I think the article I glanced over said that they are aparently they are hiring more developers and firing everyone else.

Applying GTO to life choices would be a disaster. Hardly anything is a zero-sum game.

I could be wrong but I think positive-sum games can still have game-theoretically optimal solutions?

Not that I think it's useful to apply game theory to every situation...

Ok maybe it's not just positive-sum, it's messy variables that are different for everyone.

Let's say there are a lot of benefits to working your ass off for a while, including but not limited to: you gain more experience, you party less because you're busy, you feel like you accomplished something, you bond with your coworkers, you make connections, you keep your brain from decaying as you get older, the day goes by quicker, you get a promotion, you like the rush of delivering under pressure, you barely have a life outside the office, etc. etc. etc.

For someone else the benefits of doing the least possible every day may outweigh those. Maybe they work at home with kids and also love to paint.

So game-theory for life stuff only seems optimal on a completely unique case by case basis, which could also be called "mulling it over and deciding what works for you".

I was being too nitty :P

I probably should have just read you as saying "not everything is a game", which LDO is correct and is what you're really pointing out.

I get to interview the new coop candidates. I guess I need to decide if I want to be the easy interviewer or the ball buster interviewer, and what questions I should ask them.

I seem to run bad in being put in positions as defacto project manager w/o really being given title to boss people around or it being clear what's expected of me.

In the last few weeks my job has progressed thusly:

1. Architect working on middle layer and AWS stuff, while a contractor works on the react front end which is based on prototypes cranked out by our UX guy. The entire project and all requirements managed by my boss.
2. Same, but being asked to interface directly with the UX guy for ongoing changes.
3. Volunteered to help the struggling contractor and do some of the AWS Cognito integration with the react front end myself, instead of just guiding him - since he never asked questions and took weeks to do simple things.
4. Took over the front end when contractor abruptly leaves - claiming visa issues - but i think he just quit, possibly after being told he was in performance improvement status or w/e.
5. Handed off the front end to our good react dev and CSS dev as they were pulled off other projects.
6. Told to make tasks in jira but not really clear if I have the authority to assign them to others.
7. Told by my boss she thought all of Sign in and Registration was working - even though there are plenty of open Jira tickets for wrapping stuff up.
8. Apparently I am now project manager in charge of delivering Sign in and Registration including all the little crap like interstitials and password requirements tooltips - by next Friday. Also I'm not supposed to let the good react dev, who by all accounts is going to own the front end, to do too much refactoring when he gets back from vacation next week.
9. Ok then.

In 2006 I took a job with a small contracting firm. The boss/owner called me and one of the project managers in to discuss a new project. I took a few notes but assumed that the project manager was in charge. I kept getting this weird vibe though because the boss was talking directly to me. I was like - am I supposed to just spontaneously take charge here or something?

Fast forward a year and half later when I'm leaving the company. I find out the boss was very unimpressed with me for not writing very much down that first meeting (even though I remembered and implemented everything he talked about to his complete satisfaction). Turns out I was supposed to be the actual project owner, and that other guy was just there to help if needed. The problem is no one ever told me that. And by that point it didn't really matter anyway.

Like I said, I think I run bad in these spots.

Not allowing refactoring is a bad sign imo. If it needs refactoring it should be done now.

It will be.

Is there a reason you aren't asking the right people for clarification when this happens? Not trying to be a dick, am curious what your thoughts on it.

If no one is visibly in charge I tend to take charge until someone stops me, lol

I am lucky I have my boss or I would be in your position suzzer. From what you’ve posted here you definitely sound like a project manager to me. It actually sounds very similar to my role except I’ve been kind of shoved into development stuff and you are the other way around

I probably should have leading up to this. But today everything went down too quick, my boss's boss was in the room, and then my boss had to leave.

We'll probably clarify it tomorrow. But I guess since I don't mind the position I may not bring it up. I'm just glad we have a deadline, a clear goal, and I've been anointed with the power to create and assign tasks.

I don't really like project management. I don't hate it either. I like building frameworks and libraries and doing devops stuff that developers can build features on, while they sweat over the nitty gritty stuff like tooltips for password strength requirements.

But mostly I want the project to succeed so I'll do whatever is needed.

Are they expecting you to come up with the verbiage or is it supplied by Product and you just have to do the typing?

I have higher-level requirements but not detailed enough to tell devs exactly what they need to do.

Also there was an old .net app that almost went live, but they didn't like how registration worked, and the key guy left - so it's scrapped. So we're sort of rebuilding that but also changing it.

It's messy.

This. In like 2007 I had a job making $100k and had nothing to do that I could really do or make myself do. I worked in an office, but no one there worked on remotely the same thing or had any idea what I was up to. I was expected to be out on meetings a lot and showing my face for a while every day was enough. I even got a raise while I was there. But it was, well, I don't want to use the word 'torture', but it was by far the worst job I've had* and I crawled around 140 degree attics making $25k a year too.

*well, I did telemarketing for 1 day when I was in HS.

Good luck! I’m on the way to the office, these guys want to add 50% more head count this year, we’ll see how messy it gets...

There is no worse UX hell than wrestling with Word numbered lists and bullets.

Paste a list item from one list into another - even though it's the second item in the new list, it's still numbered 8. Numbering is still based on the list above, even though it's literally inside another list. Yeah Word - that's what I wanted to do!

Trying to copy a numbered section with sub-bullets and get it to paste somewhere else w/o completely undoing all formatting is basically impossible. But it remembers the number from the old list!

Usually when trying to copy I somehow drag the whole bulleted list into a tiny sliver on the left of the page. Yes Word, clearly that is a common use case. God forbid you just somehow let me copy 5 lines of formatted text and paste them somewhere else. Let's turn into Visio for no reason instead.

It's 2019 and as far as I can tell there's still no simple way to have numbered lists with a half a row of blank space between each list item, but tightly-spaced within the item (when it's say a paragraph or has sub-bullets). Nope - tight single spacing will be strictly enforced within and between the items, and will look like utter crap. So I just hit an extra return and put a whole blank row - which of course completely freaks word out.



Pleasing!



Word, because **** you.




LOOOL - I fixed the mis-numbered bullet by deleting up to the previous bullet then hitting return, but the sub-bullets still think they're part of the other list. I almost had to retype the whole thing from scratch to fix this, and of course every time I touch the email address it turns into a hyperlink - which no one ever wants.

Yeah, you’re better off doing the formatting after you have the content done, which matches Word’s ‘select then do’ metaphor but no one’s actual workflow. What’s worse is when multiple people with different normal templates edit the same file, I finally stopped letting people add to my docs because it was faster to manually retype their changes than reformatting the whole document. Wait till you start messing with lists within tables...

I used to. Yes.

Making good games is a pretty rewarding experience. It was fun for a long time but the crunching burned me out eventually. (after several years)

The solution to Word and anything similar is to always extend the thing you want it to look like and never ever try and format using indention UI icons.

If you have:

A
B
C

And add
A
1
a
Paragraph
B

And at some point you lose B's relation to A, you put thr cursor immediately next to A and then hit enter and create B again.

If I need to switch to a diff font and back, I move my cursor to the right of the last word in the font I want and then type it there, cut and paste later.

Using the text formatting any more than absolutely as little as possible is a horrible experience.

What i ended up doing was giving him his “own” lab machines for his development and basically took over the servers he was developing on and gave them to my team.

Spoiler: we solved the problem in 4 hours. I let this guy’s boss manage him, **** that.

Before anyone is like “why do you need personal machines why dont you develop on vm’s/containers/etc”

We do. But for this project we need to configure some servers with extremely expensive hardware and ship them to a very large company. So basically only one person can use them at a time or **** up everything else that the person’s working on.

I got tired of how locked down the machines are and i’ve nearly containerized the entire environment but it’s a little complicated.

Its honestly gotten to the point where I just copy and paste in a paragraph that describes what ****ING REPRODUCTION STEPS ARE with an example and email/chat that to people. "This is broken" **** OFF.

@suzzer99 I agree word's bulleting system is mind boggling but re: renumbering can't you just right click the bulleted list and select "Restart Numbering" or something like that? I thought that worked pretty well now. Can do the same with continue I think.

And shift tab and tab should bring you in/out of different levels of bullets.

Ah - I just click the promote/demote button. I'll try right clicking.