• jverd (unregistered) in reply to jverd
    jverd:
    In my adult professional life, however, I've never had a job that was so horrible that I couldn't stand two more weeks of it, although another poster's comment above about 1-3 months in the UK might have made me make a different decision in one case. I can imagine that SOME people might experience that, and might be willing to accept the risk of being jobless for the ability to end severe pain right now.

    Also, while I assume that most of the stories on TDWTF are embellished a bit to serve the art form, if I were to find myself in some of those situations as literally awful as the stories describe them, in particular this idiotic source control one, and if I had a month or more of living expenses saved up, I'd probably bolt without notice.

  • (cs) in reply to jverd
    jverd:
    jverd:
    In my adult professional life, however, I've never had a job that was so horrible that I couldn't stand two more weeks of it, although another poster's comment above about 1-3 months in the UK might have made me make a different decision in one case. I can imagine that SOME people might experience that, and might be willing to accept the risk of being jobless for the ability to end severe pain right now.

    Also, while I assume that most of the stories on TDWTF are embellished a bit to serve the art form, if I were to find myself in some of those situations as literally awful as the stories describe them, in particular this idiotic source control one, and if I had a month or more of living expenses saved up, I'd probably bolt without notice.

    I ONCE walked into a job that turned out to be intolerable. I could not afford to just walk out (people in the real world rarely can), but my third day there I got an interview for the real dream job: startup company, pay was double, I'd really be using the maths and digital electronics skills I'd graduated with not so long before, and I'd be going in at a considerably higher level of responsibility. At the interview, I made the mistake of talking honestly about the place I was about to leave, and found out the hard way that the CEOs of this company and that one were golfing buddies. Upshot was: rather than get this dream job I had to sit around for three more fucking months in a department where we got treated like a bunch of arseholes.

  • Common Sense (unregistered) in reply to John Hensley
    John Hensley:
    Common Sense:
    This post, like so many on this site, reads like it came from an underachiever who is upset that they have not been handed the promotion he believes he deserves. If "Steven" and co were so incompetent, why were they headhunted by another company? Why were they kept on in a consultant role? Why was the OP not offered the job, if he was such an expert in software development and delivery?
    You are defending a dev lead for shutting the rest of his team out of source control. You are the problem. It's you.
    John? I can not say I am surprised to see you posting on this site. Unfortunately, neither am I surprised at the attitude you have displayed here. I expect you to be in my office when I arrive on monday, where we can discuss your future as a member of our team.
  • John Hensley (unregistered)

    I won't be in my office. If you have something to discuss you can find me in your wife's bedroom.

  • (cs) in reply to John Hensley
    John Hensley:
    I won't be in my office. If you have something to discuss you can find me in your wife's bedroom.

    Fucking hell, John, wasn't expecting to find you here too. Never mind, join in, hope you like a buttered bun.

  • Common Sense (unregistered) in reply to Matt Westwood
    Matt Westwood:
    John Hensley:
    I won't be in my office. If you have something to discuss you can find me in your wife's bedroom.

    Fucking hell, John, wasn't expecting to find you here too. Never mind, join in, hope you like a buttered bun.

    My wife? Oh, you mean my husband, barry.

  • (cs) in reply to ObiWayneKenobi
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    A douchebag deserves a douchy response. There's no logical reason to eat shit and pretend to be all smiles when someone is obviously a sociopathic lunatic that has no business being part of the human race, let alone in the workforce. Being nice to "be the better man" in the fact of a scumbag like this does nothing except empower them. If more people were reluctant to take shit and were more apt to just say "Screw this" and leave, scum like this wouldn't be able to exist.

    These people are hostis humani generis, enemies of the human race, and should not be allowed to exist.

    This is exacly right, and this process is part of the socio-natural selection.

    But I the meatime, before leaving, I think Miguel should find a way to screw Stephan's work, so that he eats his own s**t. A sort of... collateral damage :)

  • (cs) in reply to Nagesh
    Nagesh:
    How is one collecting overtime pay to feeding family when work only 40 hours?

    Man, if the guy is a Junior he probably has no family yet, and if he was a Senior he would have quit right away.

    In a developed country, the salary of a senior AP should be enough to sustain his family, even with a non-working wife. If it's not the case, one should switch to a better paid job.

    No need to work more than 40hours just for financial reason, but if you are professional you would.

    Personnaly I don't do this anymore, as companies NEVER thank you for doing this.

  • (cs) in reply to Daryl

    Yep.

    This is crazy how people do think they know about things but don't, considering the PLENTINESS of ressources freely available on the net..... I learned all those things by myself and I don't understand why other ones don't.. are they all RETARD ?

  • (cs) in reply to PedanticCurmudgeon
    PedanticCurmudgeon:
    Assuming you're telling the truth about not trolling, how exactly do you propose to teach an idiot not to get ahead by being a total douchebag, etc.

    You don't teach idiots. If they are not able to teach themselves not to be idiots, then do not let them alive.

    And I'm not trolling, just intolerant upon uncompetencies. R.T.F.M.

  • (cs) in reply to Anketam
    Anketam:
    Being nice or being a douche to a douche is equally a waste of energy. They are not going to change and will behave in the same self centered way regardless of what you do. The best thing you can do is get out of there as fast as you reasonably can (reasonably meaning you have a new job lined up before you quit).

    There is always a way to make someone cry. Doing nothing will leave the sh1t-m@n as-is, so he can do his sh1t again and again.

  • (cs) in reply to geoffrey
    geoffrey:
    Miguel should have used the opportunity to learn from Stefan rather than complain about him. I like his style. Give developers latitude to do their work, but have final say as the source control conduit, giving him an opportunity to leverage his more senior knowledge and experience to improve upon his team's work. It's win-win.

    Had Miguel been on board with that, he'd be in management by now.

    You say "developers"... I'm curious, are you or have you been a developer ?... What "senior" means to you regarding knowledge ?

    Personally, I have met some developers with few years of experience that I would consider "senior++" compared to some arrogants scumbag 25+ yrs exp. "senior A/Ps".

    And regarding management, a developer should obviously NEVER learn anything from them or salesperson as they are simply "out-of-the-art".

  • (cs) in reply to Cheong
    Cheong:
    I would have told her that "It's fine to have 40 hour week. But don't complain if any project deadline is sliped because of this."

    If she is sane enough, she would have backed off.

    Good point. Basically that can be considered as "letting them e@ting own s**t", but would end up with Miguel being fired because of similar reasons...

  • (cs) in reply to Derwent
    Derwent:
    In reality, the reason (some) companies don't survive financial issues is that when they cut staff they cut their own throats by getting rid of the best people (who often are their most expensive - for good reason). I suspect part of this is internal politics, and part of this is that good IT people often have an attitude that grates at managers - even when a manager can see that this person is the most able on the team, an opportunity to get rid of that Dev who's always causing trouble by explaining "the real way Software Engineering should be done", and who (much to the ire of the PM) is earning more money than him is too good to resist. [...] "Look at the cost of this dude to do the same job as some other schleper". No-one ever questions WHY that person is costing so much (usually they getpaid about 1.2x what the others are, and is doing about 5 times the work, and is often the only one to have expertise in some aspect of the project).

    See you on the streets, brother!

    I totally agree, I've seen this many times too.

  • (cs) in reply to ThomasX
    ThomasX:
    This is just a sign of a rotting culture. That incompetent gatekeepers of HR just can't seem to deal with reality.

    We need salespersons - yes.

    We don't need HR. These pests should be annihilated.

  • (cs) in reply to Jim
    Jim:
    I recently red an article (on yahoo, I think, so it must be true) about how to keep staff happy without giving them more money. Lunches was one of the (relatively low cost) ideas to boost morale and make staff feel valued.

    Jim, just on this point I totally disagree.

    What I've seen is that people just join the meal for "the food", as it saves them to pay for their own at lunch, and get one free.

    It does not change the way they feel about their colleagues as they generally gather before and after with the same persons they like the most, and not the others.

    This is a utopic invention from Management/HR, which is not realistic. You cannot force people to like others by sitting them next to the other. It does neither increase team "cohesion".

    And one point too, don't forget that articles are written by fellow human beings, putting a brand on it (Yahoo or other) doesn't change.

  • John Hensley (unregistered) in reply to Totara
    Totara:
    You don't teach idiots. If they are not able to teach themselves not to be idiots, then do not let them alive.
    another success from the Anton LaVey school of personal skills
  • creative solutions (unregistered) in reply to Totara
    Totara:
    ThomasX:
    This is just a sign of a rotting culture. That incompetent gatekeepers of HR just can't seem to deal with reality.

    We need salespersons - yes.

    We don't need HR. These pests should be annihilated.

    For a truly customer-centric cloud-ready enterprise platform that incentivizes creative team-focused solutions and leverages out-of-the-box thinking as part of a silo-free business paradigm, both HR and sales could be replaced by bots. Few would be any the wiser.

  • (cs) in reply to creative solutions
    creative solutions:
    For a truly customer-centric cloud-ready enterprise platform that incentivizes creative team-focused solutions and leverages out-of-the-box thinking as part of a silo-free business paradigm, both HR and sales could be replaced by bots. Few would be any the wiser.

    Bots created by programmers , I like the idea.

    I had to read your sentence 3 times to understand hehehe

    Cheers

  • (cs) in reply to John Hensley
    John Hensley:
    Totara:
    You don't teach idiots. If they are not able to teach themselves not to be idiots, then do not let them alive.
    another success from the Anton LaVey school of personal skills
    Actually I just looked up on wikipedia on this one, never heard of him. These were just my personal thoughts after a little ten years of working with idiots (including myself) :D
  • gnasher729 (unregistered) in reply to MrBob

    [quote user="MrBob"][quote user="s73v3r"]Even if you're salaried, at many places if you're not putting in 10-20 hours of unpaid overtime a week you're "just not working out" and need to "show the company you're dedicated to success"[/quote]

    There have been plenty of studies that have demonstrated how working more than 40 hours a week is ineffective. The first that I heard from was a study in an arms factory during World War II, where we can assume the workers were quite motivated, and it turned out that they did more work in a 48 hour week than in a 57 hour week. Not more work per hour, which would be obvious, but more work per week.

    There have been studies showing that a software developer working 60 hours a week for six week will produce not one bit more usable code than a software developer working 40 hours for the same six weeks. The only difference is that after these six weeks, the first developer will be a lot more tired and will therefore produce less in the same time as the other developer.

  • Kempeth (unregistered) in reply to boog
    boog:
    "Only I access source control."
    In other words, Stephan wasn't able to figure out how to properly set up security for multiple users in SVN.
    No. This is called job security. At least as long as you can convince the management that allowing every developer to work with source control is dangerous, unsafe, inefficient and that anyone proposing something else must be an evil saboteur.
  • L. (unregistered) in reply to Totara
    Totara:
    Yep.

    This is crazy how people do think they know about things but don't, considering the PLENTINESS of ressources freely available on the net..... I learned all those things by myself and I don't understand why other ones don't.. are they all RETARD ?

    yes

  • (cs)

    Most people are simply lazy and don't want to take the time to investigate things before diving into code; either they really are clueless and can't bother to think before coding (e.g. all those WTFs where someone manually added items to an array instead of using a loop) or they're just spineless and don't have the balls to tell a manager that they can't have x piece of functionality immediately (i.e. not giving in to spoiled child syndrome), that it will take y amount of time and no amount of throwing a tantrum like a five-year old told by his mommy that he can't have a candybar will change it.

  • (cs) in reply to John Hensley
    John Hensley:
    Totara:
    You don't teach idiots. If they are not able to teach themselves not to be idiots, then do not let them alive.
    another success from the Anton LaVey school of personal skills
    You know who also went to that school? Glenn Danzig.
  • (cs) in reply to ObiWayneKenobi
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    Most people are simply lazy and don't want to take the time to investigate things before diving into code; either they really are clueless and can't bother to think before coding (e.g. all those WTFs where someone manually added items to an array instead of using a loop) or they're just spineless and don't have the balls to tell a manager that they can't have x piece of functionality immediately (i.e. not giving in to spoiled child syndrome), that it will take y amount of time and no amount of throwing a tantrum like a five-year old told by his mommy that he can't have a candybar will change it.

    Some people are work under lot of pressure.

  • A Fellow Traveler (unregistered)

    I know of a place (cough) where it's OK to work as long as you need to, you don't get paid more, as you're salaried.

    But if you report more than the alloted hours to a project, the project will run out of budget. Even though no one has actually /spent/ any more money if people work 50 rather than 40 hours. So working extra is encouraged as long as you don't clock extra. But that pits the dev managers against the beancounters who don't believe a straight 40 hour week is legit. And the dev managers don't really care what project you log against -- in fact if a project is cancelled, there's a mad rush to log hours to it so the dev managers don't have to give up budget and possibly lose headcount.

    So the pendulum swings back and forth, and people log what they're told to most recently. And then they try to mine the system for estimates vs actuals, and use that to predict dates, so magic numbers and complex formulas arise to get a handle on it, and each fiscal year we're going to "do it right".

  • jean (unregistered) in reply to Jerry
    Jerry:
    Here's one of my favorites:

    1. Every hour must be billed to a project code.

    2. There is a mandatory two-hour all-hands meeting.

    3. The meeting has no project code.

    And of course, when you bill the 2 hours to one of your projects:

    1. Take that out of my project! I'm not paying you to attend some stupid meeting!

    I'm kind of freaked out that you may work in my company (or my team). Either that or I am incredibly naive to think this only occurs in my workplace.

    My first week I was met with the "everyone works 40 hour weeks here" despite many working more than 60 hours. A few deals with good PMs ensures you can take time off but bill to the project code to make up for time in lieu.

    Not to mention I only get paid for 38 hours a week, yet still bill 40 to the project. Our cost centre looks great.

  • lollancf37 (unregistered) in reply to OneOfTheFew

    That's a question I often ask myself around here

  • Jonathan Arkell (unregistered) in reply to ObiWayneKenobi

    "These people are hostis humani generis, enemies of the human race, and should not be allowed to exist."

    That seems excessive.

Leave a comment on “The Source of Control”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

Log Out

« Return to Article