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Admin
I thought that was covered by "terrorists" but then I remembered that 9/11 was due to the great chipmunk escape of 2001. They then calmed down and did a geico commercial though. Part of their community service.
Admin
The dev manager has forgotten that the corporate game is played by people with their own agendas and don't necessarily have the best interests of the company at heart. Pointing out someone is lying, even if you have undeniable evidence is a certain way to restrict your career. Senior management lie all the time, and they don't like people that call out liars. I speak from bitter experience.
A far better way to handle this would have been for some people from the dev team to observe IT during the deployment. This way IT would have been forced to read the instructions and deploy correctly.
Admin
Oh, they would have balked at being watched. Nobody likes shoulder surfers...
And you're absolutely right. Most people are more interested in currying favor with those above them through bull****, sucking up, and being dicking everyone else over to hurt their chances of getting a promotion (if someone else gets promoted, I'm less likely!) instead of technical merit and value to the company. If people didn't play this stupid politics game, we'd have less WTFs and more successful products. I may be one of the more junior people on my team, but I know this already, and thankfully, I haven't had to navigate the sea of political BS at the office - yet, that is, because man, there is change in the wind.
All I know is if I was in charge of others, and someone tried political maneuvers, I'd mock them mercilessly in a public forum. Because I'd rather they do some friggin work instead of try to schmooze me.
captcha: whiseky - man, I could use some of that right now
Admin
This is my first post, i signed up only to reply to this one and here is my text:
omgwtf 12 wingdings-fonted deployment guides and noone in the IT department says something?
woot!
captcha: <insert something smart here :p>
Admin
I have been reading here for a long time but this little sweetie of a WTF has made me register.
Knowing that BS like this is happening in all parts of our economy makes me sick. How many people have already lost their jobs over personal vendettas like this.
And the fact that the IT manager was not fired on the spot AFTER saying that he is not able to change the font and lieing is truely the real WTF here.
Admin
Very nice story.
I have to say that if I'd been the development manager I wouldn't have let it run for a dozen deployments - two or three would be enough to make the point, and then I'd have called a meeting myself. And in answer to "You're not calling Joe The IT Guy a liar, are you?", I'd have said something more neutral like "The information he is giving us is clearly incorrect; I'm not judging why it is incorrect." Assuming I was interested in keeping my job of course. Maybe the development manager had lost interest in that.
Admin
I've definitely seen a sidebar story re-posted to the front page at least once before. Alas, I can't remember which story, otherwise I'd provide a link.
Admin
We DID provide a script for the installation. We actually provided a series of installation programs for the various parts of the system that had to be installed (websites, web services, NT services, databases, etc). Obviously, there was a lot of configuration options, which required some documentation. Most of the documentation could have been avoided with a little common sense, but they had already proved that we did not have that luxury.
There were also several prerequisite components that needed to be installed and properly registered. Specifically, one of the installation problems was that the Xceed Zip Library, which was very quick to install, but registering the licensed version (as opposed to the demo version) it required going to their website and downloading some license file. We knew that they were not following the instructions when they kept only installing the demo version, causing our services to crash.
Admin
About the deletions... I've found some interestind deletion (see below).
<font size="1">[quote_start]</font>
Re: Symbolic Installation
by Anna<font><font size="1">[quote_end]</font></font>
For Alex Papadimoulis: This is from "Predator" - a sci-fi/action movie starring (among others) some actual governor of some actual US state... You'll figure it out who this might be, would you? :) And yes, wtf is that text doin' here?captcha = pizza ... I'm getting out for lunch :D
Admin
"We know how to install a program!"
Or thinking that taking orders from dev people are below them, or out of some age-old quarrel between the two departments. Anything, really.
Obviously he doesn't care about what's 'better' anyway, nobody who does would not read instructions they were explicitly told to read, and then lie about having read them knowing well that it could be the cause the deployment isn't working.
Admin
Hear, hear!
What I care about in the people I work with is that they are capable of writing good code. And if I was a project manager, I'd occasionally review code checked in by other people just to see how good it was.
At any rate, a manage should only consider how easy it is to work with the managees, and also the quality of the work produced. It's sad to hear stories like this with managers who I suspect don't care about much at all, except for the paycheck at the end of the day (and stock options, etc). If anyone's making money being a cold-hearted bastard, it should be me.
Admin
Thats assuming the screenshot provided is origional. Which i would assume it is not considering it would be proprietary information
Admin
Instead of wingdings, a co-worker of mine would embed the following somewhere in his documentation: "Congratulations, you're read the document. Contact me and I'll buy you a beer." This was a more positive way to accomplish the same thing. He even had to buy someone a beer...once.
Admin
Clearly, the correct approach would be to send one set of indtructions in wingdings, then, when the inevatable failures occured, fess up and send a message up through the chain "We're having problems with the last install and we've determined that our instructions were illegible due to font issues. Attached are corrected instructions."
This at least puts everyone on notice from the beginning that IT isn't reading the install instructions which is the real point of the exercise. No matter how personalliy satisfying it is to show up incompetent goofballs, it's not a winning strategy over the long run.
Admin
But a licensed version costs money--something they probably didn't budget for.
Hey, webmaster--there's a problem with the captcha. The font wiggles too much for the size of the box. When a letter with a descender is at the bottom of the box the descender is missing.
Admin
I think that is the best solution of all. You get to keep your job, and you would only be out $5, rather than losing your job or a chance at a promotion.
Admin
<FONT face=Arial>Well, of course. They don't want actual effectiveness. Just the appearance of forward motion. And damned if we're gonna let silly details like truth muddy that appearance...</FONT>
<FONT face=Arial>I'd love to work for a dev manager like that, too (and I have worked for a couple), except that, in today's typical corporate environments, he'd probably be the one ultimately getting canned.</FONT>
<FONT face=Arial>Damn the torpedoes, and pay no attention to that man behind the curtain...</FONT>
Admin
Now that is sage advice from a master of office politics.
This is indeed a litmus test of a dysfunctional company. There do exist organizations and companies where the Development Manager would not have been the one to get canned.
It's clear the company was doomed. The IT people had clearly stopped doing their jobs, the Development Manager had probably been collecting salary while looking for a job, and the senior management was so concerned with maintaining appearances of a functioning company in one that was imploding that they didn't want anything like this to be the straw that broke the camel's back.
I myself crawled along at a startup for two years while collecting a half-decent salary while the dotBomb exploded. The Dev Manager just got sick of it finally, and said "screw it, I'm going out in a blaze of glory".
If this is true...
Admin
From reading this, and without looking at your actual situation, I don't think the scripts went far enough.
In Alex's intro he says that ops were instructed to "add CorporateAccounting to the COM+ Role Store on all MTS Servers.".
There is little on Windows that cannot be scripted and that certainly can.
As for the Xceed Zip library - that sounds like sufficient reason for not letting it get past the evaluation point.
Of course the devs in question may not have any control of this, in which case you are stuffed - but they should be fighting like hell to get it removed.
One of the things that we, as the produces of software, have to accept is that if users repeatedly fail to use our stuff correctly it's our job to change something so that they can't fail - in this case changing the user base (ie Ops) might be a reasonable way to do that.
To respond to the previous post about dev not knowing the ops systems well enough - if that's the case dev should either be fired or quit, depending on whose fault it was!
Admin
You don't work in IT do you? More often than not management is not interested in solving the problem. They're interested in who's to blame for the problem.
Admin
Oh no it doesn't! Considering that that's a gif image, it would have to not just translate it, but first OCR it for you as well.
Hint: It's the alt tag. Same happens for any image on any website, it's just that in this case the alt tag matches the text in a picture of some text.
cheers,
DaveK
Admin
Been there, back in the dark days of COM. Was trying to get a custom interface attached to an object, so I was very careful to write up 2 pages of step-by-step for our install crew (who'd been complaining about a lack of step-by-step instructions on past releases). We send them off with the instructions, type library and .dlls to do their thing... and they break it. I then have to spend six hours on the phone with one of our tech folks figuring out that they had not even looked at the install instructions before royally hosing -- in the way only COM objects for web application installations can be hosed -- the components and libraries we'd sent them.
And people wonder why I don't take their requests for documentation seriously anymore.
Admin
Yeah i think the little image edit tools and the ability to right click 'save picture as' was a dead giveaway. Just wondering who went through the trouble of making the alt tags ;-)
Admin
<more sarcasm> I don't get it... </more sarcasm>
I think it really reads..
Hi, a little dude with two squares Writes-a-Diamond Not-My-Diamond. His-Diamond
And then send it three times.
Admin
Seems like everyone is overlooking the root causes of all of this. I see two main issues:
Managers are supposed to be about people first, whatever the people do (in this case programmer) second. If either managers would have taken time up front talk actually "talk", maybe after the first failed deployment, no one would have been in the position these people were put in.
People shouldn't wait until they feel like they are fighting in the "Alamo" destined to die in a courageous last stand to take action. This kind of crap doesn't happen overnight. That is why the company ultimately failed.
Admin
<font size="3">But, they DID end up "releasing" the VP of Development (the dev manager's boss, and a fantastic manager) for being "counterproductive." </font>
<font size="3">In addition to his constant battles with the Lumbergs of the company, he replied to an email from the President/COO, detailing line-by-line why every statement in the President made in the email was false, and copied all of the senior management on it. He was gone the next morning. </font>
<font size="3">I resigned the next week, and then began looking for a new jo</font>b.
WAY TO GO!! Its comforting to hear about subordinates who are loyal to GOOD managers. I have left jobs for the same reason and will do so in the future if need be.
KJB
Admin
~!
Admin
I have to be a bit of a contrarian on this one. Probably because even though I'm a software developer, I've been on the receiving end of "brilliant" software that had been developed by another branch of the company that I was supposed to install and use as part of my development. Of course, the software didn't have much of the way of deployment instructions, and the writers had no clue as to how it would actually be used.
I suspect that the operations team was in a similar postion and was getting software that had little or no documentation and had just gotten used to writing and following their own install procedure. The fact that the head of dev actually decided to lay a trap for the ops folks is funny (in a sad way) but I can understand upper management not liking that. Might have been more professional to actually try to work together and resolve the situation, rather than "winning".
Admin
heh, you can tell the readership... The WTF here is that it took 12 failures before anyone decided to do anything, and they needed to involve directors to do it. Solution 1 would be for one of the oh-so-frustrated developers to physically visit the infrastructure guys and walk them through it in person. That would have saved the detailed click-by-click document. Solution 2 would be to fix the utterly fucked up communications process. The end result of this was probably a bunch of pissed off people that will do their best to catch each other out as much as possible.
So the WTF isn't really the 12 failures. It's actually that the company seems to be staffed by people with zero communication skills. Welcome to IT services.
CAPTCHA: clueless. Indeed.
Admin
That does go a long way. Similar to the fellow who found the paragraph in a EULA that spoke of "Special Consideration" if you wrote to an email address at the company. That was a $1000 check, after 3000 people had downloaded the software and he was the first to write.
Admin
The way I would handle this is the following:
Post the instructions on a web server controlled by the DEV team with integrated (or some other) authentication scheme. If you put each step on a separate page(wizard style), you would be able to check the http server logs to see exactly how well the instructions were followed including: when each step including completion was performed, who did it, where they were logged in when they read the instructions, etc.
Send them the URL. After the first botched (or even successful) deployment, review the logs and send it upstairs.
Big brother is always watching...
Admin
This is just crazy. If the installation is that complicated, you just can't expect someone who is not familiar with the details (such as that you need a registered version of some third-party utility) to perform it correctly.
The only reasonable option is to get one of the devs over there and to it in person, together with somneone from IT, and simply state that it is the only way to do it.
I'd blame the dev manager for agreeing to try this with a script in the first place.
Admin
Two governors, actually. Although one of them is a former.
Admin
Ok, so:
Dev Manager: Dilbert IT Manager: Wally CxOs: PHBs
Admin
I worked at one telco, whose network wasn't able to support software deployment over its own network, so we had to deploy software to servers on the network via CD. Unfortunately, they had a "lights out" policy at their 42 data centres, i.e. no operations staff.
We in turn were a company providing software development to this Telco. So to get a CD in a drive we needed to get the Telco's people to contact the local LAN staff, send the CD by courier rather than internal mail), then have another sub contractor come in who was qualifier to put the CD in the drive. Of course it wasn't the LAN person’s job to collect CDs and let people into the data centre.
The first time we tried this we had 8 CDs sent to different servers across the same city. The process took longer than it would have taken me to walk to each machine myself. (even walking around the city)
Needless to say, no CDs were successfully deployed or even recovered. Three disks went to building (of about 400 employees) where only the cleaners would take the CDs, they were never seen again.
In the second attempt, half the CDs were deployed correctly, one was installed upside down, the rest disappeared. The OPS sub contractors could only guarantee a week window as to when the CD was in the drive which was a problem because we needed to know when this was so the contractor could put the boot CD back in, in case we needed it.
Unfortunately most of the telco's data centres were in regional areas, where neither the courier nor the OPS contractor had staff, they in turn sub-contracted this work to other people/companies.
So to get a CD in a drive took involvement 6+ companies, but not always the same companies, to be deployed to 42 locations for a single release.
Luckily we had 11 project managers on the project.
Ironically we were able to send the software (in fact a complete backup of the server) regularly over the internet to development teams in the <st1:country-region w:st="on">US</st1:country-region> and <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Canada</st1:country-region></st1:place>. (1.5 GB image) We had a fast internet connection; after all we were working for a telco. :)
I also remember a series of meeting, regarding network security, which after three, 2-hours meetings we had agreed who need to come to the meetings.
Admin
<FONT face=Arial size=2>This reminds me of an episode of the TV show Friends. Chandler's company was making a commercial and Joey wanted to try out for it, and gave him an audition tape. Chandler thought Joey would be wrong for the part, so he told Joey that he watched the tape (he didn't) and showed it to his bosses (also a lie), but they passed on it. Joey told Chandler he knew he was lying about watching it. Eventually Chandler admitted that he didn't watch it and asked Joey how he knew. They watched the tape, and it was a commercial that Joey did for Japanese TV for male lipstick. It was really bizarre, so if Chandler watched it, he surely would have had something to say about it.</FONT>
Admin
Admin
You rang?
Admin
<poor_pun> Does that mean the Infrastructure Group members are a part of the "Brotherhood of N.O.D."*? </poor_pun>
Although, if I saw instructions that bad, I'd report it back to the author!
CAPTCHA: T.B.A.
Admin
Yes they would, you just haven't discovered what the right font is yet. I'm sure they make a perfectly readable series of pictograms in something, that explain the issue perfectly...