IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

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Koushirou

Log Wizard
<Gold Donor>
5,183
13,117
Had a much bigger rant written out, but doubt anyone cares that much to read it, but having similar damn problems. Just stuck duct-taping together PoC applications that were built 10 years ago that are the lifeblood of the business unit. I’m the sole point of failure for getting content built and released once assets are done because no one else knows how this pile of shit works and no one else wants to know. But because “it works” I can’t get any approval or help to modernize this fucking piece of shit. Then they bitch about why do things take so long and why do I never have time to work on tickets for the team I’m actually part of now (which I don’t know why I was even added, I’ve barely been able to touch any of that work).

We had a kaizen three years ago going over my clusterfuck of a process and finally got people higher up the chain to see how broken and un-scalable this shit is and we got approval for a project to update the infrastructure and then automate almost the entire process. We finished the MVP of phase 1 of one piece of the infrastructure, got congratulated on fixing the problem and were taken off it. Nothing is fixed, everything still sucks and I’m still doing the exact same crap as three years ago just with different problems.

Fucking sick of sitting here essentially alone in a closet babysitting retard code while everyone else is working on shiny new projects that they can actually feel proud of and see results with. My manager told me for years now that he’s going to try to get me away from this shit, but it’s fucking inescapable. I’m not learning shit and there’s no advancement for me. Takes a lot of bullshit for me to leave something I’m comfortable in, but other shit these past couple of weeks which is too long and stupid to write in a post is honestly making me want to quit.
 
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moonarchia

The Scientific Shitlord
24,308
45,656
Had a much bigger rant written out, but doubt anyone cares that much to read it, but having similar damn problems. Just stuck duct-taping together PoC applications that were built 10 years ago that are the lifeblood of the business unit. I’m the sole point of failure for getting content built and released once assets are done because no one else knows how this pile of shit works and no one else wants to know. But because “it works” I can’t get any approval or help to modernize this fucking piece of shit. Then they bitch about why do things take so long and why do I never have time to work on tickets for the team I’m actually part of now (which I don’t know why I was even added, I’ve barely been able to touch any of that work).

We had a kaizen three years ago going over my clusterfuck of a process and finally got people higher up the chain to see how broken and un-scalable this shit is and we got approval for a project to update the infrastructure and then automate almost the entire process. We finished the MVP of phase 1 of one piece of the infrastructure, got congratulated on fixing the problem and were taken off it. Nothing is fixed, everything still sucks and I’m still doing the exact same crap as three years ago just with different problems.

Fucking sick of sitting here essentially alone in a closet babysitting retard code while everyone else is working on shiny new projects that they can actually feel proud of and see results with. My manager told me for years now that he’s going to try to get me away from this shit, but it’s fucking inescapable. I’m not learning shit and there’s no advancement for me. Takes a lot of bullshit for me to leave something I’m comfortable in, but other shit these past couple of weeks which is too long and stupid to write in a post is honestly making me want to quit.
You are approaching it the wrong way. If you are the only one able to maintain a business critical process/system, then you tell your boss what your salary and workplace environment expectations are effective immediately to prevent you from moving on to something new. If they try to phase that system out or try to make you train your own replacement just walk. If they are stupid/cheap enough to put themselves in that situation they deserve nothing less. You aren't going to get what you want from a corporation by being a hard worker and hoping the C level appreciates that.
 
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Siliconemelons

Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
12,124
18,220
Having worked for a company neigh 20 years..and being a super pro company guy will do anything. After now being away from them…

Moon is absolutely right
 
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Noodleface

A Mod Real Quick
38,319
16,206
We (3 firmware groups) were asked today if we could hit a 7/22 target freeze. Two of the groups have not started and we are the only one that has. We're still a ways out. Long story short, we got fucked by hardware availability.

Anyways one of the firmware groups threw me under the bus and called out my group for the sole reason they haven't started. Never saw red so fast in my life. Write a scathing email to the entire functional team and CCed up through my senior director and his senior director. Homey don't play that shit.

The gist of my reply was "if I'm blocking you why is this the first I've fuckin heard of it?" My senior director pulled me aside and liked that reply. Fuckin dicks.
 
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Haus

<Silver Donator>
13,063
50,967
View attachment 537305

Manager asks for estimate for new feature, give estimate, “sounds high”, readjust, as usual doesn’t go according to plan, manager asks opinion on moving timeline, I say “looking at historical data we absolutely should”, manager ignores me, must get feature out despite it not being mission critical, we ship a half baked feature, I spend the next 2 months ironing out issues due to shipping half baked feature. Management assures me lesson learned and “we will no longer will work backwards from deadlines”, slight hope for change emerges, cycle repeats.

😫

The point is pretty simple. Every manager up and down the chain needs to prove THEY are the magical manager who moves the needle for the company, at least in the eyes of whoever they report to.

So each one wants to make things either happen faster, cost less, or both. The number of managers a request/requirement passes through determines how many steps of "I bet I can get this done 10% faster/cheaper" you get, and they're cumulative.
 
  • 1Like
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moonarchia

The Scientific Shitlord
24,308
45,656
Had a much bigger rant written out, but doubt anyone cares that much to read it, but having similar damn problems. Just stuck duct-taping together PoC applications that were built 10 years ago that are the lifeblood of the business unit. I’m the sole point of failure for getting content built and released once assets are done because no one else knows how this pile of shit works and no one else wants to know. But because “it works” I can’t get any approval or help to modernize this fucking piece of shit. Then they bitch about why do things take so long and why do I never have time to work on tickets for the team I’m actually part of now (which I don’t know why I was even added, I’ve barely been able to touch any of that work).

We had a kaizen three years ago going over my clusterfuck of a process and finally got people higher up the chain to see how broken and un-scalable this shit is and we got approval for a project to update the infrastructure and then automate almost the entire process. We finished the MVP of phase 1 of one piece of the infrastructure, got congratulated on fixing the problem and were taken off it. Nothing is fixed, everything still sucks and I’m still doing the exact same crap as three years ago just with different problems.

Fucking sick of sitting here essentially alone in a closet babysitting retard code while everyone else is working on shiny new projects that they can actually feel proud of and see results with. My manager told me for years now that he’s going to try to get me away from this shit, but it’s fucking inescapable. I’m not learning shit and there’s no advancement for me. Takes a lot of bullshit for me to leave something I’m comfortable in, but other shit these past couple of weeks which is too long and stupid to write in a post is honestly making me want to quit.
Here is exactly what I would say to your manager, in email or in person with the email afterwards just for a paper trail:

"Hello Boss, depending upon your response this may be my last day supporting <X>, which saves our company $Ym per year. In my current role this is not a product I officially support, and my salary is far too low to continue to be the sole supporting developer. Going forward you will need to change my salary to $ZZZk per year effective immediately, and my job title to whatever it needs to be to support that. I will report directly to you or the CTO. If I do not get this in writing from you by the end of the day, you will need to find someone else to support <X> immediately, as I will no longer be doing so. My current job title is <A>, and my team has other issues they need me to be working on. Please talk to whoever you need to in Finance and HR to make this happen."

This will either 1) get you $$$ to make the bullshit worth it, so tell him what you actually want to make to make it worthwhile to you, 2) get you off of working with <X> so you can do whatever it is your team actually does, or 3) get you fired, so be ready for that if you go through with it. Have your resume ready, and get it out there yesterday. A female with serious dev creds is something HR drools over, so you might find something better fast anyways.

Don't worry about rocking the boat, for <X> you *are* the boat. If they want to keep using it they will either have to give you what you want, or pay someone else a shitload to take that up, either in house or via support contract with the company who made it. Once the ultimatum is laid down just stick to your guns and let the chips fall where they may.
 
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TomServo

<Bronze Donator>
7,177
10,516
Guess I'm not logging in tomorrow.

Working from phone. My engineers been on call since 1am est
 
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TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
<Gold Donor>
43,068
110,094
We (3 firmware groups) were asked today if we could hit a 7/22 target freeze. Two of the groups have not started and we are the only one that has. We're still a ways out. Long story short, we got fucked by hardware availability.

Anyways one of the firmware groups threw me under the bus and called out my group for the sole reason they haven't started. Never saw red so fast in my life. Write a scathing email to the entire functional team and CCed up through my senior director and his senior director. Homey don't play that shit.

The gist of my reply was "if I'm blocking you why is this the first I've fuckin heard of it?" My senior director pulled me aside and liked that reply. Fuckin dicks.

This sounds familiar.

For whatever reason I was given this project to build an entire solution alone. But of the 6 platforms the other team was using I had used 0 of them other than writing python before in general. I had also never done anything with DevOps or anything like that. Somewhere along the way the director of their teams (we all fall under the same VP) started complaining that I wasn't finishing fast enough. To such an extent that he felt the need to tell my manager he was going to take the project from me for being "incompetent" and not finishing fast enough.

Nevermind that their own project is nowhere near ready for a variety of reasons. Which is fine, okay deal with it. Why am I the problem if you have 30 other problems? They want to go live for a customer account by 1AUGUST. Which most likely will not be happening. My project was so important its not even on their go live checklist. I asked him why I am not on there if its so important. he shrugged me off.

We had a meeting with that director the other week where I had to show my shit working end to end or he would "take the project from me for people more competent." Faggot didn't say a single word when it did every single thing he never bothered to list requirements for.

He tried to throw me under the bus for not setting up end to end alerting and notifications for it. At the last second he said this project had to work end to end with the production alerting system. Some tool called OpsGenie. Yet another thing I know nothing about. I ask around and see how people are doing this and get this integrated to New Relic, yet another stupid ass thing to learn as I knew I could have it touch OpsGenie like he wanted. I had like 2 days to put that together.

It isn't like its super difficult but everything takes time. You want me to learn how to push shit to New Relic, whatever that is, and setup a bunch of dumbass alert conditions for it when you have an entire team of SREs who you pay to do all of this, but still dump it on me to figure it out. Why? I had originally just opened a SRE ticket to have them do all of it. Guy comes back and says it will take too long we need this working RIGHT NOW!
 

Borzak

Bronze Baron of the Realm
25,817
33,711
Someone said their wife worked at a large national grocery chain and they are 5 minutes from opening in one time zone and nope, not yet they're down. Be some interesting videos of this stays down for a while especially airlines.
 

Palum

what Suineg set it to
27,222
42,996
Interesting. I thought we'd have tons of vendor and client impact but not really so far. I'm wondering what the deal is.

Lmao though mail server might be down so maybe there's more under the covers. At least all our major apps are up.

This is why I'm floored every time I tell people I want 100% out of band backups and DR and they tell us it's too risky.
 
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Borzak

Bronze Baron of the Realm
25,817
33,711
My girlfriend texted from the hospital she works at as a nurse. Some departments are not doing well, but others seem okay. She's a OR nurse and said they are still scheduled for procedures but the in hospital pharmacy is lagging. Friday always seemed like an odd day to schedule that but it's one of her busier days.
 

Asshat Foler

2024 FoH Asshat
<Gold Donor>
48,194
43,397
Rip anyone dealing with crowd strike.
Lol. Had a recruiter call with CS like 2 months ago. Job sounded awful. 20% of their company is in Israel and a large majority in India. Sounded like they had an India team spinning up a new project that had a gov cloud aspect to it and needed a US citizen to be the monkey turning the wrenches in the US. Hard pass. Dodged a bullet.
 
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TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
<Gold Donor>
43,068
110,094
Interesting. I thought we'd have tons of vendor and client impact but not really so far. I'm wondering what the deal is.

Lmao though mail server might be down so maybe there's more under the covers. At least all our major apps are up.

This is why I'm floored every time I tell people I want 100% out of band backups and DR and they tell us it's too risky.
We have tons of Azure Data Factories driving lots of our critical processes. None of them seem to work currently. Likely due to them all being modified VMs individually.

So even our alerting of shit not working is down. lol.
 
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Palum

what Suineg set it to
27,222
42,996
We have tons of Azure Data Factories driving lots of our critical processes. None of them seem to work currently. Likely due to them all being modified VMs individually.

So even our alerting of shit not working is down. lol.
Yea thankfully we have a lot of Linux but still enough win servers to fuck things up. I'm kinda shocked none of our prod env got hit. I don't know the details of CS admin so I don't know if they have the concept of update groups which might be the saving grace.