So many of these strips have happened to me, I sometimes think I'm writing it.
I and two co-workers (Jim and Bob) were on a project. Jim and I put in 40 hour weeks, while Bob burned the midnight oil. He was easily doing 60 hours every week, and sometimes up to 80.
As in panel one, our manager told Jim and I that we should be more like Bob. The two of us appeared to be "slacking" (his word), and upper management had noticed. Jim and I pointed out we were both on schedule, it was only Bob's component that wasn't progressing.
Bob had been assigned the task of writing the project's password validation routine. He spent almost four months on it. His code was almost 8,000 lines, with ifs, whiles, and for loops nested up to 13 levels deep. And on top of that, he used tab stops of 8, meaning the code at the 13th level *started* at column 104.
The deadline was coming up, our manager got nervous, and told me to help Bob "polish it off". He made it sound as if it was 95% complete, and just needed a little tuning.
I looked at it, and my eye glazed over. It was not only unreadable, it was completely incoherent. I ignored the code and read the original requirements. I re-read them, because I thought I must be missing something. All the requirements said was that passwords had to be between MIN_LEN and MAX_LEN characters long, had to have one of five different subsets of characters (digits, upper case, lower case, etc.), and that all characters had to be exist in both ASCII and EBCDIC.
That was it. That was all there was to it. That was what he'd been working on for months.
I banged out a 30 line function in 5 minutes that met all the requirements. Then I spent a few hours testing various permutations on different ASCII and EBCDIC terminals to see if there were any edge cases it might not handle. There weren't. There, it was done. We made the deadline.
Unfortunately, our panel four was far less pleasant than in the strip, at least for Bob.
When our manager saw my code, and realized Bob had spent months of budget solving a one hours problem, Bob made the mistake of complaining that Jim and I didn't come CLOSE to producing the "quantity of work" that he'd generated.
Yes, he actually said quantity. Not quality.
The manager actually did the math on the whiteboard in front of us. It was so painful to watch, Jim and I felt sorry for Bob (almost). I'd written 30 lines of code in 30 minutes. Bob had written 8,000 lines of code in roughly 900 hours. So my "quantity" of code was 60 lines per hour, to Bob's was 7.6 lines. And that was comparing commented and tested code that was confirmed to work, compared to uncommented code that didn't even work. And that, he told Bob, was how he was reporting it to senior management on Friday.
No one was surprised a month later when Bob was transferred to a role in a completely different part of the company that had nothing to do with development.
So many of these strips have happened to me, I sometimes think I'm writing it.
I and two co-workers (Jim and Bob) were on a project. Jim and I put in 40 hour weeks, while Bob burned the midnight oil. He was easily doing 60 hours every week, and sometimes up to 80.
As in panel one, our manager told Jim and I that we should be more like Bob. The two of us appeared to be "slacking" (his word), and upper management had noticed. Jim and I pointed out we were both on schedule, it was only Bob's component that wasn't progressing.
Bob had been assigned the task of writing the project's password validation routine. He spent almost four months on it. His code was almost 8,000 lines, with ifs, whiles, and for loops nested up to 13 levels deep. And on top of that, he used tab stops of 8, meaning the code at the 13th level *started* at column 104.
The deadline was coming up, our manager got nervous, and told me to help Bob "polish it off". He made it sound as if it was 95% complete, and just needed a little tuning.
I looked at it, and my eye glazed over. It was not only unreadable, it was completely incoherent. I ignored the code and read the original requirements. I re-read them, because I thought I must be missing something. All the requirements said was that passwords had to be between MIN_LEN and MAX_LEN characters long, had to have one of five different subsets of characters (digits, upper case, lower case, etc.), and that all characters had to be exist in both ASCII and EBCDIC.
That was it. That was all there was to it. That was what he'd been working on for months.
I banged out a 30 line function in 5 minutes that met all the requirements. Then I spent a few hours testing various permutations on different ASCII and EBCDIC terminals to see if there were any edge cases it might not handle. There weren't. There, it was done. We made the deadline.
Unfortunately, our panel four was far less pleasant than in the strip, at least for Bob.
When our manager saw my code, and realized Bob had spent months of budget solving a one hours problem, Bob made the mistake of complaining that Jim and I didn't come CLOSE to producing the "quantity of work" that he'd generated.
Yes, he actually said quantity. Not quality.
The manager actually did the math on the whiteboard in front of us. It was so painful to watch, Jim and I felt sorry for Bob (almost). I'd written 30 lines of code in 30 minutes. Bob had written 8,000 lines of code in roughly 900 hours. So my "quantity" of code was 60 lines per hour, to Bob's was 7.6 lines. And that was comparing commented and tested code that was confirmed to work, compared to uncommented code that didn't even work. And that, he told Bob, was how he was reporting it to senior management on Friday.
No one was surprised a month later when Bob was transferred to a role in a completely different part of the company that had nothing to do with development.
Management.
Show your are efficient- Get more work.
Show less efficiency- Put into PiP.
FUCKERS, don’t even know what they want.