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First week at my new job is good Free lunch every day. Drinks. Intermittent snacks. Occasional breakfast. It's not impossible they're actually witches and the plan is to fatten me up and eat me. Attempts at out of hours team building are once a month and seem well intentioned It's made an excellent impression I just have to figure out what I'm actually in charge of. It's a spin out that is still heavily linked with the parent in a way that seems unhealthy.
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May 8, 2021 08:17
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Batterypowered7 posted:Those old rear end mainframes must cost so much to maintain. The business inertia is huge. Until the last person who knows how to fix it dies, somewhere a terminal-access-only mainframe running a complex web of Cobol and hand-rolled assembly functions that violate every known rule of good memory management will chug in a frozen basement.
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May 8, 2021 12:47
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It's not so much "my" work that does it but lately manager type people we work for/with have gotten it into their heads that they are gonna "make my job easier" or "save time for me", which inevitably results in ten times more work and reduced quality of features. "Yeah we heard you already had written a piece of software that does everything we need buuuut we would like to make things as easy as possible for you so you can focus on what you're good at and get the product done, so we would instead like you to use this other software that we just happened to get for cheap and which only does half the things we need and does so in a terrible and slow way, and you'll spend an additional 3 months hacking around its limitations and basically ending up inventing a goddamn p2p network data diffusion protocol since we only make sane and rational choices here and no you can't just use an external database!!!! This is to help you don't you see." "Hmmmm you say you can implement this new feature that needs to be added in about two days? Hmmmm I hear you but instead we are gonna bring in a totally new guy and he can learn the entire codebase, which is extremely schizophrenic due to being shoved around to like 6 different people already, half of whom where not even programmers and should not have been let anywhere near it, and he'll do that and implement the easily most complex single feature in the product, in about three days (sic!) because that's how those things work and in no way will this backfire and you definitely aren't gonna be spending ten times as much time trying to teach that guy how to do the thing rather than just doing the thing yourself and it will not result in a disaster that you will have to clean up. Instead we want you to focus on what you're good at, which is the thing the other guy implied you guys were incompetent at." I extremely enjoy being told what i am and am not competent at and what will save me time, by some pissant middle manager. Yes I know they're not really trying to save me time and that's just how they're trying to convince us of the decision they've already made. Maybe try not implying we don't know what we're doing tho?
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May 8, 2021 15:52
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"thanks for doing all our marketing work by yourself for two years to get us VC money but these guys have their own team and so you're out on your rear end and no you haven't worked here long enough for your stock options to vest, idiot. whaddya mean you left a good thing to come work here? this was always the plan"
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May 8, 2021 16:18
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goatface posted:The business inertia is huge. Until the last person who knows how to fix it dies, somewhere a terminal-access-only mainframe running a complex web of Cobol and hand-rolled assembly functions that violate every known rule of good memory management will chug in a frozen basement. Depending on the industry the risk is huge too. Those mainframes have been bug fixed and optimized over decades and replacing them with a brand new server suite with newly-written Java software or whatever is not an easy thing to do. I'm not defending mainframes or anything but for enormous industries like banking you can't just shut everything down over a weekend and replace everything and then turn it back on and assume nothing will go wrong.
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May 8, 2021 16:57
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goatface posted:The business inertia is huge. Until the last person who knows how to fix it dies, somewhere a terminal-access-only mainframe running a complex web of Cobol and hand-rolled assembly functions that violate every known rule of good memory management will chug in a frozen basement. Yup. The cost isn't even a factor. Cost-benefit analysis treats the current model as the zero point without any "excess" costs; "if we fix this, it will take a couple hours of work and save us a few thousand dollars" doesn't even register the second half, just "it'll take worker time so we can't approve it". It doesn't matter how hosed a system is, as long as it's running it gets treated as "this is working normally and fine" even when it's neither normal nor fine. Sincerely, the person still pushing for one hour, maybe two maximum of active developer time (avg $45 in my area, but of course our one IT guy per division is underpaid) to save 50-100 hours of our time per year ($16, so $800-1600, and we're already over $3,000 in) by implementing code that's already written and small-batch tested, just needs a larger batch test and then merged. "We can't justify the cost." It's not even new code!
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May 8, 2021 17:27
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Elephant Ambush posted:Depending on the industry the risk is huge too. Those mainframes have been bug fixed and optimized over decades and replacing them with a brand new server suite with newly-written Java software or whatever is not an easy thing to do. I'm not defending mainframes or anything but for enormous industries like banking you can't just shut everything down over a weekend and replace everything and then turn it back on and assume nothing will go wrong. Banking, at least the majors, are probably a lot less likely to have an actually ancient, untouched system--more likely they have actively developed mainframe software they keep building on, and millions of dollars in contracts with IBM to keep cycling out the hardware for new models.
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May 8, 2021 17:32
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Elephant Ambush posted:Depending on the industry the risk is huge too. Those mainframes have been bug fixed and optimized over decades and replacing them with a brand new server suite with newly-written Java software or whatever is not an easy thing to do. I'm not defending mainframes or anything but for enormous industries like banking you can't just shut everything down over a weekend and replace everything and then turn it back on and assume nothing will go wrong. Additionally the mainframe often has other systems connected to it that expect data to be handed to them in an exact way, even if it's "wrong" An example of that sort of thing: Microsoft Excel treats 1900 as a leap year even though it isn't. This wasn't a mistake on Microsoft's part, they had to do this so Excel was compatible with Lotus 123, which mistakenly had 1900 as a leap year.
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May 8, 2021 18:20
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our app uses hard-coded settings defined in PHP for a huge variety of settings and options that each client has available to them so each of these has to be defined in the code per environment to take effect on that specific environment, per client. this has lead to literally dozens if not hundreds of "woops, i merged my code in the wrong place, didn't mean to turn that off, let me do another commit and we can deploy again" and "oh poo poo i didn't merge my change yet, we need to deploy again. give me 15 minutes i'll let you know when i've pushed my changes" in the last few years. despite all of this, the product team still continues to build new and more complicated functionality on top of this PHP setup instead of defining new settings in the DB where it can be edited without the need for a deploy. new employees especially struggle with this and we are in the middle of the biggest hiring campaign the company has ever seen. just piling poo poo on top of poo poo on top of poo poo, and then acting clueless when everyone points out to them that their decisions lead to these mistakes.
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May 8, 2021 19:43
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ben shapino posted:our app uses hard-coded settings defined in PHP for a huge variety of settings and options that each client has available to them The classic "we don't have time to do it right because we're pressured to get it done by an arbitrary date" followed by "it takes less time to put out fires than it does to do things right the first time". I loving hate capitalism.
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May 8, 2021 21:23
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just make up some technical or security reason why you need to do the work. if technical management isnt on board youre hosed anyway.
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May 8, 2021 21:30
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I was told the Free Market allows everything to run super efficient and government is completely ineffective. Some of you saying that's a lie?!
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May 8, 2021 21:44
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carry on then posted:Banking, at least the majors, are probably a lot less likely to have an actually ancient, untouched system--more likely they have actively developed mainframe software they keep building on, and millions of dollars in contracts with IBM to keep cycling out the hardware for new models. That's the fun thing. IBM is EXTREMELY happy to sell you some z/OS device which is FULLY backwards compatible with the 50 year old device for which your mainframe software was first written, the software whose first developers have actually by this point died of old age.
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May 9, 2021 01:26
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https://mobile.twitter.com/ehansalytics/status/1387413794721206274
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May 9, 2021 22:33
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If the IT guy doesn’t stop condescending to me over a loving unnecessary platform switch so help me. Keep loving sending poo poo over that I can google and ignore the “HELLO I HAVE A HUGE ISSUE” flags I’m waving. like to be fair, one of my sore spots is being talked down to wrt: computers, and now that saddled with being blown off on something that could severely affect my productivity - yeah. But the cloud
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May 10, 2021 12:03
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Skeleton knows whats up
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May 10, 2021 12:05
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teen witch posted:. My soon-to-be-former organisation continues to charge headlong at The Cloud, despite not getting... any of it. They're just using google drive and some minor organisation / storage thing, and hoping everything will work out. Today's latest is: they wanted group editing of some documents, so they gave everyone write access. Now someone has apparently accidentally deleted everything. No backups. Fortunately those of us who have been here for a while (who are all leaving in a couple of months) had our own backups, which we will graciously provide as soon as we are asked. Don't know what's going to happen after those two months though.
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May 10, 2021 12:11
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My current solution to using drive for an entire organisation is to manually back the whole thing up on an external drive once a month. People get ac ess to individual folders. It's going to be a nightmare if we expand beyond two or three people. Barudak posted:Skeleton knows whats up Maybe I'm just a traditionalist but I have a summer intern do all my analysis manually.
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May 10, 2021 16:45
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Atopian posted:My soon-to-be-former organisation continues to charge headlong at The Cloud, despite not getting... any of it. I thought that you had 30 odd days to recover accidentally deleted content?
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May 10, 2021 16:55
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goatface posted:The business inertia is huge. Until the last person who knows how to fix it dies, somewhere a terminal-access-only mainframe running a complex web of Cobol and hand-rolled assembly functions that violate every known rule of good memory management will chug in a frozen basement. my fiance, with a degree in something totally unrelated, got hired and trained to be a mainframe programmer by a major bank. at first when i looked up what Cobol is, I thought her future prospects could be iffy. but it seems like a lot of boomers are her higher-ups, the mainframe ain't going anywhere, and even if it was, somebody knowledgeable will have to be there to make the transition possible. so at this point I think she got a pretty drat bullet proof computer-toucher job?
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May 10, 2021 17:04
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20 Blunts posted:my fiance, with a degree in something totally unrelated, got hired and trained to be a mainframe programmer by a major bank. at first when i looked up what Cobol is, I thought her future prospects could be iffy. but it seems like a lot of boomers are her higher-ups, the mainframe ain't going anywhere, and even if it was, somebody knowledgeable will have to be there to make the transition possible. so at this point I think she got a pretty drat bullet proof computer-toucher job? Business oriented languages were made to be easy to understand and audit by random subject matter experts so anything that's COBOL or the like has super important transparency or auditing requirements that make changing systems nearly impossible. The ironic part is that we quickly cut corners in COBOL etc. to make it more like normal programming so now it's actually harder to understand so we have ancient unknowable programs that it is very important we don't replace.
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May 10, 2021 17:32
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The Cloud is just another person's computer I'm borrowing, so why can't I just load a virtual mainframe into it? This stuff is old Eldritch computing. It relies a lot on hardware idiosyncracies during compiling and runtime, usually entirely by accident. These are where the stories come from like I deleted a comment about the manager being a prick dated 1977 and for some reason wire transfers to Israel stopped working. The easiest place to run bullshit like that without a ton of chaos is just the original mainframe.
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May 10, 2021 17:42
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zedprime posted:The Cloud is just another person's computer I'm borrowing, so why can't I just load a virtual mainframe into it? I remember reading something similar where a program worked great, but only because of line length enforcement where everything over a certain limit of characters didn't count madness
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May 10, 2021 18:22
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Classic languages that were around at the time often had the punch card limits still hard coded in. Line length limits and function names limited to 8 characters long are just the beginnings of the pain.
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May 10, 2021 18:44
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Remember how we got that cost of living adjustment that was pulling teeth to get people to admit it happened at all? Turns out the people who have been here 15+ years are getting paid the same as people who have been here 3 or less. Who could have seen that coming. Almost like the complete refusal to discuss pay has consequences.
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May 10, 2021 19:07
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My boss told me to apply for this other job. I did. I told him about it and he said I probably won't get it. What the gently caress
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May 10, 2021 19:11
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Every year all employees at my company are forced to take what amounts to a few hours of courses on security in a company effort to try and curb phishing-style attacks. They then send out simulated phishing attacks and we have to report them when we spot them. They also send out a bunch of crap via 3rd party links that we have to click on. "Take this survey on corporate culture" or, my personal favourite, "your company is switching to a new corporate credit card, click here to apply". These are legitimate links that we're supposed to click on, but they feel like 100% phishing attempts. Then they complain when no one takes the surveys or fills out the card applications.
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May 10, 2021 19:22
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Sitting on a meeting about migrating 4200 users to a new domain. Half our applications don't work on the new domain. Leadership has set the deadline to get everyone migrated as the end of June. Lmao.
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May 10, 2021 19:25
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Boiled Water posted:I remember reading something similar where a program worked great, but only because of line length enforcement where everything over a certain limit of characters didn't count The famous story about the 500 mile emails is my favourite https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles
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May 10, 2021 19:33
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Atopian posted:My soon-to-be-former organisation continues to charge headlong at The Cloud, despite not getting... any of it. How? Even the lowest level commercial Gsuite has file restoration built in for the Gsuite admin, I'm like 99.9% sure? It also has a trash can that keeps files for (I think) 30 days?
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May 10, 2021 20:05
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Inzombiac posted:My boss told me to apply for this other job. 
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May 10, 2021 20:42
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zedprime posted:Let's be real if you're gonna code anything with an accounting background you're gonna get pigeon holed into a business-oriented language crime against computer science. I probably would not mind that TOO awful much, to be honest! zedprime posted:~*Doot doot doot gonna learn some C# to make some handy tools for my day to day*~ Well, hello strange man! I played Half Life and have a soft spot for suspicious G-Men with FaNtAsTiC oFfErS, where do I sign!? SkyeAuroline posted:Yup. The cost isn't even a factor. Cost-benefit analysis treats the current model as the zero point without any "excess" costs; "if we fix this, it will take a couple hours of work and save us a few thousand dollars" doesn't even register the second half, just "it'll take worker time so we can't approve it". It doesn't matter how hosed a system is, as long as it's running it gets treated as "this is working normally and fine" even when it's neither normal nor fine. Hold up. HOLD UP. These are example numbers, right? Of course they are, you're not fixing all their poo poo for that. No, of course you are not. Regardless, please report to the Negotiation Thread posthaste: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3768531 Everyone should go there, it owns Barudak posted:Skeleton knows whats up Be that as it may, he still needs to chill the gently caress out 
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May 10, 2021 21:04
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SkyeAuroline posted:Remember how we got that cost of living adjustment that was pulling teeth to get people to admit it happened at all? I had a job where the president of the company handed out bonus checks in person on the shop floor around Christmas time. The rubric for this bonus was apparently opaque, and (long before I got there) when someone asked why someone else got a significantly larger bonus than him, the president apparently had a fit and said that if people shared pay with each other ever again, they would be fired and bonuses ended. When I told my mentor that I was quitting after a year working there, he shared how much he was making and was like "Good, I won't let my son work here." I was like "WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE!?!?" and he was like "I dunno, they gave me a job in the slump in 1982 when I really needed it" and I just stared at him blankly before saying "Good luck, see ya'"
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May 10, 2021 21:10
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Inzombiac posted:My boss told me to apply for this other job. I wonder if your boss was hoping you wouldn't get around to it, so that when you were like "promotion plx" he could come back with "You never applied for that other one, dunno when the stars will align again" Maybe I'm being unfair to your boss but he's a boss so probably not
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May 10, 2021 21:12
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Zarin posted:
They are not, in fact, example numbers at all - that's just the situation. If "for that" you mean my pay compared to developer pay it's because I'm in an entirely different department with an entirely different role, I just work in the systems they nominally maintain. I also have no idea if that's what our guys are actually paid since, as mentioned, everyone here is allergic to any communication on financial stuff. But rough average for the area. I'm also in a federal minimum wage area where just about everywhere else I'd be making $12-13 tops and not be able to make rent. Believe me. I've been looking for a long while now.
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May 10, 2021 21:16
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My office wants to cross train people into learning Mainframe poo poo, so we're not boned if one of the 60 year old dudes retires suddenly. This offer does not come with a pay bump to the level our Mainframe guys are at, and we would still have to do our other duties, whereas the mainframe guys get a lot of free time to watch youtube or whatever when there's nothing to do. suprisingly, the few people who expressed interest decided not to go through with it after learning the specifics. Similar story regarding the "App developer" position that's sitting unfilled.
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May 10, 2021 21:17
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InternetJunky posted:Every year all employees at my company are forced to take what amounts to a few hours of courses on security in a company effort to try and curb phishing-style attacks. They then send out simulated phishing attacks and we have to report them when we spot them. Mark the training as a phishing attempt. That's how you get the secret good end.
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May 10, 2021 21:19
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SkyeAuroline posted:They are not, in fact, example numbers at all - that's just the situation. If "for that" you mean my pay compared to developer pay it's because I'm in an entirely different department with an entirely different role, I just work in the systems they nominally maintain. I also have no idea if that's what our guys are actually paid since, as mentioned, everyone here is allergic to any communication on financial stuff. But rough average for the area. Yeah, I was just sorta memeing; I'm kinda familiar with your situation because you're in like half the threads I've bookmarked lol  I'm probably also having flashbacks of when I was a user doing higher-level work to fix the terrible systems and processes we had, all for user pay, that really didn't lend themselves to the sort of career advancement I was expecting so I am totally DEFINITELY not super-bitter about that on your behalf, nope, not at all. That'd be silly. Ahh, one of my favorite conversations:  I have a great opportunity for you! I hate that word. Why? It's got lots of visibility! What is it an opportunity for? What do you mean? What is it an opportunity for? More pay? Finally getting into an office job? I've taken 3 'promotions' and completed a half-dozen high-visibility projects and I'm still making the same pay I made 3 years ago when I topped out the scale. I finished my degree and STILL can't get out of here. What does this 'opportunity' provide that all the other ones didn't? . . . . Yeah. Opportunity. If you want me to do it, just order me to do it. I'll do it. But I have plenty of resume padding at this point.. . . I think this was right around the time I emailed HR and asked them how much I'd owe the company if I quit. They had a tuition-assistance program but no mechanism for actually having help landing a role using that degree within the company. The only option was to just toss your resume into the black hole that was the online job portal and hope for the best.
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May 10, 2021 21:34
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InternetJunky posted:Every year all employees at my company are forced to take what amounts to a few hours of courses on security in a company effort to try and curb phishing-style attacks. They then send out simulated phishing attacks and we have to report them when we spot them. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/may/10/train-firms-worker-bonus-email-is-actually-cyber-security-test quote:West Midlands Trains emailed about 2,500 employees with a message saying its managing director, Julian Edwards, wanted to thank them for their hard work over the past year under Covid-19. The email said they would get a one-off payment as a thank you after “huge strain was placed upon a large number of our workforce”.
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May 10, 2021 22:25
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nexus6 posted:https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/may/10/train-firms-worker-bonus-email-is-actually-cyber-security-test lol loving moron workers, they should know better than to expect praise and bonuses - management, probably
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May 10, 2021 22:27
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