I work with a bunch of morons

The BBQ Pit
1

I’m working on one particular project here, a database for a surgical group. There is a “team” of about 15 people, of which I am the only programmer. The project has no specs, no schedule, and no direction, and yet I am expected to produce a magnificent application as of yesterday. Am I given any direction on this project? Fuck no. 14 other people, and 14 completely disparate ideas and what this project should be, and not one of these sorry losers deems to communicate any of these ideas to me. And apparently, several “partners” have been asked in to help out (without my prior knowledge or consent), including Microsoft, who has not a fucking clue what the project is, but is completely happy to take a million dollars from us.

The core of the chaos is Barbara, who took complete credit for the last project, and even got a promotion for it, despite the fact that she doesn’t have clue one. I hear from her maybe once every 3 months, and yet she has the title “project manager.” What does she manage? Well, apparently she drew a “chart”, which is nothing more than an indecipherable squiggle that she’s very proud of. She’s been proudly showing off this squiggle to outside vendors, including Microsoft, who can’t make heads or tails of it. But they’ll take a million dollars to ignore it.

“But tdn”, you may ask, “why don’t you just take control of the project?” Believe me, I’ve tried. Ever try to get a box full of kittens to march in lockstep? Same thing. Not possible.

And now there’s another project, on which I was but a minor observer. As of yesterday, everyone is screaming at me because the application doesn’t work. Why haven’t I fixed it yet? Because it’s news to me that I was even involved. Fine, I’ll fix it, despite the fact that my time is already overbooked by the other clueless project. It’ll take less time than arguing over who should really be fixing it (an outside vendor who answers neither phone nor e-mail). Except I ran into a brick wall. They’ve moved the database location and won’t tell me where they moved it. I just got an e-mail that said “Is it necessary that we even have a database?” Uh, yeah. That’s pretty much the whole idea.

At this point I must make special mention of the IT department. These people are experts in their field because they apparently once heard the word “computer.” These clueless fucks have a policy that’s rather unbelieveable: Should we make any changes to the application, including debugging tests, we are to submit the code to them for committee review, and then on approval, they will apply the changes within 2-4 weeks.

How fucked is that?

2

Sometimes I love working for a small company.

Me: “Hey boss, I need to change the net config on the main, production, mission-critical AIX box to use the new internal router I just built using Debian and a spare PC.”

Boss: “Okay. Can you do it Saturday? We don’t want to lose any customer data…”

Me: “I really don’t feel like coming in this weekend. How 'bout I do it at lunch?”

Boss: “Whatever you say. Just don’t fuck it up. You want anything from Chipotle?”

And this on a machine that could bring the company to its knees if it were unavailable for more than an hour, for which the failover is entirely inadequate.

3

And to think I used to begrudge my machine the 30 seconds it took to reboot after the crash phase of the debugging cycle. :eek:

4

That’s the problem with working for a big company. Over 30000 people here, I think. And an IT department that’s more concerned with creating red tape than with getting things to run smoothly.

5

Where are you based? Surely a project with no controls is not SOX compliant? At my company, as a bare minimum you would need a project contract which specified the deliverables and timeframes. Sounds like you’re in a nightmare situation.

6

Amen to that. I nearly always work on the live FileMaker system while the users continue to do their work, rarely discuss what I’m going to do with anyone but the ones most immediately affected, and file no paperwork of any sort before or after. (I have a database file that I write to to record changes I made and/or change requests, but it’s my own doing. I’ve run a report to show to someone else perhaps twice in three years).

At the moment, I’m in a rare departure from this mode, working on a local copy instead of the live copy, because I’m splitting the functionality of a single table/file into two separate tables, while at the same time merging a pair of other tables/files that contain similarly-structured and -purposed data into a single table, both of which reshape the architecture of what calls what and what inherits what throughout the rest of the database. I did it all under my own planning, made it backward-compatible with existing data, finished testing field-mapping for import of legacy data yesterday, and so far my biggest and only problem with red tape is trying to get a commitment from the production manager for when I can get some production people to come upstairs for a half hour to walk them through it and get feedback before rollout.

Before I worked here, I worked at BBDO, which was also a FileMaker shop. At first they weren’t too bad on the pointy-haired boss stuff, although there were those useless Monday morning meetings and submitting progress reports every week, but then they rolled out these nasty one-size-misfits-all Project Plan thingies that took longer to fill out than 96% of the work they described took to perform. The thing about FileMaker is that it lends itself really well to improvisional work. When you’re not doing something like splitting tables in half, it’s good and efficient to take advantage of that: instead of figuring out how you’re going to implement a new report or a new data entry screen and, after planning it, then go do it, you just go in and make it happen. If you do something that doesn’t work the way you wanted it to, it’s FileMaker, you undo what you did and try something else. So instead they wanted me to write up a comprehensive plan with detailed steps and including a “back-out strategy” and file it before doing anything.

7

Ah, but specs are for people not on the go, you see. The people here have lives, and can’t be bothered with silly details like actually defining what they want. I’m the computer expert, I should just be able to make it happen.

8

You and me both, buddy.

9

If I may quote Wally from Dilbert, “Of all my projects, I love the doomed ones the most.”