Thursday, July 15, 2021

Work Life: Attentive to detail? Detail-oriented? Why do people who claim this seem to be the worst at it?

Although this one instance today triggered this post, the main reason I post this is because I just have flashbacks to all the other individuals who also claim to be very detail-oriented.

I have worked with some extraordinarily detail-oriented people. I worked under a CEO of a company of over 500 individuals. I met him once. He remembered my name and some random information about what we spoke about over 15 months prior. Others may not have been as good but they were still impressive. And if there was one thing in common for all of them... none of them have ever said that they were detail-oriented.

If anything... perhaps I am biased to the data... I find everyone who has ever told me that they were detail-oriented especially after I tell them to correct a minor detail are the worst detail-oriented people. Always something on the line of "so sorry, I don't usually make these mistakes. I pride myself on being attentive to details.", "please let me know because I am very detail-oriented", or some other BS. They are not even average.

There was one guy that was so terrible that I nearly told my manager that I could no longer work with him because it was taking me longer to edit his work than to do it myself. I was really about to, but his work was so bad that even upper management said enough was enough. This was a lot because I've seen them accept pretty bad works before.

And today's example was a developer who talks a mile-a-minute to cover his inability to stay focused. He "prides" himself on his detail-oriented work. Yet every request has some pretty big blunders like misspelled object names, wrong server, wrong types. What really threw me for a loop was that he misspelled a name twice. One was an obvious catch like "label" vs "lable" but the other was OB210. OB is for outbound, so obviously that should be the letter O, but instead it was a number 0. It took me a little bit of time, and I actually tested that... it took me another hour or two because the "misspelling" of label was the actual spelling.

Yes there is human errors but this guy is up there. Developers have to provide me a list of their changes. Because he appears awesome, he gets a lot of new projects so many of his objects do not exist yet he will provide me a list of stored procedures like... spName, sp_Name, NameWithoutSp, NameWithSpAtEnd_SP, SPName, SpName, [spName], dbo.[spName]. It is just pure crazy how inconsistent this guy is. I can understand other developers do a little of this because the name was already that way but this guy gets to create his own names.

Third example, he created a bunch of destination folders. They have the same structure CustomerName_Type_CarrierName_something. A list of maybe 10 of them, then there is one folder that keeps failing because it is called CustomerName_Type_CarrierName _something. Who puts a space in the folder name? Then not catch it because it also needs to be set inside a configuration file where it is even more obvious there is a space.

Last example is he somehow screws up the SQL stored procedure names in such a way that even SQL gets confused. I use C# SMO to create automatically create scripts and he has one where it creates a name [SpName ] in the textheader but sql actual corrects the name to [SpName]. So this creates an error because the textheader doesn't match the actual name.

I just do not understand how these people have such huge egos and still look impressive.

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