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Search - "micro-management"
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Boss: "it's not the same font"
Me: "yes, it is"
Boss: "don't argue with me. It's a different font"
Me: "ok it's a different font" (it's not)
Boss: "change it please"
15 minutes later and I've done nothing at all to it. Boss comes back.
Boss: "see? I knew it was a different font. This looks perfect now. Why were you lying to me before? I don't like you arguing with me"11 -
In the last project i worked in, the product owner wouldn't treat people as people but as resources.
The problem with that is you just look at people and their work in terms of a checklist and remain blind about real humans face.
She wouldn't understand the challenges of building something with an absolutely new stack which people needed to learn from scratch and put pieces together. She wouldn't be supportive of people trying out things and fail.
One fine day I told her that I was spending too much time on meetings and i should be excluding that time from available sprint timings.. she made me open my calendar in a screenshare session with all team members. Made me go through go through every meeting invite i had on calender and ordered which ones should i be attending from then and which ones i wont. That was insulting. It broke the trust.
I decided to not work with the project. Stopped putting my heart and soul into it and eventually got out of it in a month time.
Don't put your team into a position like this ever. You have to trust them with the problems they face and try to find a solution. Scrutinizing and micro management will always kill the team.1 -
I understand now! I keep getting ++ on rants I wrote forever ago, and I finally understand the formula to become devrant famous:
1. Pick something that is mildly annoying and at least mildly tech related. For best reception, it should be something widespread, uncustomizable (and or difficult to customize so nobody does), and just mildly annoying so it's not too over played.
2. Post a long form rant, using almost the entire character limit to make this one, insignificant annoyance into a much bigger issue than it is. This is how the mainstream media does it, this is what the people want!!!!!
3. Somehow find a way to shift the blame onto one of the following groups: Microsoft, apple, arch, arch fanboys, arch haters, users, management, the fundamental laws of physics that allow computers to function, or in a worst case scenario start a flamewar (emacs sucks; arch is the best operating system; micro$hit; it's just Linux, if they wanted to call an OS GNU, they would finish fucking Hurd; etc. It's almost too easy)
4. Sit back and wait. You're now internet famous in a tiny portion of the internet. Congratulations. You've made it.11 -
- Be me
- Been in a new job for 2 months
- Was excited because of 50% salary increase and better position
- Have a new team of 6 devs including me. All new guy
- Market crash
- Top management demands a trim down to all divisions
- Will be left to 3 devs next month
- All the while being asked to
- Deliver a shopify like marketplace from end to end
- Deliver integration with partners for data inventory tracking
- All within 2 months
- Furious when target is not met
- Demands a micro management to every single person on the team on what their day to day schedule
- Demands everybody to live by hustle culture and ready to work non stop even nights or weekend
- Be me
- Been working non stop for at least a month
- Sacrificed weekends and holidays
Beginning to think that maybe the money and position isn't worth the hassle6 -
Imagine: It's the year 4249.
Corporate has finally managed to convince workers that they don't need a salary.
Workers are now paid with food, shelter and clothes. And it's only in effect if you achieve your deadlines.
Keystroke monitoring softwares are now replaced with Webcam eye tracking software.
GitHub Co-Pilot now takes over your code editor and tries to dictate you how to write better code.
Refusing to do results in a signal sent to the management about your behaviour and you lose food access for the day.
HR Recruiters now require you to give them a blood sample and part of your house as a security deposit.
They also require you to have a micro-chip placed in your brain so they can monitor their worker's thought process.
Switching a job is no longer an option. You pledge allegiance to one company your entire career.
You can never see the real world now because the government has mandated you to never take off your VR glasses.
You see the world the way the government wants you to see it.
PHP is still trash.
Life is Good.11 -
Management: List your most significant achievement during this cycle.
Me: Developed and implemented a full stack of database micro containers that allow scalability and reusability. -
So I let myself go by all of this talk about giving more freedom and autonomy to your team. "Don't micro-manage them", they said. "Trust them," they said. And that's the way I wish to be treated. That's how I personally work best.
Alas, this only works only when they're truly good at what they're doing. Sometimes I feel like we'd go faster if I did everything myself. These baby devs must be taken by the hand every damn step of the way.5 -
Workload rant.
Our new line manager is overly expecting from all of us (product/design/tech) and is micro managing on ground level without having any real sense of reality. He just wants everything to be built overnight.
He is smart, no doubt about that. But guess, I learnt from him what I had to. Not to stereotype but he is a typical Indian manager who keeps pushing boundaries.
He just added 80 features for Q1 roadmap with on 3 PMs, 1 Designer, 1TPM, and bunch of techies .
What the actual fuck! 😂😂😂 And he wanted to add more, thankfully we ran out of time in the meeting.
And my super talent and genius blabbering co-woker who works mechanically just fucked herself real bad. Lol
I kept telling her not to add Feature XYZ to the roadmap because:
1. There'll be spill over from Q4
2. She is already overloaded with 1 task and keeps crying all day about being unable to handle it
3. She is setting wrong expectations with management for herself and rest of the team
4. Boss will add more work and she'll be fucked
She was adamant and did not listen.
Now this is what happened:
1. ALL her Q4 items got pushed to Q1. LMFAO
2. She was literally crying since morning on calls for being overloaded and we are yet to start Q1 assignments
3. Additional tasks along side feature XYZ were added on her plate
I tried to push back the manager and that's when he said okay, let's keep some items for Q2.
But holy shit. 80 features between such a small team and wanted to done in few weeks.
I need to pump more steam in my job hunt activity. This place is ridiculously toxic.33 -
Joined a new startup as a remote dev, feeling a bit micromanaged. So this week I joined an established startup as a senior mobile dev where I work remotely.
Previous two devs got fired and two new guys got hired (me as a senior dev and another senior dev as a teamlead, also third senior dev will join next week).
Situation is that codebase is really crappy (they invested 4 years developing the android app which hasn't even been released yet). It seems that previous devs were piggybacking on old architecture and didn't bother to update anything, looking at their GIT output I could tell that they were working at 20-30% capacity and just accepting each other MR's usually with no comments meaning no actual code reviews. So codebase already is outdated and has lots of technical debt. Anyways, I like the challenges so a crappy codebase is not really a problem.
Problem is that management seems to be shitting bricks now and because they got burned by devs who treated this as a freelance gig (Im talking taking 8-10 weeks pto in a given year, lots of questionable sick leaves and skipping half of the meetings) now after management fired them it seems that they are changing their strategy into micro managament and want to roll this app out into production in the next 3 months or so lol. I started seeing redflags, for example:
1. Saw VP's slack announcement where he is urging devs to push code everyday. I'm a senior dev and I push code only when I'm ready and I have at least a proof of concept that's working. Not a big fan of pushing draft work daily that is in in progress and have to deal with nitpicky comments on stuff that is not ready yet. This was never a problem in 4-5 other jobs I worked in over the years.
2. Senior dev who's assigned as the teamlead on my team has been working for 1 month and I can already see that he hates the codebase, doesn't plan on coding too much himself and seems like he plans on just sitting in meetings and micromanaging me and other dev who will join soon. For example everyday he is asking me on how I am doing and I have to report this to him + in a separate daily meeting with him and product. Feels weird.
3. Same senior dev/teamlead had a child born yesterday. While his wife was in hospital the guy rushed home to join all work meetings and to work on the project. Even today he seems to be working. That screams to me like a major redflag, how will he be able to balance his teamlead position and his family life? Why management didn't tell him to just take a few days off? He told me himself he is a senior dev who helped other devs out, but never was in an actual lead position. I'm starting to doubt if he will be able to handle this properly and set proper boundaries so that management wouldn't impact mental health.
Right now this is only my 1st week. They didn't even have a proper backend documentation. Not a problem. I installed their iOS app which is released and intercepted the traffic so I know how backend works so I can implement it in android app now.
My point is that I'm not a child who needs hand holding. I already took on 2 tickets and gonna push an MR with fixes. This is my first week guys. In more corporate companies people sit 2 months just reading documentation and are not expected to be useful for first few months. All I want is for management to fuckoff and let me do my thing. I already join daily standup, respond to my teamlead daily and I ping people if I need something. I take on responsibility and I deliver.
How to handle this situation? I think maybe I came off as too humble in the interview or something, but basically I feel like I'm being treated like a junior or something. I think I need to deliver a few times and establish some firm boundaries here.
In all workplaces where I worked I was trusted and given freedom. I feel like if they continue treating me like a junior/mid workhorse who needs to be micromanaged I will just start interviewing for other places soon.5 -
So I'm finally doing the job I was hired to do 2 years ago, with the promise of working 1.5 years ago, and scheduled to work 1 year ago as the project slips about a 1.25 years.
The project is on it's 3.5th year of a 3 year plan and based on the architecture of the project, the project architect started a degree in software architecture 4 years ago. In Latin. When his first language was Japanese and his second was Indian English while this was a US company. And his entire degree was in Lisp, PHP, and html, this project is in C#, and his professional background is in Fortran.
This is a man who is no longer on the project, not allowed to contribute or talk to us about the project, and what little documentation he left us is in Swahili translated from Korean via Google translate from the second year Korean language major exchange student from Russia who got really into meth and Telenovelas.
It is every version of MV* without the M and with every definition of * including some he made up and some that have only been proven to exist via machine learning algorithm written in SQL statements.
This project represents an implementation of the presentation tier of an n-tier application, yet attempts to reimplement the other n-1 tiers in html5 and the dreams of children.
The new lead is a former engineer that couldn't begin coding until he figured out how to map all of his variables to his former cars and girlfriends inclusively and learned his management skills from the big book of micro managers and that one time everyone else in the office was sick but the intern. Who now has a girlfriend whom he works 200 feet from so he isn't 100% thinking with his largest head. At least from observation.
Yet, I still can't bring myself to go be with the whales/become an accountant. -
So I was rejected by the management today for promotion to Senior 2 although I have done several major feature developments + infra design and basically end to end ownership.
Reason for no promotion? That's the best fucking part, according to the feedback, the work I performed on the service I created is well-designed,
and the code quality is commendable. However, they pointed out a notable difference in code quality between the micro-service
I built and the rest of the project developed by others. This, apparently, suggests that I lack a strong sense of ownership over the broader product.
First of all, we have super tight deadlines (almost 996), and I burned midnight oil to make sure the service I am in-charge of is designed really well.
Also, how in the flying fuck the other how the inability of others to maintain good code quality elsewhere in the product is being used as evidence against my sense of ownership
and initiative in ensuring high engineering quality for the repository I wasn't even working on
What a delusional management, the entire feedback feels like just an excuse to fuck off, we are not promoting you...
May be instead of doing actual engineering work, I should have just do minimal work and write more design docs / technical artifacts
It is very demoralizing after I worked hard for so many months, product went out really well.. yet when performance review comes, rejected with a petty reason7 -
So we're doing this contract work for this other company and the project is just an overcomplicated piece of garbage where they shoved every buzzword technology into it just because. I managed to get the code just about organized and functional on our side of the contract and it was looking up when suddenly the management decides "we had a rough start, lets start over, learning from our mistakes"
So I was thinking "cool, there were a lot of problems with this overcomplicated pre-optimized stack, surely we can only do better".. oh boy how naive I was. See Im not the guy in charge of the infrastructure (unfortunately) and really the project structure across this huge multi service project is a free-for-all kind of management.. so we had a call on friday where they explained how the new structure should be built... 3 new technologies, more micro services and even worse dependency tree later I was contemplating suicide on the spot.
I tried to make this shit usable and efficient and all my fucking work went down the drain in a single day of these fuckers throwing more buzzwords at the problem... I can't even get a new empty project started without browsing our huge 100+ repo project git for which dependency Im still missing to even run it...
I fucking hate this retarded piece of crap project and I hope every "manager" and "developer" with an exception of very few chokes on a cock...2 -
In good news today: my donut 🍩 looked abit like the surprized picachu meme.
In the sad news section: theres mostly meetings and bad micro management.3 -
If they are a good PM just do your job, they’ll leave you alone. If not, just throw some of that micro management back at them. Tell them you need at least an hour of their time to show them how to properly hold a pencil, but that if they need to hold off on that it’s understandable as they have plenty of flaws to work on. That should make things fun
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I can't deal with this stress anymore
I really like working at this company but the stress is getting worse and worse, too many projects going on, deadlines creeping up, micro management through "agile" and many others.
Not sure what to do, I like the people, the projects themselves but I fucking hate the management!
I think I'm gonna have to leave, I might even need a couple months break just to regain my mental power before I get back to work.2 -
Depends. If the schedule is busy enough, i try to carry on and focus on simpler, low-effort high-reward tasks so i don't stagnate.
If there is nothing getting burned in the oven i just call it the day and go out or relax with some game/show ^_^
I feel like all this "keep calm and carry on" mindset to solves crisis is just the result of bad micro-management of the society as a whole, but maybe i just get filosophical and anarhist when i'm low on motivation 🤔 -
Does anyone feel like their boss is always scheming behind your back. They are changing the requirements and rejecting you without even reviewing your work and are too good to attend any meetings. They’re trying their best but wouldn’t ever give you credit when you are trying your best and getting good results. At what point does the micro management and fear of failure make it so you can’t even take the simplest feature without melting down?1
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Am I right? Is this micro management?
So, in my new team, I have another coworker is my buddy, we are same level and I doubt here coding techniques as I have seen very bad code written by her.
The thing is, whenever I need to pick up a new jira, she starts telling me what code I need to change, without me understanding the ticket or the code.
She forced a code change which was obviously a bad one.
She asked me what did I do yesterday and said that I could have worked on this jira.
Although this is a start but I don't want yo waste my time working with someone who is trying to micromanage when I clearly have the potential to be working without her micro-managemnt.
The problem I see is that her priority is not learning but I don't know what is that but she worked on the tasks which are clearly not our teams work, in the initial informal chat she was too concerned with people being young in the company like who is married who is not etc.
I don't see her as a good developer.
Should I move to other project? or am I overreacting?7 -
So I opened devRant to find the new *bling* expressions feature added to the avatars.
So I set my expression to happy because nowadays, for some reason, even though work has been tough, I've liked it. And things have been good. Mostly because my lead is on holiday and the acting lead is a hundred times better than him in all aspects (micro management and as a Dev).
Cut to the evening when I'm walking home, the lead calls me up to inform me on a production bug that had to be taken up (acting lead had already asked me to look into it, we had an agreement). And I *HATE* the way he assigns tasks and acts like I'm a wee baby who can't even find his mother's tit.
Anyhoo, ended up changing my avatar expression to majorly fucking frustrated because of the Damn phone call.
So kudos to @dfox and @trogus to adding these little features which make people a bit more expressive! -
I pride myself on not being a nerd. I can communicate with customers and I don't dismiss aesthetics, marketing, delivery dates, and legal considerations as completely inconsistent and arbitrary.
But still, when clients complain about my predecessors, I start to feel for them and imagine when past developers
- preferred to rewrite the legacy system
- were reluctant to use Microsoft software
- needed much more time than estimated
- and failed to understand implicit requirements.
I know that there are a lot of developers in the world, but you need a decent or good one who is available and willing to work on your project.
As (web) developers, we should behave more like craftspeople, stay calm, and ignore entitled clients' and managers' moods and micro-management attempts unless there's really a critical issue.13 -
In few months I went from working independently on a project while developing lots of vertical knowledge to being body rented to another company where I spend most of my time doing calls and continuously reworking a suite of over engineered micro services (after ages instead of progressing we’re rewriting for the nth time basic CRUD because the team keeps coming with new refactoring ideas and since budget/time limit aren’t tight nobody on the high management seems to care of the time we’re wasting). I miss being able to stay “in the zone” for hours without calls, being challenged and learning on the job so I’m considering to find another job.
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My last post entails how my company moved me to a freelancing role upon completion of my task (VoIP micro service: incoming and outgoing calls, voice mail drop, voice mail greeting, call forwarding, sms, and a couple more features) — app is now live and used by company’s agents to contact leads on our other products (designing), so boss tells HR to tell me (I realized this from HR’s slack screen when on huddle with me) to add WhatsApp integration. I responded that since I’m a freelancer I would charge $30/hour for it. HR said he’d get back to me and it’s been 3 working days now.
They are also trying to have the app on Apps*mo so they cash out for other companies to use the app.
It’s been 2 weeks and a day since the end of my probation (I’ve been with them for 3 months) and no one has acknowledged this — I also wrote to my boss asking why management won’t acknowledge this but three days after probation they changed my role. Same company that held off my offer later to two months later in the job to offer a Senior Python Developer role as “HR has Covid and could not send it until now”.
He has not responded to my message. Pretty much no salary for me these past few days.
I’m now looking for other jobs. Meanwhile, I’m building from scratch AGAIN a VoIP micro service and I plan on making it public and free upon completion.
BUT I feel the company might take action against me. Do note that I did not sign the offer letter as the link had 3 days expiration and HR said he would send a new one but never did, even after I reminded him at least 2 days in a week.
____
While typing this, I got the urge to proceed regardless any circumstance.4 -
Which should I choose:
Company A: much better pay and benefits, team seems nice, Glassdoor citing quite bad reviews about CEO and upper management.
Company B: current company. uninteresting field, team in distance, tech lead likes micro management and quite annoying in general. In middle of a project.5 -
Does anyone else have managers who are wishywashy on how to track work? Tickets! No not that label, this epic.... Put in hours worked on a ticket, but also make sub tasks.
It is like micro management hell.
All the while all I want to do is get something done!