Are we still in the dark ages?
Are we as a technical society still at a point of ignorance in our understanding of privacy? Do we still think that it’s ok to offer up registration page that solicits personal information on the web with using ssl to secure the data?
Folks, come on. It’s 2009. Bandwidth is not that expensive that the cost difference between http and https traffic is going to make or break your business. It also just shows that you have no interest in showing responsibility for your customers information.
The offender is job.com. Shame on you.
Bravo!
And I quote:
The lower the CEO salary, the more likely it is to succeed.
The CEO’s salary sets a cap for everyone else. If it is set at a high level, you end up burning a whole lot more money. It aligns his interest with the equity holders. But [beyond that], it goes to whether the mission of the company is to build something new or just collect paychecks.
In practice we have found that if you only ask one question, ask that.
This is the kind of stuff that keeps me sane when I work with asshats.
Qa Manager….
Going to start a new catagory of post here, inspired by other posts of this type around the interweb. We’ll call them OH for Over Heard.
Today’s entry is a doozy:
I’ve never before met a QA Manager who could care less about bugs.
Why are people so afraid of email?
You know, it’s a curiosity to me as to why folks are so afraid of email. Whether you’re in the same office or you’re dealing with an outsourced group in india, folks seem to have this great fear over sending mail. In fact most of them show an even greater tendency not to respond to email they’ve received, but rather come directly to you to discuss the question at hand.
It’s not that I’m anti social. It’s not that I don’t like seeing your face (well, not true in all cases). But there’s an extremely important reason why I chose to send you email:
I want to have a record of your response
Yes, email does have the tendency to encourage trolling. Yes, people who would otherwise be polite to you in person can turn all snarky in email. But it also has this great advantage to help clarify what’s been discussed.
Writing something down forces you to think through what you’re saying (or so I hope) and gives you an opportunity to self edit before you answer. It also helps that when I’m tasked with about 10 different things and you ask me to do something, I can refer back to the email and not have to bug you when forget exactly what you’ve asked for.
Any Questions?
Hot ‹ Meat Product › Injection
Ok folks. This one is simple common sense. It’s kind of like not exposing yourself in public or not being vulgar around your parents. But it seems like I run into this situation at every company I’ve been at. Simply put: some jackass thinks it’s cool to name some super secret cool project with an ironic name (with possible sexual overtones) that may not be appropriate if a customer ever finds out.
Cool? Yes. Innocent? No. A bad idea? Yes. Why? Because it will likely make it’s way out into the real world and your customers will see it. It would be a rare case of it not actively hurting the company. Let give you an example and let me preface it by saying that names have been changed for my benefit alone. It’ll be obvious to the folks who were there.
I was working with group that had previously been a startup but were now apart of a large company after an aquistion. Most of the folks from the startup years still maintained their sense of humor and tried to make working for a big company interesting. So they were producing a security product and one of their current projects at the time was to implement a new authentication protocol. All concerns about implementing new methods of authentication aside, there was a lot of effort put into getting it right. This new authentication protocol had a long name but the acronym boiled down to d.r.u.g (again, names changed…).
When it came time to implement the daemon to manage the protocol interaction, they of course continued the theme and called the daemon d.r.u.g. dealer. (You can probably see where this is going). In testing, logs messages indicated that the d.r.u.g. dealer was providing to the addict (the client in the auth transaction). All through development and testing, the name inspired jokes and kept us laughing during one of the roughest release cycles we had seen.
Well, we shipped and moved on to the next release immediately. However, someone along the way neglected to change the name for our d.r.u.g. dealer. Not too long after, a customer called up to trouble shoot a problem with this new authentication protocol. When support asked for information from the logs, it was discovered that the d.r.u.g. dealer was still providing for the addict. The customer was more than a little shocked and support was extremely embarrassed by the situation. Needless to say management was unhappy and the engineering org got our asses chewed out.
‘Nough said?
Heads Down
Ok, MR CEO. I have a message for you. It’s a simple one and I want to you listen very carefully to what I have to say. Ready? Here it goes:
When it’s obvious that I’m working heads down on a problem, please don’t walk up and tell me a joke.
Now I realize you’re a little uncertain about the gig you’ve just taken. Only being here a month and all, I can understand how concerned you might be. After the absolute fucking mess you’ve found you’re a little concerned about what’s going in engineering. Because of that fact, I can understand that you want to check in with all aspects of the organization to make sure people are getting shit done. But please don’t come up to me and do the check in “thing” by telling a joke, starting a conversation about my pint glass or asking me if some general area of work is all good.
When you do that, you disrupt the mind from the problem I’ve got it wrapped around. What that means is that I lose time working on the problem, become less productive and end up spending the next arbitrary amount of time getting my mind back to the problem. That is, after I write this fucking blog post.
I understand you want to act like the cool hip CEO so you can get the inside information. You want everyone to believe that you’re one of the guys so that they will talk to you as such. But I’ve got a little fact to share with you:
You’re not.
Now please let me get back to doing my job and please go do yours.
Tools
At an established company after hours projects should be reserved for cool new developments, neat hacks and other such refinements. Not for updating, upgrading and migrating existing software tools infrastructure during an high intensity release schedule. That’s the gist of the conversation I just had with one of the over achieving yet completely demotivated founders of the company I currently call my day job.
About the day job: It’s for a company that’s been around for a couple of years. It’s gone beyond the startup phase and really pushing toward the adolescence phase where a company is growing from 20 people to 100. Even the slightest impact on the release schedule at this point is detrimental.
Anyways, I am all about adding, updating and modifying the tools that we use on a day to day basis in order to achieve our goal of developing good software. But there are some really basic requirements that have to be met in order for these changes to be effective:
- Changes need to planned. If the work needs to be done during a tight release schedule, add it as an actual task so that the impact can be understood.
- We can’t negatively impact the existing workflow of the existing toolset while implementing the new one.
- The addition, change or modification needs to be throughly tested before introducing it into the tool chain.
- The change needs to make the workflow of the tool chain easier. Otherwise users will balk at the change.
- And above all else, it’s not a side project when you’re changing development tools. The impact is important enough to take the work seriously.
Did I miss anything?
To whom it may concern…
To the CEOs, the office managers, the engineering managers and all the other folks who can expense extra curricular items. I have a favor to ask. It’s a simple one and it can be easily done. And believe me, your employees will thank you for it. Are you listening closely?
Please please please stop buying your companies ROCK BAND.
I don’t need to hear the support manager try and keep the beat on the drum pads, which I can hear him slamming because they didn’t turn the music loud enough. I don’t need to hear him rush the beat and then fall behind the beat while he takes a swig of his beer.
I don’t need to see the awkward founder type trying to live out his rock star dreams from childhood. I don’t need to watch him fail horribly because he can’t get comfortable “rocking out”.
I don’t need to hear the Chief Scientist try and sing Nirvana’s In Bloom. I know it’s not punk rock and all to sing in key, but Kurt Cobain could actually do it. I don’t need to hear her butcher the tune while the support manager is still trying to keep a beat.
So please stop this type of abuse and give the $150 for the game to some charity. Think of the children.
Oh god. They trying Gimme Shelter now.
