InsideTech

When my father died, I told my employer at the time that I would need some time off.  That was over the weekend.  The showing was on a monday, the funeral was on a tuesday.  The monday afternoon (day of the showing and the first workday after I had alerted my employer to my impending absence) the boss calls me on the phone wanting to know if I was coming in that day.

I sighed heavily then hung the phone up.  He called again tuesay, wednesday, and thursday.  I returned to work friday out of aggrivation.

Same employer: Coworker wrecked his motorcycle over a weekend.  He couldn't walk.  My boss called him the following monday and when he was told that he couldn't come to work because he couldn't walk (couldn't drive) my boss went and picked him up.  I mean afterall, us programmers just type, right?

I was fired from my last job because I was in divorce court instead of at a meeting I knew nothing about to demo a product that was not finished and full of bugs to a company that had continuously ignored my pleas for them to fix their end of the webservices connection so it would work.

Good times.

You know, its times like that that my smarta$$ mouth gets me in more trouble than its worth because instead of just sucking it up, I inevitably spit out some quick / witty retort about how utterly rediculous and nonsensical those types of things are and right there, it hits the fan.

I don't see it as a flaw, just something that needs a bit more polishing.

I was once charged with creating an online payment system for a customer so that they could take credit card payments with our web application.

After doing the needed research (PCIDSS) I drew up a plan to implement this into our application.  Once done, I took this plan to the boss, and after the usual give and take on design standards, the one pivotal aspect we couldn't aggree to was the customer's inability to take a payment without an internet connection.

The application we had also had an offline mode, where the user could use a part of the application to alter data while offline on their laptops, then upload the data back to the server when complete.  Now, so we are clear, what I was being asked to do was to SAVE payment data to and end user machine so it could be trasmited during the normal checkin process. 

The data to be stored included:

1.) Full track data.

2.) PIN Number (Debit Only) -- which he demanded be keyed in by the user instead of the cardholder via normal keyboard

3.) CVV Number

I refer the interested person here.

When I explained that I couldn't do that, I was told that I would either comply, or work elsewhere.

Was this voluntary or mandatory that he returned so quickly?  Either way it was stupid. 

I too knew someone who had to leave work early to take his wife to the hospital when she went into labor.  This action was held against him as well.  I did tell you about my two ex co-workers that were taken from work to a hospital via ambulance and it was held against them for leaving work early.  One had a mild stroke, the other chest pains.

ZeroDayExploit says ...

I too knew someone who had to leave work early to take his wife to the hospital when she went into labor.  This action was held against him as well.  I did tell you about my two ex co-workers that were taken from work to a hospital via ambulance and it was held against them for leaving work early.  One had a mild stroke, the other chest pains.

was this a call center? it sounds like 2 I used to work for.

Bosses that say one thing and do another...par for the course maybe ?  :)

I was hired on once while in college.  Was asked to cut back on college so I could work more.  Gave up multiple weekends with my kids (divorced so those weekends count double for me) and then, on the occasion when I made it into work at 9ish AM (one employee never showed before 2pm, another never before noon, and another sometime between 11am and noon -- no real schedule at that place) I was chewed up for an hour because my quality of work was slipping.  Mind you, the reason I was "late" is because I had 3 hours sleep the previous weekend (All weekend in a datacenter 150 miles from home) and the following monday (day previous to this) up all night working on a webservice connection that was under a deadline.  I was just too tired to be a smartass, too tired to care, and just slept with my eyes open through that one.  lol

People always wonder why the good ones leave.  Better than going "postal" on someone.

@ Zero Day it was mandatory.  She is still doing good though.  I agree the companies here in San Antonio and gov. business will hire for 90 days then fire you.  I have had many friends lose jobs that way.  I remember working at Sears when they cut out their full time staff.  If you didnt' cut back to part time they made your life hell.  Then you would just have to quit.  Sad sorry state this world had become.

You know the saddest part was that I really wanted to see the application succede.  Seriously, I missed the personal time that I was losing, or the time I lost with my kids, but I pushed myself pretty hard to make things happen, too.

That's what really peeved me when my not being available 24/7 because of a few personal issues got me into trouble, or when I would get lectured for coming in 20 minutes late after being up all night in a datacenter troubleshooting a PC because nobody listened to me the first time.  Every "mistake" I made was thrown in my face on a constant basis while the mistakes of everyone else where just overlooked.

I still remember the time one of my coworkers decided, on a whim, to implement ESXi for our development servers which was a fantastic idea in my opinion.  The problem was that he did it before a major demo (run from our dev servers) and didn't bother to test our new virtual servers' connectivity.  The next morning I got blitzed from the boss for something I knew nothing about and had to fix.  Guess who didn't man up and say that *I* had nothing to do with it.

We also had huge problems moving new code to our production environment.  Nothing was versioned and everything was moved line by line / file by file.  Mistakes and downtime were constant with every moveover, and not just bugs we missed either.  This stuff was entirely avoidable.  So one weekend I sat up the whole weekend versioning 10 year old code and setting up a system to migrate dev code into production error free that, to this day, has never resulted in any downtime for their production servers.  We had 1 guy that refused to learn how to do an svn co command via command line on the servers (or even via a third party svn gui interface) so I caught all manner of hell when the project was completely sanctioned from the beginning.  Instead of seeing a project that COMPLETELY removed the errors and downtime we had they saw it as me being the only person who could move code up.  Well, that was only b/c they didn't care to learn to do:

"svn update <directory>"

VERY few higher ups can say their sorry.  It's like you should already know, so they don't have to say it.  Reminds me of being in grade school, or junior high. 

Sad to say but I had an informal relationship with my principals (we moved a lot)  I would get to have snacks with them.... and lunch.

Dad was Navy. 

That stinks.  They sould have been able to see that you were "overquaified" via your resume.  I think is what companies mean when they say "over qualified" is "we aren't willing to pay you a living wage."

I guess it all depends what part of the country you live in.  Here there are ligit reasons for being overqualified, but for the most part it is because they don't want to pay a living wage.  I had a co-worker with 16 years of technical experience.  When he was pushed  into early retirement he went job hunting only to find a job this month, (he got pushed into early retirement in January.)  He would be interviewed and then be told he was over qualified after being told that his qualifications seem to meet what the company was looking for.  He finally was offered a position, part time, out of his field at over $8 less an hour than he was making.

I have been out of work since July and have been running into roadblocks trying to get unemployment.  I have had a couple of offers for an interview, but they were in some cases almost 1,000 miles away.  I don't have the money to take that risk and I can't relocated at this time either.  I have my resume posted on Monster, Careerbuilder and a local company.  I am getting notifications from Careerbuilder but not from the other two.  I am suprised that Monster hasn't yielded any results at all, so not like their reputation.  Of course of the offers I am receiving most are scams like, "for an investment of $1,000 you can start your home business."   Yea right.  Anyway, good luck on your search.