Tag: work
-
Read more...
-
Disclaimer: The content of this post does not reflect my current employer, or any of my clients at present. I've pulled details from my work history dating back about 20 years and stitched them into a more-or-less coherent narrative without being specific about any one company or client because, as unfashionable as it may be, I take my NDAs seriously. If you want to get into an IT genitalia measuring contest please close this tab, I don't care and have no interest.
Time was, back in the days of the home 8-bit computers, we were very limited in what we …
Read more...
-
@here grenade - noun phrase - The act of tagging a message @here (meaning, everyone) in a crowded Slack channel (users >= 100), causing everyone who's busy but monitoring to drop whatever they're doing and flame you for bothering them by messaging @here. Normally done by a user trying to get a response to a maximum severity ticket that's been ignored for longer than the SLA.
Example: "PFY threw an @here grenade into the #tech-support channel because the border router was on fire and the admins on call were ignoring their pagers. He got kicked but at least the outage is over."
Read more...
-
Proper channels excise tax - noun phrase - The markup paid on commonplace things when you go through proper channels at work to do something rather than going rogue, buying it yourself and filing an expense report. For example, a flight from Chicago to Boston might cost $176us if you paid for it yourself, but by using your employer's internal processes and vendors the cost of the same flight is closer to $630us.
Read more...
-
Taxonomic debt - noun phrase - The time you spend learning arbitrary jargon at a new job.
Source: Bradford Stephens
Read more...
-
sharkfinning - verb, gerund - Learning something from scratch in an entirely hands-on way, which is to say, "Swimming with the sharks." When you don't know what you're doing or how to do it, but you have a job to do.
Read more...
-
Long time readers are probably wondering where I've been lately. The answer is kind of long and is worth a post all on its own. The short version of the story is, work's been eating me alive lately. This is our busiest time of year and it's been all hands on deck for a couple of weeks now. In point of fact, last week was our quarterly all-hands meeting, where everybody on my team was flown into town for a solid week of meetings. All day, every day. Most of my visible activity lately took the form of parts of …
Read more...
-
onboarding suppository - noun complex - The massive volume of data that a new hire has to assimilate and comprehend before they can understand what they're supposed to be working on to any meaningful extent.
Read more...
-
A couple of weeks back, as part of our continuing education program at my dayjob I ran a hands-on class on locksport, the quasi-science (perhaps art) of picking locks for fun and... well... fun. I'm a security wonk so most of the talks I run have some security content in them, but I wanted to do something that was fairly suitable for everyone (coders and not). So, I got the go-ahead to expense a few more locks and some intro picksets to give away from The Lockpick Shop (no consideration for mentioning or using them, they had what I needed …
Read more...
-
I guess I should wish everybody out there a happy Thanksgiving that celebrates it.
I haven't been around much lately, certainly not as much as I would like to be. Things have been difficult lately, to say the least.
Around this time of year things go completely berserk at my dayjob. For a while I was pulling 14 hour days, capped off with feverishly working three days straight on one of the biggest projects of my career, which not only wound up going off without more than the expected number of hitches but has garnered quite a few kudos from …
Read more...
«
2 / 10
»
