Basic Technical Competence

Most companies have a mix of skillsets needed in the employees, and so you end up with the technical folks doing technical work, and folks managing them, who are typically less technical.  But there is a basic technical competence level that needs to be maintained, or the managers end up wasting everyone's time with bad ideas.

Case in point:
Our application generates a ton of data.  So much that the clients need to be in the same datacenter to get it at the rate we produce it.  The remote datacenters do not have enough incoming bandwidth to receive the data in a timely fashion.  One day we were discussing this problem, which limits the locations of our clients, and one of our project managers suggested "Why don't we just use the cloud to get it to the other datacenters fast?"

I mean, ya gotta have the basics in your head to play the game right, y'know?

Doing the absolute minimum is A BAD FUCKING IDEA

This blog has become my vent for all the crap from The Job.

Ok, so we have a system that sends data into a central routing system, built by another group.  In order to be able to prove that any delays in the system are not due to our system being behind, we have a subscriber program that reads the data and checks transit time.  Because that project may get moved to other servers, we wrote a minimal subscriber to output just that info.

Cow-orker is tasked with writing the script to analyze that program's log files to track the time.

He write a program that expects every message output to be the one with the data he needs.  Absolutely no filtering by content at all.  So if we alter that message, or add other messages, that script will fail. 



All it would have taken is to filter for the 2 words before the data value to guarantee that only relevant messages would pass into the script.  But No!

sheesh.

I really wonder about people sometimes.

Really Stupid Training

Ok, TPTB at work decided to drop new training right away, so I was filling in some time (that I was not interested in doing real work during) with taking it.

It's the repeat of the workplace safety dreck, and diversity training.

So I got to watch a crappy slideshow of how to lift things, walk up stairs safely, and how to arrange by desk.

Then the diversity training.....

I'm all for diversity, and it's good that The Job at least follows the law in its efforts to hire/retain staff.  But it serves nobody to have 45 minutes of videos where a person with a specific disability natters on about how it does and does not affect them on the job, and what others should do to when they do/do no need help.  It really doesn't.  Particularly when it is someone with a visible condition, where only the most idiotic of people still publicly offends with comments or actions.

Still not getting through to that guy

This morning, returning to the salt mines, I noticed that one of our monitoring tools was showing an error condition that I knew was not strictly correct.  When cow-orker arrives, we discuss, and determine that it's an artifact of the significantly different rates of monitoring and reporting of that metric.

So cow-orker and I decide it would be good to make it configurable, so that we can have it only report if it's consistently bad.

Cow-orker makes code change, tests in isolation, deploys to the one machine where the problem was manifesting.

Cut to an hour later, when second cow-orker reports that he is suddenly seeing malformed messages arriving at his client.  We look, and the time coincides with cow-orker One deploying his changes.  But he's off at an early lunch, so we put it aside.

After lunch, I pass One in the hall and mention it.  He says that Two had mentioned it to him, but that they were seeing the errors from another machine, which had not been altered, so it could not possibly be his code.

So when I return to the pod, I ask Two, and he shows me the single, solitary error from another machine, and the ongoing several in a minute stream from the suspect machine.  I show this to One, and he then looks and realizes he did not pull the repo before making his changes, so his binary reverted a week's worth of fixes.  Off he goes to pull, re-implement, and redeploy.

Sheesh, you'd think that this 4th time he'd start to learn that at least he should at least just so "Ok, I'll check it out" before trying to dodge blame.

Get yer goddamn ducks in a row first

Ok, so today I had a remote cow-orker piss me off greatly.

I'm fresh out of another meaningless "town hall" meeting with upper brass - the usual type, full of platitudes and Orwellian euphemisms for corporate anti-social goals, and I get a message form this cow-orker - "Did you stop sending messages from X" (X being the system I am lead on)
I check my output logs - output volume is down, but nowhere near 0.
"No, we're still sending"
"Well as of N minutes ago, I stopped seeing any data.  You can look at my logs and see"
"I believe that you are not receiving data.  But we are transmitting"
"Can you check again?"
"I have, and we see no errors on send, and our receiver is getting data in a timely manner"
"Well there must be something wrong with your system"
I send the receiver log snippet showing we have received messages across this interval.

Radio silence for a while.  Then "I think I know what happened - another receiver grabbed the same ID"
In other words, your receiver was borked, and you failed to believe me when I showed you that it was not our transmitter.

Don't do that.  Even if you are certain it's their fault, do not cast balme until you have proof.

Another Reason to Hate Open Offices

I realized something the other day.

I've been at a new job for a couple of years, and I've noticed that I've been much less interested in doing activities after work.  I get home, and all I want to do is veg out.  While some of this I attribute to the realization that I've got over 10 years left until I can retire, there is more to it.

And then I realized that I've been working for over 2 years in an open office environment, as opposed to my previous workplace, where I had a tall cubicle (tall enough for an actual door).  I spend all day in the middle of an open room, with several large TVs(mercifully muted), 40-some-odd cow-orkers, and all the attendant noise.  I literally have no privacy except when I go to the toilet, or take  phone call in one of the little booths we have for that purpose.

I'm an introvert (shock, that a programmer is an introvert!), so all that exposure is exhausting me, so much so that I just want to cocoon myself when I get home.

Amazing differences

We've got a new contractor in my group, and I"m pleasantly surprised - they're proactive, smart, and easy to get along with.

I'm very happy to have someone who I can describe a task to, and find it done in only slightly more time that I would take (due to my being already up to speed on the issue)

The only mild flaw is needing rather longer explanations than I prefer to give, and being a no-UNIX type.