How not to be seen!

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Manfred_Nowak" <svv1999 at hotmail.com> wrote in message 
news:Xns9D1DDC8ACE272svv1999hotmailcom at 65.204.18.192...
> http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Small-But-Rapidly-Growing.aspx
>
> -manfred

Sounds a lot like a place I worked at a few years ago (let's just say: 
"recruiter software" and "mst"). This line in particular is exactly how 
things worked there: "as soon as someone bought that feature, developer 
would be responsible for adding it in." That's what happens when salesmen 
are allowed to run a company.

Like David, we too had loads of code obfuscation, except that our 
obfuscation was a result of lazy, incompetent developers and a constant 
management (and development team!) attitude of "just get it in as fast as 
possible, and then move on to fight the next fire" (which obviously is a 
strategy that *breeds* fires in the first place). In fact the code was bad 
enough to make TheDailyWTF: 
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/We_Have_Met_the_Enemy.aspx (The first part, 
with "Nate") In addition to the issues mentioned, there was also one 
instance of a data-loading function named "save". Took me a while to figure 
that one out (especially considering all the other forms of obfuscation 
mixed in there).

Like David, we too had a lot of noise in the developer room. Except our 
noise wasn't from a salesman gong, it was from the other developers. One of 
the developers (the one who happened to be a co-founder of the company) kept 
yelling "Pinky!" at random intervals (I swear I'm not making that up). That 
actually went on for the entire year I was there, and all signs indicated he 
had been doing that long before I started, and yet he still never tired of 
it. Another developer would never stop yapping about things that has nothing 
to do with work, but to top it off he couldn't go more than one sentence 
without using some form of the word "fuck" at least three times. And no, 
that's not an exaggerated figure. I don't get offended at words like that, 
but the sheer repetition of any one word is plenty irritating. And then 
there were the noise-making company-branded Yo-Yo's (not to be confused with 
the noise-making Yo-Yo's that actually worked on the development team). And, 
of course, there was the developer who decided he didn't need headphones for 
*his* music (But then, there seems to always be one of those people).

And not only did I get scolded for things, like David, that had been 
obviously outside my control, but they fired me on the spot for them (and on 
the first and only time they had brought the issues up with me). The issues 
included (off-the-top-of-my-head-examples): Not showing up at meetings that 
nobody bothered to tell me important things about (such as time, place, and 
the fact there there even was a meeting at all). Moving my desk away from 
the developers and down to the basement (I had been moved there by one of 
the many managers, not on my own accord, and in fact this particular manager 
was sitting right there in the room, right next to me, at the time I was 
being fired for this. He said nothing.). For allegedly leaving the building 
to go to lunch (which, first of all, why would that be a problem?, second of 
all, it wasn't mentioned anywhere in the rulebook, and thirdly but most 
importantly, I hadn't even been doing that anyway). For being slow to get a 
particular feature in (note the obfuscated code above, and the fact that 
it's a hell of a lot easier for obfuscated code to be understood by the 
people who actually wrote it in the first place). And, for, and I swear I'm 
neither making this up nor twisting the words: I "wasn't social enough".