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.

Humility as a Programmer virtue

Humility is good in programmers.

Not just 'humility as lack of arrogance', but 'humility as not assuming you know everything'

A few days ago, a cow-orker had an issue pushing some code into our repository, and had to recreate the work.  He pushed the fix, or so he thought.  I went to our build machine (yes we don't had automated builds, mea culpa), cloned the repository, and tried to build the system.  When it got to his code, the build failed due to a missing file.

When he arrived, I mentioned that I was unable to build the repository version of his code, and his reply was "And yet I can build it in my workspace"

It pissed me off because he has had previous cases of him forgetting to add files to the push, so he should know that it's one of the possible errors he could make that would show up on another machine.

So be humble.  If someone mentions something you worked on is not right, ask them to show you what is going on before you attempt to evade blame.

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.