So no, despite good advice to go and still see Massive Attack, we didn’t in the end.

Instead, we went to see Superman Returns.

Man, what an utter bag of shit. Singer, that’s 145 minutes of my life I want back.

Got a call from the agency this morning, and the council should let me know tomorrow. I know it’s later than expected, but they’re citing bureaucracy at the council end, which is nothing surprising really.

Yes, it’d be nice to know for sure – and now that should be happening tomorrow. But I’m taking heart from the fact that a) they’re keeping me up to date with what’s going on, and b) that they haven’t said “no”. Surely if it were going to be “no” they’d have said by now, rather than keeping me hanging on.

Right?

As well as all the other malarkey going on this week at work, the project manager who joined us at the start of June upped and quit. No notice, no information, just a letter saying “I’ve had enough, I’m not coming back”. Which was, to be frank, a bit of a surprise. Not an entirely unpleasant surprise, as she wasn’t best liked (and not just by me) but all the same, I don’t think any of us expected her to just up and leave.

Anyway, it made me think a bit more about the way companies and managers see their techies and developers, and particularly the way they manage them when it comes to projects, timetables, targets and the like. I was also kind of inspired (or at least the article made me think) by Positive Sharing’s “How Not To Lead Geeks“, which made an awful lot of sense when I read it.

I think most managers see techies as unruly, chaotic, and not really all that organised. Which is kind of amusing, when you think about the fact that most of us are based in logical processes, and deal with natural progressions and information flows every day. In fact, I think the real mind-block for most managers is in seeing that actually, we’re creative. We get a brief that says “we want a website that does x,y and z. Go away and do it.” Sometimes – as is my case with the current workplace – the entire brief is “We want a social network website. We don’t really know what one is, but we want one. Make it.” And that’s what I’ve done – and it’s bloody good, in general. Or was, ’til Arsehole Boss got his grubby mitts on it. But that’s another story.

So yes, in many ways techies and developers are actually creative. Yet most managers appear to see us as minions, people who need to be micro-managed, people who don’t have a creative thought in their bodies, because, well, they’re techies. They use computers. They don’t draw, or paint, or design clothes, or write. Well, write is the closest to what they do. But you get the idea – in the minds of these managers, techies aren’t creative, they need to be guided every inch of the way, even when (or perhaps particularly when) those managers don’t actually have the knowledge themselves.

So you end up in a project where everything is being counted, every day is set out in an order of micro-modules, with goals, achievements, chokepoints, setbacks, the lot. And I’ve yet to meet any techie – in fact, any creative type at all – who likes being micro-managed in that way, and who doesn’t kick back against it in as many ways as possible.

What techies actually need when it comes to management, and Project Management in particular, is to have someone who says “OK, this is what we need. You’ve got x weeks to do it. This is what it must do.”, and then maybe once or twice a week comes round to the developers, sits down and says “How’s it going? Anything I need to know? Are we still on target? Any problems?” and then keeps track of the project in that way.

We don’t need Gantt charts, timelines, task lists, analysis, checklists, test plans, Microsoft Project, or any of that. We just need to be allowed to do what we’re good at, and to have someone who can communicate that process up the line to meetings etc.

Really it’s a simple answer. Maybe I’m simplifying it a bit, I don’t know. What I do know is that I’ve only ever worked with one PM who could work like that, and it was also the only project I’ve worked on where all the techies were happy and motivated – and prepared to put in the extra hours if necessary-, and where the project came in early, under-budget, and with no problems at all.

So maybe it’s micro-management that kills creativity, and destroys projects more than anything else.

This evening we were supposed to be going up to Westonbirt Arboretum to see Massive Attack in a one-off outside concert.

However, I’ve woken up today feeling shit, exhausted, and just not in the mood for doing owt. We’ve been so busy over the last two months, and yesterday was really the first “day off” we’ve had in a long time. Even so, we spent a lot of time sorting out bookshelves in the office at home, looking at lots of other stuff that needed to be thrown out, and generally organising things.

So much is still up in the air – the council still hasn’t got back to me, although they’re apparently “waiting for someone to sign off the final documents”. On a positive note, at least they’re not saying “no”, so it’s all looking promising – but at the same time, they still haven’t come up with a confirmed answer, and no full offer. Which means that all I’m going on is optimism at the moment.

Herself is still applying for jobs, but the interview dates are still at least a month off, realistically.

So we’re just in a kind of limbo at the moment. It’s a situation I hate being in – once I’ve made the decision to move, I just want to get on and do it. All this waiting around, waiting for job information, having to keep on going in to a place where I truly despise the managers/owners, it all just gets to me. I want it to stop, so I/We can get on with the next phase, can move and get started on the new place.

It’s frustrating, and it leaves me exhausted. I’d love to see Massive Attack tonight, but I just can’t find it in me to think that seeing them is worth a minimum of a 90-minute drive each way…

With the new PC, I’ve also installed iTunes to deal with a lot of the music. This has turned out to be a bit of a double-edged sword.

For a lot of things, iTunes is great – burning CDs, building playlists, buying music downloads – all great. No problem with that at all.

However, it has fallen down big-style on one particular area. It just won’t read in all the files I’ve got. Well, I say that – it reads the files, but in a good 50% of the cases, it doesn’t get the relevant information. Now, Real Player has no problem with the files, and has always been able to keep track of who’s done them, which album, so forth, so fifth. But oh no, not iTunes. It won’t take into account the file structure ( i.e. they’re all kept in a file structure that goes /music/[Artist]/[Album]/[Tracks] )

So in order to make use of iTunes in general, I’m supposed to go through and re-identify about 6,000 files, enter in all the tag information – all of which is in the file structure, and it even shows in iTunes with the file structure identified. It’s just the information that’s fucked. Yet Real Player has got it all with no problem.

Have I missed something? Or am I just going to have to spend time going through the entire fucking file structure, editing all the ID3 tags for all the music that iTunes insists hasn’t got the right information?

So D4D™ comes in at #4 for “how to not work for an arsehole” in Google, according to the stats I looked at today.

Ah, if only I knew that, I wouldn’t still be working for Arsehole Boss, and before that Twunty Manager, and before that, Stinky.

How do you manage to not work for an arsehole? Go self-employed. And even then you might still be doing so…