

Tales from the WTF company, part II - drm237
http://szeryf.wordpress.com/2008/03/20/tales-from-the-wtf-company-part-ii/

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phaedrus
This poses an interesting question: if you find yourself in such a position,
working at a company that is doing so many things wrong, what do you do? I can
think of several different things, but which is right?

1\. Easy way out - go with the flow and add your own WTFery to the mix, and
try not to let it destroy your soul.

2\. Fight for what's right at every turn, and stand up to the status quo.

3\. Pay lip service to the status quo, but subtly and sneakily introduce best
practices one at a time. It would be an uphill battle, and hard to fight
backsliding without blowing the undercover nature of your cleanup operation.
In order to do this, you'd have to find the coworkers who still have a bit of
a soul that hasn't been crushed, and get them on your side to help you.

~~~
makecheck
If you aren't in a high position, you really won't be able to swing the ship
directly.

All you can do at lower levels is drop strong hints. This can be done whether
or not you quit (e.g. at an exit interview, assuming there even is one).

~~~
wallflower
The best (yet flawed) analogy I ever heard for a large company. People in a
company are like gears in a complex gearworking. Some gears have more
influence/leverage such that if a big gear (GM) moves a little a lot of
smaller gears may start moving faster. And to cap off the analogy, sometimes a
movement causes some other gears to go backwards. It was from a VP too.

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budu3
Why was he fired? Because he didn't stay overnight?

~~~
radu_floricica
I'd blame the direct manager, Jola (and not just because something like that
happened to me once). The guy from Germany made the big mistake of not hiring
the right people in the first place, so he's completely responsible for the
mess, but as far as the firing goes, it's her decision. His job was to bring
experience, fresh air and make waves - and he was brought in for this purpose
by Johann. At the very least Jola should have held a big long exit interview
with him, since she knew already that the company was in trouble.

~~~
radu_floricica
And another comment: I'm from Romania, and I saw several startups just like
this one, funded by somebody abroad and managed by a local not in IT. They all
were pretty much like the one in the article. I always wondered why they were
such big failures. Obviously, the incompetent local manager, but they failed
too spectacularly for this to be the only reason. Now I start to think this
kind of culture actively rejects competent people. Even if they stay with the
company for a while, they're never promoted to a position where they can use
their skill.

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dustineichler
It's never a good idea to be the new guy to change everything. That's bad tact
especially when you're not sure how things work their. Still, that place
sounded real bad. I'm glad you got outta there.

"f _ck you, f_ ck you, f*ck you, your cool! i'm out!"

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kajecounterhack
I wouldn't want to work there either.

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agentbleu
I am interested in this "It was really easy, though, because this class stored
the data internally in a dictionary but the lookups on it were done by
sequentially iterating through all the keys to find matching one. All I did
was replacing the iteration with normal dictionary lookup."

can someone explain how to do a normal dictionary lookup?

what is that? and is there something similar in PHP?

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
A Python dictionary is a hashtable structure. It's kind of perverse to iterate
over the keys to find the value when you can just do the hash lookup directly.

A PHP array() is also a hashtable structure. The PHP equivalent of the
described code would be to do a foreach() over the array rather than doing an
array[key] lookup.

