... but a wise manager
     

     

    What about the manager who does not even know enough to ask a question?

    0
  • b_redeker1

    @hymie said:

    @bstorer said:

    A stupid manager ... a smart manager ... but a wise manager
     

     

    What about the manager who does not even know enough to ask a question?

     

    Wait, wait, I know this one! That's the guy who shouts a lot, right?

    0
  • Steeldragon

    @Smitty said:

    @blakeyrat said:

     Earthquake-prone, floating bridges... lemme guess, Mercer Island?

    Considering that wind storm knocked out power to Mercer Island for, what, 3 solid weeks... not as much a WTF as you think. Apparently all the infrastructure there (including the power grid) was hacked together our of spare parts and hope.

     Yep, Mercer Island.  As I previously mentioned, our VPN servers are in a closet here in the office, while everything else is in the LA datacenter.  So if the island's power grid goes down, so does our VPN connection.  In short, their DR plan is fully craptastic.  It's just a flimsy excuse to saddle us with $800 laptops.

    On a related note, in addition to crappy hardware, we recently learned that upper management has decreed that developers are to be saddled with the standard image used by all other computers in the company (for security purposes).  The standard image boasts several great features, such as forbidding access to the C:\ root on your own machine.  The Internet Explorer options menu is rendered inaccessible with Javascript disabled, so testing changes to our website should prove exciting.  The desktop is fixed with the spiffy green hill image that you get on a fresh XP install, and the screensaver is an animated company logo.  It has a neat little internally-developed client for receiving various patches, which is always running and can't be killed via task manager.  Corporate loves to push out patches during the day and the client forces a reboot as soon as the patch is installed.  No 'remind me later' option for us.

    Our first-level managers are pushing back against the decision, but since they're just glorified drones I doubt their resistance will be effective.

     

    ouch. really sucks to be you.

    0
  • S

    @morbiuswilters said:

    So most of us ended up with rebranded Osbornes and shit like that.
     

     

    Ohhhhh we used to DREAM of using rebranded Osbornes. We use to have to go to work at 10:00 at night, half an hour before we went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day in our half-cubes, and pay the owner of the company for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.

     

    But if you try to tell the young developers of today that, they won't believe you.

    0
  • S

    I love my work laptop and I wouldn't want to go back to the shackles of a desktop even at gun point.
    With a laptop you can work at home or on the road, take it to meetings for when you might need to look up stuff, givea presentation, etc.. 

    Really, not taking your laptop with you is like those weird people who never take their mobile phone with them and the cost of laptop vs. desktop is peanuts in comparison to the salary costs, dishing out the dough for a good machine will simply repay itself within the year when your costly developer isn't waiting around for his laptop to finish some job which a better laptop would have done much faster. 

    Perhaps you are all just old beared folk who also still have a landline.

    0
  • B

    @SQLDave said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    So most of us ended up with rebranded Osbornes and shit like that.
     

     

    Ohhhhh we used to DREAM of using rebranded Osbornes. We use to have to go to work at 10:00 at night, half an hour before we went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day in our half-cubes, and pay the owner of the company for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.

     

    But if you try to tell the young developers of today that, they won't believe you.

    Ah, memories... nowadays they've got phones that will kill you and dance around your grave, and every home has at least one computer capable of eating your lump of poison for you.  Kids these days don't know how easy they've got it.
    0
  • Mole

     We have desktops and pool laptops. If you want to work from home, on the road, in meetings, etc, then you use a pool laptop and remote desktop. 

    0
  • b_redeker1

     @Mole said:

     We have desktops and pool laptops. If you want to work from home, on the road, in meetings, etc, then you use a pool laptop and remote desktop. 

     

    Or in the pool?

    0
  • C

    @campkev said:

    Typo fix --Ling

     

    Just out of curiosity, what did you fix?

    0
  • V

     This is very similar to where I work. Ever since the swine flu scare, the higher ups have focused on business continuity plans. We aren't forced to take our laptops home, but they often give us polls asking if we are capable of connecting through a VPN (same poll that the other depts gets).

     

    And as for IT getting less, they also have given every user in the company dual monitors, except for the developers. We (and the user base) are also running on windows vista, yet somehow the admins are running windows 7. Oh and another thing about the dual monitors (I work in insurance too), is that some of the users have rotated their new monitor by 90 degress... what is the point of that?

    0
  • dhromed

    @Vechni said:

    is that some of the users have rotated their new monitor by 90 degress... what is the point of that?
     

    O ye of narrow vision!

    I have rotated my 4:3 monitor 90°. It is awesome and I would never go back.

    I can see more of any vertically oriented information. That includes everything from code to documents ( = websites) to any sort of tree or list view in any application.

    You should not, however, try to rotate with anything less than 1200 pixels on the shortest side, because then other stuff like panels and palettes will become unacceptably cramped. If, however, all you do is manage documents and look at pornsites, a portrait orientation and slightly less than 1200 pixels wide is very workable and may prove superior. YMMV.

    I had to turn it back onece, to test something. It was like, how the fuck did I ever work with this letterbox?

     

    0
  • W

    @dhromed said:

    I have rotated my 4:3 monitor 90°. It is awesome and I would never go back.
    I tried that once, but I have yet to meet an LCD monitor that doesn't look wrong when viewed at any orientation other than head on. The colours at the top and bottom of the screen get messed up, the contrast is all weird. Maybe it's not a problem for really high-quality LCD monitors but the stuff we have at work just doesn't cut it.

    0
  • dhromed

    @Welbog said:

    The colours at the top and bottom of the screen get messed up, the contrast is all weird. Maybe it's not a problem for really high-quality LCD monitors but the stuff we have at work just doesn't cut it.
     

    Yeah, TN-panels are right out.

    Mine is a $500* dollar S-IPS. It has no colour-oddness whatsoever.

    I will probably buy a similar one when my CRT at home runs out of will to live.

     Practical advice: If you decide to buy an LCD (online), the panel type is often not listed or unknown to the salesman. Instead, look for response times of around 8ms (as opposed to TN's 2ms) and viewing angles of around 170° (as opposed ot TN's lower angles). These aspects are dead giveaways of IPS.Also the price.

     

     *) loose compensation for € euros to $ dollars.

    0
  • b_redeker1

    Ages ago (97?) I worked on a kiosk that had a portrait oriented LCD screen. You needed custom drivers back then, but the screens actually worked better that way.

    Usually these screens would have a better view angle horizontally than vertically. When rotated, this meant that someone trying to look in from the side wouldn't see much, whereas a difference in length wouldn't be much of a problem. Or at least, that's what marketing said, and they never lie.

    0
  • S

    @morbiuswilters said:

    the motivational Barack Obama Quote-of-the-Day calendar my company gave me as a Christmas present.
     

     

    PLEASE tell me that is more of the Morbius wit, and not true. For the LOVE OF GOD tell me that. (Otherwise, start sharing those gems!!)

    0
  • S

    @dhromed said:

    @Vechni said:

    is that some of the users have rotated their new monitor by 90 degress... what is the point of that?
     

    O ye of narrow vision!

    I have rotated my 4:3 monitor 90°. It is awesome and I would never go back.

    I can see more of any vertically oriented information. That includes everything from code to documents ( = websites) to any sort of tree or list view in any application.

    You should not, however, try to rotate with anything less than 1200 pixels on the shortest side, because then other stuff like panels and palettes will become unacceptably cramped. If, however, all you do is manage documents and look at pornsites, a portrait orientation and slightly less than 1200 pixels wide is very workable and may prove superior. YMMV.

    I had to turn it back onece, to test something. It was like, how the fuck did I ever work with this letterbox?

     

     

    My monitor got stuck at 45°, but since it still "works" my company won't replace it. The human mind is an incredibly adaptable organ. <*organ*.. snicker>

    0
  • dhromed

    @SQLDave said:

    The human mind is an incredibly adaptable organ. <*organ*.. snicker>
     

    My penis is also an adaptable organ. It can adapt to aiming needs in case of toilet usage, to snug fit needs in case of vagina, and to ballistic projectile needs in case of "breasts are over there".

    @SQLDave said:

    My monitor got stuck at 45°, but since it still "works" my company won't replace it.

    Are you kidding or do you really have a fixed slanted* monitor?

     

     

    *) I had this monitor once, and you could shear it 90°. At that figure, it intersected with a black hole fifteen megaparsecs east of here, and collapsed. Worst $5,000 dollars I ever spent. Pretty bad vertical resolution of effectively 0, also. <Lie>

    0
  • morbiuswilters

    @dhromed said:

    My penis is also an adaptable organ. It can adapt to aiming needs in case of toilet btk usage, to snug fit needs in case of vagina btk, and to ballistic projectile needs in case of "breasts are btk is over there".

    BTKTFY.

    0
  • dhromed

    There's no way it could deliver a snug fit in btk! I'm only human!

    0
  • B

    @morbiuswilters said:

    @dhromed said:

    My penis is also an adaptable organ. It can adapt to aiming needs in case of toilet btk usage, to snug fit needs in case of vagina btk, and to ballistic projectile needs in case of "breasts are btk is over there".

    BTKTFY.

    You're projecting, morbs.  Quit projecting.
    0
  • A

    @Smitty said:

    Yeah I love the salaried plus on-call combo.
     

    This part doesn't really bother me.  While a little over time pay would be nice, I like knowing just how much money is going to be in my account at the end of the month.  I don't have to worry about: did I get enough hours in to pay the bills? What bothers me is the second part of your post.

    @Smitty said:

    Unfortunately, on-call really means "IT bitch for a week".  When anything, and I mean anything, is going wrong, the on-call person gets to deal with it.  Even in the middle of the day during the week, even if the problem is with systems the dev has never seen and someone much more qualified is sitting next to him.

    What bothers me is when I get calls such as "I can't log in.." or "the web site isn't up...".  I... Don't... Care!  I... Don't... Have... Access!  For some reason, just because I wrote the application, I am expected to be the go to guy for anything that goes wrong.  Nobody here seems to understand that I am a.) not tier 1 tech support, and b.) don't have admin access to the box, so I can't do anything about it anyway. 

    Managers, users write this down:

    Developers != Tier 1 tech support

    Developers != System administrators

    Developers != DBA

    0
  • M

    You people.....

    My previous job was as the sole IT person (Sys Admin, Network Engineer, Developer, Help Desk, etc.  If it plugged into a wall and had as much as a keypad and display, or even a bunch of flashing lights, I was responsible), on Call 24/7, for a company with 3 facilities in North Carolina, 1 in Dallas Texas, 1 in Romeoville Illinois, and 1 in Middleton Ohio.

    Performed a complete upgrade of the Dallas facility from Novel Groupwise to Exchange Server in 3 days (Exchange server from bare metal) when we bought that facility.  Including wandering around the facility looking for computers/users and installing Outlook (someone had taken it upon themselves to install Office XP and explicitly not install Outlook because they were on Novel e-mail), fixing all manner of WTFery and virus infestations at the same time.

     And when we bought the Ohio facility it was worse, MUCH worse. Nothing like trying to get everyone back up and running when EVERY SYSTEM in fthe facility is removed from the domain and no one knows or will share any of the admin passwords.

    And then there was the night I was called in to my primary facility at 3:00 in the morning for an "emergency" only to find out that they were out of paper.

    I left with severe health problems (Blood sugar consistently over 600 and attendant stress related problems).

    0
  • L

    @campkev said:

    Just out of curiosity, what did you fix?

    @campkev said:
    Plus, if I have a doctor's appointment, he won't even let me enter the time off into our time and labor system unless I miss at least half a day.

    vs.
    @campkev said:
    Plus, if I have a doctor's appointment, he won't even let me enter the time off into our time and labor system unless I miss at least have a day.

    0
  • dhromed

    @Medezark said:

    My previous job was as the sole IT person (Sys Admin, Network Engineer, Developer, Help Desk, etc.  If it plugged into a wall and had as much as a keypad and display, or even a bunch of flashing lights, I was responsible), on Call 24/7, for a company with 3 facilities in North Carolina, 1 in Dallas Texas, 1 in Romeoville Illinois, and 1 in Middleton Ohio.
     

    How the fuck is this even possible?

    @Medezark said:

    I left with severe health problems (Blood sugar consistently over 600 and attendant stress related problems).

    You're lucky to be alive here, posting. Man.

    You feel better now? Is it all okay?

    Do you want btk to tenderly rim you and then gently slide in? We can do that. We have connections. Don't let anybody tell you the TDWTF mod team doesn't look after its patronage.

     

     

    0
  • blakeyrat

    @Vechni said:

    Oh and another thing about the dual monitors (I work in insurance too), is that some of the users have rotated their new monitor by 90 degress... what is the point of that?
     

    90 degrees in what direction? Are they just staring at the edge of the bezel, wondering why the image is so narrow and the resolution is so poor?

    Because that would be hilarious.

    0
  • P

    @bstorer said:

    @campkev said:

     So, to sum up . . . yeah, sucks to be you guys.
    Fellow moderators: I say we ban campkev.  Clearly he does not belong here, and also I hate him.  All in favor?

     

    I vote nay; if he goes then surely so will I. In other news, 4:3 monitors rotated 90 degrees are awesome.Though that was a while ago; one of the CRTs died and got replaced by a crappy 24" LCD and the other will soon. I don't have an LCD to replace the third CRT yet, but in compensation I do have a third 24" LCD that I'm running off of the eyefinity on my main machine. Biggest problem is I'm running out of desk space, and it's going to be a pain in the ass to figure out how to start making two vertical tiers.

    0
  • T

    @dhromed said:

    @tgape said:

    [big story]
     

    cliffnotes:

     Write better software, you git.

    Am I correct?

    Maybe.  You get more customer exposure, which leads to more awards and quicker promotions1, *and*, supposedly, you get overtime for any time over 8 hours of on-call time.  On the other hand, I like being able to sleep while on call, as well as maintain a good relationship with my wife.

    1 The customer sees these people as the individuals that fixed their problems.  They don't understand that, by and large, in this group, they're also the individuals that *created* the problems.

    0
  • dhromed

    @tgape said:

    The customer sees these people as the individuals that fixed their problems.  They don't understand that, by and large, in this group, they're also the individuals that *created* the problems.
     

    This is the crux of the matter.

    0
  • belgariontheking

    @Qwerty said:

    This policy should last about as long as it takes for the weather to turn nice enough to leave your car windows open in the supermarket carpark, with your laptop on the passenger seat, inside the standard laptop bag that screams "laptop inside."
    Doesn't your place of employment have a rule that prohibits this?  Ours says "put it in your butt. .. err, the trunk."

    Course, we actually have had issues with this, but the rule has always been in place.

    0
  • belgariontheking

    @PeriSoft said:

    4:3 monitors rotated 90 degrees are awesome.
    First off, sweet Jesus dude!

    Second, http://www.google.com/products?q=desktop+monitor+mounting+hardware Here's a start.

    http://www.google.com/products?q=desktop+shelves

    0
  • B

    @belgariontheking said:

    Doesn't your place of employment have a rule that prohibits this?  Ours says "put it in your butt. .. err, the trunk."
    That's an odd way to phrase that rule, what with the "err" and all.  I guess this is what happens when management discovers Dragon Naturally Speaking.  I imagine a lot of your internal memos start like this:

    MEMO

    To: All end ploy ease shit no employ seas fuck delete backspace go back erase how the fuck do eye erase wears that Manuel ...

    0
  • Mole

    If your lucky enough to get a personal laptop (rather than a pool laptop), then our policy is that "Sensitive data should be encrypted". Only one person does that though, he's a software engineer and the only one with a personal laptop. The other departments don't have any staff capable of using encryption, and if it was setup for them, the password would probably be stuck to the laptop at the top of the screen.

    (Note that it says "should", not "must")

    0
  • S

    @Mole said:

    If your lucky enough to get a personal laptop (rather than a pool laptop), then our policy is that "Sensitive data should be encrypted". Only one person does that though, he's a software engineer and the only one with a personal laptop. The other departments don't have any staff capable of using encryption, and if it was setup for them, the password would probably be stuck to the laptop at the top of the screen.

    (Note that it says "should", not "must")

     

    Oh I absolutely love those kinds of linguisticly loose security enforcement rules.

    - You should never login as root
    - You should never share your password
    - You should always test your code

    The ultimate way to accomplish a way to say "I told you so" a lot, but doesn't actually add much to security.

    0
  • M

    @dhromed said:

    @Medezark said:

    My previous job was as the sole IT person (Sys Admin, Network Engineer, Developer, Help Desk, etc.  If it plugged into a wall and had as much as a keypad and display, or even a bunch of flashing lights, I was responsible), on Call 24/7, for a company with 3 facilities in North Carolina, 1 in Dallas Texas, 1 in Romeoville Illinois, and 1 in Middleton Ohio.
     

    How the fuck is this even possible?

    @Medezark said:

    I left with severe health problems (Blood sugar consistently over 600 and attendant stress related problems).

    You're lucky to be alive here, posting. Man.

    You feel better now? Is it all okay?

    Do you want btk to tenderly rim you and then gently slide in? We can do that. We have connections. Don't let anybody tell you the TDWTF mod team doesn't look after its patronage.

    Yeah, the doctor was shocked that I was able to walk into the office and actually hold a conversation with him.

    You don't really want to know how the company grew so quickly and erratically.  We bought quite a few facilities at firesale bankruptcy prices.

    I can't tell, based on the types of assistance offered, whether your expressed concern for my health was genuine, however I will tell you that after accepting my current position ( which consists mostly of some lite application and report development work with ASP.NET and Oracle, and the occasional adhoc query/report ), which is almost completely stress free, includes unheard of things like decent pay, benefits, bonuses, raises and ample vacation time, as well as recognition for good work and a competent manager, my health quickly returned to normal levels. 

    And my co-workers are all competent too.  The business unit we service, is another story.

    0
  • S

    @Medezark said:

    And my co-workers are all competent too. 
     

    Obvious troll is obvious.

    0
  • dhromed

    @Medezark said:

    I can't tell, based on the types of assistance offered, whether your expressed concern for my health was genuine
     

    My comments tend to hover in a quantum superposition until someone observes them and I collapse.

    0
Log in to reply