One day, the Director of Web Ops (marketing role) submitted a ticket to update the list of product categories on the website’s navigation. Sounds like a simple ticket right? Just some html edits. Nope. Every day for three days, she changes her mind and adds new changes. What should have taken me 10 minutes stretched out to three days. She held up code review of my ticket because she kept making changes.

She had plenty of time to sort out what she wanted. That ticket had been sitting in the To Do pile for two days before I touched it.

She was being an asshole because she knew she could get away with it and I had no recourse: my direct manager was on vacation, the entire dev team was going to be laid off anyway so no one was going to defend us on “trivial” matters, and we were going to enter code freeze soon so she’d just argue it was critical business changes for our critical revenue season.

I suspect she was also just not good at her job. I never met her in person because she was hired during the 2020 pandemic and we were all working remotely. I did see her make a five minute presentation during an all staff meeting…and she didn’t come off too well. Her voice was trembling during her turn to speak…like she was not confident or not prepared.

She knew she was causing chaos but she put on this act of not knowing. She was definitely trained on our dev team’s practices for tickets and deployments. She knows about code review, beta testing, and user acceptance testing that has to happen before a ticket can be deployed.

It happened to be before Thanksgiving weekend 2020. Our deploy was going to happen on Tuesday instead of Thursday because Thursday was a holiday (no one would be working) and Wednesday was a half day.

Tuesday afternoon at 1pm, she messages me and the dev in charge of deploy about more changes! My time is already occupied because our Product Manager went on vacation and dumped a large amount of user acceptance testing on me. I scream at my computer at that point because I realize I’m in the ninth circle of hell. I tell the other dev in a separate message that Web Ops has been making changes EVERY DAY since I picked up that ticket.

Other dev tells her that we have to check with the C-suite executive for engineering because we’re not allowed to make changes to tickets so close to the deploy. This is actually the policy. He also tries to give Web Ops the benefit of the doubt because we’re not deploying on our usual day. He had to do that to so she didn’t feel bad (and so she doesn’t complain about us not working towards the company’s goals).

Other dev had to do the code changes because I was otherwise occupied with user acceptance testing. If I were him, I’d be pissed that I was distracted from concentrating on the deploy so close to the holiday.

Director of Web Ops was actually capable of even more chaos. I ranted about it before. For that dramatization and if you want to go down the rabbit hole, see: https://devrant.com/rants/4811518/...