Most of my managers lambasted my teams for their emotional intelligence because we did laugh at their jokes.
Or what we thought were jokes, anyway.
In one instance, we weren't able to debug a field issue without logs. The site had generated the a binary log file that was about 5GB. For security reasons, the log could only be transferred to our secure FTP site. The problem was that the site pointed to a 300MB drive. The log was too big to be downloaded.
The customer screamed at our director, who screamed at our manager, who screamed at us. We explained that the FTP site simply didn't have the capacity to download the needed log, so there was nothing we could do.
He sprung into action to get the FTP site upgraded. While a five dollar 8GB USB drive would do the job, this was upgrading infrastructure, meaning it had to be approved by purchasing, and IT, and IS, and data security, and the CTO, and...
The customer was screaming every week for a fix, and finally, after three months of negotiations with the stakeholders, our manager held a meeting with us to proudly announce that he'd gotten approval, and budget, to upgrade the FTP site. Yay!
It would be another month before it was implemented, but we could look forward to the site capacity being almost *doubled* from 300MB to a full 500MB.
The group reacted as expected, laughing at the joke, waiting for him to tell us what the real upgrade was going to be.
The meeting minutes indicated sourly that the group did not respond "professionally" to the news of the upgrade. I guess we lacked emotional intelligence.
Quote a team member: "there's not enough facepalm in the world for this place"
While it seemed like our management and IT departments were living in 1980, this was 2015.
IT announced a bunch of upgrades all at the same time:
- the FTP site capacity would be upgraded from 300MB to 500MB
- the company would migrate from Windows XP to Windows 7
- they "hoped" that by year end, software engineering's development machines would all be upgrade to 4GB.
The reason I remember it was 2015 was because Windows 10 had come out a few months earlier, and our IT department was proudly announcing the upgrade *to* Windows 7. Not from 8.1 to 10, but from XP to 7.
What was really funny was that they were trying to hire at the time, and they just couldn't understand why people kept turning down offers. I told HR that instead of just telling them what we had, walk them around and show them. Afterwards, the dejected HR person told me that "people come here saying they're tired of working with old tech, but when I show them what we have, they tell us it's a decade older than what they have at their current jobs".
What's really insane is that management was proud of how advanced they were, were actually bragging about it, and couldn't understand "all the negativity".
At one of the all hands meetings, an exec who'd just joined from a different industry said he had was blow away with how high tech we were, and how our company "seemed like Star Trek" to him. The common response was "well, Star Trek *is* from the 1960s".
As one friend who worked at a competitor put it, "our receptionist has a better computer than your engineers do", and he was right.
Of course, the important people - VPs, managers, HR, IT, legal, marketing, etc. - all had machines that put the engineers to shame. The most common reaction execs had when they asked us to demo something was "is someone wrong with your computer? it seems really slow". They would then be shocked when we listed the specs of our machines.
That was followed with "why don't you have a current machine, like everyone else?", only to find that everyone else in the engineering teams had the same.
That in turn was followed by shock, and asked why we didn't upgrade. We'd then show them the paper trail of years of requests that were ignored, or blocked, by upper management.
Sad, but true; henceforth, the term "yes-men", which now includes "yes-women" (I don't think that "yes-people" sounds right, so I'll stick with the two genders).
I have, as a Canadian, seen a newspaper article that used the term "persons of snow" to describe a snowman. The same newspaper once described the city budget shortfall as having been addressed and that finances were "back in the African-Canadian".
Methinks someone wrote a script to replace "<demographic>man" with "person of <demographic>" or the like. They certain skipped the proofreader step.
I mean, if Bob isn't laughing at the boss' jokes, does he even want to work there?
One wonders. I laugh, cry, sniffle at ever meeting when "'Da Boss" does so. Y'know, "team support", blah, blah, blah...
This one is actually backwards.
Most of my managers lambasted my teams for their emotional intelligence because we did laugh at their jokes.
Or what we thought were jokes, anyway.
In one instance, we weren't able to debug a field issue without logs. The site had generated the a binary log file that was about 5GB. For security reasons, the log could only be transferred to our secure FTP site. The problem was that the site pointed to a 300MB drive. The log was too big to be downloaded.
The customer screamed at our director, who screamed at our manager, who screamed at us. We explained that the FTP site simply didn't have the capacity to download the needed log, so there was nothing we could do.
He sprung into action to get the FTP site upgraded. While a five dollar 8GB USB drive would do the job, this was upgrading infrastructure, meaning it had to be approved by purchasing, and IT, and IS, and data security, and the CTO, and...
The customer was screaming every week for a fix, and finally, after three months of negotiations with the stakeholders, our manager held a meeting with us to proudly announce that he'd gotten approval, and budget, to upgrade the FTP site. Yay!
It would be another month before it was implemented, but we could look forward to the site capacity being almost *doubled* from 300MB to a full 500MB.
The group reacted as expected, laughing at the joke, waiting for him to tell us what the real upgrade was going to be.
The meeting minutes indicated sourly that the group did not respond "professionally" to the news of the upgrade. I guess we lacked emotional intelligence.
Quote a team member: "there's not enough facepalm in the world for this place"
While it seemed like our management and IT departments were living in 1980, this was 2015.
IT announced a bunch of upgrades all at the same time:
- the FTP site capacity would be upgraded from 300MB to 500MB
- the company would migrate from Windows XP to Windows 7
- they "hoped" that by year end, software engineering's development machines would all be upgrade to 4GB.
The reason I remember it was 2015 was because Windows 10 had come out a few months earlier, and our IT department was proudly announcing the upgrade *to* Windows 7. Not from 8.1 to 10, but from XP to 7.
What was really funny was that they were trying to hire at the time, and they just couldn't understand why people kept turning down offers. I told HR that instead of just telling them what we had, walk them around and show them. Afterwards, the dejected HR person told me that "people come here saying they're tired of working with old tech, but when I show them what we have, they tell us it's a decade older than what they have at their current jobs".
What's really insane is that management was proud of how advanced they were, were actually bragging about it, and couldn't understand "all the negativity".
At one of the all hands meetings, an exec who'd just joined from a different industry said he had was blow away with how high tech we were, and how our company "seemed like Star Trek" to him. The common response was "well, Star Trek *is* from the 1960s".
As one friend who worked at a competitor put it, "our receptionist has a better computer than your engineers do", and he was right.
Of course, the important people - VPs, managers, HR, IT, legal, marketing, etc. - all had machines that put the engineers to shame. The most common reaction execs had when they asked us to demo something was "is someone wrong with your computer? it seems really slow". They would then be shocked when we listed the specs of our machines.
That was followed with "why don't you have a current machine, like everyone else?", only to find that everyone else in the engineering teams had the same.
That in turn was followed by shock, and asked why we didn't upgrade. We'd then show them the paper trail of years of requests that were ignored, or blocked, by upper management.
🤣 Oh. Sorry! That wasn't a joke?
This may just be Bob's way of quiet quitting.
That was a joke? I thought it was yet another new corporate motivational motto that makes no sense. I put it in my notes with an asterisk even!
Sad, but true; henceforth, the term "yes-men", which now includes "yes-women" (I don't think that "yes-people" sounds right, so I'll stick with the two genders).
Persons of yes.
I have, as a Canadian, seen a newspaper article that used the term "persons of snow" to describe a snowman. The same newspaper once described the city budget shortfall as having been addressed and that finances were "back in the African-Canadian".
Methinks someone wrote a script to replace "<demographic>man" with "person of <demographic>" or the like. They certain skipped the proofreader step.
"yes kissers"?
"ministers of yes"?