Category: General Bitching

Frontend Violation

I overheard a Product Owner tell her colleague how much she hates another manager. She said “She has been messing with my frontend!” which I wasn’t sure if that was meant to be a funny pun or not, but it sure was funny.

I was convinced I’d misheard her, but as she explained further, it sounded like it was actually an accidental pun. She explained that her ordered backlog of work had been intentionally sabotaged. She made reference to a “Frontend backlog” so I assumed she had 2 streams of work: a “Front-end” and “Back-end”, and it was the Frontend one that had been sabotaged.

I’d advise that you don’t touch people’s frontends without permission, and definitely don’t do it in work-time.

King Of All Excuses

Beavis seems the king of working from home. I don’t think I’ve known anyone work from home as much as he does. His excuses often seem strangely worded. Most people will just say “My daughter is poorly” or “I’m getting work done on the house”, you know; simple, straight to the point, and not disclosing personal details.

Last week, at 10am Beavis wrote something like “I have a poorly pip. She was meant to get up at 7 but got up at 9, so I have to work at home”. I had to read it a couple of times to realise that “pip” was presumably his daughter. But then I wondered how he didn’t get her up at 7. If he really couldn’t get her up because she was ill, then surely he would know by 8 that she ain’t going to school, and he ain’t going to work. At 10am, why is Beavis declaring he isn’t coming in, when he knew that long ago that he wasn’t coming in?

His excuse this week was that it was “Pip’s first day at School so I’m taking my parents down. Once they are sorted, then I’ll be back to work as normal”. Again, I had to re-read it a few times to make sense of it. He meant he was taking his daughter and parents to the School. His daughter will stay there, and he will drive his parents back. Now they know where the School is located, they will handle the child-care from now on. The “taking my parents down” phrasing sounded funny, like he is gonna kill them.

However the next day, he is working at home again because he “needs to take care of the bloody parents”. Dammit Beavis, you have really gone and killed them and now you have to bury the bodies.

Also, if Pip hadn’t started going to School, where does she normally go that her illness prevented her from going to? If his parents were free to take her to School, why couldn’t they have looked after her when she was ill? Presumably they did look after her prior to her starting School.

Too many unanswered questions. I think he is lying his way out of his murder spree.

Recently, the Coronavirus has been becoming more prominent. Now there is strong advice that if you show any symptoms, then you need to self-isolate, which means you have to work from home for at least a week. So it was no surprise to me when Beavis declares himself as self-isolating.

I don’t know how he gets away with it. There is no way someone can have such bad luck that he gets impacted by all these personal and family afflictions.

Indian English

I always knew there was English (UK) and English (USA) which has minor differences in spelling e.g. localize instead of localise, and words/phrases like “sidewalk” instead of “pavement”. UK folk can understand it fine, although we often joke about it not being “proper English”. In recent years, I’ve sometimes worked with Indian staff and quickly came across some strange words and phrases.

So it turns out there should be a English (India) too. Here are some classics:

  1. “Today morning” instead of “this morning”
  2. “Have some doubts” instead of “have a query/question”
  3. “Prepone the meeting” instead of “bring the meeting forward”. Prepone is the opposite of postpone. I actually really like that one. It’s incredibly logical and is easier to say.
  4. “to do the needful”. This one often throws me off. I think it’s like “please action this”, or “do whatever is required”.
  5. “Kindly revert”. Indians love prefixing sentences with kindly. Apparently “revert” means “respond” which is just weird. This causes confusion when they leave this as a code comment on a Pull Request/Code Review. You think they are telling you to roll back your changes, but they just want you to respond with a reply.
  6. “The same”. They use this instead of “it”, sometimes it sounds fine, other times it is really jarring. “Can you fix the bug and update the documentation for the same”.

Bonus one: Some people pronounce GitHub as “JitHub”. This probably is in the same category as the pronunciation of the Gif image format.

Mini Musing #6: Expenses Risk

I overheard a conversation between a Tester and his Manager. The tester explained that he had purchased an online course on a programming language and he asked if he could claim the money back on expenses. When his Manager expressed doubt that the company would cover it, he then said “well, never mind, I knew it was a risk.”

A risk!?

The way I see it, he should have bought the online materials to become more knowledgeable because he is interested in the subject, not because it’s simply something he could get for free. Describing the purchase as a “risk” shows the wrong attitude in my opinion.

I do wonder if he regrets the purchase and wanted to get his money back via any means necessary.

Unprofessional Slack

I find that people can be rather informal on Slack due to people perceiving it more like an Instant Messaging client, rather than a formal communication channel like email.

Here are some examples words and phrases:

  1. Words, phrases or spelling that I would consider “Baby speak”: Fanks, looksies,
  2. Very similar to the point above: comedic phrases like Facejacker’s Brian Badonde: “Bwoh bwexcellent work”,
  3. Switching letters for comedic effect: “fassive mailure”.
  4. Old English phrases: “I say, old bean”
  5. Regional slang. I’ve seen it all, from Geordie “howay”, Yorkshire “off t’meeting”, and Cockney “I’ll have a butchers at your report”.

When we are in a multicultural team, there is no way a non-English speaker understands this. I did ask the non-English members of my team, and they were unaware of Cockney rhyming slang. They did recall a few phrases from films that they had seen and were now enlightened.

Other comedic spellings/phrases/inside-jokes can be confusing or make people feel left out.

Other unprofessional examples:

  1. People putting silly statuses including sexual innuendos. They would never do this on Skype.
  2. People posting stuff they would never write in an email or say to your face. I was communicating in a thread with someone over the course of an hour. It was time to go home, so I left the office. He then posted some meme along the lines of “and he’s gone!” implying I fled because he asked me to do work. There is no way he would have said that to my face. I have never even met the guy in person or spoke on the phone.
  3. Someone asked for help with putting a video together. For some reason he added a random swear word. One guy points it out that it is NSFW, then someone makes a joke about the video consisting of pornographic material, someone else makes a joke about a convicted sex offender. No idea why people thought any of these things were appropriate, and it is completely out of character for our company culture. If I hadn’t read it myself, I wouldn’t have believed it happened…

but I guess anything goes on Slack.

Side Rants: Music Hipsters

Just for a change, here is a non-development blog.

I once was talking about music with my brother and ranted about someone claiming their music taste was the best and they kept on hyping up obscure bands. It seemed to me they just liked them because of their obscurity, and then trashed any band that was popular.

My brother responded; “damn, I hate those Pitchfork hipsters”.

I asked him what he meant, and he told me about the music review website Pitchfork. They tend to cover music outside the mainstream eye (apart from Kanye West for some reason), and my brother said he knows loads of people that listen to obscure bands, plus Kanye West, and also think their taste is elite. A weird coincidence.

Music is all about having your own opinion, but yet there’s loads of people that just accept the music that plays on the radio. Then there’s a large group of people that are very anti-radio, yet just follow Pitchfork instead. Ironically, they are just doing the same thing and following trends, but then pretending they’re not a sheep.

At work, a guy keeps hyping up how cool his music taste is. He does listen to quite a range of stuff; a combination of obscure rock bands, electronic/indie-pop, and hip-hop.

One day, I take a look at The Needle Drop aka Anthony Fantano aka Melon, and noticed many of these obscure and cool bands that they love have been reviewed by The Needle Drop; and reviewed highly.

It seems we have a Melon Hipster on our hands.

Today, he starts ranting about how bad Green Day’s new album is; “Father Of All…”.

Melon Hipster hadn’t listened to Green Day since American Idiot, presumably after that his music taste “matured”. So what makes him listen to “Father Of All…” when he hadn’t listened to 21st Century Breakdown, Uno, Dos, Tré, and Radio Revolution?

Well, The Needle Drop had just reviewed it, hated it, and gave it a ridiculous score of 0. Melon Hipster had listened to it just to trash it.

I’m not saying it’s a good album (I haven’t heard it), but listening to an album once and then ranting about how bad it is isn’t an honest opinion. Echoing the “opinion” of a media outlet or social media influencer doesn’t make your music taste cool either.

Mini Musing #4: Amnesia

Colin sits down next to Senior Developer Tim.

Colin: “Can I speak to you about the 2 things I was going to ask you yesterday?”
Tim: “Yeah sure, what’s up?”
Colin: “Can you remember what the questions were?”
Tim: “No”
Colin: “I’ll come back when I remember what they were”.

Brilliant. Sometimes it’s like a comedy show.

Slack Analytics

I recently discovered that Slack has an analytics page. We’ve been using Slack for around 1 year now, and the statistics sure were interesting.

The channel with the most posts is the team that were responsible for the adoption of using Slack. They collectively have written 74,000 posts in that one channel. That figure is seriously alarming. What about posting in other channels, or sending private messages? Damn.

Well, their highest individual posted 64,000 messages, but the average for their team was around 30,000. Their newest member of their team led the monthly charts for December with 3,500 across the 18 days she was in the office.

I think I use Slack far too much, but I have 1,700 message for the entire year. Yet, that is half the leading December poster. My team’s channel has around 1,100 posts. So we post around 74 times less than the highest posting team. That particular team has posted 2.5 times the second place team, so they are ahead by some distance.

I do wonder how much Slack impacts productivity. I think the team that is leading the Slack charts is perceived to be very productive and innovative by the Managers. Yet perception by Managers is often different from the actual truth. I often hear their team claim they are too busy and that other teams need to help out with their backlog. Maybe if they weren’t on Slack so much, then more work would be done? I don’t see how one team can justify sending 74,000 messages across a year. That is a staggering amount.

Why is my build failing?

A Senior Developer asked for help on Slack. His build failed, so he triggered it again and it failed with the same error. He had hoped it was just a random failure.

I pointed out the reason it had failed is because there was a failing unit test. His code change was a one line change. He had changed a boolean value from false to true, but hadn’t updated the unit test.

After I pointed it out, he then deleted his post for help. Destroyed.