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Admin
Millitary Fool, whats happening...
I'm going to need those TPS reports ASAP!
Admin
Oh, man does that piss me off. Suits asking for reports that they never read. Because let's face it, nothing boosts productivity like random interruptions for useless crap. My personal favorite is when my boss interrupts me to ask about the exact same thing I wrote in my report the day before.
Admin
Ugh, reminds me of my last company and the Unhappy Customer. In a desperate bid to save the failing project, a project manager decided to have twice-dialy status updates meetings with the customer... Many of which I was required to attend, even though I was supposed to be working on actually fixing the problems. "Gee, vt_mruhlin. Why is this project taking so long?" "Because you keep dragging me to these stupid meetings."
Admin
Ha. I had it the other way. Filling timesheet forms every week in a home brewed app that couldn't even display a report, so I had to peek through the DB to see if I had missed a day. 3 months later the boss called me to ask why I didn't report my work on a monthly basis as I was told.
Admin
So, did we finally dump the awful "Featured Comment" thing over the weekend, or has the random number generator just not selected one yet?
Admin
Sadly, sometimes it's not what you do, but what's written in report that counts :)
Admin
Just out of curiosity - has anyone ever embedded a Dilbert strip - or any other source of comedy - in a status report, just to see if anyone would notice? (I did, they didn't)
I once had to rewrite a system, and through automation, managed to reduce a very complex task to a few simple steps. The 30 page manual was reduced to about 2 pages. One day, a few months later, some manager in some group that used the thing was complaining that the system was too complicated and needed to be simplified. My boss just looked at me and started to ask "Didn't you already..."; I cut him off and asked the other manager if he'd read the status reports. Of course, he swore that he did. My boss just tossed the status reports for the past 2 months at him and laughed.
Admin
On one project I began to suspect that my project manager was either ignoring my reports or green-shifting the statuses, ie. changing my red (in the shit) or orange (close to it) tasks statuses to green (all rosy).
I filed the same report for some 2 months to test this out (didn't even change the date embedded in the filename) before some one higher up the food-chain noticed.
It was cruel but funny.
Admin
In my previous post my manager had to produce a monthly analysis of all software faults that month (some 400+). One day he thought it would be funny to replace PMIP (A medical messaging protocol) in the report with PIMP.
As far as I know this hasn't been changed to this day. And he is still pimping his reports.
Admin
Management treats reports the way coders treat code; if it's not causing a problem, it's probably not worth their time to investigate and/or fix.
Does your codebase contain any legacy code? Code you're not 100% positive if it's used or not; probably not, but just to be on the safe side, you leave it alone? Sure, it'd be nice to go back and fix it all up, but there just isn't enough time in a given day/week/month?
Now you know why management does the same thing with reports.
Admin
Our HR department recently came out with a related idea to keep themselves in work - weekly "illness/holiday last week" reports. I.e. rather than reporting the exception of when you're ill or on holiday, you effectively report the opposite, thus wasting a few minutes of everyone elses' time every week to keep an HR droid in employment correlating it all. Go team!
Worse still, it almost totally negates the point of having illness reports and holiday requests. Oddly, my suggestion of "why don't we just tell you our planned dates of illness?" didn't go down so well.
Admin
TRWTF is that Dilbert is still considered a source of comedy.
Admin
I had a buddy insert into a requirements doc, something like:
Nobody noticed. He even read it out loud during the review meeting. Nobody was listening.
(For the record, this was a voicemail company. Nothing at all related to waffles.)
Admin
That is exactly what happens to me so often. Daily meetings with the customer followed by a meeting with my own Project Manager followed by a meeting with your colleagues, answering random questions coming from random people on that project. That leaves you 2 to 4 hours a day for doing the urgentissimo work because the PM already promised for Monday next week. It's a funny thing that this only happens when something has to be done urgently. Is there also a rule like the one that adding staff to a project that is late slows it down even further?
Admin
In a recent project of mine, I had to code a confirmation dialog along the lines of "This is not reversible, are you sure you want to do this?" and then two buttons "Yes" and "No". Just for kicks, I added a third button, labeled "Maybe". Took half a year for anyone to notice.
Admin
Admin
I recently sent out APSR (Another Pointless Status Report) with a large section done in Haiku. Well, badly done in Haiku; i'm a tech, not a poet.
Sadly, not one comment or complaint.
Admin
Years ago I worked for a 911 dispatch agency as computer support. There was this one police chief of a podunk town in our jurisdiction who started getting alot of criticism and feeling that his job was in jeopardy, asked us to print and send him the last 5 years of all the incidents his agency reported to. With full details. We told him it would be too much info to work with, but he insisted.
Even though it was a little rural town, 5 years of info with full details amounted to 6.5 boxes of 8.5" x 11" tractor fed paper. We had fun delivering it. Months later, I had to go to his office to fix a terminal and noticed the boxes of paper still sitting in the corner where we'd unloaded them. The ridiculous request didn't help his case, and he was finally fired.
Admin
At my last job I reported directly to one of the owners. One day he got a bug up his *** and started demanding daily activity reports at the end of each day. About a year before I finally left for good I realized he probably wasn't even reading them so I ran a test. Instead of spending the last 45 minutes of the day writing the pointless report I just sent him the same one over and over again. Nothing. Then I just stopped sending it. A week later he asked me why I hadn't been sending my daily reports in. I said "oops" and started re-sending the same report again and continued sending him the exact same report every single day for the next 8 months until I left. I even wrote a cron script to send it out for me at 5 PM sharp every day. He never said a word about the content. I think he just wanted to see that it was there every day.
Admin
Over the past 30 years, I've developed a sort-of-guide by which I gage the importance of tasks assigned to me.
More often than not, it works (at least for me).
Admin
Admin
Fortunately my project was on time and under budget, or someone might have gone back and actually read the plan.
-Harrow.
Admin
I used to work for a department that tested all our customer nodes, like 3500 of them. The reports went out to about 50 people on several manegerial levels. The e-mail was broken down into three parts: the summary, followed by the breakdown by state, and then a breakdown by area code.
What made it difficult was that the format of the report (how it looked) had to be very specific because one of the high muckety mucks wanted it to "look nice" on his Palm Pilot (specifically, using a font he liked and the screen could not wrap). Another set of analysts wanted it to "look nice" in AOL Mail, which was not HTML compliant. They wanted the numbers to align with one another, but AOL didn't always keep fixed fonts for some reason, so we had to make everything align in Arial font size 10, kerning and all (like a "1" takes up less space than a "7"). We would generate the reports in a fixed font, convert them to Arial 10 in AOL Mail, and then had enter spaces (not tabs, because the reports were also imported via script into some other analyst's databases) in the "tables" until everything aligned nicely. Every day.
They were so focused on how the reports looked, that if you sent out the report in the wrong font, you'd get 3-4 complaints, usually with superfluous anger, like all caps, in red, usually just one stern comment like, "UNACCEPTABLE!!!"
Once, for two weeks, we didn't catch a glitch, and 2 weeks of reports didn't have updated data. The letter subject even said the same date every day until we caught it when the month changed (it helped that "July" is shorter than "August"). No one complained. We quietly fixed it, and nobody seemed to notice.
We also had another employee in our department who sent out these god-awful reports daily. Complicated cross-linked Excel spreadsheets to some fairly important people, and only he could nmake them work. He could only run the macros on his system because of the proprietary paths in the VBA code. He ever went on vacation, either, and if he was out for the day (a frequent problem), he would do them from home via VPN and PCAnywhere. He refused to document what he did. Well, one day, he had to be gone for three weeks. Long story short, he was volunteering for the USO, and agreed to an assignment in Greenland where he would have NO Internet access.
Well, he tried to explain to another coworker how they ran, and even loaded him the laptop he used. The day after he left, the reports just wouldn't run. I helped this other employee all day trying to get them to run. It was terrible, and the VBA code was the design of a madman. Finally, we had to tell the high muckety mucks that we couldn't give them the reports and why. The response was priceless:
"We can never get the spreadsheets to open, so we never look at the reports from that guy. Someone else has been doing them for us for over a year now."
When we asked if someone had told him this, they said, "I think so. Surely someone must have." Later we got forwarded mails where several people requested the guy stop sending the report, they no longer needed them.
I informed our boss of this, but he was kind of spineless, so nothing ever got done about it, and the guy "resumed his work" when he got back. He was also one of the first against the wall when the revolution came... :-P
Admin
We have to track our time every week and give reports like that. My managers have told me that they never read them but I have to continue doing it. If a customer bitches about why we're charging them for X amount of hours, my manager can just look at the time tracking system and see what I claimed to be doing for that period of time. All I put in there is "Worked on X component of Y project" or "Fixed ticket #123".
Admin
I recently was put on a project coding in a language that I hated. All of my cvs check in comments were black humor rants on how much the language sucked.
I could always tell who read my comments because they'd complement me afterwards.
And the story has a happy ending. Having completed that project, I've just been moved to a much better project because my manager knew that if he didn't move me, upper management would put me on a different project using that language.
I [big heart] where I work.
Admin
Admin
You should have left the script active after you quit.
Admin
Did you turn off the cron job after you left? Would have been funny when your boss continued getting status reports after you left...
Admin
Not exactly a funny story compared to most, but:
Shortly after starting at my company they began moving to a new platform, and added a web portal to view generic reports. The only time anyone had to personally run a “special" report was in very rare cases.
I was eventually given one of these that needed a report daily ever other quarter or so. I knew enough of the old language and system to update new projects to the new system, but the reporting was beyond me and it came up so rarely that I never bothered learning it. I just updated a few sections of the previous report each time this came up.
The first few times everything went smoothly, then at the end of one quarter I happened to look at the report - large swaths of it were zeros! Over half the data hadn’t even been read in. I grabbed the report from the previous quarter, correctly modified it, and made sure it worked correctly for next time but I didn’t relish the idea of having to run weeks worth of reports over again. But . . . no one had noticed, as time went on no one requested that I run them again. So I began to wonder, if no one looked at that section of the report whey did they keep requesting them?
It turns out they only needed one specific section, which had been filled in. This information was easily found on the portal, and just as easily copied and pasted into an email, which is all they had been doing with it.
Thankfully the next time it came up whoever had been requesting them was trained in the using the portal, so never asked for them again. To this day, only one other person knows about that report missing half of its information . . .
Admin
Reminds me of the proverb:
You don't lose weight by weighing yourself more often, you do so by changing your habits.
Admin
Dilbert isn't a comedy - it's a sad, depressing tale about the fate of every CS grad in today's IT industry.
;)
Admin
Admin
Admin
I knew for sure that my reports weren't being read when one day I was told that a project that I'd been working on for over a month, and had been providing weekly status reports about, had been cancelled months ago.
Admin
Admin
Not in a status report, but: I was once told to write up a license agreement for a piece of software my team developed. You know, the kind that comes up during installation and the user has to click "I accept" for the install to finish. This was for a piece of software to be used in-house only, so it was never clear to me why we needed a license agreement between our organization and itself. I put together a license by simply cutting and pasting from the licenses I found on some commercial products we had around the office ... and tossing in a few clauses of my own, including "You agree to sacrifice three chickens to Microsoft before running the software" and "We may cancel this agreement at any time if you violate the terms of the agreement, make illegal copies of the software, or if we decide that we don't like your face" and "You agree to let the lead developer date your daughter." The software was distributed with this license agreement. No one -- not my boss, not any of the users, not even the legal department -- ever said anything about it to me.
Admin
I have learned that unless the requester of a tool/project calls you at least twice withing 24 hours since requesting and once every other day its not an emergency. If an info request is not replied within 3 hours, its not an emergency. Course of action: do a careful plan, don't rush, work on it when not busy with emergencies. If it does not become an emergency in a few weeks it most likely will get canceled. Work-hours saved, everybody wins.
A special case to it is when the specs change within 16 hours of request or becoming an emergency. I that case doing any work on the project should go into a 24h hold. I have managed to save whole workdays worth of work this way more than once. The specs came full circle back to what what was originally agreed upon after going through unrecognizable stages... That was really a WTF!? experience.
Admin
When I worked for the military, we had to fill out questionnaire's all the time for many different agencies all of which had intertwining oversight. There was a lot of redundancy between these questionnaire's, so finally someone got the bright idea of combining them into one big questionnaire.
Except ... this only eliminated redundancy when the wording of the questions was exactly the same, which was almost never. The first time I had to fill the monster questionnaire out I came to "What are the requirements for this system?" Okay, no problem, I gave a quick summary. A little later was "What functions will this system perform?" I struggled with how this was different from "requirements", and made a note to ask my boss if there was some technical difference in the definitions while I moved on. A little later was, "What capabilities will this system provide?" Then "Describe the functionality of the system". I think they asked "hey, what is this thing supposed to do" in about ten different ways. When I figured out that this really was the same question asked over and over, I just wrote one answer and copied-and-pasted it. I periodically thought that it would be fun to give a totally different answer each time and see if anyone noticed, but I never did try it.
Oh, this didn't apply to just narrative questions. They had a push to convert all the systems to web applications (whether they made sense as web apps or not, but that's a different story), and they asked whether we had plans to make this a web app and on what date we planned to do this at least half a dozen times. How many ways are there to ask "On what date will this system be re-written as a web application?" Plenty.
Admin
Sadly remembers me of Richard P. Feynmans experience. When he, out of boredom, reported the weekly numbers of flies caught at the office, his collaborators were soon asked why they did not report their catches.
Admin
okay, this is not a wtf. managers don't have time, nor they need to find some, for asking reports they need. they just want it on time, and look at it if they want. sometimes they want to open an old report to answer a question that came up.
the wtf is that the guy had no time to make the reports. wtf? you make the reports manually??? come on! 3 of every 100 things you do is wrong. if you have a 100 step you do each month, it is 3 errors per month. stop doing that, and automate the process.
Admin
As an overseas scientist doing satellite operations, I used to have to write a weekly status report for the US office handling admin. I started writing them in formal business-speak, but eventually switched (for my own sanity) to '1st person action casual', e.g.:
"Today we raced against time to complete our schedule before closing, but alas! A bug appeared, and we worked frantically to overcome it. Success was ours! Science assured, we relaxed, finished a few tasks, then called it a day."
Months go by, no comments on the weeklies. Finally, at my annual home visit, I stop and ask if they've been getting my reports. The secretary smiles and says, yes, they don't understand them but they do enjoy reading them.
Admin
Admin
Yeah, I turned it off. But I really should've let it keep going...
...missed opportunities...
Addendum (2008-01-28 14:44): But I know he would've gotten a laugh out of it if I had left it running. He was a really nice guy and a lot of fun to work for - except for that one little quirk.
I actually think he just wanted something from me so that he could feel like he was applying his rules fairly to everyone but he didn't really care about what I was doing because we had a "trust". We were good friends before I started to work for him and we're still pretty good friends today. I was at his place last Friday for a monthly poker game so...
Admin
Once I hyper linked all the punctuation to that paris hilton porn video. Never heard a thing about it.
Admin
Actually, if you have enough time on hands, good relationships with your boss and the customer is quite desperate for your services, you start a 12h-14h workday doing the actual work. You know it will go to hell, so you can do it half-assed, but you charge the customer for the overtime arm and leg, or just get them to owe you a huge boon. "Wife is sick, kids are taken from school by taxi, and I'm writing for you something you now say wasn't needed in the first place? Excuse me?"
Depending on who you're doing this for, the reward may exceed the effort by far :)
Admin
Just prior to the Phantom Menace, I was writing up a design document. Not exactly the most stimulating thing, so I decided to motivate myself by turning my obsession with the movie into the document. I put pictures of characters from the movie and into the document in various locations (section headers, and such). Also, for some reason the project had the acronym FLI, so I put a small fly in the corner with the page number.
With the design review the pictures went over quite well, even assisting with the effort (turn back to the page with the robot on it, etc). They were a cool bunch. But in the end they said the pictures had to be removed from the final "official" version. Everything but the fly. To my knowledge that fly is there to this day.
Admin
My status reports used to get merged into reports from other departments and presented to upper management. We got copies. I suspected it was a copy/paste operation, so put in some reference to upgrading computer ventricals, and my manager, bless his heart, got the joke and didn't include it.
Admin
Admin
Admin