How To Demoralize Employees: A DIY Guide for Terrible Companies
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The first person to receive a ticket should be doing triage on it.
It sounds like he did. :)
ETA: in a minimal sense.
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There's a woman at this meeting who is WAY too energetic. It's kind of disturbing.
Let me also leave this [3] here because @Blakeyrat.
[3] Yes, again. (I had to number it that way because of the way Discurse puts in fake links when you compose a post. That's probably another WTF right there.)
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broken image icons
Don't know why you're getting those.Hosted on photobucket; probably blocked by your demoralizing employer. Anyway, @FrostCat already posted a screenshot. Unless it's blocked for you, too.
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Everything is blocked at all times. Forever.
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Everything is blocked at all times. Forever.
Cell phone + "share internet connection"?
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Cell phone + "share internet connection"?
Everything is blocked at all times. Forever.
Why should @blakeyrat have to pay for internet on his own dime to get his work done? If he's already tried to work with his employer to get things working and things still won't work, let them pay his rate doing next to nothing. After all, TDWTF isn't just a ranting forum, we actually do help each other here - so he can claim it's work related. ;-)
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Everything is blocked at all times. Forever.
Imagine a web proxy, stomping on @blakeyrat's LOLCATS. Forever.
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And a ginger to boot.
Dear lord.
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Jesus.
Is there anything I can type that people won't take 100% seriously?
Do you even know how annoying it is that only Boomzilla, apparently, got the joke?
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get his work done?
Because obviously looking at imgur or photobucket isn't "getting his work done."
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Imagine a web proxy, stomping on @blakeyrat's LOLCATS. Forever.
I nearly LLOLed. Say it again so I can like it again.
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Is there anything I can type that people won't take 100% seriously?
No, because you get so butthurt over it we all just pretend to take you seriously.
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Do you even know how annoying it is that only Boomzilla, apparently, got the joke?
So my attempt at a different take on the humor doesn't count???
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Imagine a web proxy, stomping on @blakeyrat's LOLCATS. Forever.
For you, @FrostCat, until @boomzilla can catch up to your post.
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Ho Jesus, I just got involved with an extremely WTF-y website. Yikes.
I might have to submit this sucker, once I understand it myself (even vaguely), and have time to anonymize it.
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Goddamned. Status meeting today:
"Now instead of just PROD and TRAINING (considered mini-prod), we have to deploy to Disaster Recovery, DR."
"How is DR going to get all the stuff we deployed in the last, you know, months?"
"They just imaged the PROD server."
"Instead of us doing an error-prone deploy which requires manual intervention, why don't they just image PROD every 24 hours or so?"
"Blakeyrat, you make far too much sense to be working here."
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"Blakeyrat, you make far too much sense to be working here."
Dear God, I hope that's an accurate quote[1].
[1] except for the name.
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It is, everybody in my group knows the company is WTF. At least outwardly. Pretty much all the WTF stuff I've described comes from either company "established practices"* or are from third-party apps we support/modify.
Except this latest one I posted about, it's first-party. I haven't really dug into it though. It utterly defeats Visual Studio's poor debugger.
* Which I know aren't really, our manager just refuses to call them on the bullshit-- for example, I frequently visit another dev group that has standing desks and dual 24" 1080p monitors.
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he's referring to me writing my SQL in lowercase
I write mine in lower case, 'cause otherwise it's TOO MUCH SCREAMING… Which I reserve for the the Oracle DBMS I use, itself.
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he's referring to me writing my SQL in lowercase
Look like you're writing it in uppercase there...
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This. So much this. Take a project very optimistically scheduled to take a week. Have a meeting to <s>figure out how to</s> cut the schedule to a day and a half. (The actual schedule is longer, but the proportions are the same.) Who is not invited to the meeting? Anyone actually working on the project.
Well, of course not. They only have a day and a half to get the project done, they can't afford to spend time in a meeting.
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They only have a day and a half to get the project done, they can't afford to spend time in a meeting.
Unless the project is late; then everyone is called into meetings to figure out why it's late. The later it is, the more meetings to "solve" the problem.
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Unless the project is late; then everyone is called into meetings to figure out why it's late. The later it is, the more meetings to "solve" the problem.
And here, management applies the 'infinite loop' theory.
Too bad they mixed it up with infinite scrolling, complete with stalls when loading more data (i.e. meetings) and all the employees hating it collectively.
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This post is deleted!
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This post is deleted!
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Is this actually happening or just a hypothetical?
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WTF are you talking about? What did you post? Where?
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You know what, nevermind.
Suffice it to say I'm never submitting content to the DailyWTF homepage again.
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Come on, you can't chicken out now. We need entertainment!
BTW I just realized this thread is also on homepage. I don't frequent there anymore.
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I don't either, and I stupidly assumed someone was policing the content there, but wow was I stupid.
Also due to Discourse I guess, I can't even fucking edit my own fucking first post anymore. Why? Just so Atwood can torture me from beyond the grave? Oh, he's not dead? That's even WORSE.
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Atwood can torture me from beyond the grave? Oh, he's not dead? That's even WORSE.
I LOL-ed.
Actually, I almost posted a genuine WTF story today, not this redit-sloppy-seconds bullshit. I gave up half-way through because I didn't trust that the owners of the WTF product won't link it back to my firm. I'll have to get deeper into the product so I'd know how to anonymize it effectively.
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I have zero confidence in the woman running this project. We just had a long meeting with the web services group (we're building a web server to be consumed by another group at the company), and between me and him we hashed out pretty much exactly what it should look like, short of actually writing the damned code. This meeting lasted about an hour, and we all agreed at the end it was the right thing to do, and we all left feeling good about it.
She's been talking the last half hour about how this represents a huge scope change (it doesn't-- we were just discussing how to deliver our original scope), how she doesn't understand half of what he said (which, ok, but the people doing the actual coding did, so...), and how she hasn't had a chance to "catch her breath" today (whatever that means.)
She seems to be having kind of a "calm panic attack", if that makes sense. Meanwhile, I'm tempted to just check out a branch and write the fucking thing.
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I'm tempted to just check out a branch and write the fucking thing.
I suggest you do that. If you wait for management to catch up, you'll be forever. Far better to present as fait accompli when they're just coming to the realisation that you were just scoping things out and that this doesn't blow the schedule out of the water after all. A lot of organisations just can't seem to cope with the idea that after management decided what to do, if you've got competent staff your best bet is to get out of the way and let them do it.
“We need a meeting to discuss how you're going to…”
“No need. It's done. All working, sweet as a nut.”
“But…”
“Be a hero and tell everyone how it was a massive challenge but we've got it done on time and in budget.”
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Oh God I just had the dumbest conversation.
We're creating a web service that uses third-party sprocs to insert data into a third-party database. We don't control the sprocs or the database.
We were talking about splitting the project into tasks, and one of the things the woman mentioned was that we need to write mocks for all of those sprocs. And I asked why, and that opened a shitstorm.
Apparently, it's "company policy" that every business entity have mocks that can be used locally to test the project without relying on any particular database. That's fine; I think it's excessive and anal, but fine*.
But in this case, the database is third-party. The sprocs are third-party. I pointed out that we're not creating mocks, what we're doing is creating tests based on us reverse-engineering a third-party database. And if the third-party database changes, it's likely our tests would continue working fine. Which makes them utterly useless. I said instead of mocking up this database and sprocs, which will take ages, we should just write tests based on the database operation being a single atomic action.
"No, we have to do the mocks."
"Even if they're useless?"
"The company says we need them, so we're going to make them."
"Ok, but it'll blow the project schedule."
"Doesn't matter."
"Well when you dole-out work, all I can ask is don't give me any tasks that you, I, and everybody on the dev team knows is utterly useless. I come to work to get work done, not screw around with pointless stuff."
* At the time he explained it, I asked the guy why couldn't we just use a SQL database file attached to the project, and have the test framework change the connection string to it instead of writing 600 lines of code that do nothing but mock-up data? The answer was BS, but more importantly: he hadn't thought of that before. Haha.
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But in this case, the database is third-party. The sprocs are third-party. I pointed out that we're not creating mocks, what we're doing is creating tests based on us reverse-engineering a third-party database. And if the third-party database changes, it's likely our tests would continue working fine. Which makes them utterly useless. I said instead of mocking up this database and sprocs, which will take ages, we should just write tests based on the database operation being a single atomic action.
In general, you don't want to waste your time testing other people's stuff (unless there's a very good reason to, such as needing to know whether the vendor is a fucking moron who doesn't test their own products). The DB and sprocs sound like they should be regarded as a sealed unit by your code.
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Well duh. Now convince the project manager of this project of that.
It's actually worse than "testing other people's stuff" because we're not, we're testing based on what we reverse-engineered the other people's stuff to do. So we could be testing on an accurate clone of their DB (at least until it changes), or we could be testing on an completely inaccurate copy of it that only behaves the same in the most superficial way.
The worst part, mocking this thing up will take probably at least a week. It's really super-complex, and those 12-or-so sprocs touch maybe 50+ tables. It's a HUGE waste of time on a project that already has a tight schedule.
I really hate working here, I thought I could get through 4 months without burning bridges with either this company or the contracting agency I'm going through, but I don't think I'll be able to make it.
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The worst part, mocking this thing up will take probably at least a week. It's really super-complex, and those 12-or-so sprocs touch maybe 50+ tables. It's a HUGE waste of time on a project that already has a tight schedule.
Sounds like the perfect sub-project for Mr. Technical Project Manager to have a go at himself, while you go and work on the other parts that actually need attention.
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I don't think she's a programmer at all. I mean she has "developer" in her title, but I can only assume that's a clerical error. She doesn't seem to understand anything about software development or testing.
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Is she reasonably new and from the Cleveland area? We fired a lady like that earlier this year. I'm getting flashbacks. I spent 5 hours sitting with her, ignoring 4 obvious bugs, to show her why unit testing is useful for replicating issues, while she kept whining "Can't you just, like, write the unit tests? You did it before!" Yeah, on my OWN code.
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I don't think she's a programmer at all.
Perfect. Writing pointless tests will keep her well away from the coalface where she might cause real trouble.
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I don't think she's a programmer at all. I mean she has "developer" in her title, but I can only assume that's a clerical error. She doesn't seem to understand anything about software development or testing.
And that's how you get to be a manager.
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I really hate working here, I thought I could get through 4 months without burning bridges with either this company or the contracting agency I'm going through, but I don't think I'll be able to make it.
Mmmm....real life rage-quit.
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Is she reasonably new and from the Cleveland area?
You'd hope so, but my gut feeling tells me people like that come 13 to a dozen.
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You'd hope so, but my gut feeling tells me people like that come 13 to a dozen.
Just as I suspected: carbs are the cause of all evil.
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After the first sentence I was expecting a Drew Carrey show reference.
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Just as I suspected: carbs are the cause of all evil.
My company has a gluten-free staff.
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I don't know if this is a new bug or not but I've seen a number of threads I was watching suddenly go to "Regular" and now I don't get notifications until I track 'em down, including this one. Anyone else seeing this?