Exceeding Authority

One of my cow-orkers keeps acting like he can dictate what I do.  We report to the same supervisor, and work on separate projects, although my projet is a data source for his.  But today we had a meeting about data formats and such, and he starts handing out tasks to me.  And it's a task that makes his life easier at a cost to my usability.

THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE.

I do not work for him, and he knows this.  So I fire off an email to our common boss to outline that of the 3 items in the email, one is already in progress, one is clearly a bug that we will be addressing, and the third is a new *request*, and one that has ramifications to prospective other clients of our system.

I am pissed off that I had to do that.  This is not a case where there is a real vacuum in the structure.  And it comes from a guy who was all over our not sending as much data as we claimed we were, until he realized he had forgotten the multiple messages in a payload that we all had to deal with.

Ctrl-Alt-Delete

Have you ever had a colleague who does not seem capable of quickly jumping to a new topic?  One whom you can see rebooting the monitor process when you ask a question that is not about exactly what they are doing at that moment?

Not the context-switch of "I'm deep in thought about X, when you interrupt" but the part after that, when you have their attention.

Then add in the annoyed "I have no idea what you are talking about"

my life, several times each week

Monolingual Programmers

Perhaps I'm getting cranky in my old age, but I find it extremely irritating that there are programmers out there who do not attempt to use more than one programming language in their jobs.

It's a fucking 21st century, people, it's not that hard to learn a programming language enough to work in it.

Followup on "NOW we need to test"

As expected, the test plan I wrote has been soundly ignored.  I provided it, and the priorities are nowhere near that product.  My originakl individual assessment has been deemed satisfactory.

I'm so glad that I spent the time writing up a test plan.

Saw it on a button

When I was in college, I had the hobby of collecting pin-on buttons with geek-related sayings.  Stuff like "God is real unless declared integer" and the like.
During one exam, I wore one that read "I'm surrounded by idiots!"

I feel that today.

At The Job, we are realizing that a departed contractor left a lot of buggy code in his wake.  As we find the problems, we are fixing them.  One of them involved code that filtered out excess notifications based on time and some other factors.  The other dev was done with his tasks and so he started looking at the code.  We realized that it was not filtering correctly, so he started making fixes.  When he was done, he asked how we were going to test it.

This is not a n00b, this is a dev with 25+ years experience.  Sure, the project is fed gigabytes of data per day, but we already know that we can test a binary in isolation.  So the obvious way to test it is to create a data file with the desired qualities for the filter (pass and block values) and run that file through the code.
So it seems to be to be blindingly obvious that this was the way.  But it did not to him.  So I ended up writing the generator and running the tests, showing hiom the results, waiting while he fixed things and put the new binary on the test machine, etc, etc, etc.

Sheesh. 

I was trying to let him run with a section of the project as his domain, where he would be the SME, and I would stay out of it, but he just does not seem to cotton to the idea that he needs to be proactive and look ahead of the one thing he's currently doing.

All I gotta say is that my boss better put me in for another level bump ASAP

Sure, NOW they decide we need to test

So today the PM gets insistent in the daily that I need to write up a test plan for the rework of our DB population module.  It was written incorrectly by a contractor who left recently, and there seems to be lingering blamestorming on how we did not know he was not doing the right thing (hint: when you have 5 priorities and only 3 developers, you end up having to assume everyone knows enough to ask for help).

Now, I get the desire for testing, but until this very week, nothing, I mean NOTHING has had an official test plan on this faux Agile fustercluck of a project.  So why does this suddenly need a test plan?  And who is going to test it?  The DB relationship are part of the complexity of this part, and I'm the only one who has any idea of what those relationships are.

I swear, it's going to turn into me teaching someone the whole mess including how to test this, all the while being given other work, because someone else is 'doing the testing'

Thinking outside the paradigmatic box

I've probably blogged about this previously, but I'm too lazy right now to search.

I've determined one crucial thing about good older programmers - they are not at all afraid to exit the programming language and use the system around it.

I have been helping a junior programmer with some tasks - he inherited a program partially built, and I was one of the builders.  It's a multi-program system, with data being processed by a number of Python and C programs in sequence.  He's been tasked with converting everything into a single program, and is having issues with getting the data from some steps into the next ones.

Where the box is, it seems, is in trying to stay totally inside Python.  He asked for my help, and my immediate answer when he described the issue, was "Just redirect the output to a file, and read that file in as the next step.  It avoid having to worry about the string/list formatting"

He seemed reluctant, and eventually found the step needed to convert the data formats (which I would have done in a similar fashion, but I would not have had the initial problem for more than 3 minutes before converting the data)

So one of the skills to develop is that of seeing where the box edges are, and that they are often just lines you can cross