Forum Overview :: Still Life

Boss story 1 of 10 by Oom Shnibble 09/19/2005, 5:06am PDT First a bit of background. I work at a small software development house as a senior developer. I've been in the industry for 6 years and my first job involved doing a lot of everything and my second job was working for the Hitler of the Development world. Everything had to be done RIGHT (In all caps.). He would go over every line of code after it was commited to CVS and if it didn't meet his high standards you would be called into his office and condecendingly told what was wrong and how to fix it... This is my third job. Things here are carnage. No one has any grasp of basic concepts like : Avoid code duplication, avoid global variables and only open a connection to the database when you need to and then open only one because it costs money to licence extra connections to databases. Recently the support director of our company decided that he was bored of his job and promptly got the CEO to agree to making him the IT director and create a new marketing director position for our old IT director. Our new IT director is a cretin to start with and completely ignorant of how a development team should be run. Recently our CVS server died in the line of duty. Fair enough it was 7 years old and hadn't been upgraded in that time. We had backups so it wasn't a big deal. So I thought. The first thing my boss does is find the oldest machine not in use (As a permanent replacement to boot. (Except it didn't)) and tell me to set CVS up on it. Problem 1 : The machine only booted up on 1 in 3 attempts. Problem 2 : The network card was FUCKED UP. Problem 3 : Random crashes. Problem 4 : The CD ROM drive was FUCKED UP. Problem 5 : When you turned the PC off the PSU fan would turn off but the Windows XP shutting down screen would still show on the monitor. That is just a partial list of the problems. The biggest issue was that the harder I tried explaining to the boss that this was probably not the best replacement machine the more he insisted that I make it work. After a day of this he finally relented and we bought the cheapest PC he could find from the shittiest supplier we could find (Cue me having to drive to the supplier 3 times because of faulty hardware on the new PC.) There isn't a budgetary problem. THe company is making a lot of money, enough in fact for all the directors to travel first class to Buenos Ares to stay in a 5 star hotel for a strategy meeting where the only strategy they worked on was picking up prostitutes. THE SHNIBBULAR ONE, OOM

Boss story 1 of 10 by Oom Shnibble 09/19/2005, 5:06am PDT