Month: Aug 2025

Remember when people used to know what they were doing?

Remember when people used to know what they were doing? those were the days.

“what concerns me the most is that there was a time where everything almost worked like clockwork and now it seems like more ruins every day”

Software Architect

“I am more surprised when something works”

Me

We used to be a company full of smart people, working effectively. Now we work slowly and people just cut corners and do incredibly dumb things. In more recent times, people now don’t think for themselves because they ask AI what code to write. Sometimes it’s absolute rubbish but they never reviewed it themselves; so it really is zero thought. You point it out to them that it’s not going to work, and they respond back with an overly polite message, clearly written by ChatGPT; which just adds insult to injury.

So it’s like developers don’t even develop because AI does it. Then they don’t do any dev-testing. Then the Testers don’t know what they are doing either.

Recently Testers have been installing our software on the application servers.

Even though one of the Lead Testers has been posting angry rants about it; it keeps on happening. The Lead Tester’s points were that it’s not representative of live, and how it takes up the RAM/processing time and lags out the app server for everyone else.

I don’t get why people got the idea to install the client on the app server, and remote on. You can’t think that is official. The servers were always configured to only allow 2 people on at once, so it’s not like the entire department can log on to test if it was the official process.

I just hate what this company has become. I feel like it’s just gonna keep getting worse with managers constantly encouraging people to use AI.

Let’s read the words, the words, the words, of the developer

Introduction

When working with Indian developers, their English skills can vary. You also need to be aware of certain words exclusive to Indian English; some of which I actually like. For example they have the word “prepone” which is the opposite of “postpone”, but in UK English, we don’t seem to have a single word for that.

Some phrases seem more like poor grammar. An example of that is “Can able” or “Can’t able” when we would say “I’m able/unable”.

  • “i think you can able to see the second image is it?”
  • “I can’t able to find any relationship between those two codes” 
  • “still we can’t able to recreate the issue”

“For the same” is an interesting phrase because it just refers to something earlier in the sentence without having much meaning. It’s similar to when they say “do the needful” which just means “do whatever is required” but often doesn’t really add anything to the instruction; if they have requested something from you, then surely you will do it if you can.

There’s a few strange greetings like saying “good noon” which I’d assume is just a shortened version of “good afternoon” rather than being appropriate for a very specific time period. There’s a few people that have a strange greeting of “Ho!”

“Ho!! Is it please can you share those knowledge with me…”

To take time off, they like to “avail”. As a bonus, here’s a strange requests:

Morning Team,
I have picked up fever and heavy cold. Availing AL today.
 Please conduct stand up and end call.
Available over mobile for any urgent issues.
Thanks and Regards,
Jeeva

I’m glad you told me to end the call Jeeva, because I’d have stayed on it all day otherwise.

Indian Pull Requests

When it comes to the Code Review process aka Pull Requests (PRs), it can be hard to ask them why they are making certain changes. Sometimes asking questions can just lead to further confusion. Also, sometimes I’m sure some developers try to blag and hope you move on.

I was discussing this with a Lead Developer and he agreed that asking questions can either result in

  • Blagging
  • Revert the code and hope it works
  • Or you actually get a good answer. But then if it’s not clear why the code was written like that, then maybe it does need a code comment or some documentation so others don’t get confused in future.

Even though I often got frustrated with their comments, in recent times, a lot of them use AI like ChatGPT to rewrite their responses, or sometimes I get the impression they just put your question into the AI and hope it comes out with a good response. So instead of poorly written English, it’s all robotic and a blag of jargon. So you can’t win really.

Row

“Refresh on special while saving special note, row background, Radio button alignment based on include exclude” 

Blagging with Words on PRs

I questioned their pointless try/catch blocks which were catching an exception then rethrowing the exact same type of exception.

“Yes, as I couldnt use the dll in the resourcepicker project, so we can thrown the exception and catched it in resourcepicker class”

And

“The resources can be used due to filecahe, but no changes can be saved, when service is down. The above message is already used in Picker solution.”

Then when their project was being merged into the main branch, another developer questioned the same code. This time they said:

“To restrict that, have drilled up the ux tree and displayed the error message.”

Observation 

“Found an observation while testing 12602 in 9.3.6 branch”

what does that even mean? I assume “observation” means “bug” or “potential problem”.

Bad Refactoring

He refactors some existing codec but also changes the return type of the method, which means the caller’s logic will have to be changed so was causing cascading changes which weren’t really relevant to his main change. Also, the logic didn’t look equivalent so I wouldn’t call it refactoring:, more like introducing a bug. He then claims he hasn’t changed it…

Me: "is this equivalent? It was checking >1 not >=1"
Them: "Actually, I haven't attempted to modify that as the logic written working as per acceptance criteria, and it already tested"
Me: "I don't understand, this method has been changed in this PR"
Them: "Just used expression for methods as commented by Andy. Apart from that i haven't changed any logic around that."

Down Merge

Vignesh
Here after no comments fixed against assurance branch?
Just need information about down merge
 
Andy:
sorry I'm not sure what you mean?
 
Vignesh
Two comments pending for our side... if any one raise PR I will raise PR also. Because of down merge... Incase only I will raise PR again do down merge that's why I am asking

IsMobileEnabled 

IsMobileEnabled needs to return boolean value, so removed exception caused by null and also the GetResources during Trigger prompting needs to include Template also along with Protocols.

Didn’t Launch The Portal

me: “where is this used?”

developer: “This is used at TryLaunchPortal()…. At this point of time we never know the portal type to compare and verify the condition because the user didn’t launch any portal“

walkie talkie comms going on here

This reminds me of walkie-talkies, stating “over” so you know it’s the end of the message.

Roshni 
give line break after method over
 
Shoban
Ok Roshni, Updated the changes
 
Shoban
Completed with the Changes
 
Roshni 
give line break after method over not before the method over
 
Shoban
Thanks Roshni, Got your point. Made Changes
 
Roshni 
and again please remove the empty line no 267
 
Shoban
Code changes completed as mentioned

Welsh 

PR: Updated the Walsh text

Description: Updated the resource file with Walesh text

Do you think the text is gonna be accurate if he can’t get the title correct in English? It should say “Welsh text” as in “the Welsh language”.

Customer

Merge from Curomer first branch to main

Accelerator Keys

To define an accelerator key (allows you to use Alt key to select it), you place an & character before the letter. So Export has E defined. Edit can’t use E because Export has taken it, so they have chosen D. Cancel seemed an odd choice of N.

btnBackup.Text = "&Export";
btnContinue.Text = "E&dit";
btnCancel.Text = "Ca&ncel";
btnBackup.DialogResult = DialogResult.None;


Me
can't C be used as an accelerator key?
 
Kalyanaraman
C for Continue
 
Me
what is the continue button? Isn't this it? btnContinue.Text = "E&dit"; that is using D

SQL is up to 10 times better

yes i have tried with mocked 10 lacks data in local
and while this query the data was well optimized.
For data, I ran sp thrice

I bet you can’t tell if this is from some old children’s folk tale or an Indian’s PR

Always Run SQL Code Analysis

Roshni has worked here several years, and when she started, I’m sure she made the same mistake several times. When making a database patch, we have a Patching Tool that not only applies the patch but runs some code analysis to make sure it conforms to coding standards.

Many times when developers have reviewed her code, Roshni has been told her patch would have been flagged by the tool if she had run it as part of her Developer Testing.

When I was a junior, once I was told by the Seniors; I never forgot to run it again. It’s like the embarrassment/shame makes you remember. Also I cared about quality and this was a simple process that ensured quality and standardisation of our SQL code.

Recently, she had merged her fix ready for release and a Tester, Mick pointed out there were patching errors so her SQL patch cannot have been run through the Patching Tool, or even tested.

She claimed it had been tested, and it was a problem between SQL versions. So her claim was that – both her local machine and the test server it was run on (by another tester in her team) was a different version to what was on the main test environment we use before releasing the software.

So Mick looked at the SQL patch and saw the error was about a missing namespace. The patch was inserting XML, and XML has a namespace attribute on the first line. So then he looked at what data is currently in the table, and saw that all the existing entries had a namespace declared, and this was missing from Roshni’s patch.

So Mick embarrassingly pointed this out. So she had lied about testing the patch locally, she must have lied about it being tested in her team, and lied that it was an SQL version issue.

She then submits a brand new patch which conditionally checks if the previous patch had created the entries. If it hasn’t then, this new patch would insert them, then if it had already added them, then her new patch would run an update statement instead.

Mick then points out that this is nonsense because the original patch had failed so would have just rolled back and stopped patching. What she needed to do was just to fix the original patch so it would run. So then she quickly deletes her new patch, and updates the original one.

Although it’s what we wanted, the speed that she did it makes me think she hadn’t run the Patching Tool because it can be very slow to run. So yet again, we have told her it is important to run it through the Patching Tool, and she hasn’t bothered.

Although I think nothing was actually wrong with her new change, another tester had pointed out that her changes were across two repositories and her changes in the other repository were also flagging errors in the Patching Tool. So it’s not like she just forgot to run it once, it’s just that no matter how many times in the past we have told her YOU MUST RUN PATCHING TOOL; she never does.

It’s just infuriating we keep employing people like that that don’t listen or care about the work they are doing.

Unconscious Bias

There was a time where a group of people were hyping up “woke” topics, and the latest topic was “Unconscious bias” which is supposed to cause a certain degree of racism/sexism during the hiring or promotion process. Or maybe even leading to some microaggressions in meetings.

We were encouraged to watch a few courses on LinkedIn Learning, but it was not mandatory. Some of it was actually quite interesting.

There was one cringy moment where the presenter gave a trigger warning of sorts:

“if you feel an emotion, pause the video and deal with it. If you still feel the emotions, contact me and discuss it“

In my opinion, I think if you get overwhelmed with a simple LinkedIn Learning video, then you have bigger problems.

In my notes, I had written this claim but not sure what it means – because how do you even measure the bias:

“Research has shown that even a 1% bias in favor of promoting men changes the outcome.”

The following sounds like a decent philosophy though. If bias does exist then we do need to take it into account:

“By understanding that we’re all biased, we can make the decision to work together to be more conscious of our thoughts and actions when relating to others. Not only can we fix the current situation, we can then resolve not to do it again. Over time, it’s possible to learn to think and behave differently.”

She then makes the claim that even if you look at different aesthetics within a particular gender, you can notice trends which would suggest there is an unconscious bias at play:

“Blonde women earn 7% more than brunettes. Slim women make more money than obese.”

Some of the categories of bias are quite interesting. Halo bias probably does make a huge difference. You can say it’s like when you work with a Senior who you respect; whatever they claim in the next project you are tempted to back them and agree.

  • Halo bias – “admiring all of a person’s actions because of their praiseworthy actions in the past” 
  • Perception Bias – “the tendency to form stereotypes and assumptions about certain groups that makes it difficult to make an objective judgment about individual members of those groups.” 
  • Therefore it is difficult for women to be hired in gender perceived roles. E.g. software developer 
  • Confirmation bias –  “Seeking out evidence that confirms our initial perceptions, ignoring contrary information.” “We double-down and seek out information to justify our position.” 
  • GroupThink – When the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in incorrect decision-making.
  • Performance Bias – Underestimate women’s performance but overestimate men’s. Men are often hired on future potential, women hired on past performance. 
  • Attribution bias – Less likely to credit women for success, but more blame for failure. Women’s contribution is less valuable. Women are more likely to be interrupted when speaking. 
  • Likability Bias – Expect men to be assertive so like them more when they are assertive, but have a negative response to women. Agreeable and nice is perceived as less competent so need to assert themselves to be effective, but then are less liked. 
  • Maternal bias – motherhood is perceived as less committed and less competent. Strongest kind of gender bias. Lower performance ratings, and lower pay in future. 
  • Affinity bias – gravitate to people like ourselves, dislike those that are different. More likely to give positive performance ratings to those that are similar. White men’s prominence means women and those of colour are negatively affected. 
  • Double discrimination (intersectionality): Women, and of colour is double discrimination. 3+ minority attributes make people feel like they don’t fit anywhere. 

“Woke” people seem to suggest that men are the problem when it comes to bias. However, I have seen claims that if you have an all-female panel they are often shown to be biassed towards hiring men. The claim was women don’t want to hire someone they perceive as a threat, or someone who is more attractive than them.

There was another LinkedIn course I watched that stressed the point that both genders show bias, sometimes in different ways.

There was a test where participants were shown pictures of men and women and they had to state (purely by stereotyping) if they associate them with “family” or “career”. Regardless of the participant’s gender, 76% of people associate women from the images with “family” rather than “career”.

There was also a claim which I would like to see what results back it up:

“Diverse teams tend to be more committed and work harder, and companies with more women in leadership tend to produce better business results.” 

During the hiring process, there is some scope to anonymise it somewhat to try and remove any bias against gender or race, in an attempt to judge purely on merit.

New Comms Process

I’ve made many blogs about communication. It seems that over time, there can be a new tool that managers start using which then becomes the cool thing to communicate with. Email was always a popular way of sending the information to all. When messaging apps like Microsoft Teams or Slack were available, then these became the cool way, but it involves people subscribing to the channel in the first place. Then we had Social Media style apps, initially “Facebook for Work” and then Yammer which was recently renamed to Viva Engage. Then there’s documentation style websites like Confluence, Sharepoint.

There was one post that made me laugh where a manager highlights the problem of having too many apps which then people have their favourites and have different frequencies checking them. So he points out the absurdity of cross-posting, and wants to fix the problem by carrying on cross-posting, but mainly causing you to divert from one platform to another.

As one colleague hilariously pointed out: 

“I’ve just followed a link posted to Teams to a Yammer post that contains a link to Confluence…”

Here is what the manager announced:

Hey everyone,
You might have noticed, during this quarter, that I have been trying out various different ways to get a message out to the whole department. I've put content on Confluence and Teams, and sent messages by Teams, Slack and Email cascade. The bottom line is, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to getting important info out smoothly.

But this is a problem we can solve. And it's a problem that we must solve: with this many people in the team, it is critical to have a way to announcements and updates out to everyone. So this is how it will work from now on:
You are reading this on Viva Engage. This is a new community set up specifically for long-form comms across the train. If you Follow this community you will get updates of new announcements. But I won't rely on just that - I will also send out notifications on Teams and Slack, with a link to new posts. I will also use Teams and Slack to post short-form updates that do not need a post on Viva Engage. So here is the call to action:
• I will commit that the leadership will use both Teams and Slack to send out department-wide notifications. As long as you look out on one or other of these channels, you will not miss out.
• I ask everyone to do this right now: whichever tool you prefer (Teams or Slack), make sure you have access to the right channel (see screenshot), pin it or star it, and make sure notifications are turned on.
For this first post, I will also send out an email cascade but in future I will drop this step. It's vulnerable to delays and with the other channels set up, we don't need this as well.

For the Viva Engage posts - please "like, share and subscribe"!! Let's make this a conversation
Thanks

Managing The Message

We released a much anticipated feature to our users, and it was going through our roll out process. This means only a group of users got the update, then next month it would go out to more, and so on.

So the initial users were excited to use it, and other users were eager to hear their opinion. As part of the release, there were other changes that went out, and some users were encountering issues with Feature A which had some bug fixes and improvements, and this was unrelated to our Feature B which went out in the same release version. Since both features involved some processing in the background, some users were falsely attributing a problem with Feature A to a problem with Feature B.

They took to Facebook to complain, and even suggested some workarounds that were complete nonsense. It’s basically a placebo effect of making a change and the crash goes away so you falsely conclude it helped when it was mere coincidence.

We are told that we must never respond to users on social media. All posts have to go through official channels that Marketing and Support use.

A developer raised the issue with a group of managers and a liaison from Marketing.

“Are we doing anything to combat this line of thinking that Feature B is causing crashes? This is one of those really fun Facebook threads that has popped up because our company has remained silent on the cause of an issue with Feature A, and the users have clutched at straws to come up with ideas for a fix and pooled them all in one place. One of their suggestions is quite harmful to us because it involves clearing the cache which then requests a large download to our servers. We now have a fix for the main crash they are reporting, so we should make it clear a fix is coming, there is no workaround, and it has no relevance to Feature B.

Concerned developer

I agree that as we’re quite clear on what the cause is (and isn’t) it feels like we should explicitly clarify this and address the incorrect speculation.

Product Owner

As I’m sure you can expect, we have been very close to this for the past four weeks and are working with relevant senior people to agree what messaging we can send out to the market.

Marketing Manager

“close to this for the past four weeks”! Yet have stayed pretty much silent the entire time. Then that resulted in Feature B getting a bad reputation which puts people off using it, and it’s generally damaging to the company that we responded so slowly to address what the users consider a big issue with our software. Marketing have been really bad in recent years, and is a reason why we have lost market share because the opinion from our users has declined.

Innovation shambles

Recently, managers decided that every few months we should have an Innovation Week. The idea is that you can work on ideas that can improve our work processes or even add a new feature to our products. However, the time limit of one week is a bit limited to actually get something complete in my opinion.

To be efficient, we really need to come up with a great list of ideas before the innovation starts, otherwise it cuts into the week. Some people did submit ideas before, and others on the day.

The initial meeting quickly became a bit of a shambles. Paul had created a Miro board under a different account that the attendees didn’t have write permissions for. Even when we clicked the link to request access, and Paul claimed he approved it; it still didn’t work.

He then tried creating a different board, but that didn’t work. To not waste further time, we just posted ideas into the Microsoft Teams chat which then he transferred onto Miro.

Since the ideas were essentially just titles on the board, people were supposed to explain their ideas but I don’t think many explained too well. We probably needed some kind of formal process to:

  1. describe the problem, 
  2. ideas on how to solve,
  3. pros and cons, 
  4. any possible costs like software licences,
  5. prerequisites to be able to investigate or implement the idea.

Another thing was missed is that you have to have accounts to use many of the AI tools, and that was a focus of this month’s innovation. With a lot of software, it often needs a special licence for commercial use and we weren’t advised how to acquire licences. We had Github Copilot and Office Copilot but what about other AI tools?

One guy apologised for misunderstanding that the ideas should be process improvements and he had come up with an idea for our software that our users would use. Paul said he hadn’t misunderstood at all and we could suggest either process improvements or new features… but that’s not what the Miro board said. It was only for process improvements and so all but one idea was for process.

We needed to assign our names to them, so initially Paul tried to create a spreadsheet but couldn’t work out how to share it so we could all edit at the same time. He ended up pasting the ideas into a Microsoft Teams “Whiteboard” which I had never used before but it looked like the Miro boards.

There were loads of ideas, but many were of debatable value. However, like I stated, we never discussed them effectively. Without knowing the pros and cons or prioritised the business value; there were loads of ideas that definitely weren’t strong enough. So with a large list, it was hard to pick something to work on. Some of them would need more than one person, but what guarantee is there that the team will be full? Less likely when the list is so big.

So I asked the question if we should only put our name against 1 item, or vote for several so we can see which teams are full, then the full teams get approved. Paul said to only vote once otherwise it will look like teams are full, but you’d end up dropping out if another one of your votes were successful. I suppose that’s a good point, but only voting once will mean you could be the only person to vote on a team project, so would then have to choose something else anyway, or gamble and go by yourself.

With most people finally assigned (and many just disappearing, presumably to slack off), with many going solo, and some probably having more team members than required; we got told to communicate with our team members.

I was in a team of 3 but I thought the ideal team would just be a pair. I waited for 30 mins or so but the guy that came up with the idea hadn’t contacted me, and you would assume he would take the team leader position.

I then took initiative and added a group chat with my 2 team members, and after another 1.5 hours, I finally got a response from one person who asked how we should begin to plan. I responded with my notes I had created to set the scene. He suggested one extra point to my notes, then didn’t hear from him for the rest of the day. The other team member didn’t respond at all.

The next day, my manager contacted me and said I was assigned to help finish a project that was behind schedule so my “innovating” had come to an end.

Absolute shambles really.

Manger Advice

I had some notes that I think were originally from a Twitter thread.

I think the question was from someone who had been a developer for several years and had just got a new role as a manager, so asked for advice.

One point someone made was that as a developer, you can gain a lot of success via individual contributions. Fixing a bug, delivering a feature, fixing a test environment etc, but as a manager, you are only really successful if your team is. Therefore, the focus is no longer on yourself. It’s about enabling people to work by dealing with impediments, and motivating them.

Another point was to value the 1-on-1 meetings. This builds relationships and trust, and you can learn about emerging problems and concerns. It gives you new perspectives and reminds you of how people are progressing when it comes to performance reviews.

Management goes in 3 directions, and all these directions have their own traits and challenges. Down – take care of your people and ensure they are cared for. Talk to them; lead them. Sideways – be aligned with another manager. Understand what is happening in other teams and how that will affect your team. Collaborate with them. Expand or adopt practices that they are adopting.

Up – you must sell your team’s success and communicate potential problems/challenges… Ensure the boss knows and understands the right things at the right time. Embrace the fact that you must balance these three directions well to make it work.

Although some managers could keep programming, a proper transition means you should be using your expertise to guide.

You are managing people, not Kubernetes pods. People have good days, bad days, birthdays, divorce, death… it’s all part of the “people deal”. You have to have a healthy distance/relationship as, at the end of the day, you must hire/fire/manipulate/lead/promote/demote them. Be humane, but be professional.

Invest in culture and lead by example. Don’t do things that you wouldn’t want to be done to you, and show a positive attitude towards whatever comes. Negative emotions and scepticism can ruin so many beautiful things.

See yourself as the conductor of an orchestra: Realise that, on the night, the instrumentalists can do this without you ONLY if they’ve worked well with you in rehearsals That your place is not to make the best sound from one instrument, but to bring the best out of all the players cohesively.

Communication Breakdown

Here’s a collection of moments where there was some kind of misunderstanding with communication.

Duplicate work

This scenario has happened a few times in various forms. I don’t get how it can happen when work ultimately comes from the Project Managers.

“we have been pressured to give estimates on the API improvements, but it turns out another team has done 80% of the work”.

Lead tester

Another manager said there was another team involved as well, but didn’t specify in what capacity. So it sounded like a simple project which should have been assigned to 1 team was assigned to 3. Then there was more drama when it seemed the team had been working on it for over 6 months but it shouldn’t have taken that long.

New PC

“It’s over 4 years old (nearly 5). Is it still performing ok or do you  want a replacement?”

I was asked if I wanted a new PC, but although I knew others had a better PC, it always seemed a bit of a waste to get rid of a working PC if it wasn’t a significant upgrade. I didn’t know if they had changed the model they were getting in either so I wasn’t sure what was considered “fast performance”. So I was a bit “on the fence” in my reply. I didn’t want to be dishonest and would rather someone decide what the policy was.

It can take a long time to get up and running if I’ve turned it off, and I think building our software can take a few extra minutes compared to some people, but other than that I believe it is fine.

My PC wasn’t new when I started and other people got faster and new PC’s. So maybe I deserve a treat; I don’t want to get left behind if everyone else is getting shiny new PC’s!

But I was surprised that I just got a simple message of acceptance. I suppose it makes his job easier to not order me one. 

“I will make a note to ask you again in 6 months.”

Team meetings when you are all at your desks

When we were in the office, we had face to face meetings. As time went on, we seemed more accepting of people that wanted to occasionally work at home. However, when they did, then you needed to dial them in, which wasn’t too bad if you had a meeting room. When we were at our desks, we couldn’t just gather round, we then all had to go on a call.

Me 14:11:
what do you think of Skype meetings when you are all at your desks

Dan 14:11:
they're shit

Me 14:11:
I guess it can be a bit cramped if there's 4 people gathering around 1 monitor
but it still looks a bit inefficient/awkward to me

Dan 14:12:
yeah I don't think people concentrate when they're on skype/teams/whatever

Me 14:13:
I like the one the testers are having
Rob "Alex, can you share your screen"
Alex "what am I showing you?"
Rob "regression testing"
Alex "I never did regression testing"
sounds organised

The Module handover

There was a time where the new idea was that we would hand over most of our domains to the developers in India, and then we move onto newer, exciting projects. I think most of the handovers happened but then we canceled the idea because they decided it was treating the Indians as “second class”.

We have been on this call for 30 minutes for our handover. Someone just asked what the domain is.

Meeting with entire Team but without Vinitha

Although I implied it was a bad idea to assign Indians to a project that was considered inferior, assigning an Indian or two to every team to make them seem integrated also doesn’t really work. When we worked in the office, we had everyone except Vinitha there, so she missed all the ad-hoc meetings we had at our desks, and also all the office banter. The timezone difference doesn’t help either because there’s large parts of the day where she has gone home and we are in the office. There was the occasion where we booked a meeting but then forgot to dial her in. She eventually requested to leave the team. The key thing is to assign projects to co-located teams and not force them to be distributed. But assign the quality projects evenly between the locations.

Online Communications

One day we received an email to our group Development email account.

Someone has logged a comment on the Support Centre "How to activate a portal in local developer’s system or in any of the test environments" and given us this email address to respond to.
This isn't a question we'd be able to answer, we presume someone in Development would be able to answer this/set this up.
Thanks.
Online Communications

Why would someone think the support centre was the correct place to ask that? Even if it was a new starter, surely they would ask a colleague first rather than contacting support.

Everyone to the breakout room!

When we worked in the office, occasionally something exciting/dramatic would happen and we’d be called into a meeting.

To: Group Development
Subject: Please go to the break out room now
 
Hi all, 
Please can everyone go to the break out room now.
Thanks!
Isobel

So with much panic, we all ran in. It was actually for a colleague’s leaving presentation but wasn’t planned in advance. To avoid people panicking further when they see the email, Isobel had to send a clarifying email. On the plus side, there was food:

Apologies for the email sent earlier. It was a leaving presentation for Elliot - nothing to panic about.
There is some food that Maria made for Elliot and colleagues in the upstairs kitchen. 
Isobel

Poor communication

When we started working with the Indian developers, we noticed that it seems a cultural thing that they would message you a greeting, then wait until you respond before asking their actual question.

I think a lot of English developers would see a message like “Hi”, then go back to their work until they get the actual message/question… but it never comes. You might just get another “Hi” or “are you free?”, sometimes having to wait until the next morning for the follow-up message.

I made a joke about that scenario:

Previously on Teams:
"Hi"
<episode starts>
"need one help"
<credits roll>
tune in tomorrow to find out what the problem is

It’s incredibly irritating to know that someone needs your help, but you don’t know if you can help, or how long they will need you for. So then it just becomes a distraction.

How about you ask me the questions, and I answer them when I am free?

I could say that I am free, then suddenly not be free if I get a call. So it doesn’t really make sense to delay until there’s a time where you think messages can be sent quickly back and forth. Messaging is asynchronous in nature, just send it and wait. 

It seems a common problem, and someone made a website about it:

http://www.nohello.com/

There was one more frustrating scenario where we had both Slack and Teams. Vignesh asked me a question on Slack. I took a while to answer so he then messaged on Teams. Although it was the distracting statement which gives you no context:

“I need some clarification..when you are free please ping me”

Security Training with 2 days to sign up

I’d imagine organising external training takes a while since they always drag out processes. However, we had 2 days notice to choose a live online session to attend. I think the problem is that the CTO sent an email to his direct reports, then they forwarded it onto theirs and so on. It had to go down 4 levels of hierarchy before it actually got to the software developers who needed to attend. Why doesn’t the CTO just send it to the Group Development mail group?

Some people then didn’t attend so it was probably a waste of money.

Further confusion was that there was a Fundamental Session and an Advanced Session. Were you supposed to attend one then the other? Could you skip one if you think you know the basics?

A shambles as always.

Auto Captions

Autocaptions on videos are a useful feature, but have traditionally struggled with different accents, or poor microphone quality. Over the years, software and hardware technology has improved, and I’ve seen dramatic improvements recently as “AI” becomes more prominent.

I had a few examples in some old notes, some from Microsoft Teams, and some from the learning platform Pluralsight.

I didn’t write down the actual transcript, but Luis was talking about Unit Tests in Software development. One of his key points was that Luis’ Mum is desperate for unit test coverage.

“Uhm, that as the code base grows, New York women should come only as soon as they hit.

 So it’s about the violence is not about professional shears alone.

if you don’t have a you know for unit tests even when you tested manually, you cannot really be sure that the that the code is working at any given point in time. Because my mom will desperately.”

Then there was this nonsense:

“Check the output of this divide the 2nd 5th Norman Vietnam. Do something else, or if it’s not then go ahead and continue with my with my low right, but this can easily be come on notice so I never can happen here.

 Media versus colon. And even when eyes usually refer to in Texas, we can just type ideas for index and and that should also help our our cognitive ability to process the words.

So this story is fetuses.”

On one call, I said “perhaps I put it in About?” and the captions read “pops up in a bowl“. There was a part where I didn’t even say anything, yet it reckoned I said “Got the trick here”.

On another call, we were talking about websites that are helpful for Juniors. One person mentioned the site “Geek For Geeks” but the subtitles humorously stated:

“Dig for *****”

When I was watching Pluralsight, the presenter was talking about CDNs: Content Delivery Networks. Instead of “most CDN’s“, the subtitles say “seedy inns“. For “CloudFront” it then stated “But with Claude Friends“, then “customisations” was “customers. Asians“.

I saw a Twitter post that said that “Jira” was a problematic product name which had a funny and numerous interpretations:

 The various ways Google Meet transcribes "JIRAs"
- Euros
- Yours
 - Cheers
- Jurors
- Juris
- Gyros
 - Gears
- Jails
- Chairs
- Cheetahs
- Jesus
- Judah
- Judas
- Jeera
 -Jealous
- Jeres
- Deers