The Office

I got the first dose of office politics yesterday, and I am only an intern!! Basically the group that I am working with filed a progress report with the sup saying that my part of the project is stuck because I wasn’t up to task. This, after not hearing from the guys for a week after I sent them an API spec. So I went and talked to them about the spec yesterday and they were still clueless about it. Retards. I sat with them for one hour explaining a 20 line spec.

The project lead seems to be a typical management type in a programmer’s shoes. Very voluble about schemes, scenarios, requirements, but how much does he know about his own project? He’s demoing the code and shows me a data file. There are roughly 5-8 parameters in it. I ask him about one and he doesn’t know what it means - this is the file which acts as input for the whole simulation and he doesn’t know what it is - and he’s project lead!

He tells me consider cases where systems run out of memory. Consider cases where dual cpu systems run out of shared memory. I say I can and I will, if you can write code to check when that happens. Can you do that? Didn’t think you could - so why the hell ask me to consider it?!!!!

And all this after refusing to pay me my money. Reason? Higher level politics.

PS: The Office on BBC