Quitting The Day Job

Reasons We Want To Quit

New category here, thought we’d share with you our own personal day job “experiences” that help reinforce the reasons that Desk Coder and I want to quit our day jobs.  Hey, blogging is suppose to be therapeutic isn’t it (ok maybe not, but it’s cheaper than actual therapy)?

But you don’t just want to read about us….share your experiences with us….

Me First!

My wife works for a Human Resources Consulting company.  They send out frequent newsletters on various subjects.  Recently she sent me a snippet from one, from an article on “How to make Yourself More Valuable at Your Job”.

She sent me a line that stated “…offer to test the company’s website.”  And she followed it with the comment of “you should do this.”

I am sure the the people in the cubby-holes around me heard me laughing out loud.  I took a couple of moments to let the humor subside and responded to her.

Part of my job had been to “test the company website”.  Well, not exactly.  My job was to “code review” the applications going out.  This was part of our compliance with the assinine Sarbanes-Oxley regulations.  When I did my code reviews however (OH I will post on these later), I would always bring up the web applications and work through them a bit.  This was to make sure that they matched up to the changes in the code and were supposedly doing what they should.

As I did these application reviews, I constantly ran into issues with the applications.  I ran into errors and faulty programming.  I ran into functionality and flow issues.  I ran into huge usability issues.  When I say huge I mean HUGE.  The biggest problems I had was usability.  These applications were absolutely horrid in that area.

BUT!  These code reviews were always “ceremonial”.  These applications ALWAYS moved forward.  In fact the Project Manager always sited the fact that there were no errors that keep the applications from “running”.

The final straw for me came when a new application was rolling out.  I did my review and set my my usual list of issues.   But this application was a “model for future development”.  So it went out.  AND the Vice President of our department sent an email congratulating the project manager and encouraging all of us to look at the new application.  He included a screen shot of the application, a screen shot that had some of the horrible items in it that I had pointed out.

I immediate set him and the Application Manager an email saying “this is terrible and looks horrible and there are multiple issues with it!”   I never heard anything back….ever.

I asked the Application Manager to take me off of code reviews for that group.

I refused to ever look at their applications again.