Page 5 of 8
Posted: Fri Aug 14, 2015 8:26 pm
by TheCatt
I hope you spent the other 118 minutes on the Internet.
Posted: Sat Aug 15, 2015 1:09 pm
by TPRJones
Of course.
Posted: Sat Aug 15, 2015 1:20 pm
by Malcolm
We hired these retards to give us a talk.
Update: no one liked them. I can't find any dev who had anything good to say about it. The phrase "waste of time" has come up from more than a couple people. The only difference that I noticed when I came back was that leads and managers had boards in their cubes with post-it notes or handwritten tasks. Those fuckers had to have cost thousands of dollars.
Posted: Sat Aug 15, 2015 1:47 pm
by TheCatt
Malcolm wrote:We're in the middle of redoing our entire DB-report function for our team's website product. No one really showed me much concrete code until a couple weeks ago. It was written by our new intro dev who's barely, if ever, used .Net.
Me: So, how'd you handle all the table joins?
Newbie: Exhaustively hardcoded them.
Me: We have around 1500 possibilities you'd need to deal with for this to work for everything we want. How many do you have so far?
Newbie: About 20.
Me: Well, you wasted that time, then, because we're doing it a sane way instead.
You seem awfully passive in this process, why not confront those issues earlier, or lead the design or mentor the new kid?
Posted: Sat Aug 15, 2015 3:07 pm
by Malcolm
TheCatt wrote:Malcolm wrote:We're in the middle of redoing our entire DB-report function for our team's website product. No one really showed me much concrete code until a couple weeks ago. It was written by our new intro dev who's barely, if ever, used .Net.
Me: So, how'd you handle all the table joins?
Newbie: Exhaustively hardcoded them.
Me: We have around 1500 possibilities you'd need to deal with for this to work for everything we want. How many do you have so far?
Newbie: About 20.
Me: Well, you wasted that time, then, because we're doing it a sane way instead.
You seem awfully passive in this process, why not confront those issues earlier, or lead the design or mentor the new kid?
"Communication issues," again. The acting tech lead is non-techie but refuses to:
1) trust me to interact with other humans without a chaperone
2) trust my two degrees in computer science
3) acknowledge that I've lectured to every fucking size group of IT students possible, from a couple hundred students at a time to solo sessions and everything in between without similar complaints ... when people want to learn, I have infinity times more patience, when people act stupidly, I have infinity times less
4) acknowledge I have more coding experience, in the number of years and languages, than all other devs on the project fucking combined
The manager above her isn't any better, except that one's a real coder. Her problem is she's too goddamn nice. They also cut me, the ONLY senior dev, completely out of this guy's hiring process, and little to no .Net experience would probably have made me bounce him.
The reason why I'm so passive is that if I tried to help him prior to my being asked explicitly by management, I'd be reprimanded for doing so. Those two and the new software architect we've gotten are becoming the bane of my existence. They're also the reason why the 4-5 intern/part-time devs report to the intro programmer we've got who used to be a CPA, in spite of my having more management experience than any other dev on the team. In short, my managers are fucking stupid and when they are, I tell them so. They'd rather be nice than correct, I go the opposite way.
In the past year, the company overhauled the management structure and SDLC process, and things are getting more and more Brazil-like surreal.
Posted: Sat Aug 15, 2015 3:41 pm
by TPRJones
If you are the only person there who really knows their shit and management is that far into the retard red zone, then it won't be long before you are let go.
Get something else lined up.
Edited By TPRJones on 1439667733
Posted: Sat Aug 15, 2015 8:15 pm
by Malcolm
TPRJones wrote:If you are the only person there who really knows their shit and management is that far into the retard red zone, then it won't be long before you are let go.
Get something else lined up.
A major part of our company info authority is going to change next year. I've got shit 1/3 done for the transition to the new one. Literally no one but me knows fact one about the details besides "FTP." That gives me a bit of leverage, and I've not put together a proper grievance form yet, so to speak. I'm also the dude that troubleshoots prod incidents because no one else has a prayer unless they happen to have worked on the mystery broken component, and they can't even reliably deduce that from a stack trace. Trying to pay off my debts, I'm lazy, and I fucking hate interviewing. Thought crosses my mind at least once a week, though.
It's not that the other devs are stupid like the managers, but I've been in the majors way longer and fucked up every way they have or will 10 times or more. I could save them hours, days, or weeks.
Posted: Sat Aug 15, 2015 8:40 pm
by TheCatt
Malcolm wrote:TPRJones wrote:If you are the only person there who really knows their shit and management is that far into the retard red zone, then it won't be long before you are let go.
Get something else lined up.
A major part of our company info authority is going to change next year. I've got shit 1/3 done for the transition to the new one. Literally no one but me knows fact one about the details besides "FTP." That gives me a bit of leverage, and I've not put together a proper grievance form yet, so to speak. I'm also the dude that troubleshoots prod incidents because no one else has a prayer unless they happen to have worked on the mystery broken component, and they can't even reliably deduce that from a stack trace. Trying to pay off my debts, I'm lazy, and I fucking hate interviewing. Thought crosses my mind at least once a week, though.
It's not that the other devs are stupid like the managers, but I've been in the majors way longer and fucked up every way they have or will 10 times or more. I could save them hours, days, or weeks.
I guess you can keep being that guy, or, you know, make a shitload more money by being helpful and personable.
and they can't even reliably deduce that from a stack trace.
This week I had a dev send out an email highlighting what line in code he thought was throwing an exception in test.
Me: That line doesn't reference anything in the stacktrace.
Him: But it's the line # that the error message spit out.
*headdesk*
Posted: Sat Aug 15, 2015 8:41 pm
by GORDON
If losing you will sink the company, perhaps it is time for you to negotiate your way up into a more stable position.
Posted: Sat Aug 15, 2015 9:11 pm
by Malcolm
I guess you can keep being that guy, or, you know, make a shitload more money by being helpful and personable.
I would make exactly $0 more.
If losing you will sink the company, perhaps it is time for you to negotiate your way up into a more stable position.
My company is massive. My entire team could disappear and no one would care. As far as negotiation goes, I don't know if I want higher position. Leads tend to get sucked into managerial personnel bullshit more than technical issues. I'm at the tallest point on the pyramid such that my gig is primarily code. I'd hear an argument for reducing my overall coding time to 75%. Anything more is past my tipping point. Every tech lead I've seen up there is doing 25% at most.
I think I may actually take the time to put together all the insane bullshit they've been doing since late last year and lay it out in front of them. That's an official shot across the bow. The fact I had to pull 75% of a new DB report engine design out of my ass in 3-4 days and integrate it with the badly implemented 25% that looks like a Sunday night special from a damned freshman programmer could convince me to kick that ball down the hill. I give less and less of a shit about that place the more and more of my debt is paid off.
Posted: Sat Aug 15, 2015 9:18 pm
by GORDON
Ah, large company, I'd always pictured 200-300 employees making one or three products. Don't know why I thought that.
Does your IT department have an "Architect" position? Whenever I've seen those they tended to be just people who didn't do much work but acted as interactive brains that could quickly point the devs in the right direction for whatever needed to be done, or just make sure no major fuckery happened with the code structure.
I was never much impressed by them, personally.
Edited By GORDON on 1439688019
Posted: Sat Aug 15, 2015 9:18 pm
by TPRJones
It's hard to impress people with miracles when they have no concept of what it is you are doing. All they'll see is "Malcolm is upsetting the stability of the team, we would be better off without him."
Posted: Sat Aug 15, 2015 9:22 pm
by GORDON
I hate big IT shops.
Posted: Sat Aug 15, 2015 10:02 pm
by Malcolm
Does your IT department have an "Architect" position? Whenever I've seen those they tended to be just people who didn't do much work but acted as interactive brains that could quickly point the devs in the right direction for whatever needed to be done, or just make sure no major fuckery happened with the code structure.
Whenever I talk to an arch, I feel like one of Napoleon's corporals asking him for points on digging ditches and loading a cannon. Unless you're designing something from scratch and have time to listen to their long-winded explanations, I find them to be roadblocks.
All they'll see is "Malcolm is upsetting the stability of the team, we would be better off without him."
The devs that still seek my assistance unofficially, the devs who are forced to come to me because I know the product, and the biz and sales folk that get to close on their $200K accounts because I fix the prod issues might differ on that opinion.
Posted: Sat Aug 15, 2015 10:44 pm
by TheCatt
Most architects just like to talk, and don't actually do shit. They tend to employ a whole lot of hand-waving too
Me (Architect): Um, we do 10,000 transactions per second today, your proposed system won't.
Other Architect: "We'll worry about those details later" (while waving hands).
Me: But you can't support contextual data lookups for serial validation and business rules processing. that's not a detail. That's a requirement.
Other Architect: We'll handle it when we get there.
I'm an architect + team lead, but I spend 75% of my day coding. A few days a month we gather in a room, and someone has to drive on the projector all day, and we (I, really) question everything I see that looks like it could be done better. Even things like using putty instead of mRemote, or not using screen, etc. I expect the same of them to me if I'm doing stupid stuff.
Posted: Sat Aug 15, 2015 10:57 pm
by Malcolm
I'm an architect + team lead
The number of meetings you would be in, mandatory, would prohibit that where I work. They'd also never let one person handle both those jobs.
"We'll worry about those details later"
Odd. The problem I have with my arch is he wants to go over too many useless details twice, as slowly as possible, and wants the non-techie, non-domain managers in the meetings. We have a CORS problem that slipped out into prod because, again, people (like our former lead and the CPA dev) didn't consult me or take basic sanity-check measures like hitting FUCKING F12 to bring up the dev tools in any browser and viewing the console output. I know exactly what's going on and why. I could get our team all the answers we need to make all the decisions we want, and actually take some fucking action to solve it. All I need is a meeting with a dev or two from another team without assholes jacking my meetings. I could alternatively email about 10 questions to them and get answers that way. I'm explicitly forbidden from doing either without a douche manager holding my hand. It's like they're allergic to getting shit done.
The devs that still seek my assistance unofficially, the devs who are forced to come to me because I know the product, and the biz and sales folk that get to close on their $200K accounts because I fix the prod issues might differ on that opinion.
Then again, those dudes have little to no impact on my annual review, which has little to no impact on me and my salary unless I don't hit a certain level. Going beyond it is pointless.
Edited By Malcolm on 1439693919
Posted: Sat Aug 15, 2015 11:00 pm
by GORDON
Malcolm wrote:Then again, those dudes have little to no impact on my annual review, which has little to no impact on me and my salary unless I don't hit a certain level. Going beyond it is pointless.
Annual review time:
"Yell me how you've been a team player this year."
Posted: Sat Aug 15, 2015 11:29 pm
by TPRJones
Malcolm wrote:The devs that still seek my assistance unofficially, the devs who are forced to come to me because I know the product, and the biz and sales folk that get to close on their $200K accounts because I fix the prod issues might differ on that opinion.
It's a good thing they're in charge, then.
Posted: Sat Aug 15, 2015 11:32 pm
by TPRJones
GORDON wrote:Annual review time:
"Yell me how you've been a team player this year."
(emphasis added) I like to think that Malcolm's annual review does involve a fair amount of yelling.
Posted: Sun Aug 16, 2015 8:07 am
by thibodeaux
Malcolm wrote:The manager above her isn't any better, except that one's a real coder. Her problem is she's too goddamn nice.
I think I found your problem.