Manager: Feature C doesn’t work

Dev: We never built feature C

Manager: Nonsense, I remember feature C clearly!

Dev: It’s still in the backlog

Manager: But we had many meetings about it

Dev: Never got put on the board

Manager: Feature C is very important!

Dev: It was never assigned to anyone

Manager: What could possibly be more important than Feature C?

Dev: All the other features you placed on the board and assigned up until now

Manager: Well I need Feature C done asap! It should be top priority!

Dev: Ok then next sprint add feature C to the board and assign it to someone

*Next planning session manager leaves feature C in backlog in favour of other tickets*

*2 days later*

Manager: What is the status of feature C?

Dev: You opted to leave it in the backlog

Manager: BUT IT SHOULD BE TOP PRIORITY!

Dev: …

Police tech support, corruption, stilettos, fake agents, and all that. This is gonna be a long story.

Remember when I posted about wanting to become a digital nomad and how my annoying landlady has sped up the process for that? So I was looking for apartments to move into. Just a couple of months to get surgery, recover, and gear up for the new life. I met a real estate agent. He showed me his license, he's known by the guards and admins in the residence, and I met the unit owner together with him inside the unit itself. I did a background check and all looks good. A major property developer even posted several awards that he achieved. Sounds legit? Nope. This will soon become the highest level of real estate corruption I've ever seen in my entire life.

The property developer is well-established and has various luxury residences. After some further digging, I saw several posts about him in private owners' groups except they were screenshots of his name and face, not actual texts so it did not appear in the initial search. I see comments from several tenants and owners that he scammed. It turns out they even have a WhatsApp group dedicated into taking him down because he's done all kinds of trouble - bouncing checks, stealing items from the units, fucking up people's apartments, taking money from people and then ghosting them, etc.

Everyone seems angry but also hopeless because apparently, he's been doing this for years and the property hasn't banned him. There were discussions that the property itself takes bribe from him so he can freely go in and out of the residence. As far as I know, he's been doing this for almost a year, maybe longer but since he's a licensed agent with the management on his side, he's pretty much untouchable.

I mentioned his name to a previous agent I talked to, let's call her "Stiletto Girl" because she gave me a tour around the towers while wearing stilettos and dear god, I don't know how people manage to walk so long with those things on. Stiletto Girl was more furious than I am and sent me screenshots of their conversations. She obviously hates the guy and she confirmed that there is indeed corruption in the admin office.

I collected all these information and posted to an investors group to warn them about buying properties there. I received messages with terrible experiences and overall, people are convinced. This group has members that can buy properties in full with cash. I managed to get his account blocked in one of the payment options he provided and I was instructed to file a police report so they can permanently disable his account. I'm working on his other accounts.

After a trip to several police stations, I found myself talking to this asshole investigator in his camo. I fucking hated the guy and the tone of his voice. He gave me trouble for not knowing the suspect's full address. At some point, we were just yelling at each other. He made a phone call and went back agreeing to finally let me file a police report.

He asked for my ID. I gave him my company ID, I learned that doing this builds instant rapport to some because it's a well-known airline company and most of the people have taken a flight there so they're extra nice to me. Maybe they think I can give them a discount or something, whatever. Nope.

Him: "You're a software engineer? Are you good with computers?"

Me: *laughs knowing where this is going*

Him: "See, I have a problem with my computer. Can you fix it?"

Me: "Sure. Just give me the police report first."

He starts working on it. This time his tone is more friendly. Other police officers come in and he introduces me as his new "friend". As discussed, after the police report has been made, I sat on his computer and started fixing his shit. They went outside to respond to some emergency and asked me to guard the station for the meantime, lol. There's only me and another woman in a separate cubicle. When they came back, one of the police officers came up to my desk jokingly pretending to be a victim of some crime asking to file a police report.

I finished fixing his shit and now his asshole energy is diverted to the person I filed a police report against.

Him: "Do you think this guy is a one time criminal?"

Me: "Oh no, he's notorious and that property does nothing about it. I think he has a connection there."

Him: "WHAT?! I will pay them a visit tomorrow! Send me more pictures of him. If I see that fucking guy.."

Work, the haiku:
(Plus more Dilbert)

“Where are you on this?”
“I’m where JIRA says I am”
“Ok, but how far?”

Manager: In order to increase business resiliency we will be doing cross training this week.

Dev: What does that involve?

Manager: Everyone will do everyone else’s job for one day each. After this you will all be considered trained so that if anyone can easily fill in for anyone else.

Dev: …

Company Motto: “Business is simple, hire amazing people and let then do their thing”

Company Culture: You can’t do that!! It’s really hard and expensive to hire people with those skills! How would we replace you or save money by continuing to not give you a raise if you did that!?

Management: Our internal app must be 100% rigid so that we users follow predefined process flows exactly so no mistakes are made while also being 100% flexible so that users are free to go about their business in whatever way they feel is appropriate for their own unique needs. These are the requirements!

Dev: …

I've been working as a developer for 10 years now... I got my first software development job when I was still learning for my masters.

After all this time I have switched programming languages and product types a few times from web development to mobile apps to desktop software (C++, CEF, QT,).

And I have come to the conclusion that I want early retirement... like right now retirement... I'm done dealing with management that doesn't understand shit... dealing with people we have outsourced part of the shit to... needing to fix stuff that is broken after some other person refactored the code and didn't fully test it and it somehow got approved... dealing with people that think that "know better" and implemented things like that 5 years ago because they thought like "THAT" and will not accept my merge request because of that.

Like don't get me wrong I love to make and develop software, but since this is the 3rd job in the row with a toxic environment like this I feel like I need to move to the country side and open up a farm or something :|

1) Read the wiki on git. I probably have enough shorthands and test methods that you won't need much other shit to debug issues.

2) when debugging, remember that if it is there, there's a good reason why I put it there.

3) commented-out code is probably useful for maintenance. I left it there for a good reason. 😛

4) chances are whatever I wrote, was the state of the art at the time I wrote it. There might be better ways to do it now tho.

5) I always work modular. First, understand the structure. (probably also documented on wiki) DO NOT fuck up the structure. If you change it, you document it.

6) If you feel I wrote shit, it's probably because management annoyed the living shit out of me. Pun intended.

7) Your confusion is normal. I don't do dumb shit.

There’s immense power in being perceptive to what your business prioritizes for the rank and file versus what the business prioritizes for *itself*.

Like for example pushing to get individual performance reviews done with an exceeding pressure of a certain drop dead date while suddenly but simultaneously relaxing of any similar immediacy of completing management reviews.

🧐

Talk amongst yourselves.