Job: cashier
Item doesn’t scan
Customer: “That means it’s free, right?”
🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄
Only about 4 weeks in as a cashier and I’ve heard this enough to last me a lifetime.
OP, I’ll have you know that I pull that joke every single time it happens. And I make sure to throw out a great, heartfelt laugh and slap my knee just to make sure you get the joke.
It’s great.
Maybe a niche issue, but “that doesn’t scale!” In the context of software development.
We’re writing software for usually very well defined user groups, but so many of the architects and seniors want to build a second Netflix, which costs 4 times as much as the simple solution and in the end usually isn’t even better, because those morons have no idea how to do that.
Currently, I’m in a project where I fought tooth and nail to avoid having a micro service architecture for a batch job that inserts less than a million entries per day.
so many of the architects and seniors want to build a second Netflix
Good old Resume-Driven-Development
I wouldn’t even call it that. It’s a weird lack of a sense of scale combined with organizational hurdles.
They basically can’t estimate, how much resources a proper app would need and they don’t know how to manage teams to work on a common codebase. So they simply draw a diagram of the functionalities, spin out each block as a “Service”, assign that to a team and call it a day.
I’ve talked to several of them about this and I had to do very simple math directly in front of them to convince them. I’ve had to explain to a grown man, an experienced engineer, that 16 cores and 96gb memory are more than enough to handle a million simple inserts per day in a batch mode. He wanted to split the job into 4 services, each essentially running 10 lines of actual business logic, each using the resources mentioned above. Absolute madness.
“We’re in code freeze, so no more changes are to be committed until release! Also, the management needs this change to be fast-tracked to be included with the release, so let’s make it happen, people!”
I just read your comment to my husband and he said, “Every fucking month! Oh my fucking god.” (He’s a DBA.)
Me: Software developer. Other person: Sales guy.
Sales guy: Have you finally fixed the XYZ bug?
Me: What XYZ bug? Never heard of this before.
Sales guy: The bug that impacted our project A, B, and C! It is there for years!
Me: No, I have not fixed it. Because I just heard about this issue now. Nobody told me about an XYZ bug, or problems with projects A, B, and C.
Sales guy: What? Why didn’t you know about such a bug? This cannot be possible! I’ll talk to the boss about your incompetence!
Me: Because none of your team found it necessary to inform me? Maybe we should talk to the boss about this.
Open a goddamn ticket.
I will go and open a ticket and I will put two words in it, and require you to contact me for
moreany information, and then I won’t answer the phone for 6 weeks. Oh and don’t bother leaving a voicemail message or sending me an email, because I never check them. However despite my complete unresponsiveness, I am nonetheless going to insist that it’s marked as high priority even though I don’t understand what high priority means - Every Employee Ever“please fix”
no bug report, only fix!
“X is down/broke.” No, Kelly, the internet isn’t “down.” You typed the URL wrong in your browser.
People will state it like the entire company has lost internet connectivity, or an entire department cannot access files or run a certain program, when actually, only a single user is having a problem.
Also people not knowing the difference between log out, restart, and shutdown. Even after explaining it to them.
I can’t really sympathise with you here. You’re clearly an IT guy, so the difference between log out, restart and shut down is as natural to you as breathing. For the average person is not that intuitive. For many people the computer is “on” when they press the power button and enter their username and password. And the blurring of the distinction is increased by most people having a smartphone where just lifting it up to your face wakes it up and logs you in (technically) at the same time.
I know you’re explaining it to them, but if that’s not something that they live and breathe, they’re just going to forget the explanation. I’m a molecular biologist, so to me the differences between genome, transcriptome and proteome are bleeding obvious, but I have a colleague who’s not a scientist but needs to become familiar with these terms. I explained them to her last week in an meeting that lasted an hour, but this week I had to do that again. She’s not stupid, it’s just all very abstract to her.
I’m mean, it’s literally in the name. These are not concepts that require a degree to understand, much less an hour long meeting.
Logout means ending your user session, restart means your computer turns off and then comes back on, and shutdown means it turns off and stays off.
The buttons are all in the start menu, they are clearly marked, and these concepts have existed for 30 years at least.
It’s like driving a car for decades and not knowing what the difference between reverse, drive, and neutral are.
I still think your promoting the view of “this is obvious to me so it should be obvious to everyone”. Even your explanation would be confusing for someone who’s not an IT guy - what does it mean “end my user session?” People rarely go to the start menu to deal with their computers’ “on-ness”, they just press the hardware button that has an incomplete circle with a line on top or often no marking or label at all. Or they close the lid and that makes them think of their laptop as “off”.
It’s not about being “obvious.” It’s about understanding the most basic concepts involved with using a piece of equipment that is central to their job and has been that way for decades.
I wouldn’t want ride in a car with somebody that couldn’t remember what the difference between red, yellow, and green traffic lights are, or couldn’t remember how to activate their turn signals or windshield wipers. And I certainly wouldn’t want them operating a vehicle as a core part of their everyday job.
Now I’ll grant that in general, a car is far more dangerous than a computer. But the principle still holds, these are not tough concepts to understand, takes literally 5 minutes to explain at most. Plus, they haven’t changed in at least 30 years, so it’s not some new fangled techno-babble.
