Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[nenjin]

Pretty frustrating morning to come to work to.

First off, I learn that a customer I spent a week on site with in August, who quit using the software immediately after I left, is now low-key threatening to sue us.

They weren't ready for our software to begin with. But then also every employee at the business told me who their biggest problem was. Even the accountant GM stated it. Sat in a boardroom meeting with the GM and Owner and sort of described the situation as I saw it. Was told my input was valued and appreciated.

Come back home and they do a 180 and say they didn't appreciate my comments or my insights. (Long story short, the problem guy has been there for like a decade and there's no one to replace him so he threw his weight around and said it's either me or this software. Dude was trying to sabotage us on Day 1 telling everyone we shouldn't do this. Owner decided to side with him. Guaranteed the guy is stealing from them. That is almost always the case when someone throws this big of a shit fit, who also happens to be labeled as the biggest problem at the business.)

Anyways, we agreed to let them out of a $120,000, 5 year contract they INSISTED we write for them. No strings attached, just pay for the time on site for both myself and my coworker, who were there for a week.

Now they're trying to reconcile a single week's business out of Quickbooks and are pissed that our accounting integration doesn't push line item details and "the numbers don't match." Pretty sure this is the first time they've looked at the accounting data in 2 months. They said their lawyer is going to send us an email which we haven't seen, which I'm sure is a legal threat.

I'm being told not to worry about it, that I didn't do anything wrong and this is just how some people in my industry choose to behave. That doesn't help my sense of responsibility much. I'm just sick of cheap ass customers who don't know what they want and don't take their own commitment to running their own business using our software seriously. So sick of this nickle and diming and finger pointing. It's a waste of my time.

Oh but the hits keep on coming!

For months a customer has wanted a custom project done that automates some yearly task they have to complete at a very specific time. No one wants to do this project but they were willing to pay for it, so I greenlit it. I came up with the idea of how it would work with the least development resources.

During the quarterly planning meeting, which I'm not part of, my CEO heard this request and instead of assigning it to the developers, who said this was their responsibility to work on....he instead kicked it BACK to my department to do custom database development work. We're support people. We're not developers. We will require development support to craft this thing, which begs the question why the devs aren't being allowed to do it. My boss' rationale was that dev is super busy and has bigger fish to fry....but this is paid custom DEVELOPMENT. That is not a support task. He even floated the idea of us receiving spreadsheets of data and uploading it for them.......ON CHRISTMAS EVE.

God fucking damnit I'm so mad. I did all the leg work to get it to this point, only to have it thrown back in my face and be told we will write the code OR give our time so the customer doesn't have to.

It's pretty fucking frustrating when my CEO parachutes into a meeting with no context and makes calls that his entire team is telling him are wrong.

I must have ranted loud enough he heard me because he came into my office to apologize and said he wanted to talk about it. So that's something I guess.

PPPPPPFFFFFFFFFTTTTTTTTTTTT, this job sometimes.

[Great Order]

Had a pointless (Although I didn't know it or I'd have skipped it) lecture shoved into my timetable with less than 24 hours warning, which threw my plans for today out the door, which meant I've wound up missing Jitsu. I put my gis in to wash (Which was to be done this morning, but again, plans) and the machine went out of order. I got it out, put it in a second one, the machine started up so I left. Came back after it was done and it had just... stopped. 26 minutes on the machine still, it had just decided it was going to stop for no reason.

All the while I'm kicking my caffeine addiction because I've definitely been a bit over-reliant on it the past few weeks and it's making getting out of bed difficult since I'm feeling dead until I get some of it into me.

So just generally feeling kind of shit.

[Akura]

Idiotic decision from corporate. The kids' clothing section is having the signs that separate each category(tops, bottoms, etc) removed. We're still supposed to separate the different categories, it's just that there's nothing there to tell where each one begins. The problem with this is the people who roll clothing are morons who just randomly put clothing everywhere even with the signage. Even for the fact that my entire job is to sort the clothing racks so that the rolling process is simple and linear, they still can't do their jobs right. And I also have to clean up the boys' section every morning.

[Magmacube_tr]

My phones headphone jack got a clump of yarn in it. It took me 15 very long and frustrating minutes to get it out.

[Frumple]

termites *grumbling noises*

bugkillin' folks gon' be here... sometime this week

hopefully

it do suck when you notice a hole in the wall what wasn't there and then look closer 'cause where did this hole come from and then you notice the hole is goddamn wiggling and you're like fuuuuuuck

[Eschar]

Could be wrong, but it doesn't look like the sizable new interest in DF from the steam release has translated into anything near a sizable amount of new forum dwellers or interest in the forum.

I'll go look at the actual numbers in a moment.

[King Zultan]

I haven't noticed much of an uptick ether, and have only noticed a hand full of new faces that have stuck around.

[Magmacube_tr]

Could be wrong, but it doesn't look like the sizable new interest in DF from the steam release has translated into anything near a sizable amount of new forum dwellers or interest in the forum.

I'll go look at the actual numbers in a moment.

I don't even think most of them even know that the forum exists. The new players ask their questions on DF subreddit and get their news from the Steam page. They are automatically funneled to those places, and have no need to seek anywhere else.

Yeah, there is a reason why forumites are an endangered species of netizen.

[Eschar]

Could be wrong, but it doesn't look like the sizable new interest in DF from the steam release has translated into anything near a sizable amount of new forum dwellers or interest in the forum.

I'll go look at the actual numbers in a moment.

I don't even think most of them even know that the forum exists. The new players ask their questions on DF subreddit and get their news from the Steam page. They are automatically funneled to those places, and have no need to seek anywhere else.

Yeah, there is a reason why forumites are an endangered species of netizen.

There's also the Kitfox discord, which as useful as it is means people's first resource for questions or talking about their forts is the discord.

[nenjin]

Corporate organizations. Ugh.

We built a thing 7 years ago to transmit inventory orders back and forth between Party X and Party Y. Party Y sends it to Party X, Party X sends it back to Party Y, yadda yadda. Party Y is my client. Party X is their partner.

Party X has always sucked about communication. Party Y is a unique special case in the way they do things, which mean's they're a thorn in the ass of Party X from a technical perspective.

So Party X updated a whole bunch of shit on their side and fails to tell us any of it. The thing breaks.  Party Y is now out about, oh, $600,000k in transactions due to this. Enough has changed we have to refactor the 7 year old application package so it starts working again.

The person who wrote this thing is long gone, so I have to take the time of the best dev in my company to address it. He drops everything he's doing to respond to someone else's crisis, which we all hate but we do because it's why our customers love us.

Panicked emails back and forth. Finally we get a real response from Party X and calls start getting scheduled. There are upwards of 8 people representing Party X on these calls. Scheduling meetings at like 8am the day of with zero respect for my time. And they admit they just completely dropped the ball and changed everything without contacting us.

In one day my dev refactors our stuff. All we're waiting on is a password to send with it so we can test the changes. I'm told what generates us our password and user account is an automated process on Party X's side.

Party Y needs this working by like, Monday. Or they have to submit all this stuff by hand to meet month's end and collect, and that will take them a day.

I tell Party X: Get us our password by like, 2pm today and we can probably be testing or at least find the next problem and maybe have it back up and running by end of day.

My dev is messaging me saying he's ready to do this shit if they'll meet their end. By 5pm they don't. So basically I'm waiting on an email that will probably come over the weekend and it's up to my dev whether he wants to work the weekend on this, grind it out at 8am and hope everything works, or just say fuck it, your vendor screwed us all and this month is a bust and enjoy your OT entering 300+ transactions by hand.

And then they dump even more great news on us and tell us our application won't work once we migrate it off Party X's network. Which was supposed to happen by year's end. I emailed 6 months ago asking what we needed to know if we were going to change the location of the integration. I got a "we'll look into that for you" and never heard back. I'm pretty sure the person I emailed was on the calls we've been having.

They want us to use their API like all their other customers do. It took the original dev like a year to build this thing. It predates their API. So there's no way we'll redo it before year's end, which means the migration can't happen.....all because Party X doesn't have their shit together and never has.

Why were they supposed to migrate before year's? Because the Corporate IT for Party X wants to decomission Party Y's server because it's an outlier and it's a security risk. Last year they came at us with a massive security audit and threatened us to make immediate changes to the server (which is their's, btw) in like, a week or they'd just shut it down. And we did it. We completed all their audits and made 80% of the changes we were able to and saved Party Y's business from coming to a complete standstill. But the plan was to get them off that server and on to our side, so Party X's IT could shut it down once and for all. Now that plan is basically fucked, something we've been working on for a couple months now and myself and Party Y just heard it at the same time.

It really kind of sucks some days being the one in the middle of all this bullshit. Even when it's not our fault, our customers will usually breathe down our necks to pressure their partners because "we understand it." Thankfully Party Y has a whole new crop of people who are trying to take management more seriously and actually advocating for their own needs and contacting their own vendors and partners. It's still baffling to me some days though that this is how the world works.

I've been solving problems for so long at this point and getting to the root of things because that's how shit gets fixed, that bureaucratic inertia drives me absolutely bonkers.

[Schmaven]

Sewing... Minor finger punctures, occasionally drawing blood.  But there will soon be a waldo hat for a costume party!

[King Zultan]

Sewing... Minor finger punctures, occasionally drawing blood.  But there will soon be a waldo hat for a costume party!

Your costume's power has increased ten fold due to you having to shed your own blood to create it.

[MrRoboto75]

People who obviously enjoy the company of anybody else more but are too polite to just tell me to fuck off already.

[Schmaven]

People who obviously enjoy the company of anybody else more but are too polite to just tell me to fuck off already.

Yeah, thats akward.  But it is possible that eventually 1 of those people will be genuinely interested.  It just takes a slog of encounters to find your people sometimes.

[TD1]

And, additionally, it seems likely you're overthinking it. Continue to socialise. Those that want to bugger off, will bugger off. If you want to bugger off, then bugger off.

If anyone's sticking around out of politeness, that's a them problem. And eventually, they will bugger off.

In the end you'll be left with a core group of non-buggers.


This TED talk brought to you by.......