Organizational Dysfunction
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Disjointed ranting follows.
We have a team of utterly braindamaged business analysts (the team used to be good, but their manager took the well liked people who did their jobs better than her to be threats and drove them out, meanwhile hiring... frankly, idiots) who are responsible for being the interface between my developers and the rest of the world. In order for us to not be made to look like braindamaged morons, we have to smear as many of the fuckups (which are constant. More things are wrong than are right) as possible back on the BA team.
Naturally the BA team tries to smear as much of it back on development as possible.
The situation has escalated to very nearly a shooting war.
That team basically takes anything that could possibly be construed as 'Development made a misstep' or 'Development took 45 seconds longer than estimated' or 'Development did not have required ESP and asked for clarification on a sentence largely made up of gibberish' and escalates it to our management. This usually takes the form of cc:Director.
We are more tactful and usually only cc:Manager and just let our (highly annoyed) director shout at theirs out of band.
Except this week. This week, their manager is out. Her OOO reply says to email her boss (actually a junior VP now, rather than a director) about any issues. Excellent. cc:JVP on whatever idiocy was transpiring at the moment.
That team FREAKED THE FUCK OUT. They had considered it completely unthinkable that cc:Boss+1 could be applied to them, rather than just to developers. Best part: The email where one supervisor in particular was freaking the fuck out cc'd our Boss+1.
I spend entirely too much of my time on organizational politics - mainly building elaborate illustrations of where other people fucked up and how we were working on faulty information when we wrote Thing That Doesn't Quite Do What The Customer Thought It Should Do.
We recently had an app go live where the specification was still changing in fundamental ways FOURTEEN DAYS after initial deployment, and all those changes were related to reconciling what the BA's wrote with what the customer actually expected. All implemented as emergency production changes, of course.
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but their manager took the well liked people who did their jobs better than her to be threats and drove them out, meanwhile hiring... frankly, idiots
A's hire A's and B's hire C's.
I spend entirely too much of my time on organizational politics
Eh...this is what good managers do so their underlings can get on with the work.
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A's hire A's and B's hire C's.
not so!
a
C
can become aB
and so are still a threat.B's hire Z's and fire them if they ever climb to be more than W's
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Post of the day.
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wait... that's NOT their job title?
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No, it's something like Boring Animalist.
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Got to work. Boss was showing am FNG around. An FNG on my team. Who I didn't know was coming. And clearly getting two FNGs (there's another coming next week) to start on the same day was too hard so now I have to repeat myself.
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I could have deleted that embarrassingly stupid dvorak joke for you, but I guess now it'll be there forever.
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So this thread is now me live posting all the idiocy I come across.
Project plan says go live date is the 17th. We are still developing, just got test data yesterday, and the spec as delivered from the BAs is still self contradictory incomplete junk.
This morning "The customer is expecting this live on the 10th".
This is apparently now fact and reality.
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@boomzilla said:
A's hire A's and B's hire C's.
So who hired the B's?
They were thought to be A's at the time.
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@DCRoss said:
@boomzilla said:
A's hire A's and B's hire C's.
So who hired the B's?
They were thought to be A's at the time.
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FNG got a computer on the first day! He even got a network account.
With zero group memberships.
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This morning "The customer is expecting this live on the 10th".
How/why does the customer expect it to be live when the customer (as interpreted by the BAs, so it's their fault) doesn't even know what he or she expects it to do?This is apparently now fact and reality.
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Unknowable.
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"Ticket closed" apparently means "I've looked at it and I'll do it after lunch"
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So the next feature I'd like is a "Pre-Close next ticket" button, I'll be working on it eventually anyway. Saves me to remember closing it.
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Last week we crash emergency fixed a bug with very deep roots because it was necessary for some new customer.
This bug resided in the core behaviors of the system and therefore had a very large risk profile. But it was a crash emergency fix, so minimal testing and no burn in.
Week later, we find that the bug had been worked around in 56 different applications, which have been silently (nonfatally and nondestructively) failing ever since.
Now we are doing 56 more crash emergency fixes (despite this being a strictly cosmetic issue).
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That's what they're paying these lazy ass developers for!
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Who says BAs and PMs are developers?
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I typed 84 posts to a new layout: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...Oh, sorry I fell asleep on my keyboard
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This post is deleted!
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So, we're jeffing jeffs now?
I know the topic isn't a jeff... but it's about as disjoint as one.
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I really wish there was a branching forum software that wasn't as confusing to use as reddit.
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So, we're jeffing jeffs now?
I deleted the second Jeffing message that was for one post that I missed originally.
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Thanks for doing it.
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doing it.
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From the point of view of the company, they hired a development firm.
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Actually, no. From the point of view of our customers they hired a firm that magically transforms a data feed of their own design (from something some jackwad put together in Excel to high end ETL data dumps) into physical product. They don't particularly care about the custom software necessary to make that happen (and routinely refuse to pay for it).
We have had customers refuse to accept quotes with software development costs of a half dozen hours. But for some stupid fucking reason they'll happily pay someone to do it manually every single god damned morning for 1 hour. At the same billable rate per hour. For years on end.
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A's hire A's and B's hire C's.
I feel like I am missing the joke/whooshing here but I substituted the A's, B's and C's with the first swearwords that came to mind.
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@boomzilla said:
A's hire A's and B's hire C's.
I feel like I am missing the joke/whooshing here
There's not actually a joke. It says that top-notch people hire other top-notch people. Those who aren't quite as good hire people who are even worse than they themselves are.
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It is understandable.
In this way, no matter how many "last minute changes" are given, the poor soul who have to do it manually would do it in roughly the same time, so no increase in the cheque to pay.
You know, ask for new budget is difficult, while people seldom question on-going fixed costs.
While the money may look the same to you, the effort to transverse bureaucracy is quite different.
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"Launching a new product line" is a thing that costs money.
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This just in: Asking "Why is somebody else wholly unqualified doing your job for you?" is now unnecessary sarcasm.
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Seriously. I had a manager talk because I pointed out that technical questions from line developers should go to team lead to site supervisor and then down to me, rather than to a BA to an administrative assistant and then to me.
Because one path has 3 people who should know the damned answer on it and the other has people who don't know a damn thing on it.
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@RTapeLoadingError said:
@boomzilla said:
A's hire A's and B's hire C's.
I feel like I am missing the joke/whooshing here
There's not actually a joke. It says that top-notch people hire other top-notch people. Those who aren't quite as good hire people who are even worse than they themselves are.
Oh. That makes more sense. I thought it meant type A personalities hire type A personalities and type B personalities hire type C personalities, so when we started wandering around the keyboard I got completely lost and started dancing on a trackball.
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Received an email from another supervisor requesting advice on which one of my production servers is the place to implement a half baked disaster of an adhoc shitty knockoff of a thing my team already does.
Or, rather, from that supervisor's minion, but clearly written by that supervisor.
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So you send him a Youtube link to that "we've already got one" bit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
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He already damn well knows we have one because he was my teams supervisor when we effing built it.
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Received an email from another supervisor requesting advice on which one of my production servers is the place to implement a half baked disaster of an adhoc shitty knockoff of a thing my team already does.
We get that sort of thing occasionally.
And we get to support it when it goes to production
Win for everyone!
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"The Raspberry Pi I left in your office with 'Production Server' scrawled in Sharpie on it. I just commissioned it."
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+π
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I would kill for an RPi production server. Most of our shit isn't that powerful.
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Would you pay £35 (excluding accessories) out of your own pocket though?
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He already damn well knows we have one because he was my teams supervisor when we effing built it.
That's probably how he knows he wants one of his own...
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Someone I do volunteer work for has an R-Pi server. I wrote the networking for the app it runs. I'd love my own R-Pi server so I can debug issues, but alas can't spend £35 out of my pocket for that.
Have to simulate with VMs instead.
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