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PopGreene | 11 months ago
In my last job, requirements, such as they were, were based on some idea that someone in authority thought we might need. No consideration was given to the needs of the clients of the code. They weren't savvy in the any of the current technologies, so it wasn't even the latest fad.
I developed the skill needed to implement their dumbfsck idea-du-jour quickly and without breaking existing code. However, the resulting code was increasingly more convoluted and incomprehensible. I had inherited a god object that I only added to over time.
When I quit, my boss knew he was not going to find anyone that could keep up my pace, much less understand the code. He tried to get me to stay, but I told him that I will never work on this code again, so there'd be no point in staying.
A couple years later a former coworker told me that the guy that had taken over had a bug in some code that was convoluted but rock solid when I left. I figured he had noodled with the code and broken it. Sucks to be him.
Told my coworker to tell him that my advice it to look for another job.
So yes, I hear you when you say they're perfectly capable of sabotaging themselves.
k310|11 months ago
I often found that assignments from my boss were to please the fantasies the boss or their boss, who seemed to pay more attention to those fantasies and toys on their desktop than actually getting things done in a solid way for the customer.
On one job, I attended meetings where amazing ideas were dropped off the table because management couldn't see the big picture potential. We were in a market where every vendor had a proprietary database schema, to stymie conversion. A bunch of us proposed giving away an open database schema, and competing in that larger market, which was beneficial to customers, and a meritocracy. Oh no. That would mean that product quality was more important than slick salesmanship.
The boss sued a disgruntled employee for hacking his computer, and after he won, the judgment was "Well, you two work it out". Right.
One director had a mania for "Windows NT is the next great thing" in production systems. Fortunately, I was on the Solaris side. I didn't hang around long enough to hear the success stories (as in throwing chairs, I imagine)