The tool that doesn’t exist anywhere else is so true. I had a boss that insinuated I was inexperienced because I didn’t know his specific internal process (which was complete nonsense because he is literally illiterate and cannot read or write).
When I politely corrected him that this was my second job in this specific industry he paused before continuing to ramble as if I’m some intern when I was with the company for 3 years in a midlevel role.
Same guy who once gave me a 30 mins lecture about how much he wants women like me and his daughter to succeed and “have a voice”, literally without letting me insert more than 1 word the entire time.
there comes a time where you have so little supervision that you can actually do something interesting and productive
Those are the days. I can even sometimes sneak in some tech debt reduction.
We had a great saying in a team I uses to be on: “Write good code and hope no one notices”
Oh god, add in “random scripts throw errors that you’ve never seen before” and the anus-clenching Teams DONK sound that precedes yet another poorly-worded indecipherable rant from my boss.
Are you spying on me? Had to change my password this week. And we’re in a release freeze.
Agile/Scrum, ISO 9001, ITIL, Six Sigma, CMMI, etc; it’s all cargo cults.
I’ve seen cargo thrown around a few times. What is that?
Build a skunk works, it’s like an IT department’s shadow IT, shave a yak, shed a bike.
attend mandatory training
I love doing big capital projects and spending literally millions of dollars in developer hours just for senior leadership to change their minds after the fact and not want any of what we just built!
Awfully true.
Forced password resets.
Entropy defeats recall.
Desk blooms with secrets.Ah, white collar haiku…
I was in a band called White Collar Haiku.
We mostly did Huey Lewis and the News covers.
- waiting 20 minutes for your PC to boot all the corporate bloatware before it’s usable
- quarterly 4-hour-long all-department meeting that could have been an email
- “incorporating” the latest tech buzzword into your process because that one manager has nothing better to do
- “celebrating” things like Company Culture Week™ and other BS stuff imagined up by people with nothing better to do
- waiting 20 minutes for your PC to boot all the corporate bloatware before it’s usable
This is the bane of my existence. And of course IT locks us out of the UEFI so we can’t set the system to auto-boot 15 minutes before we show up to work.
I’m just happy I was able to remove OneDrive from the start-up applications. Now I don’t have to waste an hour each day waiting for files to sync
If only I could remove OneDrive… IT expects us to use it for everything.
When I was getting a PC upgrade, I explicitly told them that I had already handled backing everything up (as they repeatedly said I needed to do). Most of my projects are synced with our version control, so I have a projects folder with a few hundred GB in it that I didn’t need to explicitly transfer to my new PC (I would check out projects as I needed them). I wrote in the ticket that they didn’t need to transfer any files, I had already handled it. And I told the IT person who took my old PC. They said my new PC would be ready the next morning.
Lo and behold, it wasn’t. I called and asked, they said they were still working on it. The following day, I went to pick it up and the IT person explained that it took so long because they had to transfer over hundreds of GB of files. And they reminded me that if I had been using OneDrive, I could have had it a day sooner.
You know, because they had to copy over my files. That were already in version control. A system they admin. And that I told them about like 5 times. After they said they wouldn’t be responsible for file transfers.
Ah well, guess I got paid for their ineptitude. I wish this was the worst they’ve done, though.
Having a team touch base, followed by a daily standup, followed by a quality initiative meeting, followed by a biweekly support touch base, followed by a demo for a tool your team will never use, followed by lunch and learn session over some AI tool you’ll be forced to use, followed by your biweekly 1:1 with the manager, followed by the department touch base, followed by the company all hands… Aaaaand done with meetings. Finally, some time to get some work done… then your downstream customer wants you to investigate why their counts don’t match yours… “could you run the totals again? Could you run them broken down by hour? By minute? By second? Can you get me a list of each record at these 6 timestamps? Can I get them in a different format? Oops, the problem was on our end.” Great. And it’s 5 o’clock. Scrum master gonna be up my ass about story points tomorrow.
oh no my PTSD is coming back.
As a project/portfolio manager, the first thing I try to do is eliminate everything except the customer part. That is really hard to fix, but at least there is more time?
You must be a fellow data engineer
Eh, more software now. But I work on a streaming platform so or downstream customers are data engineers.
“Let’s try to get this thing done with a ridiculous deadline, knowing full well that the work will be discarded because of overriding factor X but it looks good that the team got it done in the deadline someone set, so the someone will get their bonus”
Move slow and no things.
