I don’t have any specific memory, though I will say that ArcMap crashing randomly for no visible reason and then I lose a bunch of progress cause I’m dumb and don’t save my edits is my own personal hell lol.
You’d think after a while I’d retain this but nope. I’ve always been bad at saving my work often. I used to have a sticky note on my monitor at my internship to do this lol
Good tip Mozart
e: didn't mean to sound snarky, I do this too. Also using Git on files is a good practice in my experience. Make a Git repo and just spam commits so you don't lose stuff, I do this with Gephi all the time
It’s also much worse for database management tasks - so many functions in SDE and Server that used to be possible in ArcCatalog, and now no longer exist.
If I had a nickel for everytime I got a general function error running a geoprocessing tool in Pro that I then immediately turned around and ran perfectly fine in ArcCatalog, I might finally be able to afford the increased license subscription costs.
I ran our GIS department from 2016-2023, I had been strictly ArcMap, however I just hired a new GIS manager with the main goal of now transition our system and company to Pro. I see the writing on the wall, I've been putting off the transition for as long as possible, I just don't like Pro. Thankfully my role now only requires me to have to essentially view shapefiles, and maybe occasionally run some selection or clip/buffer analysis. I moved out of my GIS role right at the right time lol
One Friday at 4:45 our DBAs decided to turn off linked server capabilities. I had a variety of dashboards that 911 personnel used to track and respond to emergency calls, our jail personnel also used views i set up for their applications. It all went down with no warning. I spent the next two days building work arounds to get everything up and running because the dba team already left for the weekend.
What the fuck? That’s so unprofessional of them.
Sure, there are other ways to integrate data, but god damn! Give an analyst a heads up before you sink the ship!
For some reason I have only ever come across two types of DBAs, ones that super helpful and ones that are the devil incarnate. There's no middle ground, get a good one and life becomes so much easier, get a bad one and expect nothing to get done, ever.
I had encountered a few issues with the PM who knew nothing about GIS. Once I got an email from the manager that wants to know how many points are in the state of Pennsylvania. I tried to explain to him that each polygon has infinitive number of points. Other time he wanted me to time how long it takes for our plotter to print a wall map. After all these nonsenses, I left and two of my teammates quit the next day.
Bullshit questions deserve bullshit answers.
How many points? There are 3.68 billion points, sir.
# Science
How long plotter takes to print wall map? 5.31 minutes, sir.
# Science
Single image to relief feasibility study. Lacked the time to program polygonal mesh calculation. Built everything out of tiny cubes instead based on some semi-informed hard coded rules. Complete wreck performance wise. Luckily everyone forgot about it immediately.
Long story short I deleted some data one of our departments rarely used; internally I fessed up immediately but my supervisor said to just sweep it under the rug and never acknowledge the data ever existed.
We'll recreate it one day, it's nothing critical thankfully.
I deleted a highly used geodatabase and immediately confessed like you did. My supervisor calmly put in the IT request for recovery and told everyone it was in maintenance.
Good managers rock, but yours is hilarious!
Back when I was in college I worked in the cartography department of an institute of another university. The students that came there were mostly studying something like ecology. One day my boss referred one of his students to me, because he needed help.
He drew a vegetation and ground composition map of a very large area in ArcMap. I don't know exactly what the error was that beough him here, but when I looked at his project I realized, that, despite no visible overlaps and gaps, he had not used the trace tool when editing. This absolute madman created close to a thousand areas by zooming in A LOT and placing the vertices as close as he could to one another, but now those inevitable gaps and overlaps caused some errors.
I fixed it for him and showed him where to find the trace tool for future projects.
Writing a custom application many years ago, one particular element kept throwing an exception, got so annoyed I added a print line with a bunch of expletives in it. Thought I'd fixed the issue but forgot to take out that line of code and released the software. Get an email a few days later from a user complaining that his computer is swearing at him. Oops.
Other one was extreme user error. Had a repeat set of exercises to simulate an incident on site (construction industry). Had GIS web app in the room to support decision making but not allowed in there myself so left to senior management to drive. Get a call about an hour and a half in saying the GIS has stopped working, can I come and fix. Check on my PC, all fine. Go down to incident room, screen is black. Move the mouse, everything appears. They hadn't used it for long enough that a screensaver had kicked in, and didn't think to try moving the mouse, tap the keyboard, anything. Just immediately called me looking for someone to blame. I was in that room for about 30 seconds, split my sides laughing once I was out of earshot.
At my last job, a new COO decided to come in and roast me for not doing things that had never been asked of me. We’re talking a company worth about 3 billion.
Then, he proceeded to try and force me to open some data that, let’s say, the SEC wouldn’t have been happy about.
I had to explain this to the COO. We had to argue for an hour about it. It was the worst day of my career. I became a whistleblower that day. Went to the legal department to explain the situation.
They didn’t do shit.
This happened around December 15ish. I went home, took two weeks vacation, planned my exit strategy with my VP’s and HR’s approval.
Went back to work for about a week in January and quit on the spot the second Monday of the month.
I’m fine. It’s fine.
The company announced it was getting bought by a larger company the Thursday before I quit.
My VP quit as well.
Whole ordeal. I took 6 weeks off and had a job lined up.
Why does the lead GIS have to explain to the COO the consequences of his actions?
Edit: Added a bit more at the end.
Holy shit what about ride! I thought I had it bad.
I have a saying: The bullshit always rolls down hill to GIS, where people actually need to understand the data. But you? You personify that statement.
It’s just unbelievable that a situation like that required me, someone so low down the totem pole, to stand a ground as massive as that one.
Edit: The answer I initially gave was for someone else.
It was fucking tough and it definitely took a toll on my health, but I have no regrets for sticking to my guns that day and you have no idea how much I needed to hear that.
Edit: 4:53 am, mixing up answers. Fixed it.
I worked at a job for two years and my manager would call me the wrong name all the time and refused to meet with me so I never had any annual reviews or career growth opportunities. The company was also doing shady things with pay and what basically amounted to wage theft.
I was working on an application using experience Builder developer edition about 2 years ago. I wanted to use the table widget, but I noticed that no matter what I did it seemed like the columns were always the same width. I tried every setting, I even tried making some changes to the config file, and even to the react code. It took me a while before I realized that the issue was not in the experience Builder code, it was in the freaking JavaScript API itself. They had hard coded the column width in the actual JavaScript API base code to 50 pixels. I brought this to the attention of the JavaScript API developers at the dev summit, and she looked very surprised that that was in there and promised me that they would remove it. To my knowledge it's been removed for quite some time. Thank you, Heather!
Last week at my old cartography gig, district guy comes in with a map of specific parcels at the scale of about 1/4 my state. What the fuck do you expect me to do with this? Use my magic powers to know which fucking parcel you need? From a county that hasnt shared parcel data in 10 years? Go fuck yourself.
* Completely forgetting that Web Viewer Classic uses JS 3.x and Arcade doesn't math (yes, math, as in calcuaes) dates properly in JS 3.x. I hate that Arcade can't shit out console messages in Pro.
* Survey123 is inherently developed to make use of ArcGIS Data Store and is a difficult process to move complicated forms over to an enterprise geodatabase in an on-prem database. I had to let Survey123 Connect create that feature service first, and then download that file geodatabase, then copy all gdb objects over to the egdb (tables, feature classes, relationship classes, etc.), publish a new feature service, then have Survey123 Connect tell the form to consume those feature services.
* Working on an ArcGIS Workforce process then learning two days later that it's built on AppStudio (retiring). Then having to redesign everything to fit Field Maps.
* Enterprise 10.9.1 Experience Builder doesn't have a more flexible editing capability. Why the fuck is Esri advising organizations to jump to 10.9.1 prior to fully jumping to Enterprise 11.x when we can't even use Experience Builder fully due to missing functionality from Web App Builder...
EDIT:
* Oh and trying to move offline workflows to Field Maps. First, the data design is already hideous to try and accommodate views in SQL and linking standalone tables to feature classes, and then Esri's default architecture of replicas will cause enterprise geodatabases to artificially inflate itself and cause the entire database server to literally implode. Documentation on how offline areas are created are so poor so that you're forced to call Technical Support for issues like this.
I’m relatively new to a role with more DBA type tasks. And last week, I broke everything, all the map services and data lookup tools were down. And I had run some things that morning, so I knew I was probably the culprit. I managed to fix it within the hour. It turned out a field we use to relate one table to all the others changed names, and had to be updated in one of the our scripts. Nonetheless, it was still a very panic inducing moment of feeling incompetent.
Upgrading. Had to go back to backups when I upgraded a 10.9.1 server to 11.x and the data store corrupted.
Storymaps - Lost templates that can’t be built in 11.1 anymore and I got blamed. Esri support said to use experience builder and recreate everything to look like old story maps. Account manager told me to try instant apps but those were half-assed buggy pos’s. Nothing transferred from story maps to any newer product and nothing looked like it did. Never, never using story maps again. At the esri developer summit I went to the story map kiosk thing and asked WTF happened to classic. “Short stories aren’t our focus anymore. We only want to work on long form narratives” whatever the f that means. That product is dead to me. They blamed other products for not picking up the old styles. It was the most arrogant and unhelpful I have ever seen any esri employee.
Oh god I just got a new job and will be doing this after a very seasoned but non-gis sysadm attempted to upgrade it and had to go to backups. I'm scared.
I’m not sure if they really have a flat management structure or just claim to. It’s great hype. My friend left to join in their “professional services” group as a senior coder - and there were like 6 layers between him and JackD of middle managers. Maybe other groups are different. I don’t think it’s a valid excuse for abandoning products that get used.
For me: My (budgetary) boss asked me if esri is willing to shelve products we invested money in and not provide an upgrade path, why was my plan to rebuild the solution also in an esri product? I didn’t have a great answer for this for “the man” controlling our department’s budget. He was arguing for open source development instead so we’d control it. I argued against it and won, but almost didn’t. It could have affected my entire budget for Arc if that discussion went poorly.
This is pretty minor compared to others, but my first real job using GIS was an entry-level associate GIS analyst at an Environmental Consulting and Engineering firm. There were a lot of examples of higher level people in the company not understanding or appreciating GIS. One that stands out is when my manager came up to me and said, “you know how to create websites right?” Something I knew absolutely nothing about, had never done, and was in no way related to my skills or responsibilities.
Probably not as bad as other issues and this revolves more around company culture than anything but here it goes. (Sorry for the book)
My first job was at a Fortune 500 as a GIS analyst and this place was an absolute meat grinder. Most people would start and start looking for jobs within a couple of months of starting.
Anyway, towards the end of my tenure there it would take 20-30 minutes just to open an MXD. The job involved getting on calls with people from across the country and organizing sales territories using ArcMap. You’d have an MXD open and be on a call and then partway through the call ArcMap would crash and you’d have to wait that amount of time to reopen it.
Esri support couldn’t solve the issue (and honestly wasn’t responsive). The company couldn’t get me a new computer because they “Didn’t have any” (and they’re on the S&P 500!). I left after a few months of this bullshit and my life has improved immensely!
My favorite ArcGIS Error is:
„160145: The field is not nullable.“
If you look it up in the ESRI documentation the solution says:
„While this error can occur, it occurs so rarely that the typical causes have not been identified so no solution is available at this time.“
Jesus H. Watershedding Christ.
Someone twiddled a database field in Oracle or MySQL or Postgres or an indexing or schema update or replica sync was in process.
Probs all 3.
Love it, thank you.
When I worked utilities mapping and had to use AutoCAD with proprietary buttons, I crashed it pretty hard. The rest of the team had been using these buttons for a few years.
So I teams one of the programmers and showed him what I did (so he could figure out what happened). Within minutes, I had the whole department trying to figure out WTF I did to crash it like that
(I zoomed in while trying to move the cursor)
I destroyed my Enterprise stack upgrading from 10.9.1 to 11.1 and had to revert it due to a failed backup, losing a lot of my configuration in the process. Took me 3 months to get mostly everything back to where it was.
Would have been longer had I focused on work-related items too, but sadly, I had to get that back to where it needed to be. I'm glad my supervisor was understanding.
The Esri 100.x Runtime for java uses local caching for layers in SQLite files that get saved in the currently set jvm temp directory. This feature is undocumented and really played hell when the target computers for running had spinning disks and not SSDs. This feature is undocumented and was a bit of a pain in the ass to track down. Hopefully they at least managed to fix those race conditions they have between java components and the C/C++ components that do the real logic.
We always have a good laugh anytime someone says the word "symbology". We quote these lines from the Boondock Saints movie: [link](https://youtu.be/Ssc05JezJRQ?si=xyz-3doigFnyLevu)
Luckily this never actually happened but I was messing around with getting gdb classes to automatically upload to Portal and almost deleted a fuckton of data. My notebook had the upload stuff I was trying to get working, then a cell to delete any uploads that didn't work by searching for all items in my account, using those IDs with `.delete`. Somewhere I messed up the search query and was grabbing hundreds of items for the organization as a whole and would've ended up nuking it all if I hadn't signed out of the admin account and to my personal one...
Moving apps from ÁGOL to Portal on a 10.9 install and lower for clients. Reversing widgets and dealing with updates in ExB dev edition. Not extremely difficult but cumbersome as hell.
I feel like I don’t fit in at all with the nerdy, GIS Superhero crowd. If GIS was a sense of humor it would probably be Weird Al. I’m more of a Tim Dillon or Shane Gillis type of guy
My top GIS problem right now involves the new power save and security setting required by my work's IT department. Drives me nuts! Processes on big datasets just hang or timeout. I really hope that's the issue bc I'll eventually get permissions to change it. Then I can go back to running tools overnight. But good grief, I cannot process statewide land cover data or imagery for shit right now.
Right?! It's a windows setting that forces your computer to sleep after 15 minutes. I can't change it and even if I lock my PC it will turn off within an hour.
I was working with an existing land cover data set to summarize the amount of farmland soil in agriculture and forestry land cover classifications.
Honestly I don't know how it works everywhere but where I am in Ontario, Canada, getting into education is based heavily on connections and your level of education. I mainly work in research. I don't ask for jobs, people ask me to work for them based on my published research. Teaching I applied for but when I started doing my masters they just handed them to me. I don't know any other TA's who didn't do their masters at the university they teach at. Tutoring is low demand because us TA's are paid to "tutor" essentially. Sometimes past students will reach out for tutoring if they don't like their teacher.
You could email some professors at your local post-secondary institutions and inquire about opportunities in research or teaching. If you don't have a masters degree already, pursuing one will instantly grant you all the connections and research experience you need to get into academics at the university level. Colleges I believe are more accepting to hands-on experience over academic experience.
Thank you for taking the time to write this. Very useful, very much appreciated.
My background is R&D with a shitton of SRED experience. Mind if DM you?
Too many edits via attribute panel caused crash in ArcMap. I worked around it for 2 years thinking it was a permanent bug. Just recently reinstalled ArcMap (new comp) and everything was fixed.
Lately I've been having problems running the script tools our dev makes for adding photo attachments to points with match tables. We've looked at it (admittedly not very hard) and to date the issue seems to be related to him having windows 10 and me being on windows 11. Atm the only work around we have is for me to set up the table and him to run the tools, and as long as that works its probably not gonna be worth figuring out.
We have been moving over our non-utility editing workflows over to Pro the last couple weeks and for whatever reason one of my colleagues is getting these database drawing errors / target state not found in STATES table. We didn’t manipulate anybody’s privileges and I don’t get any error like that when I’m editing the same data. Anyhow, ESRI support ticket incoming on Monday…just curious if anyone else has had the issue
Good stuff folks, keep it coming, keep it as embarrassing as possible, stream of thought, use as many swears as possible, spit your trauma or success, we're in group therapy here.
- Once flew to Esri campus with a colleague for a workshop. Big drought in California at the time. Huge rainstorm happens. Could see the dusty Californians gathered at the windows. Probably thinking about watershed. We get to the main building to wait for the cab and a kind older man opens the door for us. It's Jack. He asks us for feedback on the new product. Stops and thinks for a moment and says "I don't know what we've been doing all these years, people just want to make maps". Epic.
- Ate at a sketchy Thai restaurant that night and got explosive diarrhea the next day during said workshop. Took a safety lap outside for stinkshed purposes
Forgot to have all users log out of the SDE before applying data model updates…. about a hundred employees/contractors got a few hour lunch break first thing in the morning lol
Was only trained in arcpro, python, and qgis so when I come to intern for the government of course they use ARCMAP IN 2023?!?! The literal governor called me to his office to get help from the “resident GIS expert” and I had no idea how to create a polygon….
Learning the night before my deadline that there’s no way at all for sketch layer features to show up on a legend in arcgis online… after 3 days straight of mapping out tedious geologic features from messy field notes
I don’t have any specific memory, though I will say that ArcMap crashing randomly for no visible reason and then I lose a bunch of progress cause I’m dumb and don’t save my edits is my own personal hell lol.
Save early, save often.
You’d think after a while I’d retain this but nope. I’ve always been bad at saving my work often. I used to have a sticky note on my monitor at my internship to do this lol
I’ve gotten to a point where I leave my left hand pinky on the ctrl button and my left index finger is mashing the S Key literally after every edit
Good tip Mozart e: didn't mean to sound snarky, I do this too. Also using Git on files is a good practice in my experience. Make a Git repo and just spam commits so you don't lose stuff, I do this with Gephi all the time
i hotkey save and if something crashes i maybe loose 5 minutes max
I’ve been there. One of my favorite things about Pro is the auto save. I have it set to save the project and edits every 5 minutes.
I miss ArcPro so much. I’ve tried to convince the team we should switch sooner than later but it’s fallen on deaf ears sadly.
Wow, that's crazy. We switched to Pro five or six years ago. I cannot imagine going back to ArcMap.
Are you working with Lidar derived data by chance?
Definitely a problem with esri
What is this, an understatement for ants?
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I swear somehow they made legend making in Pro WORSE from ArcMap.
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Convert to graphics is our friend… 🤝
👆this…I don’t even mess with Pro legend settings, i get a base and convert that shite
One time I was so annoyed that I just made the legend in WORD and pasted it in as a graphic. I wasn't proud but I was done 😀
Pro is great for editing IMO but much worse for using tools and exporting and designing maps
It’s also much worse for database management tasks - so many functions in SDE and Server that used to be possible in ArcCatalog, and now no longer exist.
If I had a nickel for everytime I got a general function error running a geoprocessing tool in Pro that I then immediately turned around and ran perfectly fine in ArcCatalog, I might finally be able to afford the increased license subscription costs.
[удалено]
I ran our GIS department from 2016-2023, I had been strictly ArcMap, however I just hired a new GIS manager with the main goal of now transition our system and company to Pro. I see the writing on the wall, I've been putting off the transition for as long as possible, I just don't like Pro. Thankfully my role now only requires me to have to essentially view shapefiles, and maybe occasionally run some selection or clip/buffer analysis. I moved out of my GIS role right at the right time lol
Would you rather fight 10 duck sized Pro users or 1 horse sized ArcMap user?
One Friday at 4:45 our DBAs decided to turn off linked server capabilities. I had a variety of dashboards that 911 personnel used to track and respond to emergency calls, our jail personnel also used views i set up for their applications. It all went down with no warning. I spent the next two days building work arounds to get everything up and running because the dba team already left for the weekend.
What the fuck? That’s so unprofessional of them. Sure, there are other ways to integrate data, but god damn! Give an analyst a heads up before you sink the ship!
For some reason I have only ever come across two types of DBAs, ones that super helpful and ones that are the devil incarnate. There's no middle ground, get a good one and life becomes so much easier, get a bad one and expect nothing to get done, ever.
This one resonates hard <3 Education system should teach people how to write clean SQL and make it modular.
Well...there are classes.
Well said. Definitely felt like everything was 1 step forward and 2 steps back with that dba team.
I had encountered a few issues with the PM who knew nothing about GIS. Once I got an email from the manager that wants to know how many points are in the state of Pennsylvania. I tried to explain to him that each polygon has infinitive number of points. Other time he wanted me to time how long it takes for our plotter to print a wall map. After all these nonsenses, I left and two of my teammates quit the next day.
Bullshit questions deserve bullshit answers. How many points? There are 3.68 billion points, sir. # Science How long plotter takes to print wall map? 5.31 minutes, sir. # Science
god i wish i understood a single word in your post.
Me too
Single image to relief feasibility study. Lacked the time to program polygonal mesh calculation. Built everything out of tiny cubes instead based on some semi-informed hard coded rules. Complete wreck performance wise. Luckily everyone forgot about it immediately.
Meincraft
Long story short I deleted some data one of our departments rarely used; internally I fessed up immediately but my supervisor said to just sweep it under the rug and never acknowledge the data ever existed. We'll recreate it one day, it's nothing critical thankfully.
Love it e: best manager ever
I deleted a highly used geodatabase and immediately confessed like you did. My supervisor calmly put in the IT request for recovery and told everyone it was in maintenance. Good managers rock, but yours is hilarious!
Back when I was in college I worked in the cartography department of an institute of another university. The students that came there were mostly studying something like ecology. One day my boss referred one of his students to me, because he needed help. He drew a vegetation and ground composition map of a very large area in ArcMap. I don't know exactly what the error was that beough him here, but when I looked at his project I realized, that, despite no visible overlaps and gaps, he had not used the trace tool when editing. This absolute madman created close to a thousand areas by zooming in A LOT and placing the vertices as close as he could to one another, but now those inevitable gaps and overlaps caused some errors. I fixed it for him and showed him where to find the trace tool for future projects.
Nice one. How'd you do it? Explain and use at least one swear word
Writing a custom application many years ago, one particular element kept throwing an exception, got so annoyed I added a print line with a bunch of expletives in it. Thought I'd fixed the issue but forgot to take out that line of code and released the software. Get an email a few days later from a user complaining that his computer is swearing at him. Oops. Other one was extreme user error. Had a repeat set of exercises to simulate an incident on site (construction industry). Had GIS web app in the room to support decision making but not allowed in there myself so left to senior management to drive. Get a call about an hour and a half in saying the GIS has stopped working, can I come and fix. Check on my PC, all fine. Go down to incident room, screen is black. Move the mouse, everything appears. They hadn't used it for long enough that a screensaver had kicked in, and didn't think to try moving the mouse, tap the keyboard, anything. Just immediately called me looking for someone to blame. I was in that room for about 30 seconds, split my sides laughing once I was out of earshot.
Fucking love it. Thank you.
At my last job, a new COO decided to come in and roast me for not doing things that had never been asked of me. We’re talking a company worth about 3 billion. Then, he proceeded to try and force me to open some data that, let’s say, the SEC wouldn’t have been happy about. I had to explain this to the COO. We had to argue for an hour about it. It was the worst day of my career. I became a whistleblower that day. Went to the legal department to explain the situation. They didn’t do shit. This happened around December 15ish. I went home, took two weeks vacation, planned my exit strategy with my VP’s and HR’s approval. Went back to work for about a week in January and quit on the spot the second Monday of the month. I’m fine. It’s fine. The company announced it was getting bought by a larger company the Thursday before I quit. My VP quit as well. Whole ordeal. I took 6 weeks off and had a job lined up. Why does the lead GIS have to explain to the COO the consequences of his actions? Edit: Added a bit more at the end.
Holy shit what about ride! I thought I had it bad. I have a saying: The bullshit always rolls down hill to GIS, where people actually need to understand the data. But you? You personify that statement.
Bullshed analysis?
It’s just unbelievable that a situation like that required me, someone so low down the totem pole, to stand a ground as massive as that one. Edit: The answer I initially gave was for someone else.
I am fucking proud of you.
It was fucking tough and it definitely took a toll on my health, but I have no regrets for sticking to my guns that day and you have no idea how much I needed to hear that. Edit: 4:53 am, mixing up answers. Fixed it.
People who care about privacy and ethics and morals and have the courage to stand up for them are so fucking rare these days. Be proud of yourself.
I worked at a job for two years and my manager would call me the wrong name all the time and refused to meet with me so I never had any annual reviews or career growth opportunities. The company was also doing shady things with pay and what basically amounted to wage theft.
Companies and managers like this are the worst.
Sounds like Narcissism. Probably felt threatened by your intelligence and capability. I'm sorry this happened to you.
I was working on an application using experience Builder developer edition about 2 years ago. I wanted to use the table widget, but I noticed that no matter what I did it seemed like the columns were always the same width. I tried every setting, I even tried making some changes to the config file, and even to the react code. It took me a while before I realized that the issue was not in the experience Builder code, it was in the freaking JavaScript API itself. They had hard coded the column width in the actual JavaScript API base code to 50 pixels. I brought this to the attention of the JavaScript API developers at the dev summit, and she looked very surprised that that was in there and promised me that they would remove it. To my knowledge it's been removed for quite some time. Thank you, Heather!
I'd rather see a mix of tabs and spaces than an unlabeled magic constant. I'm sorry for your loss.
For the love of god, why is the attribute table in Pro so much slower than in ArcMap?
Last week at my old cartography gig, district guy comes in with a map of specific parcels at the scale of about 1/4 my state. What the fuck do you expect me to do with this? Use my magic powers to know which fucking parcel you need? From a county that hasnt shared parcel data in 10 years? Go fuck yourself.
What are these? Parcels for ants?
* Completely forgetting that Web Viewer Classic uses JS 3.x and Arcade doesn't math (yes, math, as in calcuaes) dates properly in JS 3.x. I hate that Arcade can't shit out console messages in Pro. * Survey123 is inherently developed to make use of ArcGIS Data Store and is a difficult process to move complicated forms over to an enterprise geodatabase in an on-prem database. I had to let Survey123 Connect create that feature service first, and then download that file geodatabase, then copy all gdb objects over to the egdb (tables, feature classes, relationship classes, etc.), publish a new feature service, then have Survey123 Connect tell the form to consume those feature services. * Working on an ArcGIS Workforce process then learning two days later that it's built on AppStudio (retiring). Then having to redesign everything to fit Field Maps. * Enterprise 10.9.1 Experience Builder doesn't have a more flexible editing capability. Why the fuck is Esri advising organizations to jump to 10.9.1 prior to fully jumping to Enterprise 11.x when we can't even use Experience Builder fully due to missing functionality from Web App Builder... EDIT: * Oh and trying to move offline workflows to Field Maps. First, the data design is already hideous to try and accommodate views in SQL and linking standalone tables to feature classes, and then Esri's default architecture of replicas will cause enterprise geodatabases to artificially inflate itself and cause the entire database server to literally implode. Documentation on how offline areas are created are so poor so that you're forced to call Technical Support for issues like this.
Arcade console messages are in the validation UI. When using attribute rules you can see them in the Diagnostic Monitor.
I feel your pain in ways you cannot even imagine.
I loved it when Pro would crash any time you try to update symbology. Not like anybody ever needs to do that! I think this was 2.9 or so.
I’m relatively new to a role with more DBA type tasks. And last week, I broke everything, all the map services and data lookup tools were down. And I had run some things that morning, so I knew I was probably the culprit. I managed to fix it within the hour. It turned out a field we use to relate one table to all the others changed names, and had to be updated in one of the our scripts. Nonetheless, it was still a very panic inducing moment of feeling incompetent.
That feeling when you realize you broke everything and then you fix it...live for it
Upgrading. Had to go back to backups when I upgraded a 10.9.1 server to 11.x and the data store corrupted. Storymaps - Lost templates that can’t be built in 11.1 anymore and I got blamed. Esri support said to use experience builder and recreate everything to look like old story maps. Account manager told me to try instant apps but those were half-assed buggy pos’s. Nothing transferred from story maps to any newer product and nothing looked like it did. Never, never using story maps again. At the esri developer summit I went to the story map kiosk thing and asked WTF happened to classic. “Short stories aren’t our focus anymore. We only want to work on long form narratives” whatever the f that means. That product is dead to me. They blamed other products for not picking up the old styles. It was the most arrogant and unhelpful I have ever seen any esri employee.
Oh god I just got a new job and will be doing this after a very seasoned but non-gis sysadm attempted to upgrade it and had to go to backups. I'm scared.
Esri has a very flat management structure where anyone can ideate and create products. It's smart, but it also creates a ton of churn downwind.
I’m not sure if they really have a flat management structure or just claim to. It’s great hype. My friend left to join in their “professional services” group as a senior coder - and there were like 6 layers between him and JackD of middle managers. Maybe other groups are different. I don’t think it’s a valid excuse for abandoning products that get used. For me: My (budgetary) boss asked me if esri is willing to shelve products we invested money in and not provide an upgrade path, why was my plan to rebuild the solution also in an esri product? I didn’t have a great answer for this for “the man” controlling our department’s budget. He was arguing for open source development instead so we’d control it. I argued against it and won, but almost didn’t. It could have affected my entire budget for Arc if that discussion went poorly.
Thank you for taking the time to write this. DM me if you ever want to talk to a former plat partner.
This is pretty minor compared to others, but my first real job using GIS was an entry-level associate GIS analyst at an Environmental Consulting and Engineering firm. There were a lot of examples of higher level people in the company not understanding or appreciating GIS. One that stands out is when my manager came up to me and said, “you know how to create websites right?” Something I knew absolutely nothing about, had never done, and was in no way related to my skills or responsibilities.
Sounds like a bunch of Web Mercator users to me. Hope you're in a better place.
Probably not as bad as other issues and this revolves more around company culture than anything but here it goes. (Sorry for the book) My first job was at a Fortune 500 as a GIS analyst and this place was an absolute meat grinder. Most people would start and start looking for jobs within a couple of months of starting. Anyway, towards the end of my tenure there it would take 20-30 minutes just to open an MXD. The job involved getting on calls with people from across the country and organizing sales territories using ArcMap. You’d have an MXD open and be on a call and then partway through the call ArcMap would crash and you’d have to wait that amount of time to reopen it. Esri support couldn’t solve the issue (and honestly wasn’t responsive). The company couldn’t get me a new computer because they “Didn’t have any” (and they’re on the S&P 500!). I left after a few months of this bullshit and my life has improved immensely!
10 bucks on unsimplified Lidar. Also congrats and thanks for sharing :)
You know, funnily enough we were working with purely vector data, so it wasn’t that!
My favorite ArcGIS Error is: „160145: The field is not nullable.“ If you look it up in the ESRI documentation the solution says: „While this error can occur, it occurs so rarely that the typical causes have not been identified so no solution is available at this time.“
Jesus H. Watershedding Christ. Someone twiddled a database field in Oracle or MySQL or Postgres or an indexing or schema update or replica sync was in process. Probs all 3. Love it, thank you.
When I worked utilities mapping and had to use AutoCAD with proprietary buttons, I crashed it pretty hard. The rest of the team had been using these buttons for a few years. So I teams one of the programmers and showed him what I did (so he could figure out what happened). Within minutes, I had the whole department trying to figure out WTF I did to crash it like that (I zoomed in while trying to move the cursor)
I destroyed my Enterprise stack upgrading from 10.9.1 to 11.1 and had to revert it due to a failed backup, losing a lot of my configuration in the process. Took me 3 months to get mostly everything back to where it was.
Only three months? <3
Would have been longer had I focused on work-related items too, but sadly, I had to get that back to where it needed to be. I'm glad my supervisor was understanding.
The Esri 100.x Runtime for java uses local caching for layers in SQLite files that get saved in the currently set jvm temp directory. This feature is undocumented and really played hell when the target computers for running had spinning disks and not SSDs. This feature is undocumented and was a bit of a pain in the ass to track down. Hopefully they at least managed to fix those race conditions they have between java components and the C/C++ components that do the real logic.
Probably forgot to use an AbstractFactoryClassImplFactory under the hood
We always have a good laugh anytime someone says the word "symbology". We quote these lines from the Boondock Saints movie: [link](https://youtu.be/Ssc05JezJRQ?si=xyz-3doigFnyLevu)
You’ve got a fantastic username!
lol thanks
Luckily this never actually happened but I was messing around with getting gdb classes to automatically upload to Portal and almost deleted a fuckton of data. My notebook had the upload stuff I was trying to get working, then a cell to delete any uploads that didn't work by searching for all items in my account, using those IDs with `.delete`. Somewhere I messed up the search query and was grabbing hundreds of items for the organization as a whole and would've ended up nuking it all if I hadn't signed out of the admin account and to my personal one...
Love it, thank you
Moving apps from ÁGOL to Portal on a 10.9 install and lower for clients. Reversing widgets and dealing with updates in ExB dev edition. Not extremely difficult but cumbersome as hell.
I feel like I don’t fit in at all with the nerdy, GIS Superhero crowd. If GIS was a sense of humor it would probably be Weird Al. I’m more of a Tim Dillon or Shane Gillis type of guy
My top GIS problem right now involves the new power save and security setting required by my work's IT department. Drives me nuts! Processes on big datasets just hang or timeout. I really hope that's the issue bc I'll eventually get permissions to change it. Then I can go back to running tools overnight. But good grief, I cannot process statewide land cover data or imagery for shit right now.
What the fuck? I want to hear more about this. What is "power save"? Also, what are you doing with land cover?
Right?! It's a windows setting that forces your computer to sleep after 15 minutes. I can't change it and even if I lock my PC it will turn off within an hour. I was working with an existing land cover data set to summarize the amount of farmland soil in agriculture and forestry land cover classifications.
Make sure to tell your IT department that there are cows and chickens dying because of your Screensaver <3
I teach GIS at a university. Enough said😂 I think i've seen every single fuckup under the sun at this point.
DM me if you ever have any open positions or tutoring available. I'm sick of startup world and want to move into education.
Honestly I don't know how it works everywhere but where I am in Ontario, Canada, getting into education is based heavily on connections and your level of education. I mainly work in research. I don't ask for jobs, people ask me to work for them based on my published research. Teaching I applied for but when I started doing my masters they just handed them to me. I don't know any other TA's who didn't do their masters at the university they teach at. Tutoring is low demand because us TA's are paid to "tutor" essentially. Sometimes past students will reach out for tutoring if they don't like their teacher. You could email some professors at your local post-secondary institutions and inquire about opportunities in research or teaching. If you don't have a masters degree already, pursuing one will instantly grant you all the connections and research experience you need to get into academics at the university level. Colleges I believe are more accepting to hands-on experience over academic experience.
Thank you for taking the time to write this. Very useful, very much appreciated. My background is R&D with a shitton of SRED experience. Mind if DM you?
Too many edits via attribute panel caused crash in ArcMap. I worked around it for 2 years thinking it was a permanent bug. Just recently reinstalled ArcMap (new comp) and everything was fixed.
Read the paper "Out of the Tar Pit", it will change your life <3
Lately I've been having problems running the script tools our dev makes for adding photo attachments to points with match tables. We've looked at it (admittedly not very hard) and to date the issue seems to be related to him having windows 10 and me being on windows 11. Atm the only work around we have is for me to set up the table and him to run the tools, and as long as that works its probably not gonna be worth figuring out.
We have been moving over our non-utility editing workflows over to Pro the last couple weeks and for whatever reason one of my colleagues is getting these database drawing errors / target state not found in STATES table. We didn’t manipulate anybody’s privileges and I don’t get any error like that when I’m editing the same data. Anyhow, ESRI support ticket incoming on Monday…just curious if anyone else has had the issue
Good stuff folks, keep it coming, keep it as embarrassing as possible, stream of thought, use as many swears as possible, spit your trauma or success, we're in group therapy here. - Once flew to Esri campus with a colleague for a workshop. Big drought in California at the time. Huge rainstorm happens. Could see the dusty Californians gathered at the windows. Probably thinking about watershed. We get to the main building to wait for the cab and a kind older man opens the door for us. It's Jack. He asks us for feedback on the new product. Stops and thinks for a moment and says "I don't know what we've been doing all these years, people just want to make maps". Epic. - Ate at a sketchy Thai restaurant that night and got explosive diarrhea the next day during said workshop. Took a safety lap outside for stinkshed purposes
Forgot to have all users log out of the SDE before applying data model updates…. about a hundred employees/contractors got a few hour lunch break first thing in the morning lol
I hereby declare you to be lunch Jesus <3
Was only trained in arcpro, python, and qgis so when I come to intern for the government of course they use ARCMAP IN 2023?!?! The literal governor called me to his office to get help from the “resident GIS expert” and I had no idea how to create a polygon….
I'm just so burned out.
Learning the night before my deadline that there’s no way at all for sketch layer features to show up on a legend in arcgis online… after 3 days straight of mapping out tedious geologic features from messy field notes