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SkyeAuroline posted:Nope. Software written in 1988! 9 character limit. 30 years of running random numbers and saving them. And the RNG only supports 0-9 despite the field supporting full alphanumeric characters. I don't remember what this system actually did but I definitely have a similar anecdote. The system generated a random number that had to be unique, so after it generated it did at least check for clashes, and then if there was a clash it would generate another number, so far so good. Of course after a few hundred thousand order numbers (or whatever it was) it started to take longer and longer to generate unique IDs. Eventually it even exhausted the search space, or at least had filled enough that it seemed to hang the system and never respond, so people would kill it and restart, only for the same thing to happen the next time.
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Feb 24, 2021 02:43
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Yeah it can be really easy to say "get rid of toxic people" but I've worked at jobs where the toxic person is there specifically because the boss is just as toxic. Like "starts a meeting by leading everyone in a prayer for Romney's victory over that [slur]" while the boss nods in approval
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Feb 24, 2021 02:48
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Yeah my post simplified things quite a lot, and the possibility of cronyism/nepotism and other complexities of dealing with finicky, irrational humans on power trips and poo poo at scale went through my head but I didn’t want to write a huge essay so I cut myself off and ended up with just the idealism. I am very much a Type B personality and don’t really care about power and authority, so making decisions like ceding power to a better qualified team lead or whatever if it means less stress for me and more productivity for everyone else is really easy for me, and I think I sometimes project. I’ve also absorbed business wisdom from my dad, who’s the type to fire friends and torpedo relationships if they’re doing damage to the business/morale/client retention. And also only hires associates’ offspring if they’re actually qualified, which means he doesn’t hire associates’ offspring. He is successful, but also an rear end in a top hat. As for managing up, my team lead (the one who I ceded authority to) does a lot, now that I think about it. I’m just happy it’s not me dealing with that poo poo.
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Feb 24, 2021 03:09
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"Don't do business with your friends / family" and "don't form a partnership" (as in the business formation) are good lessons not to have to learn the hard way.
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Feb 24, 2021 03:17
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my new gig apparently bases your entire review on who "vouches" for you. like one lady literally got a <gold star review> based entirely on being friends with one of the high level super engineers. she and her wife used to have standing dinner dates with him and his wife so they're close and he was like "she's amazing and gets a gold star" so That Is That. since i joined during covid and have literally never physically met anyone, i am apparently hosed no matter what i deliver and tomorrow i have a chat with another company so
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Feb 24, 2021 04:59
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A vendor keeps calling my phone like a crazy ex. loving chill and send an email you fucks.
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Feb 24, 2021 09:48
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I am a computer toucher working in a computer touching company. Jira and Agile is a thing, though used entirely improperly. It's like the powers that be decided that the most important thing about agile is that work is done in 'sprints'. Nothing else matters. So, tasks aren't estimated properly, nothing is delivered at the end of a sprint, and the content of a sprint changes wildly during its duration. So you get to the end of a sprint, and then ???. The whole process is pointless. But it means they put 'agile' on the marketing material. Not that it affects me much, as I don't actually get to do work any more because ~seniority~. It seems the best use of my years of experience in working out how to touch computers in just the right way to trick them into doing what I want, is to let it rot whilst I help the sales team bullshit customers. On the upside, I can spend most of a day doing sweet gently caress-all and people think I'm really busy and doing a great job?! I've not figured this one out yet. The dumb poo poo I'm doing is looking for somewhere else to work? I really don't know if getting paid reasonably well to spend most of the day in an unmotivated stupor is better or worse than getting paid slightly more to do a lot more work but to also actually have the satisfaction of achieving something.
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Feb 24, 2021 11:15
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Goddammit goddammit godammit godDAMMIT IF I SAY SOMETHING DOENS'T MAKE SENSE IN ENGLISH, THEN IT DOESN'T loving MAKE SENSE! If I say "that's a bad idea" and give you TEN REASONS, ACCEPT THAT IT'S A BAD IDEA. I had to loving say the words "Cyberpunk 2077" and I'm probably gonna get sent home for sass, but I absolutely can't with this right now.
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Feb 24, 2021 12:28
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Fleta Mcgurn posted:Goddammit goddammit godammit godDAMMIT Game industry?
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Feb 24, 2021 12:47
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"get sent home for sass"???
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Feb 24, 2021 12:52
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Don't use the c word please. (no really, what's the issue?)
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Feb 24, 2021 13:02
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Workaday Wizard posted:Game industry? IIRC from earlier in the thread yes, these particular weaboos like to tweak that poster's work and make it worse
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Feb 24, 2021 13:32
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Ignatius M. Meen posted:IIRC from earlier in the thread yes, these particular weaboos like to tweak that poster's work and make it worse Yep. e: As an example, let's say I wrote: "The jeans were blue." Boss would say "it's fine." Team Incel, however, would say: "All jeans are blue! You don't need to specify!" So, "The pants are blue." "Fleta, they're not pants, they're jeans." "Then can we just say 'They are jeans'?" BOSS: No, it could be better. TEAM INCEL: Oh, I got it! "The jeans were blue pants." ME: That...makes no sense and is totally repetitive. TEAM INCEL: It's what [BOSS] wanted. BOSS: didn't Quantum of Phallus posted:"get sent home for sass"??? Yeah, one time my boss told me I wasn't pushing hard enough to change what he wrote (he thinks if I approve a sentence he writes, I'm not doing my job, even if what he wrote is good. Keep this in mind.) So I gave it another pass and then he was angry at me for wanting to change TOO much. Then he hung up on me, called me back, asked me if I was "pissed," and when I said I was just confused because he had given me conflicting directives, he just said "yeah." Then he sullenly sat and responded to me with monosyllables until I said, "Look, I apologize if I came off aggressive or negative, I really didn't mean, to, but I feel like we need to move on from that to get this done." Then he told me to keep working, hung up, and THEN immediately called back and said that I was to stop working and not continue until the next day (so, not sent home because I was already at home, but you know what I mean). Then he refused to speak to me through anything but Skype chat for about a month. I'm not the first person he's done this to, although he usually saves it for more extreme cases. He has a "do nothing until I'm furious" management style that... can be hard to deal with. However, his girlfriend is a wretched person and he definitely projects poo poo she does onto me. Like she'll sit there and literally tell him "This is poo poo, your script is terrible, this is all crap" and he has to remain silent because he's scared of her and thinks her English is incredible. (It is, from a usage standpoint, but not from a writing standpoint. She probably thinks instruction manuals are a laugh riot, based on what she's found funny in the past.) Then he'll turn on me if I offer the slightest hint of criticism and get really mad. He remains the best boss I have ever had in this country. He's not like this most of the time, but he cannot divorce frustration from how he deals with people in the workplace. Unlike my last boss, he isn't gaslighting me to hell and back. Project is very close to completion and people are very tense. That's all I can say in anyone's defense, mine included. e: lmao one of the Team Incel members just called me to "remind" me to follow Boss's instructions. Thanks, I'm not the one sticking memes everywhere against all directions not to, but thanks! Fleta Mcgurn fucked around with this message at 14:16 on Feb 24, 2021 |
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Feb 24, 2021 14:11
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Fleta Mcgurn posted:Yep. poo poo, that's so Spanish it kinda hurts to read. I remember a time when I was working as a librarian intern for my uni, with a bunch of other mid 20s-early 30s people. A girl wrote a notice to hang in her library's door, and as she was in the English section, she wrote it in Spanish and English, and snapped a pic and sent it to a group chat. Another girl told her that what she tried to write made no sense at all, and she did snap at her because "she had shown it to a friend and they said it was totally OK". The girl doing the correction was a professional translator. We all knew that. And she was loving right, to boot.
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Feb 24, 2021 14:38
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Every year we have to evaluate our employee satisfaction. When I first started 7 years ago we had questions like "How satisfied are you with the cost of your healthcare?" and "Is your manager available when you need them to be?" Every year the scores are bad, generally because of them cheaping out on our healthcare, or freezing raises and bonuses, or some really boneheaded upper management decisions. Rather than fixing these things, they just make the questions more and more generic so the scores get *slightly* higher overall. And it's turned into a comparison of last year, rather than an overall "How are you feeling NOW" thing. Last year we had "How does your healthcare this year compare to last year?" Technically it still sucks, but it hasn't gotten worse. I guess I'll give it a good rating then. "How does your pay compare to last year?" Well, same thing I guess. I can't wait til this year's survey opens up.
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Feb 24, 2021 15:03
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Shellception posted:poo poo, that's so Spanish it kinda hurts to read. I remember a time when I was working as a librarian intern for my uni, with a bunch of other mid 20s-early 30s people. A girl wrote a notice to hang in her library's door, and as she was in the English section, she wrote it in Spanish and English, and snapped a pic and sent it to a group chat. Another girl told her that what she tried to write made no sense at all, and she did snap at her because "she had shown it to a friend and they said it was totally OK". Thank you for saying this because I actually feel way better! Like I know I'm not imagining things. (It's been a really hard year for me work-wise; I'm basically coming out of what feel like an extended coma filled with nightmares.)
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Feb 24, 2021 15:14
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Fleta Mcgurn posted:Thank you for saying this because I actually feel way better! Like I know I'm not imagining things. (It's been a really hard year for me work-wise; I'm basically coming out of what feel like an extended coma filled with nightmares.) As someone who's done a lot of unofficial English revising (I am no translator in any sense but I have a C2 and work in an English-dominated scientific field so I get asked to do so frequently): No, no you aren't, at all. There's a definite tendency here by some people to seriously overestimate their English level. I had the habit of writing the reason for a correction when I did them ("missing verb" "this is an adverb not an adjective, use this instead" "this adjective goes before the substantive not after" and so on) and even with the notes I have been challenged sometimes ("well what you wrote sounds wrong"). Yeah I know I am no native and sometimes I make mistakes buttttt lady I just had to rewrite, reorder and punctuate your ten-lines behemoth of a sentence. If you think I am wrong, which I may well be, please do a bit of googling before complaining  .
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Feb 24, 2021 15:29
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Fleta Mcgurn posted:
I had a boss once who suffered from bipolar disorder and he was like this. It was a loving nightmare to work for him. Pretty much everyone on the dev team quit and he ran the company into the ground after his wife appointed him head of product in an iOS app development team. This guy didn't even own an iPhone. He also thought mac shorcuts used CTRL instead of CMD. He ran the company into the ground and it was closed about a year after I joined
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Feb 24, 2021 15:42
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Workaday Wizard posted:A vendor keeps calling my phone like a crazy ex. loving chill and send an email you fucks. uggghhh this is my last boss meanwhile he would just aimlessly ping pong around the city "getting some parts" in his work truck harassing everyone with the power of the Iphone
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Feb 24, 2021 15:58
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I spent part of this morning correcting grammar and rewording an email one of our contractors had drafted to send to a customer. We're changing out a couple of connectors that are nearly impossible to get on short notice and increasing the length of the assembly to accommodate the replacement. The contractor clearly didn't quite understand the technical details so I clarified those and went out of my way to put a visual together from the product drawing to show what was changing and how. I put my changes in red text, lined out the areas that needed to change, etc. Boss reviewed it and took out the strike throughs but left the red text. Contractor gets the all clear from my boss to send the email and just forwarded what my boss sent; red text, "Based on input from the team" header and all to the customer and half our group.
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Feb 24, 2021 16:49
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I have a boss that absolutely does not understand half of what they sees, but will absolutely spend hours or days meticulously editing and rewriting everything. It takes forever and absolutely blocks a dozen projects because nothing can move forward, and of course they come out much less comprehensible and almost always have new errors introduced But at least I can always logjam things and then take an easy day a few times per year
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Feb 24, 2021 17:08
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Shellception posted:As someone who's done a lot of unofficial English revising (I am no translator in any sense but I have a C2 and work in an English-dominated scientific field so I get asked to do so frequently): No, no you aren't, at all. There's a definite tendency here by some people to seriously overestimate their English level. I had the habit of writing the reason for a correction when I did them ("missing verb" "this is an adverb not an adjective, use this instead" "this adjective goes before the substantive not after" and so on) and even with the notes I have been challenged sometimes ("well what you wrote sounds wrong"). I purposely have let no one at my job know that I'm a good writer/editor, at the risk of being assigned stupid tasks that I don't want to do
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Feb 24, 2021 17:40
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 'That doesn't make any sense. Change it so that it's like this instead' 'Okay' 'That doesn't make any sense at all, change it back''Okay' 'Okay that makes sense''Okay'
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Feb 24, 2021 18:12
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Outrail posted:
Ah, creative positions. Never changes.
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Feb 24, 2021 18:16
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SkyeAuroline posted:Ah, creative positions. Never changes. Worse, financial reporting.
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Feb 24, 2021 18:20
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Outrail posted:Worse, financial reporting. ... Finances don't change just because you shift things around on the report, what are they even asking of you at that point? Doesn't make sense. Then again, thread relevant and all...
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Feb 24, 2021 18:36
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SkyeAuroline posted:... Finances don't change just because you shift things around on the report, what are they even asking of you at that point? Doesn't make sense. Then again, thread relevant and all... In the past, instead of recording carryover under expenses where it should be, somebody thought it was a good idea to report it as negative income. So income looks way lower than it is. So now that we fixed it the books look weird compared to last year. So somebody wanted to change it back so years look comparable, then they didn't like that because it was wrong (duh), they wanted it changed back. Now it's good. Progress. Outrail fucked around with this message at 18:48 on Feb 24, 2021 |
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Feb 24, 2021 18:43
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SkyeAuroline posted:... Finances don't change just because you shift things around on the report, what are they even asking of you at that point? Doesn't make sense. Then again, thread relevant and all... One would THINK that, yes. Still, can't count how many times we've been asked to roll the numbers up differently, or put different cost basis items in different buckets, etc. None of it triggers my "this is improper" spidey-sense, either. It's just that there is/can be a LOT of Professional Judgement into how things are reported, and depending on who (or what metrics) are involved, higher-ups will absolutely want to try and arrange things in a way that don't cause some VP somewhere to fly into an apoplectic rage.
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Feb 24, 2021 18:45
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arsegrit posted:I am a computer toucher working in a computer touching company. Jira and Agile is a thing, though used entirely improperly. It's like the powers that be decided that the most important thing about agile is that work is done in 'sprints'. Nothing else matters. So, tasks aren't estimated properly, nothing is delivered at the end of a sprint, and the content of a sprint changes wildly during its duration. So you get to the end of a sprint, and then ???. The whole process is pointless. Management with no expertise in the subject matter assigns the points, doesn't let give the team any time to review and properly scope. Then your sprint retrospectives are always, "These burndown charts are AWFUL! What happened?!!!!"
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Feb 24, 2021 18:45
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Someone convinced the CEO we should do AGILE but he hated it so all we do is have scrums and planning sessions and then ignore everything and do whatever the emergency of the day is. Our Scrum Master is a project manager for a client who we do no work for and have basically no interaction with. He has no idea what our team does and the sum total of his contribution is to add meetings to everyone's Outlook calendar.
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Feb 24, 2021 18:51
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SkyeAuroline posted:... Finances don't change just because you shift things around on the report, what are they even asking of you at that point? Doesn't make sense. Then again, thread relevant and all... *laughs in hastily modified depreciation schedule*
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Feb 24, 2021 18:51
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Zarin posted:One would THINK that, yes. I spend a long time pulling out budgets together. Way better than we've ever had before. Now we can have a few different breakdowns that show various things like wages vs other expenses etc that allow some forward planning. But since we can see that, can you show this as well? How about that? Just show this too? Change the name of this please. Nevermind that means I have to rewrite or reformat reams of sheets. It's a 'give an inch, take a mile' issue but also that means I have to spend more time doing it. Next board meeting they're going to complain about how much money I'm spending.
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Feb 24, 2021 18:52
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Here's the best email I ever got from one of our field techs. No information, no context, no nothing - just three words, his typical Windows 3.1 background, and his name.
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Feb 24, 2021 18:55
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AHH F/UGH posted:Here's the best email I ever got from one of our field techs. No information, no context, no nothing - just three words, his typical Windows 3.1 background, and his name. What was wrong? GARY
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Feb 24, 2021 19:05
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AHH F/UGH posted:Here's the best email I ever got from one of our field techs. No information, no context, no nothing - just three words, his typical Windows 3.1 background, and his name. Staticy emails duh, I've had success wrapping aluminum foil on the bunny ears.
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Feb 24, 2021 19:07
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I like it because it's not just about the the actual issue he was dealing with, it's also a bigger question about the content of the email, and even beyond that - Gary himself, as well as my job, and the world. As far as the solution, I just sent him a typical "Hi Gary, Please send us the serial number of the unit you are working on. Thanks" And he just sent it in (only the serial number, no other words of info, of course), and it turns out it wasn't equipped with the product at all, and I emailed him and told him so, and he never responded. Job done. AHH F/UGH fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Feb 24, 2021 |
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Feb 24, 2021 19:09
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AHH F/UGH posted:Here's the best email I ever got from one of our field techs. No information, no context, no nothing - just three words, his typical Windows 3.1 background, and his name. I'm assuming he was on site at 333G (Project code? location code? customer code?) and didn't know what the problem was? Minimalist emails are a joy when they reach a level of a sentence or less. Sometimes they're all you need, sometimes they're missing some crucial info, sometimes it's a riddle that stumps you. A friend I interned with wrote an email on his last day that was quote:subject: cake for last day in kitchen It fit him so well it's still one of my favorite emails ever.
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Feb 24, 2021 19:10
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AHH F/UGH posted:I like it because it's not just about the the actual issue he was dealing with, it's also a bigger question about the content of the email, and even beyond that - Gary himself, as well as my job, and the world. So... it was the serial number what was wrong there?
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Feb 24, 2021 19:13
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Shellception posted:So... it was the serial number what was wrong there? Despite there being monthly training on our department's product, and him having done these kinds of field checks many times, he still didn't understand that we need the serial number on the unit to find out actually be able to tell if it has the product or not. He's also fully capable of searching the database serial number himself and knows how to do it, he just wanted someone to do it for him.
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Feb 24, 2021 19:18
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AHH F/UGH posted:Here's the best email I ever got from one of our field techs. No information, no context, no nothing - just three words, his typical Windows 3.1 background, and his name. Not mine but my spouse once asked a client for some document scans they needed and the client replied with a single line of text that simply read "NO send you letter", now we say it as a joke when the other asks for a simple favor or whatever.
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Feb 24, 2021 19:50
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