RANT: Atlassian Jira has nothing out of the box to filter basic admin search/filter

 As of 2025-09-05, there is nothing out-of-the-box with Jira to allow someone to find and identify an item with open sub-items or parent-items.

Scenario 1

There are several stories that were canceled that have sub-tasks that were not canceled. If you go to the default dashboard for yourself, all those sub-tasks still show up on your list. There is no way to find all the sub-tasks that have a parent-item that is Cancelled, Closed, or Done.

Scenario 2

I want to find stories that are not Cancelled, Closed, or Done that have all sub-tasks that are all Cancelled, Closed, or Done.

RANT: Colleagues/Employees misspelling company/customer names in "formal" places

As I live life at the same pace as everyone else on Earth, I am slowly learning that I am quite different from most people if not at the very least average people. But, I am still not sure why.

Here is one that is to me seem to be a very small and simple example that I think most or at least average people should already be able to do.

Spelling customer company names correctly seems simple enough. We have a database that has the correct spelling. Many documents have the correct spelling. Yet, somehow, in our main reporting system, it is spelled differently.

Please bear with me as I think I am partially lenient (maybe not super lenient) of things that may cause such misspellings. I am likely guilty of such practices in commonplaces like an instant message or maybe even an informal email. 

I can understand a quick message here or there.

I can understand in live scenarios like a presentation or in training.

I can also understand if a customer name is somewhat complicated.

Today's straw that broke the camel back was the name Macy's. Ok, so I can understand maybe Macys being used instead of Macy's because the apostrophe causes issues in certain scenarios. In our database, it has references to Macy's, Macys, and MCY. Yet in our customer facing and main reporting system, this person spelled it Macy. This variant is not used anywhere else. And this bothers me.

What also bothers me is that there is also a folder name customers. And this same person did not use that folder, so now we have two folders Customers/Macys (spelled correctly) and just Macy with no customer.

Now because of this, other users are starting to use the parent folder for other customers. So later, there is now TheGAP, while we already have a folder Customers/GAP. In the database and everywhere, it is just referenced as GAP.

The worst part is that I cannot fix any of this because it is published and officially used besides that I have no control in this area. It just eats at me each time I see it.

And so many questions come up like who reviewed this change? Why is there no checks? Why is no one else complaining? And so the world goes on anyways and here I am wasting time on what I guess is trivial to everyone else.

I have also seen things in stored procedure names, application names, requirement documents, tickets, etc. This is not because English is their primary language or US is not the culture they grew up in or due to age. If anything, English-only speaking, born and raised in the US seem to be the worst at this than other people.

I guess this is insignificant BUT WHY?

Like reviewing code and I saw someone put in an extra case to remove an asterisk to fix a function that used regular expressions to filter out special characters. Then there were other lines to remove other symbols that look like the regex was not filtering. In about a minute, I saw they used a dash in the regex string which is obvious the original developer thought it meant to keep dash but regex uses dash as a shortcut for everything in between the prior and next character. For example, a-z is all lower-case characters in the English alphabet. So )-=, means all characters between ) and = in the ascii table. The asterisk is in that range, thus why it was kept.

This means that multiple developers and multiple reviewers over the span of multiple years kept overlooking this "bug" in this function. HOW?? WHY??

And of course, someone used this function in such a way that it requires this "bug" because it needs that special character in that range because someone decided to also use it on a date string. So now we have a function called "RemoveSpecialCharacters" that removes only a select characters and the white-list filter is hard-coded in that function. Why not at least pass a parameter of exceptions? WHY?

Now my brain just simplifies all these issues into just a bundle of HOWs and WHYs with no relevant information as if repeating it will just numb my brain into caring about the original problem.

RANT: Why Scrum / Agile Does NOT Work for non-IT companies

My brain is just hurting right now. I can no longer take just how dumb people are in general. It just boggles my mind how little people just use their brains. And this is why I believe agile just cannot work in non-IT companies.

How to Make Agile Work

Just say you are doing agile. Use agile terminology. Use words like scrum, daily stand-up, retrospective / post mortem, acceptance criteria, etc. Say it with confidence, no one really knows what they mean. And those who do, just speak louder and interrupt them.

Breakdown three month waterfall processes into two week waterfall processes (but call them sprints). You cannot do a TRUE sprint because the other teams are not dedicating to the who agile process. If you need to show delivery, say that QA is taking too long. Deliver quickly with terrible quality. Make sure to blame others for the problems. Worst-case say there was too much scope creep.

Do daily stand-up call, a daily call that is supposed to be 15 minutes as 30 minutes. Don't worry what that means, just say it is a short status call. It is never short nor a status call. It will always go over 30 minutes because there is always someone who does not know how to summarize their status.

Want to be a scrum master? Just say you are one. No need for certification nor all the testing and training. Everyone I worked with who had one are absolutely clueless. Sure some try, but no one really understands. Why because none of them are engineers of any sort. They are just PMs that couldn't make it to be a PM. Or worse, they are engineers or analysts that couldn't make it.

If you want to do something your way, you HAVE to "act" dumber (or be yourself whichever is dumber) than the other person. There is no logic or reason that can persuade the other person especially if the person is actually smart. What persuades a logical person from even trying is to make them think that you are too dumb to be reasoned with. They may say something like "that will save you on step" and you should respond "I want to add a useless comment" but don't say useless... because you have to show the managers that you are doing something even if that something is nothing but you cannot say nothing... so nothing is something. Or, just agree but continue working as if you never had that conversation.

Even if you have the power to persuade people and get them to understand the process, DO NOT DO IT. You are just going to inflate the director's ego. He was just guessing stuff but now that he saw that it works, he will assume that it was all him and will take all credit. And because you were probably the biggest trouble-maker by making people complain that you are forcing them to do stuff, you'll likely get laid-off for being the most unproductive person.

Work Life: How to report a coworker who is meeting way below expectations?

Simple answer is do not. The farther they are from you on the corporate tree, the bigger the no.

I have been a part of a few colleagues' end to the team. I hated doing it but one directly impacted my work (transferred), the other was requested upon me (fired), one that did absolutely no work (transferred), etc.

There is no good to snitch on someone especially if the boss does not bring it up. Boss bringing it up may be the only opening but even then tread very carefully. If you are unsure, then do not say anything negative. Feel free to omit positive but at worst stay neutral.

First Example

He was hired because he was a friend of a director. His career was a very non-technical role put into a role that required multiple technical roles. I did my job and trained him. I repeated multiple things to him. Things got ugly when he started "throwing me under the bus" by saying that I didn't train him.

Unfortunate for him, I had really good reputation by the time he joined so most of his attempts were met with a lot of question marks. I have worked with difficult colleagues before, so I started to use these strategies.

Keep records. I made sure that I always emailed everything to him. Even if it was a call, I will send a summary of the call, the decisions made, and the information he needed. Anytime he said he didn't know or said I didn't tell him, I would just respond to the email to remind him the information that I supposedly did not send. Near the end, I had resent the same email 5 - 10 times.

I basically did all his work. If he did work, I had to redo all of it and have to go through many people angry that that have to explain the work again. I can even tell him (when we are alone together) exactly where it was in his notebook.

Eventually, I just had enough of it. 1 month of training; 2 months of "re-training"; 2 months of supervising his work and correcting everything; 1 month of basically just doing his work. I basically just wrote to my boss and asked her to give me his work directly and exclude him completely. I explained I would save the company time and money if he just stayed home.

Her solution was that she will take over supervisory role of his work. I do not know what happened, but he was eventually transferred to another group. My boss was eventually let go couple months later although this may not be related to the guy. She was not very well-liked to begin with. I was the only one to send her off.

Second Example

The second person can talk the talk. He sounds very impressive after working with the company for a year after graduating. I suspect he was not well liked by the previous group and sent to us packaged like it was a great deal.

We were in the same line of work. I did not have to do the initial training or the second training. Supposedly he was not getting it correct and I was tasked to train him again. His work is full of errors: grammatical, data, format, etc. Each time I would point it out, he would thank me because he is such a perfectionist and cannot stand those things. There are quite a few things that I do not point out mostly due to the sheer amount of time that I spend just correcting the fundamental parts of his work.

I did not have a good impression of him. My boss kept assigning me to help with his work. I eventually documented all the time spent on his work. At this job, I was able to do my assignments within 3-5 days. It would take me 6-10 days to "help" him complete his.

This time, I spoke with my boss and said that I was no longer any help to him. I was spending more time fixing his work than just doing the work myself. My boss also took over primary supervisory role. Eventually, he was fired.

At some point he was put on probation then a second probation.

Sadly, he was not even fired for terribly poor quality work but he was snoring during one of the executive meetings.

Third Example

I had to train someone who used to do the same work. I later found out she used to work for our team before I was on the team. I also learned she was transferred out because no one wanted to work for her.

Yet somehow I had to train everything from the start. I would give her tasks with expected dead lines. She did not do them.

I simplified the tasks. One of these task would just be to create a template (copy, paste, then rename a file) which takes 5 - 10 minutes. I'll check the next day and it will still not be done. When I question her, she would say she will work on it. On the second day, she will say that she did not know how to do it. I would show her on that call, then explain she can do the rest. Third day, still nothing done and she does not even join the meeting. No show on fourth and fifth day. I reported the missed meetings to my boss because I was not sure she was on PTO which he said she was not. After a week, she has not even completed the first task and was not joining meetings.

At this point, the assignment is overdue so I just do the work. I give her a new assignment with the same tasks. This time I just do the work in a separate folder because I already expect her not to do the work. After another week of no progress, I just submitted my portion.

I have only reported to my boss that she has not shown up for most of her status meetings, does not even respond to emails or instant message, and has ignored most other things. I tell him just give me the assignment because I am just wasting time checking on her. I was also a contractor and I get paid the extra hours anyways.

Eventually, I learned that she was transferred. After another two years, I still saw her on the active directory.

Suggestion to Manager

In most cases, no one will ever jeopardize their reputation to snitch on someone else. I have talked to many colleagues who have complained about others. I can guarantee you that none of them will say a peep to a manager or HR. Anyone that snitches already have pretty bad personality, and no one wants to be lumped with them even if it is with good intentions.

I just happen to be confident in my work. I also make sure that I already have a good standing reputation. I am still very careful on what I share and who it is shared to. Everyone else have always just quit and did something else. Then you are just left with the crappy people who also just moved up a spot on the seniority ladder. 

Why do I suggest others to just say no? Look how hard it is to fire someone. I cannot imagine providing any more evidence on how useless someone can be. #1 and #3 provided absolutely zero value. #2 at least did something even if it was still zero value. If anything I can argue that they provided negative value because I have to spend more time to correct the work. My team even got back an already known low-performing person.

Unfortunately, I have no way to prove that I am a pretty optimistic and patient person. I have given them lots of passes and liberties before I started my list on them. Technically, a list of CYA (or CMA in my case). Because no matter what, you always need to watch out for yourself. You never know when someone will push you under the bus. (Also doubles as a good source for yearly reviews)

If Any Action

If you do need to do something, my recommendation is to phrase the request as a detriment to your performance. I used to be able to do 20 tasks in a week; now I can only do 10 tasks a week due to addressing other tasks like training or assisting others. Or, I used to be able to complete a task in 2 weeks; now it takes me 4 weeks to complete. Or, I have been putting in overtime to cover these additional tasks that are not mine; I've worked overtime everyday for two weeks.

If manager does not do anything, make sure to track the changes. If management has issue with your decreased performance later, you need this list to back yourself up. If you get below expected year-end evaluation, this can prove that you have gone beyond expectations. If you leave work incomplete, this will also help back you up.

If management still has issue, do not invest more time in that company. Start looking elsewhere. 

In more cases than not, having a detailed list will make you appear to have more leverage compared to someone that does not (assuming both people are on somewhat same level). I prefer to be more passive aggressive. Not to be a bad or evil person, but also as my "hidden" test for the manager if they understand some level of relationship intricacies. If they just want only hard evidence and facts, then I do not believe they are very fit managers. They clearly will not understand a good number of people.

RANT: I hate poor-quality developers who appear to be ace developers- Consistency

The first problem I have with poor-quality developers is how inconsistent they are with many aspects of development. I especially do not like the ones that self-claim to be "good" developers because they delude themselves that they are not susceptible to bad habits by pretending they are one-off issues not to be addressed.

The latest list of request consisted of something like the follow:

WebAPI

webApi

WEBapi

Those are the names of the databases a list of objects I was supposed to copy. It is in a nice table, and it is to me so clearly obvious they are not in the same format. One can argue that this makes no difference to the database, but this attitude to inconsistency is everywhere in this persons work: email, documentation, chats, etc. Anecdotally, I feel there is a strong correlation to poor consistency with the quality of developers. If they cannot even be consistent with a simple list, I question their consistency with more important details.

And this is evidenced by other changes that I have to promote. I promoted an object that had the word "complited" in it. AND it passed code review. This could be a "fat finger" problem but there are times when the spelling is completely off where I already feel sorry for the other developer that has to troubleshoot this. They also have deal with names that developer had mistaken a number 1 with lower case l or a capital I, or when there is a mysterious space in a name where the agreed pattern is to not have any spaces. I also have had requests to objects that do not exist because they used the wrong database name or server on a regular basis. The list goes on and on: missing documentations, missing dates, wrong ticket number, even numbered lists that have missing numbers, etc.

I can understand mistakes here and there, but when does it become a real problem. In most cases, I can figure it out but it is taxing on the amount of time it takes me to research (or time to rant).

What triggered me to write this post is that these types of developers tend to be the first to claim their #1 pet-peeve is inconsistencies or they have an OCD to be perfectionists or they rarely ever make these mistakes. From my own experience, I can tell you that the best developers I have worked with never had to make these claims. Even developers of average skills would not make this claim. Somehow the worst offenders ALWAYS make this claim and out of no where.

I rarely ever have to ask if this bothers them. I just point it out and suddenly they will say one of the three statements above. It takes all my efforts to not have my jaw hit the floor. Not only that, but they have never improved in this area.

But how does this really translate to their code quality. They go through a lot of defects. Their code is consistently returned. They always claim poor quality of requirements yet other developers seem to have much fewer code returned to them.

Are you detail-oriented?

This has made me question the interview question "are you detail-oriented?" I always answer this with a lot of concern and I do intentionally do that in my interviews. The reason is I feel that anyone that says they are detail-oriented with a lot of confidence are the above type of people. In some sense, I feel this is almost a trick question for both the interviewer and the interviewee. Could there be people who are hyper detail-oriented? Yes, but that will show in their answers to other questions.

There does seem to be an aura of detail-oriented wanabes versus actual people who are. To me, the difference in the way they approach problems. Wanabes tend to give lots of information that seems relevant but does not quite answer the question. They are the people I would go into a meeting for a simple question, spend an hour, people feel it was productive, but then seem like they didn't get an answer to their question.

On the other hand, real detail-oriented people gives you what seems like a very short answer. Sometimes it even includes information that seems irrelevant. But then once you start working on it, you realize that you do need that information.

I answer the question that I am not very detail-oriented but that I seem to be more consistent than most of my peers. I even explain why I answer hesitantly. I also explain that there is a level of detail that is warranted for different cases. If we are discussing the big picture, we do not want to be inundated with details questions that is not ready to be answered. If it was a life-critical component, I am quite capable to be consistent most of the time. I will admit that I am not super consistent, but will explain that I have methods to improve on my accuracies.

I am not detail-oriented at all with these blogs. Most of the time, I just type as I think of things to talk about. I rarely go back and proofread my blogs unless it is too obvious that I need to move something to another part of the blog. I also "proof" if someone leaves a comment only because I cannot remember what I wrote and need to reference... and I have found quite a few grammatical and spelling errors.

Interview: Attentive to detail? It is a rather low bar to pass.

 I remember early in my career there were several questions I struggled with in interviews. One of those questions was "Are you detail oriented?" In my mind, I am always seem to miss a minor detail. I seem to consistently score 99% than 100%. If there was a silly mistake to make, I can make it. So I was always hesitant in responding to this question. But of course, I knew better and responded yes anyways because there is no other answer to this question.

First, what a useless question from interviewers to ask a question that any intelligent person can answer but cannot verify.

Second after years of experience, I am way, way, way, way more detail oriented than most people I have worked with. And those that were more detailed spent too much time on details than getting the work done. I know most people will claim this whether this is true or not, but I am saying that they are on the more extreme side. 

Because everyone kind of have to answer that question (now more indirectly than directly like in the past), that means all those people also claimed they are detail-oriented.

Now, I want to say that I am far from perfect. But there are so, so, so many details that I catch that just makes me wonder why we even hired this person. What broke the camel's back to make my publish this post was where one of our developers repeated the same ticket number in the description. The number is right next to the original number. The developer added to the description, #12345, right next to that exact number so that it read #12345, #12345.

COME ON.... that is too blatantly obvious. They even had to click in the field to update so it is not like they copy/pasted too quickly.

Another example is when they provide their list of changes, they consistently miss items on their list. More than 50% of the time.

Grouping remaining examples together: they misspell objects (in development this is quite important because they are use shorthand so I cannot tell if it is intentional or not), they repeat items, they do not enter data consistently (eg they will repeat an item name but have different types).

I am lucky to have one good ticket with no errors 10% of the time. And this is just with requests. If I get into email messages, instant messages, etc... it just boggles my mind how terrible my colleagues are with details. Of course, I am not saying they are terrible people or workers. I am just saying that being detail-orient is way more overrated than most intelligent people think.

Conclusion

If you ever get the question, be confident that you are detail-oriented especially if you finished in the top 10% of your high school class or got into a top-tier university, you are easily more detail-oriented than most people.

That is besides the point that the question is just useless like "are you a good person?" or "are you telling the truth?" One answer lets you progress and the other... well, no one chooses the other answer. That's why they are useless questions. Sometimes I wonder if HR even tries. Or if I want to be more open-minded, I think HR wastes too much time on the bottom 20% than the top 80%.

Rant: Another reason to hate tech support (obvious issue but lost communication)

 I was just on tech support chat. I just got connected to chat which opened with that our internal wiki was down. My work laptop suddenly crashed, so lost communication. Laptop continues to have issues and no longer can connect.

Now on my personal laptop to connect to help desk, and I see that the ticket was immediately closed because he asked how my day was and I didn't respond. Even though the top of the conversation clearly shows my issue, he did not even bother to open the link I provided which gives the error immediately (everyone within my department is getting the error).

All he had to do was open the link and troubleshoot the issue.

Dear Managers, Don't be so damn lazy or cheap!

Lazy

Group punishment

"Team, do this. Team, do that. Team, you're all punished." Will an extra minute kill you to do your job properly? Stop generalizing us as a team when we all know who you are talking about except for that one guy you are actually trying to speak to, especially when it is something negative.

We have this new guy on the team. He came in late, left early, and did poor quality work. What made him especially hated was how pro-active he was about looking like he was always available to back up people, knew how everything worked, etc. but never backed it up (he missed his own calls, had earphones on while in training, caught snoring on a conference call). And that is just the tip of the iceberg of issues.

Sadly, this is not even my issue about work because there is always someone like him in the corporate world. My beef is actually with how management deals with this.

We used to be allowed to work remotely twice a week. The new guy abused this system. So management's solution was to have a team meeting to discuss how the remote work is being abused and now is now only once a week. On top of that, notifications are now required the prior day. Not only that, there was an issue that we must be at work on-time and not to leave early.

We are not a large team (5-7), so we all know each others work schedule pretty well. Two of the members are always in early by an hour. Two of us always stay late at least an hour later. So it is very easy to know exactly who this was being addressed to, yet we are all being punished for this? I barely even work remotely even once a week yet I felt slighted by this rule change. My commute is pretty bad, yet I make it in on-time almost everyday. I used the remote work when I see that there was an accident.

After a couple months of this in place, there have only been two people who have been consistently late and leaving early... the new guy and the manager. And this was not even a slip from good behavior, they violated the new rule since day one. Both were late, both left early, although the new guy checks to see that the manager leaves before he leaves. Both have sent notices the day of, and sometimes no notices at all.

And to kick us while we're down, the manager labels this as a corporate-wide mandate as if we don't speak with anyone else in the company. Our jobs has us speaking with a lot of people, so we know that none of the other groups have even heard of those restrictions.

General Fear Tactics

As if my respect for management could be any lower, they threaten us with a question: "what is the difference between off-shoring our jobs and letting use work remotely full-time?" Yea, good luck finding a comparable off-shore resource. First, if that were true then there is even larger cost benefit to replacing someone who works on premise than someone remote. Second, management barely understands when someone speaks with an accent. Either they waste all of our times asking to repeat themselves 20 times or they pretend to understand than waste my time later to explain or worse misinterpret what was said. Last, management is going to stoop so low to use fear as their tactic to keep us happy? That is the best weapon they can use. I barely see my manager or anyone on my team. I actually go out of my way to see my colleagues just to make use of going to the office. I know none of them ever goes to see anyone else. For meetings, they are all over phone or online so it is basically like working remotely anyways. And then at the end of the day, who do you not see in the office most of the time? Management... of course.

Distribution Blast

We all dread doing timesheets. We hate them. What does management do when there are violators of not submitting your timesheet? Why don't we blast everyone that there is a minority of people that are not submitting their timesheets? Not only are they the minority but they are the multiple offenders. So let us just waste everyone's time to recheck that their timesheets are submitted.

OH! It is month end, let us send another blast that these timesheets are extra important to be submitted.

OOPS! If you are going to be out of the office, another email to remind you that you should know that you took time off and do your timesheets earlier... JUST IN CASE that you didn't read the previous emails that came in the last 10 minutes that your timesheets are due.

OOPS AGAIN! If you are working tonight or the weekend, you can submit it later. Well, if we can submit it later why do we need to submit it now? 

Then I have to get another email from my manager that there are some timesheets not submitted. COME ON! There are only 5 people in your team. I know two of them submitted, and I know I submitted. That leaves only 2 people left and I am pretty sure he also submitted it. You could not spare 10 seconds to just address that one person?! Of course, I had to triple-check just so that I didn't have to eat my own words later.

On a side note: Is there no one in upper management that finds it so damn stupid on how you expect to get a report on hours worked before the end of the time range but yet ask us to submit our hours as precisely as possible? For example, upper management always require an EOM report on the last day of the month. Why not the day after when the month actually ended?!? This simple logic does not even include the amount of time and effort that it takes to build some of those reports, so in reality the reports are built almost a week early so the report is either missing a week or estimating a week. Then they complain why the report is not accurate and puzzled when we explain that there are estimations needed even though we explain this same thing every month for years. To top it off, they don't even need the report immediately. That is corporate America for you.

Cheap

Candy

The other day, I won a raffle (first time in my life). I do not eat chocolates and gifted it to a secretary. She said that her boss really liked that kind of candy, then without a second thought gifted it to him.

I do not interact with him at all. I am pretty sure that he does not even know who I am. I thought he would have at least shared it with his functional area. Nope... he just brought it home and shared it with his wife. What did I get? Not even a thank you, a pat, or a handshake. Didn't even bother to know who I was.

I am not sad or angry over this, but I surely lost a lot of respect for him. At least I can see why management is the way it is. I believe that values and culture starts at the top. Clearly, no respect for the small people (although there have been many other red flags, imo). I have crossed paths with him and direct reports multiple times, and they also do not care to know who I am.

I shared the rest of the basket to the people in the company. Sometimes, I wonder if I am just double damning myself by making other people feel better about the company at my expense. Then, I feel guilty that even crosses my mind... because there does not need to be a reason to be good.

Food

We had a company day and everyone was excited about the free lunch. In my opinion, it was a measly lunch: sandwich, cookie, chips, and a drink. We could buy it for $5 at most, so I'm sure it cost the company less than that per person. AND... my problem is not even that it is a cheap lunch.

My issue was that there were some speeches from the CEO, COO, and CFO. Most of the people left after some time and went to get food. While a few of us remaining stayed to listen (the speeches were bad and boring). When the speeches were done, we went to get food but they had run out of food. They ran out of food well before we even got there. 

The silver-lining was the amusement because the speeches were about how well the company was doing: record profits, record growth, and thanking us for our contributions and loyalty. 

Rant

Sorry, there may be a lot of grammatical errors and other mistakes especially when I think faster than I type. As you can tell, a lot has been festering in the back of my mind. As much as I try to be positive, there is still a part of me that is constantly disappointed by people who are more fortunate. 

Buggish: Microsoft Outlook - Replying to Meetings

I just cannot tolerate it after so many years and Outlook versions... why do they not include reply button as an option when you open an Outlook meeting? It has the forward and forward as iCalendar. Yes, you could just CTRL+R or Right-Click > Reply but some people just cannot understand how to do that (those people exist or they just enjoy messing with my brain). That or they conveniently forget every time I explain those options after I waste 2 minutes (plus being distracted from my work plus venting why they do not either write it down or open the several emails with the same steps).

Or I suppose I could just stop sending meeting minutes that way the boss can stop requesting them from coworkers when I am out. Sorry, that was my 2 minute rant. Back to work!

Buggish: Disappearing Scroll Bar on MSN site on IE11

While testing Hebrew on different browsers, I clicked on an interesting news article on Internet Explorer which defaulted to MSN. While reading the article, I kept failing to scroll down the page. This is when I realized that as I read the article, the vertical scroll bar disappears (reappearing after moving the mouse around).

I assume this is by design because other pages on IE does not have this problem. Nor is MSN a problem on Chrome or FF. Sure I could use the scroll wheel on a mouse or the arrows on the keyboard, but unfortunately I happen to want to use the touchpad tap because double finger slide is not very fluid on this laptop nor the tiny up/down cursor buttons. I guess this is kind of a rant on my laptops keyboard and touchpad designs too. At least keep the arrows there... or even better let the functions exist even if the scroll bar is not visible.

Work: Late Night Work

Just finished some night work. Nothing like a period of time where no one else is on to distract you from work. I always feel like I easily do about a day's worth of work within a couple hours. 

For one thing, I noticed that the type of people who seem to talk forever rarely work the extra hours. Not that I'm complaining because I get a lot more work done. But I always wonder what goes through their heads that make them have to repeat everything multiple times within the same conversation. I even have one person who keeps telling me how to do my work that is not even related to that person.

For example, we would have a conversation about what work needs to be done. The work is to get Jobs A, B, and C completed by Day 10. Her job is to make sure Job B is completed by Day 5. Her requirements is that it will take 3 days. So, working backwards, Job A has to be completed by Day 2.

For some reason as I explain to another person if they can finish their work in 2 days, person B has to reiterate that it is important that they get 3 days. As we complete the details of Job A, person B has to interject that if they cannot finish in 2 days that they cannot finish their work by Day 5.

What always gets me to practice some calm is that historically group B has always finished their work within 1 day for the last 2 years. Each time, she stresses that they need 3 days which I always give them. I have tried different methods to figure out what her concerns are. I've tried asking directly, providing the contingency plan if the different groups cannot meet their committed dates, and another minor differences.

Another time, I always trying to get a timeline from the testing team. This disruptive deployment needs to be put into place so I am trying to gather the preliminary duration that each group needs so that I can determine around what date we can deploy. For some reason, they cannot give me a duration unless I give them which date we can deploy.

Confused, I try to explain them that I need their duration so that I can determine when the deploy date. Yet the manager continues to stay on her story that she needs to know when the deployment date is so that she can work backwards from that. Afterwards, I even checked with a few other people in the meeting offline to see if perhaps I was not making any sense. They seemed to understand what I was asking, and eventually I was able to piece together a plan without the manager of the test team.

What made matters worse was that the timeline overlapped with another priority. In the next meeting, I had to figure out a contingency plan. Here, she gives me another roadblock in that she cannot have the code change until after that priority is completed. I stated that is not a problem so we will just have to drop code after that is done. Although not exactly a real problem, she somehow things this is a show stopper and keeps repeating that they will not approve the work plan because they cannot meet my initial plan. I repeat that I understand why they cannot meet it, so we have not changed to a new date given the new information. Yet, she will still not approve the new date because it does not meet the INITIAL plan, emphasizing "initial."

Sometimes, I just do not understand why I have to go through these types of people. I wonder if they ever listen to themselves. I have found that it is just easier to ignore these people and just accept that it is the way things are. Unfortunately for audit reasons, I just have to keep asking then escalating to get the approval. 

I think most other people have already arrived at this conclusion. When I try to ask for alternate methods of handling these matters, I seem to only get a smile, a pat on the head, and a shrug. With the proper people, I seem to be able to hold my meetings within 15 minutes and get the work done with higher quality and efficiency. With teams that just include a couple of these talkers, my meetings take up to an hour. I have even timed a couple meetings and found that they take 30 of those minutes. An additional 15 just to respond to them.

One minor change that I have been able to implement is that I know which topics impact which group, so I get all the quick topics first. Once one of the talkers start, I start signalling that the people not pertinent to the discussion to drop/leave the meeting. I've let them know that I'll forward any information if it impacts them.

As a result, I find that I have one of the better attended meetings in my team. They also come prepared and ready with their plans. I have tried to explain this to my team, but for some reason they also like to repeat things until it has been beaten to a pulp. Yet what can I say, they've been doing this for years. Somehow we manage to stay afloat yet executives wonder we never get ahead. The continuous reorganizations do not help either.

Life: Hole-ier Socks than a Decade Ago?

Is it just me or do socks seem to get holes a lot faster than like 10-20 years ago? I feel like I definitely put more stress back than then I do now, yet I always seem to have more and more socks with holes. Perhaps it is my selective memory, but I am pretty sure I did not have to throw away so many socks. Socks, today, do seem to be more comfortable than in the past. So maybe the endurance of the socks have decreased.

I guess while I am on the topic of socks. Why do I always seem to have one of each kind of socks? I even try to buy the same pack so I have the same socks, yet my washing machine or dryer seems to always eat them so I am always left with odd numbers of socks. But how do they know? Why can't that eat them in even numbers so at least make me think I just misplaced a pair of socks.

Rant: Why Do I Have Trouble Convincing People to Use Search in Outlook?

Unlike my fellow coworkers, I like to use the search features because it is faster to find specific emails for me. But for some reason, they are forever stuck using folders to categorize their emails.

Of course, this is not much of a problem with our personal emails, emails that go directly to us (for work purposes). These are primarily with group emails. We need folders for internal, for external, for processes, for projects, etc. Depending who is more direct (which is very subjective at times), emails are filtered however the person handling it wants to filter it.

This would not be a problem if Microsoft Outlook actually returns the correct emails with the correct search terms. I just do not understand why Outlook just does not return the correct results when I request it to search in all folders. For some reason if I search for a ticket number, not all the emails are in the result. This is not even missing a folder, some of the emails found are in the same folder as the missing ones. If I go to that specific folder and search for the exact same term, it returns me the emails missing in the other search from a different folder using search all folders.

The reason I am trying to convince everyone to stop using folders and use search terms is because there are times we need to audit a process and see all emails related to the search term. I cannot afford the time to go through each folder to find emails on something.

Their counter argument is that they cannot find the emails that way. I am like... what?! They just have to type in the folder name that they normally use and there it is. I even demoed this in front of them in our conference call on many occasions. This would also force them to use our standards so that we can all find emails related to specific topics.

For example, I have to trace what happened with Ticket#123. Did we get client agreement for the scheduling? Would this be under folder 'external' or folder 'processes' or folder 'scheduling'? To make it more confusing there is all 'processes' in 'external' and 'scheduling'. That is not to be confused with 'internal' and 'external' in 'processes'. I have actually raised this example to my group and their explanation is that they know which one it would be in. Somehow this makes sense because it works for them even though they could not figure out how the other person files their files. Yet, I am expected to know which folders they had filed it under. Yet, searching for 'internal process' will provide the same materials that they are looking for. And if they just want their specific emails, they just have to type in their name or email id.

Folders are so old-school (in my opinion). This folder structuring has always been a problem. I have been trying to convince them that labels, keywords, and searches are much more effective in our line of work because we handle a lot of different teams.

Anyways, this rant has really triggered within me to evaluate me value to the team. I have tried to instill a lot of different ideas from my experience but none has stuck with any of the new members. Although they recognize that I am bringing ideas, most of them (in my opinion) are so stuck with their old processes from their old teams. I know that I have some prejudices towards their generation of corporate engineers, but they just cannot convince me that they care for new ideas at all.

On a side note about ranting, I am starting to notice that I jump around a lot when I'm venting. It gets more difficult to focus on my original complaint as I get more.... 'passionate' about the issue. I wonder if there is a way I can focus the energy more effectively. But on the other hand, I can use being more passionate about certain things even if I have to become less rational then usual.

Rant: MS SharePoint 2010 Hiding Lookup Item and Webparts Contradiction

Each passing month, I seem to hate SharePoint more and more. I thought I was smart to find a solution to hiding items from the lookup, but of course the other other side effects that you do not think about until later when you need the same information.

The latest episode is that I have finally a list long enough where it is worth hiding. If you had read my previous post, you'll find that you can no longer use calculated fields to hide items from the lookup list in the latest 2010 patch. So, I made a manual field just for display purposes. It is kind of dumb that you enter the same info twice but at least I had a way to control the lookup list... or so I thought.

So now the problem is when I clear out that field, I can no longer use web parts to display the "child" items into the parent list item. If I repopulate the field, the child items return back to display. The reason I thought this would have worked is because I used the Connections to value from the actual column that I thought it would attach to.

For example, I have columns DisplayText and LookupText. Initially, I have DisplayText and LookupText as "Release 1". When in the child item, there will be an item "Release 1". I add a few child items to "Release 1". On the parent item, I have added a web part to view the child lists. The connection I used was to compare the values in the lookup field with DisplayText (even though I use LookupText for the lookup field). Now when viewing the parent item, I will see the associated child items.

Later I clear out LookupText, the child item will not see "Release 1". By doing this, the parent item view with the web part to view child lists now will be empty. EMPTY?! WHY!?

Anyways... this is more of a rant because I just stayed up all last night because someone there were issues with the install process and the on-call resources could not be found or at least the proper on-call resources. I just do not understand why I cannot just do a simple relationship between two views in 2014. Or why an international corporate company cannot afford an enterprise sharepoint or even allow an inhouse server to host the data that we are managing, especially when we provide a cloud service which does not even need new hardware... the questions of why's are endless.

Game: Candy Crush Saga Dreamworld 250 Dropping only Black Swirly Licorice

This level is by far the most annoying level, by far. I do not know if this broken but I actually succumbed to using YouTube to see how others have passed this level... only to find that their candy drops look nothing like mine because mine only drops black licorice pieces. Unfortunately, I did not record my eventual win of this (primarily because I went through many, many, many lives) but I did eventually pass it and I do not want to see it again.

My strategy that eventually led to the win was to set off as many fishes at the same time as possible. There seems to be a slight window where it will drop candy pieces. It will drop some licorice, but candy will drop. At this point, I try to clear as much of the top jellies as possible. I typically will reach moonstruck mode which hopefully will clear up as much jellies as possible (hopefully the top ones). Because eventually, it will drop only licorice again (and no more candies will drop). In my winning game, I was able to just have the bottom with candies to eventually just use a horizontal striped candy and a fish.

Good luck!

PS - For some reason if I only get 1-2 fish, it almost always (95% of the time) hits one of the trapped candies at top. I was trying to avoid this to see if I can just get enough horizontal striped candies to clear the jelly before the licorice fell. This strategy did not even clear more than 10 jellies (at best with the striped and wrapped candy combo).

If I got for horizontal or stripped/wrapper combo, I only get licorice. With combination with only 2-3 fishes at most, there are only about 3-4 candies that will drop out of 20+ left cleared licorice.

Even with the final strategy, this took me clearly more than 30 lives (lost count) over a span of several days.

Work: Enterprise Defect Management (rant)

I have worked with defects my entire professional life in support, integration, project management, and release management. I found that the size of the team makes a large difference in the management of defects. In smaller companies, there were few factors to determine the priorities of defects. Simply, the client's most urgent issue is the highest priority. The reason for this is because typically there is only a single person working on each project and each project has a single client. Although a person could have multiple projects, project priorities are typically managed by the boss (i.e. manager).

As companies grow in size, there are more people involved and more priorities to manage. Management of defects move towards another team that does not have easy access to development, testing, and deployment planning. Unlike its smaller company counterpart which typically will only have 2-3 roles involved, now I have to deal with several parties. Depending on the size of the projects, there may now be up to 10 different groups each with their own resources and priorities.

One of the biggest problem that I run into is finding a single method on how to manage the defects. The largest factor to my problem is that there is no single entity that makes the final call. Because of this, there is a lot of delays to the decision because the work cannot "start" until the decision is made. Although the official start is not determined, some teams take it upon themselves to work on certain items. This actually causes more problems to managing the defects. Because a change is simple for a development group, the amount of testing is not necessarily simple nor the deployment.

A simple change in a more fundamental code base could trigger a lot of tests required. Because the lab environment only has a single instance, production may have to deploy over a span of time because it has several environments. And so far, only a single path for a single change.

If multiple development groups provide multiple solutions, there are a lot of resource conflicts that can occur across many teams especially testing. For example if ChangeA is put into testing and requires 2 weeks to deploy to production, ChangeB cannot be put into testing until ChangeA has completed testing. ChangeC cannot be put into testing until ChangeB has completed testing, but ChangeB cannot leave testing until ChangeA is completed in production.

So far it is manageable although it does not address how it can be caught up yet, but another factor on issues from deployment or testing is not considered at this point. If ChangeA faces a problem in production and needs to be backed up then what should be done to ChangeB? Depending on the criticality, ChangeB could be backed out or merged with ChangeA. If ChangeA cannot be replicated in test, then what is the path forward?

If ChangeA works but ChangeB is unable to pass testing, ChangeC is now on hold. How should the group handle if a very high critical issue now comes up? Should everything be backed out then readdressed? Should it be merged to current change?

So far I have only addressed the main actors to SDLC, but there are other actors that make this management more complex: management and product planning. Because they have their own plans resources are now being used to manage unexpected work that comes up, budget and promises need to be considered.

This is comes to another factor to the resource consumption. Regular/planned/scheduled releases are impacted or impacting to defect deployments. Although rules are made to what changes should go into a emergency/point release or a planned/scheduled release, there are always exceptions that throws the process for a loop.

There seems to be several red lights to the chaotic process that I am currently in.

1. The most obvious request from release management is to skip a few weeks of releases. And obviously, no one can stand missing fixes for 2-4 weeks. If the product cannot remain stable for a month, there is something seriously wrong with the product (IMO). What customer wants a solution that require weekly updates? I get quite irritated with weekly updates for changes that do not even impact me to begin with!
2. Similar defects keep showing up. No one wants to manually fix out-of-sync issues, while also unable to replicate or completely fix the problem. There is something seriously wrong fundamentally with the product if no one is able to figure out syncing issues that keep coming up for over 3 months (for us two years even with some fixes that didn't do anything).
3. Every team is requesting additional resources or time. Obviously something is wrong with planning if everyone (or even the majority of groups) cannot accomplish the simplest of tasks within a regular plan.
4. Always in catch-up mode. There is seriously something wrong if product/application planner cannot realign the plan given the current situation.
5. No COO. There is not a single point person who can just put their foot down and just move forward. I do not how many times we spent more time "negotiating" with everyone when the worst plan was still faster than the "planning" of the changes.

Rant over

Buggish: SharePoint 2010 - Moving List Items to Subfolder, Not Possible

In summary, there appears to be no way to move a list item in SharePoint without additional code. In other words, SharePoint 2010 cannot move list items OOB or with SharePoint Designer (SPD).

I have spent several days trying different things, eventually stumbling on Reference-1 which confirms that the task is not possible. I tried moving adding toolbar (Reference-2) but I was unable to get the same options to move. I tried workflow but there is no action to create an item in a subfolder. There does not even appear to be a manual way to move items to a subfolder.

For those who do have access to the server and can code, Reference-3 appears to have some notes on it. But it appears to be similar to other "move" processes where the process is basically to create a new list item then delete the old one. The problem I have with this is that it loses a lot of the item historical data that are useful for audit.

The reason I was looking into this is to find a solution to archive old data. The benefits of archiving is to keep the current list shorter and cleaner. The other benefit is to keep the table size low. Currently, my only workaround is just to delete the data after a period of time. To "backup" the data, the current plan is to just export to Excel. A better solution would be appreciated.

Reference

1 - http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/686c2ebb-6337-4f3d-b599-24d38b67c225/moving-list-item-to-a-folder-with-in-the-same-list-based-on-condition
2 - http://www.techgrowingpains.com/2010/07/how-to-copymove-sharepoint-items/
3 - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mcsnoiwb/archive/2009/04/30/copy-listitems-from-one-custom-list-to-another-then-move-them-into-subfolders.aspx

Project: My First Attempt in Doing Anything in Linux

I thought that I was quite flexible in understanding how to run computers. I have quite some experience supporting Windows systems for personal and business use (albeit enterprise level). Yet, I cannot naturally navigate and figure things out on Linux. I would imagine switching from Linux to Windows is much simpler than Windows to Linux.

From installing applications, installing drivers, finding upgrades, to just basic command prompt uses, I have struggled with them all. By struggle, I mean that I had to either web search or read a book. Nothing seemed intuitive to me... or perhaps this is a sign of my age. Even following instructions was not always so simple. There was always something different, especially in the GUI. Command prompt was more similar between versions and distributions, but it does not always play very nicely with other components that were installed through the GUI.

In my opinion, the GUI should be simple to use but I have actually found that the command prompt has comparable perks (or rather fewer 'issues'). There are also some nuisances in the GUI that does not quite allow you to just use the keyboard without having to switch to the mouse.

After this experience, I can see clearer on how Windows can still be quite powerful yet having always many IT professionals complaining about them. Windows requires much less knowledge about the system to get a development environment running or even just simple infrastructure use. I can simply install Windows, Visual Studio, and MS SQL Server and have a development environment basically ready for me to develop. A little bit of knowledge on public IP address and you can publish a simple web application within a day or two.

I have already spent over a week just trying to get Linux running with Python, Eclipse, and Django. Along with the installation, I have also learned a lot of other functions to running and maintaining Linux that I would not care much for as a developer. So although Linux may be more enterprise friendly, it is not so friendly on the individual level. I would think just to get a company started with Linux technology, you'll need at least 2-3 people at the minimum for average entrepreneurs: someone that understands how to maintain Linux, a developer, and sales. While for Windows, you really only need one person because a sales person could throw together a web application... maybe two where the developer also maintains the server. Sure you could find a Linux person who can do all three, but from my experience, they are far from being sales people even if they have superior products while sales people could sell Microsoft inferior products.

I've heard some friends say that Linux is still dominant in enterprise level but I see more and more conversions to .NET solutions on enterprise websites. This may not be an indication that they Microsoft-centric for their infrastructure, but by their hype I would imagine that the technology should be changing in the direction of Linux as companies grow to enterprise level. They also say it is free, but Microsoft's solution is basically free too (only because everyone practically already has it). You can find companies with only Microsoft products, but you will be hard-pressed to find companies with absolutely zero Microsoft systems.

Although this is mostly my rant on the learning curve to Linux, I am not bashing on its power and effectiveness technologically. I just think if the community did a better job on making it more newbie-friendly, they may find that they would have a greater impact... but then with some Linux folks, they almost seem like they design Linux just to prevent technology illiterates from converting.

Reference

http://askubuntu.com/questions/224942/linux-headers-not-upgraded