Aggressive²

ag·gres·sion [uh-gresh-uh'n] (noun) overt or suppressed hostility, either innate or resulting from continued frustration and directed outward or against oneself. The contents here are intentionally vague due to removal or limiting information pertaining to company knowledge or lack there of (on his behalf).

[aggressive2-blog]

But I know best...

Ok let's just go over a conversation I just had. The easiest way to do this is to assign topic variables. Me: X only changes Y and never touches Z. So the issue is that we have something else changing Z. Him: No what I am saying is that we only change Y and don't touch Z. Me: Isn't that what I just said. Him: No, you said we change Z. Me: No I said that X only changes Y and never touches Z, so it must be something else changing Z. Him: Exactly. It might have gone on for a bit more than that, but the basic concept is there. I stated what was happening, had it shot down then regurgitated back to me as if he had thought of it, then told that what I had said was wrong and that his version was right. Another gem with him happened just before where he was telling me that this SQL workaround that I had shown them (to avoid issues due to the way they make/use stored procedures), didn't work under certain circumstances. I acknowledged that it shouldn't work, but then again you shouldn't need to use the workaround in that instance. But no, he had already made the workaround work in that situation, and when I reiterated that he wouldn't need it, he said that it was all in his head and it was the methodology that worked best. I wish that I could post the exact issue to show how stupid he is being.

[aggressive2-blog]

Extremes

I realised today that I work with two extremes. One is extremely close minded (if he doesn't understand something, it has to be wrong and he is right), the other is extremely open minded (if he doesn't understand something, it has to be a conspiracy and he wants to know more).

When you put them together they create a black hole that devours everything around them. It's scary, I don't know which will snap first and go postal on us all.

[aggressive2-blog]

Share? Yes, Please!

Words can't express what I'm thinking right now. The simplest of concepts, yet they seems to still get them wrong. So my "social" feed was just bombarded with updates from our Marketing Department. Every time they saved the article (via publish, and not a soft-save), they clicked Share because they were given a prompt after doing so.

Sure this may be a UX issue, but still, if you knew how the system worked, you wouldn't make this mistake right? right?

[aggressive2-blog]

Trainwreck

I don't know where to start. I've been restricted from interacting with any other facet of the company outside of my own. On a daily basis, it's epic facepalm after epic facepalm, and I'm unable to do anything about it because I've been told that it's none of my business.

Now I have a few problems that I want to address:

The Marketing Department

They'll plate just about anything, and give it to you with a smile from ear to ear. They have no concept of complementary colors, producing either insanely hard to read red text on a light red background, or color combinations that induce vertigo.

Unfortunately we've already handed them the loaded gun, and they have shot themselves more than once. One would think that after the first time that they would have learnt that you only press that button once, or it emails the customer database again!

Finally, they are blissfully unaware that animated GIFs belong back in the 90's on GeoCities pages, and that busy background images do nothing more than distract and deter users.

Application Development Team

These guys have never heard of UX, and just throw things onto forms. If something doesn't work, they blame something other than their code. If their application is running slow, they reboot the computer. If it still runs slow, it needs a bigger computer.

I'm lost for what to do. I've worked in many different industries, and have skill sets that are stronger than of those mentioned, but because I don't have the University degree, I'm nothing in their eyes and all efforts to try and help them get dismissed.

What gets to me the most is the constant belittling of my chosen languages because they aren't typical windows development languages. There's only so much you can take of the ages old compiled vs interpreted argument. Personally I couldn't care if a compiled application ran better than an interpreted script, what I care about more is that my code works.

[aggressive2-blog]

Opinionated Truth or just Misinformed Fact

There was a conversation this morning that started off in the usual manor;

Statement - Usually some over the top waffle about how he is one step infront of the rest because he's figured out the finer points behind the secret agendas of some organization.

Evidence - This is where I usually shut off. It's either fabricated and he's fallen hook, line and sinker for it, or he's read something then re-organised it so that it fits perfectly into explaining why.. the world is flat, and how all images from space that show a round earth are fake (in all honesty, I've never had that conversation pop up, but I'm not ruling it out of the possible things he'll say one day).

So today's discussion was about Anonymous (he loves harping on about how they are a front for the government). Later down the track it turned to "the first virus". Being interested in viruses I decided to tune back in.

"Well the first virus was actually made to see how large the internet was" ... at this point I shut off again.

The first "virus" is generally considered to be the "Creeper Virus" written back in the early 1970's. (I could be wrong with this statement though).

The virus he is referring to was the "Morris Virus" in the late 1980's almost 20 years later. He missed many other great viruses such as Elk Cloner, Byte Bandit, (c)Brain, Stoned, Jerusalem.

Now I don't claim to be a great scholar of Viruses, I do take an interest in seeing how they tick (if ever I get a chance), but I dislike being told something that's actually inaccurate. I could have corrected him, but then it probably would have turned into a 30 minute argument about what a virus really is, and if it's not on the internet, it's not a virus... or some waffle like that.

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"They are all hacking..."

From time to time I'll have him walk over to me and rant at the lack of real players in his current FPS of choice. "They all use hacks, you watch them and you can see them hacking". He from time to time used to follow through with claims that he's been to the sites where you get the hacks because that's where they said they got it from (not getting the sarcasm in the retort to a hacking accusation; "yeah.. I got them at siteX.com). At first I believed him that they might have been hacking until it came to the once a year office FPS tournament mess around.

It's not that everyone is hacking, he is just that bad. When I saw how he played and constantly complained about us having better pings than him (on a LAN game) I knew that he was the issue and not the players. He even went as far as saying we had better video cards (which in actual fact we're all running the same model PC with the same video card).

Another thing that he rants about is how console FPS' are not real FPS' because they make the controls easier. I know that it's probably already been done and someone's shown that controller is better than keyboard, but in most cases your average keyboard/mouse user versus a controller player would result in the controller player throwing their controller to the ground in frustration at the lack of precision (hey don't look at me like that, I play on both, I like both equally.. some games shine on controller, others on keyboard... not hating). He just loves to rant about anything that he thinks that he "knows".

Is there nothing this guy won't complain about?

[aggressive2-blog]

Usability / Stability, you can only have one!

Somewhat sick of the situation that I'm in at the moment. Working in a fairly small team where two of us are open-minded, where the others are fairly closed and are terrified of change.

From where I sit, I can see the whole picture, where things are failing, and why. The simple fact is that we are growing faster and the current system just can't keep up. I've spoken of some of the tools that I use in my area and how it would be beneficial for them to use along-side the systems, but that is another thing that needs to be managed and they don't know how.

I think it's more a power issue they have. Remove their ability to manage something and they feel useless. See I personally think that if you can use something that will increase stability, and reduce strain, do it. Our jobs are to make ourselves redundant. If we made the perfect system we wouldn't be needed, but because you can't write the perfect system, so you'll always be needed. They just keep creating work-arounds to temporarily keep the system up, and them around.

The current event that sparked this entry was a DB issue. We've been advised to look into a High Availability solution to an issue that we're having, but we've been told that it has to be Windows based. Why? Personally I think it's because they don't want to learn how to manage something from a terminal console is my guess. Is the concept of terminal access really that hard to grasp?

I'm not saying this from a Linux fanboy's opinion, hell if the best solution meant running the DB's off a modified Playstation VITA, I'd still suggest it having no knowledge about the thing. You have to keep the companies best interests in mind, and this I think is something that they are not doing. Their demands will result in a bandaid solution due to the limitations enforced on us.

I've already had it happen to me with the current setup that I was forced to run with. I had created an ideal setup for what I needed for a DB solution, but at the last moment the plan was changed and I was forced to implement another method, which has been catastrophically flawed (and I had said that from the start that it would be). Why the change, someone's ego got in the way, and they decided that they knew best and they saw a fault in the logic. They freaking created the biggest fault that could have been made in the setup and forced us to run with it.

Forget "Brogrammers", the new (or should I say old) enemy to company growth in the IT sector are "popgrammers", those developers that have been around for years, and refuse to change their ways and logic to accommodate for advances in technology while still using out of date programming languages.

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"Maybe you should write some deployment tools..."

After watching him struggle with an IDE, 2 instances of Chrome, 4 Explorer windows and a Remote Desktop Instance (with another 3 Explorer windows), I suggested that he should probably develop some sort of deployment tool to make his remote deployment/testing procedure easier.

"I did at one point in time, but then my tools couldn't keep up with my brain".

Wow, just wow. He was struggling to copy files from a local folder into a shared folder on the machine he was RDP'd into. Copying files! 

[aggressive2-blog]

An error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.

Orlando Aloysius Battista

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"I wish Linux would go back to doing that..."

He was referring to making users compile from source... so that they could be "binary" programs and not scripts. Serious face palm. Get off your high horse already.

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"You need to change your algorithm..."

"...because I'm not working on a silly UNIX machines" is how he prefixed his statement, then went on to say that he had to additionally remove ownership on each file after use. "What you mean is that you need to add to your routine" I interjected while trying to hiding a smug expression.

He examined my original routine, and sure enough I release each file after use. Upon converting my example, it seems that he left out one line, and it was this one line that caused a few days worth of grief.

I like how he looked for a scapegoat, first in the operating system, then in myself for the original example, but only found a brick wall.

[aggressive2-blog]

"It's not fast because it's not a binary"

Thank you Capt. Obvious, but that script took me a total of 5 minutes to write, 2 to debug/fine-tune, while it took you half a day to work out how to write it in your language (after I gave you my "script" to use as a reference on how to complete the task). Which is now more efficient?

Actually I'll expand this a little.

The task was to chunk a 861Mb file into easy to consume pieces (with some content analysis put into the chunking). Not a major task, but an easy little test to see what he could do.

The original "script" I wrote was no more than 700bytes, of which 100 was easily the hard-coded file name. It was quickly hacked together on a P4 2.8 machine running Ubuntu 10.04 with a blistering 768Mb of RAM (welcome to my test and mess around machine). It could have been smaller, but I didn't want to spend time on such a trivial process.

He rewrote my "script" in his language on his development machine (of which I don't have to specs for, but I know it's more than my development machine) and compiled it.

At the point of writing this I ran the same original script on my development machine, Windows XP SP3, Dual Core 2.0 with 3Gb of RAM. Again nothing to be proud of, but it does the job.

And the results are:

--

My Test Machine (Script): 383s (2.24Mb/s)

My Development Machine (Script): 228s (3.77Mb/s)

His Development Machine (Binary): 210s (4.10Mb/s)

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Technically I wouldn't call these "results" due to the fact that I don't know what spec his machine is (and I guess the results would be closer if I was to run the binary on my development machine), but a savings of 18 seconds isn't that something worth "gloating" about when he wasted half a day (or possibly more) trying to achieve that result.