Topic: Craziest thing you've ever seen (at work)? (Read 3808 times)

milifist · « **on:** June 30, 2007, 12:12:53 PM »

Alternate title: Make milifist feel better about his job.

What is the craziest thing you have ever seen at work? Absurd code? Wacky policies? Anything to reaffirm my belief that other people have to deal with workplace insanity.

I'll start with my job to give a baseline.

I work as a web developer in a small subsidiary of a huge heartless corporation. We develop websites for a specific industry. These are hosted solutions that the clients sign multi-year contracts for service.

The insanity:
The core of our sites is a set of 10+ year-old C programs that generate the html that is sent to the browser. The basic page layouts are stored in an Oracle db. The C programs connect to the db, read the layouts, pulls in the specific data the is placed in the layouts, and then generates html tables to format everything.

Wrapped around the C programs is a mess of php, java, perl, javascript, and shell scripts. Our sites all use frame sets. They rely heavily on javascript for code functionality (including security), and our main menu is a java applet.

We typical host only two-three accounts per webserver. However, all of the accounts essentially connect to a single Oracle db server. And, all of the servers are running SCO UnixWare.

And if all of that weren't bad enough, we offer an offline version of our sites (each site is customized for each client). The offline version is basically a copy of the online version hosted an XAMPP. Which means that virtually anyone can see all of our source code (minus the C garbage).

No one involved in the creation of the C programs still works at the company, however we have a couple of old, ardent, C coders that insist php is too inefficient. So it is unlikely to be any changes anytime soon.

Make me fell better, top that for insanity. Please.

On the upside though, my boss is hot! Even if she is a bit like one of those touchy-feelly, go team! type managers...

hackess · « **Reply #1 on:** June 30, 2007, 12:55:28 PM »

Funny, we develop websites for a specific industry too. Our clients also sign multi-year contracts for service.

We're still technically a startup company. We have positive cash flow, but we don't have that really nice cushion in the bank. Yet our CEO has been known to give away multi-thousand dollar projects for free to keep one specific group of clients happy. Being on the support and development side of things, and therefore having done or being asked to do tedious, complicated coding for free, I'm ready to firebomb several cities. Springfield, MO, you're first.

The Accounts Director disappears for hours in the afternoon, leaving his team with little direction. Luckily, most of them are self-sufficient and smart enough to figure some things out on their own. The rest of them come straight to me instead of asking my minion first. I can't say I blame them; my minion is ridiculously inept sometimes. He's been there over six months and I still have to remind him to run a debug on the code when troubleshooting. Four months ago, when I wanted to fire him for inadequacy, the CEO once again was wishy-washy and said, "eh, let's give him a warning and see what happens." Sigh. Now that he's out of his probationary period, I have to have a good reason to give him the axe.

Agent_Tachyon · « **Reply #2 on:** June 30, 2007, 01:25:22 PM »

Perhaps he's just transfixed by you and cannot concentrate?

I saw a coworker streak (yes that way) through the operations room where all the monkeys sit in rows yelling 'I'VE BEEN FRAMED' (my personal suggestion). Sigh...I still need to go find a suit for court.

Nosferatu · « **Reply #3 on:** June 30, 2007, 02:11:02 PM »

I'm slaving away for Ronald at the moment... I see lots of strange things.

Not least of which are the assorted scum of Glasgow mumbling something about wanting food in my general direction.

Chris · « **Reply #4 on:** June 30, 2007, 10:53:05 PM »

Quote from: Nosferatu on June 30, 2007, 02:11:02 PM

I'm slaving away for Ronald at the moment... I see lots of strange things.

Hey, me too!

Hey, me too!

I recently switched franchises when I moved, and I have to say, this new one has a policy that I have never seen or heard about before.

Their employee handbook states that if you do not provide at least two week's notice that you are going to quit, you're last pay check will be that of minimal wage.

Personally, if I quit and they cut me my last check based on minimal wage, I would call them on this, and seriously get it checked out by a lawyer. If the outcome would be favorable, I would push for class-action status on the case. I don't like if when business owners try to screw their employees out of money that they rightfully earned.

I'm not so sure that you can simply change someone's wage just because they didn't provide you with two week's notice that they were quitting. Even if they were warned ahead of time and signed off on the employee handbook (Which even has misspellings), I don't think it's enough to grant them permission to change someone's rate without proper cause (IE. Less responsibilities, etc)

Nosferatu · « **Reply #5 on:** July 01, 2007, 12:17:37 AM »

I'm actually on minimum wage at the minute (For my age band, £4.45 p/h) it should go up after the second review, if it didn't already after the first (They're kinda lax with payslips...)

The bit about notice from the handbook I liked was that if you give notice and they just want you to fuck off now, they still have to pay you for the hours you'd be 'expected to work' for your notice period. I'm planning on this being a temporary fundraising gig, so I may well let standards slip before I tell them I've leaving just so they'll tell me not to come back =P

RelandR · « **Reply #6 on:** July 01, 2007, 02:34:27 PM »

... to expand on the *Ronald* tangent a bit ....

I didn't realize how far UK minimum wage had come so in a search I stumbled on this article and this one on International cost-of-living comparisons

and found this snip interesting ::

Quote

35 minutes of work for a Big Mac

Wages only become meaningful in relation to prices, i.e., what can be bought with the money earned. A globally available product like a Big Mac can make the relationship between wages and prices much clearer. On a global average, 35 minutes of work buys a Big Mac. But the disparities are huge: In Nairobi, one and a half hours’ work is needed to buy the burger with the average net hourly wage there. In the US cities of Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Miami, a maximum of 13 minutes' labor is needed. Although the comprehensive comparison of purchasing power and gross wages puts them at the top of the table, higher production costs mean that workers in Swiss and Scandinavian cities need 15 to 20 minutes for their Big Macs. After buying the study's basic basket of goods and services, earners in Zurich, Geneva, Dublin, Los Angeles and Luxembourg retain the highest portion of their net wages for discretionary spending like vacations, luxury items or savings.

edit: gotta squeeze a Quality of life charting in here as well.

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Author Topic: Craziest thing you've ever seen (at work)? (Read 3808 times)

milifist

Craziest thing you've ever seen (at work)?

hackess

Re: Craziest thing you've ever seen (at work)?

Agent_Tachyon

Re: Craziest thing you've ever seen (at work)?

Nosferatu

Re: Craziest thing you've ever seen (at work)?

Chris

Re: Craziest thing you've ever seen (at work)?

Nosferatu

Re: Craziest thing you've ever seen (at work)?

RelandR

Re: Craziest thing you've ever seen (at work)?