Yoink!

We recently had one of our main QA guys quit. He gave two weeks, but the company decided he could go ahead and leave at the end of the day. Right or wrong, I feel when companies do this they're often acting out of spite. All of the developers at my company, with the exception of the two on my team, all have large flat panel LCDs.

The day after the QA guy left, the other developer on my team decided he might like having his external display be an LCD. When he went over to the guys desk the sales guy was already there grabbing the LCD. "Man, I sure hate to see this go to waste." He then left with the LCD.

I'm not sure how it sitting there for 12 hours meant it was going to go to waste. I'm not sure why, if he felt the need to have an external display for his laptop, he didn't already use one of the many CRTs laying around. Then he could argue that he needed extra desk space. My real problem with this is that he's out of the office over half the time. Why put yourself ahead of the people making the products who are in the office all the time? It just seems selfish and petty.

Derek-isms 2

Here's the latest collection of statements and conversations I've heard from Derek lately.

• (sneeze sneeze) Bless you...I sure hope you're not getting sick...(expressed with "genuine" concern)


• Derek: Hey, where did you just come from?
  Other: While your detailed interest in my travel plans is always charming, let's just say I'm here and leave it at that.


• Derek: Hey, Greg. I'm done borrowing Tom's books. Did you want to borrow them before I gave them back?
  Me: No, that's alright, thanks.
  Derek: Ok. I'll just put them on his desk then.
  Me: Um, ok.
  Derek: Which desk is his?
  Me: Just put them in the cube next to me.
  Derek: Ok. Hey, his keyboard and mouse are in this other cube.
  Me: (Sigh) Yeah he was sitting over there last week because he likes the light better. I'm sure he'll find them whichever cube you put them in.
  Derek: Ok. I'll put them in the one next to you. They're right there if you want to borrow them.


• Derek: How's it going?
  Me: Oh, I can't complain.
  Derek: That's funny. I knew a guy who said that. I said, "Sure you can." He assured me that he couldn't. It was part of his job description. He actually wasn't allowed to complain.
  Me: (walking away) That's funny.


• Derek: I just heard you're leaving. Good luck at the new place.
  Me: Yeah, I'll keep my fingers crossed.
  Derek: The only problem with that is it's hard to type.
  Me: Er, yeah.
  Derek: Well, keep your chin up.
  Me: Ok.
  Derek: Otherwise, someone might sock you in such a fashion as to cause you to have to keep your chin up.
  Me: Yeah, I guess that could happen.
  Derek: I'm mainly staying here out of a sense of loyalty to my co-workers. And my immediate manager.
  Me: Oh? Well, that's good.

There are more, but you get the idea.

Let the Good Times Roll

I put in my two weeks notice and I will be moving on to a hopefully better situation. I'm sure that can't really be much of a shocker to anyone that reads the frustrating situations I've been dealing with at my current company.

My manager called the other developer (before even talking to me) and asked about how we were going to transition things. Of course, he seems to have forgotten that the other developer will be out for a week long vacation. If only we had some sort of calendaring application available to keep track of those things...

This will leave the current team staffed with exactly one developer who is still relatively new to the language and the architecture, a manager that seems to always have some other more important project on his mind, a sales guy that is convinced that this product will sell itself so he doesn't really need to understand it, and a product that has a distinct lack of resources, requirements, and customer feedback. If it wouldn't require me to share the pain (or take the brunt of it), I'd almost be tempted to stick around for that first commercial ship date.

While the developer will be fine without me (I think he's fully up to speed) I think the other problems are going to blow up soon. Couple that with the fact that the developers are doubling as support staff for the new stuff as well as a previous product line and it gets a bit bleaker. If I told you that we can't even build the old product would that make it sound worse? And that it's written half in a language we don't work in and half in a proprietary language neither of has any experience with? What if I said neither of us has ever even installed it? Now what if I got a non-trivial support call on it today? Did I mention that we ship the new stuff at the end of this month?

Yeah, I bet it's going to be fun to watch. The sad thing is both developers have been mentioning all of these problems in every meeting, at ever opportunity, for the past 3+ months. If only developers weren't such whiney little bitches, maybe someone would listen.

Anyhow, I'll be wrapping up my job duties over the next two weeks as well as finishing up any half-published material on this blog. I'll also try to eavesdrop a bit more to get one or two last juicy tidbits. After that, I foresee this blog going dark for a while. At least I fucking hope so...