TL;DR: I dont work in IT, but I code at work, and the non-IT higher-ups lack of knowledge shows brutally.

So I work in aviation, not IT. Through coincidences, I was tasked to work on our flight plan distribution logic years ago, which was then written in BRL (Business Rule Language). In lockdown 2020, I finally started to learn "real" programming with Python, but soon shifted to Java. Which was good, since all of a sudden a few months ago the company ditched BRL and the godawful IBM ODM IDE for... Java and IntelliJ. Nice. BUT my teammates have zero clue about Java and no real inclination to learn it by themselves. So I have been appointed their mentor, despite me stating Im still a beginner myself. Its somewhat doable, I get the hard problems, they do basic maintenace, basically renaming variables and stuff. One of my yearly goals is to make sure a completely new guy is able to do everything I do by september. It took a LOT to talk them out of it.

In my last yearly review I got some flak for not "selling" myself to other teams enough, whatever that means. So, as a learning project, I designed a new intranet page for our department in Javascript. Its loved by all. It has links to all the stuff we need woth a nice interface and built in tools to make work easier and more efficient. I did it on my own, in my spare time, simply because I was fed up with the old crap and it was an enormously good learning opportunity. Now they want to give some other guy the responsibility over that page/tool because apparently it is "not in my process team description". They even planned a day for me and him so he can "learn Javascript then". Suuure...

I also did a digital checklist tool as a webapp. All this runs from a local folder, no server at all because reasons. I made it work. Now they want it integrated into some other tool some other guy made. He wrote his tool in PHP entirely so merging the two will take considerable time. Which I told them multiple times. No, it does not take about two hours.

Sometimes, comrades, sometimes....
Im still grateful for the opportunity to code at work but the lack of knowledge really REALLY shows. My goal now is to talk management into paying for a Java course for me (they are very expensive here). That way, they get a better employee and I get more knowledge and an actual certificate thats worth something. Usually in this company, this has higher chances of success than straight up asking for more money.

Sorry for the long story, but it felt good just typing it all out, even if nobody reads this.

Managers on Slack at 08:30: Hey frontendJunior, can you accept that meeting for 09:00?

frontendJunior: * No response *

Managers: * Clueless why nobody would see a ping literally 30 minutes before a meeting *

Fullstackclown, watching it all unfold: lol 🤡

Manager: "We can't have new releases breaking older versions of the mobile app!!!!! We'll lose all our customers!!!!"

fullStackChris: "That's fine, we can do API versioning, but it will take some time to implement, I'll have to be quite careful and write some tests to implement it. Probably 2-3 weeks..."

Manager: "NO WAY, THAT TIME ESTIMATE IS WAY TOO LONG, WE DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THAT!!!"

fullStackChris: "So how do you wanna support multiple versions of the app without doing any sort of versioning?"

Manager: "...we'll think of something!"

Dev: "..."

And with 99% certainty, I expect to hear this in a week or two:

Manager: "fullStackChris, we'd like to introduce you to the highly technical concept, API versioning. It's a way to version the API so we can support multiple versions of the application our customers use! It's amazing! Please implement this immediately so we can support multiple versions of the application!"

Sigh... each day managers learn a bit more how physical reality works... you can't have your cake and eat it too.

Why do managers always want to fucking "discuss"? If you had literally a first-grader's education in basic electronics, you could define tasks and tickets by yourself and not have to fumble around all day and fuck it up,

My company’s upper leadership is sooo focused on the NUMBER of defects that are open on our project and only the number. We give each defect a priority of P0, P1, or P2. You would think this would help prioritize and strategize our plan to fix them. But nope. Every week we have some arbitrary “goal” to hit. A number purely made up by clueless leadership as to what makes a “quality” product.

On Friday’s, managers start harassing devs to merge their fixes and for QA to close out defects. So effectively rushing to hit that arbitrary number or else we’ll have to work Saturday.

Meanwhile they want more test automation coverage to reduce the incoming defect rate. But when the fuck do we have time to develop said tests when all you want is the defect closed to bring down your precious little number?!

They’d rather us close 25 P2 defects to bring the number down rather than 10 P0 or P1 defects. These leaders are so incompetent it kills me! Without any back story, they’re ultimately the reason we’re in this position in the first place! Argghhh!

I've just realized the very root cause of the frustration of devs everywhere!

It has everything to do with the manager's thought process:

Manager: HUR DUR, ME NO UNDERSTAND SOMETHING!!! MUST BE WRONG!!! ME CREATE BUG TICKET!!!

Dev: 🤦‍♂️ ...sigh...

After working form home for over 18 months now, I start reprioritising things.
I relocated to Ireland almost 3 years ago and I love the people, and country.. but..
The government is a new level of incompetent, selfish (politicians) and clueless. Unlike any other EU government I’ve ever seen.
To this day I’m not allowed to leave the country to see my family. I don’t know many people here because most of them already left so that sucks.

Although my company is great, we got a new female CEO which (just my impression) feels like she gotta prove herself to the world and the company is falling apart since she took over. Seniors leaving on a weekly basis and new managers and grads get hired.

I could go back to the country I grew up in and make my 110k a year (which is a lot in Europe) and I could be close to my fam during covid shit. But I told myself to never go back there because I hate that place..

I’m seriously considering leaving the country I love to go back to the country I hate, make good money for 2-3 years and then come back.. but when thinking about going back there I could cry..

It’s fucked up but COVID makes me consider it..

If I could I would buy a cheap farm somewhere and go off grid 😅

what an absolute condescending garbage post...

"brilliant coder who can't meet a deadline"? well, you're the idiot right there, you just admitted it - they are brilliant and you don't know how to set deadlines

imagine labeling someone who can't meet a workload DIFFICULT! god this is making me fucking fume

"normal management" - yeah this is normal management alright, treating everyone like they don't know what they are doing and expecting them to follow you blindly, sounds pretty normal to me

it's shit like this that leads to cocky ass young dumb managers who actually don't know shit about building a product themselves, but then turn around and think they instead have the ability to manage a team to do it... incredible

I never understood people complaining about their managers until I got a new one and started to ask the most clueless things.

Man, some days, these fucking managers just make me want to get fucking drunk...

clueless questions, annoying fucking fake priority shit immediately asking for this and that with absolutely no planning or thinking ahead

its really like guiding kids through kindergarten some days

i want to bring some seriousness and structure to this company but some days.... man, i just am done with it

Assumptions are a terrible idea, yet I find myself making them all the time about other people. I am finding the very sobering reality about people who use technology vs people who create technology. The users have zero intellectual interest in how the technology accomplishes a task. While the creators get absorbed into the details and often relish in being able to maximize capability.

A point of frustration for me is users who are in a semi technical field yet take zero time to learn how to configure a piece of tech. They get a plug and play attitude and seek in panic when things don't work. The work is semi technical because they need to understand some of the fundamental physics involved to assess things using instrumentation. Yet when asked about a system they actively modify as to how it is normally setup they are clueless. Me, who helps write the software to control these devices, is stumped that they have zero interest (or capacity?) to understand how the system is normally configured. This is not the first time I have made assumption about what they know in technical contexts. I have run into this before with managers, but not with technicians.

How do you manage your expectations with people who won't invest any time into how their equipment actually works? How does someone operate that way to begin with? Where is their curiosity about how things work?

On the flip side, I swear at my fucking phone because I don't care how it works, but I just want it to stop doing everything besides being a phone... Fuck you, we are not the same, I think...

A place where you can evolve your skills, competitive and that you're respected.

And NO FREAKING CLUELESS PROJECT MANAGERS that do not understand how software is "born" and expect you to catch insane deadlines...