Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 2: Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand

This is a particularly special episode for me, as these problems are taking up so much of my time with non-sensical bullshit, that i'm delayed with everything else. Some badly require tooling or new products. Some are just unnecessary processes or annoyances that should not need to be handled by another human. So lets jump right in, in no particular order:

- Jira ... nuff said? not quite because somehow some blue moon, planets aligning, act of god style set of circumstances lined up to allow this team to somehow make Jira worse. On one hand we have a gigantic Jira project containing 7 separate sub teams, a million different labels / epics and 4.2 million possible assignees, all making sure the loading page takes as long as possible to open. But the new country we've added support for in the app gets a separate project. So we have product, backend, mobile, design, management etc on one, and mobile-country2 on another. This delightfully means a lot of duplication and copy pasting from one to the other, for literally no reason what so ever.

- Everything on Jira is found through a label. Every time something happens, a new one is created. So I need to check for "iOS", "Android", "iOS-country2", "Android-country2", "mobile-<feature>", "mobile-<feature>-issues", "mobile-<feature>-prod-issues", "mobile-<feature>-existing-issues" and "<project>-July31" ... why July31? Because some fucking moron decided to do a round of testing, and tag all the issues with the current date (despite the fact Jira does that anyway), which somehow still gets used from time to time because nobody pays attention to what they are doing. This means creating and modifying filters on a daily basis ... after spending time trying to figure out what its not in the first one.

- One of my favourite morning rituals I like to call "Jira dumpster diving". This involves me removing all the filters and reading all the tickets. Why would I do such a thing? oh remember the 9000 labels I mentioned earlier? right well its very likely that they actually won't use any of them ... or the wrong ones ... or assign to the wrong person, so I have to go find them and fix them. If I don't, i'll get yelled at, because clearly it's my fault.

- Moving on from Jira. As some of you might have seen in your companies, if you use things like TestFlight, HockeyApp, AppCenter, BuddyBuild etc. that when you release a new app version for testing, each version comes with an automated change-log, listing ticket numbers addressed ...... yeah we don't do that. No we use this shitty service, which is effectively an FTP server and a webpage, that only allows you to host the new versions. Sending out those emails is all manual ... distribution groups?? ... whats that?

- Moving back to Jira. Can't even automate the changelog with a script, because I can't even make sense of the tickets, in order to translate that to a script.

- Moving on from Jira. Me and one of the remote testers play this great game I like to call "tag team ticketing". It's so much fun. Right heres how to play, you'll need a QA and a PM.

*QA creates a ticket, and puts nothing of any use inside it, and assigns to the PM.
*PM fires it back asking for clarification.
*QA adds in what he feels is clarification (hes wrong) and assigns it back to the PM.
*PM sends detailed instructions, with examples as to what is needed and assigns it back.
*QA adds 1 of the 3 things required and assigns it back.
*PM assigns it back saying the one thing added is from the wrong day, and reminds him about the other 2 items.
*QA adds some random piece of unrelated info to the ticket instead, forgetting about the 3 things and assigns it back.

and you just continue doing this for the whole dev / release cycle hahaha. Oh you guys have no idea how much fun it is, seriously give it a go, you'll thank me later ... or kill yourselves, each to their own.

- Moving back to Jira. I decided to take an action of creating a new project for my team (the mobile team) and set it up the way we want and just ignore everything going on around us. Use proper automation, and a kanban board. Maybe only give product a slack bot interface that won't allow them to create a ticket without what we need etc. Spent 25 minutes looking for the "create new project" button before finding the link which says I need to open a ticket with support and wait ... 5 ... fucking ... long ... painful ... unnecessary ... business days.

... Heres hoping my head continues to not have a bullet hole in it by then.

Id love to talk more, but those filters ain't gonna fix themselves. So we'll have to leave it here for today. Tune in again for another episode soon.

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

Recently, our team hired an arrogant trainee-junior to the team, who turned out to be mean towards the other developers and in a habit of publicly mocking their opinions and going as far as cursing at them. He steals credit and insults others. He openly admits he's an offensive person and not a team player. When someone from the team speaks, he might break into laughter and say demeaning sentences like "that's so irrelevant oh my god did you really say that? hahaha". Our team consists of polite and introverted engineers who cannot stand up to bullies. Normally this kind of behavior won't be suitable even if you work in a burger shop especially not from a trainee. Let alone trainee, the rude behavior of Linus Torvalds was not tolerated, despite him being in the top position and a recognized star talent in the IT field.

I personally no longer feel comfortable speaking up during teams meetings or in the slack team chat. I'm afraid my opinions will be ridiculed or ashamed - likely will be called "irrelevant". I respond only if I'm directly addressed. We have important features coming up, requested by the customer, but I feel discouraged to publicly ask questions - I sort of feel having to regress into contributing less for the product. I also witness that other younger developers speak less now in meetings and team chat. Feels like everyone is hiding under the bed. Our product team used to have friendly working atmosphere but now the atmosphere is a bit like we're not a team anymore but a knot.

Lesson I learnt from here is: There is a reason why some companies have personality tests and HR interviews. Our proud short boarding process was consisting of a single technical interview. Perhaps at least a team interview should be held before hiring a person to the team, or the new hire should at least be posed a question: are you a team player? Technical skills can be taught more easily than social skills. If some youngster is unable to communicate in a civilized manner for even five minutes, it should raise some red flags. Otherwise you will end up with people who got refused from other companies which knew better.

I think I just miiiight have found a new job, but before, some comments about the state of the data engineering industry:

- Sooooooo many people outsource it. Man, outsourcing your data teams is like seeing the world through an Apple Vision Pro fused to your skull. Fine if it is working well, but you will go blind of your subscription expires. Or if Apple decides to ban you. Or if they decide to abandon the product... you are entirely dependent on their whims. In retrospect this is par for the course, I guess.
- Lots of companies think data engineering *starts* with an SQL database. Oh, honey, I have some bad news.
- Quite a few expect MS POWER BI will be able to deliver REAL TIME DASHBOARDS summarizing TERABYTES of data sourced from SQL SERVER (or similar). Facepalm.
- Nearly all think the handling of data engineering products is just like that of software engineering. Just try. I dare you.
- Why people think that "familiarity in several SQL dialects" is something to brag about?
- Shit, startups. Startups are dead, boomers. Deader than video rental physical stores.

That's all. On to the next round of interviews!

!rant
We were finishing another sprint of our grocery shop site at school and it was time for a demo.
There we are, showing our work before the other students. Our teams have a healthy habit of always checking each other not to leave some stoopid mistakes in the final versions, so everybody always regExes and validates THE SHIT out of every input field, both in the view and on the server side. But this one team found out that sometimes it's not enough.

Like every team, they're asked to buy a negative value from their shop. The guy clicks through the process, buys exactly -1 of a banana. He clicks the button to purchase and the site returned "Added banana to the cart!" and we're like "haha n00bz". But someone asked them to show the cart and everyone stopped immediately.

There were 9999 bananas in the cart.

Turns out the member responsible for purchase validation made it add 10000 if the quantity of a bought product was negative.
To this day I can't understand why he did that. xD

Reflecting back on my previous post regarding quitting my job without an offer . Today the final email from system came : my resignation is accepted, my lwd is 7th dec and portal no longer shows the with draw button. The small spark with potential to burn the world did burn it , so her we are.

3 people were supposed to be part of this seperation : my current manager, the avp (person who hired me, was sr manager back then) and HR. HR was on leave for 2 days and all my emails went into auto reply from her, and when she came back, she approved the resignation without any discussion.
my manager(EL), who is the primary cause of me taking this step, tried talking to me. I can't say its because of u, so I simply said WLB, I need work from home. She tried to bring facts : why wfh? you are doing fine in hybrid ? you are getting 6h work every day? your joining letter said all days working from office?
I didn't entertain those points. The meeting ended in 5 mins.

Next day I emailed again regarding my status and she was the person who texted me saying such emails are not acceptable, go to portal and initiate seperation. she shared the steps and as i was about to press the button, I got a call from the avp

I tried the excuse approach bit he was able to see through it (he was showing disappointment). his talking style is charming, so I eventually opened up to him. the call lasted 30 mins, it made me think and today morning I was thinking of alternatives and discussing with him on chat, ittle to my knowledge that my manager has already approved the resignation. fine, I guess.

But here is the main story: WHY DO I WANT TO RESIGN? why would I ask a 3 day office company to gove me wfh and write here that even this is a lie. WHAT IS THE REAL REASON? here are the points , most of which i told the avp in some way as well:

1. The most frank reason is disrespect. I have been in this org for 2.9 years and was one of the first 4 members to join. today we are a 20 people team, one of the 1st 4 came as product manager and is now senior pm, 2nd came in as SSE and is now EL (SSE-> Module Lead -> Engineering Lead). 3rd came as SSE and is now ML . I came as software engineer and is still a software engineer . I even helped hiring a guy with 2 yrs less experience than me and in 10 months he got a sneior position but not me

2. The obvious area of disrespect is when I try to put my point, but my points are not considered but rather needs to be approved by those peole who hold a title. I am a laughing stock among juniors

3. Even after doing flwaless work for years and not getting an ounce of respect, my smallest mistakes are openly highlighted and humiliated. There was once a prod bug that was caught during sanity but for that, I was shouted upon by this EL at 1140pm in night in a 3 person call of EL,an intern and me. this same lady joined 10 days before me and did nothing but politics and talkings to get a position where she is humiliating me

4. These people suck at management and end up making us feel like slaves. one mistake (from anyone) and we get called out in meetings, chats . Our estimates are questioned and negotiated because the "senior" thinks it can be done in lesser time .

5. New rules are enforced everyday , making everything a dev's job . unit test cases? developer will do . uat testing? developer should do. prod testing? dev's job after getting prod numbers whitelisted. war room testing of modules? dev's job . let other teams know of changes? dev job. making a list of all tasks,all estimates and hourly time spent by a dev in a sprint? dev's job. What is the responsibility of qa team and EL?

6. in past 2 years I added 500+ commits, worked on 450+ small to large tasks and almost 99% of app's features are known to me. but in first year I broke my left arm and took a month wfh. In 2nd year i got stage 3 cancer and took 2 months sabbatical. all this made my contributions z my efforts as 0 and I never got any appreciation once.

----

With all these issues, what else could i have done apart from putting papers? How much can I figjt the useless fights? I am not the loudest nor the most cunning person in thsoe rooms. And these 2 seems common attributes of both of those SSEs who got good leadership positions.

I am sorry I couldn't be a better fighter. I am tired of fighting : my life, my situation and now the fight to proove my worth in the only space that i am passionate and proud

Couple months ago I mentioned that the product group needed to involve engineering when making promises to the business. Otherwise they were going to write checks our asses can't cash.

Welp, now the situation has happened and I pointed out that a lot of things have been promised for delivery that we haven't planned for or even seen in engineering. And things that I have been harping on haven't even been accounted for and, unlike business promises, these are legal requirements. Now I'm the asshole because I pointed this shit out in front of the whole team.