Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2015-07-27 10:45 pm
azurelunatic) wrote2015-07-27 10:45 pm
Video behind gatekeeping: still not documentation.
It was slightly less fuck o'clock in the morning when I shambled in to work on Friday. I was contemplating dropping the heaviest of my things at my desk before going to the departmental all-hands in the auditorium of the executive building, but then I saw Purple shambling forth. "Yo!" I called, and he waited for me to catch up with him, scowling in the not yet burning light of midmorning.
We found seats in the auditorium. I ran to the ladies' room; Purple declined the chance for extra caffeine. I was all set myself. I'd happily gone through the drive-through and got a small breakfast as well as a large coffee, although I would forget about this later. Mercifully, my stomach did not in fact eat itself thanks to this foresight.
The higher-ups had gone over most of the tedious-to-me financials in the previous day's meeting, so there was only a little more that I had to suffer through. The new VP (who is an unassuming, accountant-looking fellow in a button-down and jeans who does not choose to display every inch of his privilege in his bearing when walking among co-workers) then whipped out a presentation about a particular product that my team has had some small involvement with. Now, it is no secret that a recent-ish version of this product went over very poorly with the customer base. It is also no secret that large chunks of the company have been working very hard on making it not terrible. (This one is customer-facing, and not one that I've had the opportunity to get to know well enough to yell about myself.) One of the complaints about the thing is that it does depend in a large part on Flash. The new VP was using some novel presentation software to present this thing about the product. "What does it use?" asked the peanut gallery.
"Flash."
One of the points was some of the customer feedback that has come in, about the pain of using the software. Some were mere pained explanations of how bad it was. One, the last one, was merely an impassioned wail of the name of one of the community manager types. The new VP explained that this was the printable comment in a thread which included a really memorably profane item from which the VP had himself learned a new word. It was, he said, a word that he would have known had he been raised in the UK. The next executive speaker had spent significant amounts of time in the UK, and that word was not new to him.
I was curious, and I had an iPad. A quick interrogation of search engines led me to the single page upon which the hapless community manager's name lay in quite that agonized configuration, and up I scrolled through the thread until I reached the original post, and then I skimmed a little more in-depth back down again. Ah yes. There was the pain, expressed in terms of anatomy; there was the increasingly elaborate description of the ease of use; and that was certainly an effective, if revolting, cap-off. I shared with Purple.
One of the things that makes me happiest about my job is that my department is one of the departments that attempts to make sure that things that make users that angry don't happen. (I joined after this particular release, and that release is still spoken of in hushed tones, in a manner of "let's don't do that again".) I'm aware of the stuff my teammates have been doing, and while it's only part of a large and concerted effort across the business, I have heard some of the differences in the tone of passing commentary. It's nowhere near as upset as I remember things being at certain open source projects in my past.
I had, right backed up against this meeting, yet another meeting about the helldesk software. (The comparison between those user comments and the comments I was likely to make did not escape my mind.) This one was special, since they had one of their experts down out of Portland. I wasn't sure if this meeting was going to run long or what, and emailed the organizer to let her know that I would be on my way but might be late.
My manager had let it be known that there were some members of the team being honored at this meeting, and that was the second-to-last agenda item. I was slightly surprised but very pleased to see the three members of the executive committee of mid-June's conference up on the screen being honored by name, with the rest of the group mentioned collectively. I'd worked hard on that, and it was delightful that we were getting props for it.
That was the last agenda item, so I scrammed for the Q&A. I made a quick detour through the adjacent cafeteria and grabbed a boxed-up salad, as this was going to run through lunch.
To my surprise and pleasure, the lady who had sat across from me at the post-Supreme Court decision lunch (my buddy the admin who'd ditched us for Facebook had particularly asked her to come) was back, temping at the reception desk in the building where I was having the meeting. I'd never been in that wing of the building before, so I needed the map to find both the room, and the elevator to get up to the second floor. Those requirements were quickly accomplished, and I slipped in to the meeting only a few minutes late.
The organizer evidenced delight at seeing me (in person, finally, after a few months of communication). I quickly determined that Beldorion was not in fact in the room, nor was he on the phone. In fact, there was only one other internal customer in the room, someone I'd never met. He, it turned out, worked in one small subset of IT, with a department who were both resolvers and requesters in the helldesk software.
The vaunted expert was in fact in the room in person, down from the Northwest. There was some guy on the phone as well (a manager in a building that had been lately afflicted with Network Woe). That did it for the users. There was some guy who did something, some manager-type lady with an iPhone, someone working on the actual software, the improvement project coordinator, and someone at the other end taking quiet notes.
They went around the table and introduced themselves. One of the guys mentioned that he had been one of the early reviewers of the user-facing UI, and he had called it out as being ugly and a waste of space. The UI had been implemented basically exactly as it had been presented to him. My comment at this juncture must have been a puzzle to transcribe, as it was a literal gibber of rage.
I wasn't taking detailed notes during this meeting, but a few things impressed themselves upon me. It appears that the group is still trying to put in a few quick fixes to the existing user-facing front end in order to make it Less Bad while it is still in place, but they have found enough Wrong with it that there is nothing for it but that the original implementation will need to be torn out and replaced with something that is not a polished sphere of lion dung.
I brought up the fucking horizontal scroll bars, and the guy in one of the corners broke silence enough to go into some of the Fractal Wrong there. He was the guy who'd spoken up about the terrible UI. Apparently you'd think that changing the lack of horizontal scroll bar would involve just one CSS file, as they, you know, cascade. In fact, no. That is hard-coded into every individual CSS file for each page, and there are a zillionty. It was, he said, like peeling an onion of Wrong: each layer was Wrong, and then you would look deeper and there was more Wrong lurking beneath, and the promise of yet more waiting unseen.
The man from IT said something about documentation, and that uncorked a volcano. I had many words to say about the way documentation is sprayed about the company. I mentioned the list of printers, which was last updated in 2013 when I strongarmed the guys in my then-building to update with ours, which was in the old knowledge base software. When I inquired this time, I got a new spreadsheet for my building, to share with our intern. The current documentation says roughly, connect to a print server and peer around, since there are a lot of printers. Thanks.
And then -- then! There is the training site, where you have to first register for the site, get your registration approved as being in-company, then you must register for the course, then you must find the lessons, and only after installing the correct blessed plugins and/or codecs, you can view the video in whatever browser is favored this quarter of the year. Video training, for something that should be done with text documentation. I emitted a stack of profanity that I am not proud of, particularly because it was only a stack of profanity in which I listed out bad words for some long number of seconds, and not in fact a coherently crafted single obscene structure building to some form of rhetorical point.
A silence descended upon the room briefly after I ceased letting fly. Then:
"So, different learning styles."
"Well! I don't think that will be going as a front page quote, 'Azure says it is ----'!"
"Is this being recorded?"
"I think maybe we won't have to show this part to the CIO..."
(Maybe I was slightly proud.)
Between the guy on the phone, the IT guy in the room, and me, we responded to the expert's questions, and essentially the users require a whole bunch of stuff exposed that normal users don't, because the process of getting stuff done in this company is so very "I know a guy" and also broken, such that we are accustomed to things getting lost and forgotten and dismissed on no particular reason, and thus we need to take responsibility for following up and providing leverage against each other. We also use the ticketing database for a change log, and making things hidden had messed up this use case (in the absence of better change logging for internal infrastructure).
"So, if you were to wake up tomorrow, and everything was better, how would you know it?" the lady with the iPhone asked.
My top two were easily copyable links to tickets which would Just Work, and of course obliteration of the lack of horizontal scrollbars. The IT guy's were somewhat similar.
The imported expert put his pen down. "You mean to tell me that after all these things that you've told me about how stuff here works, what would make the most difference to your lives is basically cosmetic??!!??!?!"
I shrugged. "Well, we can work around everything else."
He stared at us. "Endlessly resilient," he said. "Virtual Hammer employees are endlessly, singlemindedly resilient."
They're planning to use the complaints about the current thing as requirements that the new one can't be let to violate, but they're still coming up with the design for the new thing.
What with everything, I never did get a chance to get my lunch. I figured I'd head back to my desk and do that while looking at my email, or maybe I'd get lucky and overlap with Purple's crew out in the courtyard. By this point it was 1pm. I headed back downstairs (not before filing a ticket about the overstretched video cord in the conference room) and intended to extend an invitation to the cute temp receptionist to drop by the rainbow table at the beer bash if she was strapped for something to do when she got off work.
So we chatted for a while. And I showed her some refinements in the site map software. And then Mr. Wizard Beard came through. And the IT Guy came back through and we debriefed from the meeting. He told me about a conversation with the people who had been implementing it:
"This list of services we provide -- most of it makes sense, but this one thing here, that's a file we edit in the course of doing other things, that's not a service we provide. It doesn't make sense."
"We're not here to make sense."
Thus the item stayed in the list.
The guy reassured me that People Had Been Sacked, and he was fairly confident that they had been the correct people sacked. Also, "Shadow IT" at this company was off the chain. Most places have some, but this place has a lot, and members of Actual IT are rarely particularly eager to actively assist you in the process.
The cute temp receptionist and I got onto the topic of confidence, and being up-front when you didn't know a thing, especially while doing tech support. She kept dismissing herself as not being particularly tech-savvy, but she then mentioned how she was basically the lab monitor for a past workplace's computer pool, and her strategy of googling anything she was uncertain on how to do. I told her that in fact this was a great foundation for a technical career.
She did not particularly enjoy it when she called helpdesk when she didn't know how to do something and got condescension. Due in large part to readingtim's meta on some of the patterns of arrogance and abuse in tech, I was able to point out that a lot of the people who are attracted to tech as a career are people who have been trained their whole life to value Knowing Things, and also (the bad part) to hold all forms of ignorance in contempt, even when it is the completely normal lack of knowledge of someone who has never been trained in the thing and doesn't even have the background knowledge to know what would make a sensible starting query to a search engine. She wrote down "xkcd lucky ten thousand" as a future possible weapon to use against some of those asshats.
Eventually I did get a good look at the time and I needed to rush back to my proper end of campus.
I got a few bites of my salad before I had to run off to help set up for the beer bash. Mr. Sub-tle's Apprentice was running the table with me, as Mr. Facebook's last day had been last week or something. I grabbed the first part of my gear, got into a discussion about gender and sexual orientation with Mr. Sub-tle's Apprentice (apparently knowing about the existence of non-binary pronouns means "you know a LOT about this stuff!"), got out of the discussion in order to get the rest of the gear, and then came back clad in my Team Rainbow shirt with my blue-purple-pink scarf array, carrying more rainbow things and three printouts of the wikipedia page on Rainbow Tables the cryptography technique.
The Women In The Workplace group saw my extra rainbows and evidenced envy. So I let them borrow the plastic strip curtain banner. It was bright and lovely in the tree behind their table.
The Guy who'd Gone to Facebook dropped back in to make sure we were doing well. It was good to see him!
Throughout the evening, several people saw the Rainbow Tables papers and suddenly exploded into laughter, as it is a terrible, terrible pun. Other people were very confused and I had to explain that they had nothing to do with each other, just that this is a table we're sitting at, it's covered with rainbows, and thus including information on Rainbow Tables is a terrible terrible pun.
phone and the new guy both busted out giggling.
The new-ish scruffy Brit in the office with the suspiciously gendered bananas was surprised by the existence of the club, and also surprised by the ratio in #cupcake (currently perhaps 3:7, though I may have lost count what with new people and bots).
I was paying half attention to the table and half attention to the little circle of #cupcake behind me, so I kept tuning in and out of the conversation. It had started at https://what-if.xkcd.com/126/ and there was some deep discussion of how you would keep birds from going into the staircase, how you would take care of bodily functions, how you would deal with the effects of butter on the digestion, what you would drink, and many other things. phone won the discussion when he said: "In case of space fire, don't take the space elevator. Take the space stairs."
The group eventually moved to the fire pit. After closing down and cleaning up, I followed, and more delightful conversation ensued.
Purple and Ms. Antisocialest Butterfly chatted on the phone; I approved their dinner ideas. Purple gave the scruffy Brit a lift closer to home on his way to dinner.
At dinner, I texted Mr. Facebook to get the cute temp receptionist's name.
Some of the dinner discussion was called to a halt as a basically 7-foot cop walked past in the restaurant. Mr. Antisocial Butterfly dubbed him The Mountain.
Next time Tif and I are down thattaway for dinner, I may call Purple to see what he's up to. :)
We found seats in the auditorium. I ran to the ladies' room; Purple declined the chance for extra caffeine. I was all set myself. I'd happily gone through the drive-through and got a small breakfast as well as a large coffee, although I would forget about this later. Mercifully, my stomach did not in fact eat itself thanks to this foresight.
The higher-ups had gone over most of the tedious-to-me financials in the previous day's meeting, so there was only a little more that I had to suffer through. The new VP (who is an unassuming, accountant-looking fellow in a button-down and jeans who does not choose to display every inch of his privilege in his bearing when walking among co-workers) then whipped out a presentation about a particular product that my team has had some small involvement with. Now, it is no secret that a recent-ish version of this product went over very poorly with the customer base. It is also no secret that large chunks of the company have been working very hard on making it not terrible. (This one is customer-facing, and not one that I've had the opportunity to get to know well enough to yell about myself.) One of the complaints about the thing is that it does depend in a large part on Flash. The new VP was using some novel presentation software to present this thing about the product. "What does it use?" asked the peanut gallery.
"Flash."
One of the points was some of the customer feedback that has come in, about the pain of using the software. Some were mere pained explanations of how bad it was. One, the last one, was merely an impassioned wail of the name of one of the community manager types. The new VP explained that this was the printable comment in a thread which included a really memorably profane item from which the VP had himself learned a new word. It was, he said, a word that he would have known had he been raised in the UK. The next executive speaker had spent significant amounts of time in the UK, and that word was not new to him.
I was curious, and I had an iPad. A quick interrogation of search engines led me to the single page upon which the hapless community manager's name lay in quite that agonized configuration, and up I scrolled through the thread until I reached the original post, and then I skimmed a little more in-depth back down again. Ah yes. There was the pain, expressed in terms of anatomy; there was the increasingly elaborate description of the ease of use; and that was certainly an effective, if revolting, cap-off. I shared with Purple.
One of the things that makes me happiest about my job is that my department is one of the departments that attempts to make sure that things that make users that angry don't happen. (I joined after this particular release, and that release is still spoken of in hushed tones, in a manner of "let's don't do that again".) I'm aware of the stuff my teammates have been doing, and while it's only part of a large and concerted effort across the business, I have heard some of the differences in the tone of passing commentary. It's nowhere near as upset as I remember things being at certain open source projects in my past.
I had, right backed up against this meeting, yet another meeting about the helldesk software. (The comparison between those user comments and the comments I was likely to make did not escape my mind.) This one was special, since they had one of their experts down out of Portland. I wasn't sure if this meeting was going to run long or what, and emailed the organizer to let her know that I would be on my way but might be late.
My manager had let it be known that there were some members of the team being honored at this meeting, and that was the second-to-last agenda item. I was slightly surprised but very pleased to see the three members of the executive committee of mid-June's conference up on the screen being honored by name, with the rest of the group mentioned collectively. I'd worked hard on that, and it was delightful that we were getting props for it.
That was the last agenda item, so I scrammed for the Q&A. I made a quick detour through the adjacent cafeteria and grabbed a boxed-up salad, as this was going to run through lunch.
To my surprise and pleasure, the lady who had sat across from me at the post-Supreme Court decision lunch (my buddy the admin who'd ditched us for Facebook had particularly asked her to come) was back, temping at the reception desk in the building where I was having the meeting. I'd never been in that wing of the building before, so I needed the map to find both the room, and the elevator to get up to the second floor. Those requirements were quickly accomplished, and I slipped in to the meeting only a few minutes late.
The organizer evidenced delight at seeing me (in person, finally, after a few months of communication). I quickly determined that Beldorion was not in fact in the room, nor was he on the phone. In fact, there was only one other internal customer in the room, someone I'd never met. He, it turned out, worked in one small subset of IT, with a department who were both resolvers and requesters in the helldesk software.
The vaunted expert was in fact in the room in person, down from the Northwest. There was some guy on the phone as well (a manager in a building that had been lately afflicted with Network Woe). That did it for the users. There was some guy who did something, some manager-type lady with an iPhone, someone working on the actual software, the improvement project coordinator, and someone at the other end taking quiet notes.
They went around the table and introduced themselves. One of the guys mentioned that he had been one of the early reviewers of the user-facing UI, and he had called it out as being ugly and a waste of space. The UI had been implemented basically exactly as it had been presented to him. My comment at this juncture must have been a puzzle to transcribe, as it was a literal gibber of rage.
I wasn't taking detailed notes during this meeting, but a few things impressed themselves upon me. It appears that the group is still trying to put in a few quick fixes to the existing user-facing front end in order to make it Less Bad while it is still in place, but they have found enough Wrong with it that there is nothing for it but that the original implementation will need to be torn out and replaced with something that is not a polished sphere of lion dung.
I brought up the fucking horizontal scroll bars, and the guy in one of the corners broke silence enough to go into some of the Fractal Wrong there. He was the guy who'd spoken up about the terrible UI. Apparently you'd think that changing the lack of horizontal scroll bar would involve just one CSS file, as they, you know, cascade. In fact, no. That is hard-coded into every individual CSS file for each page, and there are a zillionty. It was, he said, like peeling an onion of Wrong: each layer was Wrong, and then you would look deeper and there was more Wrong lurking beneath, and the promise of yet more waiting unseen.
The man from IT said something about documentation, and that uncorked a volcano. I had many words to say about the way documentation is sprayed about the company. I mentioned the list of printers, which was last updated in 2013 when I strongarmed the guys in my then-building to update with ours, which was in the old knowledge base software. When I inquired this time, I got a new spreadsheet for my building, to share with our intern. The current documentation says roughly, connect to a print server and peer around, since there are a lot of printers. Thanks.
And then -- then! There is the training site, where you have to first register for the site, get your registration approved as being in-company, then you must register for the course, then you must find the lessons, and only after installing the correct blessed plugins and/or codecs, you can view the video in whatever browser is favored this quarter of the year. Video training, for something that should be done with text documentation. I emitted a stack of profanity that I am not proud of, particularly because it was only a stack of profanity in which I listed out bad words for some long number of seconds, and not in fact a coherently crafted single obscene structure building to some form of rhetorical point.
A silence descended upon the room briefly after I ceased letting fly. Then:
"So, different learning styles."
"Well! I don't think that will be going as a front page quote, 'Azure says it is ----'!"
"Is this being recorded?"
"I think maybe we won't have to show this part to the CIO..."
(Maybe I was slightly proud.)
Between the guy on the phone, the IT guy in the room, and me, we responded to the expert's questions, and essentially the users require a whole bunch of stuff exposed that normal users don't, because the process of getting stuff done in this company is so very "I know a guy" and also broken, such that we are accustomed to things getting lost and forgotten and dismissed on no particular reason, and thus we need to take responsibility for following up and providing leverage against each other. We also use the ticketing database for a change log, and making things hidden had messed up this use case (in the absence of better change logging for internal infrastructure).
"So, if you were to wake up tomorrow, and everything was better, how would you know it?" the lady with the iPhone asked.
My top two were easily copyable links to tickets which would Just Work, and of course obliteration of the lack of horizontal scrollbars. The IT guy's were somewhat similar.
The imported expert put his pen down. "You mean to tell me that after all these things that you've told me about how stuff here works, what would make the most difference to your lives is basically cosmetic??!!??!?!"
I shrugged. "Well, we can work around everything else."
He stared at us. "Endlessly resilient," he said. "Virtual Hammer employees are endlessly, singlemindedly resilient."
They're planning to use the complaints about the current thing as requirements that the new one can't be let to violate, but they're still coming up with the design for the new thing.
What with everything, I never did get a chance to get my lunch. I figured I'd head back to my desk and do that while looking at my email, or maybe I'd get lucky and overlap with Purple's crew out in the courtyard. By this point it was 1pm. I headed back downstairs (not before filing a ticket about the overstretched video cord in the conference room) and intended to extend an invitation to the cute temp receptionist to drop by the rainbow table at the beer bash if she was strapped for something to do when she got off work.
So we chatted for a while. And I showed her some refinements in the site map software. And then Mr. Wizard Beard came through. And the IT Guy came back through and we debriefed from the meeting. He told me about a conversation with the people who had been implementing it:
"This list of services we provide -- most of it makes sense, but this one thing here, that's a file we edit in the course of doing other things, that's not a service we provide. It doesn't make sense."
"We're not here to make sense."
Thus the item stayed in the list.
The guy reassured me that People Had Been Sacked, and he was fairly confident that they had been the correct people sacked. Also, "Shadow IT" at this company was off the chain. Most places have some, but this place has a lot, and members of Actual IT are rarely particularly eager to actively assist you in the process.
The cute temp receptionist and I got onto the topic of confidence, and being up-front when you didn't know a thing, especially while doing tech support. She kept dismissing herself as not being particularly tech-savvy, but she then mentioned how she was basically the lab monitor for a past workplace's computer pool, and her strategy of googling anything she was uncertain on how to do. I told her that in fact this was a great foundation for a technical career.
She did not particularly enjoy it when she called helpdesk when she didn't know how to do something and got condescension. Due in large part to reading
tim's meta on some of the patterns of arrogance and abuse in tech, I was able to point out that a lot of the people who are attracted to tech as a career are people who have been trained their whole life to value Knowing Things, and also (the bad part) to hold all forms of ignorance in contempt, even when it is the completely normal lack of knowledge of someone who has never been trained in the thing and doesn't even have the background knowledge to know what would make a sensible starting query to a search engine. She wrote down "xkcd lucky ten thousand" as a future possible weapon to use against some of those asshats. Eventually I did get a good look at the time and I needed to rush back to my proper end of campus.
I got a few bites of my salad before I had to run off to help set up for the beer bash. Mr. Sub-tle's Apprentice was running the table with me, as Mr. Facebook's last day had been last week or something. I grabbed the first part of my gear, got into a discussion about gender and sexual orientation with Mr. Sub-tle's Apprentice (apparently knowing about the existence of non-binary pronouns means "you know a LOT about this stuff!"), got out of the discussion in order to get the rest of the gear, and then came back clad in my Team Rainbow shirt with my blue-purple-pink scarf array, carrying more rainbow things and three printouts of the wikipedia page on Rainbow Tables the cryptography technique.
The Women In The Workplace group saw my extra rainbows and evidenced envy. So I let them borrow the plastic strip curtain banner. It was bright and lovely in the tree behind their table.
The Guy who'd Gone to Facebook dropped back in to make sure we were doing well. It was good to see him!
Throughout the evening, several people saw the Rainbow Tables papers and suddenly exploded into laughter, as it is a terrible, terrible pun. Other people were very confused and I had to explain that they had nothing to do with each other, just that this is a table we're sitting at, it's covered with rainbows, and thus including information on Rainbow Tables is a terrible terrible pun.
phone and the new guy both busted out giggling.
The new-ish scruffy Brit in the office with the suspiciously gendered bananas was surprised by the existence of the club, and also surprised by the ratio in #cupcake (currently perhaps 3:7, though I may have lost count what with new people and bots).
I was paying half attention to the table and half attention to the little circle of #cupcake behind me, so I kept tuning in and out of the conversation. It had started at https://what-if.xkcd.com/126/ and there was some deep discussion of how you would keep birds from going into the staircase, how you would take care of bodily functions, how you would deal with the effects of butter on the digestion, what you would drink, and many other things. phone won the discussion when he said: "In case of space fire, don't take the space elevator. Take the space stairs."
The group eventually moved to the fire pit. After closing down and cleaning up, I followed, and more delightful conversation ensued.
Purple and Ms. Antisocialest Butterfly chatted on the phone; I approved their dinner ideas. Purple gave the scruffy Brit a lift closer to home on his way to dinner.
At dinner, I texted Mr. Facebook to get the cute temp receptionist's name.
Some of the dinner discussion was called to a halt as a basically 7-foot cop walked past in the restaurant. Mr. Antisocial Butterfly dubbed him The Mountain.
Next time Tif and I are down thattaway for dinner, I may call Purple to see what he's up to. :)
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Just c&ping that so I can admire it again.
Your helldesk meeting sounds epic.
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There is a video clip from the MythBusters which should accompany the mention of a polished sphere of lion dung. The thing is remarkably high gloss for a polished turd.
It was an epic meeting and I sort of wish I had had a recorder about my person for it, if only to capture the bad words.
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I feel this pain
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"I know a guy" hella does not scale, but "this can introduce me to the guy" is more helpful.
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