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The most outrageous moments of my career
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The most outrageous moments of my career
#1
Hi, folks.
This is a question for people who have (had) a misfortune Tongue  of programming for the living. I was wondering whether you'd like to pass along entertaining stories that happened at workplace, "Terrible Bosses"-style.

A year ago I got a mail telling me to report to another department head. When I asked my department head if it's for real, he told me "Yes, they need your skills". Pretty flattering, isn't it?

Well, the very same day I had an employee review, where the main claim against yours truly was ... complicated code, and I was given six month probation to learn to uncomplicate it  Naughty
Test everything in a Python shell (iPython, Azure Notebook, etc.)
  • Someone gave you an advice you liked? Test it - maybe the advice was actually bad.
  • Someone gave you an advice you think is bad? Test it before arguing - maybe it was good.
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#2
did you erupt?

couldn't resist!
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#3
I came to that - quit even without finding a new job (for the first time in my career). Found a job in 2 weeks

Here's another good one - from the same place.

Code reviewer, AKA my team leader, looking at a line with struct.unpack -
Quote:I don't know what are you doing here, but we will simplify that.
Wall

PS When I finished my on-loan project - to customer's full satisfaction!, I tried to promote it in my own department. Reaction of one of the team leaders:
Quote:You should have placed it in FrameWork 
Test everything in a Python shell (iPython, Azure Notebook, etc.)
  • Someone gave you an advice you liked? Test it - maybe the advice was actually bad.
  • Someone gave you an advice you think is bad? Test it before arguing - maybe it was good.
  • You posted a claim that something you did not test works? Be prepared to eat your hat.
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#4
In an app that acts as a middleman, buying from one group and selling to another, nationwide, I once enabled a test account with coverage across the country (instead of just where we could sell). In less than 10 minutes, I had cost the business over $18,000 as we were buying pretty much everything all of our affiliates had to sell... and we couldn't do anything with that traffic except look at it sadly.

It took my boss three full days of calling our affiliates and begging them to accept returns. We got a little lucky there, since most of them have fairly strict policies that they never accept more than a 10% return rate.
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#5
I try to "sell" a memoizing decorator to a department head for a time-consuming data-processing APIs - response of C++ programmer and - to add insult to injury Tongue  - an algorythmist 
Quote:It is too complicated
Test everything in a Python shell (iPython, Azure Notebook, etc.)
  • Someone gave you an advice you liked? Test it - maybe the advice was actually bad.
  • Someone gave you an advice you think is bad? Test it before arguing - maybe it was good.
  • You posted a claim that something you did not test works? Be prepared to eat your hat.
Reply
#6
Mine wasn't a bad boss at all, as a matter of fact the best
I rarely had any audience with my boss, unless there were
major shakeup's in store or for a review.

On my first review, I sat down with him.
The first question he asked is 'Why do you always address me as Tom?'
I responded 'Isn't that your name?'
to which he responded 'No, it's Paul'

I still got a great raise!
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#7
I used to write the same report every year, on pediatric poisonings. I used data from NCHS (National Center for Health Statistics). One year they changed their format, and I didn't notice. I was using SAS, and the default when reading data and line has too few elements is to the read the rest of the elements from the next line. So I was reading every other line of data, and my numbers were half what they should have been. I didn't notice this until the report had been cleared by a dozen people and posted on our web page.
Craig "Ichabod" O'Brien - xenomind.com
I wish you happiness.
Recommended Tutorials: BBCode, functions, classes, text adventures
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#8
Funny exchange with my manager today. We had a couple of run-ins and argumentst lately, but he's happy with the results. So today he tells me:
Quote:You are doing exactly what I want you to do
I quip in response 
Quote:No, I am not doing what you want me to do - I am doing what you need me to do
He smiled....
Test everything in a Python shell (iPython, Azure Notebook, etc.)
  • Someone gave you an advice you liked? Test it - maybe the advice was actually bad.
  • Someone gave you an advice you think is bad? Test it before arguing - maybe it was good.
  • You posted a claim that something you did not test works? Be prepared to eat your hat.
Reply
#9
Story #1

Got sucked (like about anyone in the company able to write two lines of code) in the Mother Of All "Trouble Projects". As usual, managements starts panicking, and as usual this means the developers are the scapegoats. So the project enters a micro-management phase where even leaving your desk to empty your bladder looks like a corporate offense. We have delivered most of the code, and we are all merrily debugging the problems reported by the testers (of course, management never accounted for these, forgetting that making folks code twice as much as normal in the previous phase would lead to more bugs...). Now, instead of learning to use the "reporting and dashboard" part of the bug-tracker application, they ask us to produce daily an excel sheet that :

  1. List all the bugs assigned to us
  2. For each bug, tells how many hours/days it will take to fix
  3. Has an additional  green-smile / amber-meh / red-frown icon to indicate difficulty of resolution
Day #2: when asked why I return my Excel sheet in the morning instead of before leaving the previous evening, I answer that my 6-years old son enjoys very much putting the icons in before going to bed. He like to help Daddy and feel useful. While we are discussing the subject, I ask how I can tell how much it will take to fix a bug without spending some significant time doing the analysis. I'm instructed to enter times "at random". 

Day #4: my project manager discovers that, as instructed, my Excel report uses the RANDOM() function

Day #5: the project management discovers that many developers have developed some love for Excel's RANDOM() function.

Day #6: the management stop requesting the Excel sheets.
Unless noted otherwise, code in my posts should be understood as "coding suggestions", and its use may require more neurones than the two necessary for Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V.
Your one-stop place for all your GIMP needs: gimp-forum.net
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#10
Quote:in the Mother Of All "Trouble Projects"
In telecommunications, we have a department named 'Trouble'.
Which I was asked to run

This department encompassed all trouble, including
customer service and even 'Roach nest' in switch wiring (Not kidding)

Your post sounds like daily report needed in 'Office Space' movie (my second reference today)
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