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Admin
Alas the situation is quite common..... At least this time the outcome (for you and the other devs and juniors) was good... The "juicy bit" would be to find the (hopefully horrible) fate of the Boss+n....
Admin
'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?'
boss+1: "of course they must!"
Admin
When boss+1 demoed the code, it was his responsibility that everything would go fine. That's why he is boss+1. He failed. Which makes him incompetent, and he should be fired, by his own standards.
Admin
wouldn't it be boss^2 and boss^3?
Admin
In this case cubing the Boss+n's IQ would actually give a sensible result
(Yes i know that it needs to be below 1 in order to get smaller with cubing, hence the correctness....)
Admin
s/disinterested/uninterested/
Admin
Jaded cynicism (fostered in no small part by stories on here) suggests to me this was boss+1's plan all along, to force the entire (expensive) team out by painting them as incompetent, inexperienced wastes of money and then replace the entire team with cheap offshore contractors, and pocket the bonus for saving the company money.
I've witnessed minor political points-scoring at a previous firm so it's easily possible in my mind that some places do operate like this. It is just appalling that the technical people are the ones made to put up with it.
Admin
Admin
In a perfect world, there would be another step in here.
"We then went to boss+2 and told him, as a group, that we would all quit on the same day if the boss+1 problem was not dealt with to our satisfaction."
Obviously this would never happen because 1. you'd have trouble getting everyone to agree to carry out the threat in time and 2. it probably won't change the final result. But it's just a thought exercise anyway.
Admin
Boss+1 didn't get where he is by having things go wrong under his watch, and if things did go wrong under his watch he for sure made it clear that it was someone else and not him. And Boss+2 certainly isn't paid to care about what middle management are doing.
Standard bank/large corporation.
Admin
That's what's known in the business world as "having a union." There is no other way for line workers to have power.
Admin
"wouldn't it be boss^2 and boss^3?"
Only in a bureaucracy, methinks.
Admin
They replaced us all with junior developers. The younger guys had even less of a clue than we did about what to build or how to make it sufficiently generic enough so that it was even remotely close to what was actually needed. This caused the regulatory deadlines to be missed which caused all sorts of finger pointing from the top down. Naturally, all the developers were fired. The managers were left in-tact as it's NEVER their fault.
Word got around about what happened. I understand that they're having a hard time attracting people to fill development roles these days.
Admin
I wish we were able to publish actual names for that reason - to act as a warning to others.
Admin
OK, TRWTF is that you didn't get sued for this. At pretty much everywhere I've worked, inducing a coworker to follow you to a new job is a breach of your employment contract. How'd you manage to dodge that one?
Admin
Yes, you would want him to be disinterested.
Admin
@masonwheeler - here in the unitystates us employees have no contract. There's nothing they can do about who we talk with or who we invite to join -- or leave-- a company.
Admin
Who induced them to leave? The junior developers wanted out as much as we architects did. In my particular case, I told my new employer I had worked with a good junior guy who wanted to leave so they called him, interviewed him and offered him a job.
Admin
Much of what's in employment "contracts" is legalese intended to scare you, nothing more. Even when it is enforceable can you imagine taking a job at a company with a reputation for suing former employees?
Admin
What's wrong with demanding programmers write perfect code every time* ?
Admin
Except the law, natch.
Admin
In the US, specifics vary from state to state, but in general at-will employment means anyone can leave their employer at any time for any reason they feel like. With a few exceptions, contracts specifying otherwise are not worth the paper they're printed on.
In any case, even if the law were on the employer's side, it would almost never be worth an employer's time or money to bring such a matter to court unless the employee in question is somebody absolutely indispensable to the survival of the business.
Admin
Having power doesn't fix broken leadership, though. The union might make it possible to tolerate the stupidity, but the company will still be broken and go out of business.
Admin
... and here comes Duke to pick nits: Where was boss+0 in all this? Why did he keep telling devs to push unverified code to the world? Why did he allow boss+1 to shit on his team? Why did the devs have to raise their concerns over his head?
Admin
He was a royal suckup; yes'd B+1 at every turn.
He had been there for 25 years, was really good at it, and managed to never be held responsible for failure because he had obeyed orders.
Admin
If a company has more than three layers of boss, it's doomed.
Admin
So not only did they thoroughly burn all their bridges (and any rafts to boot) twice, but they also deemed it necessary to carpet bomb the country side for good measure. :D Ah well, at least they reap what they have sown. That is rare.
Admin
I used to work for the Swedish police. They have eight layers of management. I completely agree with your assessment.
Admin
"OK, TRWTF is that you didn't get sued for this. At pretty much everywhere I've worked, inducing a coworker to follow you to a new job is a breach of your employment contract. How'd you manage to dodge that one?"
Assuming you can get sued for this, I'd be interested to see it being proved.
Admin
Apple, Google and some others were fined several hundred million dollars because they had an agreement that they wouldn't poach from each other. So the law seems to be very interested in guaranteeing that employees are free to join the company that has the most interesting job, the highest pay, the best working conditions etc.
And now try proving that anyone "induced" anyone to do anything. Clearly when I leave, any coworker is free to ask me if my new company has more jobs available and if I would recommend them.
Admin
Google shows disinterested to be a perfectly fine word. Been in use since the early 1700's
Admin
Non-recruit agreements between employers and employees are very weak in California, and tech startups like this because it makes technical labor readily available, but it isn't necessarily the case in other US states. If the employee accepts a specific payment for the agreement, or if it is part of a productive business arrangement (e.g. corporate partnership) then a court can be more inclined to enforce it.
Admin
All this stuff is negotiable, and as a general, very broad-brush rule, where they have been specifically negotiated for a one-off employment contract (as for e.g. a senior employee) such clauses are likely to be valid, whereas if they're thrown in as a standard term for all employees, they're very unlikely to have any (significant) legal weight.
Admin
Yes, "disinterested" is a perfectly fine word. But it doesn't mean the same as "uninterested". It means, essentially, "impartial". (More fully, that one does not have an interest in either side of the debate.) As James pointed out, you would want boss+2 to be disinterested, but instead he was uninterested.
Admin
"Yes, 'disinterested' is a perfectly fine word."
I think you mean cromulent.