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Search - "reporting"
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Stakeholder: In user profiles, I want users to be able to renew gift memberships for their giftee.
Me: ???
SH: For example, if I buy a gift membership for you and it expires or is about to expire, then I want to be able to renew it for you.
Me: Typically, gifts aren’t the gifter’s responsibility to manage. There’s no reason for you to be able to manage my membership from your account, even if just to renew. You’re opening up Pandora’s box here. If you let users renew for giftees, you’ll eventually have a user ask if they can cancel the giftee’s membership because they got into a fight and want to stick it to the giftee.
SH: But our users aren’t using the gift membership sales flow correctly. That results in all sorts of data issues for our reporting services and we spend so much time fixing it by hand.
Me: Your sales flow is confusing. The website asks users to verify membership for a giftee in case the giftee has or had a membership. How it the gifter supposed to know that? You’re trying to make things easier for you, but you’re expecting the user to know that and comply. That’s unrealistic.
SH: But there must be a something you can do.
Me: No.9 -
In my last rant (https://devrant.com/rants/5523458/...) I regaled you lovely folks of how I had to diplomatically yet firmly defend my work/life boundaries during off-work hours for non-life threatening affairs (a frustratingly common occurrence), and concluded the thread by mentioning that I still had a job, but would make a note of my frustration of that for whatever exit interview happens.
Well, no need for those notes any longer.
I and half of the engineering force, along with several senior managers were laid off this morning in the form of a "mandatory on-site all hands".
I live and work in NYC. Several people took trains and booked rooms from as far away as Boston to be here (or at least I know of specifically two people who commuted up here on Sunday to be here for the "all hands"). I presume those people used their travel benefits to get here and back.
We were dismissed before the meeting even took place, and according to a coworker I became friends with (yes, despite my snarky comments in other threads, I *do* actually have coworkers I became friends with lol) who survived at least this round of layoffs, once the actual all-hands commenced, the company first disclosed the layoffs, then announced being awarded a major contract with the very client the entire org had been working on overdrive to win for the last nine months. He had already been looking for a new job and got an offer last Friday, had been mulling it over, but told me once we were off the phone he was calling them up and accepting. He had three people reporting to him, and lost two. Even he had no idea it was coming until one of his now-former subordinates asked him to come outside and told him they'd just been let go.
I knew going in to this startup that "it's a startup, anything can happen, just mind the gap". That's why I asked on numerous occasions and tried to get time with our CFO to ask about revenue and earnings; things that in my years at this place were never disclosed to the rank and file, I'm not a professional accountant or CPA by any means, but I did take a pair of corporate accounting classes in community college because I like the numbers (see my other rants about leaving the field and becoming a math teacher), and I was really curious to know how the financial health of the business was.
It wasn't so much a red flag as it was an orangish-yellow that no one ever answered those questions, or that the CFO was distant but not necessarily cagey about my requests for his time; other indicators were good while interviewing--they had multiple fully integrated, paying customers (one of which being a former employer from years ago, which aided me in having strong product familiarity during the job interview), but I guess not enough to be sustainable.
Anyway. I'm gonna use the rest of the week to be a bum, might get out of the city and go hang with friends Pittsburgh, eat some hoagies and just vibe for a while. I've got assets and money stashed up to float pretty easily for a while, plus a bit of fun money so losing the job isn't world ending. Generalized anxiety because everything is going to shit worldwide, but that quickly faded into the backdrop of the generalized anxiety I always have because existentialism or something like that.
Thanks for reading. Pay the teachers.5 -
Regarding my last rant:
I have all my 3 Raspberrys set up for seti@home now, reporting to twitter and my own "surveillance" system for them.
The system is still ugly, the code is ugly but that's getting improved next!4 -
Just curious.
Has anyone ever had to face the wrath of the people they were ranting about here in devRant?
I introduced my reporting manager to this network, and I have done some amount of ranting about him.
I guess you could say 'danger' is my middle name.3 -
A few years ago my boss held a brainstorming meeting to go over features for an internal reporting app. I brought up we should have related business news stories scroll on the page header like Fox business or something. He laughed and said sure. Two things happened after that.
1. Found out the marquee tag still works in chrome.
2. Yeah you bet I put that shit in there.
Anyways a meeting was held a few days after where my boss chewed me out for actually doing it. He showed the app to his boss and got laughed at by his leadership team when they saw news headlines scroll over analytics graphs.
After writing this I realize this is more his embarrassment than mine. Have a great Tuesday fam.7 -
Records Person: Can you look at this member renewal issue for system A? It’s happening on the website you maintain. Here are some recent errors to debug.
Me (web developer): I can’t reproduce the error your reporting. Is there something I’m missing? And is there an example for the staging environment?
RP: There’s another team that will manually reconcile the records in system A if they don’t match what’s in system B. So this gives users two active memberships when it should only be one.
Me: 😑 So you already know the issue is human intervention messing with the records and causing the renewal issue. This is not a website issue. It’s a data issue.1 -
New job is turning out to be kind of the opposite of what I was expecting, based on interviews.
I thought I had done a pretty thorough job asking the kinds of challenging and specific questions during the interviews and was pretty satisfied with the answers.
Three weeks in, I’ve more or less been turned loose onto my first project which is….installing patch updates.
Next few projects through the end of the year and into Q1 next year are similarly sysadmin-chore work, which I’m not going to act like is beneath me or unimportant but it’s not quite what we talked about in the interview when I applied to an SDET position.
Point of order to talk about once I wrap up these first few projects, it doesn’t exactly seem like they know where I’m supposed to be or where to even really put me (on the org chart I have a line reporting up to boss, but I’m also the only one not on a functional team) and reading through the wiki last guy just kind of did everything.
If that’s what this is….eh I need to know if that’s how they want to use me and find out soon.11 -
I love Rust's error messages, but I think they were trying to be a little too smart with the error reporting here and ended up relying too much on properties of the medium.
How the fuck do I tell which is which?
My hypothesis is that because #3 can only be a lower bound based on the phrasing of the sentence, and because #2 is an upper bound, the correct order is 2;4;1;3. But why do I have to do intermediate level English grammar exercises to read my error message? -
I like being an employee in product development team (rather than a consultant in a project) - we're exempt from reporting hours per project and making sure to stay within budget.
But on the downside it's frustrating to se how the org happily spends development time without considering we cost money. Just found out that one department ordered a campaign site that took 4 days for 2 devs to build.
It's now ended and revenue was only a few hundred bucks.
When I asked "Didn't we lose money on this project? Considering our salaries and the ~60hour dev time"
- "Oh no, we don't count the dev team as a cost! You already work here and would get paid no matter what" 😑
Good thing I'm not in finance.4 -
Infrastructure took away our read access in S3 to data that we own and our ability to manually delete/upload to S3 in that prefix (which we own). Without waiting for us to confirm that we have alternative means to read and change what is in there. And I had no warning about this, so here I am doing a midnight mod on an existing solution of mine in hopes that I can finish it before tomorrow morning for some legal reporting deadline.
Things would be so much easier if the infrastructure team let the emergency support role have those permissions for emergencies like this, but they didn't. I guess "least privilege" means "most time spent trying to accomplish the most trivial of things, like changing a file".8 -
German public service digitization. Websites celebrating the new "digital functionality" of the federal ID card, but if you need to prolong the actual card, you have to visit a public administration center in person, no way to prove your existing valid ID in a zoom meeting although that's de-facto standard accepted even when opening a bank account, plus they have all of my data so they should know I have a valid ID and they could just send the new one to my postal address.
So I have to appear in person at their offices, so I need an appointment, but in times of covid pandemic, appointments are rare and only offered on a day-to-day basis in my hometown, that's why I have to visit their online appointment web app at 7 a.m. in the morning to grab one of the few appointments when they are released.
Don't tempt me to write a script that squats all the other appointment slots to resell at the highest prices...
Situation reminds of the times when it was even harder to get a vaccination against covid, and the media kept reporting about the minority that refused to get vaxxed, so they didn't have to admit there wasn't enough vaccine anyway.
This rant is not about politics, it's about the failure of bureaucracy, but if it was about politics, I would just quote Rezo that it shows who had governed this state for sixteen years.
When I rant about German internet connectivity, people usually reply that the web is much better in Taipeh, Bangalore or Guadalajara, so I can still have some hope that it's not all of the world that's totally lost.
So give me some hope, folks.6 -
Facebook world hack was my first hackathon failed miserably
but had great time with fb dev's reporting password related bug on their platform -
I hate unit test. I hate testing by code.
I hate the idea to write code that tests code. And that u must update both when u add a feature. Like wtf.
Good debug mode with clear verbose and precise reporting tool and voila.
Drives me nuts thus trending shit.10 -
I was called on a review meeting on why the task took so much time and why my performance is going down.
I clearly stated that I was not managed well and I had lot of dependencies in presence of my reporting manager. She didn't look happy. Now I'm kind of worried that she could act weirdly as women are also emotional beings taking everything to the heart.5 -
can anyone share their experiences on switching jobs inside the company?
i have been an Android dev at my current company and a job has recently been posted which requires a java engineers. i am expecting this is a backend job. i got 0 experience with backend or java backend frameworks, but i understand java well and always wanted to transition to backend. even the reporting manager is someone whom i have seen in meetings and sitting with my TL
should i go with it? should i inform my TL? would it he awkward? would i get any raise? chances of me getting fired increases more or less with this?
please share your journey6