Headphones/earbuds everywhere.

@jestdotty > "hope you pay well for all those uselessly expended calories."

We do, $5 to $10 an hour above the average in this area. Our janitors make $22 an hour. Nobody is forced to work here and pay is generally not something folks complain about.

If someone is wanting a paycheck just for showing up, I'll send them to you.

@jestdotty > "but you sound like an immense justifier"

Expectation of 8 hours of work for a fair exchange of 8 hours of pay?

Yes, I am a justifier.

@jestdotty > "what's it matter how many hours you do if you get the work done."

That's the thing about working in a warehouse, there is always work to do. If you're talking to a hot girl/guy and not stocking shelves, someone else is having to do your job.

I don't know exactly how the rounding worked. The old software didn't log the attempts but calculated the time differences in the attempts and always tried to give the employee the 'benefit of the doubt' in the event where they meant to clock in/out and accidentally did the other (if that makes sense). Something like if you clocked in, then clocked out in 5 seconds, it left you clocked in because you must have accidentally swiped your card twice (using the first time stamp, not how many times you swiped).

They figured out they could do that several times and a 15 minute break (calculated by the system) could last an hour just as long as they swiped within that 15 minute period, essentially restarting the counter.

@PaperTrail > "Our HR folks are rock stars."

Example of rock star attitude.

HR VP 'Adam' (who started as a logistics mgr, worked his way up) knew about how hourly folks would game the system by clocking in/out multiple times gaming how the software calculated the hours worked (TL;DR).

Because their software didn't log the behavior, we had no way of proving this occurred.

Fed up with the complaints, Adam one day called a muster of the entire logistics department, outlining from this day forward, anyone caught gaming the system would be fired immediately. No warning, no probation, you're fired.

Adam: "To prove I'm serious, Jeff, Tom, Bill. You're fired. Get out. You're final check will be direct deposited"

Jeff: "YOU CAN'T FIRE US! YOU HAVE NO PROOF! THAT'S ILLEGAL!"

Adam: "This is a right to work state. I can fire you for wearing brown shoes. Get out."

After that, folks gaming the system suddenly stopped.

@TeachMeCode > "HR can still get fired"

We've fired two HR VPs since I've been here (nearly 28 years).

First one for reasons unknown, we think he and the CEO got into an argument over something. Nothing nefarious, he was a good guy.

Second one (replacing the first one) was a hire from one of those really expensive corporate placement companies. Came in with very impressive credentials, could talk the HR talk, etc.

All fell apart when he was expected to do actual HR work. He was kinda surprised that he would be expected to understand our insurance, local employment/safety regulations, etc, saying "At my last job other people do that work."

He was here maybe two weeks.

I sometimes understand the hate for HR, so I guess we're lucky. Our HR folks are rock stars.

No touchy-feely team building nonsense, you come to work and you get paid.

@YourMom > "I sent this to our HR on their last day at work"

Ahhh..Strange Brew. Classic.

@YourMom > "hypnotist circles"

I'm surprised there is such a thing as hypnotist circles.

> "leave for office at 7.30, reach office at 9.30"

Two hour commute? Yikes.

If I were a young single buck, I would either move and find a residence closer, request work-from-home, or quit and find a job closer to me.

I know being married+kids makes that a difficult choice, but it's worth your own sanity to explore all options.

@retoor > "DevRant not your diary, idiot"

Um...yes it is. Its for ranting...it's in the name.

What do you think a diary is used ... wait...name calling? Ahh...you're one of the internet trolls I read about, never mind.

Shoo..shoo...back to under the bridge or I'm getting my spray bottle.

@devux-bookmark > "I still don't get why Microsoft has constantly changed their windows UI"

Ironically, the Microsoft Shell is completely customizable. Since, I think, Windows 7, the Shell hasn't changed, they've just applied a different theme/skin ever since. There used to be a huge 3rd party market that updated the Windows skin/theme. Wanted Windows to look exactly a Mac? There was a theme. Wanted a Linux theme? Windows 8, Windows 95? It was out there. Until our networking dept dictated a 'standard' desktop, I used a minimalist theme (no desktop icons, very thin start bar docked at the top, only the clock in the system tray), with everything I needed+used tucked away in Windows 3.11 style folder groups. Perfection.

> "How is MSSQL so popular?"

#1, its from Microsoft (nobody ever gets fired when choosing a product from Microsoft)

#2, its not Oracle

#3, Bill's nearsighted grandma with dementia can create a table with as much skill as MS Certified DBA.

I've been using MSSQL since 6.5 and like any legacy 'enterprise' product, its become so bloated with nonsense nobody but niche edge cases every use its 'enterprise' features.

@jestdotty > "she builds a universe of stringent details."

That is brilliantly accurate.

@PaperTrail > "when she essentially said 'OK, I'll call our insurance rep"

She did contact our insurance rep and he was dumbfounded that she knew how to find the discrepancies ("How did you even know where to look?").

Her response to me afterwards: "How did *he* not know? That's is his job! No wonder these insurance companies are going bankrupt. Idiots."

@retoor > "Yeah, weird how people lose their way when it looks like a bit different huh"

This is the same woman who reads our insurance's benefit details (the ones that are hundreds of pages) and comprehends it enough to find the loopholes.

We had a contract with a roofing company for a new roof, siding, gutters etc (hail storm damage), and she found several duplicate entries, just worded slightly different, that they were trying to double-bill the insurance. She 'called them out', which the company rep tried to make sound like she didn't understand construction contracts.

TL;DR, when she essentially said 'OK, I'll call our insurance rep and a lawyer to help me understand your contract', the rep (within an hour) had an adjusted contract. My wife fired them anyway, demanding our non-refundable deposit back (which we got back), saying the contract still was misleading.

*I* would have never caught the details she caught. Its a superpower I don't have.

@Grumm > "So we cannot use 'this task is killing me' ? or 'my back is killing me'"

Posts are flagged and removed for offensive language like 'killed', 'shot'. Not all, but enough to where you'll hear folks say "Pew Pew" instead of 'shot'

"Other day my buddy was pew pew'ed next the liquor store..."

I hear that and I'm reminded, again, our society is getting dumber and dumber. Not the folks that do it, but a system that makes people change words so they won't offend and their social media banned/canceled.

Language is a social construct. Words in themselves have no value, no action, it's our stupid monkey brain that reacts to hearing/reading 'Kill' that causes folks to lose that mind.

George Carlin has old comedy bit about curse words that is still relevant today.

@tosensei > "it's about 'The Algorithm' suppressing everything that might possibly be in any way whatsoever controversial"

Then it's 100% about the "hypersensitive woke snowflakes".

Cancel culture is still alive and well.

@rootshell > I've never been at a place where management actually took responsibility"

Its not perfect and a lot of pressure mgmt puts on themselves to push each other.

It it a little uneasy when we get an alert and 5 upper managers all want to help "fix" the problem and the VP badgering the mgrs. I just want to scream sometimes "STOP!! Go back to your office and let me fix this!"

The other day, 'Mgr-Mark' interrupted me 3~4 times (kinda lost count) throughout the day about a problem in HR that had nothing to do with him or his area (he's responsible for the logistics systems). The mgr who is actually responsible was busy and he took it upon himself to step up.

Kept stopping by "Is it fixed yet?...What do you need? I'll get networking involved. Do we need to have a meeting with XYZ? I'll schedule it."

I really wanted to say: Dude, stop...I appreciate it...but stop. If I need your jedi powers to blow up the death star, I'll ask.

@rootshell > "The real ones get blunted into "cover you ass" mode where they just make sure shit don't slide on them."

Since those 'dark days', new mgrs have embraced leadership principles from the book 'Extreme Ownership'.

Now it comes down to ownership and if you care enough about the project/process/whatever to get the job done. As of now, if something is screwed up, nearly all the mgt team takes responsibility for the issue, then work backwards to find out what they didn't know/could have done better, then set a plan to improve and make sure the problem isn't repeated or make sure we have a process in place to resolve future problems.

Its not about blame, it's about responsibility. They take being responsible very seriously. If anyone tries the "its not my fault, Greg screwed up!". OK, Greg screwed up, but you're Greg's boss, *you're* responsible. Greg obliviously didn't have has the tools or leadership to succeed. What can *you* do in the future so Greg can succeed?

> "im gonna start documenting all decisions of this retarded manager"

And keep the documentation in a safe location, away from the ability for any of the 'powers that be' to see and delete.

Previous department mgr would routinely scan our hard drives looking for evidence of 'something' that folks could embarrass him (pictures, message threads, etc).

I had a directory of Dilbert cartoons that I saved locally (C:\Dilberts) whenever the daily strip hit a little close to home. One in particular was an almost a word-for-word exchange (one where the pointy-hair wanted a pre, pre-meeting), so I printed it out and hung it on my wall.

Knowing me very well (one mgr called me "King CYA"), the dept mgr found and deleted the directory.

He knew I couldn't complain to anyone. It's a company computer and he had full admin discretion to do anything he wanted.

Little did this guy know was C:\Dilberts was just the download directory. I backed up everything to my personal google drive.

> "Code coverage now has to be 80% or higher across the board"

I'm so sorry.

If it helps (and you're using C#), you can set a directive on/in a file/class that tells the compiler to ignore that metric.

We are cataloging # lines of code just for own morbid curiosity (only the C# cs files in the project directory). Kind of a "wow, that's a big project", but nothing we're measuring or anything like that. Nobody cares.

When our VP (who does not write code) saw the value in our dashboard (just the project, # lines, and total at the end), he was excited and wanted my boss to create departmental measures.

He said "Sure we'll do that". Later he said to me (when I asked the obvious) "No, we're not doing that. Joe will forget about lines-of-code measure by the next quarterly meeting."

That was over a year ago, guess what? Subject never came back up.

Opinion: I have a general "rule of 3". If I'm abstracting more than 3 layers, I'm probably making it too complicated.

And my own personal rule of "If I'm writing a lot of code to do something, I'm probably doing it wrong" always comes into play in encapsulation and separation of concerns.

@Root > "Oh well. I'll be here 'til the end."

Ditto

I felt your sadness when I read you actually have a 'Change Management' department. Yikes.

We had something similar called the "Integration Department" and it was more about saying 'No' to ideas they (and their friends) didn't come up with.

Ex. After successfully implementing a Service Bus event processing for orders, I could easily listen for various events throughout the order process (taking the order, processing payment, shipping, etc) and send the customer notifications (text/email, etc). My mistake (according to their review) was I compared it to how you can track your Domino's pizza order

The Integration Department summarized we're not a pizza restaurant but a professional enterprise system and we would not lower ourselves to pizza delivery (and it wasn't a feature our customers asked for)

About 6 months later the head of our eCommerce department implemented the customer order notification system using my Service Bus framework.

Not our HR. They are likely the most important department in the company. Since they've been given full discretion in hiring the best people (no DEI, no quotas, affirmative action, etc), we have and retain the best folks.

You have no idea how boring it is around here. No drama, pissing contests, no alpha-male chest pounding. Folks who want to write some code, talk about <random movie/tv-show/sports>, and at 5 o'clock go home. Wash-rinse-repeat.

My son is a nurse at a VA hospital and some of those complaints make it to Congress.

He's undergoing an 'investigation' right now for one of our countries finest 'heroes' complaint about not bathing him 'correctly'.

The guy has a fetish about men washing him like a baby and complains to his congressional representative if he doesn't get...um....satisfaction, if you know what I mean.

Son answered this guy's call light, walks in, he's spread eagle on the bed, crapped himself, and said smiling "I pooped myself, I need you to clean me up"

My son did the absolute minimal with the guy complaining/cussing my son wouldn't 'go up inside' to do a thorough cleaning.

Of course, none of that is on the official complaint. Something about my son refused to honor the dignity of our countries finest heroes with basic sanitary needs...blah blah blah.

Luckily, this guy is a 'frequent flyer' with complaints and, so far, nothing is ever done to a nurse 'caring' for him.

> "How the **** do you even measure that empirically?"

This steps into 'stay out of my backyard'. Mgrs are supposed to define the parameters, block obstacles, and *stay out of my way*.

If I'm asked, I would say 0%. Its not like mgrs would know either way.

@cafecortado > "Mediocre apps is all we can expect from them"

And 'retiring' apps people love and used on a daily basis like Google Reader and Picasa.

UPDATE

Senior leaders decided to do nothing.

I suggested to my boss (which he was already contemplating) that we allow a 'cooling off' period and then suggest a somewhat rube-goldberg solution (outside ping). When they had time to actually think, it was a one time fluke that didn't warrant the complexity, time, and the most important piece, money.

#winning