In a user-interface design meeting over a regulatory compliance implementation:
User: “We’ll need to input a city.”
Dev: “Should we validate that city against the state, zip code, and country?”
User: “You are going to make me enter all that data? Ugh…then make it a drop-down. I select the city and the state, zip code auto-fill. I don’t want to make a mistake typing any of that data in.”
Me: “I don’t think a drop-down of every city in the US is feasible.”
Manage: “Why? There cannot be that many. Drop-down is fine. What about the button? We have a few icons to choose from…”
Me: “Uh..yea…there are thousands of cities in the US. Way too much data to for anyone to realistically scroll through”
Dev: “They won’t have to scroll, I’ll filter the list when they start typing.”
Me: “That’s not really the issue and if they are typing the city anyway, just let them type it in.”
User: “What if I mistype Ch1cago? We could inadvertently be out of compliance. The system should never open the company up for federal lawsuits”
Me: “If we’re hiring individuals responsible for legal compliance who can’t spell Chicago, we should be sued by the federal government. We should validate the data the best we can, but it is ultimately your department’s responsibility for data accuracy.”
Manager: “Now now…it’s all our responsibility. What is wrong with a few thousand item drop-down?”
Me: “Um, memory, network bandwidth, database storage, who maintains this list of cities? A lot of time and resources could be saved by simply paying attention.”
Manager: “Memory? Well, memory is cheap. If the workstation needs more memory, we’ll add more”
Dev: “Creating a drop-down is easy and selecting thousands of rows from the database should be fast enough. If the selection is slow, I’ll put it in a thread.”
DBA: “Table won’t be that big and won’t take up much disk space. We’ll need to setup stored procedures, and data import jobs from somewhere to maintain the data. New cities, name changes, ect. ”
Manager: “And if the network starts becoming too slow, we’ll have the Networking dept. open up the valves.”
Me: “Am I the only one seeing all the moving parts we’re introducing just to keep someone from misspelling ‘Chicago’? I’ll admit I’m wrong or maybe I’m not looking at the problem correctly. The point of redesigning the compliance system is to make it simpler, not more complex.”
Manager: “I’m missing the point to why we’re still talking about this. Decision has been made. Drop-down of all cities in the US. Moving on to the button’s icon ..”
Me: “Where is the list of cities going to come from?”
<few seconds of silence>
Dev: “Post office I guess.”
Me: “You guess?…OK…Who is going to manage this list of cities? The manager responsible for regulations?”
User: “Thousands of cities? Oh no …no one is our area has time for that. The system should do it”
Me: “OK, the system. That falls on the DBA. Are you going to be responsible for keeping the data accurate? What is going to audit the cities to make sure the names are properly named and associated with the correct state?”
DBA: “Uh..I don’t know…um…I can set up a job to run every night”
Me: “A job to do what? Validate the data against what?”
Manager: “Do you have a point? No one said it would be easy and all of those details can be answered later.”
Me: “Almost done, and this should be easy. How many cities do we currently have to maintain compliance?”
User: “Maybe 4 or 5. Not many. Regulations are mostly on a state level.”
Me: “When was the last time we created a new city compliance?”
User: “Maybe, 8 years ago. It was before I started.”
Me: “So we’re creating all this complexity for data that, realistically, probably won’t ever change?”
User: “Oh crap, you’re right. What the hell was I thinking…Scratch the drop-down idea. I doubt we’re have a new city regulation anytime soon and how hard is it to type in a city?”
Manager: “OK, are we done wasting everyone’s time on this? No drop-down of cities...next …Let’s get back to the button’s icon …”

Simplicity 1, complexity 0.

This was not exactly the worst work culture because the employees, it was because the upper level of the organization chart on the IT department.

I'm not quite sure how to translate the exact positions of that chart, but lets say that there is a General Manager, a couple of Area Managers (Infrastructure, Development), some Area Supervisors (2 or 3, by each area), and the grunts (that were us). Anyway, anything on the "Manager" was the source of all the toxicity on the department.

First and foremost, there was a lack of training for almost any employee. We were expected to know everything since day-1. Yes, the new employees had a (very) brief explanation about the technologies/languages were used, but they were expected to perform as a senior employee almost since the moment they cross the door. And forget about having some KT (Knowledge Transfer) sessions, they were none existent and if they existed, were only to solve a very immediate issue (now imagine what happened when someone quit*).

The general culture that they have to always say "yes" to the client/customer to almost anything without consulting to the development teams if that what was being asked to do was doable, or even feasible. And forget about doing a proper documentation about that change/development, as "that was needed yesterday and it needs to be done to be implemented tomorrow" (you know what I mean). This contributes to the previous point, as we didn't have enough time to train someone new because we had this absurd deadlines.

And because they cannot/wanted to say "NO", there were days when they came with an amount of new requirements that needed to be done and it didn't matter that we had other things to do. And the worst was that, until a couple of years (more or less), there was almost impossible to gather the correct requirements from the client/user, as they (managers) "had already" that requirement, and as they "know better" what the user wants, it was their vision what was being described on the requirements, not the users'...

And all that caused that, in a common basis, didn't have enough time to do all this stuff (mainly because the User Support) causing that we needed to do overtime, which almost always went unpaid (because a very ambiguous clause of the contract, and that we were "non-union workers"**). And this is my favorite point of this list, because, almost any overtime went unpaid, so basically we were expected to be working for free after the end of the work day (lets say, after the 17:00). Leaving "early" was almost a sin for the managers, as they always expected that we give more time to work that the indicated on the contract, and if not, they could raise a report to HR because the ambiguous clause allowed them to do it (among other childish things that they do).

Finally, the jewel of the crown, is that they never, but never acknowledge that they made a mistake. Never. That was impossible! If something failed on the things/systems/applications that they had assigned*** it was always our fault.

- "A report for the Finance Department is giving wrong information? It's the DBA's fault**** because although he manages that report, he couldn't imagine that I have an undocumented service (that runs before the creation the report) crashed because I modified a hidden and undocumented temporal table and forgot to update that service."

But, well, at least that's on the past. And although those aren't all the things that made that workplace so toxic, for me those were the most prominent ones.

-

* Well, here we I live it's very common to don't say anything about leaving the company until the very last day. Yes, I know that there are people that leave their "2-days notice", but it's not common (IMHO, of course). And yes, there are some of us that give a 1 or 2-weeks notice, but still it's not a common practice.

** I don't know how to translate this... We have a concept called "trusted employee", which is mainly used to describe any administrative employee, and that commonly is expected to give the 110% of what the contract says (unpaid overtimes, extra stuff to do, etc) and sadly it's an accepted condition (for whatever reasons). I chose "non-union workers" because in comparison with an union worker, we have less protections (besides the legal ways) regarding what I've described before. Curiously, there are also "operative workers", that doesn't belong to an union, but they have (sometimes) better protections that the administrative ones.

*** Yes, they were in charge of several systems, because they didn't trust us to handle/maintain them. And I'm sure that they still don't trust in their developers.

**** One of the managers, and the DBA are the only ones that handle some stuff (specially the one that involves "money"). The thing that allows to use the DBA as scapegoat is that such manager have more privileges and permissions than the DBA, as he was the previous DBA

Needed money for my company, not enough clients to support business on SaaS alone. Took on a 5k / month job building a platform that competes with my SaaS (more niche, less generic). Also sign up new client who that company's owner is part owner onto my current SaaS. Win / Win?

I do a lot of custom work to my platform to fulfill their needs, which is why I ran out of time for the 5k / mo project. I did these customization for free. Losing money to keep client, but also improving my system.

Work gets busy, I need to drop the 5k project. Client is upset I am working more on his other company (he is not majority owner). I return 1 month of funds to the owner and say I cannot continue.

Owner threatens to make other company that he is part owner stop working with my software if I do not complete project. Blacklisting...great. I agree to work with an overseas developer to do it and PM it for 3 months at least. Making nearly nothing from it (now 1k / month for PM), working nights to deal with India, losing sleep...

Other company suddenly folds due to conflict of egos with that SAME owner. Users drop from 16 to 1. I drop the project, no more strong arming me. Everything is a loss, all effort and money lost for nothing. Bad bet..however...

Owner becomes 100% owner of the other company, and of the software company. I transition him to PM his own project, he still uses my software because It doesn't, nor will it, ever do what the one he is building does. Also, partners from previous company break off and use my software again. New Client. #profit.

But holy hell was it stressful in the interim. People's business tactics are disgusting. Stay calm, play it neutral. Win. Sometimes you have to do what you don't want to do in order to succeed...at least for a little bit.

I was so scared that how he screwed his partners he would screw me over as well if I built one of the modules I have planned for my System, but haven't done yet.

If I did it for him first and then built my own (totally diff codebase) I really didn't want to run into any legal issues considering the schematics he has now are mine, but I didn't finish that part of the system for him. He is obivously highly competitive. Even though he wanted me to, and still does, want me to run his company for him.

Who knows, maybe in the future. To be CTO / COO of two SaaS CRM's in the same space may make sense. But I will never sell my software to him or partner with him. Too much drama. Avoid the drama. Be careful out there fellas.

If you are a creator, people will take advantage of you in every way imaginable. Read the fine print, read the people, document everything. Don't put yourself at risk.

Aarrrgghhhhh!!! I am so fucking pissed off right now. It seems like I am paying for my sins in this life.

1. My cousins/relatives outcasted me after a little fault of mine. I used to think highly of them and respected them all my life and this how they acted on me.
Because of this, the entire family is boycotting my parents and they are pissed at me for getting them disowned.

2. My health is a mess. A toxic infection along with SAD creeping in due to less sun exposure. No matter how much I take care of myself, some shit shows up after periodically.

3. My wealth scene is as confusing as it can get. Not only I am unable to make up my mind on the finance strategy and execute it, but also frantically making silly decisions which is causing stress, confusion, and expenses.

4. That Narcissist bitch who abused me and destroyed my will to live is still stalking me after months and causing harassment. Only if the gender roles were reversed, the guy doing so would be in jail but fuck our legal system that biased towards women. This shit is causing me psychological distress.

5. Been away from work for few days due to sickness. I texted my talkative colleague whether she'd like to sync up and help me get upto the speed with updates. I listed 4 bullet points as agenda from my side. They were crisp short serving as pointers to remember. I even asked her to add her points if any.

Now she comes back saying that the way I send communication is it seems like she reports to me.
I have been praised time and again by countless people on my communication structure and soft skills. Never once I received such feedback in years.

I do accept it gracefully. However, I am unsure whether it is even a relevant feedback, since it's coming from someone who is literally struggling with communication with everyone (that she herself mentioned in the same thread).

Funnily she did say that when our manager departs, they'd make her report to me and I was like nah! that cannot happen.

She kept saying various great things about the company when I was new and slowly as I settled in and discovered the reality, her truth changed.

WTF!

Fucking annoying. I am all in for feedback of any kind but how should I figure which should be considered valid and which as invalid?

Life is nothing but a quicksand, you just keep sinking in irrespective of whether you try to get out or stay still. There is no external help or resources available.

So much mess to deal with.

Rant/Question
So I had this friend who has his own company, hosting is part of their business. He gave me a VM to host some websites, test stuff and whatnot. Free. I have quite some important stuff on there (personal, and a few demo sites for clients). No backups of my own, because they do nightly tape backups, and RAID accross physically seperated datacenters. Today, he just shut down my VM - for personal reasons (really personal, nothing to do with his company whatsoever, he hates me lately for something I can't influence). He doesn't say weather or when Ill get the data, and gave me no time to pull it. Can/should I go to the police? I just want my data back, but I don't know if I can do anything as it was free (no contract).
Switzerland, btw.

I have to write my IoT coursework in an Ubuntu VM running on Linux 3.2. VBox Guest Additions doesn't support this Ubuntu version, neither does anything else. Contiki, the operating system we're coding for has been abandoned for many years, the devs moved to a new project called Contiki NG. If I try to compile with any standard above ANSI C it fails with cryptic errors deep inside the OS. The docs for the old Contiki are paginated with JS so I can't use the browser's fulltext search, but they also don't have proper bulitin search.

This cannot be legal. They are violating every accessibility guideline in existence. I just need the text to be slightly larger and even I have to go through hell. I imagine blind, deaf or dyslexic students just give up.

Me doing ops analysis...

Day1: No way! How the fu
Day2: Nah, someone else will do this...
Day3: Fuck! Why dont we have a Legal Dept
Day4: Okay Im just gonna run an ml to find irregularities
Day5: These scans cannot be ocr-ed...
Day6: br-brute force
2 months later: so there's a problem regarding the Express Contractual Remedies of Contract A and Amendment C...

Been seeing some ridiculous dumbshit comments regarding war which piss me the fuck off so I'll address them here

---

"xyz country did not abide by the rules of war"

What RULES in WAR? WAR is WAR, there are no fucking rules! Anyone can kill anyone however he wants to!

"Using xyz is illegal in war"

What can be ILLEGAL in WAR? WAR ITSELF is fucking illegal you dipshits. You just made a crime legal, normalized it and called it WAR

"Doing xyz is a war crime"

WAR-CRIME? WAR ITSELF is a fucking crime you cuntfuck! You cant do further crime than participating in war! While you're legally doing that crime you might as well do anything else illegal because now everything is legal in war, there is no such thing as a fucking war crime

"Do not kill women children and the elderly in war"

Why the fuck do they get a free pass? How about the 18 year old, 25 year old? Its fine to kill them? Who the FUCK are you to say who can be slaughtered and who cannot? Get the FUCK off my dick you fucking dickriders. If some groups of people can be slaughtered THEN SO CAN WOMEN CHILDREN OLD FUCKS AND BABIES BE SLAUGHTERED! DONT GIVE A FUFK. Either stop the fucking war or dont complain who got slaughtered.

NO RULES IN WAR.

NO MERCY IN WAR.

Same way how recruiters show no mercy or compassion in hiring. They dont give a FUCK. They fuck with everyone and waste everyone's time. Same way in war. Fuck anyone. Slaughter anyone. OR. Dont begin the fucking war in the first place