For me:
Sometimes it doesn’t matter how hard you work, your going to get laid off either way.
Just showing up can sometimes make the difference.
Your not paid to be a software developer. Your being paid to be a problem solver.
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Being right doesn’t matter if you can’t convince others.
Also that the best way to convince others that your ideas should be done is to make them think it is their idea. Worrying about getting credit works against getting things done.
When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.
And then you get laid off. 🪿
Don’t touch liquid nitrogen with your bare hands.
Don’t touch glowing metal with your bare hands.
Don’t touch exposed wire with your bare hands.
Spending your own money on super high quality gloves is absolutely worth it.
Pff! Where’s the fun in that?
So if I put a pair of nitrile gloves on, I should be able to touch those things with no problems? brb gonna go try it
Don’t forget to grab something out of the heavy machinery
Don’t put your dick in it either. :/
No that’s actually perfectly okay.
Well I’M Homer Simpson! —Grimey
Thank you Six Finger.
So you’re saying that as long as the bare wires are soaked in liquid nitrogen, they’re fine to touch!
I mean you would think…
Stupid no fun allowed lessons, next you’re going to tell me I can’t feed the lions dressed in a zebra costume
Don’t touch the -80°C (-112°F) freezer with your bare wet hands (learned this today :D )
Can confirm, these are excellent lessons.
Star Trek lied to us about the competency levels of our co-workers.
To be fair, the story is set a few years in the future.
And revolves around the best of the best. The enterprise is the flagship of the federation
Thats why I like Orville so much, because its just averagely normally competent workers doing space communism things
Yeah, when they had flip phones.
My favorite quote of all time is from the web series PeopleWatching when on character compare the present to Star Trek saing “We have the ships, but not the crew”.
No matter what, under no circumstances should you ever believe the company or place you work for will back you up.
If a company was placed in a situation where they can get rid of you for any reason, they will and they will do it as fast as possible.
Even if you believe you are irreplaceable, a company will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get you out of the equation.
Even if you have been with the company for 20+ years, if the company sees a way to save a hundred bucks by getting rid of you, they will.
Even if you and your boss and their bosses are buddy buddy and they are the godparent to your child and if you donated them a kidney, they will replace you.
Even if you show that you work the most, bring in the most sales, work the longest, get paid the least, and do work so everyone can slack off, they will replace you.
Also HR is never there for you. It is there to protect the company first and foremost. If you go to them for any reason, you are on a list to be the first to go.
Even if you ARE irreplaceable and crucial to success, the company will only realize it a month after you’re gone.
Even if you ARE irreplaceable and crucial to success, the company will only realize it a month after you’re gone.
So true.
But it is still fucking hilarious, to watch go down.
Pro tip: Make sure some colleagues have your contact info, so you can enjoy the news right away when your former boss gets fired for incompetence. It doesn’t fix anything, but it feels nice.
I remember reading of the lady who donated her kidney to get boss and then got fired
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Literally an hour ago my boss tells me he doesn’t think I’m working fast enough because things aren’t always getting finished. I tell him that six months ago the labour budget was reasonable and but now I have half as many hours to do the same amount of work.
He tells me it can’t be helped, the labour budget is what it is. I tell him that the work can’t be helped without more labour, because it is what it is.
Anyway, I guess what I learned on the job is if you use management’s own words against them you’ll get written up
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yup, did it some time ago, boss yelled in a meeting, wrote an email ‘for confirmation of understanding’ with word for word, he did NOT like it. and ofc I did not understand what all the yelling was about.
Boss said, last year’s performance met expectations, so we are all not getting any bonus.
What?? Hold on. It’s a performance-based bonus. This directly translates to a bonus-based performance, effective immediately.
Fuck the company, I don’t work for peanuts.
Hard skills are important for doing the underlying job, but soft skills matter more if you want to progress in the career as well as financially.
You could be the smartest person alive, but if you don’t communicate effectively and play nice with others you’re almost useless.
I’m in this comment and I don’t like it.
Validate your backups regularly.
Also, make backups.
Taking a day to actually test backups by doing a cold reset can save a business, thats for sure.
The horror of being a senior admin is realizing that the whole thing could live or die based solely on your actions and decisions. And that you will be blamed.
This is where you bring Chaos Monkey in and see where your weak points are.
I’ve always wanted to deploy Chaos Monkey for its actual purpose, but I’ve never been in charge of a big enough infra to make it worth the time. I have turned off databases just to see who files a ticket, which seems in the same spirit.
A shout test is what I call that.
If your backups are untested, you don’t have backups.
Years after the fact I could make the lead developer’s eye twitch just by mentioning the guy who was supposed to maintain the backups but we discovered after the fire that he actually hadn’t been doing it. That guy was fired, but it didn’t bring back the lost code.
Wait, you didn’t have some git-based thing with an off-site upstream?
Everybody has a test environment.
Some are lucky enough to also have a production environment.
As a network engineer we don’t even have a test env linked to prod. Everything is prod.
Everything is prod.
No no, everything is test.
Cover Your Ass
You can’t go in and give 100% every day. You will burn out. Give 70% regularly. Only give 100% when shit really hits the fan. People will think you are a miracle worker.
Plus, companies will abuse you.
Not even companies, other coworkers or your manager
Keep notes on your work.
- Its proof of the work you have done
- A lot of people forget things, including yourself.
- It helps you reflect back. Helps with projects that are spaced apart as well.
On three separate occasions over the course of many years, I ran into an issue and searched Stack Overflow for anyone else having the same problem. The approved answer was exactly what I needed, and went to go hit the upvote button, only to realize I can’t upvote it because I was the author of the answer.
I get this like 6 times a year.
Wait. Are you my alt account?
I hate doing that but it saved one of my colleague’s job.
One of our employees pretty much unfairly accused him of loads of things but when he showed his written personal log of work, he got a new chance at staying in the company.
I’m happy for the guy. He’s really nice. It’s a shame everyone is so damn grumpy at my company.
I kind of have a silverbullet instance to keep work notes but it’s not nearly organized enough. and keeping it organized with all the things going on would require soo much time.
I know not all companies may let you use it but I found Logseq to be quite useful for this. No real organizing, just write in the daily notes and search later.
It uses links to connect notes together, as long as there are common words. Obsidian is similar but logseq emphasizes daily notes more.
yep, silverbullet is in the same category and it’s a docker, and i use docker to work, so they can’t block it
It usually doesn’t need to be perfect, good enough is often good enough and can be a lot faster where trying for perfection might not get finished in time.
with the era of llms and vibe coding the bar for good enough got way too low.
“Good enough for these clowns.” is the key phrase. But I try to leave off the last three words if I say it out loud.
HR protects and represents the company, not you as an employee.
Complaining to HR is more effective when you can frame it from a company liability position.
Just because someone was made a supervisor it doesn’t mean they know what they are doing.
I was once made a boss over this particular employee who was better at their job than me, and much older. I made it clear to her that I had no desire to wield any authority over her and that I considered us peers.
If my bosses knew what I’d done I would have been roasted but I feel like I made the right call. And having her respect was more invaluable than anything my bosses ever did.
My manager has been the manager of my department for over 7 years and admitted to my face that she has no idea what we do. 💀… And then did not make any effort in the last 8 months to learn what I do.
I had worked at a theme park a couple summers. I operated one of the rides during a state inspection. It wasn’t a simple push the button and off it goes kind of thing, you manually controlled it. There were three big hydraulic motors with tires that powered the moving portion. The goal was to never equal the tires and I was good at it.
A new supervisor was promoted only because her sister was a manager already. She didn’t know how to properly operate the ride and was training others. I walked past one day to hear it roaring around one direction then the tires started screeching as it was hammered the other direction. I put in my notice the same day as that was my tipping point of stupidity, I wasn’t going to be there when someone was hurt or worse.
The supervisor who promoted her only did it to kiss ass, she complained she hadn’t had a single day off all summer because the new supervisor couldn’t perform the job.
That’s flat out nepotism, and an impending disaster. Good call on getting out sooner rather than later. The pay 100% was not worth the risk.
Forget the 8 months, it’s the 7 years that makes you think ‘how come you’ve not taken some of that time to learn what we do’?
Ah yeah, well, it was about 8 months ago when she said it to me, and somehow she’s gotten away with it because my department knows what it’s doing at all times. She’s being investigated and has decided this is the time to retire. Good riddance, absolute piece of shite.
Managers aren’t there to do your job. They are there to clear the way so you can do your job. Handle schedules, handle HR requests, filter bullshit coming from above you.
As a manager, my goal is to have people smarter and better than me under me. Give them the space to do what they do best. While I give them the direction on what they should be working on. Half of what I do is make sure they aren’t wasting time focusing on stuff that doesn’t actually push the project forward.
And if someone is put in a supervisor position and can’t handle those tasks either? I didn’t say they didn’t know my job, they literally didn’t know what THEY were doing.
At my first internship, they made me go through an entire bookshelf of safety training manuals that felt like they were written by the local staff. They were all full of things like “don’t put a pipe on the end of a wrench to give you the leverage you need to do your job” and “don’t forget to clock out at lunch or we’ll have to assume you were gone for exactly one hour”. Took me a moment to realize they were in fact telling me exactly what to do, but in a way that would also cover their asses. Always thought that was clever.
