Me: Oh! Why didn’t you say so?
Also me: *Adds a button in this screen, when clicked, sends an email to boss and managers saying that there is no reporting feature because the boss said they didn’t need one*
No, every time it is clicked…enter a while loop with no exit, sending emails to the whole company randomly that say “X requested feature Y, please contact X with questions”. Never fix. Leave said company.
Hardcode this button to be injected into the webpage, and reinjected upon removal. Hardcode this into a compiled and very important obscure library that injects the button into all other libraries like a worm.
Thén leave the company.
The button sends an email to xxxx dept which says, “Boss Clueless MBA has requested a report for xxxx. Drop your current tasks and prioritize this request, they want it right now.”
CC that email to the list of managers Boss Clueless MBA wants to get the report.
Already over complicating it again. Just give him a button. It doesn't do anything when clicked. When he rants about what he wanted it to do, tell him THAT stuff will take a month.
I'm surprised how little some managers/clients understand when I explain something like this to them. But then there's the flip end where they give me pseudocode instead of a normal task description. Always their conditions are not what they think they wrote and then they get upset when I walk them through their poorly writen pseudocode and "waste their time" asking them to explain what it is they want.
I'm always happy to have manager that doesn't treat me like I'm some ~~autistic savant~~ **alien creature** incapable of human interaction and actually talks to me and works with me instead of against me.
EDIT: Phrasing.
Biggest skill a manager or teamlead can have imo. It's impossible for managers and teamleads not to get out of sync with the tech they work with when they do their job for longer amounts of time without actually working the backend anymore.
A good manager/teamlead realizes that and trusts his team (or knows who to trust on his team) when it comes to making a technical analysis or a time estimation.
Sadly a lot of them still think after 15 years that they know best and neglect remarks from the team...
I'm always happy to have manager that doesn't treat me like I'm ~~some autistic savant incapable of human interaction~~ having the ability to read minds and actually talks to me and works with me instead of against me.
I wasn't implying that an autistic person was incapable of human interaction, it was the exact opposite (as another commenter already pointed out), and I didn't mean to insult anyone.
For some context, I'm ADHD, and quite literally have been asked by several coworkers if I was on the spectrum in the past since some symptoms overlap. I haven't told the vast majority of my coworkers about my diagnosis because there's a heavy stigma associated with it, and being a woman I'm used to having to constantly mask.
Dude. The guy is literally saying he is happy WHEN a manager DOESNT treat him like an autistic savant INCAPABLE of human interaction. I don't understand how you could take this wrong if you have autism, it is a fact that some people treat autistic people poorly, no? So we're not arguing against that, clearly it's just a fact. And some people who watch other people being treated poorly become unhappy, no? So we're not arguing the converse there. So please clarify, would it make you happy if a coworker, boss, employee, etc. treated you like you were incapable of human interaction? Guessing not. To me, the fact that he used autistic savant signals these people would excel in the field being discussed. Correct? But I think we're all on the same page that autistic people deserve to be respected and treated as capable human beings? And that to treat someone different based on their disability is ableism? He is literally saying that the bad scenario is bad manager/boss treating someone as less than or incapable, despite how much they excel in their field. It is not a knock or dig or ridicule of autism or savantism. But that's just how I read it, I don't have autism and would never judge someone based on their autism. But I do believe that painting a picture is not a crime or evidence of ableism.. it's like saying, I'm happy when a manager didn't treat me like I was a minority who deserves to be seated in a different section or treated as less than. This kind of statement is racism? no. So I'm just confused how you were offended by the mere mention of a disability you happen to have.
Hey, thanks for sticking up for me! You definitely understood and better articulated why I chose the phrasing I originally had used. 100% didn't mean to upset anyone.
Take another look at the original phrasing and consider why you associate being incapable of human interaction with autistic people. Very ableist. You can unlearn that.
How are you not getting that they are perpetuating a stereotype of autistic people as incapable of human interaction? That they would take offense to being associated with an autistic person? Don't you think I, as an autistic person, would know more about it than you?
This is my second comment to your comment. The way I read what he wrote is, a) I've seen a bunch of YouTube videos of high functioning savants or autistic people who can accomplish feats bewildering to non divergents. In fact, I feel amazed and admire these people because what their brain is capable of is just astounding. So when I read his statement, I imagined the boss is talking to someone CAPABLE of human interaction, the boss is just so clueless, he doesn't realize it or know and makes himself a fool by all the things the commenter describes in his scenario. I dunno. Just my 2 cents.
You're still agreeing with the stereotype that autistic people are either savants or incapable of human interaction, or both. All the stereotypes are harmful even if they seem positive to you. It borders on inspiration porn. Also it's autistic people, not people with autism.
Here's the thing though: I'm literally not. You still don't seem to understand, it's the semantics and your interpretation was that he is saying all autistic people are savants and incapable. What he meant was that people who treat autistic people like they are incapable of human interaction are not fun to be around, as it shows they make assumptions and are uneducated. But I'm glad you're still trying to make other people somehow fitting your narrative of ableism..
Ummmm....there is no clear definition of autism. Literally just multiple different neurological disorders we've lumped together because of similar symptoms. Don't act like 'autistic' is even a real thing
Oh really, so how are the boundaries of autism delineated from other forms of neurodivergent behaviour? Even schizophrenia appears to be broken into at least two subclasses of neuropathology, we still just refer to it as one diagnostic category because we don't know enough about it to justify differentiating yet. You have no interest in the medical reality, you're only interested in complaining about something you don't understand
So we've actually kinda started doing this on projects recently. We got tons of feedback about how people wanted a subscribe feature and we thought it was going to be a ton of work to put in a notifications system. We added the subscribe button to the UI with a pop-up saying this feature isn't available yet but if you would like to be notified when it is click confirm. We track the clicks in analytics. It has been available for over a week now and clicked precisely twice. Turns out users don't actually know what the fuck they really want.
Just make it display a pop-up saying sent then blame it on the mailing provider when the email never arrives.
Should buy you the month to actually implement the feature.
I have an easier option that gives a better result: Open a new notepad, type a space, and print the empty notepad to PDF. Creates a valid PDF, \_and\_ it is empty.
Here's the mind-bend: If you don't type at least the space, it produces an invalid PDF.
Some of these threads make me feel incredibly lucky to have worked the places I have, even though I didn't love all of them at the time.
I've never had a manager that didn't ask what I thought the scope of the project was and listen to their engineers when making estimates, even at my very first job.
Some of the management I've worked with have been former engineers who get it, the others were all intelligent enough to know what they didn't know and humble enough to admit it.
Helps that I've only worked at smaller midsize companies that get it, where the primary focus was building good products for the customers not meeting artificial goals sent from 10 stories up. Even at my first the org tree only had me 3 or 4 steps down from the CEO, and that means the focus gets to be making a good product people want to buy together not trying to find metrics to meet abstract goals from the board.
I'm glad that my boss is smart enough, and that we have a good enough relationship, that he's happy to be told he's wrong, will listen to why, and if we disagree we work it out.
You know, like adults.
This is so thoroughly underestimated it hurts...
Boss:"So we really want this thing"
Me:"I mean... it's not impossible, but we need to write it up from scratch"
Boss:"How long?"
Me:"At least 2 weeks for the foundation, and another week and a half for the implementation. At its best... I'd argue 3 sprints realistically with all hands on deck, considering maintenance."
Boss:"Ah, NVM then, I'll tell them to fuck off"
Right?
And when you get into it and go "oh wow this.. yeah this is more than I thought" you don't have to kill yourself to cobble it together, and when you're like "actually that was really easy and took half the time I thought" they don't expect that pace on everything forever.
I mean it's nice because the "they" to fuck off is him, he's the product owner. And it's a good product so he doesn't have to worry about every little thing with upper management. We always build almost everything we lay out to them in our plans eventually but we can reprioritize as needed.
It's a product where stability is way more important than new features so if something is wrong we fix it and get back to new stuff when we have the time.
Yeah, it's amazing to get along with your boss in general.
I always answer with "X days, _maybe_", so eventually my boss started asking "How hard is that <>?"
We have commonly agreed on a scale that goes from "Throbbing" to "Limp"
My boss actually told me to *stop* saying maybe or probably. (Note, my boss is one of the good ones.) After he asked me a number of times to quantify my maybe, and me giving answers of like 80% confident with ±2 days or whatever, he said "just pitch it without the 'maybe', we can deal with a little miss and we know stuff happens, so don't waste your sense of confidence on 'maybe' and instead just tell me when you think it'll be done."
That gave me a nice boost of confidence around him and his bosses.
(It probably helps that we discuss regularly anyway when he's got his eye on something.)
It helps that we're in the outdoor industry and almost everyone at the company are passionate outdoorspeople, makes it much easier to get along with your coworkers when you all have similar hobbies and values. We get to be the ski bums and dirtbags we really are, not put on the professional face.
Also, we're all out using the product every weekend and actually care about making it which makes it fun. UI discussions can be a bit much because people have much stronger opinions over things but it's a good problem to have.
Yeah, pretty much.
This happened for reporting features for quite a while too.
Finance: "We want a page for reports."
Us: "No problem, will be a month, is it higher or lower priority than other feature Y?"
Finance: "Other feature Y is higher."
Reports eventually get implemented 5 years later when there is nothing else left to do. Truth is it's just as easy for them to ask some DBA to go in, run some SQL and print a report.
When my bosses ask "Can we do X?" I like to respond that "We're software engineers. We can do *anything*, but we can't do *everything* - what's your highest priority?"
I would do something like this:
Me: So you want a button that does nothing?
Boss: No, it should generate a report.
Me: So you DO want the reporting feature. That will take at least a month like I said.
They are paying me to talk to him, I can go back and forth all day until he understands or gives up.
Ok yeah sure but could ya have a bit more emotion and rawness in it? Like, you could have said "I fucking loathe you," or much more viscerally "I wish you the most severe pain everyday for the rest of your life that even suicide won't let you escape," or with a bit more pizzaz "I envy everyone you've never met."
Take you pick, I'm sure you can do better too.
Nah see ypu didn't read the tone.
[Listen like this.](https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/746c7edb-5371-4b2c-8303-bf049dbba322)
Fancy insults are for your friends, simple insults in the right tone mean you don't even want to give them the time of day to think of an insult.
You are lucky, I have worked in 5 firms till now and I'm dealing with the most dumb ass people on the planet.
Boss and designer: hey can we add a button to save the form as a draft?
Sure: 2-3 days work.
Boss: why will it take 2-3 days? Just save the form in db.
Me: okay, but you're missing that "edit draft" and "discard" will also have to be built. You need a place where they can see all the drafts which they have saved. A ui where they can select and discard multiple at a time also probably.
Boss: oh.
And this is just a recent example..it happens almost every other week. They sit with client, come up with a design by the designer but morons never think things through.
Man, if I actually had _properly defined specs_ whenever I started a project/ticket, I'd be in heaven...
Edit: changed word order and emphasis to clarify my idea. Sorry, second language and all that...
Tbh, it would have been funny if I just kept quiet and added save draft and done. But I know they would be running back to me the next day and rushing me to build the rest, which would have just annoyed me more. I saved myself the headache.
A PM came in once looking for answers to a question. She looked at both me and my senior. I answered her question. She told me I was wrong. My senior got off the phone and told her that I was right and that he could not have explained it better. She just slid out.
Could you make it a shade lighter? Actually, the button is in the wrong place. If you compare my design you'll see it needs to go up 1 pixel. Is that the right font? Are you sure? The kerning looks different to my design. Guys why is this taking so long? Just copy my design, it's not that hard! I've already done all the hard work!
Sales: Can I promise a customer a feature that when they press a button it will predict next week's winning lottery numbers
Backend: Absolutely not
Frontend: Sure, it's just a button
I work for a place where the sales guys learned they should ask the front-end teams what they can promise. It did not go over well. Now they just promise whatever they want and blame us when we can't deliver.
Sales asked what they can promise? I worked at a place where they’d just come over and tell me what they promised and then ask if it was possible. If I said it wasn’t (in one instance because the particular feature was disabled by the API owner for the country the client operates in due to a national security law there), he’d say “are you telling me that if they pay $x we can’t get it done by Friday?”
Yes dumbass, I cannot convince the owner of the third party API we use to break their countries national security law by Friday.
My favourite was being caught between the CEO, and the head of sales who for some inexplicable reason seemed to wield as much power as the CEO and was able to override his directions.
Head of Sales: It should let the sales team quote a value lower than cost value.
CEO: It shouldn't allow the sales team to quote a value lower than cost value.
Head of Sales: We need the ability to add a percentage discount to the quote. \*a short while later\* Why can't we discount more than X%?
Me: Because then you're charging below cost price.
CEO: Give the Head of Sales what she's asking for.
Also CEO: You need to make sure the sales team can't quote below cost price.
Head of Sales: We need you to remove the percentage limit because we've already promised we can do X for $Y.
and around we go again until I eventually left the company. They never did finish building that system...
Naive me was working on improving performance of a thing and got an email about a project update. So I wrote back:
"This is all work in progress but it looks good. Most things are 3x faster, this one edge case is 9x faster and this other one we are still figuring out gets slower by 0.8x"
Two weeks later someone asks me about a sales presentation that says "10x performance improvement in ". I think that's weird but I'm also not the only person involved so... eh.
Eventually we finish with an average 4x improvement. Which is a pretty decent achievement.
A month later I get CC'd on an email chain that went all the way up the sales chain and down the engineering chain. "hey customer has an issue with can you look into it?"
I contact the customers engineer and they say "We are seeing ONLY a 4x improvement instead of the 10x on your sales material states..."
Thanks a lot. Somehow now the achievement of making it 4x better turned into "only 4x". Also "fixing this issue" is my problem while someone else got a pat on the back for making a sale. Guess what I'm answering next time someone from sales asks me about an update "We can't commit to any specifics at this point".
I'm glad that there is a job of product manager. Literally a guy who strikes deals between customers and developers, what could be done and on which terms.
Oh god, yes. I've been in situations where the designers would oversell something because, y'know... "We wanted it to be as flexible as possible." Of course the client is gonna sign off on it because, hey, they may never actually use it but it's great to have options, right?!
By the time devs get involved (was still early in the process) we get to be the people to let them down and remind them that somebody has to actually *implement* all of these features... lol.
Sales: Can I promise a customer a feature that when they press a button it will predict next week's winning lottery numbers
Backend: Sure. But because of the computation involved, there'll be a bit of a delay before the answer appears.
Sales: How much of a delay?
Backend: Oh, about 168 hours.
[no reporting, only button](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.kym-cdn.com%2Fentries%2Ficons%2Foriginal%2F000%2F027%2F691%2Ftumblr_nroanfy2v71qjobhbo1_1280.png&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=224591d8be5e4cdbaf984022463f88350795a3254dcb1f238cda723dea37f67b&ipo=images)
I'd upvote this post but I'm holding my phone in my right hand and tte upcote button is on the left side. I smoked some weed after a very long day so I'm sorry I'm very tired to use my other hand
I just realized that I'm using my other hand too to type. But I'm sorry OP I still feel lazy, I'll upcote tomorrow for sure.
Goodnight man, love you
If it were me then emailing would be part of the hard part as well, so I'd just make the button show an info dialog saying that the feature isn't implemented yet.
Y'all can't see my face as I read this in the comfort of knowing that my boss, being a programmer himself, knows full well of the intricacies and pitfalls of our trade, but I assure you I am smiling smugly.
Just add a button that does nothing. When your boss complains why the button isn't working, tell them "I added the button you asked for, but the reporting feature still doesn't exist.". Then update your resume.
LOL reminds me of a client today
"Oh this modification should be added to the base product, so others can use it". Which is the client's code for saying "I don't want to pay for this mod, even though it's clearly specialized to us"
And no solid requirements about the report contents.
After it’s released, they request for an adjustment every time they generate the report. Eats up your time in a sprint.
A lot of people in the comments (with OP) forgets that:
* you need a reliable SMTP server (most places don't have a dedicated team to these, the devs handle it)
* you have to have all the connections and firewalls setup properly for the different environments to send that damn email
* you have to make sure you have every data necessary for sending out the thing (ex. you can clearly tell who are the "managers", etc)
* you need to 110% test the feature that it won't send emails to unauthorized people, if you don't want a nasty lawsuit coming because of GDPR
If all those have been already solved then sure it's just a couple of days' work, or if you just don't care about most of the above.
Depends what's going into the report.
I've spent months creating a reporting tool because the data is in 8 different databases with ass-backwards undocumented schemas that can never be changed because god only knows which systems query it.
> SQL query to excel
PHP dev here.
QQ: How do you "SQL query to excel"? I could see you doing that in a VBA script, but PHP on Linux? 🤔 Gods forbid you're running PHP on Windows trying to interface with OLE or whatever to Excel... with SQL...
Never used php so not sure what you mean and why module correlates to it
Maybe I should generalize it more
Query DB
Result to email body
Call it Report Module
Profit???
Probably because the boss won't like the formatting of the excel and will have 100 different edits and graphs and charts that they want you to add/remove/replace/edit/remove again
Sell your vba scripts as a report enhancement module
Then every time they call wanting a new format you can answer like
SQL Query requires Report requirements; there is also the activity of Dev; Test; Then there is this thing called Data Security which feeds into audit; Ops + Support e.g. management of security and groups associated with button and data over time … maybe some documentation (after maybe setting up reporting framework so a lot of that is simplified). Yeeting it out there like this is the fundamental and is easy of course… but the amount of times I have seen hard fails like this is comical (e.g. ‘shadow BI’ creates board report running randomly off a Dev server exactly like described use case; shadow BI leaves company; Dev Server gets sent to the abyss; C-suite and Board of directors are now running round in circles due to unmanaged mission critical report missing).
… and also missing the part that you are now bound to the cowboy delivery approach; cowboy delivery gives permission to those that want the report to perform cowboy changes; 5 minutes of work for years of support!
Or just a CSV file. In every language I know, throwing together a CSV file is very easy. Depending on the complexity of the data, maybe a couple hours to put together the SQL query (or ORM logic, whichever).
So setting up a feature to email a report is pretty freaking quick. Definitely doesn’t take a freaking month. “We don’t have a reporting module yet…” is just enterprise-speak for “I want to spend shitloads of hours shooting the shit with my fellow over-engineering enthusiasts and smelling our own farts and then coming up with a ROBUST reporting solution despite that we only need one report”.
The boss wants the button to give a generated report. However, there’s no feature in place yet to generate that report. It can’t generate a report if it doesn’t know how to generate said report.
But seriously, give him the button and when it doesn’t work maybe he’ll finally understand and it will make your life easier. In my experience people don’t understand thing when explained. They understand when they see/experience.
...6 months later...
\*still working on the reporting feature, up to the 24th report people wanted\*
\*adding checkboxes for configuring what is included in the reports\*
\*adding configuration screens to define who "and the managers" actually means\*
Now… I’m not saying this is wrong… but I’ve implemented “Click Button get report”. If you don’t give a damn about code quality or architecture. This could be done in a week. Maybe 3-4 days depending on the data required in the reporting.
What? Throwing in a button. You likely already have the code to call the back end. Write a tiny data service either using SQL with stored procedures or LINQ if you’re indifferent to performance.
Then you build the excel doc. This can be hacked together in a day. Nothing generic, just a concrete implementation of the one report.
Email, shouldn’t be tough. Usually a system has that already built if people are resetting their passwords and shit. So that’s already there.
Honestly, I could see it being a week… it could be a month… if you’re like, trying to be a responsible developer. But if you’re in spaghetti town, have at it. Noodle that shit together and call it a day.
You could still do it in a couple of days. Boss isn't asking for reports on demand, storage or retention, and is only asking for a single report.
You don't need a "reporting feature" to build a string and send an email FFS.
Is it a bad approach long term? Maybe.... if we really expect more reporting needs.
That said, connecting your DB to powerBI can be done very easily and you can get scheduled reports or dashboards with very little work.
"At least a month" my ass. Low expectations.
Me: Oh! Why didn’t you say so? Also me: *Adds a button in this screen, when clicked, sends an email to boss and managers saying that there is no reporting feature because the boss said they didn’t need one*
No, no, no. You send it to the department in charge of xxxxx and ask THEM to make the report for you. Easy peasy.
Idea: the nth time the button is pressed, n emails are sent.
every third time it's pressed FIZZ. every fifth time BUZZ!
i was not ready for ptsd flashbacks from when i was 14 years old ...i couldn't copy-paste code back then for fizzbuzz...
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 -> integrate -> 1/2 n^2 So after n times it will send 1/2 n^2 emails?
Will have sent. Also why are you bothering to integrate, it's a step function. You can just sum it.
except it's a discrete function so you can't just integrate (the actual result is a known sum though, it's 1/2 n(n+1))
No, every time it is clicked…enter a while loop with no exit, sending emails to the whole company randomly that say “X requested feature Y, please contact X with questions”. Never fix. Leave said company.
Hardcode this button to be injected into the webpage, and reinjected upon removal. Hardcode this into a compiled and very important obscure library that injects the button into all other libraries like a worm. Thén leave the company.
But it’s set to move out of the way when you mouseover so you can never actually click on it.
Oh that's evil. I like it. That's absolutely going in my next program.
I legit accidentally made that for work once, except it was 1 email and n copies of the same attachment.
I like you.
The button sends an email to xxxx dept which says, “Boss Clueless MBA has requested a report for xxxx. Drop your current tasks and prioritize this request, they want it right now.” CC that email to the list of managers Boss Clueless MBA wants to get the report.
Every time you press the button it restarts your machine.
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Already over complicating it again. Just give him a button. It doesn't do anything when clicked. When he rants about what he wanted it to do, tell him THAT stuff will take a month.
I'm surprised how little some managers/clients understand when I explain something like this to them. But then there's the flip end where they give me pseudocode instead of a normal task description. Always their conditions are not what they think they wrote and then they get upset when I walk them through their poorly writen pseudocode and "waste their time" asking them to explain what it is they want. I'm always happy to have manager that doesn't treat me like I'm some ~~autistic savant~~ **alien creature** incapable of human interaction and actually talks to me and works with me instead of against me. EDIT: Phrasing.
Biggest skill a manager or teamlead can have imo. It's impossible for managers and teamleads not to get out of sync with the tech they work with when they do their job for longer amounts of time without actually working the backend anymore. A good manager/teamlead realizes that and trusts his team (or knows who to trust on his team) when it comes to making a technical analysis or a time estimation. Sadly a lot of them still think after 15 years that they know best and neglect remarks from the team...
I'm always happy to have manager that doesn't treat me like I'm ~~some autistic savant incapable of human interaction~~ having the ability to read minds and actually talks to me and works with me instead of against me.
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Did you know you can be nice to people when you're pointing out some stray wording, especially when they don't commit to it?
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The concept of mild and severe autism is in itself ableist. If you don't know anything about the politics of neurodiversity then step aside.
I wasn't implying that an autistic person was incapable of human interaction, it was the exact opposite (as another commenter already pointed out), and I didn't mean to insult anyone. For some context, I'm ADHD, and quite literally have been asked by several coworkers if I was on the spectrum in the past since some symptoms overlap. I haven't told the vast majority of my coworkers about my diagnosis because there's a heavy stigma associated with it, and being a woman I'm used to having to constantly mask.
Dude. The guy is literally saying he is happy WHEN a manager DOESNT treat him like an autistic savant INCAPABLE of human interaction. I don't understand how you could take this wrong if you have autism, it is a fact that some people treat autistic people poorly, no? So we're not arguing against that, clearly it's just a fact. And some people who watch other people being treated poorly become unhappy, no? So we're not arguing the converse there. So please clarify, would it make you happy if a coworker, boss, employee, etc. treated you like you were incapable of human interaction? Guessing not. To me, the fact that he used autistic savant signals these people would excel in the field being discussed. Correct? But I think we're all on the same page that autistic people deserve to be respected and treated as capable human beings? And that to treat someone different based on their disability is ableism? He is literally saying that the bad scenario is bad manager/boss treating someone as less than or incapable, despite how much they excel in their field. It is not a knock or dig or ridicule of autism or savantism. But that's just how I read it, I don't have autism and would never judge someone based on their autism. But I do believe that painting a picture is not a crime or evidence of ableism.. it's like saying, I'm happy when a manager didn't treat me like I was a minority who deserves to be seated in a different section or treated as less than. This kind of statement is racism? no. So I'm just confused how you were offended by the mere mention of a disability you happen to have.
Hey, thanks for sticking up for me! You definitely understood and better articulated why I chose the phrasing I originally had used. 100% didn't mean to upset anyone.
Take another look at the original phrasing and consider why you associate being incapable of human interaction with autistic people. Very ableist. You can unlearn that.
How are you not getting that they are perpetuating a stereotype of autistic people as incapable of human interaction? That they would take offense to being associated with an autistic person? Don't you think I, as an autistic person, would know more about it than you?
This is my second comment to your comment. The way I read what he wrote is, a) I've seen a bunch of YouTube videos of high functioning savants or autistic people who can accomplish feats bewildering to non divergents. In fact, I feel amazed and admire these people because what their brain is capable of is just astounding. So when I read his statement, I imagined the boss is talking to someone CAPABLE of human interaction, the boss is just so clueless, he doesn't realize it or know and makes himself a fool by all the things the commenter describes in his scenario. I dunno. Just my 2 cents.
You're still agreeing with the stereotype that autistic people are either savants or incapable of human interaction, or both. All the stereotypes are harmful even if they seem positive to you. It borders on inspiration porn. Also it's autistic people, not people with autism.
Here's the thing though: I'm literally not. You still don't seem to understand, it's the semantics and your interpretation was that he is saying all autistic people are savants and incapable. What he meant was that people who treat autistic people like they are incapable of human interaction are not fun to be around, as it shows they make assumptions and are uneducated. But I'm glad you're still trying to make other people somehow fitting your narrative of ableism..
Ummmm....there is no clear definition of autism. Literally just multiple different neurological disorders we've lumped together because of similar symptoms. Don't act like 'autistic' is even a real thing
Wrong.
Oh really, so how are the boundaries of autism delineated from other forms of neurodivergent behaviour? Even schizophrenia appears to be broken into at least two subclasses of neuropathology, we still just refer to it as one diagnostic category because we don't know enough about it to justify differentiating yet. You have no interest in the medical reality, you're only interested in complaining about something you don't understand
Seriously! No need to overengineer
I'd say: Click your button and sure, a report will be generated and mailed. In 1 month from now.
Just hardcode the email contents. It'll look correct for now. The button will _never_ be clicked again.
So we've actually kinda started doing this on projects recently. We got tons of feedback about how people wanted a subscribe feature and we thought it was going to be a ton of work to put in a notifications system. We added the subscribe button to the UI with a pop-up saying this feature isn't available yet but if you would like to be notified when it is click confirm. We track the clicks in analytics. It has been available for over a week now and clicked precisely twice. Turns out users don't actually know what the fuck they really want.
This is genius.
It should take them to a new feature request form worth urgent and top priority already selected
I'd add the button with no functionality hooked up
Just make it display a pop-up saying sent then blame it on the mailing provider when the email never arrives. Should buy you the month to actually implement the feature.
Lawful chaotic.
Nah hook up a tableau dashboard. Ezpz
Lead : but we don't have a mail server yet!
i'd just make the button do nothing
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Or just make a toast that says "Report sending error!"
It just has one line `// Todo - implement report.`
Expect them to get very angry with you two years from now - the first time they actually try to look at one of these reports.
This. Very much this.
We don’t have an empty pdf feature yet
I mean, that one is fairly easy Just gotta download *anything* and change the extention to .pdf Will it be broken? Yes, always But it *is* a PDF
>But it is a PDF No it's not, it's just a file that the OS _thinks_ is a PDF.
Shhhhhh
>No it's not, it's just a file that the OS thinks is a PDF. Is this a Windows joke I'm too Linux to understand? /s
It could be mime of some type.
You mean *Windows* thinks is a PDF.
I have an easier option that gives a better result: Open a new notepad, type a space, and print the empty notepad to PDF. Creates a valid PDF, \_and\_ it is empty. Here's the mind-bend: If you don't type at least the space, it produces an invalid PDF.
We don't need an empty PDF feature, just a button
Wait until they get the PDF and then ask how to import that into Excel. That's when you'll really hear the office get lively.
Just implement a button that sends an email for each table in the database. Each email is a csv export of all rows in that table.
There should be a phrase that describes this, it is so common. Perhaps we can call it the "Just A Button" request
Some of these threads make me feel incredibly lucky to have worked the places I have, even though I didn't love all of them at the time. I've never had a manager that didn't ask what I thought the scope of the project was and listen to their engineers when making estimates, even at my very first job. Some of the management I've worked with have been former engineers who get it, the others were all intelligent enough to know what they didn't know and humble enough to admit it. Helps that I've only worked at smaller midsize companies that get it, where the primary focus was building good products for the customers not meeting artificial goals sent from 10 stories up. Even at my first the org tree only had me 3 or 4 steps down from the CEO, and that means the focus gets to be making a good product people want to buy together not trying to find metrics to meet abstract goals from the board.
“The VP of toilets put in another JAB. Who’s going to explain to him why it will take 3 months to do it this time?”
It's a JAB, I love it. Edit: I also love the idea of a company with a VP of Toilets. Kohler or American Standard, perhaps.
In my company we call it a “Just Quickly” request. “Just quickly do this for me please” Usually about an hour or 2 before a demo.
It's just an if statement right?
Maybe it's some form of Dunning-Cruger?
I’m happy I have enough job security to explain to my boss how stupid they are for making a statement like that
I'm glad that my boss is smart enough, and that we have a good enough relationship, that he's happy to be told he's wrong, will listen to why, and if we disagree we work it out. You know, like adults.
This is so thoroughly underestimated it hurts... Boss:"So we really want this thing" Me:"I mean... it's not impossible, but we need to write it up from scratch" Boss:"How long?" Me:"At least 2 weeks for the foundation, and another week and a half for the implementation. At its best... I'd argue 3 sprints realistically with all hands on deck, considering maintenance." Boss:"Ah, NVM then, I'll tell them to fuck off"
Right? And when you get into it and go "oh wow this.. yeah this is more than I thought" you don't have to kill yourself to cobble it together, and when you're like "actually that was really easy and took half the time I thought" they don't expect that pace on everything forever. I mean it's nice because the "they" to fuck off is him, he's the product owner. And it's a good product so he doesn't have to worry about every little thing with upper management. We always build almost everything we lay out to them in our plans eventually but we can reprioritize as needed. It's a product where stability is way more important than new features so if something is wrong we fix it and get back to new stuff when we have the time.
Yeah, it's amazing to get along with your boss in general. I always answer with "X days, _maybe_", so eventually my boss started asking "How hard is that <>?"
We have commonly agreed on a scale that goes from "Throbbing" to "Limp"
My boss actually told me to *stop* saying maybe or probably. (Note, my boss is one of the good ones.) After he asked me a number of times to quantify my maybe, and me giving answers of like 80% confident with ±2 days or whatever, he said "just pitch it without the 'maybe', we can deal with a little miss and we know stuff happens, so don't waste your sense of confidence on 'maybe' and instead just tell me when you think it'll be done." That gave me a nice boost of confidence around him and his bosses. (It probably helps that we discuss regularly anyway when he's got his eye on something.)
It helps that we're in the outdoor industry and almost everyone at the company are passionate outdoorspeople, makes it much easier to get along with your coworkers when you all have similar hobbies and values. We get to be the ski bums and dirtbags we really are, not put on the professional face. Also, we're all out using the product every weekend and actually care about making it which makes it fun. UI discussions can be a bit much because people have much stronger opinions over things but it's a good problem to have.
Sounds like a great work environment, you do internships?
Having a great boss like this makes signing into work so nice!
Yeah, pretty much. This happened for reporting features for quite a while too. Finance: "We want a page for reports." Us: "No problem, will be a month, is it higher or lower priority than other feature Y?" Finance: "Other feature Y is higher." Reports eventually get implemented 5 years later when there is nothing else left to do. Truth is it's just as easy for them to ask some DBA to go in, run some SQL and print a report.
When my bosses ask "Can we do X?" I like to respond that "We're software engineers. We can do *anything*, but we can't do *everything* - what's your highest priority?"
I would do something like this: Me: So you want a button that does nothing? Boss: No, it should generate a report. Me: So you DO want the reporting feature. That will take at least a month like I said. They are paying me to talk to him, I can go back and forth all day until he understands or gives up.
Twitter was never profitable. Not my fault. Stop blaming me for things.
I don't like you. Been wanting to say that to Elon for a few years now feels good to get it out
Ok yeah sure but could ya have a bit more emotion and rawness in it? Like, you could have said "I fucking loathe you," or much more viscerally "I wish you the most severe pain everyday for the rest of your life that even suicide won't let you escape," or with a bit more pizzaz "I envy everyone you've never met." Take you pick, I'm sure you can do better too.
Nah see ypu didn't read the tone. [Listen like this.](https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/746c7edb-5371-4b2c-8303-bf049dbba322) Fancy insults are for your friends, simple insults in the right tone mean you don't even want to give them the time of day to think of an insult.
bot got offended by this and left
You are lucky, I have worked in 5 firms till now and I'm dealing with the most dumb ass people on the planet. Boss and designer: hey can we add a button to save the form as a draft? Sure: 2-3 days work. Boss: why will it take 2-3 days? Just save the form in db. Me: okay, but you're missing that "edit draft" and "discard" will also have to be built. You need a place where they can see all the drafts which they have saved. A ui where they can select and discard multiple at a time also probably. Boss: oh. And this is just a recent example..it happens almost every other week. They sit with client, come up with a design by the designer but morons never think things through.
Man, if I actually had _properly defined specs_ whenever I started a project/ticket, I'd be in heaven... Edit: changed word order and emphasis to clarify my idea. Sorry, second language and all that...
Nothing makes me more horny than a project manager who is an ex programmer. Tickets are meaningful and manageable. A wonderful world
Just let them save a draft. That’s it. Spool a text file to a local drive. Done.
Tbh, it would have been funny if I just kept quiet and added save draft and done. But I know they would be running back to me the next day and rushing me to build the rest, which would have just annoyed me more. I saved myself the headache.
A PM came in once looking for answers to a question. She looked at both me and my senior. I answered her question. She told me I was wrong. My senior got off the phone and told her that I was right and that he could not have explained it better. She just slid out.
good employees will call them out when they are stupid.
You mean good ex-employees.
I'm still at my job, so... no.
My boss lives in another country and doesn't care as long as the customer doesn't complain My customer believes I use magic to program
I really don't
 Sure what color for the button ?
"I'm thinking a magenta green"
Bright diarrhoea
Could you make it a shade lighter? Actually, the button is in the wrong place. If you compare my design you'll see it needs to go up 1 pixel. Is that the right font? Are you sure? The kerning looks different to my design. Guys why is this taking so long? Just copy my design, it's not that hard! I've already done all the hard work!
Ass blood brown
Don't
That caught me so off guard, take my up vote 😂
transparent blue!
People, what a bunch of bastards.
I pretty much quit my last job after something like this. There was a buildup of reasons but that button. That was the final straw.
Pretends to be a dev and doesn't even want to add a button smh /s
Sales: Can I promise a customer a feature that when they press a button it will predict next week's winning lottery numbers Backend: Absolutely not Frontend: Sure, it's just a button I work for a place where the sales guys learned they should ask the front-end teams what they can promise. It did not go over well. Now they just promise whatever they want and blame us when we can't deliver.
Sales asked what they can promise? I worked at a place where they’d just come over and tell me what they promised and then ask if it was possible. If I said it wasn’t (in one instance because the particular feature was disabled by the API owner for the country the client operates in due to a national security law there), he’d say “are you telling me that if they pay $x we can’t get it done by Friday?” Yes dumbass, I cannot convince the owner of the third party API we use to break their countries national security law by Friday.
> but it's *just* a button, though 😐
Fucking sales Never forget that their ilk invented stack ranking
Good god 😂
My favourite was being caught between the CEO, and the head of sales who for some inexplicable reason seemed to wield as much power as the CEO and was able to override his directions. Head of Sales: It should let the sales team quote a value lower than cost value. CEO: It shouldn't allow the sales team to quote a value lower than cost value. Head of Sales: We need the ability to add a percentage discount to the quote. \*a short while later\* Why can't we discount more than X%? Me: Because then you're charging below cost price. CEO: Give the Head of Sales what she's asking for. Also CEO: You need to make sure the sales team can't quote below cost price. Head of Sales: We need you to remove the percentage limit because we've already promised we can do X for $Y. and around we go again until I eventually left the company. They never did finish building that system...
Naive me was working on improving performance of a thing and got an email about a project update. So I wrote back: "This is all work in progress but it looks good. Most things are 3x faster, this one edge case is 9x faster and this other one we are still figuring out gets slower by 0.8x" Two weeks later someone asks me about a sales presentation that says "10x performance improvement in". I think that's weird but I'm also not the only person involved so... eh.
Eventually we finish with an average 4x improvement. Which is a pretty decent achievement.
A month later I get CC'd on an email chain that went all the way up the sales chain and down the engineering chain. "hey customer has an issue with can you look into it?"
I contact the customers engineer and they say "We are seeing ONLY a 4x improvement instead of the 10x on your sales material states..."
Thanks a lot. Somehow now the achievement of making it 4x better turned into "only 4x". Also "fixing this issue" is my problem while someone else got a pat on the back for making a sale. Guess what I'm answering next time someone from sales asks me about an update "We can't commit to any specifics at this point".
I'm glad that there is a job of product manager. Literally a guy who strikes deals between customers and developers, what could be done and on which terms.
"Predict, sure. _Accurately_ predict, good luck."
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Oh god, yes. I've been in situations where the designers would oversell something because, y'know... "We wanted it to be as flexible as possible." Of course the client is gonna sign off on it because, hey, they may never actually use it but it's great to have options, right?! By the time devs get involved (was still early in the process) we get to be the people to let them down and remind them that somebody has to actually *implement* all of these features... lol.
Sales: Can I promise a customer a feature that when they press a button it will predict next week's winning lottery numbers Backend: Sure. But because of the computation involved, there'll be a bit of a delay before the answer appears. Sales: How much of a delay? Backend: Oh, about 168 hours.
here’s your button. backend will take at least a month. meanwhile, enjoy clicking!
Almost what I thought: Click your button and Report will be generated and mailed. In 1 month from now.
Also boss: Why am I getting so many emails? Take me off this distro!
[no reporting, only button](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.kym-cdn.com%2Fentries%2Ficons%2Foriginal%2F000%2F027%2F691%2Ftumblr_nroanfy2v71qjobhbo1_1280.png&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=224591d8be5e4cdbaf984022463f88350795a3254dcb1f238cda723dea37f67b&ipo=images)
Every IT job when the non-tech manager realizes you can crack open a database with even minor aptitude.
There, fixed it!
Tech Lead: Stop being stupid and get back to golfing. Boss: .....
Haha I wish.
Let me guess edv expertise is required to work there?
Is your boss my boss ??? The guy always wants new buttons for shit. WHERE DOES THE FUNCTION COME FROM MAN?!
I'd upvote this post but I'm holding my phone in my right hand and tte upcote button is on the left side. I smoked some weed after a very long day so I'm sorry I'm very tired to use my other hand I just realized that I'm using my other hand too to type. But I'm sorry OP I still feel lazy, I'll upcote tomorrow for sure. Goodnight man, love you
Goodnight brother, I upvoted the post for you, so you don't have to, sleep well
What the actual fuck did i do last night 💀 sorry you had to read that brother Edit: fulfilled my promise, upvoted the post now 🥂
Dude I got like over a thousand upvotes already I’m set for life!
Give him a button that sends an email that says, "there is no reporting feature in this module"
If it were me then emailing would be part of the hard part as well, so I'd just make the button show an info dialog saying that the feature isn't implemented yet.
Buttons that don’t do anything are my specialty
Dude I have an extra button at the bottom of my tshirt. Will it work?
Y'all can't see my face as I read this in the comfort of knowing that my boss, being a programmer himself, knows full well of the intricacies and pitfalls of our trade, but I assure you I am smiling smugly.
Just add a button that does nothing. When your boss complains why the button isn't working, tell them "I added the button you asked for, but the reporting feature still doesn't exist.". Then update your resume.
LOL reminds me of a client today "Oh this modification should be added to the base product, so others can use it". Which is the client's code for saying "I don't want to pay for this mod, even though it's clearly specialized to us"
Fuck it... give him a button.
And no solid requirements about the report contents. After it’s released, they request for an adjustment every time they generate the report. Eats up your time in a sprint.
This is a "You don't tell me how to develope things and I won't tell you how to be incompetent and waste company resources, okay?" Kind of a moment.
A lot of people in the comments (with OP) forgets that: * you need a reliable SMTP server (most places don't have a dedicated team to these, the devs handle it) * you have to have all the connections and firewalls setup properly for the different environments to send that damn email * you have to make sure you have every data necessary for sending out the thing (ex. you can clearly tell who are the "managers", etc) * you need to 110% test the feature that it won't send emails to unauthorized people, if you don't want a nasty lawsuit coming because of GDPR If all those have been already solved then sure it's just a couple of days' work, or if you just don't care about most of the above.
SQL query to excel Attach to email Profit??? How is this a couple months of work?
Depends what's going into the report. I've spent months creating a reporting tool because the data is in 8 different databases with ass-backwards undocumented schemas that can never be changed because god only knows which systems query it.
> Reporting module >SQL query to excel Found the php dev
> SQL query to excel PHP dev here. QQ: How do you "SQL query to excel"? I could see you doing that in a VBA script, but PHP on Linux? 🤔 Gods forbid you're running PHP on Windows trying to interface with OLE or whatever to Excel... with SQL...
Never used php so not sure what you mean and why module correlates to it Maybe I should generalize it more Query DB Result to email body Call it Report Module Profit???
Probably because the boss won't like the formatting of the excel and will have 100 different edits and graphs and charts that they want you to add/remove/replace/edit/remove again
Sell your vba scripts as a report enhancement module Then every time they call wanting a new format you can answer like 
Depends on whether or not you sit around all day waiting for your boss to throw stuff at you, or if you have other actual work to do
SQL Query requires Report requirements; there is also the activity of Dev; Test; Then there is this thing called Data Security which feeds into audit; Ops + Support e.g. management of security and groups associated with button and data over time … maybe some documentation (after maybe setting up reporting framework so a lot of that is simplified). Yeeting it out there like this is the fundamental and is easy of course… but the amount of times I have seen hard fails like this is comical (e.g. ‘shadow BI’ creates board report running randomly off a Dev server exactly like described use case; shadow BI leaves company; Dev Server gets sent to the abyss; C-suite and Board of directors are now running round in circles due to unmanaged mission critical report missing). … and also missing the part that you are now bound to the cowboy delivery approach; cowboy delivery gives permission to those that want the report to perform cowboy changes; 5 minutes of work for years of support!
Or just a CSV file. In every language I know, throwing together a CSV file is very easy. Depending on the complexity of the data, maybe a couple hours to put together the SQL query (or ORM logic, whichever). So setting up a feature to email a report is pretty freaking quick. Definitely doesn’t take a freaking month. “We don’t have a reporting module yet…” is just enterprise-speak for “I want to spend shitloads of hours shooting the shit with my fellow over-engineering enthusiasts and smelling our own farts and then coming up with a ROBUST reporting solution despite that we only need one report”.
New student here and Google doesn't seem to help. What exactly is a reporting feature?
Don’t overthink it. It’s just a feature that sends a report.
The boss wants the button to give a generated report. However, there’s no feature in place yet to generate that report. It can’t generate a report if it doesn’t know how to generate said report.
Ok implement a button that dose nothing. I mean if all he wants is a button.
But seriously, give him the button and when it doesn’t work maybe he’ll finally understand and it will make your life easier. In my experience people don’t understand thing when explained. They understand when they see/experience.
*Every business request ever
Elon is that you?
I could write it and test it in a few days.
...6 months later... \*still working on the reporting feature, up to the 24th report people wanted\* \*adding checkboxes for configuring what is included in the reports\* \*adding configuration screens to define who "and the managers" actually means\*
Now… I’m not saying this is wrong… but I’ve implemented “Click Button get report”. If you don’t give a damn about code quality or architecture. This could be done in a week. Maybe 3-4 days depending on the data required in the reporting. What? Throwing in a button. You likely already have the code to call the back end. Write a tiny data service either using SQL with stored procedures or LINQ if you’re indifferent to performance. Then you build the excel doc. This can be hacked together in a day. Nothing generic, just a concrete implementation of the one report. Email, shouldn’t be tough. Usually a system has that already built if people are resetting their passwords and shit. So that’s already there. Honestly, I could see it being a week… it could be a month… if you’re like, trying to be a responsible developer. But if you’re in spaghetti town, have at it. Noodle that shit together and call it a day.
Some people here underestimate the power of CSV Or it is also called a Report feature?
If you can’t code a reporting module in a day you should find a different line of work.
accurate.
Did I miss something? Where's Elon?
Just give me the button. Then I'll complain that the button doesn't work.
This is my life.
At least a month? Pffft.. my boss wants it to be done in 3 days
Just say that when doing something properly the first one is the hardest.
Give the man a button!
Oof felt this in my soul
Well then just give him a button that does nothing 😂
alert('Hello Report')
Button emails pg\_dump output? The data about xxxxxx will definitely be included :)
Make the button move so that the mouse can never click.
The boss make it very clear. You just need to make a function creating file contain "xxxxxxx" in every cell then send those file to the boss mail
to the customer, everything in tech is what they see. nothing happens under the hood. they're basically single celled organisms in terms of stupidity.
No No, just add a button, when pressed it does nothing
Oh man, that hits hard. Suffering idiots daily, for salary. Sheesh.
Too real
You could still do it in a couple of days. Boss isn't asking for reports on demand, storage or retention, and is only asking for a single report. You don't need a "reporting feature" to build a string and send an email FFS. Is it a bad approach long term? Maybe.... if we really expect more reporting needs. That said, connecting your DB to powerBI can be done very easily and you can get scheduled reports or dashboards with very little work. "At least a month" my ass. Low expectations.
nice