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Joined 10 months ago
Cake day: July 28th, 2025
  • yes, it’s when you tell boss, “I can’t do that in 3 hours, it’ll take two weeks”, and probably still have some unknown aspects of quality, that we might not want to sign off on. Maybe we can rush it in 1 week, if you’re ok with want want maybe’ 20% unverified.

    Boss fucks off to coprolite - gets it “done” in 3 hours. Gives it to someone else to QR. They comes back to me for advice on turd polishing (apparently that’s my SME). So I then waste time helping that person tactfully create a quality report that says it’s seriously defective and will take weeks to rectify to get it up to an acceptable standard - because it tells us nothing about how it got to it’s erroneous output.

    Now, we’ve wasted about a day between us, on dog-shite - and we’ve not learned anything useful.

    I don’t know what a “gen Z” is though, but whoever they are they should stand up to shite bosses.

  • Haha. Better or worse than, ‘jira tickets’ or ‘story points’?

    They’re doing a f-ing reporting database migration just now, just measure tables created that match the old DB. And standard user queries that output the same.

    “Oh hang on, does the new database have to have the same data as the old one?” "We’ve reviewed all of our non existing requirements gathering notes and the “business " never wrote that as a requirement. we can squeeze it in later on the roadmap, when some dev resources have been freed up. Can you tell us more about these ‘queries’; is that a power bi thing? - i think another team does that?”

    Sack 3 or more layers of “management/director/head of/architect/strategy”, that have a lot more impact on productivity than letting people wank from home.

  • Individual worker / team / prod line. Sure you can measure those. That’s great for those at thst level… But I don’t know how you add them up across the whole of “America” without some very dubious economic statistics bullshit.

    Empirically , economy wide measures are generally useless i reckon. And often manipulated. It’s very hard to add up output of different production lines (or different goods or services) in a single meaningful measure and account for all the variables like quality, product mix, availability and if you’re using price-weights all stuff that distorts market power. Econo-statisticians will calculate it, because they get paid to, but the honest/aware ones should fess up it’s got serious weaknesses however you calculate it.

  • MS should be more vulnerable, due to everything but Excel being toilet blockages.

    TLDR; MS already got big by being like IBM, lots of dumb corpo procurement cash is already keeping them afloat for about as long as qwerty keyboards - because some people got really good at/dependent on excel.

    Their dominance of corpo-procurement (and using ‘security’ to block out alternative tooling) means that vast amounts of the corpo world is based on highly specialised and over-stretched excel.

    Even in databases, where my organisation (large public sector) should be having a genuine competition to administer postGRESQL for us or something, has been loss-led into into a big new ms fabric contract by them appearing to undercut the incumbent (Oracle - ok not hard to undercut), but not actuall . . . [rant deleted]

    However, crap MS is at software, they’re extremely good at getting dumb corpos to sign on the dotted line.
    (‘always has been’ meme). And many humans being forced to use the only tool available, have built vast intricate systems on the foundation of that excel, many of them masterworks of skill in the face of those constraints. Hopefully they don’t last as long as one of the old Egyptian dynasties.

  • There’s still a role for actual managers - as coaches, doing recruitment, getting people into useful apprenticeships, helping them improve, developing them into standalone craftspersons.

    And as people who can sit above the day-to-day workflows and make improvements, shutdown production lines for maintenance and so on. Adapt the working system to the people they have to try to get the most out of it. Bring in a new system, parallel run it on small scale (fucking test it), manage a roll out.

    But in my experience managers are not selected to have those skills (which maybe quite rare), nor asked to perform those functions.

    And when a large organisation sees something go wrong - possibly because of a lack of those things - they just recruit more jargon filled middle managers to argue about it deflect blame or steal credit. Or commission a consultant report to tell them nothing. They’re more like overseers at best.

    The actual decent managers will admit when they made a mistake; that’s rarely given the respect it deserves.