4 ms·

Early in my career I was the only engineer in a company with a dedicated office building full of people selling my work to Fortune 500 companies as that of a la

by lrvick 5y ago

Early in my career I was the only engineer in a company with a dedicated office building full of people selling my work to Fortune 500 companies as that of a large team. Slept under my desk a lot as the 80 hour weeks made me choose between commuting and sleeping. It got worse when they hired someone to manage me that demanded I use Basecamp to log every action I take in my day . I wrote a script to fill it out with technical sounding nonsense. After a few weeks the manager came to compliment me on hearing his demands out and being so detailed in my reporting without productivity going down as I suggested in my early reservations. I explained that I automated it. He was fascinated and asked how it knows what I am doing, smelling a startup opportunity. I explained that it just makes stuff up to appease non technical managers. "Did you just do this as an elaborate way to give me the middle finger?" "Pretty much." He never tried to manage me again, realizing I had automated his job reporting to his managers too. Said script for fun: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/lrvick/5ecabfc4bb5a2f55783a/raw/d83753d0eb583adc045dc812bf4531d3f2caae4d/basecampbs.sh https://gist.githubusercontent.com/lrvick/5ecabfc4bb5a2f5578...

CTmystery 5y ago
I'm somewhat sorry to say this, but don't you see the irony in tricking your non-technical manager into not improving your life at all? A competent manager can _make your life better_. If you are working 80 hour work weeks and sleeping under a desk, wouldn't it make sense to do some backlog prioritizing to get you under a sustainable workload?
higeorge13 5y ago
One of the best gists i have ever seen!
hobs 5y ago
Haha I have a similar story but I was even earlier in my career just doing support and training things for a big call center and they just changed the policies to send an email to your boss every time you came in and left. At the time I was working a lot of unpaid overtime, and this rule was just spitting in my face - they were making sure I showed up and they were definitely not caring if you worked more. So I wrote a script to send an email at the time of my entrance and departure - whatever, I set it up to run and left for the day. Weellll, it turns out I didn't understand the configuration for the OSX version of cron (and my shitty bash script) that well and when I walked into work the next day, my boss was waiting for me. "Did you automate sending me your in and out email?" "Yes... why?" "I have a hundred thousand emails in my inbox and every time I delete as many as I can I just get... more. You have to stop it, you dont have to send me emails anymore, but you have to stop it." So I went in and disabled my script and helped him delete the several hundred thousand emails I had sent him.
- iancmceachern 5y ago
  Gotta always test everything
- kthejoker2 5y ago
  Thomas Edison's version > The manager of the circuit realized that the night operators might be tempted to shirk their work, and so he required them to telegraph a signal to him every half hour in order that he might be sure they were awake and at their posts. Edison's signal was six. > This was a wise regulation, but Edison did not appreciate the necessity for it. He found it a great bother to keep his eye on the clock and leave his reading or some experiment that he was working out in the quiet hours of night, to report that stupid "six" every thirty minutes. > He wondered if he couldn't make a machine attached to the clock that would save him the trouble. After a good deal of thinking and experimenting, he fitted up an instrument that could telegraph "six" as well as he could. > This was a great relief to him, and he felt free to do what he liked with his time without much fear of discovery. He even left the office and made expeditions about town. > One night while he was away, the manager tried to call him up but could get no response. He thought this odd as Edison was more punctual with his signals than any other operator on the line. > He waited, and tried again and again, with no better success, though the signals came with their accustomed regularity. He made an investigation, and the young inventor received a severe reprimand for his cleaver contrivance. https://www.gjenvick.com/Biography/ThomasAEdison/05-TheBoyTelegraphOperator.html https://www.gjenvick.com/Biography/ThomasAEdison/05-TheBoyTe...
CRConrad 5y ago
Maybe he got suspicious because "assessment" was misspelled the exact same way every time it occurred?
- 41b696ef1113 5y ago
  People can consistently misspell words?
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    Can, perhaps, but do they? I'm thinking people who misspell stuff might waver a bit, and not be as consistent as those who know for sure how it's supposed to be spelled. Just a WAG, though.
agumonkey 5y ago
Interesting human relationship wise. I've been severely struggling with non tech people. Landing mediocre positions in clerk jobs where everybody's is burned or bored out. Yet every attempt at improving the office life through code was met with fear or disdain. (And I never made it a personal gain only)
- exikyut 5y ago
  - I understand fear of change can be a symptom of anxiety, and I've certainly experienced this myself: I've repeatedly found myself wedged into awkward situations that aren't within my ballpark to un-awkward, and found that this can produce a "just keep going, just keep going" mentality that's negatively hypersensitive to any kind of change - I can see clerk-type positions being heavily dunked in the "we are invisible to the ergonomic considerations of the software upgrade lifecycle" koolaid, and (perhaps not having a balanced/passively-positive general appreciation of software development in abstract) can only see introducing software from the standpoint of "yet another unsolicited burden of workload I have to add to my plate" as opposed to an empathetic load-bearing fulcrum. I wonder if the distain is coming from simple insecurity, or a more complex broken sense of achievement/self-hazing, where having a given task be simplified or automated or otherwise made nicer is seen somehow "doing it wrong" (eg, the equivalent of writing garbage code to solve a problem as opposed to spending 2 weeks figuring out how to solve something "correctly" etc).
cbozeman 5y ago
This script is both hilarious and brilliant. I laughed out loud.
Shocka1 5y ago
I'm sitting here in my living room by myself laughing my butt off right now after pulling up that script. It kind of reminds me of one of the beginning exercises in the Book Head First java called PhraseOMatic: https://resources.oreilly.com/examples/9780596009205/-/blob/master/chap01/PhraseOMatic.java https://resources.oreilly.com/examples/9780596009205/-/blob/... Glad my non-tech wifey isn't home because she probably wouldn't be able to understand the convulsions I just experienced.

by lrvick 5y ago

CTmystery 5y ago

I'm somewhat sorry to say this, but don't you see the irony in tricking your non-technical manager into not improving your life at all? A competent manager can _make your life better_. If you are working 80 hour work weeks and sleeping under a desk, wouldn't it make sense to do some backlog prioritizing to get you under a sustainable workload?

higeorge13 5y ago

One of the best gists i have ever seen!

hobs 5y ago

Haha I have a similar story but I was even earlier in my career just doing support and training things for a big call center and they just changed the policies to send an email to your boss every time you came in and left. At the time I was working a lot of unpaid overtime, and this rule was just spitting in my face - they were making sure I showed up and they were definitely not caring if you worked more. So I wrote a script to send an email at the time of my entrance and departure - whatever, I set it up to run and left for the day. Weellll, it turns out I didn't understand the configuration for the OSX version of cron (and my shitty bash script) that well and when I walked into work the next day, my boss was waiting for me. "Did you automate sending me your in and out email?" "Yes... why?" "I have a hundred thousand emails in my inbox and every time I delete as many as I can I just get... more. You have to stop it, you dont have to send me emails anymore, but you have to stop it." So I went in and disabled my script and helped him delete the several hundred thousand emails I had sent him.

iancmceachern 5y ago
Gotta always test everything
kthejoker2 5y ago
Thomas Edison's version > The manager of the circuit realized that the night operators might be tempted to shirk their work, and so he required them to telegraph a signal to him every half hour in order that he might be sure they were awake and at their posts. Edison's signal was six. > This was a wise regulation, but Edison did not appreciate the necessity for it. He found it a great bother to keep his eye on the clock and leave his reading or some experiment that he was working out in the quiet hours of night, to report that stupid "six" every thirty minutes. > He wondered if he couldn't make a machine attached to the clock that would save him the trouble. After a good deal of thinking and experimenting, he fitted up an instrument that could telegraph "six" as well as he could. > This was a great relief to him, and he felt free to do what he liked with his time without much fear of discovery. He even left the office and made expeditions about town. > One night while he was away, the manager tried to call him up but could get no response. He thought this odd as Edison was more punctual with his signals than any other operator on the line. > He waited, and tried again and again, with no better success, though the signals came with their accustomed regularity. He made an investigation, and the young inventor received a severe reprimand for his cleaver contrivance. https://www.gjenvick.com/Biography/ThomasAEdison/05-TheBoyTelegraphOperator.html https://www.gjenvick.com/Biography/ThomasAEdison/05-TheBoyTe...

CRConrad 5y ago

Maybe he got suspicious because "assessment" was misspelled the exact same way every time it occurred?

41b696ef1113 5y ago
People can consistently misspell words?
- CRConrad 5y ago
  Can, perhaps, but do they? I'm thinking people who misspell stuff might waver a bit, and not be as consistent as those who know for sure how it's supposed to be spelled. Just a WAG, though.

agumonkey 5y ago

Interesting human relationship wise. I've been severely struggling with non tech people. Landing mediocre positions in clerk jobs where everybody's is burned or bored out. Yet every attempt at improving the office life through code was met with fear or disdain. (And I never made it a personal gain only)

exikyut 5y ago
- I understand fear of change can be a symptom of anxiety, and I've certainly experienced this myself: I've repeatedly found myself wedged into awkward situations that aren't within my ballpark to un-awkward, and found that this can produce a "just keep going, just keep going" mentality that's negatively hypersensitive to any kind of change - I can see clerk-type positions being heavily dunked in the "we are invisible to the ergonomic considerations of the software upgrade lifecycle" koolaid, and (perhaps not having a balanced/passively-positive general appreciation of software development in abstract) can only see introducing software from the standpoint of "yet another unsolicited burden of workload I have to add to my plate" as opposed to an empathetic load-bearing fulcrum. I wonder if the distain is coming from simple insecurity, or a more complex broken sense of achievement/self-hazing, where having a given task be simplified or automated or otherwise made nicer is seen somehow "doing it wrong" (eg, the equivalent of writing garbage code to solve a problem as opposed to spending 2 weeks figuring out how to solve something "correctly" etc).

cbozeman 5y ago

This script is both hilarious and brilliant. I laughed out loud.

Shocka1 5y ago

I'm sitting here in my living room by myself laughing my butt off right now after pulling up that script. It kind of reminds me of one of the beginning exercises in the Book Head First java called PhraseOMatic: https://resources.oreilly.com/examples/9780596009205/-/blob/master/chap01/PhraseOMatic.java https://resources.oreilly.com/examples/9780596009205/-/blob/... Glad my non-tech wifey isn't home because she probably wouldn't be able to understand the convulsions I just experienced.