Lying on your resume
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@voodoo more cos I know how much time you spend here, you sounded clever as in that post though...
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@taniwharugby its either hang out here or homeschool my kids...
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I'm heaps good at making spreadsheets that look pretty, and are easy to follow.
that's pretty much it
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The excel vs proper development is an argument I find myself involved in pretty much so every day.
Plenty of tech nerds on here, so I'm expecting some serious backlash, but in my career, run of the mill tech guys are absolutely fucking chocolate teapot at really understanding the crux of what you are trying to do. Their thinking is so god damned logical that the ability to seriously think outside the box is so minuscule, that I've found it better to just do it myself and keep them sidelined. When I was younger and gave much more of a shit, I'd spend my evenings / weekends learning about coding / excel tips / access tips so I could jury rig something quickly to solve a problem / issue / request as well as pick up some skills. At no point, and I literally mean no point, did any of the tech guys do the same thing about financial markets / products / derivatives / operational processes to so they could upskill themselves.
Now in the big money spending companies, this wasn't an issue. I worked a Morgan Stanley for 7 years and they had a tech budget which was insane. They employed tech grads and the first thing they did was throw them through the grinder on the business so they had a better understanding. I assumed GS, JP etc do the same things. Although I think they struggle to get the real top talent now as well - those interested in financials go to the massive investors, whilst Google, Tesla etc generally hoover up the rest.
Perhaps my previous job not such a great example as the CTO was best buds with the founder, so was basically untouchable. He was pretty good / strong at solving problems, but utter shit at looking forwards with respect to projects / builds.
Now that I work for a third-tier organisation .... we are back at square one. State owned FI's run like state owned companies. Takes 15 people to do a shit job of something where only 2-3 people actually do the job.
Hence, why I think Excel is fucking excellent, and I am a guru of it. Not because it's what I want to do. Because the rest of your programming / developing nerds are so fucking useless at grasping basic simple concepts.
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@MajorRage I'm 13 years in at a software company that's been going close to 30. I'm part of a small team of consultants that deliver our software to the clients and it's taken until this year to actually convince the engineering team to listen to us.
A perfect example. We have a form in our software with a drop down button called "Action". How many actions can you perform on the drop down? One.
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@antipodean said in Lying on your resume:
It's amazing how busy unproductive people can look. I worked with one bloke who everyone thought was a real go-getter. He would walk furiously from one meeting to the next carrying a noteboook. Never did anything productive.
Adrenaline junkies who thrive on noise and getting noticed.
We once re-vamped the processes and reporting in an IT Program Management function of a London bank. A key part was giving a very clear view of where each of the 50+ projects were, chances of slippage or budget over-run and any issues identified on a weekly basis. No surprises or angry users.
It was fascinating to watch the people who usually made a lot of noise energetically flapped about their pet projects, looking lost when there were no surprises or panics for them to get their adrenaline fix.
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@antipodean said in Lying on your resume:
@dogmeat said in Lying on your resume:
@antipodean I don't remember working with you?
Probably because I don't attend meetings.
If I receive an invite and there's no agenda, decline. If it doesn't relate to my area of expertise/ responsibility. Decline.
Going to meetings prevents me from doing meaningful work, like arguing on the internet.
Meetings rooms with no chairs works a treat too.
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@antipodean said in Lying on your resume:
How to crater a career by antipodean: Large town hall with senior management crapping on about their leadership retreat oblivious to the fact no one cared - I point out they aren't leader's arseholes, company performance is on a clear negative trend in a range of areas and they only call themselves leaders because they can't manage. Because managing is difficult.
I was at one of these wanky Town Halls when a group of disaffected employees at the back started humming "Send in the Clowns".
Classic.
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@Victor-Meldrew said in Lying on your resume:
@antipodean said in Lying on your resume:
@dogmeat said in Lying on your resume:
@antipodean I don't remember working with you?
Probably because I don't attend meetings.
If I receive an invite and there's no agenda, decline. If it doesn't relate to my area of expertise/ responsibility. Decline.
Going to meetings prevents me from doing meaningful work, like arguing on the internet.
Meetings rooms with no chairs works a treat too.
Yes, we have a high percentage of professional meeting goers in our organisation. A couple of years ago we converted to smart office with standing only meeting rooms etc. I think just as we were starting to see the fruits of it, Covid hit & then boom .....suddently all the professional meeting goers are back on form with 7 hours blocked out each day.
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@JC said in Lying on your resume:
@nzzp said in Lying on your resume:
@taniwharugby said in Lying on your resume:
my level of excel for my job is pretty advanced, but in my old job my boss is/was an accountant and man some of the magic he could do with excel!!
spot on, but by god it's uncheckable, and god forbid fixing it if anything breaks. Excel has a low barrier to entry, which is both a massive strength and weakness.
Of course nobody ever documents what they’ve built.
And independent testing for even mission-critical applications? Gimmeabreak. You’d never accept a professional developer saying they’ve just built something, trust me it’s fine, I tested it myself. But a 20 year old office jockey has put together a spreadsheet that may determine the future of your business? Sure, seems legit, put that baby live.
It’s called job security Keep me in as I’m the only one that knows how this shit works.
Actually that’s not always the case. I picked up a complicated reporting tool from one guy that I embellished even more and passed on to my replacement who has run it and enhanced further.
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@MajorRage I’m managing a project where the developers are in house at an tech organisation that is a subsidiary of the client and the nominal owner of the system we have to change. They know nothing about the client’s core business and have BAs who think they know best without ever asking questions. Everything is framed in terms of what’s easiest to achieve on their platform rather than the right solution for the requirements. So I’m using an external BA who I trust. She is awesome. A great BA is worth their weight in gold.
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@Victor-Meldrew said in Lying on your resume:
It was fascinating to watch the people who usually made a lot of noise energetically flapped about their pet projects, looking lost when there were no surprises or panics for them to get their adrenaline fix.
I fucking hate those fluffybunnies. They get recognition for "always being available" or "responding quickly" to their own fuckups.
I get the work done after spending a lot of time planning it in my head. I comment all my code, and I leave breadcrumbs for idiots to follow. The fact that I get this done while looking like I'm doing nothing rather than screeching loudly about my busy day appears to be a negative.
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And ubernerds are the fucking worst. I once physically threatened a guy who wrote elegant but obtuse code with no logging and no comments because I knew - as a 22yo AWS whiz - he would be gone in 6 months and it would be my shitpile to look after.
He went in 7.
A good BA is great. But you can highlight the risks all you want to the business, and if they're going to press ahead with unrealistic timelines for an off-the-shelf product that they customise to shit because the platform salesman doesn't give a fuck about anything but his bonus, well...
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@Crucial said in Lying on your resume:
It’s called job security Keep me in as I’m the only one that knows how this shit works.
Or where the bodies are buried.
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@NTA said in Lying on your resume:
And ubernerds are the fucking worst. I once physically threatened a guy who wrote elegant but obtuse code with no logging and no comments because I knew - as a 22yo AWS whiz - he would be gone in 6 months and it would be my shitpile to look after.
He went in 7.
A good BA is great. But you can highlight the risks all you want to the business, and if they're going to press ahead with unrealistic timelines for an off-the-shelf product that they customise to shit because the platform salesman doesn't give a fuck about anything but his bonus, well...
Hey come on now.....us sales folk are only as good as our support people
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@Nepia said in Lying on your resume:
@Bones said in Lying on your resume:
@Nepia said in Lying on your resume:
I have a formula book
Oh yeah because INTERNET!
Love the idea of you sitting at work and having to do some excel bits - "ohhhh nooooo....I left my formula book at hommme"
Well it's a PDF where I know the pages of the stuff I need.
I simply kept copies of spreadsheets so I could reverse engineer what I'd done previously
ifwhen I invariably forgot.The only time I didn't was when I set up a proof of concept for funding a government department. They decided the spreadsheet worked so well they didn't bother progressing developing a dedicated system. About a year after I left I got a phone call asking me to help fix it after one of them decided to make enhancements.
"Oh so you're over a barrel? Here's my daily rate."
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@NTA said in Lying on your resume:
I fucking hate those fluffybunnies. They get recognition for "always being available" or "responding quickly" to their own fuckups.
I worked for one loud prick whose sole man-management technique was to rush down the office, muttering about "project failures" and throw a printed email on my desk, demanding to know what I was going to do with it.
Fuck knows how I resisted the temptation to state the obvious.
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@MN5 said in Lying on your resume:
Hey come on now.....us sales folk are only as good as our support people
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@JC said in Lying on your resume:
@MajorRage I’m managing a project where the developers are in house at an tech organisation that is a subsidiary of the client and the nominal owner of the system we have to change. They know nothing about the client’s core business and have BAs who think they know best without ever asking questions. Everything is framed in terms of what’s easiest to achieve on their platform rather than the right solution for the requirements. So I’m using an external BA who I trust. She is awesome. A great BA is worth their weight in gold.
Absolutely understand. The product we are building has been bastardised completely to work with the in-house system because they in-house guys are literally too old or useless to adapt in any way, shape or form.
