Chapter II: The Abyss is Eternal !

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Xorkoth said:
I quit all nicotine about5 weeks ago, I have been craving occasionally but it's not bad. :) Feels good.

Just had an epicly long day at work. Was involved in a senior management-level meeting, where we discussed how to combat the issue of increasingly poor data from people taking online surveys for rewards. I've been trying to get everyone to think about it and deal with it for the past 15 years, I've developed a tools suite for helping to determine who is "cheating" on the fly. But many people in the company just refuse to use it or think about it. The senior vice president of our division of the company that deals with low-priced, fully automated research projects, has been trying to criticize me, trying to say we're not using the new software platform's capabilities right and being inefficient, for the past year. She has been making my life difficult and talking shit behind my back. Recently, my boss had my back and told our mutual boss, who is like second in command in the company, about it. Ever since then, this lady has been real nice to me and trying to include me in everything. Well, turns out, she is one of the biggest culprits of having poor data and not doing anything about it. On my side of the business, we perform complicated analysis while in-progress in the survey to determine the likelihood of them being a cheater. I wrote some text analysis software to try to determine if their open-ended question input is nonsense or not.

On this pother lady's side of the company, they have absolutely nothing in place. Even worse, they program their surveys so absolutely anyone with half a brain could figure out how to qualify for the survey. Which means the surveys get hit by "survey farms" and people using autocomplete plug-ins to put in random answers, or straight up sending bots in, and producing nonsense data. What's more, she doesn't even have the software's built-in de-duping function turned on (on my side, we are using a sophisticated plugin and analyzing a bunch of metrics, and revising over time as we keep collecting data). She doesn't check anything at all, just assumes it's correct. To the point that for the past 2 years, every single survey they have done has had the last 4 states, alphabetically, assigning to the wrong state (like Wisconsin to Wyoming, etc). And I have told her about it so many times, I took the time to show her the proof the last time, and she blew me off and said it must be right, because she paid an outside company to do it. In fact she paid them a LOT of money. I could have (and offered at the time to) done a better job (the stuff they programmed has various errors and typos, the state one was just the worst of many), clearly never got QA checked, it's so sloppy. And they're STILL using it, this lady is just too stubborn. She was trying to undermine my position on the company as the guy to lead in our technological development, but it turns out she's bad at it.

She tried to suggest that they hire another external company to get some of our needed projects done, today. And the CEO was like, "no, why would we do that, when we have our own great programming team? Xorkoth can do that for us". Fuck yeah, someone needs to put this bitch in her place. I keep offering to take this stuff on for her instead of paying another company for it needlessly. Her division was supposed to be 100% automated (client goes to an online storefront, chooses product, inputs images, other specific information, and it generates the survey's XML, launches it, sends respondents to it from the platform's survey panels, finishes in 2 days, closes and auto-generates and emails report files. No human touch at all, so like 98% profit and extremely competitively priced. It was supposed to be that way a year ago and she paid this company an absurd amount of money to do it, and they just never finished it so she has been doing it all manually. Meanwhile I'm sitting here repeatedly offering to dig into it and get it fully operational and she refuses. It makes no sense, she acts like a know-it-all, but she barely knows how to code, she bragged about her 5 years of experience with this software at her last job, but I taught myself more about it the first couple of days I started trying to learn. Her level of understanding is extremely rudimentary. Any time something I do differs in methodology from what they did at her old company, she tries to interfere by talking to our president and CEO and tells them I'm trying to reinvent the wheel and don't know what I'm doing and to make me do it the other way. But to my face, she is being all nice and asking me for help whenever she can't figure out how to do something.

So I'm just always really nice and helpful, and have been doing my homework, and communicating with some of the higher-ups, more and more.... they're inviting me to higher level meetings and asking my opinion a lot. I know someone had a talking-to with her, too, it was my boss. This lady is "Senior Vice President of Agile Solutions". And she's personally manually doing all of these projects that are supposed to be automated. What she should be doing is getting a new product done, launching it, and then starting to design the next one. Instead she's bogged down in doing grunt work and asking me for help with the grunt work, instead of developing the business. I wonder if I can take over her job eventually? I've been slowly and steadily exerting my authority in the company for years, and at this point, to all but a few, I'm the guy to talk to for anything related to programming, or thinking through something conceptually in terms of how we handle situations or treat data. I have already left a huge legacy, as nearly every process the programmers use for everything was developed by me. I just had an idea and am in the early stages of implementing a tool that will interpret a Word document that is a survey questionnaire, and attempt to generate an XML that is as close to working as-is as possible. I should be able to get most of the logic and programming and data structure and everything in pretty good shape, as we have standard formats for questionnaires. if I get that working, it'll cut programming time by like 10 times, would be a game changer.
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Wow you have had the same gig for 15 years? I can't even keep a job for 2 (I quit and fine a new one). Did have one for 5. Hopefully my next one will be like that, last one. The SRE / Devops world is fucked right now. Millions of jobs since these companies are all failing, but they all suck. Now in the cloud and the guy or two before did 100 things wrong. The demand is insane. of what these companies want out of you My last gig nearly killed me.

Not even gonna fuck with it. Only public companies from now on.

Yeah, that shit goes on everywhere. Hard to have the same vision as all. You have to prove her wrong.
 
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The woman is obviously threatened by you @Xorkoth and it's why she is acting in that manner. Just keep doing what your doing and your gonna be one of the bosses there eventually. Your a really smart man keep up what your doing and it will pay off for you in the end for sure. Proud of all you accomplished related to working on yourself the past 5 weeks, love you brother <3
 
TheInvisibleStoner said:
Wow you have had the same gig for 15 years? I can't even keep a job for 2 (I quit and fine a new one). Did have one for 5. Hopefully my next one will be like that, last one. The SRE / Devops world is fucked right now. Millions of jobs since these companies are all failing, but they all suck. Now in the cloud and the guy or two before did 100 things wrong. The demand is insane. of what these companies want out of you My last gig nearly killed me.

Not even gonna fuck with it. Only public companies from now on. Or downgrade myself or something.

Yeah, that shit goes on everywhere. Hard to have the same vision as all. You have to prove her wrong.
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Yeah right out of college. I make like 250% what I started at, I'm angling for like a VP type thing though eventually. I'm certainly the lead programmer, I basically make anything happen that needs to happen, people call me instead of my boss a lot of the time when they want to know something. If I had gone the career-jumping route, I could probably be making 6 figures now, by taking new positions every 3-5 years. My job requires a lot less skills than I have, in fact I'm the only one in my job position with an actual CS degree. I started seeing where things were inefficient and programming ways to semi-automate repetitive stuff. Basically I wrote programs and write code, and interfaces to turn a lot of terminal-based stuff that is tricky for my coworkers into point and click GUIs and stuff. So it would be more interesting to be a software engineer, but I do get to stretch my skills a bit and as a result, they treat me like I'm a god/stable genius, I have ironclad job security, I work from home, and they let me be a musician too... sometimes I'll work from a mobile hot spot while we[re on the road for weeks on end, and I often have to leave early on Fridays to go load in to a venue. I make enough money for my living expenses and to save some and not have to worry about money too often, and 4 weeks of paid vacation per year... got a nice 401k and great health insurance too. The company has been through a lot of growing pains over the past decade, but a lot of our long-range plans (I have part in a lot of them) are finally coming to fruition... it's a market research company, and we did some internally funded research into some of our largest client industries, and leveraged that to become leaders in helping to navigate the covid world. Raises were frozen for like 7 years most recently, but last year I got a $6k/year raise and I'm angling for steady raises and have been told that is what will happen now that we're in the green. And I basically get to do whatever I want as long as I get my work done. It's a pretty sweet gig, I'm lucky, working from home or wherever I happen to be at has made multitasking my life SO much more possible, it's crazy how much I can get done. My boss has become a good friend and is also a musician (went to school for music actually), the company culture is great, I like every single person I work with, with the one exception of the lady I was talking about. It doesn't even feel like work a lot of the time. When I don't push myself and try to develop new capabilities and surprise people, I sometimes can get away with working like 2 hours a day, but since it's salary it doesn't matter. It's like the least stressful job of all time, except for every once in a while shit gets crazy and I have like a 72 hour work week.
 
Xorkoth said:
Yeah right out of college. I make like 250% what I started at, I'm angling for like a VP type thing though eventually. I'm certainly the lead programmer, I basically make anything happen that needs to happen, people call me instead of my boss a lot of the time when they want to know something. If I had gone the career-jumping route, I could probably be making 6 figures now, by taking new positions every 3-5 years. My job requires a lot less skills than I have, in fact I'm the only one in my job position with an actual CS degree. I started seeing where things were inefficient and programming ways to semi-automate repetitive stuff. Basically I wrote programs and write code, and interfaces to turn a lot of terminal-based stuff that is tricky for my coworkers into point and click GUIs and stuff. So it would be more interesting to be a software engineer, but I do get to stretch my skills a bit and as a result, they treat me like I'm a god/stable genius, I have ironclad job security, I work from home, and they let me be a musician too... sometimes I'll work from a mobile hot spot while we[re on the road for weeks on end, and I often have to leave early on Fridays to go load in to a venue. I make enough money for my living expenses and to save some and not have to worry about money too often, and 4 weeks of paid vacation per year... got a nice 401k and great health insurance too. The company has been through a lot of growing pains over the past decade, but a lot of our long-range plans (I have part in a lot of them) are finally coming to fruition... it's a market research company, and we did some internally funded research into some of our largest client industries, and leveraged that to become leaders in helping to navigate the covid world. Raises were frozen for like 7 years most recently, but last year I got a $6k/year raise and I'm angling for steady raises and have been told that is what will happen now that we're in the green. And I basically get to do whatever I want as long as I get my work done. It's a pretty sweet gig, I'm lucky, working from home or wherever I happen to be at has made multitasking my life SO much more possible, it's crazy how much I can get done. My boss has become a good friend and is also a musician (went to school for music actually), the company culture is great, I like every single person I work with, with the one exception of the lady I was talking about. It doesn't even feel like work a lot of the time. When I don't push myself and try to develop new capabilities and surprise people, I sometimes can get away with working like 2 hours a day, but since it's salary it doesn't matter. It's like the least stressful job of all time, except for every once in a while shit gets crazy and I have like a 72 hour work week.
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Let me hold somethin

Edit: sump'em...let me hold sump'em
 
TheInvisibleStoner said:
Correct the money isn't everything. I would kill to work an easy job like I did in the first 5 years or so.
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Money does not buy happiness, but not having enough money contributes to misery, because constant money stress is extremely demoralizing and awful. I've been there, for sure. Once you have enough money to be comfortable and maintain your lifestyle and not be worried about it all the time, more money is kinda irrelevant, unless you're trying to fall into the "big money bling bling" lifestyle trap. I want to make a million dollars, so that I can invest it at a modest rate of return and cut myself a salary every year. If I got a million suddenly, I would pay off my mortgage and invest all the rest. I don't have any other debt anymore. Probably keep working too, until I had a reason not to. Basically double my salary essentially. Then hopefully my music career would pop off, beyond a regional thing, and I could just quit my job. Retire early, travel the world, go somewhere every year. That stuff would be cool, but I'm already plenty happy, because I don't hate what I do at all, I have a lot of freedom, and I get paid enough to have everything I need in abundance.
 
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If anything the posting seems to have slowed down now we're near the end lol

Lots of us druggos probably have those underlying issues where we don't want/cope with change, seperation anxiety and/or are now emotionally involved with this thread
 
jhjhsdi said:
If anything the posting seems to have slowed down now we're near the end lol

Lots of us druggos probably have those underlying issues where we don't want/cope with change, seperation anxiety and/or are now emotionally involved with this thread
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I'm quite excited about it I've just been very busy with things.

I must say I think Ch. II was better than I though.
 
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