Isn’t it frustrating when people don’t follow simple instructions and make things harder for no reason?

This programmer shares how his manager would completely ruin data entries and make his life impossible.

Check out how things got worse!

Machines have needs too

Something came up today in my job that made me remember something that happened to me 10 years ago.

A few weeks ago I got asked to take data from about 30-40 users, parse it, consolidate it, aggregate it, and display the results as various dashboards.

He tried his best to make everyone’s life easy!

So I gave each person an input form. I did my best to explain the basics of data hygiene to the people doing the inputs.

This column is for the date of the next meeting. It should be only dates. This column is for the proposed allocation count. It should be only numbers. This column is for the approved spend amount. It should be only numbers. Etc.

I got push back almost instantly.

The users said that in some cases there won’t be any meeting, so they don’t want to put a date in. They want to put N/A. Okay, I built in logic to account for that. Same thing for a few other columns.

UH OH…

I accounted for that too.

I got told I cannot restrict entries to only “correct” formats, as the executives (or their assistants) populating the forms want flexibility in what they enter. The form “is for their usage too, so they can track things.”

This morning I found that some of the dashboards had odd results. It was displaying little streams of consciousness. Apparently some people had figured out how to expand the form and were adding little notes here and there. Uggh.

So I added more logic to restrict ingestion to only the “official” part of the form, made extra space for people to enter notes, and moved the notes to that extra space.

He knew they were making things difficult for the system!

My experience suggests that this will be a never ending struggle. I could move the input forms to more restrictive tools, but that often leads to other issues like user acceptance, training, etc. So here we are.

Anyway, this back and forth made me remember interactions I had with a Director of Reporting 10 years ago. I was doing something similar then, taking data from various sources and creating dashboards from it.

One source was a master list of all projects and various related meta-data. Some projects were quite extensive and had multiple related timelines.

There were also dependencies between some projects. So the Director of Reporting, who owned this list, had merged cells between columns, between rows, etc.

He kept complaining about it!

He had also made these merges color coded. This admittedly made it a bit easier for humans to read. But it made it almost impossible for my tools to ingest that list and make use of it for joining to other tables.

His formatting was nice for humans, but poison for machines.

So I contacted the Director, explained the issue, and asked him to stop the cell merge formatting. He didn’t respond for a while. When he did respond, he clearly didn’t understand my explanation.

Then after some more back and forth he refused to make changes. He said his version made it easy to read. (To my knowledge, the only person who was “reading” it was him when he made changes, and me when I tried to articulate why the formatting should change.)

That’s INSANE!

I offered to create a table for him that would more or less duplicate his version as an end product of my reporting. We went through another round of back and forth and he refused again.

So for the duration of this project I would monthly make a copy of his table; then spend a couple hours going through it and unmerging all the cells. It was a pain, but I didn’t see a way around it.

That and other interactions with that man, who as mentioned was our Director of Reporting, convinced me that he had no understanding of reporting, data, dashboards, or anything related to those things.

(I will never forget his 250+ slide monthly ops review. Or when someone asked for a list of Incidents from the previous month and he casually supplied a table with 13K+ rows, where the actual count was about 60).

They were just not following the rules!

I was told that he was spectacular at managing up, and had somehow convinced our executive suite that he was essential to the well being of the company.

I got laid off from the company about 8 years after this happened. He didn’t. He survived. I checked and he is still there.

I get paid in part to account for human foolishness interfering with data collection and presentation. I know that. But it shouldn’t come from the head of the group that supposedly oversees those processes.

I worked with him for almost 15 years.

He has bittersweet feelings…

I pride myself that he thought of me as a friend that entire time, and had no idea I thought of him the same way a small town cop thinks of a habitual drunk driver.

I’m lucky in that my current company seems to do a fairly good job.

I cannot think of anyone offhand that is incompetent on a wholesale basis. But who knows what the future will bring.

GEEZ! That’s so unprofessional!

Why would they make it hard on the system?

Let’s find out what people on Reddit think about this story.

Exactly! This user wishes managers would understand programmers better.

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This user is thankful for a useful feature.

This user finds this story really painful!

Exactly! This user knows that some people don’t deserve to work on a software.

This user thinks this problem could have been fixed.

Someone’s being really particular about their work here.

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