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Last day on the contract from hell. I'd written a project with one other person in our spare time that performed a critical business function. The following conversation was had between myself, the job thief who was handed my job and their manager, with the 10 other IBM GS "dev domain experts" assigned to that team sitting silently on zoom:
Moi: hey all, what seems to be the problem?
JT: how to update the java for requirement?
Moi: I would assume a text editor, have you tried intellij
JTM: she's talking about ticket BS-101, the data is wrong
Moi: ah, well, you might want to fix that
JT: how to fix?
Moi: update the database and update the logic that depends on it
JTM: what changes are those?
Moi: the ones described in the ticket, I would assume, I'm no longer on that project
JTM: didn't you write this application?
Moi: yes.
JTM: ok, so do you know how to fix the issue?
Moi: definitely
JTM: ok... ... Can you tell us how to fix it?
Moi: yes.
*The sound of silence*
JTM: *will* you tell us?
Moi: I would, but I'm already off the clock, and as of an hour ago I no longer have a contract. And even if I did, I don't have a contract or authorization to work on that system. I'm not actually being paid for this call.
JTM: ... What are we going to do about this?
Moi: I have no idea
JTM: ok, so we can look at getting a 1 month contract to support this
Moi: I'm sure our firm has someone who can definitely help you out
JTM: *heavy raging* ... Can you do the work?
Moi: Unfortunatley, I'm already committed to a new contract at another customer. I also don't do one month contracts. I'm an engineer, not a car wash employee
JTM: well, I don't understand how you can just leave us in the lurch like this?!
Moi: well, respectfully, it was your decision to cut me from the budget because you thought you were close enough to end of the project to get it across the line with junior resources.
Interjecting-JT: I am senior!
Moi: Right. So, basically, you took ownership of the product before go live. We advised against it, in writing, numerous times. We also notified you that we would not carry a bench, so the project resources are now working on other things. We can provide you with new resources for a minimum 6 month duration who can help you out. Also, since we've cycled out, our rate has increased per the terms of our MSA.
JTM: we don't have budget for that! How are we supposed to do this?!
Moi: *zoom glare at JT* that question is more appropriate for your finance officer and the IT director. I can send a few emails and schedule a call with your account representative and the aforementioned individuals so you can hash this out.
-_---------------
I'm free! 🥳 That said, still plenty of residual fodder I need to get out of my system on these guys. Might need to start my own Dilbert.12 -
It finally happened. Upper management is demanding a historical (7+ years) of lines-of-code analysis of our entire code base. They want to justify our positions by validating that the lines-of-code has increased in accordance with the economy. I am not kidding. For every year, they expect some percent increase in our lines of code.17
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Normal people don't understand this concept; they believe that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
- The Dilbert Principle (1996)1 -
CIO: what kind of web server do you want for your dev environment? WordPress?
Me: Uhm, Linux centos running apa-
CIO: whoa that's dangerous you need to think of the people who are going to support this.
Me: right...
CIO: we're going to pick something and stick with it.
FML company is just starting to do in house dev. CIO is heavily involved and knows more than I do... My life is a Dilbert comic strip9 -
Today my manager asked me about my research into using RabbitMQ as a backup in case Azure Service Bus ever goes down.
Me: "Good. The way we designed the framework, all we have to do is drop the DLLs into the directory, update the config, and the services will start using RabbitMQ."
Mgr: "Excellent. Probably should be looking into using RabbitMQ as a permanent replacement for Azure"
Me: "What? The whole reason we moved to Azure was to eliminate the problems with having an on prem service bus. Since we've switched, there has been zero downtime."
Mgr: "That's what VP-Joe is afraid of. If Azure ever goes down, he won't know how to explain Azure to the president as to why we're not taking orders or can't ship packages."
Me: "That makes no sense. What did VP-Joe tell the president when a database goes down or a server mis-configuration?"
Mgr: "President understands internal outages, its just the whole 'cloud' thing he doesn't understand."
Me: "Um..then VP-Joe needs to explain it to him?"
Mgr: "The decision has already been made. Are you on board? Lets look at this move as a cost savings."
Me: "You mean the $10 a month? How much hardware will we need to support RabbitMQ?"
Mgr: "Yea, nobody probably thought of that."
Me: "I'm on board with whatever decision, but I'd like a little more than VP-Joe being afraid of the president."
Mgr: "I'm sure its not being afraid."
Me: "..."
Mgr: "OK, lets wait and see if VP-Joe forgets about this and moves on to something new."4 -
Do we really hate management this much?
(I'm controlling myself... just caught up with a month of Dilbert.... wish I could post more but that would be spammy...)
1 -
Work, the haiku:
(Plus more Dilbert)
“Where are you on this?”
“I’m where JIRA says I am”
“Ok, but how far?”
8 -
I was going to say almost 20 years of Dilbert... Then realized it's closer to 30...
Guess the problems of IT never go away...
14 -
I worked for over 13 hours yesterday on super-urgent projects. I got so much done it's insane.
Projects:
1) the printer auto-configuration script.
2) changing Stripe from test mode to live mode in production
3) website responsiveness
I finished two within five minutes and pushed to both QA and Production. actually urgent, actually necessary. Easy change.
The printer auto-configure script was honestly fun to write, if very involved. However, the APIs I needed to call to fetch data, create a printer client, etc... none of them were tested, and they were _all_ broken in at least two ways. The CTO (api guy in my previous rant) was slow at fixing them, so getting the APIs working took literally four hours. One of them (test print) still doesn't work.
Responsiveness... this was my first time making a website responsive. Ever. Also, one of the pages I needed to style was very complicated (nested fixed-aspect-ratio + flexbox); I ended up duplicating the markup and hacking the styling together just to make it work. The code is horrible. But! "Friday's the day! it's going live and we're pushing traffic to it!" So, I invested a lot of time and energy into making it ready and as pretty as I could, and finally got it working. That page alone took me two hours.
The site and the printer script (and obv the Stripe change as well) absolutely needed to be done by this morning. Super important.
well.
1) Auto-configure script. Ostensibly we would have an intern come in and configure the printers. However, we have no printers that need configuring, so she did marketing instead. :/ Also, the docs Epson sent us only work for the T88V printer (we have exactly one, which we happened to set up and connect to). They do not work for the T88VI printers, which is what we ordered. and all we'll ever be ordering. So. :/ I'll need to rewrite a large chunk of my code to make this work. Joy :/
2) Stripe Live mode. Nobody even seemed to notice that we were collecting info in Test mode, or that I fixed it. so. um. :/
3) Responsiveness.
Well. That deadline is actually next Wednesday. The marketing won't even start until then, and I haven't even been given the final changes yet (like come on). Also! I asked for a QA review last night before I'd push it to production. One person glanced at it. Nobody else cared. Nobody else cared enough to look in the morning, either, so it's still on QA. Super-important deadline indeed. :/
Honestly?
I feel like Alice (from Dilbert) after she worked frantically on urgent projects that ended up just being cancelled. (That one where Wally smells that lovely buttery-popcorn scent of unnecessary work.)
I worked 13 hours yesterday.
for nothing.
fucking. hell.7 -
I swear I work with mentally deranged lunatics.
Dev is/was using TFS's web api to read some config stuff..
Ralph: "Ugh..this is driving me crazy. I've spent all day trying to read this string from TFS and it is not working"
Me: "Um, reading a string from an web api is pretty easy, what's the problem?"
Ralph: "I'm executing the call in a 'using' statement and cannot return the stream."
Me: "Why do you need to return a stream? Return the object you are looking for."
Ralph: "Its not that easy. You can return anything from TFS. All you get back is a stream. Could be XML, JSON, text file, image, anything."
Me: "What are you trying to return?"
Ralph: "XML config. If I use XDoc, the stream works fine, but when I step into each byte from the stream, I the first three bytes have weird characters. I shouldn't have to skip the first three bytes to get the data. I spent maybe 5 hours yesterday digging around the .Net stream readers used in XDoc trying to figure out how it skips the first few bytes."
Me: "Wow...I would have used XDoc and been done and not worried about that other junk."
Ralph: "But I don't know the stream is XML. That's what I need to figure out."
Me: "What is there to figure out? You do know. Its your request. You are requesting a XML config."
Ralph: "No, the request can be anything. What if Sam requests an image? XDoc isn't going to work."
Me: "Is that a use-case? Sam requesting an image?"
Ralph: "Uh..I don't know...he could"
Me: "Sounds like your spending a lot of time doing premature optimization. You know what your accessing TFS for, if it's XML, return XML. If it's an image, return an image. Something new comes along, modify the code to handle it. Eazy peezy."
<boss walks in from a meeting>
Boss: "Whats up guys?"
Ralph: "You know the problem with TFS and not being able to stream the data I had all day yesterday? I finally figured it out. I need to keep this TFS reader simple. I'll start with the XML configs and if we more readers later, we can add them."
Boss: "Oh yea, always start simple and add complexity only when you need it."
Frack...Frack..Frack...you played some victim complaining to anyone who would listen yesterday (which I mostly ignored) about reading data from TFS was this monumental problem no one could solve, then you start complaining to me, I don't fall for the BS, then tell the boss the solution was your idea?
Lunatic or genius? Wally would be proud.
4 -
PSA: Proposal for the posting of third party content.
I know we all love ourselves some Dilbert or commitstrips or xckd BUT could everybody just give credit where credit credit is goddamn due!
Leaving a link isn't that hard!
Just put it as the first comment if you don't want to have it at the end of your rant.
Also for xkcd specifically put the alt text in the first comment as well. It makes the comics even funnier and shows that you are more than a half witted copy pasting monkey. -
Dilbert or C++.....
Currently Dilbert is winning.... but need to catch up on 1.5 months of strips...
Maybe i should just stop here and finish the rest after...
11 -
An old favorite that came to mind when someone mentioned C in the recent void post.
On a semi-related note, are there any modern languages that *aren’t* C-based?
7 -
JIRA, the haiku (w/Bonus Dilbert strip)
Please make a ticket
Please move the ticket you made
Please tag your ticket
3 -
!rant
I saw a devrant user posting something about "the cockroach" that survives in the company no matter what so I knew I had to rant about something similar. I worked with a guy and his ability to talk shit is in direct proportion to his salary. The guy watches youtube all day, searches for things to buy, goes to vacations and no one knows what he does. :)) plot twist: he just forwards ( not sends ) emails from the business to a software provider. Did I mention that he has the highest salary( don't ask how I found out ).
Anyhow, the guy is winning at life, no one gives two shits about him, he is always hiding and running from work. While writing this I'm actually amazed by his skill, how do you end up like this? He reminds me of Wally from Dilbert!2 -
So, the moment I started as a BA in a health insurance company, my Quora feed gets populated with Dilbert comics, and I can finally relate to them.
Thanks Machine Learning!
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Dilbert no longer lets me leech their comics from their site... It was a good... 10 years?
Seems I need to rebuild my Downloader... using Selenium.
Now...where is that project where i used Selenium...1 -
the CEO is trying to release a product that has had a total of 1 test user, himself!! 🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
Any ideas to convince him to do something like a slow launch instead of sinking a bunch of money on marketing!?!?
(I'm pretty sure dilbert or xkcd should have something related...)5 -
The best surprise is when I restart using one of my scraper apps which I haven't used in a long time ... And it still works.
My Dilbert one I haven't updated in years which implies they have not made any changes to the site or added anymore protection for at least 5yrs1 -
I need some time off. Just had this convo with a dev-manager about an 'issue' with our system change mgmt calendar (Blazor) app.
K: "In the system drop-down, it's not filtering when I type."
Me: "Let me check <I attempt to reproduce>, yep, not working. Do you get the same error? Looks like duplicate data from the database is causing a problem."
<this is over MS Teams, about 5 minutes go by with no response, then>
K: "No error, its not working."
<I find the bad data, delete it, TADA, the filtering is working again>
Me: "The filtering is working again, at least for me. You sure you didn't see an error?"
<wait 5 minutes again>
K: "No, no error."
Me: "You didn't see a little red banner at the bottom and in all caps..ERROR"
<send him a screen-shot of the error I still had in another tab>
K: "Yes, I saw that one, but no other errors. Filtering is working again. Thanks"3 -
You kinda just wake up one day and find yourself in a Dilbert comic. It then gets worse if you realize you aren't even Dilbert.
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At any given company, there are
those that do
and
those that do not
I've mostly (and sadly) worked with the latter
and those are the people who are like "ahhh yeah, no worries, don't worry about it! we need you to stay positive, not rage! why you get so worked up?" and i'm like YEAH YOU DONT HAVE TO FUCKING WORRY BECAUSE YOU DONT DO ANYTHING! YOU HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO RESPONSIBILITY IN THIS COMPANY AND ARE A FLOATING BLOB COLLECTING YOUR PAYCHECK, THAT'S WHY I GET ALL NEW ASSIGNMENTS AND AM RESPONSIBLE FOR THEM WHILE YOU ARE STILL WORKING ON TASKS ASSIGNED TO YOU TWO QUARTERS AGO!!!!!!!!
god who am i kidding, it'll never change
...man I am on an absolute rant rampage the past few days, feels good >:) -
Revision to the Peter/Dilbert Principle, the ProjektAquarius principle: a company will systematically shift the least competent employee on to the assignments the competent employees can't be bothered to do until they become an integral part of the team and drag you down with them. (E.g. eventually they completely fuck up your delivery process, although it's probably still cheaper and quicker than having them do anything else.)
ProjektAquarius principle: A Case Study
We have an engineer who is getting paid quite a bit more than me. Over time his responsibilities have gradually been reduced to documentation and running our almost entirely automated build. Well today the build failed. He pulls me over to tell me, and says he's confused because there is a file there he has never seen before in there and a file he always has seen that isn't there (basically a file got renamed. It was not non-obvious). Answer: change the file name.
Then he comes over and tells us that it's failing again because the script is not finding a file. So a coworker of mine and I go over. He explains the whole build process to us when we ask if there is any point in the script that would help us identify where the script is looking for the file and failing (there wasn't but that's besides the point).
Turns out, he had decided to put the assembly list in order. Normally no problem, but the list is in source destination pairs. So the fucking file was being put in a different directory than the one the script was looking for it in and failing. And that's the story about how my company just paid 3 engineers a quarter of a man hour each for something that would have been resolved in 30 seconds via file search/copying and pasting a file path. Related note: our process for building an install is now about 4 hours long with no change on process besides the BCAK. -
I love commitstrip comic. There are others like Dilbert, devhumor, turnoff etc. Some are not continued now like Programmers life, which was also good. Which are your favourite comics related to dev?4
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Craziest prep for interview :
Step 1 : Given sufficient time for the scheduled interview by any company, start by searching "How to prepare for Google interviews". Awe at the information before you and get all pumped up to jump in.
Step 2 : Starting with Algorithms, study each one and try not to mix any of them in confusion. In case you are stuck in whiteboard coding, close your eyes, take deep breath and visualize Don Kunth. If that doesn't help, well you are ruined anyway.
Step 3: Practice coding without internet connection, till you are able to write code while you talk about how the weather is really great today. Libraries and methods should flow like poetry. SO is sin.
Step 4: The X programming language which you added to your resume because you can write Hello World, head over to Wikipedia and read more about it just in case.
Step 5: Read some xkcd comics so you can impress the interviewer with some humor. You can try Dilbert too. -
It pays the bills and then some. And you realize over time the industry is not a meritocracy.... But who has the largest d***...
At a certain point you just don't give a fck anymore. Fighting the system is a waste of time and there are better things to do. So in the end it seems Wally got it right... Being Dilbert doesn't help much and probably makes it worse. -
Haven't been reading Dilbert for other a month but finally got around to it today. I read it through an app I made that downloads all the comics from the site.
Well apparently the downloader downloaded too much/too fast. It seems my IP is now blocked....
Wonder if it's temporary. O well... I got VPNs... -
I been at my parents for almost a month now and remembered finally that I had some of my apps backed up to GDrive, mainly Dilbert downloader... Thanks to seeing some comics on devrant.
I needed to install GDrive to sync the folders but to my surprise the number of filters just to sync my projects folder which also has the installers was > 1000...
It turns out I copied .git for all the projects...4
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