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Search - "manpower"
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Client: Can you provide some kind of guaranteed timeline that you're going to be able to move our website to our new servers with the optimizations implemented? I know you said it should take a week, but we have 3 weeks to get this moved over and we cannot afford to be double billed. I'm waiting to fire up the new server until you can confirm.
Me: As I said, it SHOULD take about a week, but that's factoring in ONLY the modifications being made for optimization and a QA call to review the website. This does not account for your hosting provider needing to spin up a new server.
We also never offered to move your website over to said new server. I sent detailed instructions for your provider to move a copy of the entire website over and have it configured and ready to point your domain over to, in order to save time and money since your provider won't give us the access necessary to perform a server-to-server transfer. If you are implying that I need to move the website over myself, you will be billed for that migration, however long it takes.
Client: So you're telling me that we paid $950 for 10 hours of work and that DOESN'T include making the changes live?
Me: Why would you think that the 10 hours that we're logged for the process of optimizing your website include additional time that has not been measured? When you build out a custom product for a customer, do you eat the shipping charges to deliver it? That is a rhetorical question of course, because I know you charge for shipping as well. My point is that we charge for delivery just as you do, because it requires our time and manpower.
All of this could have been avoided, but you are the one that enforced the strict requirement that we cannot take the website down for even 1 hour during off-peak times to incorporate the changes we made on our testbed, so we're having to go through this circus in order to deliver the work we performed.
I'm not going to give you a guarantee of any kind because there are too many factors that are not within our control, and we're not going to trap ourselves so you have a scapegoat to throw under the bus if your boss looks to you for accountability. I will reiterate that we estimate it would take about a week to implement, test and run through a full QA together, as we have other clients within our queue and our time must be appropriately blocked out each day. However, the longer you take to pull the trigger on this new server, the longer it will take on my end to get the work scheduled within the queue.
Client: If we get double billed, we're taking that out of what we have remaining to pay you.
Me: On the subject of paying us, you signed a contract acknowledging that you would pay us the remaining 50% after you approved the changes, which you did last week, in order for us to deliver the project. Thank you for the reminder that your remaining balance has not yet been paid. I'll have our CFO resend the invoice for you to remit payment before we proceed any further.
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I love it when clients give me shit. I just give it right back.6 -
Manager: The thing you working on. We need this now! Like end of the week.
Me: Desirability is not do-ability.
Manager: く( ・◇・)ヾ?
Me: I am still in the middle of figuring out how to do things in the first place, so there are some technologies to research and some problems I yet need to solve. I am in no state to just write down my solution. I don't even have enough information to even estimate how long it is going to take. I am getting there. And yes, I can rush things, but need I remind you that you want solid data as a result that actually means something? As this is *why* this whole project was started. We have some old project doing the exact same thing, but whose output we don't trust. I wonder how that came to be. Additionally, this whole project was on hold for months until I took over. So I neither understand nor accept this sudden sense of urgency. And by the way, you recently added manpower to this project. And adding manpower almost always decreases the productivity in the beginning due to on-boarding and communication overhead. Last Monday, I didn't write a single line of code due to that. So no, this week will not do, as I am also on vacation starting on Thursday that was requested and was approved by you at the beginning of the year. See you in January.undefined results project it went better than expected actually communication is key urgent deadline11 -
This Part 3 and finale of the tale of Mr DDTW, or the worst coworker I've ever had to deal with. I suggest you start from the beginning if you don't have the context, it's been a trip.
Part 1: https://devrant.com/rants/4210605
Part 2: https://devrant.com/rants/4220715
The problem with this man threatening to snitch on me to the professor if I didn't revert my commit was that he backed me into a corner. Letting him go at his pace with his quality standards would have ruined the project for the rest of us, and I'm not going to let three other people's grades suffer because one was lazy. I'm the PM, team lead, the guy who will ultimately be held responsible for this project succeeding or failing and the mediator of problems.
So I snitched first.
The professor knew us. He had an idea of how we worked as a team, who was enthusiastic about this subject, who was diligent, and who wasn't. It'd been half a semester and he wasn't stupid. I'd also taken the not-so-minor task of testing our software and handling all the little integration problems between components and between the professor's server. This had resulted in several calls between me and him because he'd been flying by the seat of his pants with some of the upgrades he'd been doing to the server code and as the fastest group we were the ones running into all the bugs on his end. And he'd also noted our prior complaint and seen the discrepancy in commits, author tags and hours logged. Mr DDTW had been graded significantly worse than the rest of us. So when I sent him a goddamn novel about our team's internal problems, the bomb was set. And so we get to the conference call, with everybody panicking and with no clue what any of this is about. Except me.
Dear god. That call was pure catharsis. Never have I seen a man get demolished so hard. Mr DDTW got a 45 minute LECTURE, a goddamn SMACKDOWN, about how he needs to take some responsibility for this team effort and that in the real world he'd have been fired. And the professor was so incredibly serene throughout! He could've blasted him with the rage of a thousand suns but he said it in such a way that Mr DDTW's only real responses were "yes", "I understand" and "I'm sorry". An entire semester of this useless fucking bitch being nothing but a leech on our team in three separate projects and he was finally getting SCHOOLED. And then, it gets even better. The professor asked how we could solve this problem, as Mr DDTW needs to do work to be graded but he can't hold us back.
I dropped a suggestion: As I had implemented the module in a way that worked, we could carry on using my version while Mr DDTW could work on a separate branch. Everything else was working reasonably well for an MVP, we just needed to improve and test now, so if Mr DDTW got it working we could merge it back into the main branch. This solved the team's problem of not being able to progress, it solved Mr DDTWs problem of not wanting to fail the course, and it solved my problem of not having to work with this shit-for-brains for the forseeable future. A weight was lifted off my shoulders. No more Mr DDTW. No more bitching and no more shitcode. A grating arsehole that had been bugging everyone all sememster put in his place and out of my hair.
On the way home from uni that day, I rang a friend and told him the entire story as I needed to get it off my chest. Every time I brought up a problem, an issue, a setback, an argument, he made a remark.
"Damn, if only he just... did the work."
Every time he said it it was in a slightly different way, but every time it made me laugh harder as he just didn't stop interrupting me with the same comment. If only he did the work. But the funniest part of all was how right he was. Mr DDTW had so many opportunities to just sit down, shut up, and do the work like the rest of us, but instead he decided to do fuck-all until he got flak for it and proceeded to dig his own grave. What sort of delusional entitlement, sheer incompetence or other dumbfuckery was he suffering from to make such terrible decisions? It's his last year of university and he still hadn't learned to just do the goddamn work (I would later find out that his friend had covered his shortcomings a lot and was apparently the reason why he hadn't flunked out of uni yet).
And so ends the story of Mr Didn't Do The Work the worst person I have ever had the displeasure of working with. We never did merge his branch as we ran out of time during testing. The professor passed him, possibly out of pity or just so that he wouldn't have to resit the course and burden some other poor sods. We weren't the top scorers this time, partially because of my shortcomings as PM but mostly because of the huge delays and manpower deficit, but we did well enough to pass the course with some very high grades. With one exception of course.5 -
The Steam Community forums for the Planet Zoo beta have really reinforced my decision to stay far away from game development.
A third of the posts are people who clearly have no idea what a beta is - "don't buy, too buggy". Sorry, were you expecting a finished game? You wasted your money, then.
Another third of the posts are people making decisions for the developers. A very common discussion is "Should they delay launch?" which makes my blood boil a bit. First of all, you have no fucking clue what kind of manpower this development team has. You don't manage them, and neither do I. So, neither you nor I should be making assumptions about how fast they can fix the issues, and definitely shouldn't make decisions about if the game should delay launch.
Second of all, neither you nor I know how the game is built. These fixes could mean a line of code, or they could mean a re-write of multiple core systems. We don't know, and I'm guessing you've probably never even written a line of code in your life so you REALLY shouldn't be telling these guys how to do their job.
The last third is benign discussion - people reporting bugs (even though there's an issue tracker, but that thing is fucking jam packed with 250 pages of reported issues), asking how to do xyz, posting feature requests, etc.
But if roughly 60% of the community is behaving poorly and actively working against development by pissing off the devs and drowning out constructive discussion, then yeah; I won't be going near game dev any time soon. Sure, developing business software means dealing with REALLY dumb people but at the very least they are in a business environment and not in a toxic forum of bullshit.
Oh, and as a closing remark, I love this game!13 -
I'm a lead Dev on an agile team. We were just handed a fixed scope, fixed date project. On Monday, instead of helping push this out, I get to have a meeting to explain how throwing more bodies at it will slow us down.
"No! We are not code monkeys! Knowing JS and Java isn't the same as knowing our application. Stop fantasizing that it's a simple manpower issue and leave us alone so we can work these fucking nightmare timelines in peace!!"
I'm looking for a better way than that to explain it to the Sr management for the business so I don't get fired.16 -
Imagine this clusterfuck:
A small company creates its own CMS on PHP 5.5 and MySQL, coded by fresh junior devs who apparently just got into coding.
My new employer sadly is one of their customers and now I got the task to migrate a group of tightly linked websites on subdomains to an actually sane and maintainable CMS...
Fuck me...
Apparently the continuous extension of the websites over the years got so labor intense, that the mentioned company lacks the manpower to fulfill further development wishes.
I've looked into the code today... let me tell you, PTSD is helluva thing.
- Each subdomain has a complete copy of the Crap Management System, there is no use of composer packages and each of the 50 folders in the webroot contains a mix of source code and images or other resources.
- LESS is transpiled into CSS by PHP on requests.
- There is no central file for environment variables like a ".env".
- Each website uses at least 5 different versions of jQuery, of which some jquery.min.js files were manually modified.
Don't get me started on how the DB is organized...
My work on this has just started, there will be more I've yet to uncover.
"C'mon, man! Gimme a break!"15 -
FUCK YOU BUSINESS GUY
FUCK YOUR SCOPE CREEP
SOLO DEV AINT GIVING U 20 FEATURES IN ONE MOTHERFUCKING WEEK
Seriously, though. Being a solo full-stackq developer who can do both frontend (react, redux) and backend (feathers, node) does NOT mean you have twice the manpower to accomplish all of your shitty shit. Just because you have an idea does NOT mean I have to implement all of it. You don't even have a motherfucking specifications for me, yet you expect me to deliver shitloads of complete fucking feature in a fucking week. This is not a fucking joke. I am NOT your mother fucking tool. I need time to build my stack, design and perfect the interface. I don't want a shitty motherfucking product on my fucking portfolio.
*dies inside*11 -
There's this huuuge project I was a part of for half a year. I was kicked off along with a few dozens of other devs (>60% of total manpower) a while ago for particular company reasons.
Now the remaining devs are oh-so-enjoying their time there..
1. workload has not changed
2. deadlines have not changed
3. no one will have Christmas-NewYear vacation
4. a new k8s-based infra is scheduled to roll out to PROD on Dec 23 (k8s is still far from ready - might need a few more months)
The most fun part is that it's not client's mgmt who has decided for #4 -- it's our own....
Boys.. Girls.. Save yourselves.3 -
Soooo might turn into the lead developer of the web services of 2 fucking schools with the manpower of 2 for which one of us ain't even a developer all because HR put my lead developer in the hospital and he might be so fucking fed up that he may not come back to work.
Fuck
Human
Resources
Holy fuck man.....I was already a lead mobile developer before and i fucking hated every minute of it and the pay raise ain't even gonna be worth it for the ammount of shit that i am going to be required to do.
Fuck this, fingers crossed man I really want my boy to come back cuz I don't wanna deal with this bullshit.
I seriously never thought i would be in this position and by heavens i have been in some shit before.
Fuck fuckity fuck fuck fuck.
Fingers crossed my boy gets better man fr.7 -
Am i whiny or is resilience so glorified in this field?
I am a junior developer. I was assigned with two projects together with a friend and a senior. My friend and I finished our assigned tasks way before the deadline. Fast forward, my senior got reassigned to a different project since we are lacking with manpower. Naturally, his transactions were assigned to me and my friend. And my goodness, his existing codes are a piece of shit! It's all over the place. His variable naming is shit, his codes are all around the place, his codes doesn't even follow our company's coding standards, no try catch, a lot of unsafe practices. In short, cleaning his code is a pain in the ass and my friend and I got really busy with cleaning his mess. The testing of our system is really near but I just thought that maybe he's really busy with the other project that's why the quality of his codes deteriorated.
He's not. One day, I saw his in discord that he's playing during work hours lol. And the worse part is that he is playing with our boss! YES. DURING WORK HOURS. I got mad but I couldn't say anything because he is really tight with the boss.
Later on that day, we had our meeting. I was surprised when my boss told me that she's expecting that the excel part of our system is already finished. A little background here, my boss asked me to study Excel VB. However, I didnt get to study that much because I was so busy fixing bugs and after that came the cleaning of our senior's shit codes.
So I tried to say these things to my boss but I was cut out by the same senior shouting "You can do it!" over and over again. No one listened to what I was trying to say! And to make it even worse, the boss had a very proud look on her face and she even had the audacity to tell me that I'm lucky I have such a good support system. I dont.
Now, the company is planning to put me in a very demanding project. I havent finished cleaning up my senior's codes, I havent started anything with the excel and the deadline is next week!
The boss told me that even if I enter the other project, that I will still be responsible for the Excel part of our system. So fucking shoot me in the face.They were telling me that I should have a good time management system, that I should be flexible, that I should adapt easily, yada yada yada. She just makes you feel bad about yourself if you're not as 'flexible' as her.
The thing is, even if I have the best time management techniques in the world, if you bombard me with a shitload of tasks, then I won't be able to do it properly! I don't even take breaks anymore! I work literally 8 hours a day, even more than that. And I dont understand, why the hell is she overworking me when her friend (the senior dev) is just playing during work hours?
Another funniest thing is that she told us that when we encounter technical problems, we should ask our senior dev. Oh boy, if only she knows how shitty his codes are.6 -
1 dept with only 1 staff, well 1 chief to be precise, all employees quit. Another dept with not enough manpower. Requested the dept with highest manpower to help with other depts tasks while struggling and solving the shits out. Thought company is bullying them with extra workload and voice out they are looking for new jobs.
They are not wrong. And that's the bittersweet shit I have to swallow. In the end, it was my responsibility and I'm not doing enough. -
TL;DR: my boss is a dick and I don't know what to do.
Been working at the company for a month now, I enjoy the atmosphere and the culture (startup btw) but I really cannot stand my superior - there's only two of us in the team. Any screw up he blames it on me without a second thought. First week in he assigned their new website project to me and honestly they have quite unrealistic deadlines. I mean they didn't even have the infrastructure for it nor the manpower to build one yet it needs to be finished by the end of this month. On top of that the spec keeps changing literally every 2-3 hours.
Also since I've forgotten to mention the guy I'm working under is one of the founders so I can't really go and talk to someone about it. I feel pretty screwed over, anyone has any advice or been in a situation like this? Is it too early to quit?1 -
Ideas:
1. Scrape github
2. Attach feature size estimate (an abstract scale) as examples across many projects.
3. Use this as prompt/finetunning data.
4. Train and prompt on project descriptions relative to feature size and number of contributors/changes in the changelog.
5. Package and release a model that takes descriptions of ideas and generates reasonable estimates of time and manpower.
6. Optional, sell as an estimate service to corporate and make money introducing some sanity to the world for a change.10 -
My monday started with boss calling me at 0730 asking if I could do a support-mission at the offices of the local landfill - this because 2 of the support people had called in sick and we where short on manpower. RIGHT! I said, with a sense of dread and disbelief. ended up spending much of the day there. fixing everything from default reader of pdf to calibration of mouse sensitivity.
It's not like I need to code or anything, since I am working on two different projects and in competition of a third. Finally came back to the office after been at the landfill until lunch and got another support mission; this time internal mission. namely write out from our companys database and import the data to an absolute atrocity called PowerBI so our accountant get the numbers......... FINE!!! I'll do that too, but dont come to me and cry when the project delivery date gets postponed into eternity!!!3 -
the latest recruitard.
so having been unemployed for 14 months, this recruiter shit is infuriating. i think they are the reason for my unemployment.
i just spoke to the biggest idiot ever, she worked for a temp agency called manpower, attempted to solicit a job for the u of a. she was "new and getting used to the technologies in the market" that was her excuse for asking me if java and js were different languages, i mean if you cant understand simple stuff like this, gtfo the industry all you are doing is hurting hard working ppl like me. i cant even get adaquate representation because there is no qualified ppl in charge of delivering me to hiring managers, and you can forget about presenting yourself c level execs dont talk to us plebs we are here for one thing to make them money and get screwed, the last 6 out of 10 jobs i have actually gotten all left me with debit they owed and dissappeared into oblivion.2 -
Quick question, is it bad to quit from a job when the project is not finished yet, especially in a startup company?
My reasoning for quitting, boss doesn’t really understand how game development usually works and mostly assuming every project will be same.
Following is my rant of background story for my question.
The incident triggered me wanting to leave is as below.
G = another guy from incubating center
B = boss
G: hey B, do u know this game studio is releasing this title soon. It’s a local company. Sounds cool.
Then they went to check the company profile. Found that the company has abt 40 staffs in total.
B: hey lunadev, do u know them? They have 40 people to make 2 titles. I think we’re the smallest company in the world that developing mobile games. Ha ha ha.
Me: oh, may be their project scope is complex. But I don’t think ours is the smallest company in the world making game. (We have 5 in total including him) there are others with only 2 ppl making games. (My sarcastic side took over me and said) I think we’re the only company in the world that has such small manpower with shortest deadline.
B: then how long do u think our timeline should be?
Me: abt 2 yrs? (Me considering all the artworks, features, testing time that we have to do)
B: urmmm I don’t think it’s that long. May be abt 6 months or a year at most?
G: ya, abt 6 months. Mobile games are not like desktop games or others so should be abt 6 months. Shouldn’t take that long.
Me: ... :)
Then I packed up my stuffs and left for the day. As for side note, boss designed the game himself and it took him 5 years to add complex features. And sometimes he will still come up to us and ask us to add that feature just cuz he was just inspired by another game he just played. Now can they tell us, this game can finish in 6 months? On what ground?
And another thing that he does gets on my nerve is that he plays game during office hours while the rest of us rushing for his project and campaign.
So, if I quit now, they’d still be in the middle of development. Oh and I’m the main programmer developing the game. So, erm.. Is it wrong?7 -
Random thought while upgrading schema and manually recreating 100+ rows table; when looking for a job, make sure you look for one where company focuses on employing brainpower, not manpower.. 🤦♂️ 🙄
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Client would say we do not want to be billed on per manpower basis, but on entire managed service basis
However, the pricing for managed services they would agree on, can only pay for a team of 4, and the project requires a team of 8 -
Is it just me that would prefer to work with Senior Engineers rather than mid level engineers?
Some mid level engineers are just pain in the ass. This one guy insist on getting perfection in all of the requirements. The problem is that if you work with software/lib for so long, you realize that most if not all software are buggy or have limitations.You can't expect everything to be perfect. Sometimes something just works/don't work and nobody knows why. Need lots of shortcuts/hacks just to make it work. I would say that 80% completion is good enough, especially since we're running out of time and manpower.
I noticed that Senior Engineers tend to be less strict. If it works then it's good enough, if we found some bugs later then we'll fix it. I like this practicality so we can tackle more important issues at hand.
I hope that I don't have to work in the same project with this guy again.2 -
Ya'll on Signal yet? Now that they are on the rise, they'll need funds and a revenue model. You can't depend on donations unless you're Wikimedia. I don't really see how would they scale up both in terms of manpower and number of users. What's the guarantee that Signal won't end up like it's counterpart WhatsApp?7