Manager coding ability

I came across this interesting twitter thread about coding ability of managers.

“your managers should be better engineers than you”

Most managers disagree about this and I’m sure there are many exceptions, but in my career my worst managers were always the ones with the weakest coding ability.

“coding ability” here doesn’t refer only to banging out code, but it also doesn’t mean just CS (computer science) fundamentals. It’s the breadth and depth to understand what is going on around them instead of just forwarding what their manager and peers are telling them.
Christoph Nakazawa

Most managers disagree about this and I’m sure there are many exceptions, but in my career my worst managers were always the ones with the weakest coding ability. https://t.co/T2R92zF1dT
— Christoph Nakazawa (@cpojer) July 28, 2023

Personally, I think it depends on what the manager is actually managing. I’ve been in teams where the manager is the team lead and gets heavily involved in coding. Other times we have restructured and the manager acts as more of a middle-man between the team and others higher up in the hierarchy.

Traditionally, over time people want to feel like they are progressing and get promoted. This can often mean that you get so good at your job ie Developer that you then stop doing the job and just manage others. For some reason that gets awarded more money even though being a prolific developer would be more beneficial to the company.

I think having someone technical to explain problems to and resolve them is very beneficial. This can either be fixing a software bug, architectural problem or a network problem. You can definitely get them resolved faster and avoid miscommunications if they actually understand what the problem is and the impact it has.

“I strongly believe that all managers in a technical area must be technically excellent. Managers in software must write great software or it’s like being a cavalry captain who can’t ride a horse!”
Elon Musk

Here’s some other opinions from the thread:

I always felt that as manager of technical people I had to be astute enough to be credible. As a leader you assist and drive problem solving. But I wasn’t a great engineer myself, I made a better manager. Everyone’s different though.

The ones that know you’re there to do a job and trust you to do that job are the best. The ones that have no idea what *they’re* even doing and attempt to micromanage *you* are the worst.

No, managers need to be good at managing, it’s just a bonus if they are well versed in the craft. They need to be good listeners and build trust. Being an expert coder isn’t gonna help them to make decisions that makes different personalities thrive (we aren’t all the same)

There are people who are very good engineers, but not so good managers. I don’t see how such an engineer can have a manager who is better at engineering than them. I think it’s totally viable to have very strong TLs that are not managers.

My nightmare fuel is working for someone who came to engineering leadership via old school project management. The kind of person who knows everything about deadlines and nothing about why they are unrealistic.

I think there’s a lot of room between “weakest coding ability” and “the best coder on the team”, and managers can be effective in a lot of that space.

In my experience, a kind of bell curve — average enough at coding = terrible enough to think they “get it”, or no real coding ability but appreciation for the technical = the guts to manage and serve technical teams effectively and actually *listen*

It works on my machine: Top 20 Replies by Programmers

I was watching a tech conference and a woman was detailing her experiences as a software tester. Her presentation was titled “Being a woman in tech“. She was implying that people have been sexist towards her, or at least a clear victim of unconscious bias. The quotes she wrote down were:

Are you sure you’re testing this correctly?
This doesn’t need testing, there’s no bugs
Why is this taking so long?
That’s how it’s supposed to work
Works fine on my machine

Now, aside from the first one (maybe the third too), those are just generic statements and not any attack on her ability, or anything to do with being a woman. As a man, I have heard other men say those things to me or other men. I often think today’s generation are told they are victims so misinterpret many statements are microaggressions.

If you have any experience with working with developers, then there’s plenty of recurring statements they make as excuses, often they use them intentionally as a classic software development joke.

Sometimes developers say them because they are certain their code was working under all test scenarios they tried. Sometimes it’s just an automatic deflection to defend their pride.

I saw this meme which has many classic ones, some that I have heard in some scenarios, and others I reckon are just included as a joke and no one actually said them. Notice how similar they are to her claims of sexism:

Top 20 Replies by Programmers when their programs don’t work…

That’s weird…
It’s never done that before.
It worked yesterday.
How is that possible?
It must be a hardware problem.
What did you type in wrong to get it to crash?
There has to be something funky in your data.
I haven’t touched that module in weeks!
You must have the wrong version.
It’s just some unlucky coincidence.
I can’t test everything!
THIS can’t be the source of THAT
It works, but it hasn’t been tested.
Somebody must have changed my code.
Did you check for a virus on your system?
Even though it doesn’t work, how does it feel?
You can’t use that version on your system.
Why do you want to do it that way?
Where were you when the program blew up?
It works on my machine.

XKCD Password advice is great but let’s not use it

We’ve mainly had the usual password restrictions of having to have a capital letter, a number and a symbol in our passwords, but recently, some of the posts by IT have referenced the classic XKCD comic on passwords. xkcd: Password Strength

XKCD illustrates the point that if you have fewer characters and require symbols and numbers, then you are either gonna just put them at the end or use simple substitution like swapping a “o” for a “0”. Then it can be hard to remember, but a password is no good if you cannot remember it. So they reckon the best thing is to use a memorable combination of words without numbers or symbols; and the combination of words makes it a long password that is hard to crack.

However, despite referencing XKCD, our IT still force the old ideas into it; so bastardising their advice:

20 characters sounds like a lot to remember for a password, so the best method to use is the “4 Words” method. Choose 4 random words (not your kids’ names), add a year (not your birth year), and put a symbol in there somewhere. This gives us something like:
Bird%CardPortBook3925
IT

Then they make the claim it’s easy to remember.

Hard to type passwords, combined with having a strict timeout on our laptops when we work at home quickly becomes infuriating:

“Anyone else need a time card for logging back into laptop 50 times a day with a new 16 digit sign in password?
Seriously, why is the fingerprint & facial recognition login disabled on the laptops, or is the way to change the autosleep setting to more than 10 mins”
Angry Colleague

Aside from our password to log into our laptops, IT do recommend using a Password Manager and using that to generate and store passwords. That is common advice from modern security professionals so they definitely have at least partly understood best and modernised practices.

When I downloaded Keeper to use at work, I chose a master password and it showed:

Password Strength: Strong
<click next> 
"Password must contain 1 digit"

Those restrictions also don’t make a great password. You can often set an incredibly bad password on many websites. For example:
P@ssw0rd
This will pass many password complexity criteria (uppercase, lowercase, number, non-alphanumeric character, 8 chars long) but is clearly terrible.

There’s this website that catalogues poor password rules:
https://dumbpasswordrules.com/sites/

We used to recommend LastPass and despite some security incidents at LastPass, there was a time where IT still would approve LastPass. I think it was the usual terrible slow process in procurement so we couldn’t switch over to Keeper at that time. One colleague made this interesting claim:

“Not sure how LastPass can be recommended when there are alternatives that haven’t been breached ever, but LastPass has on more than one occasion. They’ve been breached before, they can’t be trusted anymore.”
Doubtful colleague

How does he know for sure they haven’t been breached? A breach could have happened and it’s not publicly known. A breach could be happening right now.

Employee Profiles: Zack

I’ve often said that my employer is reluctant to sack people even if they are bad. We once wanted to hire some experienced software testers to bring new ideas into the testing team since most of ours were internally trained. One of the new hires, Zack, was recommended by another employee, and a manager reckoned we hired Zack only to appease that employee, but then that guy quickly left anyway; leaving us with Zack.

Zack seemed reluctant to do any work, learn anything, and would often not really listen but repeatedly say “yeah, yeah, alright” when you were talking to him. It was irritating because it would interrupt you whilst you were speaking but also not give you any indication if he understood it at all.

What annoyed me is that sometimes he would ask for help, then go ask someone else without attempting to do what you said. Did he not understand or was he just procrastinating and wasting your time whilst doing it?

Blagging

He loved blagging his daily standup updates, because he had done nothing but had to say something.

From probable lies: “There was no power to my PC this morning, so I had to sort that out. “

Saying a few words to blag: “I’ve been doing a bit of admin, and some other things I don’t remember”

To definite lies: “Helped get Jim up and running” (I think that is a bit exaggerated, he just watched while I helped him)

Or a bit of humour to deflect: “In Nerd Heaven, looking at XML code”

Procrastinating

There was one time Zack asked me which test organisation he could test a feature on, and he said he was gonna use my user account. I told him to create a new user since there isn’t any extra config he needs. The next day, I got in at 8:45 and he told me he couldn’t find my user on that organisation. He gets in at 8. Instead of creating a new user, he just sat there for 45 mins. So I told him to create a new user, and he walks over to Jim and asks him what his password is. Why can’t he just create a new user? Is he trying to avoid his name from being shown in the error logs or something?

Zack 13:06:
Hi. Do you know anything about filing external messages?
Me 13:06:
You need Messenger set up, and the Messenger Forwarder Tool to send them in
Zack 13:08:
OK, I'll see what I can find out about that. Jim sent me a link to a wiki or two that I haven't read yet

So he had the answer, but decided to ask others again.

I loved that time when Zack was trying to palm some work off to anyone that would take it. Zack says to Josh “So who is responsible for this?” and Josh shot him down “As Senior Testers; we are, Zack“

Me 16:09:
we have just been laughing about Zack
he got told to test an item. He spoke to Paul, spoke to me, spoke to Sanjay, spoke to Jim, then sent an email to everyone summarising our conversations
Mel comes over and says "who is testing it?"
turns out, it is Jim
Dean 16:10:
so they both had the same WI assigned?
Me 16:12:
well in fact, I think Paul wanted Zack to test it but since he isn't confident, he said Jim can assist but neither of them seemed to understand they were supposed to work together.
The item doesn't have testing details, wasn't assigned to Jim, and Zack even asked Jim how to test it and he didn't even think he was on about the same item

The Longest Work

There was one time we made some risky changes to a feature so we advised fully regression testing it, alongside some specific tests. Zack ended up testing for a month. 109 hours on his timesheet. One day, as Zack was leaving he jestingly said :

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t”
Zak

So I said to Sanjay

“Shall we mark his item as “Completed”?”

you won’t hear a better joke this week

James: “Are there any IRP experts?”

“Zack, he has spent 3 lifetimes on it”
Senior Developer

Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs

The frequency that Zack said “right, yeah” etc was insane. Sometimes I’d type it out as Zack said it to joke with team member Sanjay.

Me 09:58:
right, yeah, okay, right, right
Me 11:36:
Jim gatecrashing their meeting
Sanjay 11:37:
Jim is a legend
Me 11:37:
you should do it next, just walk up going "yeah, yeah, yeah, er yeah right"
Sanjay 11:44:
ha
Me 11:46:
yeah, yeah, um, yeah
Sanjay 11:52:
you basket
Me 15:43:
oh yeah, yeah, right
Sanjay 15:44:
you're a basket
Me 15:45:
our conversation history is just
oh yeah, yeah, right
you're a basket
that's what we have become
Sanjay 16:54:
oh yeah yeah

 Me 10:04:
We asked Zack a few times if the Test Environment was patched with the new changes and he was just like "yeah, yeah, yeah"
ended up checking myself and it hadn't been
Sanjay 10:05:
I told him yesterday it was not patched

“anything that isn’t abnormal is normal”
Chris

“ah right”
Zack

Bedding into a new team

The merging

A few years ago, some team members had been moved onto other projects and we were left with two developers and one tester. I led the team, and it was a tough project which ended up getting delayed. The result was that some managers saw the delay as a failure, and others interpreted that we did a great job against adversity.

As the project reached its conclusion, our team merged with a team that managers claimed was one of the most successful teams. Additionally, my manager switched from Colin to Mary.

Mary said the initial plan was to merge the two teams, then we were adding 3 new developers, so the plan was to then split the team into 2 because it was too big. The other developer that I led actually moved to a different team.

Doesn’t really make any sense does it? May as well have added a couple of developers to my original team.

Mary criticised my leadership and made out that my team was a disorganised mess. Technically, Colin was the Technical Manager so was the equivalent of Mary’s role in this new team. I was the development Team Lead but I didn’t think I actually had responsibilities. I kinda think things just organise themselves really. I like a laid-back culture but would voice my concerns if I felt it wasn’t working.

I was actually looking forward to seeing how organised and productive their team was. I was good friends with a couple of their team members already and they always seemed to boast how productive they were, getting plaudist from external managers.

The first week

On the first standup, Dennis talks about a problem he was having for over 5 mins. I was thinking I would have interjected and asked to discuss at the end. In my previous team, I didn’t mind people talking off-topic because it was pretty much the only time you hear people talk. But at a certain point, I’d flag it and request we organise a separate meeting with anyone that is interested, leaving the other team members to go off and do work; which is even more important in a larger team. This team had a member assigned as “Scrum Master” and that’s his job to guide these meetings.

In one of the standups we were asked to estimate one of the items. Standups are for progress updates, not planning. Why are we planning mid-sprint?

Also during this Sprint, I saw that the team was working on items not assigned to the Sprint, and left unpointed (not estimated). Then when they do officially bring it in, they bring it in with fewer points because they estimate the remaining work; and ignore the investigation/prototyping work they had just done. So what happens to tracking their actual effort? They will be lowering their velocity working that way.

There’s another type of work item called “Spike” which is an investigation item. So if you know you have a requirement but have no idea how to implement it, then you can do some design/planning to make it clearer to estimate the actual item. This team was creating Spikes when they can’t recreate bugs and so I asked them what the idea was. The way I see it, instead of basically marking the item as blocked, you are creating another item to say it is blocked and then removing this new item when it is unblocked. The Scrum Master said he has no idea where the idea came from, couldn’t remember how long they have been doing it, but everyone has been following this process without questioning it. Weird.

Meeting Chaos

I got told to go into their shared Team calendar and add all the meetings into my personal calendar. It turned out they had multiple invites for the same meetings so it was easy to miss them. So instead of one meeting that recurs daily, they had 2 fortnightly meetings for Monday and Friday then another meeting which recurred weekly Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday. So 5 meeting invites in total just for the stand-ups; then invites for a few other types of meeting. I ended up initially missing a Stand-up meeting when it wasn’t in my calendar which Mary made out was my mistake. The invites were also set to show the reminder at 15 mins before which I find really annoying. I like 5 minutes or just alert on start. So I had to then go through all the invites and change the timing.

Not the amazing organised process we were promised

With Mary micromanaging and boasting of her ability, and with a dedicated Scrum Master, you think every aspect would run smoothly and processes would be perfectly followed. I didn’t think I’d hear/read statements like this:

“it’s tested, it just needs a test case writing for it”
Tester

Dennis: "Did you log the bug we found"
Tester: "no mate"

How are we supposed to check the bug is on an older version when the test environments are all on the current version and the API often doesn’t work? This is ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. It shouldn’t be like this. We’ve never had this before
Mary

Stubborn Management

When it comes to code reviews, we have a rule that it needs to be approved by 2 people that weren’t involved in the work. We needed Dean to help fix a few of the remaining bugs since we were running behind schedule, but Mary blocked it.

“you can’t help because we need you to do the approval”
Mary

Ok, we need people to review, but he could have reviewed what the other team member’s wrote, and we can review his parts. It’s not a big problem. Also what is worse? Finishing on time but it’s not reviewed, or finishing late but it is reviewed? You have to be pragmatic.

During integration testing, shortly before release, I found another bug. Mary and the Product Owner decided they wanted to keep it secret from Software Delivery. Mary tried to blag it to us that: because the bug hadn’t been directly found from a test case; then it can be released. She was then insistent we release the software as is, and fix known bugs later. I thought it was technically unsafe to do so.

NO Mary. That’s not only not how it works, but I did find it directly from a test case, so you have just mugged yourself off.
my thoughts

why is she doing this? it just reflects badly on the company. her job ain’t to ensure a deadline
my old team member

“I’m not comfortable putting our feature out like this…we are removing items just to get something out on time. Is this even legal?”
Tester

It just seems like they are clutching at straws and giving any kind of justification to not fix it. It also sounded like they have beef with the lead of Software Delivery so are avoiding talking to him.

Implied Disrespect

For the remaining bugs on my project there were clear “easy” and “hard” tasks. Mary explicitly told me to do the easy ones and Dennis to do the hard ones. We are on the same level, just that she is chummy with Dennis and doesn’t seem to trust me.

When it came to hiring these new developers, she said she chose them simply based on how much they talked because she didn’t want people that don’t talk in her team. Which I felt was a dig at me. I tend to hate smalltalk and struggle to talk to people I don’t feel comfortable with. Not that I dislike certain people, but I think there’s certain people that I tend to instantly connect with and feel myself, whereas others I find more intimidating and it takes me a while to open up. I can talk a lot at that point but sometimes people’s first impressions are that I am too shy.

When it came to the inductions, the Product Owner, Tech Lead and Scrum Master were all assigned to the “Welcome Meeting”. Dennis was assigned the “Ways Of Working” meeting, then Tech Lead, Scrum master and Dennis were assigned as Technical Mentors. Me and my tester who had joined the team weren’t assigned to anything. You could argue we hadn’t fully integrated into the team but we knew the process and weren’t new to the company. We felt disrespected there, like we weren’t official members of the team.

Complains about autonomy

During testing some of the remaining items, a bug was found, and I took the initiative and fixed it.

“we can’t keep working like this. You can’t keep finding bugs and fixing them”
Mary

She had berated us for not having many unit tests but that actually allowed us to work faster. She complains that I have made the decision to fix a newly discovered bug without consulting, but that also got it fixed faster. Then she was “really disappointed” that we had missed the deadline. It would have been worse if I hadn’t made these decisions.

However, the next day:

“Thanks both, efforts haven’t gone unnoticed with all this, I just feel bad for you guys it’s got so manic for so long”.
Mary

Performance Review

“You’ve got the ability to not be quiet”
Mary

In my end of year performance review, Mary says she has noticed an improvement since I joined the team. I think this is just coincidence and confirmation bias. I think she wanted to “manage” me and see an improvement; so that’s what she thought she saw. I was actually demotivated due to all the disrespect and had actually been taking longer breaks and finishing early.

Mary also told me that Colin told her what I said about her during the handover period. Colin is an absolute backstabber. What happened to talking to managers in confidence?

What I said to Colin is that Mary seems to try and micromanage. Constantly asking for updates, telling you to pick up tasks that you know you have on your To Do list. It’s like she doesn’t trust you to be autonomous, and then can claim credit for success because she has been controlling it the entire time – even if it would have had the same outcome if people were just left to manage themselves.

She also mentioned the tester had complained that I hadn’t had a call with him when he asked. I wanted to have a call but he was on a call for what seemed like hours. Then when he was free, I was busy so I missed the call again.

I actually thought she was rather positive and very friendly during the review; a change in mood that remained.

Closing Thoughts

It was a weird initial few months with that team. The hype of them being organised and productive didn’t seem to be true. Then I felt like I wasn’t welcome even though I was good friends with the main developers of the team, and had actually worked with the tester previously and got on with him.

I must have caught them at a bad time, because after the current projects were released, I didn’t notice much erratic behaviour from anyone, and Mary was never problematic again. What seemed like a nightmare quickly resolved itself and I have actually really enjoyed working with the team over the last couple of years. I suppose it could have been helped by the fact that Mary did take 1 year maternity leave and then we worked more autonomously. Maybe shows that these manager roles aren’t actually needed.

Spam Emails

Many years ago there was a period of a few months where we used to get a certain style of spam email daily.

Although it seemed to get to our email inbox (so got past any spam filter we had), they often didn’t seem to have any suspicious link or obvious element of scam.

After a few months, Group IT managed to successfully filter them out.

Here are a couple of examples I still had in my Inbox.

Title: Benjamin Cory Elementary School billboard.

Segesta became a marked enemy of Sicilian Greeks, and Selinus attacked and defeated Segesta in 411 BC. This source mentioned of Majapahit expansions has marked the greatest extent of Majapahit empire.
Although the weather was good, the jet was operating under simulated blackout conditions. Listen to local ABC Radio for emergency updates.
Tallinn and 6 km near Mao. Routes 20A and 246.
UFOs had an objective physical reality, let alone to confirm their origins or motives. HeM as HoM and HeW. The town has a population of 1,193.

Title: Caulker playing for Swansea.

Helen Carter on bass guitar and Stephen Philip on guitar. He went on to set records for distance swimming into the 1920s.
Destiny Mission to Mars. He was later reprimanded by the Secretary of the Navy for verbally abusing a fellow officer who testified in the matter.
Connecticut, although they were on the rebound by that point, in part due to state regulations to protect them. Barry Reder, The Obligation of a Director of a Delaware Corporation to Act as an Auctioneer, 44 Bus.
Aviation, both are now stored. Windsor was an important British stronghold. His books have been translated into a number of languages.

We did occasionally get ones with links but targeting a group mailbox didn’t make much sense in context:

hello controlledrollout!
I remember you asked me how I lost weight so quickly?
answer is here

Employee Profiles: Legacy Staff

We used to have two Software Development departments, each one for a separate product. As one got phased out, these “Legacy” developers and testers moved onto our projects.

When people were hired for the new product, we often went for young graduates in technical subjects. The demographic for the legacy product were from an older generation, and the testers were mainly women; often part-time mothers.

What I think is so funny is that when I had conversations with other staff about them, they would quickly resort to slagging them off and be incredibly harsh. So I knew they must have been bad if they were antagonising multiple people, particularly those that rarely criticised.

Not knowing the basics

Me 16:07:
was Gina one of those legacy developers?
Dean 16:08:
Yeah, why?
Me 16:08:
Dave is explaining how to add a schema patch
why haven't you been showing her the ropes?
Dean  16:09:
i have she's just thick
Me 16:09:
ha

Using code review titles for messages

Me 14:32:
are you ready for Code Review Title Of The Week?
"I am sending this to you to check in the files"
Mark 14:40:
haha
new contractor?
Me 14:40:
Gina
Mark 14:40:
not surprised
Me 14:40:
now that I think about it, I reckon she meant "I'm on holiday, so you can sort out the errors and check it in". But why would you name the actual review that and not just send them a private message or leave a comment on the actual work item?

Code Comments

Me 17:02:
// Gina added do i need to assign the stop event
Mark 17:03:
oh god
what is she?
Me 17:03:
I'm gonna give her a stop event
Mark 17:03:
give her it immediately
Me 17:03:
that code comment is from her code review "sending code to code review"

Poor attitude to timekeeping

Mark 17:05:
I remember sitting with her for about 15 minutes, and her trying to explain something basic in the most convoluted way I've ever encountered, and I almost, so nearly walked off
but then SHE WALKED OFF
just locked her PC, got up and said "I need to go to the doctor's"
so I'm like, do you have an appointment soon?
and she said "15 minutes ago"
WTF
Me 17:06:
haha, is that a true story?
Mark 17:06:
why call me down if you have a doctor's appointment
:@
it was her second DNA (Did Not Attend)
and she already had a warning!
it's totally serious
I'm afraid
Me 17:06:
that happened to me when I slept over at my mates house once. He wakes me up at 10am and said "damn, I have a dentist appointment, you'd better go"
Mark 17:08:
ha
no, you'd better go!
I'll stay sleeping
that's like when Alex said I could stay at his after a work night out
then booted me out for football
so I went and slept in the breakout room for 2 hours

Ignoring instructions

Me 16:53:
Gina sent me an email earlier and Im’ looking at it now and it is quite funny. It has a screenshot of Visual Studio and the projects haven’t loaded. There’s an error message about running it as administrator.
 
maybe the project hasn't loaded 😀
do you need to run it as administrator?
Mark 16:58:
ha
should be quite obvious...
what does she normally do?
it seems mean, but why don't we let these people go?
draining everyone else

Testing on the test environment

If we were enabling/disabling configuration on the test environments, we sent out an email informing people because it could invalidate their testing if the config wasn’t what they expected. But instead of saying what config was changing, Lisa just said “I’m planning on testing”!

Hi, I’m planning on testing in the next 5mins. Let me know if this will be a problem.

Not knowing people’s names

Dean 11:48: 
Lisa though Dave Walsh's name was Tim Burton
Me11:51: 
seriously?
she is like the Gerrald of your team
Dean 11:52: 
yeah
not really cos she's just thick
Me 11:53: 
that made me lol

No skills

Dean 13:58:
remember lisa?
she was shit
Me 14:00:
she looked more confused than Gerrald
Dean 14:01:
she had no appropriate skills whatsoever
remember when that wasn't even a problem?
people that could just work in a generic office working here

Closing thoughts

Working with the “Legacy” testers and developers, it was clear they were hired under a different company culture or hiring strategy. It was like software testing was seen as a job anyone could do, when even basic software testing requires people competent at using a computer, and required a mindset and attention to detail to find or investigate non-trivial bugs.

Employee Profiles: WHY IS HE DIFFERENT!?

There was a former employee who seemed to have plenty of enemies. From the times I spoke to him, he seemed to have a great general knowledge and was passionate at programming. However, other people seemed to say he was weird or arrogant, and could be very argumentative and patronising.

From some online blogs, forum posts, and some work emails people dug up, I realised people had a point. Maybe you just had to catch him in the right mood, or provoke him by saying something factually wrong so he would snap and correct you.

I don’t want to bash his appearance but he seemed to take on some stereotypes of a nerdy programmer, but one of the rock/metal types. So long hair, then baggy jeans with chains, or even camo. Which makes it weird when we found his blogs as a teenager:

I am currently single (oh my Gods!) but I doubt it’s a state I shall long be in. I’m currently courting a very sweet Gothic model, who actually went to my college at the same time as me.

Aside from my Grandmas, who uses the word “courting“? But the way he claims he is dating a model sounds arrogant, but he later repeated this claim that he only dates models.

Another profile described himself as

“articulate, clever, charming and funny (at least if you have a very dry sense of humour). I’m attractive enough to be choosy but I’m not so attractive I’m un-claimable.”

Then rated his skills as “I am an extremely competent programmer and web developer“

His Guitar Hero skills are also legendary:

“As karma-driven punishment for getting it early, the guitar no longer strums down making those Expert bass licks a little too difficult for even myself”

In one email chain at work, he stated:

“I demonstrably proved, without a shadow of a doubt, that people had been lying about the scope of the problem and the nature of the issues; specifically the then head of the Maintenance Team, who pressed his own fabrications so hard I was forced to publicly humiliate him by presenting the evidence to his superiors (who he was telling repeated lies to) to get him to stop slagging me off.”

So you can see his arrogance.

I’m not sure if it was due to his arrogance, or some other reason, but although we once had an open-plan office for Developers, Testers, and Managers; he was in a room by himself, so looked like he was the most important guy in the office.

There was one amazing situation where we were in the breakout room, and a manager storms in and exclaims “WHY IS HE DIFFERENT!?“

So he had a good record of causing conflict.

There was another guy that I hadn’t met, but was reminiscent of him in some of his prose. This other guy was always trying to start arguments in trivial meetings. We had a meeting about some kind of Skills Matrix we needed to fill in, and he challenged the manager’s claim that there was a “complete” list of skills on the form.

The core skill I use as the vast majority of my job is still not on the “complete” list – despite requesting it via the form. Could you please just take a moment to appreciate why it is I get so angry with people choice of words in presentations when they are not wholly accurate?

Perhaps a phrase like “The pre-agreed list” in the presentation might have been clearer?(The level of irony that the #1 thing I do wouldn’t even be on there was completely unexpected. That is just unfortunate, and in another life might be funny. In this one it is infuriating).
Different Person Number 2

Air Con Game

I was going through some old emails and came across this gem from when we worked in the office.

Hi all
We are aware that the air conditioning is not working correctly and that it is too hot upstairs. Unfortunately the cupboard where the controls are is locked at present so there is nothing we can do about it.
The key is being located and brought across but even then, the A/C has been set up in zones but we don’t know which zone is which. The person who does know how to control it is on holiday for a couple of days.

How can you have that many levels of failures? The person who controls the Air Conditioning is on holiday, the key is in another building, but even if they managed to find it, the controls can’t be understood. It sounds like some convoluted sequence of puzzles for a point-and-click adventure game.

Employee Profiles: Philip

I was going through some old chat logs and was reminiscing about a former employee called Philip who was a Senior Software Developer in his 50’s and had an attitude problem. In addition to being flippant and unprofessional, he seemed to have the common attitude with some older developers where they seem annoyed that the programming language they specialised in has now essentially become obsolete and are very reluctant to learn new things.

We were coding in C# and SQL, but he has experience in some old specialised languages like MUMPS and had C++ experience in his Commodore 64 days.

My employer always seemed reluctant to sack anyone, so would just leave them to it and hope that they quit one day.

Philip never seemed to ask for help so would just write comments on the Work Items that he couldn’t do it, would spend hours procrastinating at his desk, and sometimes fell asleep.

When he did socialise, he would come up with random stories that seemed far fetched.

Chilling

Our software is large and complicated so we have a batch file called BuildCompleteSolution which used to take about 40 minutes to complete. You only needed to run it when there’s major updates/breaking changes, but Philip seemed to run it everyday just to procrastinate.

Dean 11:45: 
he's moved to another team
but when i saw him the other day
he was building complete solution
Me 11:45: 
what's he doing? back working with his old software?
Dean 11:45: 
apparently he's working for Digital
we've never heard of it
our theory is that they've set up a dummy company to distract Philip
Me 11:46: 
probably just a sister company they have made, then gonna announce redundancies
“this month, we have closed Digital and the Venezuela office”

Me 14:52:
I like how Philip often runs Outlook rules. It's like his new buildcompletesolution
seems to take an hour to process
Jim 14:53:
:D. He's very set in his ways. And very vocal about them.
Me 14:54:
looks like he is doing a noob c# course on pluralsight
he didn't learn from his years of experience with my team
Jim 14:54:
Really? He's finally stopped programming in the 80s?
How are you checking this?
Me 14:56:
I can see his monitor
Jim 14:56:
Ah.
Me 14:57:
seems to be going through data structures like dictionaries and arrays
and his progress bar on outlook has been there for a good 15 minutes and has gone from 80% to 95%
I often see him sitting there idle, watching the progress bar

Me 15:48:
looks like Philip is taking his time deciding if he should purchase some Nik Naks
Paul 15:48:
LOL
Me 15:48:
what do you think his favourite flavour is?
I reckon Scampi
Paul 15:48:
Nice and Spicy
Has to be
Me 15:49:
or maybe he hasn't decided
he will abandon the purchase and just buy Monster Munch
Paul 15:49:
Is he doing his online shop??
Me 15:49:
ooh I think there's Twiglets now
Paul 15:49:
Choices choices
Me 15:55:
I think he has given up coding, and shopping instead

Mary 15:19: 
look at Philip
HORIZONTAL!
Me 15:20: 
just messaged Matt about it
he has readjusted now
Mary 15:20: 
did u see him fall asleep the other day!? 😐
Me 15:35: 
no
Mary15:35: 
that was FUNNY
his head kept on falling LOOOOOL

Updates With Attitude

Matt: "Philip, so what did you do"
Philip: "CARRIED
ON
LOOKING
AT
IT
NEXT!"

“Argument with UX. They want the text to be sentence casing, so I said NO”
Philip’s standup update

Philip added a comment.
Technical Authors decided on some changes.
I need to find out how to change the text on the buttons for the dialogue box, if this type of dialogue can handle such.
Wouldn't it be nice if anything had any sort of documentation available. Guess we can all dream.

Philip added a comment.
Looks like another hijacked job.
The code has been moved around.
Thu, 01/10/2015 11:19

“I was constipated all day yesterday and the day before”
Philip

Tall Tales


Me 09:06:
because the Columbians don't want the world to know what their real coffee tastes like, each bag comes with 6 months jail sentence
#PhilipsFacts
Dean 09:08:
lol what?
Me 09:12:
Jim says he remembers Philip telling that story about 5 years ago
if you try smuggle their proper coffee out of Columbia, then you get thrown in jail
I wonder how many of his stories are true
might have to search Snopes for it
saying you can't take their "real" coffee out of the country, and the only coffee you import is lower quality

Me 09:44:
Philip is talking about curries again
rats and cats found in the freezer
Dean 09:45:
haha what
Me 09:49:
A takeaway got shut down for selling cat curries
#Philip'sFacts "most of the curries are Portuguese"

Philip's mate drank 2 bottles of vodka, took his clothes off and went to sleep in the hospital car park. His blood-alcohol level stopped him dying of hyperthermia
Dean 12:44:
haha
i have heard of that kind of thing happening before
Me 12:45:
I like how he went to sleep in a hospital car park
in the case that he does get in trouble, a doctor may save him
Dean 12:45:
clever

I wish I could remember more of his tales. There was one about a casino scam with the poker player stacking his chips comedically high. Then another about censorship in cartoons with characters headbutting each other.

Miscellaneous

There was a new communications platform we were trialling, and as a Job Role, Philip set his job title as “Low-paid grunt”

“hope you’ve gone to a much better place”
Philip written in Leigh’s leaving card

One time, IT updated our Desktop wallpapers and in my opinion was only marginally brighter than the previous one. However, many staff members complained, including Philip.

“So the attitude is to kick everyone in the head for the sake of a couple of people, not the least bit friendly.

I have a stigmatism in both eyes meaning that backdrop is physically painful to view and so has been removed.

Just this place has a Health Plan, not “Plan to ensure no health possible”.”

Me 13:46:
Philip came back from lunch completely bald. Now he is googling hairdressers
I wonder if he is regretting his decision
Daniel 13:47:
haha
Me 13:47:
“can you rollback my hair please?”