How To Demoralize Employees: A DIY Guide for Terrible Companies
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Overhearing other employees complaining about the fact that nobody here ever does any work. "Yes, they keep telling me they have a meeting to set the delivery date, but when do they actually write the solution?" Etc.
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Are you asking would I try to reason with Jeff when he clearly holds an irrational position? Currently my shoulder aliens tell me to say no.
Well...I might reason with him using a pipe wrench but that would be an exercise in insanity at that point.
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No, I was challenging this assertion of yours:
But even @codinghorror can be susceptible to reason.
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No, I was challenging this assertion of yours:
MathNerdCNU:
But even @codinghorror can be susceptible to reason.I might reason with him using pipe wrench
He might be susceptible to that sort of reasoning.
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So my company decided to test who needs admin rights on their computer by randomly yanking them.
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Have a :( . This is another case in which it is appropriate.
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So my company decided to test who needs admin rights on their computer by randomly yanking them.
In the 90s I was contracting for Lucent. Giant building. My floor, the 3rd, was a cube farm: 16 or so rows of 2x4 cube slots in various configurations, plus a line of cubes around that core. So really big. I was in a 4-man cube and for no good reason I didn't have a PC, which meant I had a vt100 or maybe vt220 or something connected to a Unix box.
One day it quit working so I called IT. Turns out they had wanted to decommission that network for a while, but they didn't know who was using it, but knew that if they asked, everyone would need it. So they shut it off to see who screamed. I think I was one of the few who did, but at least I got a PC fairly quickly after that.
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What a place that was. Stories about people dying on Mondays originated there. Almost every Monday the ~2.5 years I was there, when I got in, there was an ambulance, usually from some middle-aged sarariman having a heart attack.
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TIL "sarariman."
Sigh. log out and don't come back until you've at least read Neuromancer.
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Strictly speaking I don't know if "sarariman" applies to non-Japanese, but I don't think "salaryman" has the same connotation.
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Reading about anti-patterns on this site
Hearing about them in Tech podcasts that I listen toAnd then realizing that's how my company does everything
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Do something extraordinary? 25 dollar best buy gift card (good luck successfully buying anything with it). Shitloads of overtime to save a multi million dollar account that has been spectacularly mismanaged? 100 dollar visa gift card. Fuck you.
My overtime to rework 3 entire accounts from first principles is less than we estimated to do the work in the first place. If you want to keep top flight rockstar savior grade talent (me? Humble? Watch who you're accusing!) with no gooey family obligations, you've gotta pay to play.
And that's on top of my death 400 ot hour death march for which we haven't agreed on compensation yet.
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death 400 ot hour death march
Over how long? I don't think I've recently gone past 300 hours in a year, but I get paid for it all.
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3rd week in may thru aug 30th. Have another 100 since then, all fixing management fuckups.
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So ~65 hours (total) per week, for ~4 months. Not fun.
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Had a ticket sent me way to grant access to a test environment folder on the network.
I'm a software developer.
The L1 help desk tech thought that we manage everything when it comes to a test environment. Including giving access to folders.
I'm pretty sure that I'm the only person in this entire company that understands the concept of separation of duties.
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Reading about anti-patterns on this siteHearing about them in Tech podcasts that I listen to
And then realizing that's how my company does everything
The "That Moment" thread is over
there.
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Do something extraordinary? 25 dollar best buy gift card (good luck successfully buying anything with it). Shitloads of overtime to save a multi million dollar account that has been spectacularly mismanaged? 100 dollar visa gift card. Fuck you.
I knew a guy who wrote a report that allowed a huge company to eliminate a dozen positions. They told him he was going to get a big reward. He told me he estimated it literally saved the company millions of dollars.
He never got anything but an attaboy.
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Shiiiiiiit.
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I knew a guy who wrote a report that allowed a huge company to eliminate a dozen positions.... He never got anything but an attaboy.
At least he didn't get his own position eliminated, I guess.
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At least he didn't get his own position eliminated, I guess.
That was how I expected the story to end. Or at least an explanation that keeping his job was the big reward.
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That was how I expected the story to end. Or at least an explanation that keeping his job was the big reward.
Nah, they just weren't sufficiently rewarding for someone who saved 'em a shitload of money. He told me nobody actually lost their jobs, everyone transferred to new ones. This was a factory, and the report was based on a BOM explosion: it calculated how many future orders starting today could be assembled based on parts on hand. These were the kind of boards that go into telco switching equipment and cost $50,000 or so, and are made up of lots and lots of pieces. Before this report, a small army of people did the same thing.
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We just gained the technology to mine that from our mainframe system two weeks ago. But quantity only. Still have no way to explode a BOM and see it's components without either ordering it or manually traversing it on the terminal ui.
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@blakeyrat, do you ever get the feeling that you're being paid a junior dev salary to do junior dev work really well, and then another salary lumped on top of that to stay quiet about how bad the systems are?
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That's insane, given that it was a standard ERP feature 15 years ago[1].
The report I'm talking about was more than that--it would do the explosions an all orders for today out to some point in the future, calculate how many of each inventory item was needed, down to individual pick-and-place resistors, and then (roughly) maximize the number of orders that could be built with stock currently on hand, as well as calculate what we needed to order.
[1] That's just how long I've known about it; I have no idea how much longer you could do that.
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You write really clean, nice, maintainable code. Your co-workers understand it easily.
They write convoluted, poorly designed, poorly named, poorly architected code. You struggle to understand how anyone that has worked in the field for more than a month would "think" to write code like that.
Guess who management thinks is a better developer.
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management thinks
There's your problem right there — either that you believe this happens, or that it actually does (badly), take your pick.
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The pinnacle of coding is where you take something that is logically all over the place and turn it into code that is so clear that nearly anyone can maintain it and none of those maintainers can conceive of doing it any other way. Making the hard become effortless, turning a big ball of mud into something with its own true logic and beauty; it's great when you can do it, and turn something that scares your cow-orkers away into something that is entirely unremarkable. It's the Zen of Refactoring.
And you can't usually explain how hard it is to do to anyone. Certainly not management.
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That's insane, given that it was a standard ERP feature 15 years ago[1].
We wrote our own ERP. 20 years ago.Many of our IT VP's used to be the highly paid consultants who designed and implemented it.
In theory, there's some competitive advantage in rolling our own ERP, because it allows us to gear to our specific market requirements. We exploit that routinely. Unfortunately, because we're so far behind the curve versus commodity ERP in many areas, we more than make up for it.
And then there's the mergers and acquisitions fiasco. In this industry, homegrown ERP is the rule (because again, competitive advantage). Nobody ever transitions a plant to the allegedly standard platform (except by brute force in a handful of occasions when two plants were combined), so anyone trying to do cross-plant work has a collossal fucking nightmare on their hands.
At present, our model for working with noncompliant plants is basically 'enter order demand into the standard system, and then fuck around in such a way that we also enter the demand in their system, and then fuck around in such a way that we get the closure data back'.
And then there are the plants that have adopted the standard platform minus the one or two parts they don't like.
And the plants that use the nonstandard platform minus the one or two parts they don't like, wherein they've implemented something in MS Access to fill the gap.Frankly, I'm fairly certain we could replace it all with SAP and be able to beat out the entire rest of the industry on the strength of our other flexibilities and competitive advantages.
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And you can't usually explain how hard it is to do to anyone. Certainly not management.
It's really not "hard" in the sense of it being an arduous task at which you have to apply learned skill carefully.It's hard in that it's an arduous task at which you have to apply an innate talent carefully. You either have the ability or you do not. You cannot learn to do it if you don't have the knack in the first place.
Yes, it's a high priesthood. But the fact of the matter is that 90% of us don't need this skill if 10% of us are allowed to use it and are respected for it.
The other 90% do need to have the innate ability to think logically, of course.
The programming community today is a lot like the catholic church. You have a handful of really godly folks doing really awesome work at all levels. You have armies of people who are legitimately doing the lord's work at all levels. You also have a bunch of jackass pretenders who like to fuck children at all levels.
Ideally this would be sorted out so that the upper echelons - popes, cardinals, bishops and shit - are all the really godly folks with true divine inspiration, and the lay priests are just doing the lord's work. And all the kiddy fiddlers are burned at the stake. But it'll never be like that because someone invited self-interested middle managers to the party.
.... Yeah, that's actually a really good analogy to the state of software development. I need to change careers.
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Frankly, I'm fairly certain we could replace it all with SAP and be able to beat out the entire rest of the industry on the strength of our other flexibilities and competitive advantages.
When switching to SAP would be considered to be a competitive advantage… no, I don't think I can bear to complete that thought.
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When switching to SAP would be considered to be a competitive advantage… no, I don't think I can bear to complete that thought.
QFT...but it also means there's probably any number of other packages that would give them a boost.
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QFT...but it also means there's probably any number of other packages that would give them a boost.
This was my first thought, but I was too demoralized at the thought of someone longing for SAP that I just couldn't bring myself to say it. Thank you for speaking for the speechless.
We've had a lot of posts talking about way to accomplish the title, but @Weng totally answer-golfed us with a 3 letter answer:
#SAP
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We've had a lot of posts talking about way to accomplish the title, but @Weng totally answer-golfed us with a 3 letter answer:
Best/worst part: SAP is actually in the mix. My understanding is that we use it to bill out to certain customers in a certain business unit. It's attached to our mainline ERP systems for that business unit by homegrown interface layers and is updated in monthly batch jobs. That business unit's ERP systems are completely disconnected from the mainline ERP systems - if anything has to cross the wall, it gets manually keyed as if it were coming in from outside.SAP
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SAP
Sap is juice in Dutch. I could go for that.
The Foul Evil that is SAP and come forth out the German Hell Fire, ... no thanks.
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Sap is juice in Dutch. I could go for that.
Maple sap that has had most of the water boiled away. Yum!
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The pinnacle of coding is where you take something that is logically all over the place and turn it into code that is so clear that nearly anyone can maintain it and none of those maintainers can conceive of doing it any other way. Making the hard become effortless, turning a big ball of mud into something with its own true logic and beauty; it's great when you can do it, and turn something that scares your cow-orkers away into something that is entirely unremarkable. It's the Zen of Refactoring.
And you can't usually explain how hard it is to do to anyone. Certainly not management.
That's the way it is with the Perl site that I inherited. It's a mix of long scripts, with no general direction. Now it's a Python model of code, and people have no idea what I did with it.
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Guess who management thinks is a better developer.
Of course your coworkers are - they can write and understand others' code. You can only do the former.
</sarcasm><I know this tag as well as the previous one won't be displayed, that's the point>
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That's the way it is with the Perl site that I inherited. It's a mix of long scripts, with no general direction. Now it's a Python model of code, and people have no idea what I did with it.
I'm guilty of writing terrible Perl code that was in use in a website for most of the last 15 years. Last I heard, someone else finally rewrote a lot of it in Python.
Granted, I highly doubt it was the site you're talking about since I know the guy who was rewriting it, but it'd be humorous if it was.
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Yeah, much different site
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Had it out with my boss today, wow it went differently than expected.
He was actually really understanding, not upset at all as far as I could determine. When he asked my reasons for not being a cultural fit (basically the bullet points above, but phrased nicer), his answers were more along the lines of, "yes, we lack a lot of things to attract talent, but you know there's nothing I can promise in the short term to resolve those."
I even mentioned the "collaboration" thing.
Anyway, it sounds like he's going to call my contracting company and cut the contract short. I told him the project I'm on (after being booted from the big one) will probably take a week and a half or two weeks to get into decent shape.
So I guess we'll see what happens.
Went way better than I expected though. What a relief.
Somewhat unrelated, but the guy who I "swapped" with after I got booted from the project came up to me this morning and said, "wow, X is a total control freak. I don't know whether to thank you or curse you for putting me on this project, now I have to work with him." It always makes you feel better to have your judgements backed-up by other people.
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BOO! Where are the fireworks! Where is blakey standing on the balcony, threatening to jump if he gets fired!? I expected better.
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Haha balcony.
You obviously do not have a good mental image of the type of beige block buildings from hell I'm working in.
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Oh, so that's why you didn't do it. I understand. Maybe next time.
You could have at least slammed your head against the wall and pretended the boss had punched you.
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You could have at least slammed your head against the wall and pretended the boss had punched you.
No, he would have broken the wall. Then they'd sue him for damages.
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I doubt that works after Fight Club.
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Next on your job search: company with balcony
