fuck this job.com

My boss is a fucking douchebag. My old boss was a Jack Ass -- I hated him for a whole different set of reasons, which have been detailed thoroughly in posts prior on this very site. A Jackass, I've learned, is actually slightly more tolerable than a Douchebag.

What's the difference? A Jack Ass (JA) is aggressive, loud, obnoxious, abrasive and arrogant because of his perceived material success. While this behavior is, of course, disgusting, at least you can say that a JA is always honest. He'll tell you exactly why and how he thinks he's better than you. A DoucheBag (DB) has all the same traits, except it's all couched in this passive-aggressive bullshit that makes it all the more intolerable.

See, a JA is basically a jock, from high-school. A DB is a nerd-gone-wrong... too fucking pussified to actually say something confrontational, or state his opinion; but at the same time so wrapped up in his illusions of intellectual superiority that he thinks, inside, that he's much better than everyone else. He's just too much of a little wussbag to actually come out and say it.

I get into work today expecting my usual, Monday morning manager's meeting. Instead, I get ambushed right off the bat with the Company Financial Spreadsheet (which is managed by the owner of the company's wife, who doesn't know finance from finger-food). See, we lost record amounts of money this month, and it's all my fault.

No, DoucheBag, it's not the fact that you fucking invested fifty grand in our company website, taking developers off the work that pays the bills and putting them to work internally. Nah, it COULDN'T be that you worked twenty-grand of fake (ie, fraudulent) expenses into this month's tallies because your wife knows fuck-all about accounting. Nor could it be that you've had me and one other programmer working on non-billable bug fixes to put duct tape over the holes in the shitty product you spent a decade developing.... No... of course not.

The reason why the company isn't making any money is that my Source Safe check-ins are dropping in quantity.

Now, that's a meaningless sentence to you if you're not a programmer (if you are you're probably pinching the bridge of your nose wondering WTF kind of idiot uses VSS check-ins as a programmer metric), so let me put it this way...

Imagine that a carpenter was judged not on the quality, straightness, legality and safety of a house he built, but rather on how many 2x4's he used. So someone who builds a nicer, sturdier, more level and more safe house is LESS valuable/productive than someone who builds a hovel using twice as many pieces of wood.

Imagine that a plumber was judged on the length (in yards) of pipe he used to plumb a house, with MORE pipe being considered a good thing.

Imagine a salesman being paid commission based on how many things he sold, instead of how much they were worth. Bob closes 5 deals at $2k each, and Will closes 1 deal at $150k. Bob is OBVIOUSLY a better employee than Will, because he closed more deals.

This is not exaggeration, but an accurate picture of how fucking clownshoes stupid it is to judge programmer based on the number of times he checks something into source-control. It's WORSE than Lines-Of-Code, which is widely agreed to be one of the most useless metrics in existence.

We left this clusterfuck of a meeting with him admonishing me to make sure I'd checked EVERYTHING into Source Safe.

So I went back to my workstation and checked EVERYTHING into Source Safe... code that's being worked on and crashes sometimes, code that's not done yet, code that doesn't even build.

2 minutes after I did that he sent me another E-mail DEMANDING (in that DB-typical passive-aggressive tone of condescention) to know why I was working on the client whose files I happened to check in instead of what I was supposed to be working on.

I responded that I was just doing what he told me to and checking everything in. 5 minutes after that I was invited to an "End-of-Day" meeting with the DoucheBag, in which I was admonished NOT to check-in my work every day.

So I got a little pissed off. I said that I didn't think it was fair that I was basically being told that the company hemhorraging money out it's ass was the fault of my Source Safe check-ins. He let out a preppy little passive-aggressive sigh like I was the most retarded person in the world, and said, "Fine, Mike, let's take a look at your Source Safe check-ins, shall we?"

Perfect.

I said, "Cool."

He sat there, leafing through my check-ins for a good 15 minutes, trying and failing to find a single thing I'd done wrong. All my hours were accounted for for the past two weeks, productivity was normal to high-normal.

But a DoucheBag can never admit that he's wrong, so he kept looking, and looking.

Finally he said, "Well, good meeting. I have a hair-cut appointment."

And he left.

Mind you, he's basically bald. I had to bite the inside of my lip to keep from giggling and saying, "Don't you mean a 'scalp cut'?"

Sooooo, Mike is going back on the market, effective immediately. My resume is out, submissions are pending. It took me 2 days upon moving to the city I live in now to find this job, and I turned down 2 other offers to take it. It will take about that long to replace this job.

So fuck you, Giant Douche Bag. Once I'm gone I hope you enjoy being all alone in the world with 3 incompetent and/or untrained programmers and your own wickedly beaten-down ego for company. Maybe one day you'll realize how fucking pathetic you are, and that just being 'smart' doesn't make you any less fucking pathetic. I'm smarter than you are, but you don't see me walking around the office like some fucking sexually-repressed man-pussy.

I hope that when his miserable excuse for a company folds, you end up working at fucking McDonald's so you can take my fry order. Maybe that will bring you back down to this little place called 'reality', where you haven't been in about ten fucking years.