I can't tell if his boss is an autistic savant, an insecure hoarder, a superbusy careerist or a technical type not used to managing people, or even a normal boss rationally tuning out employees he's given up on, but can't get rid of for corporate reasons, or simply feels vamozz isn't worth his time yet. Or maybe he feels he can do all the work himself and management duties were sort of forced on him for corporate/career reasons and this is his little rebellion. Or maybe there is no problem, vamozz has everything he needs and everything is spelled out elsewhere if he can bother to look. Or maybe there are other corporate dynamics at play that vamozz isn't aware of. Or maybe his boss is depressed and is avoiding everyone.

I also don't konw what about the situation is bothering him and why. What's he afraid of? That he's being kept in the dark? That's he's going to be blamed for the team's failure? Or does he simply care about the team's performance? Performance reviews for himself? That he's not learning enough? The work's boring him? His career is being stalled? I have no idea.

I agree there's no way to know what the problem is. Hopefully it's one of these.

This is also a mystery.

Whatever the problem is, wishing the boss was different isn't a solution. If the problem is not the boss then changing jobs isn't a solution.

i can't tell neither, don't you see that he being uncommunicative u don't have a clue what is in his head, and i talked with others two friends here in the company to see another perspective and to see if I was the problem, but they somehow agree with me and we guessed for this:

" a technical type not used to managing people"

what is bothering me the most

- it's a kind of hostile/unpleasing place to work
- being kept in the dark
- not learning enough

people don't change ... and i don't think it's me, i had another job and never had this problem

Candybar, most people like to be good at their job and contribute in a positive fashion. If you're just being fed the boring menial programming tasks without any sense of the bigger picture it's pretty hard to thrive.

Yes, there are things he can do to get this information - but most (all?) of them are worse then being on a well led team. Whatever the boss's reasons for not talking with v - it's a legitimate problem that v wanted help dealing with. Avoiding this communication problem probably isn't the best way to deal with the situation.

There's no excuse for a leader being unwilling to talk to his/her team. Even if it's something like he's given up on v he should be giving v that feedback or just firing him.

Yeah this. Sure you won't have instant access but it's often not a bad idea to let stuff you can't get to work sit for a bit. You'll probably get an answer here within a day.

Either way it can't hurt to give us some info. What language are you interested in, why are you learning to program, any projects you have in mind etc. Pretty sure going by your poker track record you have the right mindset for a programmer (unless I'm confusing you)

All of this may be true, but his team lead is not here asking for advice, vamozz is, so talking about what his team lead should do in this situation is somewhat moot, though I agree with you that he's almost certainly mishandling the situation. Depending on the situation, vamozz may or may not be able to do something about it - I'm just trying to narrow it down. Obviously, that vamozz is confused and upset is a problem, but saying that it's his team leads's fault doesn't tell him anything he doesn't know.

And that's why he was given some advice about what to do about the situation with his boss.

I guess I just didn't understand your line of questioning and your responses. It seemed to me like you couldn't understand why this problem would bother him and why he wanted to do something to address the root problem with the boss - something that seemed pretty clear to me. If I just misunderstood/misread your posts - sorry about that.

Right, but most of the advice is assuming a lot about the situation. For all we know, his team lead is technically amazing and built a great infrastructure, documented everything in obvious places and is far too productive to bother with face-to-face and vamozz spent his first few months asking to be hand-held and his team lead thinks ignoring forces him to look at documentation and learn on his own. In which case, by far the best thing vamozz can do is absorb as much he can to earn his respect. Or vamozz is in a dev sweatshot as a junior contractor where they just want him for the daily grind with no intention of allowing him to develop. In which case he needs to look elsewhere and find a better situation. But then maybe he's kind of stuck or at least doesn't have a lot of options. Maybe he needs a visa to work, which limits his options. I have no idea. What he should do depends on exactly what about the situation bothers him and his means and ends. All of which I've inquired about.

You also have to think about why he's in a situation like this. Maybe it pays well. Maybe from a technical perspective, it's a lot better than what he's used to. Maybe he has some other shortcomings that prevent him from getting a good job easily. Maybe he's being taken advantage of because of his poor english and visa status. I don't know.

My thesis advisor, for instance, was quite quirky and uncommunicative, etc, etc, but I'd much rather work with him than most people I've worked with because he's brilliant and you could learn a lot from him just by seeing what he does and how he does it and gives you more insight in a few minutes you have with him than most people do in a year. And he became a lot more accessible after I started acing his class - with some people you have to earn their respect first.


I have some sense, but I'm not close to understanding his situation. There are a lot of ways a boss can be uncommunicative. And the way he writes here does not inspire a lot of confidence that he's doing everything to help himself. His team lead is not even the one who hired him. If my boss forced someone into my team and he's actively getting in the way of my being productive and my attempts to teach him have failed, it's possible that my attempts to contain would appear much the same way. Maybe the team lead is someone like Fabrice Bellard and the only way it makes sense for him to talk to vamozz more than occasionally is for vamozz to become a lot better at his job.

Candybar - I don't believe anything you wrote addresses the point that vamozz's boss won't talk to him. After months of avoiding the issue Vamozz should be going up the chain with this issue regardless of why he's being avoided. So a lot of the context you're asking about doesn't seem super relevant.

As for the end part about how this could be how you would treat someone you wanted to contain - I'd say that's a really poor leadership move. If you can't find 30 minutes over a period of months to sit down and explain to someone why they're not getting other work or even to say that you have no intention of ever giving them more complex works you're a bad manager.

I don't believe its ever ok to treat someone like that.

I don't think that's what's going on. He's avoiding meetings but they are clearly talking to one another on some level, because otherwise, how is he getting the work to do? How was vamozz able to schedule those meetings? Getting those short answers to his questions? Vamozz isn't being explained the things he wants explained the way he wants explained but it doesn't seem to be the case that the team lead is unreachable.

No one is automatically reachable to the extent that you want them to be and it's possible that there are things vamozz can do to make himself a more desirable person for the team lead to talk to.


Yes, he should talk to his actual boss (not the team lead, but his hiring manager). That's not going up the chain and that's something he's already done. But if he's going to bring this up as a major problem, above and beyond what he's done so far, what you say in that meeting, how you say it, etc, all depends on your goal and options. Does he want to keep this job? Is it worth keeping? Can he not afford to be fired because of visa issues? Can he get another job lined up that's just as good or better? Etc, etc. You can't just walk into a meeting with your hiring manager where you are going to demand that another, more valuable employee change his behavior substantially without any backup plan. If I'm a manager and there's a major conflict between two employees, letting go of the less valuable employee is an easy decision unless there are legal implications.

We have no idea how bad the situation is, what his options are, so it's fairly irresponsible to say, go up the chain and make it their problem.


Poor leadership may be an acceptable response when you're forced into a leadership role that's not doing anyone any good. I'm not saying this is what's going on, merely that we cannot rule this out. No one has an infinite amount of time to be good at everything and we have to prioritize.

The team lead that he's talking about doesn't appear to be an actual manager. Any managerial responsibility may not be something he's voluntarily accepted.


Moralizing doesn't solve vamozz's problem and we don't really know how he's being treated. We're not dealing with major human rights violations.

he is uncommunicative in the sense that he tries to avoid to talk about work related stuff

we are supposed to have these meetings to talk about my work and current projects status, and if he doesn't want to have them, it's cause he doesn't care about (ok i get it, he is busy, but how doesn't he have 20 minutes in five months)

and when u ask him for something, he ovbioulsy talks, but i get alot of poor responses, and he doesn't care to share valuable information

talking to the boss is a valid option, i don't know what is going to result from that, maybe he talks to the leader or i get move to another team, etc

about finding another jobs i don't think would be too hard, worst case scenario i can go back to my old job, and not visa problem (i work in my country of birth), so i'm not scared of being fired


he tries to avoid/ignore me, he is not rude, just indifferent and if u sum up his lack of soft skills that makes it worst

If you're not worried about being fired and if the current situation is unbearable, yet the company/pay is okay, it seems like it would be worth trying to get on to another team/group. How many people work for your boss (not your team lead, but your "main" boss)? You don't even have to bring this up to your boss now, but can network with people in other groups to slowly find your way in, because they have to want you too.

there are about 18 people in the area, and i heard that my boss is trying to hire some others, possibly for make another team , maybe i can ask him for this

and yes, there is a team that i could ask for move in

Wish I read this before I accepted an offer last week.
Confirmed salary fish ITT.

anf,

i will buy you dinner with all the extra money it earned me.

Anyone want to help me design my rest API? I am struggling with angularjs a bit. Writing an app for a friend, and I'm not sure I'm going about this the right way... at any level. Using rails for the backend.

https://gist.github.com/csahlman/2d5a65271f1ba3766dbb

There are vents, basically just posts. Vents have comments, and have a vote per user. The user can only upvote 1 of the different kinds of votes, and if they change their mind it just updates the vote and resets the original. I'm keeping counters in the vent model... and updating according to some logic (the code is a bit ugly).

Problem I'm having is that when I post to /vents/:vent_id/votes, I want to respond with the vent so angularjs will update the counter, but it doesn't update the counters in time. It takes 2 post actions to update the vent.

Am I going about this the right way? The vote model is a bit ghetto but I don't see another way to do it, and I'm not sure if I should just tally up the votes everytime it's updated or try to keep the counters in the vent model.

Appreciate any help.

nvm figured out a decent solution and am not feeling quite so dumb.

edit: Here's a gist with my main html page, and main controller for those who are interested.

https://gist.github.com/csahlman/2d5a65271f1ba3766dbb

I decided to just count each vote type. I should almost definitely refactor to do this on rails side, since I built in a method to reload all the vents after each update to a vent.

I'm having trouble finding good tutorials and finding the API difficult to navigate, so this is probably all hilariously bad.

I'm happy to keep posting code for those interested in seeing a rails/angularjs app grow. I am going to add a bunch of stuff to it and learn from my mistakes over the next few weeks.

double edit: ya... I simplified all that a huge amount by not trying to query using forEach loops on the client side haha. gogo refactor.

fvk twitter bootstrap

personally, i am sick of Bootstrapped websites, they all look exactly the same. its sickening.

and
there is one bug that is just horrible and it happens on all Bootstrap websites:

horizontal scrolling is messed up. the page is not scaled properly and i have to scroll right to see all the text. the only way this is fixed is if i resize my browser larger. so much for "responsive"

take a look at this piece of crap in action: (look at the horizontal scroll at the bottom):

http://imgur.com/0YYKnWt
http://imgur.com/0GsGyoK
http://imgur.com/I46HWRB
http://imgur.com/45i8aKs

That's pretty strange. Works fine for me.

* {overflow: hidden !important;} obv

no idea what that means but they should fix it

what did upstream say when you submitted a patch?

That site works just fine on FF and Chrome on my computer. I even shrunk the windows down to the smallest size I could and it responded just fine. I don't have high-res exactly, so not sure what the problem is.

I don't think it's a bootstrap issue. It looks more like a browser issue.

What I was trying to show is that bootstrap-responsive.css says you should have a minimum left/right padding of 20px where your screen shot shows no left padding at all.

You should look at the sites listed on http://mediaqueri.es/ at different browser widths and compare with the screen shots to see if they look the same. Some of the sites listed are built with bootstrap and some aren't.

All of the sites listed on the first page look exactly the same as the screen shots for me.

sweet!