Welcome to Thunderdome

Posted: **Tue Nov 17, 2015 5:46 pm**

Several months ago, I put in a request for some network storage after outlining the design to my idiot manager that said she understood everything. She offered to handle the internal forms and meetings. The bit she simply cannot comprehend is that the storage must be accessible by both Windows and Linux machines. As I found out today, the network storage is setup in such a manner as to be 100% inaccessible to anything *nix.

Posted: **Fri Nov 20, 2015 11:37 pm**

It's performance review time, which is like "the airing of grievances" during Festivus except with more emphasis on passive-aggressive bullshit and less on directly talking to people. I have to write a mini-manifesto as a rebuttal to mine this year.

FML.

Posted: **Fri Dec 04, 2015 6:36 pm**

A couple weeks ago:

Idiot Manager: Hey, I need you to shove this info into our database and bypass our normal loading process. Our report coverage is kind of sparse and we need the new info to up it.
Me: You know that's an increase of 33% in volume on that table, and it'll take about a week to do. I don't recommend it, either. Those workflows were set up for a reason.
IM: Do it anyway.
M: Fine.

A week goes by and I load the shitty data by recycling and retooling existing SQL. After the table is stable, I do some cursory analysis so I know exactly how much I can expect app performance to tank. The answer: not at all. The reason: not what I wanted to find out.

1) The initial increase in size was projected at ~33% (2.5M more "things"). Checked the preload table and it was more like 1.7M. Alright, whatever.
2) Of those 1.7M, 600K have the critical ID info we needed.
3) Of those 600K, only 20K have the quite-not-critical-but-really-important ID info.

But it gets better by leaps and bounds. It seems at no point in time did anyone anywhere up the chain of 3 or more teams decide to actually fucking double check the basic premise of this endeavour: Malcolm's DB gets seven figures of new things that it didn't have before. Fortunately, Malcolm did but he had to spend a week loading the fucking data before he could do it. I don't even want to know how many other man-hours were pissed away, because there was nothing "new" about it. Of the original promised 2.5M, I wrung 35 new items from it. 0.0014% fucking hit rate. Michael J. Fox has a better percentage on Whack-a-Mole.

Edited By Malcolm on 1449272200

Posted: **Thu Dec 17, 2015 11:23 am**

Work has spent the past year converting all their internal products to use what they call a "code platform." Well, unless you ask the dudes who wrote the code, they adamantly protest it's "not a platform and was never intended to be" one. We had to get on that fucker because the old alternatives were going away. I swear to fuck, it makes everything take longer and makes life more difficult. Everything from opening the code in Visual Studio to testing to building + deploying the code. I've tried to point out with direct examples and stopwatches how much more work it takes. Naturally, I got ignored.

Very first code deploy on the new platform results in a painfully visible, crippling multi-day error (4 and counting) that we've taken multiple shots at and failed to fix. The old way, I could've had this thing sorted out in a day or two tops. They've presently got everyone on the team except me assigned to the problem as customers continue to call in and bitch.

Edited By Malcolm on 1450369437

Posted: **Mon Feb 22, 2016 5:58 pm**

Yesterday, we started having intermittent site problems. Dumb-ass programmer is on call. So far, we've established the following:

1) We have a lot more custom oracle system settings than we thought.
2) One DB is hanging almost perpetually while its mirror is fine.

That's it. After 36 hours, no one knows the root cause. Why? Because it requires four disconnected teams on two different shifts on two opposite sides of the planet to coordinate.

Posted: **Fri Mar 04, 2016 12:47 pm**

I made director today

I knew it was coming and it's why I moved out here, but it's cool to be able to tell people and at the same time now I really feel the passive aggressive hate of some people who were/are at my last level a lot longer than I was.

I got it mostly because I was able to be mobile, and shift to an emerging market while capitalizing on some departures to make the higher ups worry about losing someone they developed in house. Good times.

Posted: **Fri Mar 04, 2016 1:29 pm**

You make movies? Neat! What's your next project?

Posted: **Fri Mar 04, 2016 1:34 pm**

Troy makes the big bucks, congrats!

Posted: **Fri Mar 04, 2016 2:27 pm**

TheCatt wrote:Troy makes the big bucks, congrats!

Thanks, dunno about all that though.

Salaries in this town are a bit over inflated. Probably make less now than I did in ATL, from a relative standpoint.

Gotta get my wife back in the workforce asap.

e: and director in this context just means I'm suppose to generate business for the practice now

Edited By Troy on 1457119712

Posted: **Fri Mar 04, 2016 3:24 pm**

Oh, I'm used to director meaning: In charge of managers, and teams, etc, etc...

Posted: **Fri Mar 04, 2016 7:27 pm**

TheCatt wrote:Oh, I'm used to director meaning: In charge of managers, and teams, etc, etc...

That too, Consultants and Senior Consultants are now my minions.

Posted: **Fri Mar 04, 2016 7:55 pm**

Troy wrote:That too, Consultants and Senior Consultants are now my <s>minions</s> bitches.

Fixed.

Edited By TPRJones on 1457139354

Posted: **Thu Mar 17, 2016 5:28 pm**

The wheels of bureaucracy confound me for the second time this week.

This morning, an email from someone at work arrives in my Outlook box regarding some archaic service only I know about which our group owns. Shitty, random Websphere MQ error I've never seen before and I sure as shit don't know enough to deduce anything from the collective verbal middle finger their error codes represent nor was google forthcoming with help. Check the box with our hardware manifest ... alright, it's a box where 3 MQs live, each one mapping to a different environment, one of which is Development (no one cares) and another that's Production (the Ops nazis are hypersensitive to any problems). Well, it's...

1) A production asset, so I don't have privs to login to the box and troubleshoot. Our error logging isn't smart enough to pick up the details for system-level troubles, either.

2) The Ops/Infrastructure teams say that since it's a Development environment component (which it is), so it's not their job to fix it.

FUCK YOU

Addendum:
We know we can't recompile the service because we're missing a part of the source code. We're not sure about reconfiguring, but we're also not known for modular code ... which means there's more likely than not some fucking place where the fifth-rate programmer who vomited up that piece of filth probably fucking hardcoded it.

Edited By Malcolm on 1458250643

Posted: **Wed Mar 30, 2016 12:39 pm**

Swear to god, this place is run by chimps. Oracle DB is having mondo issues. We can't apply a patch to fix it because it conflicts with a previously applied patch.

Solution: DBA says go to Oracle to get the merged patch.
Problem: Oracle doesn't support our shit anymore.
Workaround: QA is the new dev environment.

FML

Edited By Malcolm on 1459355987

Posted: **Wed Mar 30, 2016 12:54 pm**

It's amazing how much better your life would be if you went to SQL.

Posted: **Wed Mar 30, 2016 1:05 pm**

TheCatt wrote:It's amazing how much better your life would be if you went to SQL.

Long ago, someone drank the koolaid of "only Oracle can handle our DB operations."