Showing posts with label Assholes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Assholes. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

The Secret Recipe For Dealing With Assholes


A few weeks ago, TheHackerCIO promised to reveal his secret recipe for dealing with assholes.

He used it a few weeks ago himself.

Because at that time, he had a major asshole encounter.

First note the extreme dedication of TheHackerCIO to his work. He made himself available over a holiday weekend for testing and bug-fixes -- trying his utmost to speed delivery of code and shipping of product. A holiday weekend!!!

But, as the old saying goes, "no good deed goes unpunished."

Major Asshole -- who is politically connected, corporately speaking  -- doesn't find it necessary to actually provide a bug report that describes what he expects the Server API call to return and what he encounters instead. He just wants the server developer to "figure it out," on an API he has never before seen and for which he has no documentation.

That's when the power of the secret recipe comes into play.

"Just don't!"

You can't deal with assholes.

As an extremely wise philosopher said, "you can deal with a fool, but you can't deal with a damn fool."

An asshole is the modern term for a damn fool.

So, the secret recipe is to simply walk. And the only way you can do this is if you have plenty of cash in the bank. That gives you the liberating power of not giving a shit. You see, if I had to have the pay from this client, I couldn't have risked it by doing the right thing and leaving the jerk alone with his jerkhood. I would have had to cater to him, try to sooth him, try to placate his irrational jerkiness. And he would have continued to spread it as wide and thick as he could get away with.

By simply not caring; because I could easily miss out on a months billing or more; I was able to walk away until the company came to their senses and found a decent person to perform the testing with.

It's a tremendous power, money. It's not so much about what you can buy with it. It's about the freedom it can buy you. Freedom not to put up with BS. Freedom to walk from the A-holes.

TheHackerCIO doesn't mind sharing the secret. But he knows that only a very select few possess the discipline required to live debt free, as he does, and put away the cash to liberate themselves from stupidity. Most people will continue to deal with assholes, because they have to. And that's a shame.

Don't do it.

I remain,

TheHackerCIO

Saturday, December 7, 2013

A Promise to Reveal The Secret Recipe for Dealing With Assholes

Stay tuned closely to TheHackerCIO, because in a week or so, I will reveal the secret recipe for dealing with assholes.

The series on Dealing With Assholes came from ThePronounPrick Company: Joyent.

And in conjunction with the PronounPricks, TheHackerCIO has been dealing with an Asshole in his own inimitable way all week.

As a teaser, always remember that everyone in a company already knows the a-hole within.

I Remain,

TheHackerCIO

Friday, December 6, 2013

Assholes Revisited


Recently, Joyent, the Node.js corporate side chose to make a public fool of themselves by being assholes about a pronoun. It would be funny if it weren't so perverse, but these paragons of "tolerance" and "empathy" would have no problem instantaneously firing someone for using grammar correctly.

As TheHackerCIO mentioned before, the old-fashioned Grammar pedants were a bit silly, but at least they wouldn't fire someone for a grammatical lapse. The Political Correctness crowd is an order of magnitude meaner, less tolerant, and lacking in empathy.

Naturally, they put this "empathetic firing" forth while linking to  this slideshare, about "Dealing With Assholes." [note: the actual site is called "Assholes are killing your project, but the link in Joyent's blog is called "dealing with assholes."]

I took some time to view the slideshare, because I just had a run in at a client with a major asshole, and so I'm thinking about them quite a bit. I was quite amused to read this slide:
What is an Asshole? Two Tests 
1. After talking to the asshole, does the target feel oppressed, humiliated, de-energized, or belittled?
2. Does the asshole target those less powerful?
I'm pretty sure that  Ben Noodhuis -- the unfortunate, correct grammarian,  would have felt oppressed, humiliated, de-energized, and/or belittled if he had been under the power of UnJoyent and had been summarily fired just before Christmas for grammatically correct use of pronouns. Furthermore, AssholeJoyent.js were indeed targeting those less powerful -- specifically, anyone who works for them.

Then there was this slide:

Word of mouth transforms one asshole into an avalanche
How do you fix it?
    personal interactions: have a conference
    provide expectations: Nobody knows your culture when they start. Do you want them to learn it from an asshole? Provide a code of conduct.
Again FascistJoyent did NOT have a personal, private conference, did they? Instead they published publicly in order to brag about how fascist they were about pronouns. In other words, they skipped the word-of-mouth, and moved straight on to the avalanche. And I wonder if they could provide us with a copy of their code-of-conduct, with proof that it existed prior to their blog-posting, where they specified that use of gendered pronouns was an instantaneous firing offense.

As to my own wisdom about assholes, I'll have to talk more about that another day.

In the Meantime, I Remain,

TheHackerCIO





Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Fire 'em All!


Joyent will fire you for grammatical incorrectness. They blogged about it here. To insist on principle that pronouns have a gender is an instantaneous, walk-you-out-the-door, firing offense!

And it isn't just Node.js who wishes they could fire for this, but also the employer of the unfortunate offender, who in a much more cowardly fashion said here, that they would fire him, but didn't mean that literally. Except they did. I'll let another commentator describe it:

Quoting Isaac Roth:
If Ben can’t learn, we’ll fire him. [Edit: See comment below. This is not meant literally.]
Huh? How in the world that cannot be literal? You have created a poisonous environment with your coworkers/employees, where they can be held at gunpoint and be told "or you learn, or I'll fire", where learning means agreeing with your point of view, whether is correct or not. If you think you are a leader you are dead wrong.
Your extreme "political correctness" is nothing more than a fascist regime.

TheHackerCIO thought that old-fashioned Grammar-Nazis were a bit over the top, but this newer breed of Politically-Correct-Grammar-Nazis make them look like plush dolls.  Moreover, this is claimed to derive from "empathy!"

If this be empathy, then I call for eliminating it from the workplace.

It's a "zero tolerance policy."

I Remain,

TheHackerCIO