If it makes you feel better, today I had to sit through a presentation where someone “taught” us about the Myer’s Briggs personality test in comic sans 
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This is actually necessary for the upper management types who don’t really pay attention but need to be updated anyway. It’s also the reason why the email should have been a quarter of the length lol.
this is my coding font these days 
workplace harassment
My condolences that you have to work with somebody that thinks that LinkedIn flavored garbage is an improvement over the two bullet points you wrote down. Just shows that this old adage remains true even in our age of AI enlightenment: A fool with a tool is still a fool.
While we’re venting about people we have to work with:
I’m self-employed and currently working freelance for a big company around these parts. I’m not even sure what I would call my current role description, except maybe “general problem solver”? I initially got on board as a software architect and senior developer to help a product team meet an important project deadline and train the team’s in-house developers to be better equipped to do that without external help in the future.
It pretty much immediately became clear to me that the problem was not actually with the developers being too slow. Sure, some of them were still juniors but they were good and motivated juniors. The problem was actually that there was almost no project management happening. Tasks that got assigned to the developers were rarely specified or refined enough for them to actually start working on them and so most of the requirement analysis and feature specification was done by the developers. Dependencies between tasks weren’t properly planned and deadlines weren’t properly communicated leading to sudden last-minute re-prioritization and a lot of stress for the developers.
That wasn’t surprising for me as I found in the past ~12 years of doing this job that the developers are rarely the problem. In this case it was particularly surprising though as there were an agile manager a product manager and a person managing stakeholder communication for this team. This basically meant that there was roughly one manager per two developers. You would think that this leads to highly refined, easy to work on tasks but no…
The agile master was a person that had like one six week crash course on what their role was supposed to be and I can only assume that the main two things they learned there were 1.) what isn’t part of their job description and 2.) that artificially hyping up even the most superficial and minuscule achievements one can think of is the one and true way to empower people. A ticket gets closed because it was a duplicate? “Yay guys, good job, another ticket done! Keep it up!” and then they would click on this stupid confetti chrome plugin button that makes fake digital confetti rain over the JIRA board. I die a bit every time somebody presses that stupid confetti button.
The product owner simply doesn’t do any meaningful work at all. His main skill is identifying other people that are definitely at fault for the team not meeting its deadlines while not doing anything to ensure that the important tasks get worked on to even give the team a chance to achieve its goals.
The guy managing stakeholder communication actually knows what he’s doing but he’s responsible for a bunch of other teams as well and can’t compensate for the lack of competence of the other two.
After a little over three months in the project I’m now mostly doing the product owner’s and agile master’s work while sometimes writing code or helping with architecture decisions. An absolutely baffling situation to be honest. At least my feedback to upper management seems to be taken seriously. The agile master got pulled out of the team since we all agreed that we didn’t need a full-time confetti button pusher. They are now pushing the confetti button for another team. I hope that team likes the confetti button. The product manager is currently still a work in progress. He’s currently mostly working on making sure that nobody can prove that he didn’t really do his job while I’m doing what he’s supposed to be doing.
I’m mostly glad that the developers are less stressed and that the team starts to meet its deadlines more often than not. That means my work is actually bearing fruit.
I’ve been asked if I don’t want to stop working freelance and start doing this stuff as a normal employee but I’m not interested. I basically was in the same situation one year ago (with the same client) when they asked me if I wanted to become their technical lead for data & ai. That whole organization is just so kafkaesque that I can’t imagine joining it as an employee. Feels like a fast track to snuffing out the fire burning in my soul, no thank you.
Wait, for real? That’s cursed as heck.
Whimsical. 
Fun. 
Beautiful. 
yeah, it’s pleasant. i used to use a proportional width font, that really got people steamed.
workplace memos and other boring clerical work are like genuinely the most sensible application for text generating AI and its slightly gratifying to know that it’s at least advanced enough to be patronizing to management
Patronizing to management, sure. I can get down with thay sickness, but if someone doesn’t understand the material well enough and also needs to supplement the most basic communication skills with generative AI, I question if they’re qualified for their job.
I can think of a few people who’d lose it if they had to read my code in a font like that. I think you’re on to something.
On the other hand, they’d probably lose it if they had to read my code at all.
Though I think the real problem is that if most of your job can be done by AI, you don’t have a real job. Perhaps you (the collective you, not you, the person I’m replying to or the person reading this) are just one link in the long chain of middle managers primarily devoted to making each other look busy.
Still not over learning of this overall trend from Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, where the largest increase in the labour force of the First World since the rise of automation has been in white collar management and administration. We’ve replaced doing shit and making shit with moving the money pile around like a kid trying to get out of eating their broccoli.
Passed step 2!
Next is a live coding interview on monday!!!
My friend that works there (but will not be the person to interview me) will mock interview me sunday to practice!
Wish me Luck!! 3 steps to go.
Step 4 is also a live coding interview with another person, and step 5 is a chat with the company co-owner.
If i get to pass step 4 is most likely i’ll get the internship.
I’ll be making as much as my current job, but working 10 hours less + remotely + a good health insurance.
While Brazil has Universal free health care, it’s nice to have an option.
If i get this job it’ll be much easier to continue working on this field going forward.
I kinda like my city hall public servant job but there’s no future there and i don’t have much labor rights. Also, the current mayor is a far right guy and stuff is super weird/going bad places in a lot of ways.
have two former coworkers asking me if i want to join their companies and a couple recruiters in my linkedin inbox
agile is scientology for software developers. what a scam.
I’d say it is more akin to an MLM. The general thoughts in the og “Agile Manifesto” are the kinda things you look at and say “duh, weren’t we always doing that?”. Then someone with an MBA came along and thought “You could monetize that”, and turned it into conferences, methodologies, and certifications.
While I think that there are good and valid points to the agile manifesto and the ideas that stem from it, I agree with @kotojo that most of it could be replaced with common sense team/project management and most of the harm comes from MBAs ruining the whole idea by trying to squeeze as much out of developers with any disregard to sustainability.
Usually the problem is when the guy in charge cares more about short-term numbers than about people.
I haven’t worked in marketing or sales for a long awhile, but I’m applying to this job anyway and pretending/remembering I know what I’m talking about. Feels like having a job already.
be careful…marketing and sales are the TWO professions where everyone knows 100% of what they’re talking about 100% of the time.
One thing I know: this job would pay me more than I’ve ever made in my life, so I’m willing to know anything.
EDIT: mostly because I’m confident I could still do a good job. Or even if I didn’t, it wouldn’t matter.
It’s my last week to submit documents to prove I worked at the pier and lived in Venice in order to ge tu employment. Wish me luck cause I hate this stuff. Especially living in a van and being homeless according to the state, there’s no easy option when they’re asking for utility bills and crap.