Posts by evadnos nibor

A new management theory catches on

"You know, putting everything in the cloud just puts you at the mercy of someone else. That's a bit shit"

Very first batch of a new board, we're all gathered round as board 000001A gets powered up, six pairs of hopeful eyes on the LED that the firmware preloaded into the flash chip was supposed to blink. Plug in the 12v supply and the sacrificial diode pops and smokes: on the schemo the wrong way round and the fabricators had faithfully reproduced that for us. Through the whisps of diode smoke comes the voice of our esteemed Engineering Director, who was not at all a cock-bag: "Software problem: when will you have a fix?"

"Directors"

Something relatively recent (to me, anyway) is the journey down the org chart of the partial title "Director". It used to be just top brass - the people who'd get banged up if the company killed someone - but now we see "Director" in the titles of people a couple of ranks down. Where I work we have a "Director" of our department, who does what my dad would have called "admin". He's alright, nice enough bloke in a horrible job; when he tells you he Used To Be A Techie you can see he dies a little inside each time. But that greasy pole won't climb itself* - onward and upward to the Senior Head Chief Lead First Gold Director of Supervisory Management Direction Oversight.

Self-climbing greasy poles? There's a pitch for VC funding for you!

My neighbour's got one

On a warm evening, with the little cylinder of woe on his patio table, he likes to deliver what we think of as an "Alexa punishment beating".

"Alexa! Play Dire Straits..."

That's us off to the pub

It's near the Star

Which was (1990s) and maybe still is a decent FS&T pub - can anyone provide more recent info?

Got to take care of your mental health - a couple of lunchtime ESBs should sustain a spook through reading all the mundane stuff we put in our emails.

Martin is a twat

An over-officious BOFH at a place I worked introduced Lotus Notes-level of password changiness on a dev server without notice, to universal dismay. He'd brook no argument, his boss backed him up and was big enough to not be too fussed about physical threats. He and I sat back-to-back with a whiteboard between us, on which I wrote my password in foot-high letters every time I had to change it, always some variant of "Martin is a twat".

The bugger of it is, though, he *wasn't* that much of a twat, he was actually a good guy who wanted things to work, even though he was quite wrong in this case.

If you're reading this, Martin ... pint sometime? Twat.

It's raining *****, hallelujah

At a print-and-mail house I had the job of implementing the workflow for the production of a national building supplier's commercial paperwork. They'd been bitten pretty badly by being tied into SAP, so when they sacked them and took everything in-house for processing, they were very keen on being able to lift and shift print and fulfillment. The bloke running it was very switched on and produced clear and complete specs that were a pleasure to work to, plus he was a very cheerful Brummie who liked cricket and beer ... we got on nicely, which was just as well.

The one thing he couldn't get properly organised was testing, so we had to jump on the opportunities to test that came along at pretty short notice. Everything went well and we were approaching the end, with the monthly reports being the last thing to test - a few Excel spreadsheets FTP'ed over and loaded into their DB with a cron job. Part of the spec for these reports was that the name of the print supplier should be changeable and fit within a range of so many to so many characters. He rang up with the opportunity to test this just after I came out of a particularly unpleasant meeting with a power generation company and our Director-Buffoon, with many decisions going the wrong way as far as I was concerned. He was particularly keen to test the limits of the field lengths and our company name was three characters, so we'd already tested that - could I just make up a name fitting the required number of characters, simulate a print run and generate the reports?

It was half past six, it's raining, the bus goes soon, the pub was calling loudly, the boss had been a complete fool and now this - you can see where this is leading. The limit to test was fifteen characters so I rattled it in, set the job running, I'll look at it in the morning. If I hurried, I'd catch the bus. I hurried and caught it. Pub.

Next morning, my hungover backside hadn't quite settled on my seat when the phone rings and my marra from the building suppliers is sounding a little concerned on the phone. He's got some concerns with this latest test, could I have a look? An email pops up and I open the spreadsheet with him still on the phone. Got it open? I think we have a problem. My eyes eventualy focus and there, in lovely SHOUTY CAPS is the name that I'd rattled into the report and FTP'ed over to their *production* servers.

Print provider: SHOWER OF TWATS

The bastard let me look at that for what felt like ages before he pissed himself laughing and told me he'd been in early, cleared the record from their production server and, since the last test was giong to be sending the reports through to production ... we were finsihed.

A truly top bloke. Back then you could afford to go to the cricket, and we arranged to meet him at the next ODI at Edgebaston and bought him a couple of pints (which you could afford at the cricket, back then)

Flicking the Vs, maybe?

Aren't they an Oz company? That'd mean, from my British-centric point of view, that their V-signs are upside down ...