!dev

After almost a year of watching and experimenting (and not wanting to believe), I’ve learned something about the people i work with:

They don’t consider ideas based on the idea’s own merit, nor does a good idea improve their views of the person proposing it. They instead give the idea merit based entirely on who proposed it. It’s backwards.

• If they like or revere someone, their ideas cannot be bad, and they are never questioned even if they don’t make sense.
• If they sort of like someone, but that person challenges someone they like more, the ideas are dismissed and picked apart, and sometimes even reworded by the group and then accepted, with credit then given to the group. The person is still seen as wrong.
• If they dislike someone, none of their ideas are good, or they’re ignored, or ridiculed for reasons such as stating what is (only now) an abundantly obvious good idea.

(There is some overlap from the execs, where they occasionally consider an idea for its merit and then restate it, which means the idea is now coming from an exec, and is therefore readily accepted. Occasionally the original person gets some credit for this.)

It also applies to pictures of food in the cooking channel. If people like you more, they like your food more, while a professional-looking plate from a social leper gets ignored.

It’s like office politics, but applies to virtually every aspect of company life instead of just promotions, requests, and project assignments. It’s like replacing common courtesy and reason with a social FICO score: your contributions are only acceptable if you agree with your coworkers, laugh at their jokes, etc. And if you appear to like the same music, have recently posted more pictures of tacos or brownies than usual, etc.? Well, you had better do that before suggesting something you actually care about.

It’s social credit.
And it’s stupid.

Gunnery Sgt. Hartman:
What do you code, anyway?

Pvt. Cowboy:
SIR, JAVA, SIR!

Gunnery Sgt. Hartman:
JAVA? Holy dogshit! Only steers and queers code in Java!! And you don't much look like a steer to me so that kind of narrows it down. Do you suck dick?

Pvt. Cowboy:
SIR, NO, SIR!

Gunnery Sgt. Hartman:
I BET YOU'RE THE KIND OF GUY WHO'D WRITE LEGACY CODE AND NOT HAVE THE COMMON COURTESY TO WRITE ANY COMMENTS.

!dev && rant

> be me
> headphones on
> hands packed with shopping bags

Some old bitch neighbor that I can't stand: oh hi!

WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU MAKING ME TAKE OFF MY HEADPHONES FOR!?

Seriously. When someone has his hands stuffed with groceries and has headphones on, maybe they don't want to stop, put their bags down, take their headphones off and say no more than another hi. Like not even anything else, just hi and walk away! What's the fucking point!? Making me pause and waste time just for the hell of it? Thank you old bitch.

Apparently we're playing musical chairs at work... I work from home for one day and now my chair is missing. If you borrow a chair put it back where you found it. It's common courtesy.

"But the web will still be full of arrogant, uninformed, polarizing, self-promoting, controversy-creating content that has ramifications no one wants to own up to. And consequently, the web will still be lacking in common courtesy, humility, and the admittance that most of us don’t know best. Which is sad, mostly because it’s true. " - Joshua Blankenship

So I just spent 8 hours migrating our git projects from bitbucket to gitlab because SOMEONE thought backups were being done nightly without ever actually checking. Of course the only backups to be found were well over a year old and the fucking bit bucket licence expired ao migration was entirely fucking manual... CHECK YOUR FUCKING BACKUPS, FUUUCCCCKKK!!!!! At least have the common courtesy of putting something in place to report on failing backup procedures.

Oh and another thing: FUCK YOU ATLASSIAN! RIGHT UP THE ASSE WITH A RUSTY, RABIES RIDDEN, AIDS INDUCING PITCHFORK SIDEWAYS! Who the flying fuck names their repos numbers? Thanks for nothing you mind numbingly incompotent apes...

On a cheerier note, how's everyones day been?