On Tue, 12 Nov 2013 19:16:28 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

> Basically, for the best part of ten years, all I really did was swap the
> backup tapes once a week.

I seem to recall you did end user support, too.

Jim

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> On 12/11/2013 02:13 PM, Francois Labreque wrote:

>>> At this point, I have to wonder - why am I filling this form out again?
>>> What "goals" or "achievements" can I invent to put in these boxes? How
>>> can I pretend these are related to the company mission?
>>>
>>
>> Did you have any deadlines? Did you meet them?
>>
>> Did you resolve any big problem that was delaying a project?
>>
>> Did you find ways of making XYZ run faster? By how much?
>>
>> Was your code relevant to anything the company did? How so? Would the
>> company have fared any worse without your code?
>
> At my previous place, the answer to all of the above is pretty much "no".
>
> At my current place... well, they pay me to write code all day long. If
> I hadn't written that code, somebody else would have written it, which
> means it would have taken the company slightly longer to get where it is
> now.

See?  You are a pivotal team member without whom the company would be 
missing their milestones.

Writing year end reviews is not that hard!
-- 
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
/*    flabreque    */L)polygon{5,F,F+z,L+z,L,F pigment{rgb 9}}#end union
/*        @        */{P(0,a)P(a,b)P(b,c)P(2*a,2*b)P(2*b,b+c)P(b+c,<2,3>)
/*   gmail.com     */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }

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Orchid Win7 v1 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> On 12/11/2013 03:39 PM, nemesis wrote:
> > Orchid Win7 v1<voi### [at] devnull>  wrote:
> >> Any ideas for
> >> creative ways to say "last year I wrote code, this year I will write
> >> code"? ;-)
> >
> > search Google for latest tech trends and spell it out:  "Last year I wrote all
> > software in EJB.  This year I shall rewrite them as Android activities" etc
>
> Funniest god-damned thing I read all day!
>
> Enterprise Java Beans... LMAO!

good to know I brought to your attention this decade-old tech

and it sounds funny, but really:  how can an enterprise run without hot boiled
java beans? :p

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On 13/11/2013 01:00 AM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Tue, 12 Nov 2013 19:16:28 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>
>> Basically, for the best part of ten years, all I really did was swap the
>> backup tapes once a week.
>
> I seem to recall you did end user support, too.

Yes. Hopefully if you're doing your job well, users won't often need to 
speak to you. ;-)

[There's always wetware issues, of course...]

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> Staff requests equate to people standing outside my door asking me to
> fix it. Perhaps "time to fix" rather than "time to respond" would be a
> better measure. It would still require somebody to actually *measure*
> this stuff.

Most places I've been at use a database to log all this automatically. 
Even if you still want to allow people to turn up at your door, it only 
takes a few seconds to log it into the database. You can then use it as 
a kind of "to-do" list as well if you want.

> Ditto for uptime. Systems were a bit unstable when I joined, but within
> a few years everything was stable enough

Even if the senior management there weren't interested, don't you think 
it would have been nice to be able to produce actual numbers rather than 
"it used to be a bit unstable but it's better now"? If even to only put 
on your CV for future jobs.

> "Implement new system to increase performance" would require that
> somebody actually give me the *money* to perform badly-needed upgrades.
> Never gonna happen. :-P

There's other things, like software solutions to make things easier/more 
efficient to do.

> Basically, for the best part of ten years, all I really did was swap the
> backup tapes once a week.

But you could have done more?

> Not really. There is no long-term plan. We just show up each day and
> mungle on with writing the code. Deadlines don't really exist.

So if you only pretend to work for the next 3 months and don't actually 
write any code, nobody will care? I find that really hard to believe. 
Where does the company get its money from to pay your salary?

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On Wed, 13 Nov 2013 09:07:46 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

> On 13/11/2013 01:00 AM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Tue, 12 Nov 2013 19:16:28 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>>
>>> Basically, for the best part of ten years, all I really did was swap
>>> the backup tapes once a week.
>>
>> I seem to recall you did end user support, too.
> 
> Yes. Hopefully if you're doing your job well, users won't often need to
> speak to you. ;-)
> 
> [There's always wetware issues, of course...]

Of course. :)

But supporting end users is something that directly affects the company 
bottom line - you help them be more productive.  So for something like 
that, "resolved user issues in an average of 30 minutes" or something is 
a specific, measurable result.

Jim

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On 12-11-2013 20:17, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> On 12/11/2013 02:13 PM, Francois Labreque wrote:

>>> At this point, I have to wonder - why am I filling this form out again?
>>> What "goals" or "achievements" can I invent to put in these boxes? How
>>> can I pretend these are related to the company mission?
>>>
>>
>> Did you have any deadlines? Did you meet them?
>>
>> Did you resolve any big problem that was delaying a project?
>>
>> Did you find ways of making XYZ run faster? By how much?
>>
>> Was your code relevant to anything the company did? How so? Would the
>> company have fared any worse without your code?
>
> At my previous place, the answer to all of the above is pretty much "no".
>
> At my current place... well, they pay me to write code all day long. If
> I hadn't written that code, somebody else would have written it, which
> means it would have taken the company slightly longer to get where it is
> now.

That sort of implies that you have no skills that are unique. I find 
that hard to believe. There are probably specific tasks that people turn 
to you to. Either because you do them faster or better. Better either 
because more readable or more thorough.

Some of these things might even be related to Haskell as a spill over. 
Not that you use the language, but you may use techniques borrowed from 
there.



-- 
Everytime the IT department forbids something that a researcher deems
necessary for her work there will be another hole in the firewall.

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>> Basically, for the best part of ten years, all I really did was swap the
>> backup tapes once a week.
>
> But you could have done more?

Not really. Once HQ started to get involved, they seemed to perceive me 
as some kind of incompetent moron [which, oddly, is how I perceived them 
- based on actual *evidence*], and they seemed keen to take as much 
control away from me as possible...

>> Not really. There is no long-term plan. We just show up each day and
>> mungle on with writing the code. Deadlines don't really exist.
>
> So if you only pretend to work for the next 3 months and don't actually
> write any code, nobody will care? I find that really hard to believe.
> Where does the company get its money from to pay your salary?

If it were noticed that I was only pretending to work, I'd probably be 
fired on the spot. That doesn't mean that my work is critical to meeting 
deadlines - it's just that, why would you pay somebody to do nothing?

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>> At my current place... well, they pay me to write code all day long. If
>> I hadn't written that code, somebody else would have written it, which
>> means it would have taken the company slightly longer to get where it is
>> now.
>
> That sort of implies that you have no skills that are unique. I find
> that hard to believe.

Well, we all know how to write code, so...

> There are probably specific tasks that people turn
> to you to. Either because you do them faster or better. Better either
> because more readable or more thorough.

Mostly people turn to me because I happen to be the guy who wrote 
function X, and how does that work again? I could look it up, but it's 
quicker to ask you...

> Some of these things might even be related to Haskell as a spill over.
> Not that you use the language, but you may use techniques borrowed from
> there.

Heh, I still remember the day I wrote some code that parses a particular 
file, and I wrote it as a nice isolated function that takes the file 
contents (which is data) and returns the parsed result (which is data), 
and then a tiny wrapper that actually does file I/O. This makes it 
trivial to test the parsing without having to *physically* create files 
on disk...

...and then my boss ordered me to munge the two together and write tests 
that actually create (and then delete) files on disk. Sometimes I feel 
my talents are totally wasted...

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>> Enterprise Java Beans... LMAO!
>
> good to know I brought to your attention this decade-old tech

You know, I once started reading about WTF a "bean" actually is...

...a decade later, I *still* have no idea! I hypothesise that it's a 
software design fad.

(It still amuses me how every five years or so the industry oscillates 
between thinking that fat clients are best, and then thinking that thin 
clients are best. In truth, both have advantages. But at any given 
moment, the industry claims that one is "the future" and the other is 
"legacy"...)

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