Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Snotty emails

If you're going to send me a snotty email claiming that the reason you are rubbish at your job is because I failed to tell you something when in fact I did tell you, you should not really 'CC' your boss.

This is because I will take offence and I will reply to all stating exactly what happened and you will look like a tosser at the end of it.

And then you will feel obliged to ring me and try to explain yourself and I'll have to make sympathetic noises and pretend to give a damn about your or your career.

So in future, think before you try and blame me for your ineptitude. Everyone knows you're rubbish, it's too late to try and change their minds now.

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Witchhunt

All procedures were followed and yet something went wrong - the customer noticed 3 problems with the software. They, quite correctly in my opinion, pointed out that we should have spotted these three errors if we'd tested the damn thing properly.

So we have a "root cause analysis" meeting....aka a witchhunt.

Muppet: "why was this not spotted Daisy?"

I don't know why they ask me these things, I only design the software. Once I hand it over to development I never see it again.

Me: "It probably wasn't tested properly"

incompetant1: "well you didn't tell us to test it"

Upon my life, that's what they said. I asked them to write some code but I did not explicitly state that they should test what they wrote.

Now I used to write software for a living and practically the first thing you learn is to test what you write. But it seems that things have changed, the new modern way is to get me to specify exactly in a step-by-step manner how everyone else should do their jobs.

I've yet to see how this benefits anyone (except perhaps my therapist), but it does mean that other people can avoid taking responsibility for their own work.

Hours we've spent in this meeting pointing the finger at everyone except who is really to blame - the muppets who wrote, but did not test, the code.

It's the customer I feel sorry for. They expect us to be professional but the only thing we're proficient in is crushing my will to live.