Forced password resets.
Entropy defeats recall.
Desk blooms with secrets.Ah, white collar haiku…
I was in a band called White Collar Haiku.
We mostly did Huey Lewis and the News covers.
- waiting 20 minutes for your PC to boot all the corporate bloatware before it’s usable
- quarterly 4-hour-long all-department meeting that could have been an email
- “incorporating” the latest tech buzzword into your process because that one manager has nothing better to do
- “celebrating” things like Company Culture Week™ and other BS stuff imagined up by people with nothing better to do
- waiting 20 minutes for your PC to boot all the corporate bloatware before it’s usable
This is the bane of my existence. And of course IT locks us out of the UEFI so we can’t set the system to auto-boot 15 minutes before we show up to work.
I’m just happy I was able to remove OneDrive from the start-up applications. Now I don’t have to waste an hour each day waiting for files to sync
If only I could remove OneDrive… IT expects us to use it for everything.
When I was getting a PC upgrade, I explicitly told them that I had already handled backing everything up (as they repeatedly said I needed to do). Most of my projects are synced with our version control, so I have a projects folder with a few hundred GB in it that I didn’t need to explicitly transfer to my new PC (I would check out projects as I needed them). I wrote in the ticket that they didn’t need to transfer any files, I had already handled it. And I told the IT person who took my old PC. They said my new PC would be ready the next morning.
Lo and behold, it wasn’t. I called and asked, they said they were still working on it. The following day, I went to pick it up and the IT person explained that it took so long because they had to transfer over hundreds of GB of files. And they reminded me that if I had been using OneDrive, I could have had it a day sooner.
You know, because they had to copy over my files. That were already in version control. A system they admin. And that I told them about like 5 times. After they said they wouldn’t be responsible for file transfers.
Ah well, guess I got paid for their ineptitude. I wish this was the worst they’ve done, though.
- Spending a day or more every quarter/half sorting out your roadmap, prioritising stakeholder needs, tech debt and enhancements
- Someone from senior leadership decides they want random thing they invented and blows the roadmap up
- Much wanted feature (X) or issue gets pushed back
- CEO makes a comment in a company wide meeting how they can’t understand why we simply can’t do X thing yet
- Everyone in Product scrambles to make X a priority
- Go to step 1
I wish I could upvote you more than once
Not every person is the same.
Rules and processes and documentation and change management often times equals stability and repeatable successes. Some people thrive in this environment.
Moving fast and breaking shit with no rules or processes or documentation or change management often times leads to outages and an environment where you have to be the hero or a real IT “rockstar” to be successful. Some people thrive in this environment.
If you don’t like all the rules and processes and documentation and change management, then you should know thyself and find a different job.
Found the bootlicking manager! Be sure to always remind the people doing the work that they are easily replaceable. They should be grateful right?
Found the IT “Rockstar”.
Having a team touch base, followed by a daily standup, followed by a quality initiative meeting, followed by a biweekly support touch base, followed by a demo for a tool your team will never use, followed by lunch and learn session over some AI tool you’ll be forced to use, followed by your biweekly 1:1 with the manager, followed by the department touch base, followed by the company all hands… Aaaaand done with meetings. Finally, some time to get some work done… then your downstream customer wants you to investigate why their counts don’t match yours… “could you run the totals again? Could you run them broken down by hour? By minute? By second? Can you get me a list of each record at these 6 timestamps? Can I get them in a different format? Oops, the problem was on our end.” Great. And it’s 5 o’clock. Scrum master gonna be up my ass about story points tomorrow.
As a project/portfolio manager, the first thing I try to do is eliminate everything except the customer part. That is really hard to fix, but at least there is more time?
You must be a fellow data engineer
Eh, more software now. But I work on a streaming platform so or downstream customers are data engineers.
oh no my PTSD is coming back.
We had a great saying in a team I uses to be on: “Write good code and hope no one notices”
“Let’s try to get this thing done with a ridiculous deadline, knowing full well that the work will be discarded because of overriding factor X but it looks good that the team got it done in the deadline someone set, so the someone will get their bonus”
All this is great if you’re working remote. At least you can be far away from a cubicle or even worse - an open office while doing all this nonsense.
- it’s time for quarterly security training again where you learn not to open exe files attached to emails.
Or zip. Or pdf. Or security solution doesn’t allow .png, please send as .pdf.
Funny thing is, i’ve never heard about plaintext/markdown mails being enforced over the usual html-with-potentially-scripts-and-hidden-URLs.
Funny thing is, i’ve never heard about plaintext/markdown mails being enforced over the usual html-with-potentially-scripts-and-hidden-URLs.
This is always the part that drives me up the wall. Literally the default behavior in Thunderbird because it’s built by people that care about privacy and security before anything else. So many features to make email “prettier” and “easier” except all they do is introduce new ways for bad actors to hide their actions from attentive users
To be fair, plain text generators server-side usually suck (because afterthought) and there are not many GUI mail clients with a good html-to-text converter.
Oh shit. We’re not supposed to open those?
Oh god, add in “random scripts throw errors that you’ve never seen before” and the anus-clenching Teams DONK sound that precedes yet another poorly-worded indecipherable rant from my boss.
Agile/Scrum, ISO 9001, ITIL, Six Sigma, CMMI, etc; it’s all cargo cults.
I’ve seen cargo thrown around a few times. What is that?
“As I mentioned in my previous email(s)…”
Also every time a techbro tweets something a random number generator may fir- lay you off due to financial decisions.
Are you spying on me? Had to change my password this week. And we’re in a release freeze.
- Listening to some idiot salesman talk about his company’s extremely shitty SaaS product because your manager thought the email that the shit company sent him wasn’t the result of leads from data brokers selling email address data.
As someone who sits in on those calls as a sales engineer, I wish I could interrupt the weird kabuki dance of all this and say “These guys are clearly not a fit and we are all wasting time.”
But I have bills and honestly I’m probably commenting here because I checked out as soon as the screenshare started and I could turn my camera off without anyone noticing.
Please don’t ask me anything because I’ll just say you broke up and I need you to repeat the question so I can bullshit an answer.
