What's the worst place you've worked?

[Gyrofrog]

@TooGoodToCheck_

I said to my self, it’s dumb that we’re redoing stuff so often, when most of the apps we make are so similar to each other. So I wrote some handy code that could be reused, and then I created a way of making individual components that could be reused & bundled together into useful drop-in functionality (and all this in Macromedia Director).

I did something like that, but with BMC Remedy (mainly used for trouble ticketing). I had started with that company (EDIT: GTE, not BMC Remedy) as a help desk technician – not my favorite time with them, but in a couple of years I had inherited the Remedy admin position (and I’ve been doing mostly that ever since, for various employers). At one point, the sales team kept selling tech support to MLM ISPs (i.e. an MLM scheme where the participants sell ISP services). Must’ve been a nightmare for the help desk, what with all the possible different configurations.

Anyway, these contracts came in one after the other, maybe once or twice a week at one point, and it was always an emergency: “we start supporting it tomorrow!” After the second or third of these, I figured that since the GUI and workflow were mostly the same from one project to the next, I might as well build a template. Remedy doesn’t use code, per se – not for development, there’s a GUI for that – but one can generate a definition file and hack away at a few parameters, then import that. So when the project manager came to me with another emergency, I’d have a new one ready in about 90 minutes. More than a few times, though, these “emergencies” never came to fruition, no one ever took a support call and I’d never hear anything more about it.

@TooGoodToCheck_

the Capability Maturity Model

Ah, CMMI – we had that at a subsequent gig. A co-worker pressed me to come up with something approximating formal procedures, which I did (at the expense of whatever else I was supposed to be doing). Then, when she had to do some development work, she complained about having to follow the procedures! She was long gone by the time we got to the SCAMPI appraisal, but as I was on the team, I noted it is a finding: “the person who made me write a procedure complained about having to follow the procedure.” CMMI appraisal wasn’t so bad, but the guy really held our collective hand through it all, and it seemed almost too easy (OTOH it’s easy for me to say, as there had been a lot of other preparatory legwork that I did not have to do).