Ever have one of those days when you just didn't like anyone?

package Job;

sub new_day {

    my $job = shift;
    my $self = {};

    my @management_team = (
        $Useless::CorporateWeasel,
        $Backstabbing::MiddleManager,
        $FaceSmiling::Ladderclimber,
        $Insipid::MarketingDrone,
        $PHB );

    $self->{score} = push @offa_roof, @management_team;

    foreach (@Luser){
        push @outta_window;
        $self->{score}++;
    }

    if ($self->{score} > 1){
        $self->{status} = "Happy";
        bless $self, $job;
    }
    return $self;
}
[download]

I suppose @Luser is in global scope?

Is this pretty much standard, then?

You've just described the last two shops i've worked at, and i have so many more years to go!

The skillset, priorities and demands of a programmer are very different than those of a manager. You know you need to do regression testing (for example); he knows that Marketing has made a committment for a certain date. Something has to give.

I understand that, but believe a truly great manager would be able to keep a foot in both camps. (Not that I should talk; I can't manage others to save my life).

apl said: …completely forgot what had made them good programmers.

Yes, and then they (or their employers) forget that management is a skill that has to be acquired. This shows all the logic of assuming that Mike Tyson would make a good boxing referee.

---

Information about American English usage here and here. Floating point issues? Please read this before posting. — emc

_The Peter Principle_ gets demonstrated repeatedly on a regular basis. 8-)

I love everyone at my workplace, but given where I work, that's not hard.

In previous jobs, my least liked people always seemed to have had "Sales" in their title, and seemed to use a completely orthogonal set of ethics.

Sales and Marketing is the most annoying group.

Arrogance combined with low ethics and often poor expertise is their main behaviour.

For people who bill themselves as those who "execute" they sure have nothing before and after the follow through.

And I can tell you, every job and the people that surround it, sucks in its own way.

When you're the janitor, everyone thinks you're dirt, or stupid, or both. Most of them wouldn't lower themselves to earning an honest day's pay bending their back and dirtying their hands.

When you're the science geek, all the non-geeks think that being a geek is what defines you. You're an object of humour. But they'll go home and watch their plasma TV and not give a thought to the geeks who slaved in anonymity discovering what plasma is in the first place.

When you're the sales rep, you're just a blowhard shark in most peoples' eyes. But who else has the guts to go out there and get rejected over and over and over again, spend his life living out of a suitcase, making sure that the bucks that keep them all employed keep rolling in?

When you're the manager, you're an idiot. Everyone knows how to do your job better than you. Everyone knows what the real priorities should be. Yep, everyone's an armchair quarterback, adn they don't realize that middle management is just about the most unenvious job there is on the planet, where you're squeezed beteen upper management demanding results, and the whining masses balking because they're convinced you've risen above your abilities.

Each position is necessary for the survival of the entity, but not each person. ;) I've had similar varied experience. Shouldn't everyone be able to wear the currently required hat, without ego?

Bravo, punch_card_don! A hearty 'hear, hear' for this post. I've been most of them too. I've probably also been everybody's favorite doggy fireplug at one time or another. I've built companies and once I was the @hole who tore one apart.

We all slowly make our way up the spiral, and one man's wisdom is another's used toilet paper. Value is in the eye of the beholder, and I find it useful to remind myself that, no matter how stupid any given decision (or person) seems to be, the company usually has enough to send me a check every two weeks.

Don Wilde
"There's more than one level to any answer."

Yeah ... marketing is definitely missing from the list. There's a real fine line between good marketing and lying.

But he's still crashing other people...

Being the asshole I am, I'd have rigged up some sort of ink bomb so that once he unplugged the plug he was covered in puke and snot green ink with a pungent odor added for that extra bit of love :-)

meh.

I'm going to have to go with The "Marketing/Sales" guy we have over here.

It's a guy who asks for demo's for everything, but fails to comprehend how the solution can be applied in a business, so the devs end up selling our stuff :D Also, for some reason he thinks himself too worthy to load/unload the dishwasher.

</end rant>

Yesterday at work, I had one of the bosses for the power company that my company is doing a fish study for come up and ask me if her electrical engineering intern who has no experience with Perl (or computers in general), biology, or field work, could tag along with me for the day. I guess I could have her carry the backpack with the computer and other equipment in it, row the boat (electrical noise from two-stroke boat motors interferes with radio telemetric data reception) or watch while my script translates the data files.

The thing is, all the "hard" work is done, i.e. writing and testing the script to interperet the data, setting up the data receiving equipment, and tagging the fish, so to an outsider who's footing the bill for this study it doesn't look like a lot is going on right now, especially since the data won't mean a lot until the study is complete. Oh well, enough ranting, I guess I'll have to put on a dog and pony show for the power company so they'll continue to keep me employed.

Cheers,

JohnGG

I voted window washers in lack of "Cleaning staff" in general. They want to clean my desk while I work!

You have windows!

I voted for users.

Nothing jars me out of a good groove like someone on the phone who doesn't understand what a directory is. I mean, I probably wouldn't know what a directory was either if my career was as un-computer as some of the people here, but it makes my brain hurt to speed up and slow down at the same time like that...

I'm not a fan of much about my job right now (lifeguarding).

But I mostly hate whiners that don't want to take your spot on the water slide because it's "too cold". If only I'd have had the luxury of saying such a thing.

I can't wait until I can develop websites for a living and make more than I ever had freelancing.

Has anyone meet a scientist or a professor that was not geeky about their specific topic of interest. (from wiki "a peculiar or otherwise odd person, especially one who is perceived to be overly obsessed with one or more things including those of *intellectuality*, electronics, gaming, etc.") As a grad student, I am surrounded by scientist and professors, and they are some of the biggest geeks I know (as a scientist I include myself in that bunch). Just because you can't code in perl, or speak the parlance many of you can, does not mean you lack geekdom. I (somewhat like tubaandy in a post above) am slightly offended that they even made the list of "non-geeks"...But I am happy to see they are not getting many votes :)

-Bio

Has anyone meet a scientist or a professor that was not geeky about their specific topic of interest.

Abso-freakin-lutely. I've met:

1. A professor of biology who was (thankfully) ultimately fired because he (a)stopped keeping up with the state of his profession after achieving tenure, and (b)slowly forgot even some fairly basic biology. He was actually imparting misinformation to his students.
2. A political science professor who insisted that the modern Republican party were on the "far left" of the political spectrum, but refused to explain that position.
3. A neuroscientist that believes in Facilitated Communication (which has been thoroughly debunked by the neuroscience community on mechanistic grounds, and by skeptics of many stripes on "it has failed every controlled test" grounds).

And that's just in recent memory. Just like with programmers, there are a lot of professors and scientists that entered their field for some reason other than interest/love, and either fake it or only do well enough not to get ousted.

<–radiant.matrix–>
Ramblings and references
“A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.” — Herm Albright
I haven't found a problem yet that can't be solved by a well-placed trebuchet

The worst professor story I've heard happened to a friend, who was called stupid by an English professor for (if I recall) something pretty basic, like asking for extra some help.

Of course, I was an engineering student, who started at IIT, where there was one tenured faculty spot in all the humanities department (which grouped, as I recall, English, History, and foreign languages).

Some of the science, engineering, and mathematics faculty were decidedly odd, like the physics professor who started the semester by jumping up on a desk and proclaiming his name, and never erased the (double-hung) blackboards during class, instead relying on multiple colors of chalk. One was a fan of Velikovsky. Another would smoke while he taught, lighting a cigarette, taking a puff, and then standing it on its filter, never touched again; instead, he would repeat this with a second cigarette.

---

Information about American English usage here and here. Floating point issues? Please read this before posting. — emc

I voted "Boss".

I wasn't thinking of my actual boss, who is awesome: a woman in her early 60s who's been using computers since before I was born, and loves to reminisce about the good old days before UNIX.

Nope, what I was thinking of was the people "above" her. The corporate bullshit-pushers who judge software based on how good the food was when the vendor took them out for dinner, and spend all their time synergizing blue-sky paradigm cascades instead of doing an honest day's work. The MBA monkeys who hate the Perl programmers whose miraculous feats of productivity support the entire business, because we don't fit into the neat Java worldview they want to believe in.

Man, I could almost get bitter about it sometimes. :)

I can't believe somebody voted "spouse". If your spouse is your least-favorite geek, and you also work with your spouse, you need a divorce and a new job.

I don't really have a least favorite at my job. It's the clueless clients that give me trouble.

I like nearly all my coworkers, but there's a couple of guys in sales...ugh. M. has no volume control and no sense of humor. He is a loud, angry man, and I don't quite know how he managers to actually sell anything; I guess our product really is just that good. P. is his boss, and relatively new, but has already gotten off on the wrong foot with our department by taking over the cubespace that was supposed to be ours. It was laid out so we would not be shoulder-surfable and could see when people walk up to us. But the space allotted to sales wasn't good enough for him, so we got the boot. Now we make do with mirrors. B. in marketing can be kind of loud and obnoxious, too, but pales in comparison with the others.

In the end, though, if the worst I have to complain of is a few loudmouths, I'd say it's a great workplace. The other folks in sales and marketing are great. Almost everyone here is a geek of some sort, right up to the exec level.

They just walks through the company and talks, stealing time of everybody else. They do not produce any documents, because, I suspect, it needs thinking when something created in written form. They think like "I spoke it with somebody. He said it is possible to do it. It means it will be done somehow". They never can say (sic!) what they really want.

Talkative people are correlated with managers, because they are not able to do anything real (I have met excellent managers too, of course). They are lethal poison of good atmosphere in the company.

I left that company.

...well, Boss^3...

I love every one in my work place .



Best Regards,
S.Sabarinathan, 

I voted security guard. Here's my anecdote:

One morning, I am on my way in to work and just as I reach the door I realize I left my badge (which opens the door) in my car. The car is a four-minute walk away. As I am cursing to myself, our a.m. security guard walks around the corner.

This guard...

1. ... has seen me every weekday for roughly two years.
2. ... has been working at my building about half as long as I have been working there.

I ask her to let me in. She refuses.

This happened a little under a year ago. I have not spoken a word of greeting or otherwise to her since. My consolation is that if you perform your job like a robot, it won't be long until a robot replaces you.

Sorry to bust your rant, but as a security geek, I can tell you that security guard did exactly the right thing.

The guard's job is not to make sure they know everyone who enters the building, it's their job to help prevent unauthorized (not un-authenticated) access. She had no way of knowing for sure that you still work there.

There are plenty of stories of guards who did the "nice thing" and let someone in, only to discover later that person had been terminated and had come back to mess with hardware or cause other damage. I've even had to clean up after some of those messes.

Instead of snubbing her, you should be thanking her for doing her job.

<–radiant.matrix–>
Ramblings and references
“A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.” — Herm Albright
I haven't found a problem yet that can't be solved by a well-placed trebuchet

Ha! Spoken like a true engineer. You'll see in my OP I did not fault her for doing her job, I am faulting her for doing her job like a robot. She is doing exactly the right thing. Since she is so predictable, I can probably write a Perl script that emulates her to a T.

There is more context than I have inclination to provide, including the fact that my work is not all that sensitive, that the area in general is not that secure, and that my capacity to do damage is governed by my access to company servers and network, not physical access to the office building. All items that a human being can take into account, and a list of rules cannot.

I think in general it bothers me because I see this fascination in America with rules, process and automation, to the detriment of human relations and using your brain. People jump at the opportunity to shirk responsibility and decision-making.

• "Sir, your nail scissors are prohibited by TSA regulations. You'll have to surrender them."
• "I cannot sell this bottle of medicinal liquor to you without identification showing you're over 21."
• "I have to call the phone number of the company that employed you previously." -- "I was self-employed." -- "I still have to call."
• "These are your tech design standards. They're for ABAP, and you write Java, but they're standards so you have to follow them."
</soapbox>

I'd have to agree with brother radiantmatrix here -- the security guard's job is to guard. She did her job, so I'm guessing it's more like a customer service issue.

You didn't say what happened after that, but I would hope she followed up with "Did you forget your pass?" and start the procedure to get someone authorized to vouch for you and let you in, and/or set you up with a temporary pass after confirming that you are authorized to enter this secure area.

Or you could have smiled and said, "You know what -- I'll just go back to my car and get my pass." She might even have let you in at that point. Or not.

Alex / talexb / Toronto

"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds