• LCrawford (unregistered)

    Next time, Daniel will believe the rumor at frist.

  • (nodebb)

    This reminds of a time when there was a report that the makers of a popular British cartoon series made them while high on cocaine.

  • Duncan de Sordelie (unregistered) in reply to Mr. TA

    I'd be sort of surprised if most cartoon shows were not created while under the influence of substances marginally legal at best.

  • bvs23bkv33 (unregistered)

    pomodoro timing

  • (nodebb)

    When I worked for Creo, they said any expense under $500 did not need corporate approval.

    When I wanted to upgrade my obsolete computer for $350, showing that it would pay for itself within one month by saving me time during builds and compiling, I was denied - apparently this corporate policy applied everywhere except our particular office (a subsidiary recently bought by Creo).

  • King (unregistered)

    Time report systems are almost always The biggest WTF

  • Dave Aronson (google)

    Quote from one of my favorite web comics (Spacetrawler, by Chris Baldwin):

    Why ask "What could go wrong?" when one can simply ask "How entertaining will the fiasco be?"

    https://www.baldwinpage.com/spacetrawler/2020/01/08/010820-approxiscans/

  • Richard (unregistered) in reply to Developer_Dude

    Perhaps I am being cynical, but techies will work unpaid overtime as much as necessary to get the job done. Therefore management has no incentive to pay to upgrade tools.

  • sizer99 (google)

    That's quite the goatse on that timesheet's logo

  • MiserableOldGit (unregistered) in reply to sizer99

    Well I hadn't noticed that and now I can't unsee it. Just think of the poor young innocents doing a google image search for goatse right now ...

  • (nodebb)

    Somehow I always feel the need for a line on my time sheet to log half an hour of logging the time sheet. No Zeno paradox implied here, BTW.

  • Doug (unregistered) in reply to JiP

    "I always feel the need for a line on my time sheet to log half an hour of logging the time sheet" -- I did that. Eventually management several layers up noticed, and told my manager to tell me to stop.

  • symbiont (unregistered)

    i'm not sure what to take away from this train wreck.

    • the idea seemed doomed with the meager amount of time for personal work and a bit by not tracking the time spent on it
    • then came the specifications (User Guide) that were too focused on the how instead of the what
    • then the developer didn't seem to have tested his code the sad thing is that it may have worked out with a little tweaking, by simply focusing on the core task and not implementing anything. i also wonder what stopped them from tracking it like any other project
  • P. Wolff (unregistered) in reply to Richard

    Yep. And that our diminished motivation might impact the quality of our work, is completely out of scope.

    (That is, laying off "lazy" techies, isn't.)

  • P. Wolff (unregistered) in reply to MiserableOldGit

    As a grumpy old man, I say, why the heck should they be better off than we were at their age?

  • Nathan (unregistered)

    When I first read "Take 12", I expected the story to go in the direction where they were now expected to work 60 hour weeks, and get 12 hours to do something on their own. This would still put them over a normal work week, but then also get them that fabled "20%".

  • MiserableOldGit (unregistered) in reply to P. Wolff

    Oh I wasn't suggesting sympathy ... we just get to think about it ....

  • 🤷 (unregistered) in reply to JiP

    At my last company we had a very buggy "todo list" that we should log our times spent on each project on. It got so bad that we introduced a "todo list maintenance" point on it and logged 1 hour into that point each day. Didn't go over too well with our superior, but in the end we got what we wanted: The dreaded todo list was abolished alltogether.

  • I'm not a robot, honest (unregistered) in reply to JiP

    30 minutes every week for HR Work.

  • I'm not a robot, honest (unregistered)

    It was announced that we'd get 8 hours of professional IT training, and at one day a week that sounds like a good company to be at - unfortunately I'm not at that company and for us it was 8 hours a year. But at least you could spend up to $3500 on it - and that turned out to be for the whole department in total.

  • MiserableOldGit (unregistered)

    I remember one shithole of a software house I worked at where they announced the department was getting a time and resources budget for R & D. We all got very excited that we'd have a chance to try out some new ideas, new technologies, experiment a bit and do side-by-side comparisons rather than the daily grind of "leveraging" an old code base so crufty it makes most of the articles here seem trivial.
    Our optimism was quickly cut short when we found out the real intention was that we should (retrospectively) change our booking codes for projects that were so ill-conceived they never launched so the company could claim special tax relief on its failures. Slightly ironic, as in a way the R&D figure represented the money they'd wasted because they didn't do even basic research or forward planning.

  • (nodebb)

    Training is a farce where I work too. Management is always complaining that nobody's interested so the training budget is going to waste. When you actually ask for training, though, they just deflect like crazy. If it's not ITIL, good luck. Everything else is met with "you don't need..."

    ITIL in an organization managed by Hamburger U dropouts is like straightening the picture frames in a house that's on fire.

Leave a comment on “Painful Self-Development”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

Log Out

« Return to Article