Famous Last Words by Bosses I've Had

http://edweissman.com/famous-last-words-by-bosses-ive-had

by edw519 • 15 years ago

315 182 15 years ago

edweissman.com

veyron• 15 years ago

I'm impressed that there are places that have 432 projects ...

GFischer• 15 years ago

None of which are ever finished, most likely.

I've got 896 "urgent" tasks right now.

I'm quitting in 3 months' time (If I manage to get my nest egg to a non-scared-to-quit amount by then).

clawrencewenham2• 15 years ago

One of them mentions a shutdown from Amazon because they ship too many orders late. That rang lots of bells for me, because it sounds like IT at an independent fulfillment company, which will usually have its own web store and sell through many other companies besides Amazon.

432 projects are a lot to you? Imagine your boss is someone who reacts to every business challenge and opportunity by creating a new project. Imagine that every vendor you ship for has re-invented EDI, without ever having heard of EDI, and it was designed by one of:

A) Someone they found on Craigslist

B) A kid they hired who doesn't comprehend how you can write a program without wrapping it between <% and %> and loading it in a browser

C) A guy who thinks he's a programmer because he once wrote an Excel macro

Their mechanisms can be so bizarre that you can't really support them by configuring an existing fetch-n-post, or Extract-Transform-Load system. You just have to fire up Visual Studio and write Project 433, AKA "Overstock.com Is Tripping On Acid And Now Requires That We Convey Order Status Via Modulated Carrier Pigeons".

Some of the weirdest I've been asked to support:

* Moving the order file between different subdirectories on their FTP server to convey status (ie: we log into their FTP site and issue a MOVE command on the file to put it in the /shipped folder). Did I mention that each file contains multiple orders?

* We have to implement a SOAP API to _their_ spec and expose it on the public internet for them to call at-will to send orders and query for status.

* CSV wrapped in XML, but it's CSV with a sub-delimiter because one of the columns has to be treated like an array to convey the status of each line-item.

* Orders that come in an Excel file, but they never order or name the columns consistently from file-to-file.

And that's just for fulfillment services.

billybob• 15 years ago

Holy cow. Your weird support examples make me want to cry.

viraptor• 15 years ago

Oh joy. Sounds like dealing with telco billing. On one side you get excel tariff files which change in random ways every month, on the other you get silly billing data. Can you imagine ITSP getting an itemised bill for a month of calls from upstream provider? I think it was 3 rather large boxes filled with printouts. Still not sure why that happened.

kokey• 15 years ago

I once worked for a company where our tech chief made various hacks to FreeBSD to allow it to have very large number of groups and users could belong to a lot of groups. This allowed each project to have a gid, so that people working on a particular project could belong to that group and the file permissions can be set accordingly. The company would have hundreds of projects per year, and this was used for many years. This was fine until Linux and NetApp technologies were being introduced, it did not play very well with the hacks to groups.

AznHisoka• 15 years ago

At first I thought these were last words by bosses that died afterwards

OoTheNigerian3• 15 years ago

Me: The server crashed. IT Services is working to bring it back up.

Boss: Don't confuse me with all these technical details.

I bet your boss among those deciding on SOPA.

OoTheNigerian3• 15 years ago

If my comment is not relevant, then why is this post at the top of HN?

It is my understanding that the post depicts the irony that those who do not understand are put in charge.

I should not be explaining my comment, but downvoting without a counter argument makes no sense to me. It is the equivalent of responding to an argument or statement with "I don't agree"

Though not a big deal, annoying all the same.

recursive3• 15 years ago

#1. It's unlikely that the boss is deciding on SOPA. #2. Your comment does not contain any particular insight on SOPA or shitty bosses. It's just a repetition of the meme about SOPA. SOPA awareness is important, but you have not contributed to it. #3. As a joke, your comment is not particularly funny.

emmett• 15 years ago

Hacker News is not generally a place for light humor; that's probably why you're being downvoted.

Even more so, it's DEFINITELY not a place to complain about being downvoted. Complaints about being voted down earn a downvote from me, always.

chrislomax2• 15 years ago

Do you really work at a place where everything is so impersonable that it is all referenced by project number or was that used to obfuscate your clients in this example?

None of the comments surprise me to be honest, I find that managers have come from no background to instruct people on a technological level and are taken on for simply their management ability.

devs10102• 15 years ago

Referencing things by number is pretty common, I think, a lot of places use a Jira system where each ticket has a number and its often used for all development related tasks.

chrislomax2• 15 years ago

Our projects do carry a reference, it is usually prefixed by the department handling it and a number but when we have production meetings they are all referenced by the client and the job in hand.

I don't think I would like to work at a company where it was just a number, I like it being personal, it would feel more like a machine with just numbers or references

diego3• 15 years ago

You are working at the wrong company. Quit.

EDIT: "I find that managers have come from no background to instruct people on a technological level and are taken on for simply their management ability."

If true, that is a sign of a very unhealthy company.

metageek2• 15 years ago

It's a tradeoff. Some of my worst managers were former programmers; some of my best came in through some side door. Management ability--real management, as in getting people to get along and get the job done, not as in making Gantt charts and chanting buzzwords--is essential, and it's really rare to find it combined with technical skills.

RyanMcGreal• 15 years ago

Are you sure you didn't just transcribe some back-issues of Dilbert?

pavel_lishin2• 15 years ago

I've read a few of Scott Adams' books, and he's mentioned that he has intentionally tried to put some absolutely ridiculous scenarios in his comics that could never happen... only to have readers e-mailing him and asking if he'd worked at Company X, because the exact thing had happened to them.

chrisdroukas• 15 years ago

Pretty funny list, but this seems like a case of poor management of expectations. It shouldn't be your job to explain why things matter (as in 'Boss: What difference does that make?'), but sometimes that's reality.

Here's a set of slides on taking control of poor communication situations and learning to efficiently keep managers in the feedback loop. Sometimes it doesn't work out ('Boss: I haven't had time to get caught up on my email.'), though it's certainly a start.

http://www.fs.cornell.edu/PMT/Communications/Managing%20Expe...

mattmanser3• 15 years ago

Hang on a sec.

Not liking mornings or meetings.

Or forgetting what you'd prioritized someone to do.

Or being spam CCed by 'useful' emails.

I think when you look at a lot of these from the boss perspective and change the words slightly, they're totally normal human responses.

lhnn• 15 years ago

Well, of course, that would change the meaning. He can be so terse with words because many of us can fill in the blanks that these bosses have the wrong attitude about things.

epo• 15 years ago

Except that these are normal aspects of their job. Not liking the sight of blood is a normal human response too, but shouldn't be if your career choice is butcher or surgeon.

mattmanser3• 15 years ago

I dislike parts of javascript and moan about it, doesn't mean I shouldn't be a programmer.

I've been a manager before and didn't have constant meetings. Most decisions actually get made in hallways or between a couple of you casually chatting after everyone else has gone home in my experience. I avoided meetings when I feasibly could and tacitly approved of the same attitude in my team too.

krupan• 15 years ago

This! I wouldn't want to hear my doctor complain that surgery is icky or that listening to people talk about their aches and pains is tedious. Managers complaining about management tasks is not good. All of the managers I've had were once engineers. For a couple of them it was all too obvious that they still much preferred engineering work over management work, and they were not the best managers I've had, to say the least.

silverbax882• 15 years ago

Yeah, I know a lot of these hit close to home, but on the emails - you've never been a boss.

1 - Get 1300 emails a day (not an exaggeration) - 8 am

2 - Get 50 emails from executives who basically want to fire you OR someone who works for you and you have to act fast to stop the bleeding. - 10 am

3 - Get another 400 emails that are related to an ongoing discussion with managers on your level who are trying to stick your department with more work/blame/responsibility without letting you in on it. React at lightning speed to ward off evil. 2 pm.

4 - Attend many, many meetings in which executives will try to blame you, other managers will try to blame other managers, and long, tedious initiatives are discussed in hushed tones. Fight urge to nod off/strangle people/demand clarity. Pay attention because in six months one of these hapless bastards will claim everyone agreed to something preposterous in the meeting. - takes place: Every available minute. Including lunch, because "that was the only time everyone had available for some reason."

5 - Developer says he CC'd you on several emails related to the XYZ system and is baffled as to why you aren't completely up to date. Don't tell him that at 10 am the CEO was demanding he be fired (from a cannon). 6 pm.

dextorious• 15 years ago

The problem is that you think meetings totally go with the "boss" title.

But one can imagine a totally competent boss that HATES meetings and tries to have as few of them as possible to get the job done.

georgemcbay2• 15 years ago

"Me: You've been invited to a meeting with 3 department heads to hash out their differences on Project 249.

Boss: I hate meetings."

A couple of the boss responses listed here are totally reasonable and their head-scratch-inducing inclusion weakens the piece.

Meetings are a (sometimes) necessary evil, but I'm pretty skeptical of anyone who doesn't, at some level, hate them.

I mean, fuck, who wouldn't hate the idea of going to a meeting of 3 department heads to hash out differences? Sounds DREADFUL.

raganwald2• 15 years ago

It’s perfectly rational to hate meetings. But if you hate meetings, you should not be a Boss. In our business, part of the Boss job is going to meetings in order to protect your team from insanity.

If you hate something that is a core part of your job... This is a recipe for unhappiness. Now, I do not enjoy many of the meetings I attend. But I do enjoy some, and I get satisfaction out of doing the meeting part of my job well.

All that being said, I’m pretty sure I’ve said those exact words myself: “I hate meetings.” So yeah, it’s reasonable for a Boss to say those words. But not to believe them 24/7/365.

georgemcbay2• 15 years ago

"But if you hate meetings, you should not be a Boss."

I disagree. If you cannot tolerate meetings to the point where you avoid them, you shouldn't be a boss. But if you hate meetings -- be a boss. Be my boss. Because I want a boss that only calls me into meetings when it is absolultely necessary.

megablast• 15 years ago

Sure, and if you wish long enough, and dream hard enough, you can fly. But in reality, we all deal with stuff we do not like, we all go to meetings.

mediaman• 15 years ago

Maybe, but getting organizational buy-in -- and preemptively clearing potential political damage to the project -- is part of the job, especially for 'the boss'.

The boss might not like it, but it's part of the job. And pretending that all meetings are terrible does not solve the problem. That's just a technical knee-jerk response to pretend that people problems will go away on their own, or that negotiations don't need to happen because it involves 'one of those meetings'.

And if it's part of the boss's job -- which negotiating peer buy-in is -- then it's not really appropriate to go around complaining to subordinates about how he hates doing his job, especially when doing that job protects the technical work his team will be doing.

gaius• 15 years ago

Exactly. The truth is, no-one points a gun at your head and promotes you. The only people who become managers want to be managers, or they'd turn it down, or quit and go find another tech job.

ArbitraryLimits2• 15 years ago

I couldn't disagree more. In day-to-day programming life, having people want to invite your boss to a meeting instead of you is practically the only upside of having a boss at all.

zem4• 15 years ago

yeah, the "i hate mornings" one was even more bizarre

elliottcarlson2• 15 years ago

    Boss: You did great this year. I'm giving you a 2% increase.
    Me:   I hate you. I quit.
    Boss: Then I'll give you a 4% increase.
    Me:   I still hate you. I still quit.

Had the same situation years ago - fought tooth and nail to even get a review - by the time they gave me one I was accepting a position elsewhere and the 2% they offered was a joke.

memset• 15 years ago

This is a tangent, but I have yet to work at a company where the review process had anything to do with performance, and even less to do with adjusting pay based on that review. And managers seem to love saying "Yeah, I thought you did really well, and I can give my input, but it's [VP three layers up the chain] who has the final say in these decisions." Thanks, boss.

Mikushi• 15 years ago

Well as someone who has done a lot of reviews, i had my guidelines to follow for raises and bonuses, if a member of my team wanted more, they was nothing i was able to do other than bring it up the ladder and put a good word for the guy if i think he deserves it.

T-hawk• 15 years ago

The answer to that sort of situation is to do some work awesome and splashy enough to get the attention of [VP three layers up the chain].

Of course, if you're capable and driven enough to do that, you may as well do it for your own company instead.

hullo2• 15 years ago

Most bosses would love to give you more money if you're really doing a good job. Which is in fact, most likely, the reason why they're not allowed to do so.

johngalt• 15 years ago

It's exceedingly rare to get a huge raise just for doing the job you were hired for. The best place to demand dollars is in the interview. Inside a company your best bet is to clearly delinate role changes, and make your demands parallel to that change. Don't ever fall for the "do the higher level work now, get the raise later".

corin_• 15 years ago

Worth pointing out that this varies case by case. I can't speak with more than a single data point, but the only company I've been with has seen both pay rises (decent ones) and title bumps be rather fluid, and they've never actually happened at the same time. And yes, started off on a shit salary, now it's great - without any single huge change in what I'm doing, just gradual changes.

pelemele• 15 years ago

Exactly, once you settle for a specific amount during an interview, it's over.

seiji• 15 years ago

It is rare, but it happens. At least one entire team at microsoft recently received $60k+ raises (salary increases -- not one time bonuses) because google started poaching team members.

Now nobody on the team can justify leaving since they are paid so out-of-whack with their actual market value.

malux85• 15 years ago

Really? I have had 3 jobs in my 7 year career as a developer. In each job, I have always given 110%, solved every problem given to me, and been 'the guy' who can fix things quickly when they break. I'm a PHP developer by trade, recently our iPhone developer quit. I learnt Objective C in 2 weeks and am now maintaining two large iPhone apps as well as doing my PHP duties as a senior dev.

I have never asked for a raise, in my first job I started on 30k and was on 80k in 1 year (new zealand dollars). In my second job I started on 40k pounds and was on 50k in 6 months. In my current job (been here 3 months) I'm looking at a 20% pay increase in the next month.

Never asked for a raise. I just shine and get the karma back.

Mithaldu• 15 years ago

2% is a joke because it doesn't stack up with inflation. At that point you're literally getting your salary lowered.

jonnathanson2• 15 years ago

Oh man, these almost hit too close to home to be funny. True story below.

Me: So, just to remind you, I'm going in for surgery on Saturday. They're removing a gland from the side of my neck, so the recovery time will probably be three or four days.

Boss: Will you be back in the office on Monday?

Me: Probably not. Like I said--

Boss: --When will you be back?

Me: The recovery time is three or four days, so hopefully Tuesday or Wednesday.

Boss: Will you be taking any meetings on Monday?

Me: I will probably be bed-ridden, and I won't be able to speak.

Boss: That's not what I asked.

DavidSJ• 15 years ago

That reminds me of when I was 13:

Me: I don't have my homework because I electrocuted myself last night and went to the hospital [true story].

Teacher: You should have planned that into your schedule [apparently serious].

recursive3• 15 years ago

You went to the hospital because you died?

mkramlich• 15 years ago

That's funny, but he may have meant you should not put off homework til the last possible day or minute, or just this kind of thing can come up and scuttle it. If the teacher literally assigned it at 3pm, due next day, then a few hours later you're electrocuted, that's understandable. But if it was assigned a week before, and it would have only done a few hours to do, it's much less so. Because stuff comes up. If it wasn't random electrocution it would be random something else. And keep in mind the same teacher probably hears lots of excuses, some real, some made-up, all the time. I imagine it gets frustrating for them, and their empathy wanes away. Cops have a similar effect.

jpadkins• 15 years ago

Not to nitpick, but a lot of people would appreciate clear, concise communication. Ideally, communication to your boss should have been:

"Just to remind you, I will be out next week until Thursday. I let the team know, and declined all the meetings scheduled"

all the other details are unnecessary. Let em know what they need to know, and take care of things that need addressed before you go out.

thebrokencube• 15 years ago

Maybe, but it's a little silly that they can't take a second to listen to what you said.

jphaberman• 15 years ago

  Me: What time do you think you'll be home?
  Wife: Um, well, first I need to do x, and then I need to go     
    to y, which will probably take an hour.  And then I might
    swing by z.
  Me: So what time do you think you'll be home?

jonnathanson2• 15 years ago

Fair, but the backstory is that I'd told my boss about the surgery (he'd asked about the particulars) about three dozen times prior to that conversation. Some of the seemingly extraneous info ("removing a gland from my neck") was added here, per very slight artistic license, to convey information to the readers that was actually mentioned in previous conversations.

orbitingpluto2• 15 years ago

Boss: How long will it take for you to make the program? We're running low on other work.

Me: 30 seconds.

Boss: That's too long. #### could have it done in... wait, what did you say?

Me: Well that sheds some light on your style of management.

zem4• 15 years ago

i have to know - what was his reaction to being caught doing this?

orbitingpluto2• 15 years ago

There was a very long pause. He then found his words and asked how it was possible for me to finish a project (that would have normally taken 8 hours) in 30 seconds.

I had approached a previous similar project with a heavy focus on re-usability. The skeleton just needed XML added to customize it. And that could be added quicker than workers could get to that section requiring it. After that he actually asked why I had done that without permission.

Me: Because you wouldn't have been able to understand it. And because of that you would have said no.

I have an innumerable number of examples from this guy. I could start my own PHB cartoon. He kept his job because loyalty is often more valued than competence. (And in his case loyalty meant routinely fudging timesheets and not paying the grunt workers their full pay.)

I had transferred from a satellite branch to the main branch. I stayed a year under this doofus out of loyalty to the manager from the satellite branch who had recommended me. I quit at exactly 1 year. Contracted for them for 4 more months and oh was I glad to be gone.

Several months after I left I made some friends who used to have the doofus in their social group. He was ostracized and no longer welcome because he had stolen money from coats and purses piled onto a bed at a get-together.

I was also responsible for training my two replacements. I recommended that they not keep one of them. They did. After I had left this other guy managed to do a "rm -rf" on the primary SCO UNIX server that dispatched work to everyone. He also managed to improperly rebuild a RAID array on a W2k3 server and wipe everything. He also...

Wait. I feel the PTSD kicking in. Needless to say, it was a very dysfunctional work environment.

paulhauggis2• 15 years ago

It's actually pretty foolish to do this, if you want to keep your sanity in the future. If it takes you 30 seconds, they will most likely expect it that quickly in the future, even if it's not possible.

dawsdesign• 15 years ago

A bunch of babies. Start your own company then.

pavel_lishin2• 15 years ago

"You had a bad experience with a doctor? Just go to med school and open your own practice."

singular• 15 years ago

"You're just doing X, how can that take Y days?!"

Where X is something seemingly simple. What makes it more frustrating is that it is often very difficult to precisely describe why it is that X involves so much unintuitive complexity.

Also

"The users don't care about how it's developed"

Except that code quality defines the readability, maintainability, and often-times performance (deeply coupled code can make optimisations very difficult, for example) of an application both during development and afterwards.

edw519• 15 years ago

OP here. I just threw this together to have a little fun on a Friday morning. I knew I wasn't alone, but it's still nice when you guys remind me how much I'm not. It seems like there are two worlds for programmers these days: never having enough time to crank out that which must be built and dealing with alternate human reality in some institution.

These were just the tip of the iceberg. I'll probably have a bunch more next week.

Some specific feedback:

georgemcbay: When different stakeholders don't agree, I've learned 3 things: 1. You rarely make progress. 2. The only way to get them to agree is to put them in a room together and don't leave until they do agree (That's one time when you DO need a meeting). 3. My boss rarely understood (1) or (2). He was just worrying about his personal likes/dislikes. It's tough enough to convey this in a serious piece, but obviously a lot tougher in a light piece. Thanks for the feedback.

RyanMcGreal: I enjoyed Dilbert until the stories started striking too close to home. They became too real to be funny. Sad but true.

veyron: Actually, this company used 6 digit Ticket numbers. I shortened them for clarity. Remember it's a sequential numbering system, so that's the number of tickets since the beginning of time, not currently open tickets. Sadly, a typical meeting:

  Joe: How are we doing on 112182?
  Fred: I don't have that Ticket.
  Joe: Oh, maybe it should be 112128.
  Mary: No, that's in Ron's group.
  Fred: I must have written it down wrong. I mean the MJC Project.
  John: The MJC Project is on hold.
  Joe: Sorry, the MCJ Project.
  Mary: Who brought a laptop?
  Sue: I did. I'll search for MCJ.
  Fred: No, you'll get 500 tickets. Search for Joe Smith, open.
  Sue: OK, here it is. Ticket #118128.
  edw519: Kill me now.

EDIT: I am NOT making this up. Five minutes ago:

  Customer: I called you 10 minutes ago but you didn't answer.
  Me: I was here. Sometimes the IP phone doesn't ring.
  Customer: Why? Is it raining there?

mcantor• 15 years ago

By "last words", did you mean, "last words before they were fired/quit/'laid off'," or "last words before I, edw519, quit"?

Tomis• 15 years ago

Last words before the company went down the drain.

rufibarbatus2• 15 years ago

I interpreted the title as "'famous last words'-material that my bosses tend to say."

zeratul• 15 years ago

edw519: I know it's just for fun ... but on two occasions I've heard that I.T./I.S. bosses are purposely chosen NOT to be computer savvy because the otherwise operations cost too much. CEOs want good enough not perfect. This might create interesting team dynamics or sunk a project. I wander if there is a number which happens more often?

kephra• 15 years ago

I wonder why 'famous last words':

- Did someone fire the boss for those? - Did you quit your job and started a new one?

imho, famous last words should sound like: "I will not leave it nor depart it until I am buried in the ground." (rough translation) Mubarak 10th of Feb on TV.

PS: The most famous last word to quit a job in Germany is: "Ich habe fertig", you should note the wrong grammar here.

jroseattle• 15 years ago

Here's my favorite personal story. I was a consultant, brought in on a project on-site at a client's location. This is my first day, and I'm meeting the VP of Marketing.

  VP: We need to get these Cognos reports up and running.
  Me: Hmm, ok. What can you tell me about these reports?  
  VP: Mostly that we need them up and running.  
  Me: Who uses these reports?  
  VP: Not sure. Ask so-and-so.  
  Me: What information is on these reports?  
  VP: Look, let's not get buried in details. We just need these reports up and running, mmm-kay?

xpose20002• 15 years ago

heh, awesome.

vq• 15 years ago

Reports with undefined intervals and the only "requirement" is the title?

That's easy, shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes. Empty reports with just a title are really friendly for the author and reader both.

derefr2• 15 years ago

I like that: "Test-first requirements analysis." A bit like shooting a monkey into space in an uninsulated tin can to see if there are any problems with that.

LearnYouALisp2• 15 years ago

Work smarter, not harder!

xpose20002• 15 years ago

This was one of many reasons why I had to quit my last job:

ME: According to the newsletter stats, more people have opted out than actually clicked on any links last week.

BOSS: We need to increase subscribers to the newsletter.

wycats• 15 years ago

Aren't there scenarios where this would be ok?

Say 1,000 people are subscribing each week, 100 are opting out and 90 are clicking links.

What matters is opt outs per subscriber, not opt outs per link clicked.

paulhauggis2• 15 years ago

At my last company (I quit a little over a year ago), we had a newsletter with a nice opt-in system setup (I set it up during my time there). 5000 active users I think and 30,000 users that had opted-out.

Well, at one of my last meetings, my boss yelled at me and told me that we were "leaving money on the table" by not sending emails to the opt-out list.

I explained to him exactly why it was a bad idea to email these people, but he didn't want to listen. Within a day we were permanently banned from our email provider.

My boss wanted to sue the mail provider for "disrupting our service". I've had so many terrible bosses that don't know how to run a proper business, I wonder how they make any money in the first place.

rokhayakebe3• 15 years ago

Man, with a boss funny as this one, I would have never left the job.

monochromatic• 15 years ago

Boss (via email): Email me the results as soon as this thing is finished.

Me (replying to email within less than a minute): It's already done. Here you go.

    [Hours pass.]

Boss (via telephone): You're still not done with this?

Me: I finished hours ago. I replied to your email right away.

Boss: Oh, I didn't read your response. I thought the results would come via a separate email with a different subject line.

Me: ...

spiffytech• 15 years ago

Headdesk moments like these can be irritating, but if you pay attention when your boss says stuff like this and learn to communicate with them on their terms (e.g. communicating through subject lines where possible for this boss) you will see a world of difference in the ease and efficacy of interacting with them.

ArbitraryLimits2• 15 years ago

Some of these are like Yogi Berra's sayings - they're both stupid and brilliant at the same time. Compare

""You give 100 percent in the first half of the game, and f that isn't enough in the second half you give what's left."

with

"No, I meant, 'How do we fix this with software?'"

cafard• 15 years ago

Cute. But unless a boss describes himself as technically capable, why should I expect him to understand about 3 SELECT statements inside a loop?

preview• 15 years ago

A non-technical boss managing technical employees can lead to problems. It is rare to have a non-technical manager who 1) knows what they know/don't know, and 2) can effectively manage a technical team.

bartonfink3• 15 years ago

That's a fair point, but I'd still expect anyone to understand the part about how it ran fine under a test load, but now runs very slowly under a much larger load.

hkarthik4• 15 years ago

Me: This vendor software you purchased is not going to scale well on EC2, it needs physical hardware to work well. Boss: Well, we don't have time to go purchase physical hardware and get it racked. That'll take 3 months.

...3 months later...

Boss: This stuff isn't scaling, we need to all come in over the weekend to work out the kinks with the production servers. Me: Purchase some hardware and get it racked. EC2 just isn't working out. Boss: I can't. I already sold our executive team on the cloud and we don't have room in our budget for hardware.

...Another 3 months go by... Boss is gone.

joshhart• 15 years ago

But you can get physical hardware on EC2 if you pay for the big instances...

hkarthik4• 15 years ago

They weren't available at the time, and because we were using Windows, they would still have been way out of budget.

PanMan• 15 years ago

A lot of places rent out physical hardware, meaning you won't have to buy it. It might take more time if you have specific needs, but some providers can deploy hardware in minutes.

hkarthik4• 15 years ago

Agreed. I knew his 3 months excuse was a straw man argument but I wasn't in IT so I couldn't argue against it.

The truth came out only after another 3 months of failed scaling when we found out that he'd oversold the benefits of cloud based scaling to the nontechnical leadership.

ary• 15 years ago

On 99% of the projects I've been involved with:

Boss: So you can do <anything> in two weeks then?

Me: No, what I just talked about is a multi-month endeavor.

The reasoning behind this is probably formed from a multitude of influences. Executive desire, manager's attempts to look good, and a complete lack of comprehension of what building software is about all rank high on the list. The one I, for the life of me, cannot understand is why programmers insist on pushing the "I can hack that together in 48 hours" mythology. Surely it has had an effect on the management psyche and influenced the mental math used to conclude that the maximum time it should take any feature to be developed is fourteen days.

bartonfink3• 15 years ago

"Foreign keys don't buy you anything - I leave them out. If we program right, we'll never have inconsistent data anyway."

"Superclasses don't buy you anything - you should just copy the code everywhere that might need it."

"Unit tests are nice, but we should be able to write code that works and not need to rely on tests to tell us that."

No, I'm not there anymore.

highace• 15 years ago

Exactly the same for me and unit tests.

"They're nice, but we can do those once the product is finished". It didn't finish.

nickik• 15 years ago

Well at least he got the thing with the Superclasses right (the first part)

MrFoof• 15 years ago

I keep running into DBAs and data architects that keep trying the "we don't need foreign keys" argument. I always ensure they lose that argument (and stuff gets better, amazing!).

Though in all seriousness, what alternate universe are these people crawling out of?

That and the types who call their j-random database a "data warehouse".

bartonfink3• 15 years ago

This guy's experience was almost entirely with front-end technology (pretty much just JSP's actually), and it showed in almost every engineering decision he made. The sad thing is that, there is an argument to be made for denormalizing data and not using foreign keys. That argument is not "they don't buy you anything."

quicksilver03• 15 years ago

I would be very interested in knowing how you manage to win that argument. The only sure way I know of is in a post-mortem after a major data corruption disaster, so if you can suggest a less dramatic angle of attack I'd love to hear it.

Maxious• 15 years ago

"Directive 595 is as follows: 'Not null constraints give lack of flexibility, more costly evolution, inhibit the use of the database acting as a service to applications and make it an inhibitor to evolution.' As such, please remove from all production databases." To find out how this ends: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Directive-595.aspx

drumdance• 15 years ago

My favorite. Back in the mid-90s I consulted on a Lotus Notes project at a major company. We built a prototype and started showing it various VPs who would be using it.

One of the VPs was really terribly with a mouse. The tutorial was as much about the basics of navigating a GUI as the application itself.

Afterwards I asked the project manager "What does that guy do? He doesn't seem to know anything about computers."

"He's the VP of Technology." (!)

cosmez• 15 years ago

"You're Fired"

that one is pretty famous

Periodic• 15 years ago

This really happened to me in the last month. I was contracted with a company that has a contract to build a company for a bigger client with customers.

PM: We need you to fix a bug. One of our client's customers couldn't complete the form. Me: What error did they get? PM: I don't know, but it's very important we fix this. Me: Do we have steps to reproduce it? PM: No, can't you just fix it? Me: Did they retry the submission process? PM: I don't know. Me: Does it happen often? PM: Just this one customer as far as we know. Me: Well, do we at least know when it happened so I can find it in the logs? PM: Sometime last week. Look, this is really important to the client, can you just make this top priority? We want it fixed ASAP.

The "bug" has not been fixed because the devs still don't even know what the error is. We had another high-priority bug shortly before this because the client didn't understand that something wasn't allowed according to the access rules in the spec they (theoretically) helped write.

mcknz• 15 years ago

Me: I bet you're pretty good with smartphones.

PM: I guess so.

Me holds out phone

Me: Can you fix mine?

PM: I can try, what's wrong with it?

davidhansen2• 15 years ago

I'm not calling you a liar, but I'm skeptical about stories like this. I can't even fathom any scenario in which someone more intelligent than a cucumber could behave in this manner. How does this PM manage to get and maintain any job at all, let alone one that requires the ability to understand software development process and constraints?

dugmartin• 15 years ago

I've lived through many bug reports like this, mostly from very non-technical PM's who think that their power is derived from being the single point of communication between the client and the developers. Its a sad and bizarre game of telephone.

Natsu4• 15 years ago

It wasn't a PM or anyone technical, but I can confirm that people of "cucumber" intelligence do, in fact, exist in management and that I have personally met them and been ready to tear my hear out during exchanges like:

"We had an error!" "What error?" "Who cares? Fix it!"

In an unrelated note, I think I'm going to start calling such useless reports cucumbers.

protomyth• 15 years ago

I once thought as you do that this story or the hundreds of others like it were just exaggerations or failed comic sketch scripts. I once couldn't even comprehend where the humor came from in Dilbert.

Then I worked in government, health care, and big business as an employee and a contractor which allowed me to the great opportunity to meet these very people. This type of behavior is particularly common in companies that like to see managers move around so they can get experience in many parts of the business. In many companies it is actually regarded as a plus to supervise technical people without understanding anything about the technical process or some failed programmer becomes a manager.

quanticle2• 15 years ago

How long have you worked in software and which companies have you worked at? I'm asking because these PMs tend to come from smaller companies whose main job isn't IT related. In a lot of these places, the "IT Director" is the CEO's friend or family member, and the IT department is simply a holding area to keep them out of trouble.

ww520• 15 years ago

It is the bosses who don't understand things but just want things get done. Consider their role as the pressure amplifier. They just increase the pressure, I meant priority, of the problem when the clients scream. They drive the process. They don't solve problem.

oscardelben• 15 years ago

You would be surprised..

aaronbrethorst2• 15 years ago

I had a client once who did this to me all the time. Drove me nuts.

phzbOx2• 15 years ago

  One month ago: 
  
  me: Hey, everything is alright with project X?
  boss: Yep, perfect.  
  
  Next monday, employee call me.
  employee: Can you walk me through the code.
  * me explains everything* 
  employee: Ok, just to let you know you are fire.
  me: :-/ Why?
  employee: Boss will call you
  me: ok
  
  next day, boss don't call
  I write an e-mail
  No answer
  Another email 6-7 hours later
  Boss: Sorry, I'm really busy. Calling you tomorrow  
  
  *Tomorrow*
  no call
  *next day, for a week*
  no call.
  
  I go to the office to talk to him. 
  boss: I have a meeting, I have to run. I'll call you when I get back.
  
  And he still haven't call me back, and I have no idea why I got fired.

littlebird• 15 years ago

Your name isn't Buttle is it?

phzbOx2• 15 years ago

I don't know if it was a joke I didn't understand, but no my name isn't Buttle..

ScottBurson• 15 years ago

Your ex-boss is a liar and a weasel who doesn't even have the guts to fire you himself.

LearnYouALisp2• 15 years ago

Maybe they decided they could pay someone less who could maintain the code after you explained it to them. :P

Create• 15 years ago

As surprising as it may seem, this is far more common than you might think. Welcome to the club (ie. Real World)! Now, that you know how to spot a liar:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/pamela_meyer_how_to_spot_a_...

and weasels:

1986 - Work is Hell from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_in_Hell

The best for you is to move on without any worries, and never look back! (Matt and the TED talks use the word walk away ...or run :)

Zarathust• 15 years ago

Monday : Ticket 453 is your top priority, fix it asap.

Tuesday : Ticket 923 is your new top priority, fix it asap.

Wenesday : Client xyz needs ticket 1921 to be resolved, this is your new top priority, fix it asap.

Thursday : ...

You get the pattern. Running around with duck tape makes awesome products in the long run

dsolomon• 15 years ago

You work for the government don't you?

16s2• 15 years ago

The best compliment I got from a boss once:

"Normally, fuck-ups like this take three guys a week to fix. One guy fixed your fuck-up in two hours. You don't fuck-up as well as most."

rokhayakebe3• 15 years ago

"One smart man mistake, another smart man can fix. One idiot's mistake, 20 smart men cannot fix."

zem4• 15 years ago

i can really empathise with the "start the year off right" commenter - my last boss (ceo of the company) once insisted on several long phone conferences during the christmas break, so we could "hit the ground running" when we returned. he was a firm believer in permanent-crisis mode.

badclient• 15 years ago

Boss: Do you know excel? I need to make this graph look better

Me: Okay, what do you wanna change?

Boss: Well I want them to show things going up, especially towards the end so it shows us really growing to the VCs

Me: How is that possible?

Boss: It's definitely possible. I just don't know Excel.

rufibarbatus2• 15 years ago

As a financial consultant, I get a lot of graphs with downright preposterous aspect ratios on a weekly basis.

babebridou3• 15 years ago

This quote from the OP hit home.

    Me:   The program was written with 3 SQL selects 
    inside a loop. It ran OK when we had 500 parts. 
    Now that we have 10,000 parts, it runs real slow.
    Boss: I don't understand.

I could say "true story" here... with a twist. Saying "I don't understand" is basic social engineering & management 101. The boss actually understood every single word and implication in that statement, he just wants to buy some time to decide silently on the best answer. Saying "I don't understand" puts the pressure on the dev who is lead to believe it's his fault and needs to think of a better description, maybe less technical and more to the point to express the problem. While the dev reformulates, the boss has finished thinking of an answer and can give it instantly. In the end, the dev has managed to express a problem with "simple" words, and the boss has proved he has great skills at solving problems once they are reported in the correct form.

I hated my boss when he did it to me, but I have to admit I used this in turn countless times when I became "the boss", to the point it's become a private joke in my former company, anyone saying "I don't understand", whatever their position, instantly got thrown balls or clips in their face.

scottyallen• 15 years ago

I don't understand...

calloc2• 15 years ago

Whenever people ask me questions I will throw back the "I don't understand", and mean it. Sometimes their questions are inane and I really don't have an answer for it, but many other times the biggest issue is that people aren't giving me a clear view of what they want when they are asking me.

"What is it you are trying to accomplish?" is usually my second question after "I don't understand". Hopefully I can find out what exactly they are trying to accomplish and what they have now to help them.

delinka2• 15 years ago

Boss: I don't understand

Me: Call me when you do.

/me walks out

No, seriously-- I don't have time for this kind of bull. I'm not managing my boss, I'm working. And this gets in the way of working.

babebridou3• 15 years ago

Well, as much as I agree with you from a personal perspective, I'm afraid it is part of your job to manage your boss, just like it's part of your job to build your team, build yourself, build your product, build your users and build your customers.

Anyway I walked out due to interlocutor stupidity exactly once:

    Random guy that one of ours helped (for free) a year
    before barges in and asks to talk to the manager, 
    someone points him at me.
    Guy: I *demand* to talk to you about what someone from
    your team did last year. It's bad.
    Me: Sure, I'm not familiar with the story as I took
    charge only last month, and I'm in a pinch for some 
    urgent business. Your thing looks urgent too, let's
    schedule an appointement at noon.
    Guy walks out mumbling to himself.

Noon - the following are EXACT QUOTES:

    Me : So how can we help?
    Guy : you guys did this last year. We can't use it.
    Me : what's the problem? Did something new come up?
    Guy : I think the problem is that whoever did this is
    incompetent.
    Me : woah, I didn't expect I'd have time for lunch 
    today.
    /me walks out, goes to superior, tells story, the next
    day the guy in question gets shelved.

clawrencewenham2• 15 years ago

Boss: "This new feature is similar to one that's already in another program, so you can just copy that code. You can do that in a couple of hours, right?"

Me (coining a metaphor): "The fuel distributor in a Pratt & Whitney Turbojet engine will not work in a Norelco Electric Shaver, even though both can be used to cut grass."

When you combine gross underestimation of effort with the re-prioritization cycle, you get a monster that probably destroys millions of hours of productivity every year around the world. As soon as it becomes clear that the project won't get done as early as expected, the boss re-assigns you to a new priority. What would have taken 4 weeks to do 3 projects now takes 4 months and only results in the completion of one.

SeanLuke• 15 years ago

Is it me or has this guy quit from an awful lot of jobs? I'm not sure I'd hire someone so transient.

akg• 15 years ago

Boss: We have too many customer support calls. Can you work on fixing the open tickets so that these issues go away.

Me: Sure thing.

Boss (2 hrs later): Why aren't you answering the phone for our customer support calls!?

yuvipanda• 15 years ago

You get to the point when you no longer believe a word of what they say.

And then you quit.

16s2• 15 years ago

I had a boss once who thought IPv6 had something to do with car engines. I kid you not.

Hominem• 15 years ago

One Sunday I got a call from a help desk guy involving an application I had worked on. This was the first call I had ever gotten about this app. I am pretty sure I was last on the contact list PM calls me 10 minutes later and says we need to discuss my level of commitment, Says I have been shirking my duty and letting everyone else handle support. All I could say is that it was the first call I had ever gotten, maybe bump me up on the call list. He didn't know there was a call list they followed in sequence, still I should have been doing more.

I made sure this guy never PMed me again.

matwood2• 15 years ago

Recently...

Mgmt: We need to replace this system ASAP! Me: What does it do? Mgmt: We don't know. Me: Who knows? Mgmt: Maybe this girl. Girl: I'm too busy to talk, but make sure nothing breaks.

I did end up writing a replacement system. What I found out was all the people who were 'too busy' to talk or email me back with information suddenly responded when I took down their part of the system as I worked to replace it. I've never had to do a worse project and I'm happy it's over.

doktrin• 15 years ago

Humorous, however the following is actually a semi pet peeve of mine :

Boss: I'm really upset that no one has updated me on Project 127. Me: I cc'd you on all 9 Project 127 emails I sent this week. Boss: I haven't had time to get caught up on my email.

Depending on the scale and structure of the company / department, getting "caught up on emails" can range from "completely reasonable" to "fundamentally impossible".

For example, at a previous job we received no less than 250 work emails daily and often more. Needless to say, simply being CC'd was not a guarantee the recipient would be up to speed on the contents of said email string.

damncabbage• 15 years ago

But would you complain that no-one's given you an update? There are better ways to get status updates than pointing fingers.

kellishaver2• 15 years ago

My own "never have I been so glad to leave a job" story:

Me: I think it's time for me to move on. To be quite honest, I see no potential for advancement here and I'm being expected to work dozens of hours of unpaid overtime each month. As we've discussed previously, my hourly rate is already low compared to industry standards and my experience level, and you've told me that the funds simply aren't available to rectify that. I sympathize with your position, and I wish everyone here nothing but the best, but that still doesn't change the fact that this job simply isn't paying well enough to cover my expenses.

Boss: I wish I could talk you out of it, but if that's really what you want to do, I can't stop you... but honestly, I don't think you're good enough to make it anywhere else.

Terretta• 15 years ago

Noticed you both have to point out when you're being honest, as though the default is dishonesty. Must have been quite a culture of misrepresentation.

kellishaver2• 15 years ago

It was my first job out of college. I was, however, a fair bit older when I graduated and did have a few years of experience freelancing, but this was my first time working in a corporate environment.

The whole company culture was one of distrust. We would be told in meetings, for example, that the we were to lie to the sales team about product details and were regularly encouraged to infringe on copyrights when doing design work.

The ethics were a huge part of why I left the company as well, but it wasn't a battle I was going to win. I'd tried before and failed, so at that point, I just didn't bring it up.

coenhyde• 15 years ago

Here's one. I ended up hating this place. I stuck around way too long.

Jim: We need to be first search result on Google by Monday.

Me: It doesn't really work like that. We can buy ads on google though.

Jim: No I don't want to spend any money. What do we need to do to get to the top of google by Monday?

Me: Well we can implementing some of the SEO improvements we have been suggesting for the last year. But we won't get to the top of Google by Monday.

Jim: We need to be first search result on Google by Monday. What do we have to do to be the first result on Google by Monday?

....

Conversation repeats its self 3 times, while I patiently explain how google works.

...

Me: You really have to stop asking that question, it doesn't work like that.

Business Partner: NO! WE NEED TO BE AT THE TOP OF GOOGLE BY MONDAY!

I was a partner at this place. I left after many repeats of similar discussions.

Oh god this place gave me nose bleeds. I have to stop thinking about it now.

Famous Last Words by Bosses I've Had

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