The worst is when the problem is something that will only manifest at scale, so your bosses are going “You should have tested it before putting it in production!” And I’m like “DO YOU THINK I DIDN’T TEST IT BEFORE PUTTING IT IN BLOODY PRODUCTION!?”
The worst is when you’re actively raising alarms that your testing infrastructure has glaring, easily pluggable gaps that would catch certain types of common issues, and you explain that if you could have a few extra days you could get that done… And management says no, it’s not worth it, and THEN what you said
I don’t even ask for that anymore because it rarely leads to good ends. What I do now is send an email summarizing the dumb bullshit that they want me to do, describe the detrimental effects that it will have in excruciating detail, ask if there are any corrections and if my understanding is correct, and say that if I don’t get a reply from them by X time, I’ll do $DumbBullshitThing at Y time/date. It gets CC’ed at least one level higher than them in the food chain and also to my personal email address for CYA.
It puts the onus on them, creates a paper trail, and also places the blame on them when shit blows up because they asked me to do $DumbBullshitThing when the consequences were clearly laid out.
The worst is when the problem is something that will only manifest at scale, so your bosses are going “You should have tested it before putting it in production!” And I’m like “DO YOU THINK I DIDN’T TEST IT BEFORE PUTTING IT IN BLOODY PRODUCTION!?”
The worst is when you’re actively raising alarms that your testing infrastructure has glaring, easily pluggable gaps that would catch certain types of common issues, and you explain that if you could have a few extra days you could get that done… And management says no, it’s not worth it, and THEN what you said
Always remember the magic words when it comes to corporate bullshit: “Can I get that in writing?”
yep, saved our butts a couple of times.
I don’t even ask for that anymore because it rarely leads to good ends. What I do now is send an email summarizing the dumb bullshit that they want me to do, describe the detrimental effects that it will have in excruciating detail, ask if there are any corrections and if my understanding is correct, and say that if I don’t get a reply from them by X time, I’ll do $DumbBullshitThing at Y time/date. It gets CC’ed at least one level higher than them in the food chain and also to my personal email address for CYA.
It puts the onus on them, creates a paper trail, and also places the blame on them when shit blows up because they asked me to do $DumbBullshitThing when the consequences were clearly laid out.
True. I’ve been the Cassandra on projects like that.