partofthevoice

Yeah. I’m currently in a situation where we picked up a new hire and she keeps dropping these problems on me. Whenever she runs into something she doesn’t understand, I get a Teams message:

Good bye partofthevvvvvvvooooiiiicccceeeeee

It’s happening again 🤦‍♀️

The numbers don’t look right in SLT and the numbers matched yesterday, I don’t know…

They were fine yesterday, then they were all wrong all by themselves. Like magic.

Can you call real quick?

By this point, I’m already fucking irritated and I haven’t even responded yet.

• What do you mean by SLT? What the fuck is that, a dashboard?
• What are you comparing the numbers against to know they’re wrong?
• Did you create a minimal reproducible example in SQL, to demonstrate the issue?
• Did you halfsplit the problem by checking the Bronze tier data for the discrepancy?
• Did you open a ticket?
• And no, no I can’t fucking call. Please type the problem you’re actually having so that I can help you without spending three hours on the phone.

… she proceeds to create the ticket. MRE is a bunch of pseudocode referencing nonexistent tables with footnotes like, “this is the kind of tests we should check.” Oh, but you couldn’t be bothered to write the fucking test?

At a certain point, the ticket just falls into chaos:

• Her: The other team is comparing against their own dashboard, that’s how they know there’s a problem.
• Me: Please get the configuration options necessary to reproduce the calculations in their dashboard.
• Her: Here’s a list of the values they’re using to filter users.
• Me: That list counts 36. Your prior screenshot said the filter has 17 selections.
• Her: Jose said that’s the list of team members. The dashboard filters to team members.
• Me: Okay. I asked for the dashboard filters, not the team members.
• Her: Jose says they’re both the team members.
• Me: …

So after explaining (10x) that, to troubleshoot the dashboards discrepancy, we actually need the filter values from the dashboard… we end up on a 3 hour call, because none of this is fucking landing.

So here I am doing other people’s jobs while I’m already busy enough from my own. I get so burnt out sometimes.

Discipline is part the recipe for brilliance. So often, I find myself hearing of people’s problems and I realize that the problem is a manifestation of your poor discipline. It’s not necessarily that you did something wrong, misconstrued requirements or misconfigured procedures, no… it’s that you didn’t actually try to read the error message, look at the docs, catalog your technical debt, make a phased rollout plan, decide on what tests you’ll need, write a well bounded scope, … no. You just stuck your balls to the wall and said “boss, I think it’s cold outside.” How about you go open the fucking door and check?

/s… I got a little carried away there.

Do you mitigate potential abuse where someone deliberately tries to upload as much as they can as fast as possible?

*Bot propaganda?