When my phone rings and I see the number is from a certain customer's area code, I KNOW I'm going to be annoyed by whatever they say.
Posts made by jetcitywoman
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RE: Are you superstitious?
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RE: How about a good old fashioned rant?
Good point, and I honestly hadn't even thought of it. Now I just make excuses: I was working on two large projects simultaneously, only had about 3 weeks to complete this one and this one was up against a hard deadline, so I'm not sure I had time to investigate and implement an open-source library. Okay, excuses aside, the hard deadline is actually quite rare for my workplace, so now that I know about this, I can do it on future projects.
And Dgvid's right about combining programs of different languages in VMS, so there's no obstacle there. (The "magic" is only that the VMS engineers established long and long ago a standardized calling methodology for all programs AND the operating system, so passing data back and forth between modules is trivial. And actually, you don't even need to link them together. Totally independent programs can pass data and call each other by using the standard calling procedures.)
A personal observation on the use of parsing some of the XML in my coworker's Macro device driver: I privately wondered if that wasn't stupid. We already have drivers for tcpip sockets, so I thought we could just use one for this, and do all of the XML parsing in the application program. So I wondered why my project manager specified and quoted the project the way he did. We have several Macro programmers however, who may very well be put out of work if we just reused the old drivers.
I know you guys are tearing your hair out right now, reading that. I know. It's kind of dumb, if they want to stay employed, they should probably keep their skills current or at least become more flexible by learning other languages. On the other hand, these guys are our equivalent of brain surgeons, we don't want to ask them to become general practitioners. They're all late 50's or older so the odds of them finding other programming jobs with new skills are pretty low. And since they are extremely highly skilled in what they DO know, it would be a shame to just throw them away like yesterday's garbage. This crosses over into staffing concerns rather than just technology. And actually, given that this is a 30+ year old product using what is seen by the industry as obsolete skills and tools, we couldn't pay any young programmer enough work on this, so we need to keep these older guys to support the product. They're irreplaceable by the very nature of their being seen as obsolete. Isn't that a fun catch-22?
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RE: How about a good old fashioned rant?
Actually Cobol isn't that bad for parsing. Depending on what you need to do, we can do it with as little as one command:
INSPECT DATA-STRING TALLYING CHAR-CTR FOR CHARACTERS BEFORE "<MessageGroup>".
or some such. Not bad at all. Verbose yes. But then I've been thinking this week that XML is also verbose but at least Cobol isn't case-sensitive.
I actually feel worse for my compatriot working in assembler. He's got to do some amount of parsing too, and... well, the way you parse in assembler is character by painfully detailed character. I do try to do as much as I can in my Cobol program, but he likes a challenge and he's a total assembler geek so I don't want to ruin all his fun.
BTW, I don't passionately love Cobol. It was always toward the bottom of my list of all the languages I learned. I love our product, and the Cobol is only the price I pay for sticking with a beautiful product. I know it's still hard to imagine Cobol being associated with anything elegant and robust. But our product is, so there you go. That's how wonderful it is. My company actually has competing products written in things like .NET and C-whatever, but I can't tear myself away from the old workhorse who never lets anybody down. (Well, that and the fact that our product line is profitable while the newer products aren't. Ahem!)
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RE: How about a good old fashioned rant?
@stratos said:
I hope for your sanity your not actually doing that yourself? There are quite a few libraries out there that will not only help you in building the XML, but also verifying that its valid to some schema you hopefully maintain.
Ah, now you're going to say that *I'm* the WTF. We're "old school", working on a 30+ year old product that I actually passionately love. My coworker wrote the device driver in assembler and I'm working in Cobol. We don't do any of that fancy Winders bullhocky here (and we walk to work uphill in the snow every day). I know it makes you guys cringe to hear that, but it's really a stable system, easily and quickly customizable. Part of my frustration was having to wait several hours for bimbo to send her Windows logs off to her engineers to tell us what was wrong, and then when they tell me it takes me 5 minutes to fix my program. We're very nimble, if old fashioned. So I'm not sure if any new libraries would help us. And having said that, they didn't pay us enough to go full-hog parsing the XML for every possible message variation i.e. support XML fully. This was only a 3-week project on our end. We searched the messages for exactly the tag we wanted, grabbed the data from it, and ignored the rest.
@stratos said:
amusing, but i kinda agree with that. If its not too much trouble to do and increases the visibility of errors in the process i'm all for it. If for whatever reason their NAK didn't reach you, they now know that they have to try and send it again or send of some warning mail.
It wasn't alot of trouble to do, but we can't see the benefit (to us) for doing it. It's just a rule. They don't care if we actually do anything with their messages, only that we ACK them. Also, if we fail to ACK all they do is keep sending the same error message over and over. That's why I couldn't accomplish a thing for the first two days. My software was failing to parse properly, and even after I'd fixed it, their software was obsessing over the old mis-formatted messages from the day before.
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RE: How about a good old fashioned rant?
No CDATA in sight. A few people have looked at their messages and told me that it's not standard XML. It may be a bad attitude, but I don't care enough to look up what standard XML looks like. I just want to code it the way they say and get the hell out. :-)
They are embedding the original bad message inside a <originaldocument> tag. It's not so bad, it's just that they didn't tell us they were going to do that. My partner and I also can't tell the difference between how they're using NAK and error messages, they seem interchangeable. Oh, and they insist that we send an ACK to their NAK, which is amusing if nothing else.
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RE: How about a good old fashioned rant?
Funny, I was thinking earlier that it's bringing out the Y chromosome in me. I was ranting to myself that their system is acting like a bad wife holding grudges and my system has to tell it "yes dear" just to shut it the hell up.
Anyway, I thought I should elaborate a little more on why we're not acking their error message. We're trying but they're not using standard XML and they've embedded the original "bad" message inside the error, so our parser tripped over it. No matter, we're in the early stages of a custom new interface so we're having to code to their spec which we do commonly. But in those early problematic stages of working out the bugs of an interface, it's probably not a good idea to queue messages forever like they are. When one end trips and falls over bad message formatting, you really need to drop the connection and start afresh after the software is fixed.
Back to nontechnical ranting, it's also a wasted business trip because I've been working in a room alone all week. No need to physically access any hardware, and I haven't seen anybody face to face. My counterpoint at the other software vendor is making me email her to let her know when I'm ready to test and then she calls me back. And she's only a business analyst, completely unable to diagnose problems or fix them on her end, so there's been ALOT of sitting around waiting.
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How about a good old fashioned rant?
So I'm onsite at a customer location this week, testing a new interface to a 3rd party software system which is located elsewhere. I'm in integration hell. Last week the other software vendor kept insisting that we test the interface before the T1 was installed by having us email them XML data output from our program. Okay, fine. This week it's become apparent to me that it was a total waste of time, as I suspected. Always, always, always get your infrastructure in place FIRST, and then test.
So Monday I show up onsite, no router at one end. Tuesday I show up again, still working on the network. Late afternoon we finally get connectivity, and immediately have errors. Hey this is a new interface so errors out of the starting gate are to be expected. Other than having wasted almost two days onsite websurfing because they weren't ready, I'm copacetic. Keep in mind my customer paid for this trip, so I'm a little annoyed at the wasted time. Oh well, keep on truckin.
Today the other vendor and I spend all day butting heads. Their system queues up messages, and refuses to proceed to the next message until after I've ack'ed the first one. Normally this is fine, but it's not robust enough to handle problems. For example, the error we ran into yesterday - badly formatted XML on my part, which I had my programmer fix overnight. Try to start testing again today... no dice because they INSIST that we ack the error message their system sends us from yesterdays bad messages.
I have them clear their message buffer and try again. But there's some weird network glitch and it takes about an hour to clear. When we finally get the connection back up, they start processing messages we sent an hour ago and then sending us errors because we didn't ack them an hour ago and aren't acking them now. I'm having my programmer fix our end so that it acks all errors they send us and immediately throw them away just to clear the buffer and allow us to start fresh.
It goes something like this:
1. we send subscription request
2. they ack it
3. they send subscription response (kind of another ack)
4. we send a heartbeat
5. they send an error because we didn't ack a message from an hour ago when the network was down
(this happens 5 times then they drop the socket)
6. regain connection, we send a subscription request
7. they ack it
8. they send a subscription response
9. we send a heartbeat
10. they send an error because we never acked the error from before they dropped the socket (#5), etc etc.
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RE: Why users only make things worse
I'm starting to think that Morbs is our resident mime artist because he always pops in to handily illustrate something the last poster said. Thanks for the chuckle Morbs, I'm in integrator hell this week and needed it.
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RE: Project Managers
@element[0] said:
people copying an extra space at the end of a password in an email and not being able to log in(not a wtf in itself but when the same person calls you several times a week with that problem it gets a bit old)
Awesome, this one's a major fail. I'm impressed in the sense that I can see a clueless person easily doing it, and me wanting to slap the crap out of him the 3rd time he did it.
Having said that, we don't have PM's that bad either, only users. Our most clueless pm's just waste developer time on conference calls that don't apply to the developer and passing software problem logs to the wrong developers. Annoying, but not major failures. Send some PMI literature to your organizations upper management and see if they get the hint.
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RE: FTP WTF
This isn't ideal because there could be a huge load of crap in their directory, but couldn't you get around their silly rule by using mget and just grab everything that's there?
It would teach them, too, if you happened to get confidential data meant for other customers, or proprietary internal-use-only data because you had to get around their silly rule about the ls command.
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RE: 31337
He's in training for moderator-hood. He's harsh but fair, so I think I'll vote for him when the time comes. (Plus he likes me better cuz I'm a girl, I get whatever I want here. muhaha)
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RE: Job Interviews
Vechni reminded me of something and since the OP is female maybe it's a possibility so I may as well mention it. I don't actually know if this happens to women in other countries, but in the U.S. women are still subtly taught that modesty is next to Godhood and talking about yourself is obnoxious bragging. Remember, I said it's very subtle, very few women even realize this consciously but it does affect the way they present themselves. And what do you do in a job interview? Talk about yourself, your accomplishments and try to impress the interviewer. Ack!
If you feel uncomfortable talking about yourself, it's probably being picked up by the interviewers as lack of confidence in your skills. Professional women need to fight the impulse to be modest about their accomplishments and learn to be comfortable talking about them. Are your skills really good? That's great, you should be proud of them and be happy explaining how good they are. In an interview situation this translates as confidence and also passion for your work. And THAT really impresses interviewers.
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RE: Job Interviews
@Mel said:
(I've had people flat-out not believe I'm a developer based entirely on me being a girl, and have also been told *at work*, by my 'manager' I shouldn't be carrying heavy things because "it's dangerous for future pregnancies").
I'll let the guys address the interviewing question while I (seemingly the lone regular female on this board) address this. Girlfriend, get the **ll out of that country if they make assumptions like that. Go to a place that knows women are people too. The IT industry in the U.S. is male-dominated, but in my 20-year career here I've *NEVER* been faced with anything like this. Please, for your own sanity and self-respect, find some place better.
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RE: Evil Crocs
Yeah, I don't get them either. Feet have an especially hard time coping with things like fungus so you need matierals that can keep them clean and dry. Plastic is NOT one of them.
BTW, when I saw the topic header I thought this was something about Pearls Before Swine. Stephan Pastis rocks!
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RE: How do you sell software? By fucking your legitimate buyers...
@morbiuswilters said:
Creative efforts always help. I remember one PC game from the 80s that had those "quiz" questions on start-up that only had answers in the manual. I didn't have the manual, but the game would let you play anyway. It was a "upgrade your spaceship as you do missions" type game but if you didn't answer the security question on start-up it altered the game so you would be pursued by the "Intergalactic Police" for the crime of copyright infringement throughout the game. If you were damn good you could escape them and keep playing for some time but even if you weren't it gave you a taste of the game and made you want more.
Ooh, that's the best suggestion I've seen to date. Why not have a little fun with it?
I'm not a pirate either, but deeply offended that some software companies treat me like one. I used to have a game machine at home running Windows XP. It turned out to be rather a dog of a machine with various parts failing every six months, requiring Windows re-installs or just re-validation. I even discovered that the original Windows CD that shipped with my machine had an invalid CD key. When I researched online for that kind of problem, I saw that other people were referred by Microsoft back to the vendor who sold them their machine. But by then my machine was 3 years old and the PC company had no knowledge of me or my purchase. I was tempted to turn them into Microsoft, but didn't want to bother with the research or phone calls it would have taken to figure out how.
Just as Vista was coming out with all the bad press about it's DRM, some part of the machine failed again. I pitched the pos and bought a new Mac.
Expensive as they are, personal computers are short-lived commodity items. It doesn't make sense to pretend that the software can be installed once and work fine forever after.
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RE: Need to defibrulate my career
@bstorer said:
Besides, you have two livers, so it's not a big deal that
wethey took one.If that's true, the Morbius is more of a freak than I thought he was.
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RE: What impresses you?
@chebrock said:
Most of us use several programs a day, an operating system or two, a framework here and there. When was the last time you used something and said to yourself "this is a really well designed piece of software"?
I have a few. Strangely for the software world, I use as evidence that the item "stands the test of time". For example:
Somewhere in the early history of my company, someone wrote a precompiler for Cobol. It fixes alot of the limitations of Cobol, like not being able to put a variable/constant into a variable definition. (That is, Cobol requires VAR PIC X(5) but the precompiler allows me to do VAR PIC X([VARSIZE]). It also allows macros and some other useful features. To my knowledge, this precompiler has never needed to be tweaked or bugfixed in at least the last 15 years. It's the one thing that allows me - an avid Cobol-hater - to keep working with "Cobol" happily.
The application I work on is a 911 dispatching system. We're always modifying and customizing the thing for our customers. Motorola sells new mobile computers, so we write new interface drivers, mapping comes along, we write new drivers, etc. Plus they ask for new functionality all the time. It's pretty exciting. It's written in a combination of Cobol and Macro (assembler). But what impresses me is that this system was originally coded to run on DEC Vax machines back in the 1970's. We've since "ported" it to run on the Alpha platform and now on the Integrity platform, where "porting" is little more than recompiling. It's just too cool for words that this thing's been going for over 30 years with the hardware platform being swapped out from under it twice.
Which of course leads me to the reason why that is possible... VMS (marketed as OpenVMS) which is the OS that was written for Vaxes (32-bit), ported to Alphas (32 or 64 bit), and ported again to Integrity machines (64-bit). Yes, I'm a bigot, but I'll happily claim that VMS is the most elegantly-designed OS ever. I love the VMS engineers and worship at their feet. A few weeks ago some ditzy business analyst tried to explain to me and a coworker how clustering works using Windows as her example and I almost laughed in her face.
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RE: Yesterday at our oravanian helpdesk
My vote for most annoying sound is the fire alarm in my office. I'm a quiet person and prefer somewhat quiet environments. Plus since I work in an area that is mostly IT people, it's generally a quiet office. So when they do the yearly fire drill (without advanced notice for some reason), I first have to peel myself off the ceiling before I can exit the building... generally mad as a wet cat. Is it really that important to deafen everybody in the name of fire safety?
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RE: Six sigma WTF?
Cases closed doesn't really measure quality when (as one of our groups does) you change the disposition of most cases from "bug/error" to "works as designed" or "enhancement request" thereby shoving the issue off to a different group or quality status. And we don't even do Six Sigma.
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RE: You hit the Ed! --more--
Yep, me too. Been playing off and on for the last 20 years, never have won the game even a single freaking time, not even by playing in "debug" or "Wizard" mode. Very frustrating. It's got some sort of magical Murphy's Law built into it so that for every advantage you try to give yourself, the game slams two disadvantages back at you. Or you'll be doing great and then one day all your luck turns around and you have to deal with a series of increasingly-impossible-to-beat foes. Damn nymph robs you down to your underwear followed immediately by a very large swarm of killer bees.
There's a usenet group dedicated to the game. They refer to the Murphy's Law effect as the "RNG" which literally stands for Random Number Generator, but everybody superstitiously refers to it as a godlike entity. Think you're doing well? Haha, the RNG will fix your little red wagon!
I think it's the million-and-one little whimsical touches that they've coded into it that keep me coming back. Pets, ponies, inside jokes, references to science and science fiction, etc. It's how I learned what Schoedinger's Cat was. And sometimes very obscure things. I've heard that if you play a knight character, never give your horse a name, and manage to finish the game with that same original horse, it says something about "escaped on a horse with no name". (Song reference.)
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RE: One Way to Abuse COBOL
Thank you! You're pretty sweet, so I'll give you a tip.... if you really want to attract the ladies, maybe you shouldn't include the word "wilt" in your online name.
HTH
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RE: One Way to Abuse COBOL
Kudos to the OP for an elegant solution. I think I could have figurd it out if I was the maintenance programmer, unless it used 1-letter variable names and other rot. I've never worked on IBM machines, but I've pounded Cobol for most of my work life on (Open)VMS machines. At least VMS gives you memory management and pukes the process when you run off the end of the array. Oh, and I don't know if this is standard in newer versions of Cobol or if it's a VMS extension, but you can now declare variable-length arrays, although it's wordy to declare and to use. (Go figure!) It's actually so cumbersome that I rarely bother.
I hate Cobol. The only thing that's made it acceptable to me over the years is that some brilliant person way back in the annals of history of my company wrote a very elegant pre-compiler that fixes all of Cobol's limitations and idiocies. Cobol won't let you declare variable-length strings, but our precompiler lets you do it at compile time, at least. It also gives us macro capabilities.
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RE: You hit the Ed! --more--
Perhaps he'll know what you mean if you mention the most notorious of all of the "roguelikes": Nethack. It's a lot funner than a text-based game ought to be, but so insidious as to be nearly impossible to win. Well, without cheating, that is.
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RE: Moderator WTF: Revisited
Wait, after having posted that, I looked again. My post has a delete button, but the other ones don't. So it looks like this is already in place. How is Jeff deleting other people's posts? Are CS privileges hackable?
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RE: Moderator WTF: Revisited
Is it possible to just remove the ability for anybody to delete posts they didn't originally write? Or is this another one of those configuration things that Alex would have to do but won't?
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RE: The Epitome of WTF
@snoofle said:
16,000 man years to develop something that took the authors of *nix - what - a couple of man months to design and code the first time around?
Spectacular example of [mis]management not having a clue. Any properly designed system can be broken down into chunks sufficiently small and simple that any code monkey can bang it out relatively quickly.
Yep, my husband mentioned that about the *nix difference also.
The book makes no small mention of the "Process" that IBM used at the time for any project. Got idea? Run it through every company division to see if anybody had any input or arguments against it. (And I do mean EVERY division. The Mainframe teams had input over the printer teams and the minicomputer teams, and vica versa. Which meant that if the mainframe team felt that a minicomputer project idea had the potential to reduce it's mainframe market share, it would do everything it could to nix the project.)
Everybody agree it's a good idea? Run it through committees at every level of the company to flesh out the design, including the international portions of the company to make sure the project works for foreign markets. Disagreements about the design? Run it through an escalating series of committees that ended with the Management Committtee who were the end-all-be-all decision-makers. What they said was law.
Finally got a workable design? Collect a team of programmers and analysts to implement it. And by "team" we're talking about thousands of bodies. Disagreements during implementation? Work it up through the same escalating series of committees until it ended up at the Management Committee again.
Not surprisingly a great many projects failed before seeing the light of day.
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RE: The Epitome of WTF
@ammoQ said:
Impressive. Instead of 1000 lines, there were only -600 lines left. After IBM developers wrote another 600 lines, the file was empty again
Hey, you must work for IBM!
Seriously, I could have the percentage wrong - I'm typing from memory and the book is at home. But it implied that their metrics somehow combined the Microsoft code output with the IBM code output to end up with a negative number. I'm starting to learn project accounting here in my company and I can sort of see how this works. When I was young and naive, I thought that accounting was a hard skill that stressed precision and accuracy. Now I'm old and cynical and know that it's actually a black art and corporations manage to combine all kinds of sorcery into the numbers. I'm still puzzled that the SEC hasn't caught on yet....
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RE: The Epitome of WTF
@emurphy said:
Calling 16,000 wasted man-years less than "spectacular" is TRWTF
Not to mention humorous. I think he works for IBM.
BTW, by posting this, I'm not trying to slam IBM, really. I know they've since come back to their core business and are doing really well again. Cheers to them! But they did go through a phase of spectacular wtfery.
Another less breathtaking thing mentioned in the book was when Gates n Crew were trying to work with the IBM developers on OS/2. The two groups had completely different development methods. IBM was slow and meticulous. Their programmers' performance was measured by lines of code. Gates' guys were fast and efficient. They would make snarky comments about each other. At one point (I assume to make a point) the Microsoft guys rewrote some of the IBM'ers code, reducing it by 160%. The developers were not amused. But I thought it was amusing that when IBM management ran their performance metrics (remember, lines of code), they went back to Gates and asked why his programmers had negative performance. (Bunch of slackers!)
How can anybody not find these things amusing?
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RE: The Epitome of WTF
Sheesh, so many times, the WTF is that I have to point out the obvious WTF to some of you people. Okay, listen closely:
4000 people * 4 years = 16,000 man-years flushed down the toilet. If you want some more fun, take a guess at some average salary and multiply that in too.
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The Epitome of WTF
A few weeks ago someone in the JoelonSoftware forums recommended to me a book called Big Blues, about how IBM nearly went out of business during the rise of the PC industry (and Microsoft). I'm only about half done with it and all I can say is that IBM makes my company (and Snoofle's which sometimes sounds alot like mine) look pretty tame. They seemed to have written the book on how to kill projects by committee-ing them to death. Here is a really breath-taking example, and the epitome of "worse than failure":
In 1987, any model of DEC Vax could talk to any other model (using DEC's proprietary-but-good networking protocol called DECNET), and they could also talk to other machines. Apple machines had Appletalk. PC's were starting to be networked via early TCP/IP. IBM's mainframe and minicomputer models had no networking protocol and couldn't even talk to each other. People used to say that if you wanted two IBM machines to talk to each other, you had to put a Vax between them. IBM didn't like the snarky comments, so they attempted to develop their own networking protocol.
After 4000 people worked for 4 years on it, the project was cancelled as a failure.
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RE: How to hold a grudge
Having said that, I've been tempted to do exactly what the OP found for a few irritating users who cause too much trouble. But note I said "tempted". I know better than to actually do it.
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RE: How to hold a grudge
Ugh, I found something like this in one of our customer's systems. (Sit down. Ready? Every one of our customer's systems is customized. Yeah, I know. Fun always.) I was appalled because I still try to adhere to proper programming practices. But having code that says (pseudocode):
if incident.location == "123 MAIN ST" (actually the customer's office address)
do this stuff
else
do this other stuff
endifis not even in the realm of custom code. It's just bad and the guy who did it (yes, I know who you are) shouldn't have told the customer it was do-able.
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RE: Work space interruptus
If you are actually able to get a cubicle, try to get one with 5-foot high walls. I've seen some progammers put into cubes with walls barely higher than their desks and it doesn't really do much for privacy or concentration than sitting in an open room. My cube has 5.5 foot walls and works fairly well. Companies are generally funny about that, though. They want to pay as little as possible. Another problem you'll have is that your coworkers might see you as a prima dona. If you are able to get some privacy for times when you need to concentrate, be sure to allocate time every day to join the frolics and socialize.
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RE: Programming Misunderstood
Ack, I've been in that kind of environment too. You see it alot when you work for an IT dept that supports a non-IT business - or back in my "yute" it was working for MIS departments for general businesses. One place I worked, I distinctly got the feeling that the janitorial staff had more prestige than the programmers. You can never really overturn that kind of thing because it's such a subtle prejudice in the company politics.
Regarding the commments about the amount of typing involved... I used to worry (when I worked in the above type of environment) that management thought all I did was type all day like a secretary. Which isn't meant as a slam against secretarial staff, just that we were paid so much more than them, I was sure the managers would at some point go "why am I paying that secretary so much?" It probably didn't help that I was female and young. I also occasionally got the feeling that managment thought I was "watching tv" all day. I couldn't just sit and think out a problem while staring at the screen.
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RE: Programming Misunderstood
Yeah, it's painfully common. Who here hasn't offered to do a hobbyist website or website for a one-man entrepeneurial business and been asked to make the site look like Amazon.com.
Another good example was a company I worked for in the 1990's. We had one of those large-box Vaxes. It was dog slow becuase we'd been using it for about 5 years without any upgrades. Management was deaf to our requests for hardware upgrades. Finally we got them to agree to bring DEC reps in to analyze the system performance. When the report came back that the CPU was 90% busy, management's reply was "See, you don't need an upgrade. You still have 10%!
Funnily enough, this particular manager was also the one who wrote memos in Excel. Yep, all the text in cell A-1. I saw it myself.
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RE: Not quite getting it..
OMG, I get this kind of thing all the time too, customers and coworkers alike. The bottom half of my face is numb from grinding my teeth so much.
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RE: HP shatters excessive packaging world record
Your explanation is probably correct with one little exception...
@Aaron said:
costs less to send one big box than two small ones, so they throw it into a bigger box (probably the smallest they have on hand)
Note in the picture in the OP that they've clearly taped two large boxes together. Thus it's still pretty ludicrous. Maybe the shipping dept was bored that day and having a little fun.
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RE: The beginning of the end
Yep, they're surely going to revoke my woman card now. Heh.
Anyway, back to the OT, still on my mind of course. Referring to a couple of posters who've questioned rhetorically how soon before we go out of business, or that we'll deserve it when it happens... I think that when the corporate annual revenues are in the multi-billion dollars, a few million lost here and there probably aren't even noticable. If any body wayy up there notices the negative numbers in our division profit and loss statements, they'll only dump our division. So maybe that's why it's not such a huge problem (from the overal corporate perspective).
Of course there is the very clear problem that we have no focus. The CEO only cares about the multi-billion dollar bottom line and the shareholders because there's no way he can manage 200,000 employees in 150 divisions. The division heads have their own value statements which interestingly don't include shareholders. What Dgvid posted earlier was actually the value statement from my division, not the overall corporation. So you'll notice that losing good customers doesn't technically violate any of those values. Who cares if an ex-customer is happy or not? Not to mention that there are no metrics in place to make sure the division is accomplishing those values.
Then the bosses below the division heads only care about their department budgets, so don't really care about the division values, etc. The proposal group, like any other group, is required to adhere to their yearly budget. So nobody in the company has a common goal. I think this happens alot in huge corporations. I think that the management team expects that if everybody down the chain adhere's to their own objectives, profit will bubble up to the top and it will all be good. But they don't seem to realize that internal conflicts of interest do happen. I want to learn more about that. If I can see it, surely other people can too!
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RE: The beginning of the end
Ugh, don't encourage the "feminazi's". They've already tried to change stupid things like that. It's what got us into the whole extremely awkward "him or her" "he/she" crap that book writers now feel obligated to do. Also cuimbersome things like chairperson and peoplekind. People who are offended by pronouns need some stronger adjectives thrown at them to keep them busy. Heh. Or we should develop a gender-neutral pronoun like "pizmit" or whatever.
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RE: The beginning of the end
(Darn browser and/or CS. I'm too lazy to try to fix it now, so...)
MW posted: "And in real life, frequently. Getting upset about sexism on the Internet is plain stupid, though. It's not like my joke is resulting in any kind of real harm to women. People like OzPeter who get their panties in a twist are actually the people I'm trying to mock, anyway. It seems most women are smart enough, self-confident enough and have enough of a sense of humor to laugh at stuff like this. It also has the bonus of pissing off self-righteous twats."
Hmm, actually I rarely get that in real life. Maybe I run in more mature circles, though. Or maybe since I don't look like Jessica Rabbit, men don't hit on me. It did happen occasionally back in college, but not at all at work. Probably a combination of maturity levels (for everybody) in the two stages of life, combined with men in the corporate world having been beaten to death with sexual harrassment training and policies. On the one hand, we don't have to suffer being touched by creeps at work or called pet names, on the other hand you can't compliment someone on dressing nicely either. Good and bad.
Anyway, also I do think that MOST women are offended by this kind of thing, which is perhaps why they tend to "go underground" on the net/www or use male login names. In my experience, most women are way too easily offended by all manner of inocuous things, which makes men (IMO) much easier to get along with. I mean, who here hasn't known a woman to respond to an innocent comment with "What do you mean by that?" While at the same time, how many times do men greet their buddies with comments like "how you doing asshole?" and it's all good? Men are from Mars, Women are from... blah blah etc.
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RE: The beginning of the end
A little more explanation for the non-Americans here who were shocked by MW's "job offer": this is what women (when they don't hide behind a male-sounding login-name) deal with on a daily basis on the Intertubez. It's been like that since before there was a Web and the world was primarily just Usenet. I've been around since then, so I'm very used to it. And actually, MW is really on the affectionate side of sexism rather than the offensive side, so I usually chuckle at his efforts.
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RE: The beginning of the end
Dgvid is right about that. It's something I'm going to pay more attention to when I search for companies from now on. I've also been reading business books and one key thing that keeps popping up is that the best companies really focus on their product/market. They identify what they can be the best at and strive to stay that way. Where I am now is one of the results of the 1990's merger parties that many corporations were having. The primary corporation has nothing to do with my particular market segment. It's like I'm working for AOL who got acquired by Time Warner... (I don't work for AOL, but the situation is identical.) Now that so many good companies have been ruined by mergers and acquisitions, maybe I can get into a good medium-sized company with matching ethics and it will stay that way.
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RE: The beginning of the end
@jetcitywoman said:
In the 6 years I've been here, nobody's gotten fired for any kind of incompetence - and this is only the latest and largest and most high-up example.
Actually I have to correct myself here.... it's not the most high-up example. In another thread somewhere here, I mentioned how they changed our timecard/expense reporting system over the Christmas break which was a real fiasco. Actually they changed our entire accounting system and procedures. It was inconvenient for us worker-bees, but I've also heard from several bosses up that it cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars. Multiply that by all of the division heads.... The "team" who was in charge of that project was one of those very high up groups that included the corporate CEO. Instead of terminations, they granted themselves an award for it. So yeah... great place to get a good paycheck despite crappy performance. Unfortunately I have a much higher work ethic and this stuff makes me very sad.
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RE: The beginning of the end
Thank you Snoofle, you rock. I do indeed have experience with all of those items, except for budgeting and calculating cost estimates or forecasts. I'm learning that now. I've also been doing CBT training based on the Project Management Institute guidelines. I'm just worried that prospectives will look at my resume and not see the "management" or "supervisor" title anywhere and throw it away. But I'll definitely update my resume with your suggestions, and it will totally rock.
@Zylon said:
@jetcitywoman said:
We "lost" the $20 million dollar bid to a competitor because, according to management, our business development & proposal team has already used all of their budget for the year.
So who's getting fired over this?
In the 6 years I've been here, nobody's gotten fired for any kind of incompetence - and this is only the latest and largest and most high-up example. It's really ironic that twice a year they award "Excellence" awards to people because as a company we're the epitome of mediocre.
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RE: The beginning of the end
We're run by idiot bean-counters, as you can see. God knows what they were thinking. It's so sad that nobody in the chain of command is able to reverse the decision. It's completely breath-taking.
And here I am stuck at a transition point in my career. Long time Cobol programmer (which nobody wants), decades of experience with an OS that few companies even know still exists, and they pay me so well that taking an entry level job to learn current technology and re-prove myself would be very painful. One of my favoritest project managers is teaching me how to do project financials, and I'm working on being ready to "step into place" when a project manager position opens up. After I get management on my resume then I can bounce anywhere as a project manager. So I'm stuck here for a year or two. I only hope it lasts that long. Incompetence of that scale makes you wonder.
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The beginning of the end
Yesterday at work we had an "all-hands" meeting and learned a really important and depressing thing. One of our best customers who have been with us for 25 years has gone out to bid for a new system. They got grant money for it, so they weren't allowed to "sole-source" it to us, they had to open it up to fair bidding. Pretty standard, no biggie.
We "lost" the $20 million dollar bid to a competitor because, according to management, our business development & proposal team has already used all of their budget for the year. That's right, we couldn't afford the few thousand dollars to write up and put in a bid, so we're out 20mill in future revenues.
It's only a matter of time....