Decision tree: Does any department still use IE6? Yes -> lets setup a Remote Desktop cluster so the rest can use Chrome
It's the human condition (and also in part the companies' own fault since they stopped investing in employees)
The people who give a shit and are passionate eventually join the other 99.9%, because it's absolutely exhausting pulling the cart with 10 freeloaders on it who don't care.
I envy the people who can give a shit for longer than 2-3 years at any given job. I suppose being your own boss is one of the few ways to stay passionate and care about something for a long enough period of time.
I border collied these people into a room and the issue is now fixed.
The system still sucks but 2000 field engineers got 10 min of their days back.
A few weeks later the Scrum Master of the PWA team gave an inspiring talk about it at a conference.
Personally you couldn't torture out of me that my app was so bad for so long, but yeah.
I will have to think of things like this where can save 5-10 min on something program-wide.
Btw, border collies are awesome dogs, and sheep are also awesome. I find no automatic disrespect in using them as stand-ins for our human foibles; intent matters.
GP, please don't be discouraged.
Later on I ended up with a sheltie with a very strong herding instinct. She mostly just acted like the Fun Police though with the other dog and cats. Lovely creatures!
Herding sheep is such an interesting experience too. The best way I can describe it is that each sheep has a really large soap bubble around them. You need to push gently on the bubble to get them to go where you want them too. If you push too hard and the bubble pops, they'll scatter and you have to step back and let the bubble reform.
I have herded cats, sorted sheep, and wrangled cattle all throughout my career. I can come up with more that are quite accurate to the situation.
And I've been the cat, sheep, and cattle likely more than I have been on the other side.
It's simply part of working with groups of humans. We become dumb in groups and lend ourselves towards herd behavior. It often requires someone tending to us to break us of the habit.
> Calling yourself the smartest breed of dog isn't particularly humble
Surely “smart as a border collie” is not a high bar for a human.
This dog does the worst job of being a dog that I’ve ever seen.
a border collie can nip the heels of humans just as well.
There is no need to assume that they meant that the others in the meeting were less important or less intelligent, or whatever. They were, perhaps, just less interested in dealing with the problem.
And yeah I did that. It wasn't even my app. Or my team. Or my field engineers.
I was just fucking ashamed of our entire IT department and thus took it upon me to fix this.
It was the first time the PM had ever spoken to a field engineer, I think.
I run a business and the passion is still hard to maintain. On Friday one of my customers cussed me out for 20 mins because I took a few hours to respond. That was a tough way to start the weekend.
I'm sure at Apple under Jobs, the % would've been very high. It will have dropped significantly by now.
You're absolutely right on a country-scale though.
> I challenged him on this by Googling the Intune manual to set the default browser.
I've found that LLMs really democratize debate when issues like this arise!
Can't guarantee you'll win, but when someone bets you're not willing to RTFM to call their bluff-- Oh boy!
Googling does result with a Gemini/AI response at the top.
Edit: I guess I misunderstood the parent (look in the replies). I hate the phenomenon I’m describing so I’ll leave the comment but I don’t want to besmirch caminante’s good name!
The parent said they were getting stonewalled by a colleague over a T/F. Maybe you're assuming I called the parent a liar...?
edit: Nevermind. You shared your thoughts in a later comment above, dismissing the HN forum as vindictive.