So, it's the boss's _n_tieth birthday soon. His PR has decided we should organise a surprise party. We're still kidding ourselves we're a "family run company" - that moment passed about a year before I joined, and I've been here a couple of years. Interestingly we're a "family company" when it comes to expectations of flexibility about our responsibilities as employees, but not a "family company" when it comes to employer flexibility, and we're accruing HR policies at a rate of knots. The upper echelons can't figure out why few so people have agreed to attend because in their heads this is still a family business, so they are trying to three-line whip it. Two days ago an e-mail went out about a collection. Unlike other collections, it's been made pretty obvious that everyone is expected we'd donate. An e-mail was sent yesterday that the collection envelope would be arriving in our office, presumably anointed with holy chrism so we had no excuse not to have cash on us. Worse, staff members who are well known to be struggling have had to pitch in, though the amount was noticeably lower than a normal member of staff collection - I assume people aren't keen to donate to a man whose car wheels cost more than any single car in the car-park. Today another e-mail. We're all to report to the car-park, wearing insert company name here branded clothes, so we can have a collective photo taken - so it turns out we are performing monkeys too.:mad: Not the boss's fault any of this, and he's certainly earned his money - but the expectation is galling.

Where I've work has decided to run a "selfie" competition on Facebook, so we've naturally advertised it on our site. So far so OK. Last night I noticed something odd: The advert points at one of the online games we have (completely unrelated to the selfie comp, other than both being run by us), rather than the facebook page. Shurely shome mishtake? The work was done in a rush as we're short staffed, the dev who did this originally was going off on his hollibobs, and we had server problems, so I assumed an oversight had happened. No on in our in-country office is available (they're one hour ahead and had gone home) so I raise a work-ticket and ready the fix for approval in the morning. Pretty insane to have an advert for an off-site competition and not link to the competition. I've just had a phone call from marketing. They're not happy as they don't like the idea of taking the player "off the site" with a link :OMG: :WTF:. Despite the fact linked game (or a link of any kind) isn't mentioned in the ticket anywhere, they actually wanted this. I've managed to convince them that a non-clickable advert is better than one that takes you to some random game.

Some chump is sitting in corner, looking at his colleagues like a maniac giggling his head off, he doesn't even realise I've spiked the tea supply with LSD. Serves them right though, they shouldn't have put ex-lax in the coffee, I've barely been off the pot today.

Made a quick trip over to the web team today, the employer is obviously spoiling them with much better coffee than the rest of us need to suffer, so I knicked their jar of the good stuff. That'll show them. Excuse me, I just need to go to the toilet.

From that you took the estimation process was bad? :) OK it was, but that was the least of the worries, frankly when I moved on to the thing my mind was 90% made up to go (the other 10% was just to see if the rabbit hole was as deep as I though), so I just lived with it until I had my exit strategy. I couldn't figure out the whys of the estimation (the manager had recently been a dev himself so he must have known it was way out yet he behaved as if it was all good). My guess is there was a certain amount of moral hazard in the project and the crystal ball estimation was done on a basis of:

• It kept the upper managers quiet - for a fantastically long time - if you are drowning you don't complain if some keeps throwing a leaky rings at you, as long as you can use them to keep your head above water.
• It allowed the middle managers to keep escalating the commitment, i.e. stopping a politically embarrassing re-write.
• It helped them convince / placate greener devs that joining the project would not be a long term or bad thing. Not that there was much choice.

On point 3 - I knew that the estimate was BS at each stage I heard it, including at joining the project. Part of the problem was we'd discover new flaws as we worked through, not only with the system but the process the system tried to represent, so as we ticked features off the list new ones would appear, but it didn't justify or explain what happened. This remains my worst ever project (and job as it happens). I still wonder at how it was managed and how certain people weren't fired due to their handling of the whole thing (though not, curiously, my direct manager). It was all very instructive.

That's freaky. I just made my first post in a good long while, I started it before you posted this.

Back in the day I used to work in a medium-sized financial institution. Whilst I was working on the core system a new project had started that I had nothing to do with. The history before dev got involved was appalling: The finance department had sold the ability to process card payments. Then they considered the IT requirements. So J Random-Finance-Guy set up a spanky new database (to be fair he did a decent job for a non-specialist). He used an Access database. Then he started to import raw data, things worked OK-ish for a couple of months but he couldn't get the payments to reconcile without a lot of manual adjustment draining the department's resources. Then Access hit the 2GB file size limit and it all stopped working. Then they contacted IT dev. What happened was as instructive of bad managerial decision-making as it was astounding. Instead of putting the most experienced/reliable staff onto this urgent situation they put a fresh-out of uni PhD graduate ("he's clever - he'll manage") on to it unfortunately he'd only written Java. To cover the Java aspect they teamed him with a relatively newly-hired .net dev who, on paper was about as experienced as me (& I started on the beta of .net 1.0). Unfortunately he hadn't worked on anything newer than .net 2.0 and it later showed. The dynamic duo were handed a specification and they went larval. No-body seemed to be keeping an eye on them, every so often I'd have a quick chat just to see what was going on. At one point I realised that it was going wrong. As an example, they were sending .net DataSets across SOAP web services. OK the SOAP part was less of a concern, but they would have made their lives easier with WCF. The DataSet part wasn't sane at all, they did this to avoid converting to OM / Data contracts and the DataSets were large without the "extra" copies. Later I discovered they weren't even using the features of a dataset at the client, and when the client submitted the dataset to the server it was used to update an newly minted dataset which did the database work. Note that both LINQ2SQL and EF were available at this point, and either would have been a more rational fit. I had a quiet word with my manager and I suggested that, perhaps, someone should be monitoring what was going on & I that thought it could fail. Then I thanked my luck stars that I wasn't involved. 6 months elapsed and the deadline arrived: they demonstrated the system. Finance's response was "that's all very good but it doesn't do what we want." Little to no communication

Bad example, but there are plenty of places that have decent levels of freedom and don't try and impose their laws restrictively everywhere else. Hopefully the work will move there.

Frankly, we were infringing his copyright AFAICT. Where I am the copyright laws are pretty much ignored (if they even exist), but I think some degree of copyright is necessary as people need to sell their wares to live. I was more than happy to remove the image. My main bugbear from the legal side of things is the fact that we must effectively comply with US copyright law, otherwise Google will remove us (as they are indeed required to by the DMCA) and our site will pretty much disappear from the web. I don't have a problem with the copyright itself (I know many do- people need to sell their wares to live after all) or the fact that there is enforcement of it (I don't know what the DMCA contains, I am not a USian), but I do object to the effective (rather than actual) imposition of US law to all other jurisdictions. I have had time to reflect on the original reporting to Google rather than coming to us directly, which is what I was most annoyed by: I suspect that one of our competitors has done this (my ex-boss's ex-boss is well in the frame for this), pretending to be the original photographer. Thanks for your support though, it is appreciated. For various reasons I am pretty isolated, and CP is one of the few places I can let rip to people who might understand.

My ex-boss moved to our company from a rival company. He caused problems at the old place too from what I have heard.

Well the wonderful influence of my ex-boss (see posts passim) continues. He caused so much trouble with an ex-boss of his, it seems they have been waging a vendetta. Recently we were stamped on by a metrics provider, it seems that this is the work of my ex-boss's ex-boss. I went to Google metrics today and it seems the fun continues. Someone has slapped something called a DMCA report on us. Firstly, where does the USian government get off, ensuring their laws are applied internationally? Not that I'm totally against copyright but Google is effectively being forced to apply US law to non-US sites. Still, it will drive more work to the likes of China I suppose. Secondly, this could have been sorted in a much more gentlemanly fashion. I know there is a lot wrong with our site, and I am trying to clean it up, but it is such a mess it will take time. All that was needed was a quick "please remove this [single peice of] copyrighted material" rather than threatening a legal ban and removal from Google's results. [edit] Yes - I know the title breaks Godwin's Law but frankly I am too hacked off to care.

TorstenH. wrote:

And then there is this meeting where you realize that you already should have gone.
That was today.

I had the same realization recently. I was put in charge of development in my company recently and for various reasons I was put in charge of the technical side of things, my manager was put in charge of solely HR. Now he is interfering with development, despite considering VB6 a proper way to develop. It all came to a head about two weeks ago, when we had a bit of a head to head. One thing he objected to was me "having meetings [with the people we are developing systems for] without the information going through [only] him" he also accused me of being a "one man band". The first point is basically saying he maintaining his power base is more important than the dev team actually being able to do their jobs, and is the reason I'm going. The second is just plain odd: I tried to open up the dev process so developers can talk to the people they are writing the software for without going through a single person and a whole bunch of BS formailities. Somehow that makes me a one man band. Again this is all about power and control. For these reasons I'm out.

To further this long post[^] my old boss's tendrils are still being felt in the web team. He spent much, if not most, of the team's time satisfying some body that has created a spurious metric. We've proudly been displaying a prominent link on our homepage "We're Number one". Now, thanks to the legacy the ex very PHB left we're in the number twos. The company is obviously and understandably concerned about the quality of its criteria and like any system it can be played. And we did, big time. Now they've cottoned on and added exclusion criteria and duly( and correctly) kicked us out. I said this would happen if/when Google catches us, the only reason we lasted so long with the metrics provider is that they didn't have these criteria. Before I didn't have the position to sort this out, now they might listen when I say there is a good chance Google might stamp on us and we need to clean up our act. Looking forward to the s***storm that is about to ensue.

This makes my head hurt. Or at least it would, if it wasn't stuffed with someone's hand.

What an awful thing to suggest!

I bow sir, I bow!

My last boss, he was totally devious. We had a bizzare set up by any standards, the customer-facing website team (where I worked) was part of the function of one department, and another in the IT department for "Intranet". (Think Customer facing in accounts and Intranet in IT and you'll get the idea). Due to the nature of our business it isn't always clear cut which is which, so a turf war ensued. When I arrived we spent a ridiculous amount of time satisfying the needs of a company that is trying to set itself up as the arbiter of what constitutes a useful website in our line of business. This was then punted at the CEO as a huge achievement as is our Google rank which is excellent. In English. We're bilingual, and most of our customers don't speak English, the "other" version of our website (i.e. the one they'd look for) is on page 7 of Google. Not only that, our site is poorly implemented, so that sorting this out is a large chore: from day 1 our site has been bilingual, but the only way to make our language switching worse would be to have two sites. The other thing my old boss used to do is inflate the quantity of work "he" (actually his team) could get done. None of it was done properly or even well, so he has laid a nice time-bomb as our technical debt is massive. He did all this to show how much he could achieve compared to the IT department, but it was very much a case of never mind the quality, feel the width. None of this makes him my all-time worst boss. His recent activities have been stupendous and earned him the crown. First he decided to "penetration test" (i.e. hack) the website. Without telling anyone. Did he choose his own systems? No, he didn't wanted to find problems to hurt the other development team. I could have given him a 4-page A4 list of the security holes in our site because we can see the source code. Not surprising as we develop on live. So he got hold of an "expert hacker" (read script kiddie) to hack into our system whilst preparing a report to show how the other team isn't doing a good job. He got caught. IMO he should have been put on suspension until it was all sorted out (and sacked if malice could be proven) but, no, he is still here. About the same time, I was trying to get our development team working with some degree of professionalism. When I tried to get my team to do something, he would give them "more urgent work", such as a virtual tour of our institution like google streetview (We have maps and images so its not like this is totally missing functionality). Our

.... see you at the Hague

A while back I the company I worked for wanted a system to process large numbers of records in where security was pretty ciritical important. What would you do? Hire a security expert, get some a crack team of devs together and work out secure, scalable and robust system? Yes? I wish you'd worked in my old place. Here my ex-company's simple 12 step plan for greatness: 1. Sell your ability to process before getting anyone from IT to give a realistic idea of the effort required. 2. Get some bloke in the processing department, Bill or Eric or Alan* or something to write an Access/VBA system 2a. Wait until the 100,000s transactions per day fill up the 2GB limit on the database. This takes about 3 months BTW. 3. Contact IT to get them to fix the problem. Then make sure everyone know this is the now the top development priority. 4. Put a cack team of two developers onto it: one a graduate developer whose experience is in another framework, the other who [seemingly] hasn't kept up to date for 8 years. 5. Don't keep tabs on the chaps as they descend into their silo and don't contact the processing department. 6. Enjoy the mayhem as the system isn't even close to what is needed. 7. Throw very experienced devs into the team to sort the problems (and replace the original devs, who sensibly leave). Don't listen to the senior's recommmendations: drop this as fixing it will take longer. 8. Continue to ignore this advice from multiple sources as we are always "just around the corner". For 24 months. 9. Basque in the delight as the processing department assume each dev is stupid because a) Point 6 is their experience [legitimate] b) None of the developers understand the business requirements immediately through some telepathic process presumably [not]. 10. Revel in the warm glow of having glorfied clerks talk down to the experienced (and highly qualified) devs like, erm, glorfied clerks. Don't make any attempt to stop this, it will only raise morale in the already angry dev team. 11. Ensure that, instead of actually changing the system, you continue pargeting what you have, so adding to the big ball of mud and each fix breaks at least one other thing. 12. Watch as your most senior dev leaves, followed by each team member who has been forced to work on the project for more than a month. Great Sucess! I've been gone now for a good while, my contacts inform me they are still trying to fix the original system. At least they've got the records to check correctly for the first time. In the pr

I think not My dad is everyone's dad, and both their grandads too.