Can you imagine the absolute misery of working for someone like this.
A person who thinks developers are all useless, and has total contempt for any skills that aren’t “business” stuff.
A person who thinks tech is easy and you can “just” do this and “just” do that and everything will be done, always telling you “this is so easy I could do it myself” while any contribution they make only makes things worse, and if there’s any kind of hold-up it’s because you’re either “lazy” or “incompetent”
I never understood it, but business owners seem to have utter contempt for the people who actually make their money. I’m not talking about support staff, I mean the people that if they stay home, dollars aren’t getting printed for everyone else. In private EMS, the billing staff would constantly get parties and catering and gift cards and shit, while the crews actually running the calls and writing the billable reports got third-hand furniture, moldy stations, ambulances held together with a fucking wish, and constant bellyaching about how paying the crews minimum wage was costing the company too much money. I’m starting to notice the same pattern pop up between the dev team and the product team as my software company scales.
My first boss was a “just” guy. Thankfully he was also pro dev, being one himself, but sadly he was completely self-taught. This led to some interesting ideas, such as:
“We should not migrate anything to, or start any new projects in, .net framework 3. We should become the experts in .net framework 2, so people who need .net 2 solutions come to us.”
“Agile means we do less documentation.” (But we were already doing no documentation)
“Why are you guys still making that common functions class library? I just copy a .vb file into every project I work on, that way I can change it to suit the new project.” (This one led to the most amusing compound error I’ve fixed for a fellow dev.)
Good guy, all in all. But frustrating to work for often.
Can you imagine the absolute misery of working for someone like this.
A person who thinks developers are all useless, and has total contempt for any skills that aren’t “business” stuff.
A person who thinks tech is easy and you can “just” do this and “just” do that and everything will be done, always telling you “this is so easy I could do it myself” while any contribution they make only makes things worse, and if there’s any kind of hold-up it’s because you’re either “lazy” or “incompetent”
No thanks.
I never understood it, but business owners seem to have utter contempt for the people who actually make their money. I’m not talking about support staff, I mean the people that if they stay home, dollars aren’t getting printed for everyone else. In private EMS, the billing staff would constantly get parties and catering and gift cards and shit, while the crews actually running the calls and writing the billable reports got third-hand furniture, moldy stations, ambulances held together with a fucking wish, and constant bellyaching about how paying the crews minimum wage was costing the company too much money. I’m starting to notice the same pattern pop up between the dev team and the product team as my software company scales.
My first boss was a “just” guy. Thankfully he was also pro dev, being one himself, but sadly he was completely self-taught. This led to some interesting ideas, such as:
“We should not migrate anything to, or start any new projects in, .net framework 3. We should become the experts in .net framework 2, so people who need .net 2 solutions come to us.”
“Agile means we do less documentation.” (But we were already doing no documentation)
“Why are you guys still making that common functions class library? I just copy a .vb file into every project I work on, that way I can change it to suit the new project.” (This one led to the most amusing compound error I’ve fixed for a fellow dev.)
Good guy, all in all. But frustrating to work for often.