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One of the people who I'm supposed to be able to ask for advice is so condescending and gives such wonky advice I've found its better to email them a question so they feel useful and just do the job myself in the week it takes to respond to a basic question.
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Apr 29, 2021 15:56
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Code Jockey posted:ahahaha this reminds me of that "genius" engineer we had at helljob. He argued with us about structure of our code sometimes, recommending absolutely ludicrous and unreadable code because less characters == faster. A 365 admin would have to give themselves full permission to your mailbox and either open it from OWA or by adding your account to their installed Outlook client as a second profile. If the senior computer touchers have followed the correct procedure, all admins should have their own named accounts so if someone did do this it would be searchable in the audit logs.
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Apr 29, 2021 16:06
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Queen Victorian posted:I got into semantics arguments at my previous job, and the worse and more toxic that job got the more frequent and vicious they became. My role had been so degraded and diminished that semantics was literally the last area where I felt I had any special expertise or sway (I wrote all the documentation and did other technical writing adjacent tasks), so I got vicious about it (in a desperate wounded animal sort of way). One that I recall was "remove" vs "delete". Similar words, but very different implications in a software interface. We had these widgets you managed on a dashboard. One of the things you could do was add a widget to a blacklist (in case it got compromised or something). Naturally, you could later remove it from the blacklist. I set up the interface and form in the context of the action being adding/removing widgets to/from this list. Lead dev, who was all backend/API, objected to "remove" and insisted on "delete". I explained that no, you aren't deleting the widget when you take it off the blacklist and that it was confusing and misleading because it gave the user the impression they were destroying the widget when they were just taking it off the list. Lead dev argued that it should be delete because the way it works in the database is that the blacklist status flag entry for that widget is deleted from the blacklist status table. I had to explain that sometimes in UI design you have to use "syntactic sugar" to make a concept easier to grasp and better align with how the user will think about performing a task because sometimes it's different from how the thing actually happens under the hood. The user isn't going to be thinking about deleting an entry from a database table, they're just going to want to remove it from the list. I think I won that round, but holy gently caress it was all so exhausting and I don't know why he cared so much because he was not a UI person and my implementation didn't affect how his poo poo worked in the backend one bit. Always amazes me how some people just can't grasp that not everyone can understand/comprehend at the same level they do. Regular end users aren't loving database wizards, programmers or anything like that, they don't care about stupid wording for a function, they just want it to work.
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Apr 29, 2021 16:39
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BOOTY-ADE posted:Always amazes me how some people just can't grasp that not everyone can understand/comprehend at the same level they do. Regular end users aren't loving database wizards, programmers or anything like that, they don't care about stupid wording for a function, they just want it to work.
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Apr 29, 2021 16:52
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SkyeAuroline posted:Oh hey and immediately after that last one I get informed that I'm getting moved projects again from the one that I am comfortable and effective in and my performance gets regularly praised, to one that I know is a complete shitshow that cannot be fixed (and happens to use software that rejects my physical accommodations in a manner I can't get around through hardware or software) and has the current main user for it working overtime every day for a decade. With very little warning. While finding out someone is getting hired to do what I do now (... just hire someone to work with them?) and another one to work on a glorified vanity project, the combined pay being significantly higher than it would be to hire someone to unfuck our systems so we didn't NEED two more people to operate them. One of the things that really annoys me at my current job is we have people on the team who are good with Technology A and others who are good with Technology B. When a project comes in that requires Technology A it gets assigned to the person good with that technology for a week or so before it gets moved onto other people in the team. Now they are banging their heads against it trying to make progress, while the people who originally got it are moved onto something else they're not good with. Why is everyone so stressed? fake edit - actually my last place did it too: management just sees all engineers as having equal skills and expertise edit: forgot to mention timesheets update: now a report is going to be produced weekly and anyone who hasn't accounted for all the working hours in the previous week will get daily nag emails about it.
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Apr 29, 2021 17:12
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nexus6 posted:One of the things that really annoys me at my current job is we have people on the team who are good with Technology A and others who are good with Technology B. When a project comes in that requires Technology A it gets assigned to the person good with that technology for a week or so before it gets moved onto other people in the team. Now they are banging their heads against it trying to make progress, while the people who originally got it are moved onto something else they're not good with. Yup! That's the way it goes. I've bitched at length about this before but since we have this wonderful new development - I'm one of about two people in this company who understand this software at this point, and even then that's only partial (no back-end access). I'm the only one in the entire company working on improving it, because the IT guy (separate from the IT guy I actually like, one guy per division because nobody has ever asked the truck question) has his job security based off making sure no one but him understands it and he'll always be required to do processes on the back end. All of the original documentation from the program's creation is gone, and he refuses to write replacement documentation, because see: job security. So I'm also the only one trying to stitch together software documentation from what I can pick up on the user side and verify it - that's a long abandoned side project at this point. We already have a second person for this position, too, they're just on leave currently so it's just me - but she never really tried understanding beyond bare minimum to do the job We have a second set of software that has nothing in common with the first except "they use the same identifiers for their databases". We need someone working on this full time. They would need training from scratch. I would need training from scratch. The smart thing would be to hire someone to take that on, get good at it, and then cross train as needed. (The smartest thing would be to take the two new hires' salaries and pay less than the combined total to get a second IT guy here so we have someone who will actually put changes I've written up, documented, and sent proposal tickets to implement into the system; we had some review today and the past quarter's worth of work could have been done in, napkin math, about 2 weeks with fixes in place, and to a better standard! Yes, that puts my own job at risk, but still. Even part of them going in would keep me here and also unfuck the process.) Instead someone new gets to learn my work from scratch, I get to go learn someone else's work from scratch, and all improvements are lost by the wayside (along with my will to live) as I get to take on the burden of this person's absurd workload on top of going back to my current work "when I have time". Wanting to improve things is the wrong bloody attitude to bring into a corporate environment, but I can't help it. Not least because I just want to stop worsening RSI issues on account of all the lovely manual processes that have no purpose existing. (I've spent all week on manual entry that could be done in two clicks with the import tool that IT guy has locked down and requires everything to go through him - and he doesn't approve any imports)
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Apr 29, 2021 17:36
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WonkyBob posted:A 365 admin would have to give themselves full permission to your mailbox and either open it from OWA or by adding your account to their installed Outlook client as a second profile. If the senior computer touchers have followed the correct procedure, all admins should have their own named accounts so if someone did do this it would be searchable in the audit logs. When I saw my company had posted a listing for my job title(when they’d decided they’re firing my coworker) I got anxious that it was to replace me for no reason and was talking to a friend in the field about it. He told me to do this to my bosses email to find out and I was like uh gently caress no thank you. Apparently he’s done it before, but I’m pretty sure at my last company an old admin got fired + some sort of legal action for snooping on the CIOs emails.
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Apr 29, 2021 17:43
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I know it would be possible via content search but that would be pretty cumbersome
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Apr 29, 2021 17:58
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Last year we didn't have stand-up meetings or assign "points" to tasks within a "sprint" but now we do and I do not prefer it
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Apr 29, 2021 18:25
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Tetramin posted:When I saw my company had posted a listing for my job title(when they’d decided they’re firing my coworker) I got anxious that it was to replace me for no reason and was talking to a friend in the field about it. He told me to do this to my bosses email to find out and I was like uh gently caress no thank you. Apparently he’s done it before, but I’m pretty sure at my last company an old admin got fired + some sort of legal action for snooping on the CIOs emails. Log into admin section and create a rule that forwards every time your name is mentioned in an email
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Apr 29, 2021 18:38
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Tetramin posted:When I saw my company had posted a listing for my job title(when they’d decided they’re firing my coworker) I got anxious that it was to replace me for no reason and was talking to a friend in the field about it. He told me to do this to my bosses email to find out and I was like uh gently caress no thank you. Apparently he’s done it before, but I’m pretty sure at my last company an old admin got fired + some sort of legal action for snooping on the CIOs emails. Either your friend is the only person with admin access to the 365 tenant or they spend a large amount of the week hoping no one runs a full audit on all of their account activity Fried Watermelon posted:Log into admin section and create a rule that forwards every time your name is mentioned in an email Either another admin would see a new mailflow rule and hopefully ask you why it's there (and maybe you can bullshit your way out of it seeming as incriminating as it is) or Infosec would notice more internal emails getting auto-forwarded and probably have you immediately dismissed.
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Apr 29, 2021 19:42
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Prism Mirror Lens posted:Does anyone else have the customer/coworker who is perfectly lucid in emails but keeps wanting to video call you so that they can say things like “I have a question, um, when I - when I - you know, like - when I *gestures wildly* why does it - like - why does the thing - um - what I mean is when I do this, it like, doesn’t, like, you know, do what I want, if that makes sense?” I want to help but PLEASE just email me for gods sake One of our project management guys loves to call me to ask about status on various things, which is fine, I don't mind calls or emails, but for some reason he seems to believe I can see what he's looking at so I'll get questions like "Do you know when this approval will go through?" What approval? I have six from you alone. "What's the due date on this line?" We have 60 parts on order, all of them with estimated dates already. I have to remind him that I can't see what he's pointing at every time.
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Apr 29, 2021 19:50
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Edit: Double post.
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Apr 29, 2021 19:50
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Test your backups are restorable and snoop the backups. Dumb poo poo my work does: not test backups.
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Apr 29, 2021 19:53
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Lazyfire posted:One of our project management guys loves to call me to ask about status on various things, which is fine, I don't mind calls or emails, but for some reason he seems to believe I can see what he's looking at so I'll get questions like "Do you know when this approval will go through?" What approval? I have six from you alone. "What's the due date on this line?" We have 60 parts on order, all of them with estimated dates already. I have to remind him that I can't see what he's pointing at every time. This right here is the guy who will push for a return to full in office work even if a department is perfectly capable of operating remote.
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Apr 29, 2021 19:56
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Tetramin posted:This right here is the guy who will push for a return to full in office work even if a department is perfectly capable of operating remote. How else are they supposed to lean over your shoulder and breath on your ear while jabbing greasy fingerprints onto your screen?
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Apr 29, 2021 20:23
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Thanks for the info on O365/Outlook, guys. I've been logging personal appointments in my work calendar because I'm lazy, and they're not like interviews or something that'd get me on a poo poo list it's mostly therapy sessions but I think I'm going to stop doing that, just in case, and just log them into my personal google calendar. It all syncs to the same shared calendar on my phone anyway. I'll keep blocking out the time on my work calendar just without details.
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Apr 29, 2021 21:01
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Hatsune Mike posted:Last year we didn't have stand-up meetings or assign "points" to tasks within a "sprint" but now we do and I do not prefer it needs more agile
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Apr 29, 2021 21:36
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Google calendar is broken as gently caress on my phone for some reason. Confirming that EDiscovery tool does keep metadata about teams meetings or exchange online items so it’s buried in there somewhere, but it seems to be challenging to acesss.
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Apr 29, 2021 21:36
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SMEGMA_MAIL posted:Google calendar is broken as gently caress on my phone for some reason. Yeah this makes me feel a little more at ease, at least about the stuff I've already put in. Helljob was very wild west in terms of access and segregation of duties / controls, and had a lot of bored assholes with way too much access and way too much time on their hands, but current job has dedicated infosec people, controls people, and a fairly ethical (seeming) IT team in charge of top level admin.
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Apr 29, 2021 22:15
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SMEGMA_MAIL posted:I just googled this and holy lmao how the mighty have fallen Funny thing is until you mentioned Googling it I hadn't. I thought that perhaps that the corporate drivel they had presented before us was for internal use only and that they hadn't be so foolish as to actually post any of it publicly. It reminds me of Sears. Does anyone else remember Sears? They've really gone all-in on this gamble to the point of making it known that negative talk or refusal to drink the kool-aid will face some sort of disciplinary actions. Since I'd just as soon not sink with the ship that doesn't bother me.
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Apr 29, 2021 22:42
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thathonkey posted:needs more agile I only recently experienced working on an “agile” project. I have come to the conclusion that the name was given by someone with a heightened sense of irony.
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Apr 29, 2021 22:59
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Pimpcasso posted:My company changed the time frame for PTO this year. You now top out out at 15 years instead of 10. I hit my 10th year this January, but they changed the policy on the first. So I don’t get another PTO bump for five years because I was hired on January 5th instead of December 31st. At the ad agency I signed my hiring papers on June 30th, but they made me date it for Monday, July 3rd. This cost me 2 PTO days. At my current place, I checked my employee recognition points last month. Now I'm planning a trip to London on a year and a half's worth of peer awards. Night and loving day.
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Apr 29, 2021 23:17
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Tetramin posted:This right here is the guy who will push for a return to full in office work even if a department is perfectly capable of operating remote. Nah, this guy is a contractor who works offsite, so he would never get the chance to put his greasy fingers on my screen in real life anyway. He's just hilariously inept.
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Apr 30, 2021 01:29
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Breetai posted:Which is more aggravating while working tech helpdesk: a user instant messaging the word "hi" and nothing else, or asking a user a very simple yes or no question that your troubleshooting will hinge upon and then watching the message bubbles for 10 minutes while they either type an answer that is ambiguous, or suddenly stop and go offline for the day before sending? I go into the chat so they can see I have read their salutation but I make sure I don't start typing anything in reply until they send a second message asking something. If you have the guts you can also just reply with https://www.nohello.com/
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Apr 30, 2021 02:40
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mllaneza posted:At the ad agency I signed my hiring papers on June 30th, but they made me date it for Monday, July 3rd. This cost me 2 PTO days. You want to go into a COVID hotspot? 
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Apr 30, 2021 03:54
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Scientastic posted:I only recently experienced working on an “agile” project. I have come to the conclusion that the name was given by someone with a heightened sense of irony.
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Apr 30, 2021 04:27
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Rent-A-Cop posted:AGILE would work great if I could tell PMs to eat my rear end, but alas, I cannot. Traditional waterfall planning works much better if you can tell your PM to eat your rear end too though
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Apr 30, 2021 04:32
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Rent-A-Cop posted:AGILE would work great if I could tell PMs to eat my rear end, but alas, I cannot. I have to scream about this. Sorry not sorry for the nerd poo poo. I'm a programmer that maintains and develops some pretty simple automated processes that once a day connect to the company's internal data system and produce a bunch of reports. My overall job has been migrating this automation from the old codebase, which was a box of angry possums that would escape and bite people at least once a week, to a systematic framework that isn't full of weird corner cases, can be extended, and doesn't break all the time. Usual computer toucher stuff One part of the whole process that's sort of a mess is that this process relies on a whole bunch of .json configuration files in a folder. People are editing these things by hand, and it introduces errors and confusion. A folder full of .json mostly works, but it doesn't scale well and there's no audit trail for who changed what and when. So it'd be a good idea to put it all in a database. I went on leave for a few months to have a baby, and my team decides that they should move our stuff into a database. So they get two Agile Project Managers, a contract Python developer, and the senior software architect who designed the box of angry possums I'm trying to decommission, and they come up with a Plan. I get back to a zillion Jira tickets with nonsensical names and vague descriptions and meetings five days a week consisting of arguing about what the Jira tickets actually mean. I complained and got the meetings down to two days a week, and then stupid me spent four hours and 2000 words of memos explaining to the PMs why their tickets born no relation to the work to be done, and that if they actually achieve the goal at the top of the Epic, these were the stories and subtasks. But I'm not a PM and can't write my own Jira tickets, so we're stuck with the nonsense tickets and no progress. Knee deep in the big muddy and pushing on. The worst part is that there's a right solution to this problem, which is to spin up MongoDB instance and just throw the jsons in there. This would take about 15 minutes, 14 of which would be me scratching my nuts. But our database team is "too overwhelmed to support MongoDB" so instead we have to do a bunch of fragile and complicated hackery to make non-relational data work in SQL. Agile can eat my entire rear end.
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Apr 30, 2021 05:14
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I keep getting emails with gemba and andon in all caps since Amazon has that six sigma “Japanese loan word” addiction going on and I always want to write back “They’re not acronyms you idiot hellfuckers”. I’m concerned one day I won’t be able to hold back.
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Apr 30, 2021 05:18
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Ugly In The Morning posted:I keep getting emails with gemba and andon in all caps since Amazon has that six sigma “Japanese loan word” addiction going on and I always want to write back “They’re not acronyms you idiot hellfuckers”. I’m concerned one day I won’t be able to hold back. Write that, but in Japanese. Edit: Also, if someone is intent on introducing jargon for the sake of jargon, into something that I am forced to interact with but which is not central to my productivity or happiness, I am absolutely not learning what the gently caress they are talking about, and I will parrot whatever bullshit buzzwords they use back to them in grammatically correct nonsense until they give up and find someone who cares. Could that be what someone is doing to you? Atopian fucked around with this message at 05:29 on Apr 30, 2021 |
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Apr 30, 2021 05:27
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Biffmotron posted:So they get two Agile Project Managers, a contract Python developer, and the senior software architect who designed the box of angry possums I'm trying to decommission, and they come up with a Plan. I read "senior" as "senile". How far off was I?
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Apr 30, 2021 05:43
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Armitag3 posted:You're absolutely right because UX is a thing and the enduser isn't (and shouldn't) going to care about what happens under the hood. I see this disconnect between techies and non-techies all the time where these groups speak entirely different languages and I feel like a daywalker when my peers go on about the classes and methods they're working on and the people around them politely smile and nod and look at their fingers praying that the nerd shuts up. Oh, I knew I was right (about this case and the rest of the semantics), but there was literally nobody to back me up or reliably not throw me under the bus so my choices were to dig my heels in and argue for correct terminology/implementation and hopefully get the other side to see the light/relent or let it go, implement it wrong, then later end up with confused users which of course would be my fault.  Slotducks posted:I'm a tech writer/documentation guy for a software company and you wouldn't believe how many times I've been asked to write an error message and it ends up completely derailing the workflow/design from its origin just because the simple process of reviewing how a user can make an error and then how we tell them about said error points out serious flaws in the workflow. I did most of the documentation at my last job, and I definitely uncovered lots of workflow problems while writing it. My favorite was rewriting the procedure for doing a checksum verification for a program download or something. I would go through the procedure myself as I wrote to make sure I understood it well enough to explain it. I tried to perform the check and it wasn't working and I got all these errors and poo poo (and this sort of stuff is NOT in my wheelhouse so I had no clue what was going on) so I googled and eventually figured out that the checksum thing itself had been implemented incorrectly. I could get the hash to show up, but it wouldn't automatically verify, so you had to compare the hashes in the command line by looking at them. I brought this to the attention of the higher up who wrote/packaged the program but he didn't seem to think it was a big deal, despite me explaining that I would have to reveal in the documentation that we set poo poo up wrong and instruct the user to perform a janky-rear end workaround. I think I just shelved the new draft and kept the old bad one (that I didn't write) in place. BOOTY-ADE posted:Always amazes me how some people just can't grasp that not everyone can understand/comprehend at the same level they do. Regular end users aren't loving database wizards, programmers or anything like that, they don't care about stupid wording for a function, they just want it to work. I am jaded about this and no longer amazed. There are too many people that don't understand that UI/UX design goes a lot deeper than button placement and making it look pretty. Also, I'm pretty sure this guy was on the spectrum so his apparent inability/unwillingness to consider the user's point of view was unsurprising. This was esoteric B2B software with more technical users, but users being technical doesn't mean they'll be thinking about interacting with our software in terms of underlying architecture they can't see. But luckily I'm no longer at that job and am now at a better job at a better company with way better pay that has a UX-first philosophy about the development process and actually like and respect my design work instead of blowing me off and treating me like a dumb React monkey.
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Apr 30, 2021 06:45
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Our marketing people have been giving us what seems to be hourly updates on the last day for some guy who's retiring. They seem to think that everyone in the company is totally invested in events such as his last lunch with the team, his farewell, his last drive out of the carpark, and how much he looks forward to playing golf in his retirement. loving golf. Why are all these old men so obsessed with golf. Playing golf is not a personality you boring grey office fucks.
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Apr 30, 2021 08:31
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Creature posted:loving golf. Why are all these old men so obsessed with golf. Playing golf is not a personality you boring grey office fucks. It's a walk in the countryside with frequent stops to rest, and people have to pay attention to what you do. This is why old dudes like it. It's an unremarkable activity that lets groups of people talk in relative privacy without having to formally record it as a meeting. This is why rich corrupt people like it. Everyone else should ignore it. And yet.
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Apr 30, 2021 08:40
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It’s fun to go outside and do mild physical stuff with your friends where you can be competitive but also drink without a risk maiming yourself. You don’t have to be old, rich, or corrupt to like it (but it helps).
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Apr 30, 2021 08:42
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I just quit my job! I've been miserable for months and I was being asked to commit to a project for several months, so I just decided to leave now instead of having them plan the project around my presence and then leave later. My boss almost immediately e-mailed the entire team to announce this? Without telling me he was going to do that? Luckily I'd already told some of the people who I wanted to hear it from me first, but jfc dude.
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Apr 30, 2021 09:02
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Atopian posted:It's a walk in the countryside with frequent stops to rest, and people have to pay attention to what you do.
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Apr 30, 2021 12:10
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Hatsune Mike posted:Last year we didn't have stand-up meetings or assign "points" to tasks within a "sprint" but now we do and I do not prefer it For what it’s worth the guy who invented the concept of ‘points’ has publicly apologized and said it was one of the worst things he’s introduced to the world
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Apr 30, 2021 12:20
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zedprime posted:Don't forget flexing your sick carbon fiber clubs or we could cover all of the above with the people's sport, frolf. Do not associate the pure and noble frolf! with those monsters.
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Apr 30, 2021 12:23
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