this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024
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Can you imagine the absolute misery of working for someone like this.
A person who thinks developers are all useless, and has total contempt for any skills that aren't "business" stuff.
A person who thinks tech is easy and you can "just" do this and "just" do that and everything will be done, always telling you "this is so easy I could do it myself" while any contribution they make only makes things worse, and if there's any kind of hold-up it's because you're either "lazy" or "incompetent"
No thanks.
Haha yeah… imagine… right.
I wish the best for you, and hope you find yourself a better boss soon.
Thanks, but the reason I don’t have to imagine is because that job is a memory.
The good ending
The “now the tech is done can we rationalise the dev team?” fallacy just drives me up the wall. Mostly because I’ve actually worked in environments where those questions were seriously pondered and had to defend against it.
They don't forget, they never learned in the first place. In their minds the original engineers messed up, and that's why there was a vulnerability, or a missing feature. "We need a quick and cheap vendor to fix the mistakes of our awful engineering team that we laid off a year ago".
I secretly enjoyed getting on the phone (one-on-one) to explain this one to leaders.
"Previous decisions have made us a complete laughing stock among our peers. How would you like me to write that up for the audit report? Okay. I'll use my judgement."
I never understood it, but business owners seem to have utter contempt for the people who actually make their money. I'm not talking about support staff, I mean the people that if they stay home, dollars aren't getting printed for everyone else. In private EMS, the billing staff would constantly get parties and catering and gift cards and shit, while the crews actually running the calls and writing the billable reports got third-hand furniture, moldy stations, ambulances held together with a fucking wish, and constant bellyaching about how paying the crews minimum wage was costing the company too much money. I'm starting to notice the same pattern pop up between the dev team and the product team as my software company scales.
It's quite easy to understand, even though it's bullshit.
When the sales department has a good month and makes loads of sales, the business too has a good month. The activity of those individuals directly correlates to revenue on a month by month basis, so management are naturally going to be incentivised to give the sales team perks and bonuses as motivation.
In a given month the IT/dev department doesn't "generate" any money at all, they only cost. We know they generate value in other ways of course, because the product the sales team sell is surely built and operated by the dev team, but because the relationship is indirect management don't care to reward you.
Reward sales with nice perks -> Revenue goes up
Reward devs with nice perks -> Revenue doesn't change
So of course management doesn't see the benefit in giving more money to tech, because it doesn't seem like you get anything back.
Of course, the reality is that investment in tech will make the product and the business better and more profitable, but it takes months or years to see the impact of changes, and management has a short attention span.
Yeah, maintenance is undervalued.
> Things are going well
> Things are breaking
The best part is when some dufus goes “I’ve got a great idea and the grit to see it through. I just need to hire a tech person to do it for me”.
Ideas are a dime a dozen.
Woah that’s crazy how did you add the Kill Bill siren sound to your comment?
IRL Joffrey
My first boss was a "just" guy. Thankfully he was also pro dev, being one himself, but sadly he was completely self-taught. This led to some interesting ideas, such as:
"We should not migrate anything to, or start any new projects in, .net framework 3. We should become the experts in .net framework 2, so people who need .net 2 solutions come to us."
"Agile means we do less documentation." (But we were already doing no documentation)
"Why are you guys still making that common functions class library? I just copy a .vb file into every project I work on, that way I can change it to suit the new project." (This one led to the most amusing compound error I've fixed for a fellow dev.)
Good guy, all in all. But frustrating to work for often.
Oh yeah. I remember it well. Ugh. It's why I'm such a loud mouth here sometimes - if I can save one team from that guy, all my soap box shouting will have been worth it.
My boss irl