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When business people keep dragging you into one meeting after the other and then wonder why that code you were supposed to write is not ready yet...2
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I love technology. I love programming and developing software. I love self-learning new things.
But I REALLY REALLY REALLY hate Math. And suck at it too.
I want to study comp-sci at the university but I'm scared of the math.
Any tips?13 -
The manager and selfperceived omnipotent cult leader was the worst kind of businessman. Slimey and trecherous, zero sense of ethics, but felt holier than the pope because he "helped" his weakling herd of piteous employees.
These employees were smart kids, most of them in their late teens. All of them legally disabled. There was this kid who gobbled up ritalin like candy, a boy who had received his measles shots and turned socially awkward (/s), a chubby girl who could name all the hex colors of her chocolate stained shirt... you know, what we call skilled developers in the industry.
Fiftyfive of them.
They were awesome, awkward highschool dropouts, like I had been a decade earlier. They worked 50h a week. They had great humor, were passionate, devoured information about new technologies, and they built custom websites from scratch in no time. I had to lead this flock, and felt honored to work with them.
Then things started to smell funny.
I discovered all 55 of their workstations ran pirated software, from Windows to Adobe CS. I'm not without sin in that regard, but as a company it's just plain stupid.
Clients were treated like shit. I mean, we all feel like punching a client in the face sometimes, but I'm taking about unjustified debt collections paired with death threats.
Then I found out these kids were often disappearing for a few months, only to return months later.
I started digging, and discovered they were all working reintegration internships (because they were on below minimum wage disability payments), at almost zero cost to my employer.
After 6 months, my boss gave them a negative recommendation, they were all too "sick" to function in normal jobs.
Then they were rotated to a shadow company, doing the same work for another 6 months, and so on to a third company.
He broke these kids, talked them down, made them feel worthless. He threatened the ones who understood what was happening.
I ended up bringing the company down, with the CEO and two government officials jailed for fraud and corruption.
Some employees were quite mad about it, at least at first — I was the shepherd who abandoned his sheep. Luckily, most found better paid positions in no time.
Truly one of the most fucked up and difficult situations I've been in.6 -
Worst exp. with manager/higher-up?
Too many to pick the worst, but here are a few:
Manager demoted me because he believed I would be a roadblock to his wet dream of re-writing all the business services in WCF
https://youtube.com/watch/...
Manager spent years and wasted countless man hours retiring a single ASP.Net web service by converting the individual supporting assemblies into specific WCF services..
https://youtube.com/watch/...
Manager once berated me for 'missing' time log entries
https://youtube.com/watch/...
Manager scolded me for not fixing a 'bug' while praised another developer who re-wrote a reporting application due to a fixable hardware problem and deleting the source code files from source control.
https://youtube.com/watch/...
Manager wanted to rewrite all our code in XML.
https://youtube.com/watch/...
Manager wanted integration with a new phone system knowing the hardware+software did not exist yet ..
https://youtube.com/watch/...
Manager wanted me to 'take the lead' to speed up a web site in a foreign country we didn't control.
https://youtube.com/watch/... -
I've been fairly lucky with my bosses of late since I've progressed in my programming career. But my absolute worst boss was when I first started working in an office environment doing data entry. My boss at the time was terrible, and she was always against innovation or process improvement. She also always tried to make herself look good and taking credit for the accomplishments of others. If she screwed up it was your fault, and she was "always buried in email" so she could never respond to you for pto requests, or escalation of issues between departments. My whole family pretty much worked in various roles in the department and she fired my brother after my mother left the company for no reason, saying he was "sleeping", but I worked right next to him and he's tall and had to slouch just to comfortable see his computer screen since the same manager refused to approve work station improvements for him.
Our workflow was to receive daily spreadsheets of health care claims that we had to manually process and enter into the system. So being the lazy innovator that I am, and trying to find ways I can efficiently work, I delved into studying visual basic and programmed a few functions and tools in excel to analyze, highlight, and process some of the data since the claims on the spreadsheets always had a specific pattern. This was all before I had any formal education in computer science so the program was very basic and clunky but it tripled my efficiency. When I brought it up to my boss to spread it among the rest of our team so they could use it after a short 20 minute training, she struck it down saying any training or use of it would be a waste of resources since it was too technical and complex to be used and if I were to keep improving it or use it I would be fired. It was literally copy and paste from one spreadsheet to the other en masse and clicking a button to sort and fill in the blanks. Eventually I showed it to the director of the department when working on a large data entry project with her, and I was later offered a job as a technical analyst where I was responsible for the codebase that generated the reports for the department and specifically all the reports my old boss used where I would occasionally mess with her to get back at all the crap she gave me and my brother. Since all the reports were blind carbon copied to everyone, I would send out her reports on a delay while everyone else got them on time. It eventually got her in so much crap she had to step down as a manager. She still works in the same company that I started working at again earlier this year, and like the many careers she's ruined she eventually ruined her own within the company 😂4