So what's worse than hating your job?
I can't stand mine. For every project that I'm given which actually requires me to think or produce something useful to someone, I'm given a project which makes no sense and couldn't possible be useful... or put onto a team where I don't get to do any work at all. All I can do is "consult" and tell other people how I would do the job if I were allowed. Then I get to watch them fuck it up.
In an effort to better my situation, I asked to be transferred to another team where I could do more hands-on work. The transfer was rejected, but a request did come through to have me split up my time between my current team and another. The other team? The one project that I despise and completely disagree with their fundamental goal.
The team was created with an executive order for my business unit to save money and revamp all of our processes and methods. They came in with a giant hammer and forced us all to do whatever they said. I spent weeks creating a dashboard for them, displaying all sorts of data and graphs and charts, to help them "save" us money in the future and manage the business. They then decided that they wanted my dashboard on the web, so they put together a team to accomplish this. They didn't include me.
I was assigned as an SME (subject matter expert) and spent months walking them through my queries. It actually only took me a couple weeks to explain everything, but the team they hired turned over 3 times, and every time I had a new set of people that I had to explain everything to. All over again. Once they "understood", they disappeared for a few months and came up with this online tool, which I will refer to as SHIT. It's actually called something fairly close to that, but to protect various identities, I'll keep it a secret. Plus, SHIT is far more descriptive.
Everything failed. None of their reports were accurate, they had a million data inconsistencies and the entire project was a gigantic fuck-up. Since they had executive backing, however, they pushed forward. They started UAT (user access testing), which by industry standards is when the users of the application check everything out to make sure the functionality they expected to see is what is actually there. This means that the users go in, check the reports, make sure they understand how to navigate, make sure all the labels and systems are the way they want. UAT is NOT fundamental bug-testing. The developers should have already checked their code. There should be acceptance criteria set up so that if they deploy a spend report, they have what the total spend should be. If their report says 1.5m and the total spend is 2m, that is an issue they should catch. They didn't. Catch anything. At all.
Everything was broken in some way or another. They developed the dashboard in a vacuum... not asking for any outside help during the dev process and moving forward without a basic understanding of how the data was structured. The base data is complicated, it's a worldwide system with quirks and inconsistencies... and instead of using that data themselves, they built an entirely separate datamart. To make matters worse, they didn't plan things out at all. Remember my dashboard query that I developed? I used a 3rd party program to pull the data, organize it and display pivots and charts... they copied the fields from inside that application into a table, and named it after the 3rd party program. This is like if you used a database to populate an excel spreadsheet, added in some formulas, some notes in the margins, etc... then someone took all of that data and dumped it into a table called "Excel_Data". Idiotic. To make matters worse, the various accounting fields, like counts, translations, notes... were ALL copied over. So instead of using standard SQL functionality to count the number of items, they just copied over a "1" for every single row. To make matters even worse, they renamed fields. If we had a field called "System Origination Code", we abbreviated that to "Sys_Orig_Cd" in our tables. When they entered that field into their system, they expanded it out again, but into SOMETHING WRONG. They labelled that field "Original System Identifier". Why? I have no idea. The spend year and spend month fields? They renamed those to "PO Year" and "PO Month". Not only do those labels have nothing to do with the data stored in those fields... they mislead you into thinking you're looking at another date entirely.
So I was tasked with helping them fix all of their reports. I had no access to the base data, queries or anything. All that would happen is that they would show a report with 1.5m of spending on it. I'd tell them that was wrong, it should be 2m. They would then disappear for 2 weeks, come back and show me a new report which said 1.8m. I'd say "You're getting warmer, fucktards, but the right answer is 2 MILLION!" This process would repeat itself. They would find an error, fix it, then show me the new report. Now it says 1.7m. "Colder, dickheads. I already told you the answer, don't come back until it's right." I would offer to help, to look at their source data, they refused. They wouldn't allow me access to anything... probably because their datamart looked like a retarded monkey designed it.
This process continued for months. Then they wanted to deploy new reports, so I had to help them again. To keep things short, 6 reports took 5 months. I developed them against my database in 3 days... it took them 5 fucking months. I finally got them to stop just showing me an incorrect end result and me having to guess what the issue may be to actually comparing atomic data... but they still just fucked it all up, over and over.
After they finally deployed 5 correct reports (they were never able to get the 6th, cause they're stupid), I thought it was over. I had had enough, I wanted out. This is when I requested the transfer. You remember how that transfer was declined and I was asked by another team to share my time? The other team was the SHIT-design team. They wanted me to come on board their team and help debug and test all of their work. They agreed that I should have been on the team from the beginning and that everything would have gone much more smoothly. I told my manager in the most polite terms I could muster, "No, I'd rather shoot myself in the face than work for SHIT." He understood, since everyone in my organization hates them, so he told them no. As a side note, our entire corporation is going toward a web interface for all reports, so SHIT is going to become completely obsolete in about a year. All the retarded monkey work they've done is going to be done by competent designers who actually understand the base data and won't just sit there flinging shit at their computers in the hopes that everything will just work. So SHIT is going to die, hopefully soon, and I didn't want to be on the team when it did.
Did I also mention that SHIT has executive backing? And that they always get what they want? Yeah, they told my manager that I didn't really have a choice and that since they needed me, I was going to have to help. So now I'm not only not getting a transfer to another team (since I can't stand the work I'm doing now), I have to continue to do the stupid work I already do AND work for SHIT the rest of the time. Just because that wouldn't be quite shitty enough, my old team hasn't figured out who could replace the work that I've been doing for them, so I had no reduction in workload from them at all. And SHIT is going into high-gear trying to deploy a hundred more reports (all of which only I can design), so they're piling on even more SHIT for me to work on.
Fuck you, SHIT. Fuck you and my entire company.
