• map (unregistered)

    frist

    Oh, wait, I'm going to have to roll this back. Sorry.

  • Hannes (unregistered)

    I would've been frist, but I had to ask every manager if it would be okay if I was frist, before I clicked "Submit".

  • TheCPUWizard (unregistered)

    If only Alan had said "OCP - and I will not violate mine"....

  • Derp (unregistered)

    Sounds like Maria needed to be formally introduced to the business end of a flight of stairs. Repeatedly. #BOFH

  • Zenith (unregistered)

    Maria is an idiot.

  • djingis1 (unregistered) in reply to TheCPUWizard

    Then Alan would have been fired.

  • rogn (unregistered)

    Is it how mariaDB works?

  • WizardStan (unregistered)

    I've never understood how these people manage to stay in these positions. I've had two micromanagers over the last two decades, and both times quit because of them. Not just me, but several developers under them. I was on a team of five developers, all was well, and then the manager got promoted and we got a new manager. After a while one of my coworkers got a new job. Good for him. Then another. Then another. Two of us remain, the work load was large, but not insurmountable: things just took longer and the groups we were working for had no problem with that. And that's when my manager turned his focus on me, and my worklife went to garbage. Unbeknownst to myself and the other developer, because we just didn't talk about these things amongst ourselves, was that he was literally picking on one developer at a time, attempting to code through them, dictating everything. I'm not making this up, there was one call we had where he dictated code for me to write as if I were an idiot that didn't know what a for loop was. So I found a new job. At the exit interview I said exactly why: can't handle the micromanager. I ran into one of the old coworkers and mentioned that I'd found a new job: "oh, you couldn't take the micromanager either, eh?" he asked. And that's when it all came out. He wasn't just bullying me, he'd done it to the other three coworkers. He was right then doing it to the last coworker who was still there, handling everything because they refused to hire more people. He had previously been in charge of a team of 7 which had completely disbanded under his "leadership", so they had moved him into our team, and he had basically done the same thing. That was 6 years ago now. Last I heard my final coworker had quit, all projects were either moved to another team or abandoned ("Close enough. Oh, that's a bug? We just manually correct the data") and he was put on another project. So that's at least 12 developers that quit, citing this manager as the reason. Not "a" reason, the reason.

  • Hannes (unregistered) in reply to WizardStan

    " Unbeknownst to myself and the other developer, because we just didn't talk about these things amongst ourselves,"

    And that's TRWTF.

  • P (unregistered) in reply to Hannes

    They were probably too busy being micromanaged to talk about it :)

  • MaxArt (unregistered)

    Well at least he had reasonable managers that understood his problems.

    That's actually rare.

  • Kashim (unregistered) in reply to P

    First thing you do when you have problems with how your manager is acting: talk to the manager. Second thing: quietly see if any coworkers are having the same problem. If one person leaves, then everyone else should already be aware of why if they are on the same team. Once it starts happening to the second guy, bring it to higher management. If second guy quits and it starts happening to a third, upper management will already be aware, and there will be enough people left in the team to offer testimonials as to what is going on to get him removed from power.

    TRWTF is always not talking to your coworkers. If I was in that place, I'd have quit long before simply because none of my coworkers would have honest conversations with me.

  • (nodebb) in reply to WizardStan

    If 12 developers quit because of one manager, that manager needs to be removed. If the company won't, then they are not worth the time of day.

  • Scott (unregistered) in reply to WizardStan

    Good that you got out, Stan.

    Stupid managers feel as if they need to control and/or have signoff every aspect of development and deployment, even when they don't understand the problem. Less-stupid managers recognize people who can be trusted to do the right thing consistently, and let them be in charge of those aspects, only monitoring those with less experience/ability to be careful and do the right thing.

  • akozakie (unregistered) in reply to Scott

    Really, "only monitoring those with less experience/ability"? Recipe for disaster. You monitor everyone directly under you, period. The difference is that some need to be hand-held, while for the ones who can be trusted it is enough to check something they did from time to time and simply talk to them often enough to be aware of what they are doing and why. This is very lightweight, but still monitoring.

    Being in charge is not the same as not being monitored. It is responsibility and freedom. Noone will tell you how to do your job, but it can be reviewed from time to time and you may need to explain your approach if it seems nonintuitive to the reviewer. If you stop doing a good job, it will be noticed relatively soon and your trust level will be reduced.

    This site is full of stories about people who have been left in charge of something with no monitoring and over time developed the art of WTFery to epic levels. The fact that you've recognized someone who can be trusted with some issue at some point in the past is not a lifetime guarantee.

  • isthisunique (unregistered)

    I've done this before but not for auditors. In fact the other way around. I was requesting data and the other end could never get it right. The mechanism was a simple XML data dump of a few derived tables worth of aggregate queries uploaded to FTP. When I same XML, this wasn't tidy and deviated from the standard so ended up being parsed by hand. Whenever I would request a tidy up, improvement, addition, etc then instead of getting that, two more things would break or I would find multiple things added not asked for or explained. This meant a lot of backwards and forwards. Things dragged on, specifications changed. I communicated explicitly, with examples, as clearly, concisely and unambiguously as possible but it wasn't enough.

    The simple solution was to create an API which would validate and tell them exactly what was wrong. That would clean a lot without all the back and forth. I would communicated to their developer indirectly in this way. They would hammer it until it works. It would also help with automation as well as remove a lot of cruft required for the FTP endpoint which was stuck on a legacy platform. An immediate problem was that they refused to switch from FTP then offered a full data dump which was complete overkill for what should be a 30 minute task for a junior to do. In the end I implemented my FTP own transport layer which backended to the same API as HTTP rather than the file system to coerce them onto the API.

    In this case though, for audits, Christ use a replication slave. Jesus.

  • isthisunique (unregistered)

    To implement this required changing the signature of every method in the API. Fearing a riot from his counterparts, he got them all together and offered a two month window during which both old and new versions of the method calls would be supported.

    Facade pattern.

  • Omego2K (unregistered) in reply to isthisunique

    How would the facade pattern help if he can't defining the data structures and signature?

  • Dave (unregistered)

    Do people really wonder about why these kinds of managers stay employed? It's really not hard. They may be thoroughly incompetent at doing their jobs, but they are, by selection, very good at keeping them.

    You can learn a lot from the fuckers.

  • isthisunique (unregistered) in reply to Omego2K

    I wish I proofread my first comment.

    I gather they have this:

    // Pseudo code but mostly synchronous JS with made up library. Imagined object scope. // Ignore shorthands, variable reuse, lack of column validation and escaping. Assume automatic string interpolation. Last statement is return value.

    getNamesByAge(age) => {this.db.query('SELECT name FROM people WHERE age = ?', [age]).fetchRows().toArray();}

    Versus:

    getByAge(age, columns) => {columns = columns.join(', ');this.db.query('SELECT {columns} FROM people WHERE age = ?', [age]).fetchRows().toArray();}
getNamesByAge(age) => this.getByAge(age, ['name']);

    I assume they would want the same with the wheres as well but it sort of defeats the point. The fact that a facade like this is so easy makes Maria even more offensive.

    The way forward is database replication slave. Read only user. Job done. In rare strict situations your auditor should shut you down for running junk queries with them over your shoulder on a non-readonly account. Saying that it can be a mess if the auditors demand access to the authoritative database which can happen and would potentially be a valid request (or consistency check which will fail if up to the second or something). That's also in strict mode.

  • Zenith (unregistered) in reply to WizardStan

    For a micromanager's manager to fire them, they'd have to admit that they make a mistake in hiring the micromanager. It's much easier to burn through developers and say "you just can't find good help these days" or "so-and-so wasn't a team player" or whatever else shifts the blame down the chain of command. Going further up the chain of command sounds nice but I've never seen it work. At best, it's like telling the teacher that Billy is hitting you and that idiot says "Billy, Tommy says you're hitting him" and Billy breaks your arm next time. Find a way to hurt the micromanager or move on.

  • siciac (unregistered) in reply to WizardStan

    I've never understood how these people manage to stay in these positions. I've had two micromanagers over the last two decades, and both times quit because of them. Not just me, but several developers under them.

    Abusive managers will push out people who are not compliant, and hang on to people who will tolerate the abuse. Business often doesn't demand a good team, just a team that's good enough.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Kashim

    If second guy quits and it starts happening to a third, upper management will already be aware, and there will be enough people left in the team to offer testimonials as to what is going on to get him removed from power.

    How would that work in the case described, where the manager victimises one person at a time, only moving on when the previous victim quits? The remaining people in the team won't have had any issues with the manager yet; they'll only have hearsay to go on.

  • Bulletmagnet (unregistered)

    I hope she has nothing to do with MariaDB.

  • Bert (unregistered)

    Did I miss the part where they can't use /api/v2/whatever?

  • isthisunique (unregistered) in reply to Scarlet_Manuka

    That's why you have exit interviews. A good HR will also very carefully look out for bad signs. When there's a bad employee, manager or not the HR can take the manager's manager and tell them they think the person might be no good. Care has to be taken though because some people will go along with HR no matter what. On the other hand you have a lot of individuals that wont act alone but when another takes the initiative might take up the cause.

  • TheCOmmoner282 (unregistered)

    And I have heard such good things about MariaDB

  • Barf 4Eva (unregistered) in reply to isthisunique

    bingo.. Replicated slave environ (only subscriber), a SAN to refresh from, or DB snapshot... Whatever works for your Auditor's needs. One of these seems like it would have been the most sensible approach here.

  • Victor (unregistered)

    How fucked up is this world??? Doesn't Maria have a superior?? If the problem is so obvious and people from other departments know it, why on earth is she still at that position???

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    Have been searching for data regarding the matter! on account of the creator for the flawlessly displayed material! Thank you soo much!!

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