If you loved "third class programmer", you'll love "Life of an IT Grunt"



  • It's a lot longer, but the payoff is incredible. Unlike the punchline-like quality of today's post, this just...keeps...hitting!

    Start from beginning to end:

    http://integrityconsulting.net/blog/2007/05/are-most-it-managers-bad-or-do-they.html

    http://integrityconsulting.net/blog/2007/06/motivating-unmotivated.html 


     



  • Yeah, I loved that story the first time I read it. The ending is bitter-sweet.



  • i dunno, i'm sure that charly and the gang where incompetent, but he makes himself sound like a racist bastard, which makes me doubt the truthfulness of it all. 



  • I kept thinking of CPound as I read the entire thing, except that CPound isn't racist.



  • @stratos said:

    i dunno, i'm sure that charly and the gang where incompetent, but he makes himself sound like a racist bastard, which makes me doubt the truthfulness of it all. 

    I find the whole thing eminently believable, but it's a classic case of the stupid arsehole leading the stupid deadweights. The author is part of the problem, not part of the solution - knows just enough to bugger things up, and completely unaware of his very limited abilities. 



  • @asuffield said:

    @stratos said:

    i dunno, i'm sure that charly and the gang where incompetent, but he makes himself sound like a racist bastard, which makes me doubt the truthfulness of it all. 

    I find the whole thing eminently believable, but it's a classic case of the stupid arsehole leading the stupid deadweights. The author is part of the problem, not part of the solution - knows just enough to bugger things up, and completely unaware of his very limited abilities. 

    To me, he sounds like he knows what he's doing, but he also sounds extremely arrogant about it. That may be a prerequisite for being a C# developer, though... :)



  • This is just an aside from one of the early stories,but how great is this:

    http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3a/WhatthePho.jpg 



  • @rbowes said:

    @asuffield said:

    @stratos said:

    i dunno, i'm sure that charly and the gang where incompetent, but he makes himself sound like a racist bastard, which makes me doubt the truthfulness of it all. 

    I find the whole thing eminently believable, but it's a classic case of the stupid arsehole leading the stupid deadweights. The author is part of the problem, not part of the solution - knows just enough to bugger things up, and completely unaware of his very limited abilities. 

    To me, he sounds like he knows what he's doing, but he also sounds extremely arrogant about it. That may be a prerequisite for being a C# developer, though... :)

    He's a former Marine, and it shines through in his management style as well as his writing style. You probably don't use lines like "fingerbanging Suzy Rottencrotch" unless you've heard them a million times from your fellow soldiers. Even referring to himself as a "grunt", he's very much applying the lowest-common-denominator form of intellect that exists at the lower levels in the military, which is to say, not terribly sophisticated, and is a fairly aggressive, racist, and generally hostile environment to live in.

    Personally, I love that he calls one of them "Charlie", and (like every other fucking Marine I know) is obsessed with war flicks and macho shit - it just makes the story that much more believable.



  • @stratos said:

    ... he makes himself sound like a racist bastard...

    @asuffield said:

    ... a classic case of the stupid arsehole...

    Let's be frank. The guy is a fucking jarhead Asshat with a capital 'A'.

    I'm
    a fucking political retard yet can sweet talk managers in circles and
    this guy doesn't seem to know when to open or shut his mouth. You want
    dual screen monitors? Make nice with the operations staff, pretend all
    your monitors are broken and need replacements, get new ones, then
    "magically" your old ones are repaired and you have two apiece. And
    three years waiting for a $39 for a text editor to handle large files?
    There is this thing called Google, or so I heard, it's pretty neat...

    And you never, ever try to get anyone fired, especially when you know they were hired by mistake, because that can make someone else look bad, and then its curtains for you.

    And then the LAMP and open-source crap, sigh.  "Mature" Microsoft shops my ass... his real problem is that every place that'd hire him is an ill-run startup that doesn't know any better, so of course they won't know design if it bit them in the ass, the technology has nothing to do with it.

    He's not stupid, but he thinks who the hell he is, and that's a WTF right there. One would hope a stint in the USMC would have knocked his corn-fed ego down a few pegs and make him a better person, but put him in a position with some power, and then watch the fuck out, he's getting payback. Jesus fucking christ.



  • I was about to leave on a plane once from a meeting where a really bad "Charlie" type was also on my flight.  I told one of my coworkers, "If the plane goes down, don't cry."  This is one of those stories... sometimes it takes a sacrifice for the greater good unfortunately.



  • @Peter {faa780ce-0f0a-4c28-81d2-3667b71287fd} said:

    It's a lot longer, but the payoff is incredible. Unlike the punchline-like quality of today's post, this just...keeps...hitting!

    Start from beginning to end:

    Entertaining writing.  But this is what pisses me off most about blogs: nine times out of ten, when you want to read a series of posts chronologically from the beginning, there's no way to do it.  Putting the most recent item first is only good when you're following the site regularly.  Many, many thanks to the OP for posting all the links in the correct order.


     



  • One thing I can't understand is: why do most WASPs think Indian food smells terrible? It smells great to me. Is it just because they aren't used to their food smelling like [i]anything[/i] in particular? Stick to Wonder Bread and chicken soup.



  • Wow...what a racist, biggoted, bloviating, technically-challenged gasbag that guy is...and desperately in need of anger management training.

    Honestly, I was so pissed off at him I only scanned the last few entries...happy to get to the point where he gets fired.   Its pretty obvious why he was escorted out of the building -- and why he only lasted a week in the job before that.

    Is there anything that doesn't make him red faced and wanting to pound on the table?   Is there anybody who isn't beneath his contempt?  

    A few specific quotes I pulled out before I couldn't take reading his crap any more:

    "He had hacked my harddrive"

    Somebody 'hacked' his hard drive?  That's really what he thought? Really?   Mr. Nobody-knows-technology-like-I-do thought someone 'hacked his hard drive'?

    She was nice. Competent. Articulate. And white. Could I get her on my team, I wondered?

    Fuck off.

    It says here that he has twelve years of programming experience, but he graduated in ’96. That means he was coding in his sophomore year

    Because nobody in the history of programming has ever started programming before graduation.  Idiot.

    Wow...I finally found someone who makes me angrier than CPound.  There's something kind of liberating about that.

    -cw



  • Definitely an entertaining blog - but yikes! That guy is seriously damaged goods. 

     The hacked computer was exceptional. He went completely off the handle, rabidly pursuing a very unlikely scenario, and then glosses over being completely wrong and commends himself on letting Charlie "off easy". The biggest fuck up of his entire blog about fuck ups was his own, and he shows himself entirely incapable of pointing his flamethrower at himself. If I tried to get someone fired for hacking into my computer and then remembered I had done it myself a few weeks earlier - I'd probably be too embarrassed and ashamed to continue working there.




  • @CodeWhisperer said:

    Wow...I finally found someone who makes me angrier than CPound.  There's something kind of liberating about that.

    If bigoted idiots enrage you, I foresee ulcers and a heart attack in your future.



  • @asuffield said:

    If bigoted idiots enrage you, I foresee ulcers and a heart attack in your future.

    Naw, it takes a truly spectacular level of biggotry and idiocy combined with an "everyone is stupid but me" attitude to get me to that point; thankfully that combination at that extreme level seems relatively uncommon.  Spend enough time on the internet and you're bound to build up some callouses, I guess.

    -cw



  • I must admit I've enjoyed reading the blog, despite the obvious racism and the abundant use of four-letter-words. What really strikes me is that this guy managed to lose his job in only six months. Six months! In many companies, you can easily spend six months doing nearly nothing at all and get away with it. When I quit my first job after half a year, I asked my boss (who was new and had been my boss for a few weeks only) to whom I should hand over the programs I had written in those six months. He was really surprised I had accomplished anything at all in that time.



  • @ammoQ said:

    What really strikes me is that this guy managed to lose his job in only six months. Six months! In many companies, you can easily spend six months doing nearly nothing at all and get away with it.

    He would have been fine at 6 months of doing nothing. Instead he spent 6 months telling everyone he worked with what stupid smelly foreigners they were and that everything they had done before he got there was wrong, and then tried to get them all fired.  Other than grabbing genitalia and shooting people, I'm not sure of a better way to ensure such a short period of employment.



  • @ammoQ said:

    What really strikes me is that this guy managed to lose his job in only six months.

    It's worse than that...the six month thing appears to be his latest job... the one he blogs about appears to have been six WEEKS.  And he got that after only lasting at his previous job for a week.

    But the problem is with everyone else, don't you know.

    -cw



  • @CodeWhisperer said:

    @ammoQ said:

    What really strikes me is that this guy managed to lose his job in only six months.

    It's worse than that...the six month thing appears to be his latest job... the one he blogs about appears to have been six WEEKS.  And he got that after only lasting at his previous job for a week.

    But the problem is with everyone else, don't you know.

    -cw

    You are right... now that's really amazing (the six weeks, not the fact that you are right ;-)) 




    1. He is not racist. Absolutely not.  It's two issues: economics and coding competence. Overall he's saying companies want cheap labor and sometimes they're getting what they pay for. For me I'd add a third: just communicating/understanding what the heck they're saying sometimes. The majority of my current co-workers are foreign nationals. Having to deal w/ cheap wage competition and to work with the "less experienced" co-worker is frustrating. Struggling w/ the language barrier tries ones patience several times each day.
    2. He's competent and confident. And that manifests in his attitude.
    3. I care a great deal about quality code, and I get mad sometimes too. I've seen a few wtf's.
    4. A very good programmer in a bad and/or dysfunctional coding shop stands out like a Baby Ruth bar in a swimming pool. It's happened to me. It's like living in the twilight zone. The insanity is unbearable.
    5. He's a marine (once a Marine, always a Marine) - that explains a lot. But then, what's the sound when the fit hits the shan? "Marine!" Marines are a proud bunch. They've earned it. And I get tired of the arrogance sometimes too; but I'll always come back for more war stories!
    6. It's a personal blog. He's saying lots of things he never says in the work place. Don't we all?
    7. Being ex military I can really really relate. The "outside" is notably different. IMHO the military tolerates less incompetence, laziness, and crappy management. Management is actually accountable. Performance is paramount. The military is basically an "up or out" system. That is, if you're not getting promoted, you are forced out after a time limit that's dependent on your rank (I imagine the different branches' policies vary on this).
    8. Sometimes I just want to kick some of these dumb<explitive here> in the butt and read them the riot act.

     



  • @radarbob said:

    IMHO the military tolerates less incompetence, laziness, and crappy management. Management is actually accountable. Performance is paramount. The military is basically an "up or out" system. That is, if you're not getting promoted, you are forced out after a time limit that's dependent on your rank (I imagine the different branches' policies vary on this).

    Until that part, I thought you really mean it. Nice troll! 



  • I enjoy reading the guy's blog, but he's still an asshole.  What gets me is the pervasive "Everybody here but me is a complete fucking retard" attitude.  Taken in context, his beef with "Charlie" might be understandable, and the guy might be over his head.  But IMO a good supervisor (as he claims to be) shouldn't try to go behind someone's back and get them fired.  He should have worked with Charlie to help him improve, not say "Yeah, this stupid gook doesn't know shit, he doesn't belong here, so I'm going to try and get rid of him, that way everyone at this shithole company will know of my greatness."  (My apologies for using such a racist term).

     He comes across like an arrogant prick - I would have thought being in the Marines would take arrogance away from you (I wouldn't know, I'm nowhere near good enough to be in any of the armed forces), not increase it tenfold. 
     



  • @TheRubyWarlock said:

    He comes across like an arrogant prick - I would have thought being in the Marines would take arrogance away from you (I wouldn't know, I'm nowhere near good enough to be in any of the armed forces), not increase it tenfold. 

    Marine == testosterone. It's not their brains that they use for thinking...



  • Wow, pretty funny, while the blog is amusing the guy is a total fucking wanker.  Really racist.  The ex marine thing doesn't surprise me, he strikes me as the kind of dick that would join the army. 

    I never realised everyone in the world was so incompetent until this guy pointed it out to me.


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