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.

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.