Jobs that beat the caring out of you

Ok, Since Jen and Grant started this, it’s time to share some horrors…

This happened during the five or so years I was doing consulting type work with a small consulting company (which was itself a bad idea, but that’s a whole ‘nother story). Work was a tad on the sparse side at the time and I was looking for anything. Enter a logistics company that needed some integration work doing.

SSIS and ETL work for a couple months. Not ideal, but how bad could it be?

Bad. Very bad indeed, and mostly because of management. There’s one thing at least I can say about this place, they taught me how not to manage an IT department.

I’m not going to cover everything that happened at that place, just some aspects of one project. It was a package tracking system, intended to take waybill data, vehicle tracking and some other bits and pieces and make it so that any delivery/shipment could be identified as being in a warehouse or on a truck, and specifically which warehouse or truck.

First problem. It was 6 months of work at least. We had 6 weeks. Not 6 weeks to a deadline that everyone understood was going to be missed. 6 weeks to the date that the company CEO had been told this new tracking system would be in use. Nothing that can possibly go wrong there.

First problem, the project manager. He managed by gantt chart, but that’s not all that uncommon. What was less common was that he appeared to have no concept of time management at all. I worked for them 3 days a week. During one Monday afternoon project meeting, I gave the project manager an estimate of 10 days for chunk of work. I found out later that day that he’d promised it would be in production the following week Thursday. 10 calendar days from the time he was given an estimate, at a point where I’d have had 5 working days to finish it.

That got me yelled at by the head of IT.

Second problem. The project manager and BI specialist (read Excel report writer). They both repeatedly agreed on things in meetings, and then told the head of IT something completely different, something that cast them in a good light and the developers as incompetent idiots. Once is an accident, twice might be coincidence. Three times or more however…

I got into the habit of openly recording the meetings on my phone (for ‘documentation purposes’)

Third problem. The head of IT. I’d say she was a little on the side of micromanaging, but that would be like saying a Joburg thunderstorm is a tad damp. She also had a tendency to overreact, and to listen to only one side of a story before reacting.

The last straw of that particular project was the Monday when the project manager decided that the system we were working on was going into UAT for user testing (not testers, business users). It was not in any way ready and I told him that in the meeting, as did the other developer. After listening to out explanations he agreed and said he’d get another week. It might have been enough.

Next thing I know one of the other devs tells me that the head of IT wanted a word.

No, she didn’t want a word. She wanted to scream at me for over 5 minutes, at the top of her voice, in an open plan office, in front of everyone else about how irresponsible it was to suggest that the project was ready for UAT over the project manager’s recommendations, tell me how incompetent I was, how useless I was, what a terrible developer I was, that I was a liar, lazy, and that she would have me fired and ensure I never got another IT job.

I didn’t walk out. Not quite, but I did call my boss immediately afterwards. See, I didn’t work for her. I was doing the work on contract. She couldn’t fire me.

My boss at the time was the softest spoken person I know, he never raised his voice, never lost his temper, never sounded irritated no matter what. That afternoon, when he had to drop all the other work he had planned and come out to the logistics company, that afternoon I heard him angry.

Somehow the logistics company is still in business. I have no idea how.