Office politics...
Technically, I worked 15 hours yesterday to fix bugs related to making our product more robust when tcp/ip errors happen.
But, because of the political climate we are facing within our own (merged) company, I have to instead say that I modified code to work around problems in the internet.
When Engineers Become Political...
Just tell them that you had to stop the sofware from crying when the internets go boomy.
It's stupid, really.
But it got wildly political. We aren't sure this merged company is such a great thing. They're morons.
Sadly not unusual with mergers. Just keep out of it as much as you can....unless you can parlay it into something funny (for you).
This merger is worse than others I've survived.
I think there's always something of a conflict when services merge with products, in terms of methodologies. We had a goal that we hoped to achieve, and we still hope to achieve it, but unfortunately two people in the merged company don't seem to understand it.
But then, some people do not understand how companies grow, and what you can do to accomodate that growth.
True, I'm afraid.
Could be worse though.... In addition to the issues you noted, you could also be facing a situation where the joiners do not understand your industry and/or do not understand your business model.
Tricky business, mergers.
Don't suppose those two have any sense of humor....
No, they don't. They get angry. One of them flies off the handle and screams at his co-workers occasionally.
He's really, really delightful.
The other one is basically clueless. She's out of her element, I suspect.
Oh ugh. We've a couple of those. Less than pleasant. Hope it improves for you, fleeb.
When Engineers Become Political...
Hey, it's better than politicians pretending to be people with engineering knowledge.
It'll get better.
One way or another.
As for being political, I prefer to be completely forthright, but whent he shit gets weird...
*gna*
fixed a memleak in some code which also was already in a production release.
now I said that we needed to patch that in the production code also.
-nooooooo we can't do that, and its not an issue since that functionality isn't used in production anyways.
now, two years later, this code is in fact in production, and the memory leak is threattening the production system.
so, we spent next to a month worktime distributed over the last 3 months searching that issue again, since its not as occurant in the live system, and the usecase isn't triggered very often...
meanwhile the whole part of the code was replaced with a more elegant way of doing things; that was backported, but they didn't deploy it for over a month now.
In germany, lots of companies use this internal book keeping/accounting software provided by a big southern german company with a three letter acronym. They are also on the international market, so you might know what company I mean. If you dont, you are amongst the blessed people. This software is mostly used by the secretaries of our departments in order for them to see the departments finances. Most of them have read only access. In order to make things secure, you need a chipcard and cardreader, provided by an external company which starts with the same letter as the acronym of aforementioned company. Quite like with your bank account card you also need a pin to login to the interface when you want to use it.
Now we all know that secretaries have to attend special security and data safety seminars and would never ever even think about leaving the chipcard in an unlocked desktop drawer in about 1 meter distance from the card reader.... Their passwords/pins are also assembled of various words in at least three different dead and foreign languages, non-words, assorted random chars and at least a 7 digit long prime number. They are also able to memorize them easily and wouldnt need to write them down or reuse another password. So this is all pretty secure and a good working system.
Well, now that three letter acronym company bought the company providing the chipcard stuff and you'd think "fine, now they just issue an online update to streamline the corporate design and replace the former software's name with the hip and amazingly buzzword laden new name they came up with." Oh how you failed... The sysadmins now need to manually download a new install package in order to replace the existing one, quoting from the email I received that informed me about this: "this procedure will take about an hour per PC. Oh, and your users will have to change their PIN/PUKs, because now you are only able to use numbers, no letters or any other chars." Isn't that an improvement?! Not only do we get to waste at least two persons time, we also increase security by increasing the possible combinations of PINs while at the same time skyrocketing the usability and making it far easier to remember this sequence of numbers! I can already see the secretaries searching for the most unique 20+ digit primes to secure their accounts....
What blows my head is why this company buying a security company does not have enough money to pay at least one security consultant telling them "Err, uhm, you know that most of this chipcards are stored as secure as if they were left directly in the reader, so we could make the reader optional and only reserve it for some special facilities... and, err, uhm, if you force them to only use numbers, why don't we provide a multiple choice aproach like: Use the following as my pin: a) 0000 b) 1234 or c) my birthdate?"
Seriously? You're paying umpteen dollars for the expertise of my consultants, but you trust them so little that they have to notify you before and after going to lunch and about every meeting? What's next - permission slips to use the restroom??
Sounds like you've got a paranoid kindergarten teacher on your hands :)