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Admin
Transcript link doesn't seem to work. Oh well.
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That's some top-notch reading skills, unregistered anonymous user. Good jorb.
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"Content Blocked by your Organization"
Yay for Websense filter.
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@some_other_dude there is a direct download link in the article. You can grab the .mp3 all by yourself! Yay!
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The one from goget.com.au is just incredible. Who on earth could think that guessing your own ID is possibly a good system?
Addendum 2016-04-01 13:33: If only I could really edit my post :(
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@YellowOnline: What the fuck are you talking about? Defend your post as not-spam.
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NodeBB hates me and deleted my comment on http://thedailywtf.com/articles/saskatche-what-s-it . I re-commented the same but in the wrong thread. It makes more sense in the Error'd one. But I can see why you think it could be spam. I should ask that Australian site for some royalities.
I might be the only one who actually liked Discourse more than the new system that looks and feels like the old one I never missed :-/
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So this is why you couldn't come to the meetings, Alex? You were recording a radio drama about meetings?
I am okay with this.
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I wanted to strangle Luke listening to that. What a toady.
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Parts of this were physically painful for me to listen to having gone through nearly identical scenarios with my last boss.
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@DocMonster: Me too, and I was voicing him. :| From the original submission, I got the impression he was the worst kind of toady: one being groomed by a manager. So he doesn't even KNOW he's ass kissing or getting preferential treatment. The lack of self-awareness is staggering.
@Clint G.: Yup, same here. A lot of Mei's lines are extremely faithful to the original submission-- and even then, I've heard the same crap word-for-word come out of the mouths of previous managers.
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I'm not sure what's the best course of action there.. Resign after the first mei interaction. Or bash her head into the wall ?
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Original submitter here - yeah, the personality of my now-former boss was spot-on. I will say, though, "Luke" was actually a really nice guy - very personable, helpful, incredibly smart, etc., and has a lot of potential. Under the right mentorship, he could really go places. He even came to me secretly from time to time asking for advice. However, my manager kept telling him that he was smarter than everyone and gave him preferential treatment all the time, so my concern is that he'll take that to heart, and the bad habits he'll pick up will hamper his career later on, which would be a shame.
The team kept bleeding senior talent - nobody senior stayed in that group for very long, and my boss blamed that on senior developers that "didn't know how to deliver". She came to me proudly on my last week of work, after I said that it was a bad idea to have junior devs lead critical projects, and told me about the critical projects junior developers had led in that team before (it definitely showed), and exclaimed with a smile, "Aren't you amazed? It doesn't take much skill to deliver projects, just determination." I have written down and persevered all her insane quotes (some of which are in the drama), and have it handy whenever I need a laugh.
For those of you wondering why I took the job in the first place, it was because the team sold themselves extremely well - I interviewed with quite a few people on the team, and they answered all my questions the way I was hoping they would. I have since adjusted my interview questions to be more subtle and to pay more attention to body language and other subtle clues to hopefully avoid making that mistake in the future. Looking back, I'm able to see some warning signs I should have paid attention to, but didn't for whatever reason.
This was the time I was thankful I had a backup plan in place - I have a very talented recruiter friend that was able to get me out of that situation into a much better job in short order. It's crazy how many people I know who don't have such a plan in place in case their job goes sour - so when it does, they either find themselves stuck or forced to quit without immediate prospects.
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Crap, that was REAL!? Where in the world did that kind of management style come from?
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@Worf - Here's the thing - she attended HR classes on management and would say all the right things, but would do the exact opposite. It's like she internalized the classes and decided that the opposite was the way to go. I'm not sure if it was intentional or she was so completely disconnected from reality that she thought she was following the classes. It was uncanny how many bad management techniques she used - it was so surreal, there were points I felt like I was on a reality TV show that was parodying bad management.
Oh, and it's hinted in the story, but she also was gaslighting her employees bigtime - she would say one thing, then later on say she said the opposite and that we had bad memories. One of her other quotes I've saved was, "Nathan, don't do what I say, do what I mean. Take the meaning from what I'm saying and don't don't take everything I say literally." For example (and this is real), she told me to not do research on projects, because, and I quote, "The time spent researching could be spent solving the problem." If I didn't do research on a future project and it took way longer than she thought it should take, she would give me a lecture on how she meant I shouldn't do an excess amount of research. If I did do research and we ended up not going that direction, she would say that she told me earlier how I shouldn't have done research on the project. Either way, she wins and we lose.
I swear I'm not making this stuff up. I couldn't come up with this if I tried.
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@Nathan B.: Glad you could hear the episode. I've been in the same crazy-boat as you. It was even worse, since it was a small company, so crazy was all there was.
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There's an ugly name for this in some states: constructive dismissal.
Proof in this exchange:
She doesn't want to fire him, which leads to unemployment and all those nasty consequences. She wants him to quit.
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Sorry to hear that @Lorne Kates . Hope you can get out of there ASAP. The episode made my week, as I didn't imagine it would be put into a radio drama. My friends and I have been laughing about it all weekend.
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@CoyneTheDup Yep - when I put in my two weeks, she acted like she was expecting it. She was treating me noticeably worse than my coworkers - they made comments about it to me on a fairly regular basis. She had some other rationale for treating me like that, but there was no legitimate basis to her claims. I'm not sure if she believed her BS or if she was trying to make me quit, but either way, it had the same effect. However, she has treated other members on the team the same way in the past, so that might make proving it in court a bit tricky.
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The other part I couldn't believe, was the way she handled the customer. I have to say that is either one very patient customer with not a lot of other options, too stupid to realize he doesn't have to take the abuse, or is there for another reason. I know if the company treated my custom that badly I would consider moving on to someone else.
Well, whoever picked this one as a radio show - kudos. I don't think its impact would've been as powerful as a regular article.
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Yeah, the customers were pretty much at our mercy, which is yet another reason (as if I needed more) I left. I don't believe in holding customers hostage - not good business practice, and goes against my personal ethics on treating fellow human beings. She insisted on being in pretty much every meeting with the customers, and every meeting was a confrontational nightmare - she would get the customers on the defensive almost immediately, assume incorrect things about what they were saying, and they'd have to keep explaining what they wanted over and over again until she got it. The few times I tried to help explain what the customer was telling her, she interrupted me and told me to not interrupt her and stop talking when she was talking, and then chewed me out in the meeting, saying that I needed to shut up and listen to the customers. I keep saying this, but it was so surreal.
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@Nathan, oh I got out of there two years ago and have absolutely zero regrets. =)
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I'm surprised no one commented on Mark Bowitz's superb acting. That was the best silent guy by the water cooler I've ever heard. We couldn't even see him and he still managed to transmit exactly the emotions his character would feel in that situation.
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I liked Nathan until he said, "You can't work with multiple database records without a loop."
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I'll take the blame for that. It's more along the lines of this:
RequestedQty = 100 AllocatedQty = 0
While (AllocatedQty <= RequestedQty && ExistsNextDBRecord) r = GetNextDBRecord() // do allocation from db record for PO Order adding to AllocatedQty Next
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Sorry for the formatting. You get it.
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"One Flew Over a Cuckoo's Nest", perhaps.
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reminds me of that crazy idiot "Mr. Kornada" in the online comic "freefall", who refused to to evacuate from a building in the path of a hurricane, because, in his words, "getting killed by a hurricane is not on the schedule, therefore it won't happen."
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I'm not sure that I agree with this. That manager is the real source of the problems here. If she hadn't wasted half their day fussing over a colour (and, I assume, countless similar episodes on the preceding days) then they wouldn't have had so little time to finish the actual project. She is not a good manager. She did not do her job well at all. A good manager listens to their team members' concerns instead of talking over them, and lets the developers who are actually working on the project make their own decisions about how the code should be written.
Admin
Whoosh!
Let me explain in small words, "Anonymous": Mei was described as a "great manager" because in her deluded mind, she was. We call that "sarcasm." And what I'm doing now? That's called being "patronizing."
Get it now? That's a good boy.
Admin
I think I would have lasted until about the second "Yes or no?" from Mei before answering, "fuck off" and walking out.
I've been fortunate, in my 3+-decade career, to have had fairly good bosses. Especially since I started working for myself. I feel for what you went through, Nathan.