attend mandatory training
this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2025
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Oh god, add in "random scripts throw errors that you've never seen before" and the anus-clenching Teams DONK sound that precedes yet another poorly-worded indecipherable rant from my boss.
We had a great saying in a team I uses to be on: "Write good code and hope no one notices"
there comes a time where you have so little supervision that you can actually do something interesting and productive
Those are the days. I can even sometimes sneak in some tech debt reduction.
Not every person is the same.
Rules and processes and documentation and change management often times equals stability and repeatable successes. Some people thrive in this environment.
Moving fast and breaking shit with no rules or processes or documentation or change management often times leads to outages and an environment where you have to be the hero or a real IT "rockstar" to be successful. Some people thrive in this environment.
If you don't like all the rules and processes and documentation and change management, then you should know thyself and find a different job.
Found the bootlicking manager! Be sure to always remind the people doing the work that they are easily replaceable. They should be grateful right?
Found the IT "Rockstar".
- Spending a day or more every quarter/half sorting out your roadmap, prioritising stakeholder needs, tech debt and enhancements
- Someone from senior leadership decides they want random thing they invented and blows the roadmap up
- Much wanted feature (X) or issue gets pushed back
- CEO makes a comment in a company wide meeting how they can't understand why we simply can't do X thing yet
- Everyone in Product scrambles to make X a priority
- Go to step 1
My company used to do SAFe, which is supposed to be "scalable agile". By "scalable", they mean you take up half a sprint every quarter to do a big waterfall plan.
Too many in management believed their jobs depended on keeping this system. We slowly whittled them away until we stopped doing it entirely. Whatever you might think about "Extreme Programming" or "Agile" being primarily a way to sell books and overpriced training seminars, SAFe is only that. It has no other purpose.
I wish I could upvote you more than once
Build a skunk works, it's like an IT department's shadow IT, shave a yak, shed a bike.
Are you spying on me? Had to change my password this week. And we're in a release freeze.
I love doing big capital projects and spending literally millions of dollars in developer hours just for senior leadership to change their minds after the fact and not want any of what we just built!
Also every time a techbro tweets something a random number generator may fir- lay you off due to financial decisions.
Awfully true.
fix json
fuck why is everything broken
spend whole day trying to figure out
oh yeah i see the trailing comma from when i cut and pasted
JSON parsers need to get their shit together. I’ve had errors for trailing commas and comments in JSON way too often.
All this is great if you're working remote. At least you can be far away from a cubicle or even worse - an open office while doing all this nonsense.
My big company just did a full RTO mandate after 5 years full WFH since COVID started. It quickly swung from a good enjoyable job with plenty of work able to be done during all the bullshit meetings to an open office cubicle farm nightmare with harsh bright lights, tons of noise and distractions, and having to physically move from home to office and from desk to meeting room on different floors all the time eating up every last second of available time to do my ACTUAL job. And we are doing a bastardized version of Scrum and it's miserable.
I got reprimanded one day because in our daily standup I simply said that I had not made any progress on my tasks since yesterday because I was in meetings all day. Apparently that wasn't being a team player.
That sucks man.
- waiting 20 minutes for your PC to boot all the corporate bloatware before it's usable
- quarterly 4-hour-long all-department meeting that could have been an email
- "incorporating" the latest tech buzzword into your process because that one manager has nothing better to do
- "celebrating" things like Company Culture Week™ and other BS stuff imagined up by people with nothing better to do
- waiting 20 minutes for your PC to boot all the corporate bloatware before it's usable
This is the bane of my existence. And of course IT locks us out of the UEFI so we can't set the system to auto-boot 15 minutes before we show up to work.
I'm just happy I was able to remove OneDrive from the start-up applications. Now I don't have to waste an hour each day waiting for files to sync
If only I could remove OneDrive... IT expects us to use it for everything.
When I was getting a PC upgrade, I explicitly told them that I had already handled backing everything up (as they repeatedly said I needed to do). Most of my projects are synced with our version control, so I have a projects folder with a few hundred GB in it that I didn't need to explicitly transfer to my new PC (I would check out projects as I needed them). I wrote in the ticket that they didn't need to transfer any files, I had already handled it. And I told the IT person who took my old PC. They said my new PC would be ready the next morning.
Lo and behold, it wasn't. I called and asked, they said they were still working on it. The following day, I went to pick it up and the IT person explained that it took so long because they had to transfer over hundreds of GB of files. And they reminded me that if I had been using OneDrive, I could have had it a day sooner.
You know, because they had to copy over my files. That were already in version control. A system they admin. And that I told them about like 5 times. After they said they wouldn't be responsible for file transfers.
Ah well, guess I got paid for their ineptitude. I wish this was the worst they've done, though.
Forced password resets.
Entropy defeats recall.
Desk blooms with secrets.
Ah, white collar haiku…
I was in a band called White Collar Haiku.
We mostly did Huey Lewis and the News covers.
Having a team touch base, followed by a daily standup, followed by a quality initiative meeting, followed by a biweekly support touch base, followed by a demo for a tool your team will never use, followed by lunch and learn session over some AI tool you'll be forced to use, followed by your biweekly 1:1 with the manager, followed by the department touch base, followed by the company all hands.... Aaaaand done with meetings. Finally, some time to get some work done... then your downstream customer wants you to investigate why their counts don't match yours.... "could you run the totals again? Could you run them broken down by hour? By minute? By second? Can you get me a list of each record at these 6 timestamps? Can I get them in a different format? Oops, the problem was on our end." Great. And it's 5 o'clock. Scrum master gonna be up my ass about story points tomorrow.
oh no my PTSD is coming back.
You must be a fellow data engineer
Eh, more software now. But I work on a streaming platform so or downstream customers are data engineers.
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I'd love a job like this and I'm not even joking
Going on 22 days waiting for a firewall rule change so I can pull containers from the enterprise GitHub enlistment.
I've had discussions with 4 different OUs. Not one of them has been able to tell me why the firewall is different for this VM. There is no way for me to see the state of each and compare.
That's literally my dream job. I'd spend my day walking around carrying folders and looking extremely busy. Once a day I'd send a "per my last email" email just to make it look like I'm actively trying to get shit done.
Yeah, it is pretty great!
I'm building software to bridge an in house legacy system and a CLI program. It has 1 partial restful API endpoint (no delete, no patch/put). But it does have 3 cyber security suites including one that wraps the runtime. It is not a public API.
I have 4 meetings a week.
Did I mention I work from home?
My job isn't this bad but has the occasional pointless company meeting and the like. I'm fine with it - it's their money they're wasting. I do not look to my employer for meaning - I like the team I work with but I've no love for the work. I'm good at it and try to find joy in it where I can, but it is not my primary source of personal validation.
It's a pretty comfortable life. I've worked for myself before and it was much harder in every way with nowhere near the pay.
This is the way.
I thought I'd love a job like this, and it was fine, for a while.
But you can feel yourself stagnating and you know that when they eventually make you redundant you'd struggle to get another job because you spent too long coasting.
I left it for a job at a startup, much more engaging but also much more work
It's okay even fun at first, but eats your soul slowly over the years. Edit: that ofcourse depends on perspective e.g. what you are doing at the moment. I myself moved from an abusive job to a cozy corporate one, it seemed like heaven at first.
Think of it that way: those nice people are sending you money every month and all you have to do is go there and look busy. Certainly not the most rewarding way to spend your day but having money is nice.
My thing is, as long as I'm not bored at work I'm good. If I'm being paid to look busy but can't keep myself busy I'm going to feel like my brains are boiling away. But if I can actually keep myself entertained and busy and get paid for it? Hell yeah!
Just when you can't take any more; donuts in the break room!
- it's time for quarterly security training again where you learn not to open exe files attached to emails.
Or zip. Or pdf. Or security solution doesn't allow .png, please send as .pdf.
Funny thing is, i've never heard about plaintext/markdown mails being enforced over the usual html-with-potentially-scripts-and-hidden-URLs.
Funny thing is, i’ve never heard about plaintext/markdown mails being enforced over the usual html-with-potentially-scripts-and-hidden-URLs.
This is always the part that drives me up the wall. Literally the default behavior in Thunderbird because it's built by people that care about privacy and security before anything else. So many features to make email "prettier" and "easier" except all they do is introduce new ways for bad actors to hide their actions from attentive users
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“Let’s try to get this thing done with a ridiculous deadline, knowing full well that the work will be discarded because of overriding factor X but it looks good that the team got it done in the deadline someone set, so the someone will get their bonus”
Move slow and no things.
"As I mentioned in my previous email(s)..."
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