Project Fear
paperstack.com
paperstack.com
Week 1: met the team, requested access to a VM and a service account for Jira.
Week 8: the VM was provisioned. I installed the application in about 2 minutes.
Week 10: I was granted access to a service account. I entered the credential into the application and confirmed it worked.
Week 11: I presented to the team the installed and working service.
Week 12: the internship was done.
All in all I did maybe 30 min of actual work across the 12 weeks. They extended me a comfortable job offer as they were pleased with my performance, which I declined.
^ I am a proud East Texan, where we don't put a whole lot of stock in all the woke bullshit. No offense meant if you're about that life, but from our perspective, y'all are fuckin' crazy people. ;-) Love ya anyway, because we're all one big, dysfunctional American family, right? Hell, I've got family members who are batshit crazy, but I still love 'em. Anyway, /tangent
December 18th, they asked us to put up a Christmas tree.
To ensure an efficient return after the Christmas break, they made us take the tree down on December 23rd. :-)
I worked on the 3D0 operating system, and that was the shit show of cascading shit shows. All that fancy graphics hardware the 3D0 supposedly had, almost none of it worked. The promises, the missing milestones, the finger pointing, the extremely young and poor communicating staff. Electronic Arts was a brain damaging out of control nonsense place for quite a while. And printing money at the same time with their EA Sports group.
> the extremely young and poor communicating staff
That's is a huge issue in our industry
I am by no means any kind of expert in this. One thing I often see, is a developer offering management a choice, A and B, and then being unhappy that they chose wrong, agianst his advice.
That's fundamentally wrong - your proffeshional duty is to present to non-experts options that make sence, if option B doesn't make sence, don't present it at all. Present A as a technical nessesity, and if they can't handle it, they will let you know. Like Yes Prime minister discussion of the foreign office.
Its not so nice when you see an external guy burn through 10k$ budget in a week and all he can do is watch his phone for 8 hours a day.
The rest, just wow, 1-guy subversion via usb sounds like a bad story from 1999. Anything non-trivial would be impossible to ship in any reasonable quality, ever. Normally management is not that comically incompetent (and worse).
I do think we have it pretty good these days. In particular, the dev-ops movement has pretty much put an end to the days of waiting for a server to be made available to a new project.
> The rest, just wow, 1-guy subversion via usb sounds like a bad story from 1999.
Heh. According to Wikipedia USB sticks went on the market around 2000. But yeah, zip drives or something. But there'd have been reams of printed documentation in binders (or badly stapled realistically) and JIRA wouldn't have been a thing, so perhaps a net win :)
My first gig after university we moved all the files around on 3½" floppy disk and I'm retrospectively embarrassed by my resistance to a colleague's insistence that we start using a CVS server instead!
If it makes you feel better: back around 1991 or 92 one of our employees insisted that we implement version control, specifically CVS. Gilmore and I were extremely opposed and made a long list of absolute requirements (e.g. “100% transparent in emacs with no change to anybody’s work flow”) — all requirements to be fully met or no go.
The guy behind this installed cvs, moved the code into the repo, and completely ignored our stupid “requirements“ list. Of course it was such a win that neither John or I ever mentioned our list.
The story of how (or rather why!) we wrote cvsserver is hair raising too.
> I could not order a corporate laptop until I joined the project. Corporate laptops were backed up with a minimum of 2 months to deliver one.
Huh, that's some softball right there! The worst I've seen is 7 months!
> To get the code into the repository it had to be sent via the project manager on a USB stick by copying the entirety of your source code onto it
okay that's scary
> Did I mention that any copying of files off of a corporate laptop was forbidden?
Doesn't that contradict the USB process? Otherwise that's 'standard'
> In the sprint planning meeting the scrum master would demand that we “commit to the sprint.” The bodyshop minions would all meekly agree
Seems minions know their protests will be ignored, just like the author's were, so why even bother. I have seen 'minion-esque' behaviour a lot, but not the degree of brain-dead behaviour from management described there.
> Also these days I avoid any project where I won’t be in a position to help steer things before they can go that superluminally off-track.
Neat!
That's the special kind of impressive.
> Doesn't that contradict the USB process? Otherwise that's 'standard'
Yeah, I thought I might not have made that clear. They were allowed to copy files onto the laptops, just not off them.
So with the wild cut&paste integration situation it meant that none of the actual developers could be aligned with the code that was actually being compiled because we could never update to the master copy.
The moment I realised that the terrible PM was doing diff by eye instead of, you know, using the diff tool, was when I should have walked away. I stuck it out way too long in retrospect.
Been there, done that, red swingline stapler.
But then I went ahead and started adding some unit and functional tests and the tech lead deleted them the next day. I don't remember what he said exactly but he didn't see the point.
To be honest I often don't usually feel like a lot of automated tests are really necessary. But the thing I was working on really needed some kind of automated tests.
Eventually I realized that the only thing anyone had taken from my agile talk was that we would just go faster. They did not understand the testing part or direct communication with users or anything else I said. They only heard me say we would go faster.
For some reason eventually the PM did decide to take me to visit the site. Once, well after they had wasted all of the money. There was a lady there doing data entry. Due to some bugs and problems which I had never been informed about, the data entry process (which supposedly was to be done on Toughbooks in the field incrementally, but for some reason was instead all hand written and left for her to do) was literally driving her crazy. The PM never had any comment about it.
Oh. Almost forgot. At the same visit I got to see the code I had been working on throw an error and found out (after months) that it could not possibly be working since apparently the lead decided to add a LIMIT clause when the production database took too long to query. The way he did it completely broke the logic. Not sure how any of it really worked with that. No one ever told me. I found out two months later when it popped up on the user's screen (as apparently was normal).
This was also a place where four or five civil engineers had spent the majority of the funds creating hundreds of pages of documentation and UI designs (about literally 5 times more complex than warranted).
If it was mere cluelessness and I could have introduced a bit of sane process to the project I think I'd have had a blast!
At least at a defense contractor you can get hired and then get paid while waiting for the security clearance (just watching some unclassified training and such I guess).
I related this part of the post to my gf and she said at her place it’s HR that’s backed up. They have a bunch of contractors they want to convert to FT but if their contract ends and they can’t get paid they’ll go work somewhere else. Meanwhile the company is trying to hire like crazy.
I'm not sure why people can't just expect that they can explain in two or three sentences, what they're trying to accomplish and what's preventing them from getting there. No sense in a daily scrum if you can't do that.
Have you considered sending it into El Reg? They print these tales of woe all the time.
In my experience, the existence of bureaucracy always started from someone wanting to bring process in place. Either the process was not necessary in the first place, or somewhere down the road the reason for process no longer valid. Instead of removing the useless process, it lingers on. But the existence of bureaucracy never directly impact the business that there is no incentive to refactor it out of operation
In heavily regulated environments (banks, airlines, healthcare, etc) it's a feature. Elsewhere it's a bug. I also think that's why the really huge companies tend to be in heavily regulated environments.
Sometimes this control is great, as it can streamline processes, which can make employee training and automation cheaper.
The problem is that the extra work created by bureaucracy is rarely executed by those that demand it, and is often only desired due to a lack of trust in those working on the floor.
A good bureaucracy requires very little active work (by humans) and has tangible benefits. It has to be of greater measureable value than the loss of productivity it incurs on the employees tasked with running it.
Because the burden of regulation becomes a barrier to new entrants, ass opposed to the entrenched players who adopted them incrementally over the years.
In general I’m a fan of regulation, but I do understand it’s concomitant limitations and downsides.
Internally, companies suffer from the Chesterton’s Fence problem. At least democratic governments typically have to go through a long enough discussion process that someone can look back later.
It’s why companies to reorgs, “new initiatives”, acquisitions and the like, tossing both baby and bathwater out.
Also why there is a culture of “best practices” — often a cover for laziness, but also often with a kernel of good idea in it somewhere.
The Python project I just deleted a few moments ago. It's intended as a search engine for exported bookmark files, but it goes horribly wrong. The code is dirty and unorganized. Everything is wired together in the most messy way possible, and it takes forever to debug.
But I lost it at this and started laughing
> To get the code into the repository it had to be sent via the project manager on a USB stick by copying the entirety of your source code onto it
Truly unbelievable