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Admin
I've only gotten this far in the article, and this just destroyed any shred of credibility the article had. Even the worst manager on earth couldn't be this stupid, could they? Please tell me nobody could be this stupid. Please? Please? *Whimper*
Admin
Oh goddess... no.... nono... NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
[image]Admin
While searching for the previous image meme i think i found a future @HardwareGeek avatar.... [image]
Admin
Quills already twitching…
Twiching's getting painful…
How's the job market…
Writing the letter of resignation now…
…yep, glad I got out when I did.
Ah, I'm not the only one who would find more suitable employment :smile:
Admin
That was pretty much my thought reading that article - WTF are you still there.
Admin
The Real WTF is that the HOSS was not fired. The grid failure should have been a hint that the HOSS' practices were a problem. Wait a second, The Really Real WTF is the management, who hired a person who made horrible decisions and didn't fire them. Let's hope that the company is no longer with us.
Admin
That would have been the point where I'd've started railing against the incessant emails emancipating the group, using that exact directive to reintroduce some of the stuff that had been removed previously.
What do you mean project management isn't part of "equal vote in how things are done..." :imp:
Admin
One can dream though.
Admin
As a long-time reader of thedailywtf.com the answer is pretty obvious HOSS is the Boss's nephew.
Admin
Yes. I left my last job and retired after the CEO made exactly this decision and, as system architect on a system we had been designing and deploying for ten years, I was told my opinion was exactly as valuable as that of the new graduate hire. The company is still in business so it's always possible that the CEO was right, there is that, but I do know that they had a feature freeze for at least a year after I left because one of the customers contacted me by Linkedin to ask if there was anything that could be done about it (no.)
Leaving turned out to be the best decision I ever made, though.Admin
Of course, the first email doesn't actually say you can't track the progress of projects. It says you can't do it using pieces of paper stuck to the walls.
The second email says that senior management is incompetent.
The third email says that the HoSS is incompetent (doesn't understand the differences between different types of test, and which team should do each one).
Frankly, this one reminds me of a dysfunctional version of http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Directive-595.
Admin
I've seen it. More than once. Once at a very large cable television company, and once at a small television services company. It's pretty much always the same script: A misguided high-level executive hire begins to populate the senior management area with their sycophants, and this is the inevitable result. I think the absolute best one was when in a multi-channel origination control room, where almost every device in the room has some impact on a channel's activity, the newly-crowned idiot demanded safety covers be put over the primary/backup control toggle because "someone might move it accidentally."
Most of the champion-level idiots I've come across have come out of the financial services industry. Not all, though. Some will sneak up on you.
Admin
My guess is that losing 9 of their most competent developers was one of the goals of the HOSS, because those 9 competent developers are also likely to be the 9 most expensive developers. If those developers were replaced at all, I can guarantee that they were replaced by kids right out of college who would neither contradict the all-wise HOSS nor demand to get paid a fair wage.
For similar signals, from an employer that wanted to get rid of me for financial reasons but didn't have real grounds to fire me or justification for a layoff: The boss called me into a side room, issued the only formal written reprimand I've ever received in my entire career for violating a rule that was never written down anywhere and applied only to me, and talked to me for a while about how talented a developer I was and how I could easily find work somewhere else. I assiduously and publicly followed the non-existent rule (to the great amusement of my fellow developers) until I had my next job lined up.
Admin
@HardwareGeek: if you don't use this one, I WILL.
Admin
HOSS?
https://thedogsnobs.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/gift-horse.jpg
Admin
I must say... I don't get the article title today.
:star: :dash: :man:
Admin
Have been at two different avalanche and never seen it happened.
Admin
Snap. There must be a management textbook.
Admin
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Bonanza
[Hoss][1] is the nickname of one of the characters.
[Ponderosa][2] is the name of the location.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Bonanza#E2.80.93_Eric_.22Hoss.22_Cartwright [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponderosa_Ranch
Admin
Look up the definition of ponderous. Also, Ponderosa's a pun on the first word, and on top of that, it was the name of a fairly popular TV show in the 70s or so, and there was a guy on it (nick)named Hoss.
ETA: I misrememberd that Ponderosa was the ranch, not the show name.
Admin
I got laid off from a contracting job once--it was right after 9/11 and I think they were cutting expenses, as it turned out they had an office in 7 WTC. They didn't lose any personnel there, fortunately, but lost a lot of money. At any rate, they offered me the option to leave immediately so I could start looking for my next job, if I wanted, but I declined their gracious offer and worked out the rest of my current contract extension, which was a month.
Admin
Or is HOSS really the president's daughter?
Admin
Sure, someone accidentally moving the control toggle seems rather unlikely, but a safety cover over the primary/backup control toggle doesn't sound like a terrible idea. Am I misunderstanding something? Now if it were a safety cover over every control in that room, then maybe that's more of a :wtf:.
Admin
"HANNNNNNNNNNNNZOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" @slavdude
I was going to say: Is HOSS the Presidents transgender daughter, because it would explain many of the
incredableuncredable :wtf: in the storyAdmin
I doubt it was originally expressed in those words, but I've seen the attitude. Timid boss is afraid to make decisions, or support the decisions of his direct reports. So every time a decision needs to be made, let's call a meeting with the full team so we can come to a consensus. Because design by committee always works!
I've never seen it manifest as an email that directly says everybody gets an equal say though. More of a gradual process that happens after 1 or 2 mistakes. Then again, maybe this is a younger company. Millennials get that whole "play soccer without keeping score" stereotype, so I could see somebody poisoned by that mentality might out and out say that everybody should have an equal voice.
Admin
God no! After countless days stuck in a cavern with a dragon, paper in the walls is much better sight than skulls and bones, so no issue there, and don't talk to me about burn-down charts: I know everything about burnt-down things.
Admin
I got the references in the title. It's just the connection to the article that puzzled me. Kind of far-fetched, if you ask me. Next time, will they call the lead character Manolito to weave in a other title pun?
IIRC, ponderosa was also a spanish ship "the fat one" that played some part in history, but google lets me down when trying to find out if, where, when, and how.
Admin
How did HOSS manage to include struck-through text in the subject?
Admin
You're assuming that those are e-mails. It's entirely possible that they're paper memos.
Admin
Given Hoss's fundamental lack of understanding of IT, they probably are.
Admin
I didn't so I was glad for the explanation. I've never seen that obscure television show!
Admin
Why not? There is management that is perfectly fine with putting all manner of technical decisions in the sole dictatorial hands of those that are completely unqualified to make technical decisions; i.e. themselves.
Putting equal share for technical decisions into both senior and junior developers is actually a good deal less worse. Well; unless you take into account accountability... maybe ... because the first type of manager is typically also the type that will look for (and always manage to find) a fall-guy no matter what...
Admin
There are some things that humankind are simply not meant to understand. I think trying to understand the utter failure of brainpower which lead to this email is one of those things.
Admin
FTFY.
This was a big factor in two jobs I've left in my career.
One where I ended up getting my admin rights revoked because they were "no longer needed" (how much more obvious of a hint do you need?)
The other was when, in the face of rising production stats, the owner asserted boldly to me: "You need to learn how to manage your department first" (before working with another, sales, that had nearly 0 production. That wasn't the breaking point: when I was later allowed to work with sales, they went from closing 1 in ~20 leads to 1 in 3. And I HATE sales. But that assertion stuck with me, and when other WTFs were later added in, I left.)
Admin
Management is notorious for hiring people that can talk a good game. At a previous job, the director announced to the entire company how we would now have a fully fledged testing department, led by some lady who claims to have decades of experience leading a testing department. I still remember to this day how the director noted that in the interview he mentioned something about assisting with planning project test phases, and the lady just told him "No, you want me to lead a team of testers, and that is what I will do.". Apparently he felt that he had struck gold right there. This will solve all of the bugs before it even gets deployed to the client's staging environment (for a nominal fee).
Soon. it became apparent that even the biggest clients won't pay extra for testing, so after a year of her and 2 testers sitting idle, it was decided that they would now perform testing on all internal projects, and any projects that have had more than 2 delays in UAT signoff.
But even this didn't work, since the latter were usually so overly complicated (but most of that is a whole other series of stories), that it took the testers far too long to come up with test scripts because this lady was never around to help her own testers. She couldn't be bothered, and the tech leads were forced to draw up test scripts for the testers (in addition to actually fixing code). I don't think I've ever seen her do a single piece of work, she always kept deferring / sending it back to the project teams.
I'm still miffed to this day that one of my most promising juniors got taken from me to be one of the testers, and all that potential just went down the drain... :pensive:
Admin
At an appraisal, I was told that because I some bugs had been found in the (internal) application I had been responsible for maintaining, I was going to be denied a pay rise. I still believe that was unreasonable. I have never seen a developer write a bug-free application in my life, why should I have been the only exception in the universe?
Admin
It's even more obvious that HOSS is the nephew of the Boss of a rival firm.
Admin
OK, you're right. I needed to put in more context.
In a multi-channel origination control room, there is nothing but controls. Almost everything in there has the potential for disrupting a feed. The "Safety Toggle" for that type of environment is a locked door. Flipping a channel from its primary origination path to its backup origination path has a very negligible effect, as compared to say changing the path pair for the channel entirely, which was possible with the device immediately below the primary/backup toggles on the operators' control surface.
... I guess you had to be there.
Admin
I don't want to sound like I'm on management's side here, but they might have a good reason. Did your bugs cause your company to lose money? Or customers? Bugs that are especially costly in applications that are especially important will get devs fired.
Perhaps they felt the cost to fix your bugs warranted denying you the raise. Or perhaps they're just evil. Or both.