Damn Management!

Well, I just had a scuffle with management - the first of my young professional coding career. My boss suggested I use the waste-of-space itoa function included with my compiler, after I wrote my own (well, copied it from K&R, but whatever)... His reasoning was because their library implementation leaves me with pointers to the beginning and ending of the string, "This can come in handy at times." It doesn't come in handy in this case, but who cares! It could be handy in some other, totally unrelated program, so I have to use it... ::sigh::

Did I mention that using their itoa requires including a totally new header file, one that will only be used with this function? His excuse: "You can use the other functions to aid in debugging..." Apparently he doesn't realize that there's no screen hooked up to the micro I'm programming, so debugging with printf will be pretty damn worthless.

My question: Do managers just assign projects, go away to a meeting, and forget about it?

Another problem: my boss just left for the afternoon, and I'm stuck with more weird errors. Does anyone know why my 500 line program would contain errors in line 1400?

>Do managers just assign projects, go away to a meeting, and forget about it?<

:) You'd better believe it, pal, and get used to it. It's only
gonna get worse. Eat a little ca ca; build up the resume.

rick barclay

The director of our department doesn't have any technical knowledge other than how to send emails, even that is getting to be a challenge for her. She doesn't know what we can and can't do and expects the impossible.(PEBCAK = problem exists between keyboard and chair) People who run or operate technical businesses or departments should have a technical background. Just because you can manage people shouldn't mean you can manage the technology they are working with. The answer to your question is yes, but I know a couple people in management who do a great job. I can't help you with your compiler program, I'm a damn newb.

My boss has a technical background, and knows more about C than I do... which just makes it more frustrating. For just one day, I want him to be replaced by a clueless person with a degree in business admin instead of someone with a bachelor's and master's in electircal engineering.

ahh this is one of those reasons why i work for myself... - work for a company for a couple of years, move to another for another couple and then go freelance - its more money and no corporate hassles

You have my sympathy. It wasn't the last time something like that happened :D:D

Talk about impossible requests, try my field.

Me:"So what do you want me to do?"

Boss:"Just make it Armani!"
*or*
"Just make it 'fun'..."
*or*
"I don't care what you do just make it 'special'..."

Me:"Huh?"

I am not kidding about this. I have the most stressful job in the world next to 'air-traffic controller'. Everyone wants you to do the impossible, and every project must be better than the last...I can't wait till I get my own biz off the ground...

If you think you've got it bad, you haven't worked at a Grocery store, where the managers think they're demigods who can make me clean their boots with my tongue.

Ha - reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon;

The boss walks up to him and says, "We should build an sql database"

Dilbert sits and wonders if the guy really know what he's talking about or is it just some phrase he picked up. "What colour would you like it?" he replies.

"Mauve" the manager replies.. :p :p

Lol! I guess not even mannequin dressers are stress free :)

How about this, sebastiani (people need to get easier names - your truly included)

"Just make it work"

or maybe

True story:
On my work term last summer, I spent the entire time writing a program with another guy under the close supervision of our boss. We finally got it working perfectly (even error-proofing - anything short of jumping on the keyboard wouldn't do anything bad) and demoed it for one of the higher-ups. He was overjoyed and thought it was great (he especially liked the idea to distribute it on CD instead of e-mail or floppy). Even our boss said we did a good job. Last winter, when I got back, I transferred departments. I still checked my program, tho, to refresh my ObjectPAL knowledge a little (after 3 months at school). I noticed a little bug that wasn't really a huge deal, but I wanted my co-worker to know about it anyways. "Zach, fix this line", I e-mailed him. He quickly e-mailed me back and said "Oh, Bud [our boss] threw it away and said it was crap". Needless to say, I was floored that our program that had garnished so much praise just a few months before was deemed crap just a little while later (and I wasn't even told about it!)

> demigods who can make me clean their boots with my tongue.

It doesn't get any better any other place - the boots are just more expensive.

Quote:

---

How about this, sebastiani (people need to get easier names - your truly included)

---

Hey, I just added an "i" to the end of my real name...would it be easier if I went by my nickname "Seba"...?

That's a funny story tho, what did the program do?

It was a document distribution program.

Basically, whenever a job goes out, there's certain people that need receive specific drawings. They aren't the same for every person, and sometimes people want different types of drawings for every job. Our program allowed the user to log in and see what kind of drawings they were to receive. They could change it however they wanted. Then, if a job was to go out, they would get everything e-mailed to them (a VB MAPI call - took about 3 lines of code). There was other stuff to it, too, but I don't really remember. It started off as a port of a DOS program, and my boss quickly mutated it into something ugly. Honestly, I think that one of the reasons it got scrapped was that it would have been too confusing for the user to use. In the DOS version, they had to hit about 3 keys. In this, there was menus, blah, blah, the whole deal. Everytime he had another brilliant "idea", we had to redo most of the program. He also made us put every variable possible at the global level... Another problem was that everytime we asked the users what they wanted or thought, we got bi*ched at. Tell me, how will a user want to use smth that's been designed totally behind closed doors and the programmer will never use, so has no real idea of how to set it up best?

I know the feeling... trust me. Being a CE intern surrounded by a bunch of electrical engineers makes me a freakin computer genius... at least to them anyways.

So not only do I do the mundane stuff (network admin sort of garbage) but they come up with these fancy projects for me to do... one of which requires learning an entirely new computer language and learning the ins and outs of possibly MYSQL or some other database setup. The other is a graphical setup which when finished should allow the EEs here to control all switching on our system (I work for an electric company). Umm... and some of that is just impossible, if not to the point where I'd require more schooling.. I love how these guys who are nearly computer illiterate want stuff to happen and look all pretty... when I have to nearly perform magic to make it happen. They really don't get it.

Yes this is truly the "user paradox". Everyone wants customized programs but is unwilling to to the set up part. Also, users tend to ***** when they have to punch in ANY input...take my mom, when I let her play with my first program, she *****ed because she didn't like the fact that she had to make a menu choice before inputting her number, even though this feature made the program more useful...so I contrived a more complex system to where the user could input the number from the get go(which was the first menu choice-by default, otherwise the input was a choice) and that seemed to make her happy. Still, it amazes me how much extra code went into avoiding that one extra key-press!

>Ha - reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon;<

HA! My favorite cartoon char. Hilarious stuff and so close
to the truth.

rick barclay