Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

*sitcom audience cheers*

Thank you, thank you. Ok so far we've had a developer from hell and a CEO who shot to fame for being the first rectum to receive a passport and be given a job.

2 pretty strong entrants if you ask me. But its time to slow it down and make sure everyone gets a fair chance. Its not all just about the psychopaths and assholes, what about the general weirdo's and the stoners who just made life awkward?

So here we go, Most incompetent co-worker, candidate 3, "A".

"A" was a bit of an unusual developer, despite having a few years experience in his home country, he applied for an unpaid internship to come work with us ... probably should have rang alarm bells but hey we were all young and dumb back then.

I had to say I felt very bad for A, as he suffered from 2 very serious, and job crippling personal conditions / problems

- Email induced panic attacks
- Extreme multifaceted attachment disorder (also known in layman terms as "get the fuck away from me, and do your job" syndrome)

While he never openly discussed these conditions, it was clear from working with him, that he had gone undiagnosed for years. Every time an email would come in no matter how simple ... even the services team asking to confirm his staff ID, would send him into a panic causing him to drop everything he was doing and like a homing missile find me anywhere in the building and ask me what to do.

Actually "A" also suffered from a debilitating literacy issue too, leaving him completely unable to read our internal wiki's himself. Every week we had to follow a set of steps to upgrade something and every week to mask his issue, he'd ask me what to do instead ... no matter how many times I sat with him previously ... must have been truly embarrassing for him.

But "A"'s finest moment in the company, by far, was the day where out of the blue, at the top of his voice (as if wearing headphones ... without wearing headphones) he asked

"DO YOU KNOW ANYONE WHO SELLS POT?"

... why no, manager of the entire department standing behind you, I do not

... why no, tech lead talking to manager, I do not

... why hello 50% of my team staring at me ... no "A", I do not!

Needless to say all our team meetings were a little awkward for the next few weeks after that but hey who doesn't like being thought of as a stoner / drug dealer by their team mates huh?

Will A make it to the top of the list of most incompetent? Well he has some truly logic defining competition yet to be announced.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

How reading E-Mail is hard:

Me:
"Dear client,
please send the pictures for content A and Content B.

We also found content C in your spreadsheet. Do you want content C to be uploaded? Please us where to place it.

Regards

Me (who does not consider this a difficult text)
"

Client:
"Hello. Please find attached the pictures for A"

Me:
"Dear Client,
Thank you for the pictures for A.
What about the pictures for B?
And what about that content for C?
"

Client:
(no answer)

Desperate Me:
(Looking at the attachment and finding pictures for A and B)
!!@**! :(

Reluctant Me:
"Dear Client,
Please look at the new iteration <here/>

And by the way.. what about that content C?"

Client:
"Thanks and find the images for Content C attached."

Extremely fatalistic and desolate Me:
"Well thank you. Where shall we put it then?"

Client (answer to the unanswered mail above)
"Thank you. Please don't forget to put in C."

-_________-*******

In pair programming session with intern. She deletes something she shouldn't have.

Me: No, wait, don't delete that, undo.
Intern: ...
Intern: What is undo? How do I do that?
Me: ...
Me: *cringes internally*
Me: Uhm.
Me: Go to Edit > Undo, or press Ctrl+Z

I think I understand what is wrong, this poor individual has extremely rudimentary computer literacy skills worse than my 77-year old stepdad's and someone in management decided to give her a Junior Software Engineering position (actually paid internship) which is doing more harm than good.

Rant about a german problem in english

I think we as the people should just sue the german government for neglect of progress and neglect of the education system. If your not familiar with the state of german IT we have worse internetspeeds than uganda or the notoriously shitty australia, our neighbourstates look at us in disbelief while laughing in optic fibre. Our school system seperates all students after 4th grade in 3 tiers, the lowest one gives you the future perspective as a social security case. The second and highest tier require masses of useless knowledge, so called "competences"(Kompetenzen) which are totally useless skills with no real world application because they are derived from real skills, a median ground between all possible applications of that skill. And while doing that they terribly insist on doing everything the "proper" way, meaning handwritten. Most people you would expect to have basic computer literacy, meaning age 40 and below, are incapable of using basic functions of a non-smartphone computer and do not understand the slightest of what they are actually doing or supposed to do. And I mean nothing technical. Germans are the reasons they still put word as a job requirement for devjobs because this disqualifies half of our population. This leads to many people having the archaeic "we versus the machines" mentality, thinking that if they ever let the computer do parts of the job, they will then lose all of it to the machines. Thats why you never strive past basic mathematical principles in mathematics, which is a big misnomer because you never do actual mathematics, only calculating and basic calculus and statics. If you get to use your calculator, its some basic casio with no actual functionality then standard operations. And even using that is shunned upon. How is this country ever supposed to become something more than it was in the 90's, if we teach people nothing of use and kill all progress in its root.

I am so mentally drained from having to deal with the intern who I have to literally spoon-feed every single thing. My previous posts illustrate the situation...

The language and cultural barriers are too much, and I am too afraid to open my mouth because of the sensitive nature of my country's history and I'll get labelled as some horrible person.

I told my manager today that I'll stick it out until end of January (thankfully I am on vacation for most of December and January), but I cannot work with her. She was supposed to move to the data team end of December, but my manager told me if she can't even properly grasp this HTML and CSS stuff, then she will not be able to do the other tasks they have for her.

This was a disaster of an experiment and I'm somewhat traumatised ( I am sure the intern is too) and I never want another intern again, nor do I want to manage people. I never said I want to be a people manager, I just want to quietly code at my desk.

This company sells MBTI psychometric assessments and they damn well know my preference, so I'm seriously annoyed that they threw this horrendous surprise on me and kept ignoring my requests for revisiting this intern's role, because I noticed a long time ago that she was struggling with basic concepts and all they did was make her do Udemy courses.

I told them multiple times that she seriously needs computer literacy training because she will not survive in this industry if she still struggles to understand how files and folders work. Other employers would have fired her a long time ago.

She's just too slow for this job. I feel sorry for her, but I do not have the capacity to do this anymore. I'm tired, it's been a long year.

Data Disinformation: the Next Big Problem

Automatic code generation LLMs like ChatGPT are capable of producing SQL snippets. Regardless of quality, those are capable of retrieving data (from prepared datasets) based on user prompts.
That data may, however, be garbage. This will lead to garbage decisions by lowly literate stakeholders.
Like with network neutrality and pii/psi ownership, we must act now to avoid yet another calamity.

Imagine a scenario where a middle-manager level illiterate barks some prompts to the corporate AI and it writes and runs an SQL query in company databases.
The AI outputs some interactive charts that show that the average worker spends 92.4 minutes on lunch daily.
The middle manager gets furious and enacts an Orwellian policy of facial recognition punch clock in the office.
Two months and millions of dollars in contractors later, and the middle manager checks the same prompt again... and the average lunch time is now 107.2 minutes!
Finally the middle manager gets a literate person to check the data... and the piece of shit SQL behind the number is sourcing from the "off-site scheduled meetings" database.
Why? because the dataset that does have the data for lunch breaks is labeled "labour board compliance 3", and the LLM thought that the metadata for the wrong dataset better matched the user's prompt.

This, given the very real world scenario of mislabeled data and LLMs' inability to understand what they are saying or accessing, and the average manager's complete data illiteracy, we might have to wrangle some actions to prepare for this type of tomfoolery.

I don't think that access restriction will save our souls here, decision-flumberers usually have the authority to overrule RACI/ACL restrictions anyway.
Making "data analysis" an AI-GMO-Free zone is laughable, that is simply not how the tech market works. Auto tools are coming to make our jobs harder and less productive, tech people!
I thought about detecting new automation-enhanced data access and visualization, and enacting awareness policies. But it would be of poor help, after a shithead middle manager gets hooked on a surreal indicator value it is nigh impossible to yank them out of it.

Gotta get this snowball rolling, we must have some idea of future AI housetraining best practices if we are to avoid a complete social-media style meltdown of data-driven processes.
Someone cares to pitch in?

FUCCCCKKKKKKKKKK!

I need to get off this frustration out of my system.

I have a autistic retarded sister who has less than a half brain cell.

Evolution from fish to humans was faster than completion of a task assigned to this faggot.

I fucking hate her. Why was I born in this family. Fucking why!!!!!

Autistic narcissistic cunt. Horrible human.

Doesn't have any friends, no family member cares for her, entitled bitch, earns less than $75 a year.

Whenever we meet, she makes sure to belittle me in front of our parents and gives advices and gyaan on how superior she is and how much waste of oxygen I am.

Constantly mentions that my career choices are stupid, whereas she is doing great (in reality she isn't even able to score a simple degree and no one is willing to hire her).

Acording to her, I have zero financial literacy and she is a genius (in reality I am managing the entire family finances and providing for everyone).

Even when I ask her about something, she says that I am asking stupid questions where as in reality she is an anti vaxxer. God damn fuck!! She was stopping my parents to get vaccinated. Fucking bitch.

There's a simple 20 minute task regarding some tax work and she took more than 2 weeks to even comprehend my request and now screams at me for raising the request on the last day. Bitch WTF! I told you well in advance and now you fuck me up entirely.

My parents are so fucking biased and will blindly side her because she is a girl and using this argument they have destroyed me emotionally over years.

Yes, I no longer care for any of these maniacs and want to leave this place asap.

For now, for the life of me, I am ready to pay more than $3500 extra in taxes than deal with this woman child.

Microsoft's new dialog messages in their software are pretty annoying. "Want to save your changes?". "Oops, something went wrong!". "Your PC ran into a problem it couldn't handle...".

I feel these messages are unprofessionally written and that they lower the bar for acceptable computer (and English) literacy in this day and age.

Its not like I think they should give a stack trace everytime something happens but just don't dumb it down any more!

When I was young I'd play games and around age 11 received an Xbox for my bday. Hated the case, so I painted the case. Since I had it open looked into getting a replacement fan.Thats when everything changed. I discovered the modding scene and without having any computer background/literacy got to studying.

The program that caught my eye ran on Linux. *shrugs thinking how hard can it be? * Read about Linux and discover dual booting. To do that I needed to resize windows partition. Learn more about partitions and get to it. Finally prepped... Backup in case of the worst, resized windows partition, working Ubuntu bootable USB, and printed install tutorial. Check, check, and check. Install was good. Sort of.

While Ubuntu worked, the broadcam wireless chipset driver did not. Fast forward a week and I feel that i had mastered the terminal basics. And WiFi worked! Go download the aforementioned program and FTP into the Xbox and BOOM... It doesn't work. More days and hours spent researching. In the end it all chalked up to not setting a static IP address on Xbox.

After all was said and done I had a bitchin Xbox. I think the only thing I didn't put on it was some gold spinning rims.

Sad part about that Xbox is that I never used it after. Instead I just kept messing around with Linux and learning more about computers. Taught myself HTML/CSS. Learned more about shell scripting. Then Windows cmd basics. Tried programming languages but felt a little overwhelmed. Only messed with <10 lines of code to tweak existing programs.

Now I'm learning C# and loving it. Planning on C++ or Java next!

Did you ever take advantage of clients that has less computer literacy? Like have you ever escape a bug in the system by telling the client heavy technical BS! 😋

PS - fixings that bug later obviously!!

I’ve been self-employed for the past three years. Though I did spend my first year out of college working for a three person, now-defunct startup, I’ve never had a typical 9-5 (or more like 10-8 nowadays) and to be honest, never really wanted one. Lara Schenck, LLC is a profitable business, and every day I do work that is enjoyable and challenging. I make my own hours, take vacations when I want to, and run everything on my terms.

While that’s all awesome, what you don’t get from working independently is the team experience. I base my work on teaching technical literacy to non-technical designers and content producers so that they can better communicate with developers. The theory is that if a designer understands why it’s a bad idea to request 18 fonts, and if content producers know why it’s not trivial to edit the titles of a set of related posts, life will be easier for everyone. At least that’s my theory, and the assumption on which I’ve developed my business.

Lately though, in a bout of the good ‘ol impostor syndrome, I’ve been feeling like, wait, how can I be telling people how to work on teams if I’ve never really worked on one? I’ve always been the ‘Lead UI/UX/Visual/Web/Front-end Designer-person-thing’, and have never worked for a larger company with separate teams for product, UX, marketing, content, frontend, backend, etc.

So I felt the urge to look for a job, and a seemingly perfect one fell into my lap. It was for an awesome company, and it sounded right up my alley skill-wise. The title was ‘UX Engineer/Interaction Designer’. I usually balk at the the term “engineer” (perhaps for good reason) but considering the presence of “designer” and the nature of the job post, I wasn’t too bothered.

ok, fuck people. i mean the people who talk about things that are a big deal. you don't need to take a course in html/css to build a website, you need documentation.

people act like programming languages are a whole separate literacy. they're not. it is not a big deal, nor an accomplishment of any significance, to learn any language to a basic extent. variables, control flow, functions and scope should not be considered challenging topics, and people should stop bragging about them. i'm pretty sure this is because programming is new. as people, i think when something is new we tend to think of it as more complex and harder to understand. basic programming is not that.

ok that was a tangent from my real point. college is a scam. anyone can learn anything from books and the internet. any time you want to learn about something, go to google, and search "${my topic} site:*.github.io" and you'll have a page about that topic written by someone who is knowledgeable and passionate of the topic. colleges don't teach people how to think like these books/websites do. and i'm fucking sick of people who'd rather see a degree then a portfolio. fuck them shits bro. i can distinct my smart friends because my smart friends speak logically and enjoy becoming smarter. i would take the kid who watches aerodynamics videos on youtube and then built a plane over a kid who studied and got a five on his ap physics exam. watching then doing is better learning than watching and repeating. after all, creativity is not at all measured in our grades, and i'd like to argue that sometimes intelligence isn't even measured. i mean, people can say they're good at math, but the kids who talk about fibinnoci numbers and why there can never be two primes more than 7 (i if i remember properly) integers apart or the ones who prove cryptographic algorithms. i guess what i'm trying to say is the dumb kids aren't dumb and the smart kids aren't smart (well not that) but kids who are passionate and just do something instead of waiting for their degree to do the same thing are the best and brightest. i forgot what i was talking about. sorry it is almost 2 am and i am intoxicated , and i don't believe i got my point across very well either.

I work for a particular tech company doing chat based support where I troubleshoot a certain email application.

And one of the most common phrases I get is: "Hey Mister IT Guy, I am suddenly missing all of my contacts and Calendars. This super sucks! I had to rebuild my email profile to make my email work again!".

I really wish when they teach computer literacy in school they drilled "Learn How To Back Up Your Junk" more so when stuff like this happens I can get them back up and running in 10 minutes instead of telling the user they are going to have spend hours rebuilding their calendar and contacts.

My brother-in-law's mother's face when she was telling me that she was forced to use 2FA Microsoft Office for work..
"They think we're all IT ppl or what"

Just realise how complex the "simple" 2FA activation step is for someone without the slightest IT curiosity. Not super-democratic either.. (eg. For someone who uses a library PC and has no phone)

isnt it good if companies ensure that users have baaaaaasssic computer literacy if their job requires it...

So, my university has a mandatory community service program where basically students are sent to help developing infrastructure and society in undeveloped parts of the country. I and my team are going to depart in the end of this month.

We're going to help raising IT-literacy level by teaching high school students basic programming with Scratch or Python. Is that too much? Should we just start with teaching Ms. Office instead? Or do you guys have any opinion?

I had to hand in a PNG image as a word document.

Please explain this "Digital Literacy" course.

I was giving a conference in a local College, and god I saw that the tech literacy of those kids was ... None. It's abnormal how basic things like powering up a computer, differentiating monitors from towers, and that kind of stuff was so low !
(Sorry for bad English)

I finally wrote my exemption test for computer literacy(covers ms office products and basic computing theory ).never have to go to anything concerning that course ever again and got 93%+ for all the tests required to get exempted