It's Full



  • I'm working on this conversion project to take data normally fed into another system, and redirect it into our system, and as part of this, perform any translation/conversions necessary so our system can crunch the data. When I saw the sample data files, I immediately did some math and pointed out that our 100GB dev DB didn't have enough space to add all of this data, but was told to "Just get started on it!"

    A month of analysis and coding goes by, and I start shoving the data into the DB... until it's full. As in db-out-of-space errors. Upon divulging this milestone and repeating my earlier request for more space, I'm told "The DB can't be full - it's got 100GB of space!". Yes, and when we only had 30GB of data, there was plenty of unused space. BUT, we're adding all the stuff from this other system, which takes up additional space, and the DB doesn't have enough - we need more.

    It was finally decided that we need to call in a provisioning team to run special sniffing/snooping/analysis tools on the DB to see what the problem is. Two committees, 5 meetings and countless e-mails later, the provisioning team gets the representatives of the two former companies to decide on the tools that are to be installed. Then the tools need to be ordered, brought into inventory, distributed to the DBA's, scheduled, and finally installed.

    I have been told that the analysis to find the real cause of the out-of-space issue will begin in 5-6 weeks.

    My entire team and I decided to leave all the data that was already inserted in-place, so that nobody else could work either; maybe this way someone will realize it's not in my head.

    Wheeeee!

     



  • Heh, I wish I had the luxury to leave the DB full if idiot management doesn't "get it". Here, I get screwed either way, if I don't put the data in I'm obviously being defiant, and if I fill the DB, I'm obviously incompetent. I have 2 days to "make it work" perfectly without fail, because "this should be easy, software is easy!"



  • enjoy your 5 to 6 weeks of web surfing!  Hopefully you have other projects you can work on.  I have to deal with the state of massachusetts for a lot of stuff.  took them 2 years to approve some text in spanish. 



  • You guys need to learn how to pass a buck.  Just find someone nervous and weak-willed in your company and set them up for failure.  They might try to weakly resist you and say that it cannot be done, but just tell them to anyway.  Then when it fails, you can tell your boss that you did everything you could but the subordinate just couldn't handle it.  Then the subordinate looks incompetent and you get a raise.

     

    Come to think of it, it sounds like there is already someone at your jobs who is doing this...  to you.



  • Let's see, hire several contractors to evaluate a problem and come up with a possible "solution" versus buying 1 or 2TB of dead cheap storage space.

    Sounds to me like someone wanted some new toys to play with.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    You guys need to learn how to pass a buck.  Just find someone nervous and weak-willed in your company and set them up for failure.  They might try to weakly resist you and say that it cannot be done, but just tell them to anyway.  Then when it fails, you can tell your boss that you did everything you could but the subordinate just couldn't handle it.  Then the subordinate looks incompetent and you get a raise.

    Come to think of it, it sounds like there is already someone at your jobs who is doing this...  to you.

    Office politics are rather sucky and sometimes hard to avoid.  when I started my current job all of MIS was in turmoil.  I'm talking World War 3.  People went out of their way to stab others in the back to make themselves look better.  ended with the entire reporting department being "Cleansed".  My boss however was wonderful.  He shielded us developers from a lot of the politics so weren't as effected.



  • @galgorah said:

    Office politics are rather sucky and sometimes hard to avoid.  when I started my current job all of MIS was in turmoil.  I'm talking World War 3.  People went out of their way to stab others in the back to make themselves look better.  ended with the entire reporting department being "Cleansed".  My boss however was wonderful.  He shielded us developers from a lot of the politics so weren't as effected.

    Several years ago I was hired to "cleanse" an IT department for the same reasons.  I spent a week walking around talking to people until I decided that all 30 of them had to go.  I did keep a single tech support person for another month after that to keep things running while I hired the replacment department, including a new manager. 

    Seriously, if things are bad enough that you have to spend as much (or more) time with polictics than you do the normal job then you should get out.



  • @galgorah said:

    People went out of their way to stab others in the back to make themselves look better.

    Is that...  wrong??

     

    @galgorah said:

    ended with the entire reporting department being "Cleansed".  My boss however was wonderful.  He shielded us developers from a lot of the politics so weren't as effected.

    Ahh, like Noah and his ark, you floated to safety while your co-workers were drowned by a vengeful God.



  • @clively said:

    Seriously, if things are bad enough that you have to spend as much (or more) time with polictics than you do the normal job then you should get out.

    What if your only skills are betraying people, passing the buck, browning your nose and shirking duty?



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    What if your only skills are betraying people, passing the buck, browning your nose and shirking duty?

    Then you probably have great interviewing skills and it doesn't matter anyway.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @galgorah said:

    People went out of their way to stab others in the back to make themselves look better.

    Is that...  wrong??

    Yes when handcuffs are involved.

    @morbiuswilters said:

    @galgorah said:

    ended with the entire reporting department being "Cleansed".  My boss however was wonderful.  He shielded us developers from a lot of the politics so weren't as effected.

    Ahh, like Noah and his ark, you floated to safety while your co-workers were drowned by a vengeful God.

    In a way yes.  The part of the vengeful god was played by corporate who was sick of the infighting and it's effect on productivity.  Essentially the head of reporting was very power hungry and manipulative as were a lot of her subordinates.  it was eventually deamed it would be easier to get rid of them all and hire new people than try to sort things out.


  • I bet they will get the answer as soon as they try to install the analysis tools: "not enough space to install". At least, it's the tool (installer) that tells it :D



  • @clively said:

    Seriously, if things are bad enough that you have to spend as much (or more) time with polictics than you do the normal job then you should get out.

      Everything calmed down and actually runs quite smoothly now.  Cleansing the department was pretty much the final solution.  Everything else about the company is for the most part great.  I am a bit underpaid though.  I would have left long ago and found another job if I'd had to deal with the politics here.  Essentially my boss is the reason I didn't quit. 


  •  I could not agree more.  The politics of companies really make working for companies super bad.  Thankfully I've got a boss that let's me work from home often and a-Void the void situation:).  



  •  Brilliant post. :)......When will companies realise that we developers actually do research before implementation......unbelievable!!:)



  •  Hi all, long time reader, first time poster!

     I want to know desperately how people like snoofle's manager (not to mention half the other managers that get mentioned on this board) get into their positions with seemingly no technical knowlege at all.

     Seriously, how.



  •  Also, major wtf.  I tried to post twice, ended up with 2 posts.  Deleted one, both were there, I figured I triple posted by mistake.  Deleted one.  Then all were gone. :|



  • @Master Chief said:

     Also, major wtf. [snip]Complaint about CS[/snip]

    Welcome to TDWTF! The boards being a WTF is unintentional.



  • @Master Chief said:

     Also, major wtf.

    The pitiful apology for a forum software solution with which we are currently saddled is a WTF so huge and all-pervading that nobody even bothers complaining about it after they develop some coping strategies, on the grounds that there's not a hell of a lot they can actually do about it. You get used to it after a while.

    And the nice thing about being a lowly field service engineer is that office politics is a game played far above one's salary grade and therefore somebody else's problem.



  • @Lingerance said:

    Welcome to TDWTF! The boards being a WTF is unintentional.
     

    I figured, but I didn't think CS was THAT bad...



  • @Master Chief said:

     Hi all, long time reader, first time poster!

     I want to know desperately how people like snoofle's manager (not to mention half the other managers that get mentioned on this board) get into their positions with seemingly no technical knowlege at all.

     Seriously, how.

     

    Because they're hired/promoted by other people just as if not less technically competent than them.



  •  We have a similar problem with our DB server, which houses a few dozen databases ranging from 10GB to 100GB: It gets full.  Now, of course we have several other servers to use as DB storage as well, but this doesn't stop the main DB server from filling up every now and then. The solution? Delete random DBs from the server -- generally ones the deleter doesn't know why they're there for. Which is lovely considering helpdesk test DBs and production test DBs are both housed there. 

     And, of course, the main problem seems to be figuring out procedures how to deal with the storage problem. *sigh* At one point someone hooked up a USB drive to the machine and -- I'm not clear on this -- either managed to RAID it or hook it up permanently to the process somehow. So now there's a 200GB USB drive just standing there, providing space.

     The good part is, last time a random deletion happened it wiped out a delivery database -- that is, an internal DB which houses client lists, contacts and delivery tables. Of course there was a backup procedure, which had been happily backing up the wrong DB for months. They did manage to recover the data physically from the hard drive but now management is aware of the problem and we can always hope that in a few months there'll be some extra space available.



  • @Master Chief said:

    I want to know desperately how people like snoofle's manager (not to mention half the other managers that get mentioned on this board) get into their positions with seemingly no technical knowlege at all.

     Seriously, how.

    The sad thing is, the real problem is almost never that the manager has no technical knowledge.  It's that the manager has no technical knowledge and yet makes technical decisions.

    I've had a manager with basically no technical knowledge.  I "fixed" his computer *twice* by pressing the power button.  I was not the only person to "fix" his computer in this manner; in fact, he normally used other people for this.  (Yes, this happened often enough that the term usually applied - basically, every long weekend where people were advised to turn their computers off for the weekend.) Despite this, he was an amazingly good manager.

    His secret: he had the ability to recognize technical problems, and he never tried to solve them himself.  He learned which of his people had a track record of making good technical decisions, based on the end results, and he trusted those people to make all of the important technical decisions.


    In other news, sometimes, incompetent managers are hired because they're friends or family.  I expect that the prior response on this was correct for the majority of the cases: the person who hires the incompetent manager is not competent him/herself.  (Note: yes, there's overlap between the two cases.)



  • @clively said:

    Seriously, if things are bad enough that you have to spend as much (or more) time with polictics than you do the normal job then you should get out.

    Based on my experience, that sounds like you're recommending that nobody ever work for corporate.

    That having been said, the vast majority of politics that I've had to deal with as part of being part of a corporate organization could easily be said to have been the majority of the normal job, as it wasn't politics regarding my position or my superiors, but rather politics regarding non-corporate organizations and people.  (Basically, we had policies, which various segments of the company believed should not apply to them - just all the other segments.  Rarely were these policies thought to be universally unwanted; most people wanted them to apply to the rest of the company.)  It was not, however, the work I signed on for, nor was it the work for which I was trained.

    On the other hand, there was an interesting aspect of it, which kept me engaged.  The normal reason that these people did not want to comply with company policy was that it was too expensive.  Part of my job was to show them how they could comply with less expense - preferably with less expense than doing it the way they were wanting to do it.  This, unfortunately, included getting them to comprehend the suggested method - which was generally very difficult.  For example, one could satisfy the encrypted administrative connections requirement to unix servers by using ssh instead of telnet.  Once set up, ssh can be easier to use than telnet, because one can do authentication via ssh keys, with the ssh key password being remembered by an ssh-agent process.  Of course, conveying to the average person still using telnet in 2005 how to set up an ssh key is not an experience I'd like to ever repeat, yet too much of my 2005 was spent doing just that...



  • "Cheap storage space" and "big corporation" don't really go hand in hand. The company specifies that a certain type of (very expensive) san storage must be used, and all requests for it must be approved by the powers that be up, down and laterally along the chain. I've heard (can't confirm) that the company pays upwards of $10/GB for the storage units they buy.

    Although, even that is only $10,000/TB, which (as ridiculous as that is) is still cheaper than having us sit around for 2 months....



  • @Master Chief said:

     Hi all, long time reader, first time poster!

     I want to know desperately how people like snoofle's manager (not to mention half the other managers that get mentioned on this board) get into their positions with seemingly no technical knowlege at all.

     Seriously, how.


    My boss is a really bright guy, who is smart enough to recognize that in a corporate buyout, that WE were the ones bought out, and that even though our system is the one that is replacing the system in the company that bought us out, that requesting resources at this point in time and space needs massive justification by "experts" as opposed to mere developers. Getting the folks from the other team to come in and analyze the problem puts an official stamp on the justification for more space, as opposed to my request based solely upon my say so.

    It's just him being the new kid in town and trying to place nice with the process for the sake/necessary evil of appearances. Unfortunately, the "process" is so horrific that millions will be wasted in lost time in order to spend tens of thousands analyzing the cost of a problem to buy what amounts to $500 worth of storage.



  • @snoofle said:

    My boss is a really bright guy, who is smart enough to recognize that in a corporate buyout, that WE were the ones bought out, and that even though our system is the one that is replacing the system in the company that bought us out, that requesting resources at this point in time and space needs massive justification by "experts" as opposed to mere developers. Getting the folks from the other team to come in and analyze the problem puts an official stamp on the justification for more space, as opposed to my request based solely upon my say so.

    It's just him being the new kid in town and trying to place nice with the process for the sake/necessary evil of appearances. Unfortunately, the "process" is so horrific that millions will be wasted in lost time in order to spend tens of thousands analyzing the cost of a problem to buy what amounts to $500 worth of storage.

     

     

    Ahh, that makes more sense.  I can see that.



  • @Jake Grey said:

    @Master Chief said:

     Also, major wtf.

    The pitiful apology for a forum software solution with which we are currently saddled is a WTF so huge and all-pervading that nobody even bothers complaining about it after they develop some coping strategies, on the grounds that there's not a hell of a lot they can actually do about it. You get used to it after a while.

    And the nice thing about being a lowly field service engineer is that office politics is a game played far above one's salary grade and therefore somebody else's problem.

    Am I the only one that's never had a problem with the forum software?



  •  @campkev said:

    Am I the only one that's never had a problem with the forum software?

    You're just a C$ shill!

     



  • @campkev said:

    Am I the only one that's never had a problem with the forum software?

    I've had quirks here and there, and there are some definite WTFs in the way CS does some stuff internally, but I've never seen it as that bad.  Most of the web forums I've used are more problematic than CS.  I've never seen the double-post thing and considering that I have a post count so large that men fall to their knees as I walk by and women throw their panties at me, I would probably see it if anyone did.  One annoying thing CS does is do some sort of caching with posts, so your posts might not show up for 30 seconds or so, which might make you think it didn't post.  The tag auto-complete (and tags in general) are a big pile of shit.  The editor is just TinyMCE which is a standard 3rd party WYSIWYG editor and it should work fine if you have a reasonably modern, mainstream browser.



  • @snoofle said:

    I've heard (can't confirm) that the company pays upwards of $10/GB for the storage units they buy

     

    The sad part is that said expensive storage works much worse than a beige box with Win2003, stuffed with a bunch of SATA drives.

     



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @campkev said:

    Am I the only one that's never had a problem with the forum software?

    I've had quirks here and there, and there are some definite WTFs in the way CS does some stuff internally, but I've never seen it as that bad.  Most of the web forums I've used are more problematic than CS.  I've never seen the double-post thing and considering that I have a post count so large that men fall to their knees as I walk by and women throw their panties at me, I would probably see it if anyone did.  One annoying thing CS does is do some sort of caching with posts, so your posts might not show up for 30 seconds or so, which might make you think it didn't post.  The tag auto-complete (and tags in general) are a big pile of shit.  The editor is just TinyMCE which is a standard 3rd party WYSIWYG editor and it should work fine if you have a reasonably modern, mainstream browser.

     Someone who is not happy with CS, apparently never dealt with Jive Software's forum engine, used on CNET.COM. Compared to that steaming pile of shit (TRWTF), WTF forum is perfect.

     



  • @Andy_Haus said:

     Brilliant post. :)......When will companies realise that we developers actually do research before implementation......unbelievable!!:)

     

     

    Well... most developers don't! That's one of the problems. How many developers in your company do it?



  • @Master Chief said:

     I want to know desperately how people like snoofle's manager (not to mention half the other managers that get mentioned on this board) get into their positions with seemingly no technical knowlege at all.

    So often in companies with any combination of (a) a bias towards personal rather than professional, (b) poor HR departments, (c) poor management, (d) rampant politics, and (e)  probably several other factors I am unaware/can't think of, people get shuffled sideways and/or upwards into management where there is some screwy perception that they can somehow do "less harm" because they're not working in actual development.

    Well, that's been my experience in a few cases anyway.  In such places people get "kicked upstairs" instead of sacked.



  • @campkev said:

    Am I the only one that's never had a problem with the forum software?
    Yes!



  •  All of us......you obviously work for an unprofessional company or worse - work for yourself as a freelancer.  I tell you it is pathetic the quality you get on the internet these days..



  • @Andy_Haus said:

    I tell you it is pathetic the quality you get on the internet these days..

    It really is.  Especially the lack of quality on forums where people don't perform simple clarity measures like quoting :p



  • @Andy_Haus said:

     All of us......you obviously work for an unprofessional company or worse - work for yourself as a freelancer.  I tell you it is pathetic the quality you get on the internet these days..

     

    Oh,  come on!  Are you trying to tell me that developers always do everything by the book? Every single one of us has about a dozen of stories about crap developers and every single one of us encounters at least one wtf code snippet a week. I work for a consulting company, so I see it more often than people who work in normal companies.



  •  'Clarity is the unclear from the mud of polluted waters'

     quote...

     

    Is that better for you.......pathetic....i rest my case



  • @Andy_Haus said:

     'Clarity is the unclear from the mud of polluted waters'

     quote...

     

    Is that better for you.......pathetic....i rest my case

    No, actually it's not.  I have no idea who said that, since you didn't use the quote button.


  • "Clarity is the unclear from the mud of polluted waters" - thanks - I forgot.

     

    Still say the other guys is pathetic or is that peripapetic or both. Actually I stick with the first one:)))



  • @Andy_Haus said:

    "Clarity is the unclear from the mud of polluted waters" - thanks - I forgot.

    And obviously you're still not educated well enough to quote properly.

    To enlighten you, quoting in the context used here does not mean "surround with quotation marks" - it means providing a small snippet of the post you're responding to (including the original poster's name). This is typically done by clicking on the "Reply" button in the upper right corner of the post to which you want to respond, and then on the subsequent page selecting the text you want to respond to and clicking the "Quote" button in the lower left corner of the area in which you selected the text. (You can see how the end result should look by viewing this exact reply I'm making to you - your quote is above in the little box.)

    @Andy_Haus said:

    Still say the other guys is pathetic or is that peripapetic or both. Actually I stick with the first one:)))
     

    Nope. You fail. Not only did you still fail to quote properly, you were rude in correcting someone who was trying to help you. As a new poster to these forums, you're not off to a very good start. 



  •  See this is why non IT people think that we are maladjusted.  Comments and responses like this - just pathetic. I love to fail.

    A Non-Starter



  • @Andy_Haus said:

     See this is why non IT people think that we are maladjusted.  Comments and responses like this - just pathetic. I love to fail.

    A Non-Starter

     

    See, now I'm starting to think that it's not that you don't know how to use the software. I'm thinking you must just not be very smart. You still didn't quote the person you were responding to, so nobody knows what you're talking about, even after I provided detailed instructions to you.

    We require a certain level of intelligence before you can post here. Please feel free to come back if and when you reach that level. Thanks. 

      



  • Purile posters should be shot. 

    :)


  • :belt_onion:

    @Andy_Haus said:

    Purile posters should be shot. 

    :)

     

    So when are you scheduled for execution? :-)



  • @Andy_Haus said:

    Purile posters should be shot. 

    :)

    Worst trolling attempt I've seen so far.



  • @Duroth said:

    Worst trolling attempt I've seen so far.

    How about this:

     

    Um, you are stupid and nobody likes you and you smell bad and your entire ethnic group is well-known for at least one particular stereotype and perhaps more.  You should probably just give up and shoot yourself and install Linux and move to Europe or marry someone of your same gender because you are a homosexual except nobody would marry you because you are ugly.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    How about this:
    You have hurt me deeply and the emotional wounds that you have inflicted may take years to heal.  They're so deep that I'm not sure I can ever love again.  You want a piece of the scar tissue that used to be my heart?



  • Step 1: Don't buy a 1 terabyte hard drive for 180 bucks, instead spend 100x that much in analysis fees, consultant fees, and idle developer times.

    Step 2: ???

    Step 3: Profit!



    Edit: Added HTML tags


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