IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.
- Thread starter Traak
- Start date
- 518
- 210
Might I suggest considering rethinking your workflow & org hierarchy in terms of virtual desktops?
Depending on workflow you want, you can tweak and customize filesystem perspective using links to create custom views by desktop instead of squishing all into taskbar. Been doing this forever on X11 & Unix, Win10 has virtual desk support built in now.
That sounds neat but way beyond our capabilities. I need to be able to implement it on a pc where i need admin rights to delete some desktop shortcuts.
Big_w_powah
Trakanon Raider
- 1,887
- 750
Windows Key+Tab, create virtual desktop.
Windows key+ctrl+left or right to switch between virtual desktops.
Saves my fucking hide. I use one for each project I work on.
Windows key+ctrl+left or right to switch between virtual desktops.
Saves my fucking hide. I use one for each project I work on.
TJT
Mr. Poopybutthole
- 40,948
- 102,790
Friends, I come to you with a tale of Corporate IT and stupid decisions that make no sense. But are now highly beneficial to me. Little long so beware!
I've told y'all before that I work at General Motors. I worked as a dev in the Finance department mostly doing database related work. But I am not a DBA... I really do a lot of things. Anyway. So until last year Finance was paired with our Data Warehousing department. But we are now two separate entities.
Typical corporate power struggle shit I imagine. Anyway, the talent on the data warehousing team is abysmal. I'm talking "Java Devs" who I had to explain what a break point was two years ago. During that time they haven't much improved and their general data tasks are quite similar to ours. Just on a somewhat larger scale. Myself and another guy have created a ton of automated tools for data profiling, detecting anomalies, verifying data for ETL, and so on to enable our QA to focus on other stuff. I've since been doing a lot of architecture work as I was promoted a while ago to Junior System Architect.
These guys seriously had a team of 4 people doing "data verification" with their eyeballs for 80 hours a week comparing raw inputs. I have no idea why this was put up with... but I didn't have to work with them much so I just avoided them. Because god damn that's stupid. The director of our dual department outright said no my boss about wanting to integrate our automation due to some ego crap. They were basically in 24/7 damage control because they took forever to do anything, couldn't automate regression testing and had no way of really knowing the state of their projects at any given time. Just poor, poor management going on.
Last year I developed an automated reporting application that tracks project progress (SCRUM tasks for example), pulls QA metrics, tracks deliverables/milestones by just pulling all of this data and hosting it on a desktop DB I put together. Then designed a few basic reports and a dashboard type application for all of it and leveraged SharePoint's native functionality to have all of these project reports email out to their teams daily. Took me awhile to train all these fools to use it as people hate change and were apparently cool spending 4 hours a day putting reports together. God. But also due to corporate crap I was never given resources to host this application and its still running on some shitty dell desktop that's 5 years old sitting on my desk. about 270 project reports go out on this thing daily across the two departments now. It is pretty much integral to both department's operation... Warehousing bros have no idea who operates it or care as they never contact me for anything. But the application is extremely ad hoc and I wrote all of it and it is technically shadow IT and I didn't follow any of the official rules when I created it.
I've been refining it here and there but it is pretty hands off. After our restructuring warehousing got a new director in who basically just went, "WTF" on the entire warehousing team because they haven't automated shit and nearly had an aneurysm when they told him regression testing for some project would take 40 fucking days. He finds his way to the dashboard app and contacts me to explain its features.
Rekt the meeting with him on Friday and now I am in prime position to get to a lead dev position to get this shit integrated between the two departments along with all of our other data tools. So I can actually get some server space and free reign to do what the fuck I want. So I am pretty excited now. Because of the nature of the data, I essentially forced standardization across the two departments without realizing it and other departments are still wild west.
Going to be some sweet bullet points for performance/bonus as I save a TON of hours with this and can now actually use it as its being picked up officially. Before it couldn't count to my career here at all.
2017 gonna be gud son! Sorry for the long winded rant. But I thought some of you may enjoy.
I've told y'all before that I work at General Motors. I worked as a dev in the Finance department mostly doing database related work. But I am not a DBA... I really do a lot of things. Anyway. So until last year Finance was paired with our Data Warehousing department. But we are now two separate entities.
Typical corporate power struggle shit I imagine. Anyway, the talent on the data warehousing team is abysmal. I'm talking "Java Devs" who I had to explain what a break point was two years ago. During that time they haven't much improved and their general data tasks are quite similar to ours. Just on a somewhat larger scale. Myself and another guy have created a ton of automated tools for data profiling, detecting anomalies, verifying data for ETL, and so on to enable our QA to focus on other stuff. I've since been doing a lot of architecture work as I was promoted a while ago to Junior System Architect.
These guys seriously had a team of 4 people doing "data verification" with their eyeballs for 80 hours a week comparing raw inputs. I have no idea why this was put up with... but I didn't have to work with them much so I just avoided them. Because god damn that's stupid. The director of our dual department outright said no my boss about wanting to integrate our automation due to some ego crap. They were basically in 24/7 damage control because they took forever to do anything, couldn't automate regression testing and had no way of really knowing the state of their projects at any given time. Just poor, poor management going on.
Last year I developed an automated reporting application that tracks project progress (SCRUM tasks for example), pulls QA metrics, tracks deliverables/milestones by just pulling all of this data and hosting it on a desktop DB I put together. Then designed a few basic reports and a dashboard type application for all of it and leveraged SharePoint's native functionality to have all of these project reports email out to their teams daily. Took me awhile to train all these fools to use it as people hate change and were apparently cool spending 4 hours a day putting reports together. God. But also due to corporate crap I was never given resources to host this application and its still running on some shitty dell desktop that's 5 years old sitting on my desk. about 270 project reports go out on this thing daily across the two departments now. It is pretty much integral to both department's operation... Warehousing bros have no idea who operates it or care as they never contact me for anything. But the application is extremely ad hoc and I wrote all of it and it is technically shadow IT and I didn't follow any of the official rules when I created it.
I've been refining it here and there but it is pretty hands off. After our restructuring warehousing got a new director in who basically just went, "WTF" on the entire warehousing team because they haven't automated shit and nearly had an aneurysm when they told him regression testing for some project would take 40 fucking days. He finds his way to the dashboard app and contacts me to explain its features.
Rekt the meeting with him on Friday and now I am in prime position to get to a lead dev position to get this shit integrated between the two departments along with all of our other data tools. So I can actually get some server space and free reign to do what the fuck I want. So I am pretty excited now. Because of the nature of the data, I essentially forced standardization across the two departments without realizing it and other departments are still wild west.
Going to be some sweet bullet points for performance/bonus as I save a TON of hours with this and can now actually use it as its being picked up officially. Before it couldn't count to my career here at all.
2017 gonna be gud son! Sorry for the long winded rant. But I thought some of you may enjoy.
- 2
- 24,487
- 45,378
To explain how stupid IT can be though, and how dumb IT managers can be, I had a friend that automated regression testing at a job and made all his unit tests run in an ant task (tells you how long ago it was I guess) and it was flawless, excellent work. He came and told them he could handle more work since he had automated everything and had little to do. Got fired because they said if his job was so easy he could automate it, then someone else could take that over and they could save headcount.
I shit you not. Was completely pants on head retarded.
- 1
Noodleface
A Mod Real Quick
- 37,961
- 14,508
- 16,395
- 7,395
- 24,487
- 45,378
I probably would have thought it was a dilbert cartoon punchline if I didn't actually know the person it happened to.
TJT
Mr. Poopybutthole
- 40,948
- 102,790
I would have just laughed in their faces. Okay retards, later. Get a new job by end of the week.
I was quite blown away by the old manager of the warehousing team outright refusing to use the tools that would save... thousands of hours on their tasks. Keep comparing raw data with your eyes man! It isn't like there's not tons of other work to do. But if that happened to me, the second I shutdown the application would be lulzy.
The 500 or so people we have as staff would have their operations basically crash.
TJT
Mr. Poopybutthole
- 40,948
- 102,790
Not allowed to because this ad hoc tool isn't on our application landscape. Like I can only show my good/bad work on projects I was actually tasked to work on. If I innovate within those projects I can but this is not the case here.
Its just how they do stuff, it is kind of dumb. To be clear I meant internal performance review, not like my linkedin profile or something.
Noodleface
A Mod Real Quick
- 37,961
- 14,508
- 16,395
- 7,395
Ah, ok, that makes sense.
Also, thanks for reminding me I still spend 1-4 hours a day reviewing test regression results Some of it needs to be looked at by a human since it product behavior but I wouldn't be surprised if most of the work couldn't be automated away. It's kind a catch 22 in that we spend test team spends so much time reviewing results we have no time improve the damn system itself.
Also, thanks for reminding me I still spend 1-4 hours a day reviewing test regression results
Some of it needs to be looked at by a human since it product behavior but I wouldn't be surprised if most of the work couldn't be automated away. It's kind a catch 22 in that we spend test team spends so much time reviewing results we have no time improve the damn system itself.
Big_w_powah
Trakanon Raider
- 1,887
- 750
Hell yeah TJT.
An update on my status: My job postings went out Friday; I've got 5 guys I want to bring in this week to interview.
So fucking weird going from stuggling a year ago needing a job, to now hiring fucking people; This company has been a fucking surreal whirlwind, but I'm gettin shit done now.
An update on my status: My job postings went out Friday; I've got 5 guys I want to bring in this week to interview.
So fucking weird going from stuggling a year ago needing a job, to now hiring fucking people; This company has been a fucking surreal whirlwind, but I'm gettin shit done now.
TJT
Mr. Poopybutthole
- 40,948
- 102,790
Ah, ok, that makes sense.
Also, thanks for reminding me I still spend 1-4 hours a day reviewing test regression results
I'll post an example of what some of mine do later, but it isn't like a super intelligent/fancy report. I spent a few hours creating them in SSRS and called it good. If I actually get the keys to the kingdom and can directly query our databases I'll start using Tableau because its prettier. It just shows the milestones/defects/performance results/test results with a red/yellow/green indicator calculation for all of it. When they email out via SharePoint that's when the team can act on them if there's failures and defects and shit.
Our enterprise tools team doesn't let you do that though. But you can still query through the API and they're too dumb to realize that. My local DB I designed for this is much more streamlined than the 3 different systems I would have to design queries to get what I currently have. But I don't want to generate an pseudo-OLAP like I'm doing now if I don't have to in the future.
Wintermute
<Charitable Administrator>
- 2,361
- 669
Ooh some sharepoint people in here?
I have a guy at work that is tweaking our calendars on sharepoint. Right now there is a little +Add button on each day of the calendar. He wants to have only one of those at the top of the calendar since all it does is open a new form that you can select the date.
Is this possible? I told him I would look into it but it's low on my priority list.
I have a guy at work that is tweaking our calendars on sharepoint. Right now there is a little +Add button on each day of the calendar. He wants to have only one of those at the top of the calendar since all it does is open a new form that you can select the date.
Is this possible? I told him I would look into it but it's low on my priority list.