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I forgot this thread existed when I made mine yesterday so we're even
Thread: Work rants |OT|
Official Thread
Jesus Christ. We have to do some mandatory online trainings on a regular basis, a lot of compliance stuff but also regarding tools. So I have a MS365 organization tools training now. It's in English, but they hired a German consultancy to do it for whatever reason. So now I'm listening to a dumb ass insecure young German woman, talking for 2.5h. She's doing the presentation voice, overly excited, over-emphasizing her words, with a strong German accent, doing all the really basic grammar mistakes like "people who has time".
It's so tiring to listen to her. And I even have to actively participate.
It's so tiring to listen to her. And I even have to actively participate.
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2.5h listening online for a training course? Damn that is torturous. :/
I'm in the same boat though this is a technical course to learn the 3rd party software we're integrating. 4 hours a day for 6 fucking days with impenetrable eastern european accents. Eugh.
In other work rant related stuff - I love the pay but the current job is so fucking corporate. Full of non-jobs, who I'm sure are nice enough but I think even they would struggle to explain what they actually do. Bullshit jobs. Product Owners, Workstream Managers, Business Analysts, Business Architects, Business SMEs, Delivery Managers, Development Managers, Program Managers. What the fuck do these people even do?
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why do these tech companies hire all these idiots to begin with? I don't get why all those people are needed
lock2k
Due a Whippin
They will starve if they don't hire them, these companies like NGO's for retarded people lol
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Before software would've been made by ten people now the same projects are made by 50 or more people its like why? I'm not understanding what goes on at these places or does nobody understand what goes on at these places?
A view from the inside. So yep, in the past stuff was done with fewer people. I've made biiiiiiiiiiiiiig projects with just me on code and client interaction, and a graphic designer doing graphics and playing Championship Manager (I shit you not). Sales guy would go promise something he knew bugger all about, guess at a price and we'd try to get shit done on time. Tbh a lot of the time the sales guy would fuck it up - I had 3 companies in a row go bust on me in the early 00s, so clearly that wasn't quite the right model for that kind of scenario, an agency providing custom software solutions to business buyers.
Fast forward to 2011 and I get back in the business - we now have project managers. Can't say I'm a fan, though it could be that my experience was coloured by having a particularly bad one. The guy constantly panicked and pivoted from "this thing is the most important thing" to "oh now this thing is the most important thing". We hated each other. We both left, and now get on a bit better and he owns a water park and gave up the project management bollocks. Back to the point, someone decided that the problem was not sales guys selling something they didn't understand but devs being too slow and needing more management. This was incorrect. Productivity did not improve, as all the context switching just slows you down. Setting up your tools for a different task each time takes a chunk of time, and your brain needs time to switch modes. A flow of ideas and contexts goes missing.
I spent about 9 years after that in a large-ish company that didn't particularly act like one. It had no HR department and was surprisingly free of bullshit. That said, we were underresourced and my career path options were minimal. I got the top job and had nowhere else to go. So I went to get more money doing corporate stuff, first for a defence company and now a financial services company. The latter is VERY corporate.
In the non-corporate place I was building software used internally to drive the business and also used by our clients to record data that we'd use for various purposes (keeping it vague to avoid doxxing). We made pretty swift progress with a small team, but the code was quite old and needed a bit of a rebuild towards the end, and without enough resources, we were peddling hard to keep things ticking over towards the end, those fixes didn't happen. In its defence the system was quite a simple design. A monolith that could be deployed on a single machine fairly easily. Downsides were that you couldn't deploy updates very quickly, as you had to rebuild the whole thing, but upsides were very easy maintenance of the hosting infrastructure. I wanted to move to a more modern microservice arrangement but what has become clear using it in the corporate world is that it adds a certain extra level of complexity that perhaps causes more problems than it solves. It's vital if you want to build something that needs to be rapidly scaled up and down with demand, but for most businesses there's simply not going to be that level of need. So the software becomes more complicated and needs more people doing technical work to build it. There's no way I could now build stuff that took a few weeks in the 00s in less than a few months.
Beyond the technical, corporations have huge regulatory overheads, and thus dot all the ts and cross all the is. They have to have all the certifications, the ISO standards, and a whole bunch of other pointless paperwork because otherwise other businesses simply won't work with them. So everything becomes big and sclerotic - there's an army of people making sure of compliance (this is especially true when building for the likes of the UN, Bank Of England, etc). Add to that the project managers that got in early brought an army of mates, because that's what happens, so they added product owners, scrum masters, and all the other assorted bollocks. You don't talk to the client anymore, various bullshitters do. Now I get it, many devs aren't good at talking to people but I was talking to CEOs of big companies with no issues back in the day. So much of modern development is actually built around the desire to be able to work with less capable developers. Frameworks, agile methodology, etc all work with the idea that you can swap out one dev and put another in easily and quickly (which is never true by the way - training a dev up on a new system always takes months). The problem is that for any devs with actual skill it becomes absolutely shit, no fun.
Not sure where I'm going with this ramble, maybe I'll do something that makes more sense later, but hopefully it gives some insight into how things are, a bit of how it got that way, or at least made you laugh or feel some sympathy as I dive into a pool of money.
TLD(id)R: Management is useless in almost any organization. We see that at Twitter now in an explicit way.
Kill me. This 'training' consists of an Indian with a fairly strong accent reading slides, and when anyone asks a question she flaps and hands over to an utterly incomprehensible Eastern European who I'm not convinced is answering the question but it's hard to know exactly what he's saying - he sounds like he might be drunk.
Sounds like those two are going to get fast-tracked to lead White House daily press conferences once KJP's impending public meltdown occurs.
Demonstrating APIs - one to fetch a list of genders.. was ready for full wokery.. nope, just male and female. Thank fuck.
lol our development team is funny. The team leader just very casually told me that a key certification for my product will be delayed, and I only got that info because I asked. If he didn't actively approach me, it surely won't be a big deal and not a big delay, amirite guys?
He tells me it's a delay of over two years.
Like, you motherfucker, we chat on a regular basis about a ton of things, why didn't you ever tell me? I understand that we have severe resource issues and they just can't keep up with the requirements, but dude. Two years.
He tells me it's a delay of over two years.
Like, you motherfucker, we chat on a regular basis about a ton of things, why didn't you ever tell me? I understand that we have severe resource issues and they just can't keep up with the requirements, but dude. Two years.
I used to do dev stuff but am better at communicating between business and technical so my career path is going towards management. This suits me because managers don't do as much work and I'm lazy. It also suits people I work with as I used to be technical and know the best thing for a manager to do for teams is to get out of their way and not give them a load of extra shit to do, so the less I do the better as far as they're concerned. I mostly act as a translator between them and business with the aim of everyone doing as little work as possible for the maximum possible impact.
fs.blog
"I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent — their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy — they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent — he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief."
Why Lazy and Smart People Make the Best Leaders
Anyone who is both smart and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties. Let me explain ...
fs.blog
"I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent — their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy — they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent — he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief."
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My parents are not me. I got 100k$ from a winning ticket with my dad, he won twice 1M$ jackpots.
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Well it's not really a saga, just that the odds of winning the jackpot multiple times is in billions, it's weird.Right, I must have not followed the saga closely
Yesterday I did some work training crap on a zoom call - swore at some code without checking I was muted, immediately realised, luckily I was able to edit the swearing out of the video before it went onto the company sharepoint! Yay for work giving me an Macbook pro with M1Pro CPU otherwise the edit would have taken fucking ages.
Contract with university ended last week. So officially back on the job market. Even though they want me back, I've decided to make a move back to industry. The last two months involved mind numbingly mundane work. Had to create a database with over 8000 observations, manually.
I know it is going to be a tough slog but I'm excited about the future.
I know it is going to be a tough slog but I'm excited about the future.
Stifler's Mom
I've got some Scotch
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I have a new working colleague from Nepal.
Holy shit, that dude IS SOOOO LOUD when eating and drinking.
He cannot drink without a loud "GLUUUK GLUUUK", and when he is eating it's all kind of weird horrible body sounds, also involving his nose, WITH EVERY FUCKING BYTE he eats.
I am really not one of these people who is usually stressed by these kind of things, but damn, even I want to murder him for that.
Holy shit, that dude IS SOOOO LOUD when eating and drinking.
He cannot drink without a loud "GLUUUK GLUUUK", and when he is eating it's all kind of weird horrible body sounds, also involving his nose, WITH EVERY FUCKING BYTE he eats.
I am really not one of these people who is usually stressed by these kind of things, but damn, even I want to murder him for that.
Stifler's Mom
I've got some Scotch
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Interesting, had very similar experiences.
The company I worked before was getting quite big and bureaucratic.
My current company split off from the bigger one a few years ago, took all the good coders, project leads and sales people. Some of the customers of the old company that switched over to us (some really huge international car manufacturers), are wondering why they get so much better products and support now with us.
We are tiny compared to the old company, but all that bullcrap happening in the old company was cut away.
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Some days I get reminded why I hate my profession and I want out.
I work on multiple projects at the same time. Currently it is 3 projects and I occasionally get requests to touch one or two more. I also handle aspects of the hiring process and have to coordinate people/teams for releases based on project interdependencies. My deadlines are tight. And I mean really tight.
One of my tasks the last two weeks was to write some code in another project that is gate kept by a team of 2. Both of these chaps are actually friends, we talk, go out for beers etc.
The main difference is that in the past two years, I built (from scratch) 4-5 projects which are live in production and used by a number of senior people. They (the two of them) have built 1 project that is fairly simple.
The other difference is that they are the type of devs that are 90% concerned about "code purity" rather than business value. Everything has a bunch of unit tests, everything writen with redux (in angular ffs), overcomplicated, overengineered. All I wanted, was to build an interface to an API. I had to update (I shit you not) 30 files. This is a job that, if their application was engineered properly, it should require the addition of a single file, plus perhaps a couple of additions to environment settings.
Now, they are being incredibly anal about what the code should look like. No, don't write if else, write ? :. Don't use string tokenization, use a regex.
Why? Because. This constant back and forth has cost me 4 full days of work, for a tasks that in my projects would have taken me a max of 2 hours.
All this, in my view, is because devs make busywork to keep their jobs and keep feeling intellectually superior. The business value I have provided to my company in the last two years with my if-else code is 10 times more, compared to what the two of them have offered.
Yet I have to suffer this bulshit. Maybe this will be the straw that breaks my back...
I work on multiple projects at the same time. Currently it is 3 projects and I occasionally get requests to touch one or two more. I also handle aspects of the hiring process and have to coordinate people/teams for releases based on project interdependencies. My deadlines are tight. And I mean really tight.
One of my tasks the last two weeks was to write some code in another project that is gate kept by a team of 2. Both of these chaps are actually friends, we talk, go out for beers etc.
The main difference is that in the past two years, I built (from scratch) 4-5 projects which are live in production and used by a number of senior people. They (the two of them) have built 1 project that is fairly simple.
The other difference is that they are the type of devs that are 90% concerned about "code purity" rather than business value. Everything has a bunch of unit tests, everything writen with redux (in angular ffs), overcomplicated, overengineered. All I wanted, was to build an interface to an API. I had to update (I shit you not) 30 files. This is a job that, if their application was engineered properly, it should require the addition of a single file, plus perhaps a couple of additions to environment settings.
Now, they are being incredibly anal about what the code should look like. No, don't write if else, write ? :. Don't use string tokenization, use a regex.
Why? Because. This constant back and forth has cost me 4 full days of work, for a tasks that in my projects would have taken me a max of 2 hours.
All this, in my view, is because devs make busywork to keep their jobs and keep feeling intellectually superior. The business value I have provided to my company in the last two years with my if-else code is 10 times more, compared to what the two of them have offered.
Yet I have to suffer this bulshit. Maybe this will be the straw that breaks my back...
I definitely get where you're coming from here. I went the corporate route to get better tech for my CV after 9 years with a mid-sized company that wasn't really IT focused. We punched above our weight but suffered due to the lack of resources. Honestly though a bit of me is wondering if I should go back because the over-engineering where I am now is insane. I think half the problem in tech is devs wanting to add things to their CV so they implement fucking everything, and then we get increasingly complex interlocking dependencies of shite that just doesn't fucking work. It honestly has me sometimes wondering whether code is for me or not.
So I'm 2 months into my new job and I still don't have working gear to get shit done, nor has anyone bothered to spend time helping me get to that point, nor giving me an idea of what a working system looks like so I can diagnose when it's fucked. Honestly the money's great but they've recruited me with absolutely no fucking idea what to do with me. What's the point? Honestly it's a complete fucking waste of my fucking time. I've learned some good stuff on Pluralsight and reading some books so I've at least put the time to some use but honestly it's a fucking shambles. Honestly I will never again work for a fucking corporation. I'll do the minimum time I can get away with without my CV looking shit, then it's back to small companies where everyone's not hiding doing nothing because of work from home, where everyone is hired with a fucking purpose, where people know what the fuck they're doing.
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I moved early December, last time was a year before that, so maybe wired crossed?
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Yeah, probably. Year went by really fast I guess!
In the past, I was quite cautious not to jump between jobs too quickly (even when contracting), as the first question in my head when I see CVs with people having new jobs every 12-18 months is, this one is not gona stay much, so no point in investing in them.
How is the market?
Pretty buoyant tbh. Plenty of work going, and my old jobs would have me back in a flash in an emergency.
Would have done longer but the last place basically lied about the tech stack so I didn't get to work on any interesting stuff that would boost my profile as promised. No point hanging around for that.
Newish guy started about a year ago. We've joked and talked before. About cars, bikes, and videogames.
Earlier yesterday (Friday) I was joking as he walked past me and I hit him on the back jokingly with a piece of paper and said "get out of here". Fast forward an hour and my boss says "cops are here and want to talk to you."
Cops asks me about the "incident", and the cop says the guy wants to press charges. I tell them what happened and my boss takes them to view the video. Cops leave, and now my boss hasn't told me what they said, or what's going on. My boss said: "I'm not sure I can disclose it to you." Fucking retards all around.
Earlier yesterday (Friday) I was joking as he walked past me and I hit him on the back jokingly with a piece of paper and said "get out of here". Fast forward an hour and my boss says "cops are here and want to talk to you."
Cops asks me about the "incident", and the cop says the guy wants to press charges. I tell them what happened and my boss takes them to view the video. Cops leave, and now my boss hasn't told me what they said, or what's going on. My boss said: "I'm not sure I can disclose it to you." Fucking retards all around.
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Hopefully nothing, but honestly these days I wouldn't even think about any form of workplace prank. It simply isn't worth the risk. Make sure to tell everyone what happened though, so in the event BS occurs everyone will give that dude the stink eye for having a stick up his ass.
It didn't even rise to simple battery, but my work is ultra gay so we shall see.
Tbh that's absolutely ridiculous. Workplace pranks are great fun. I remember one time going out for lunch and coming back to find my computer had no memory as someone had stolen the ram for shits and giggles. Or abusing ICQ's sms spoofing capabilities to have people send each other amorous gay texts. You have to have a bit of a laugh otherwise you'll go insane.
You monster! You traumatized him.
Seriously though, hope that it results in nothing. The world has gone batshit crazy.
Nah, my job is ran by soulless bureaucrats. They're as cold as robots. I'll be shit canned in less than a week.
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Plenty of time to prepare the next prank to that twat, then. Just make sure it's from a distance this time.
quickwhips
Member Forever
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sounds like you have a horrible boss who would hire such a sensitive soul.
Yup, just got fired. Fucking cocksuckers
