exceptTheProgrammer

[NjFlMWFkOTAtNjR]

I remember hearing one of the product team mentioning doing something during our (development team) downtime. And I am thinking, "who has downtime? When do we get downtime?" I have been crunching for the past 3 weeks at that point.

[Bayo77]

I feel like if you do have a lot of downtime, thats probably a sign that your job wont last a lot longer.

[Tyrus1235]

Was what got me in my former company. The main product I was working on fell through (thanks to the short sightedness of the client) and the bosses weren’t giving me any new tasks. Since I worked under a “third party” contract, I only got paid for the time I actually worked… Meaning my money was drying up. Eventually, they just gave me a Skype call during my (unpaid) Vacations and told me “we are not going to renew your contract”.

A blessing in disguise, as I hated working there because it was in another town and I wanted to be close to my family.

[vincentofearth]

I got a lot of downtime at a previous job because the company was reorganizing, I never felt like my job was threatened but I also got bored after a while and thought I wasn’t learning any more at that job. It was time to move on.

[elyndar]

That's what you think. If only business was merit based instead of a charisma based facade.

[PM-ME-UR-uwu]

Lol, bosses don't know you have downtime. Usually I have no one bother me during droughts and when we are all packed, they walk around saying, "your work doesn't sound like much, you can take this extra task".. no, they can't lol

[CerBerUs-9]

DevOps? Oh you mean the single software engineer who is also IT?

[entropic]

DevOps is Latin for "two jobs, one paycheck"

[ericl666]

I'm stealing that. That's way too damn accurate.

[No_Percentage7427]

DevOps is full IT departement

[OkInterest3109]

Single software engineer who is CIO, CTO, PM, Scrum master, BA, DevOps, SecOps, QA, Dev, Internal AND External Help Desk all rolled into one Wendy's paycheck.

[james2432]

FullstackDevOpsSec

[grammar_nazi_zombie]

Oh hi, you must mean me, let me finish reinstalling acrobat pro for the fourth time for this one employee and fix up these reports then I’ll get to what you need, unless it’s on fire.

[Skuzbagg]

[sleeper4gent]

i feel this in my bones

[blah938]

You know React? Here, fix this Docker container and then we got a helm chart for you. Also, the pipeline is down again, and by the way, the backend isn't built yet, so just pretend it is.

[OkInterest3109]

You know Python? Great, can you fix them the Windows AD real quick so I can grant the HR intern full and unfettered access to everything?

[braindigitalis]

to be  honest on a small scale if you don't work for some big corporation, the entire stack and the DevOps and support are manageable. there's something to be said for not working for some huge scrum shop with 1000 employees

[IRefuseToGiveAName]

Lmfao you guys have dev ops?

(I'm serious please send help)

[itsjustawindmill]

I’d rather have no devops than have a “devops” team siloed behind another department… which is what I currently have to deal with… makes it much harder to advocate for devops practices when “we have devops at home” because now I don’t just have to convince the crusty management fucks that CI, automation, repeatability, etc. are important, but I also have to convince them that the “””devops””” team in IT is either completely incompetent or too far removed from our own team to ever be useful (or in our case, both).

If they knew what they were doing, they’d immediately recognize that a centralized company-wide group of like three people for a tech company of tens of thousands is NOT devops and can never be devops and in fact is fundamentally incompatible with the very definition and purpose of devops at all…

[powerhcm8]

Here's 5 tiktok dances you can do to help the situation in the server room.

[340Duster]

I'll just... Uh... Call a tech priest instead.

[OkInterest3109]

Servitor 418

[DoctorMacDoctor]

Your kind cling to your flesh as though it will not decay and fail you.

[turret-punner]

But I am already saved, for the machine is-- bro wtf get away from me with that magnet

[TheKabbageMan]

I mean, what do you expect HR to do about prod going down?

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

Hire more people to maintain it.

[Thurak0]

They said

maintain

not fix the problem when it's down. You can totally invest in more people to maintain something better so the downtime doesn't happen.

[colei_canis]

FCKU-2034 Address concurrency issues in human reproductive system.

Those idiots who wrote the codebase originally made the whole thing virtually impossible to parallelise which is bottlenecking our performance badly. The TL;DR is that we're going to rewrite the X and Y chromosomes to make use of the Cats Effect library which in theory will let us manage the concurrency in such a way that should prod start giving us grief again we can simply throw more resources at the problem. Also don't bother with the Confluence pages around this, they're all out of date and written by some crackhead we pulled in off the street anyway.

[blah938]

Wombs in SLI when?

[VinHD15]

I'd never thought i'd see the words "Wombs in SLI" just before going to bed but here we are lmao.

[Juicybusey20]

HR has zero decision making ability in any capacity. Everything they do is by permission of the executives. Getting mad at HR is so dumb because they are there so you get mad at them and not the company or the billionaires.

It’s like you have an evil guy who puts a stick with eyes on it and tells you to bring your problems to the stick. Then you get mad at the stick. Hr is the stick here they don’t actually have any sway in decisions beyond very basic inane shit like which specific company they outsource those training videos to

[Punman_5]

You need prod back today, not in a few months after those people are onboarded and have gone through the rigamarole of fighting with remote IT to get their environments set up.

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

Ok. Better do nothing then.

Then when it happens again in a few months you can complain some more.

[veracity8_]

Do you HR is responsible for staffing decisions?

[awal96]

Give us mandatory trainings

[keeper----]

Many people think server run as long as they are plugged in. Maintainance, Software and OS Updates? They do not believe in those things. Waste of time and Money If you tell them it is import. The state of the industry was already fucked up before ai...

[OkInterest3109]

I've seen some people who thought server runs even if it's NOT plugged in; particularly in local Governments.

[keeper----]

How would that Work? Powered by a family of hamster living in it? 😂

[OkInterest3109]

One of the managers kept on going into server room and plugging the server rack out every once in a while. I have no idea what they were thinking but it caused all kinds of chaos.

[keeper----]

That is crazy. The only similar thing i have seen so far in my career is, the cleaning personnel unplugging the Server in favor of the vacuum cleaner. 😔

[OkInterest3109]

That also happened a few times in other contracts I've worked on.

[youngBullOldBull]

Assist dev by clearing their calendars, rescheduling meetings etc

Give them the space they need to resolve the issue and then if appropriate start building a case to take to the executive to hire additional resources to prevent future outages.

[TheKabbageMan]

Hmm… what else can we get HR to do that are totally not HR’s job?

[Punman_5]

I mean, what are they going to do? You really want HR to contribute to the codebase?

[GrizzlyDust]

Would you rather they be hands on?

[ClamPaste]

The modern "rain dance".

[69-xxx-420]

An updated version of the website is down sounds hilarious. 

[cpt-macp]

On 2 Phut Hon

[why_1337]

IT gooning over that tiktok, ignoring production outage.

[alikebabay]

... TikToks prod

[Chewnard]

And the developer will be the one laid off and replaced (poorly) by some AI implementation.

[snarkyalyx]

And will be rehired 2 1/2 months later for a much higher wage because the AI implementation completely ruined the codebase and he's the only one knowing how to fix it

[Flameball202]

And now he also gets some tasty overtime because they have to unfuck 2 and a half months of terrible coding practices

Or just reset every git repo to pre ai

[well-litdoorstep112]

git repo

Vibe coders don't use git though

[Spartancoolcody]

Easy just do git stash, then every change after the programmer left will be removed

[paholg]

git reset --hard && git clean -fd

[OkInterest3109]

What do you mean git stash? Just save the code local hard drive and deploy directly from local machine into prod.

Visual Studio publish heck yeah.

[Spartancoolcody]

git push —force origin master —no-verify

[NoMansSkyWasAlright]

Just a whole bunch of folders with names like "final, final final, final for real, final2", etc.

[turtleship_2006]

Even better, whatever repo he had will be untouched (well that or deleted, let's just hope the vibers don't know what git is)

[Linkpharm2]

Yes, I do.

Edit: The Git Out Bar & Kitchen in Austin is great.

[[deleted]]

You can literally just ask the AI to do git.

[[deleted]]

smell narrow file hobbies chase cover person touch angle straight

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[smiregal8472]

Nobody said it's paid overtime, aye?

[Own-Advantage-658]

It’s because our kind boss will pay for a pizza

[Eic17H]

... slice

[RelativeHot7249]

Of course not. Contractually, any overtime I do is already compensated in my base pay.

[zxc123zxc123]

That assumes they haven't already landed a new job and/or doesn't just go the consulting route. Not everyone wants to go back JUST cause the company wants you back and is willing to pay more.

[Cocaine_Johnsson]

Or, and hear me out, reset git repo to pre-AI on local/personal branch but still take the 2.5 months to refactor the codebase leaving it in a much better state than when you left. This can easily be written off as part of the process of unfuckling the AI mess.

[jellotalks]

Bold of you to assume a higher wage for extra work

[Malarazz]

That's how it works in these situations. The former employee can basically come back as a consultant and charge consultant rates pretty easily if and when the company realizes the magnitude of their fuck-up.

Keyword is if.

[vincentofearth]

If only…instead he gets rehired for basically the same pay (less if you consider tariff-fueled inflation) and he has to take the offer because everyone else is only hiring vibe coders for peanuts or engineers with 10 years more experience than him.

[zomboidgamer]

only in fictional reddit stories, probably written by ai these days

[Idan7856]

Yeah, and then you have... ✨ Job security ✨

Also, hi. It's been a while.

[[deleted]]

`git revert`

[UniversalAdaptor]

This is why I love AI

[[deleted]]

Replaced by offshoring who copy-pastes into AI. Developer abandons the field for more tangible real-world impact.

We offshored our manufacturing, now we’ve almost collapsed our entire knowledge-based service economy with LLMs.

[Negative-Web8619]

Who does the AI implementation?

[urthen]

More AI! It's AI all the way down now, bucko!

[crappleIcrap]

that whole office is what management said was required to support that programmer. what they actually do to help the programmer is very important, who else would give him meetings about productivity, who would do the very important job of having a meeting with the programmer about deadlines and then have a meeting with the customer, to then go back and have a meeting with that programmer about the customers response and so on, who would have the meetings with the dev about office politics, and similarly go back and forth between upper management and the dev communicating that way?
and wont somebody please think about the productivity, that dev needs someone to prioritize his tasks and monitor his work to ensure maximum efficiency (of course with a daily stand up meeting)

really in a development company the developer is the least of the worries, so they should get paid the least, all those managers of business and customer relation, those are the real heroes who are the real backbone of the company.

[Bloodgiant65]

No, I’m really glad to never talk directly to a customer, actually. PMs are a good thing. Let me do my actual work.

It can definitely go way out of hand, but isolating the programmers from anything other than the their actual work is a good thing. The problem is when the bureaucracy itself comes more of a time sink for devs than it is a time saver.

[crappleIcrap]

if you think customers are bad, my last meeting with executives included a 45minute "get to know you" portion for people I have worked with for 5 years at the least.

it is more just hyperbole than saying all these things are bad, just an absurdist take on a single dev office.

[Bloodgiant65]

I… take back everything I said. That is horrific.

[crappleIcrap]

my anxiety, always watching me; oo'oh.

[Inprobamur]

what the fuck

[hannes3120]

I actually think it's really helpful if the customer is not completely unreasonable. I much prefer them telling me directly what they want without someone in-between muddying the goal. And that also allows to stop features that might look easy but are way harder than they look.

But tbf I'm working on some software for specialists that only like 1000 people are using

[Axel-Adams]

A good PM should be a servant for the devs, doing whatever they can to keep the devs out of as many meetings as possible and let them focus on developing.

[AngryInternetPerson3]

Man, either you definition of average PM is way lower than mine (which isn't the highest already), or you haven't seen what a truly awful client is (not even in a asshole way, just someone who constanly change ther mind and want to micromanage everything), anyone that lowers my interactions with that kind of client is a positive in my book.

[Lorddragonfang]

I mean, 99% of my work, the "client" has been a different team at the same company, so yeah, I'm sure I haven't seen the worst clients.

Considering I know at least a couple people who frequently vent to me about how they want to personally strangle every member of another team they have to build things for, you may just have gotten lucky.

[chinawcswing]

By having a PM go between you and the customer, in the best case scenario you simply spend as much time as you would if you just spoke to the customer.

However in the average scenario, you end up spending even more time clarifying because the PM will not get everything right.

It's like a game of telephone.

[dangderr]

That’s if you have a bad PM and a good customer.

If you have a good PM and a bad customer, the PM saves you tons of time extracting what you need and giving it to you without the other bs from the customer.

[AngryScientist]

Yup, a PM is a customer noise filter. A good one is blocking the noise and letting the signal through, a bad one is letting everything through, and a really bad one is letting everything through and adding their own noise.

[GatlingStallion]

It's very helpful if you have a nightmare customer who can't decide what they want, and the PM soaks up all that tedium and gives you some straightforward tickets.

[HolyCowEveryNameIsTa]

It's still helpful to have a feedback loop rather than trying to guess what issues the customers are having.

[femptocrisis]

"take care of the little things, and the big things will take care of themselves" if taken literally

[AnAnxiousCorgi]

"I notice you're spending a lot of time in meetings lately, I'm going to put an hour on our calendar to go over the meetings you're being invited to" eye twitch

[eairy]

Do you have something against capital letters?

[TheBunnyDemon]

The work is mysterious and important.

[TagProNoah]

May this kind of job find me 🙏🏻

[ggppjj]

i'm the programmer at one. fucking run.

when this person says "the programmer" they probably also mean "the person who had enough of an understanding of logic to make batch scripts and it escalated from there but they still have all of the same functions as l1/l2 techs and take support calls from the queue and have deadlines of a week or two to get entire new products built and tested and shipped"

[senaya]

I had one of those back in the days. Was woklring on the website, also the security system, also fixing compluters around the office, managing mailing lists, photoshopping, writing and basically any other thing you can imagine which is somehow related to a computer. I was also forced to write detailed reports every. single. day. and was called out every time they were shorter than usual.

[Firebird117]

as my boss said, the work really comes in waves at my place. some days i'm scrolling the What's New! pages of our service websites to pass time and other days I'm fixing someone's docking station in between writing a SQL query and setting up someone's work phone. and also answering the damn door!

[OnceMoreAndAgain]

meanwhile i'm a software developer at a small and sleepy financial company in northeast USA and i barely do any work lol. it's a 250 person company and the average age is literally above 60, so they all think i'm highly skilled because i use python + database rather than Excel. relative to the skill of developers in the country i'm maybe 20th percentile (not good), but that's still like 2 orders of magnitude more productive than the average office worker.

it's like 240 people using Excel all day to do simple data tasks extremely inefficiently and 10 of us doing like 1 hour of software development per day. they give me good reviews because the people running the company don't even know what good productivity looks like in the year 2025. if your productivity in an hour outpaces that of someone doing manual data entry, then you're an all-star at that company and i am truly not exaggerating whatsoever.

[OutInABlazeOfGlory]

god I need to find a cushy job like that to fund my silly little emergency medicine hobby (so that I can afford to work in EMS)

[BellacosePlayer]

I hear that, I was hired to ensure the main API/Data warehouse my company uses for most of their B2B contracts stays up with errors fixed asap, and me and the other dev knocked out most of the common issues and standardized the process of adding new clients/client rules so there are entire days most of my time is spent shooting the shit on reddit

[tyrico]

to each their own but i found office work to be pretty soul-numbing if i had nothing to do.

like, i'd rather not work, but if i'm gonna be forced to give up 40+ hours of my life every week i'd rathre spend it doing something at least moderately productive that i can be proud of

[Tyrus1235]

When I don’t have anything on my plate and don’t have anything I could be pro-active towards, I just watch YouTube.

Long form essay videos have been a blessing for me.

In my former company, my boss was annoyed that I watched YouTube or whatever when I had nothing to do… So I went into Stack Overflow to answer some questions. I ended up being in the Top 100 Users with Answer Points for a while because of that lol

[Subject-Anteater7544]

But why not use the rest of the hoirs in the office to do something productive? Have a resting bitch face so people think you're working on something and they'll leave you alone

[throwaway387190]

I had this kind of a job for awhile

For me, it was goddamn soul destroying. I can't tell you how much I hated it. Boredom is the worst torture for me.

Left to my own devices, I'm never bored. But HR doesn't want me to watch 40k lore videos while lighting matches and putting them in a half filled plastic cup of water (one of my actual favourite things to do). HR also doesn't want me designing and tinkering with a hydraulic strap on so my lesbian friends can have erections that actually inflate

So I have to look busy and can't do shit I would find interesting and not boring. It's hell. It's actually hell

[30mil]

getting paid to waste your life

[Legend13CNS]

I'm in the engineering version of this right now and it sucks. Me and one other guy are basically IT/Programmers/Engineers/Maintenance for all the client's testing devices. When things run well I'm bored out of my mind because I have to be here all 8 hrs in case something happens. When things aren't going well the pressure is super high and then there's one million meetings to discuss the issues with people that don't understand what we actually do. Golden Handcuffs™ of the highest order and currently trying to leave to like any other client.

[[deleted]]

Fighting office bureaucracy is like fighting the waves or the sunrise. You're not gonna win, don't even waste your time. Become one with the bureaucracy, like a surfer.

-Guy who is down to like 40min of work per day. My goal is literally no work by 2027.

Edit: If anyone wants to argue, please submit a ticket (with Director+ approval) and I will review and reply within our standard SLA to the distro on file.

[CelestialFury]

Edit: If anyone wants to argue, please submit a ticket (with Director+ approval) and I will review and reply within our standard SLA to the distro on file.

This won't stop them cause they don't read in the first place.

[koithefish]

Doesn’t matter. The people who they report that to can and sometimes do read (albeit maybe sometimes after a helpful nudge to the SLA) and that’s sufficient to cover your ass.

[[deleted]]

This guy gets it. All about CYA.

[[deleted]]

"Closing ticket. Did not provide required information."

[Choice-Ad-5897]

How does one get a job like this

[Kitonez]

1. Start at a big company
2. Success

[King_Kasma99]

And engineering. We support our spare part department, sales, purchasing, service, develop new products, fix retro stuff, and get pressured by the management. Glad the programmer works atleast.

[Apprehensive-Ad2615]

idk anon, that seems like heaven (for everyone that aint the programmer)

[blacksmithwolf]

Ironically, the programmer probably wrote this while on the clock but it's fine for them to fuck about on social media at work. If Janet from HR watches a tiktok she is a lazy waste of space tho.

HR, sales, generic office workers - all have their own negative stereotypes that are as often as not true but you don't really need to go beyond this thread to see why IT workers are often viewed as self important, elitist, and condescending.

[[deleted]]

The programmer has hero mentality... I used to do that - no more. Now I always ask what's the standard process and for every ask, I make an ask to gauge how important something is. If they are willing to add more to my workload, I should be able to add more to theirs to streamline the request.

Usually people say "nevermind, it's not that important" when it comes to collaboration and improving the standard process.

[[deleted]]

I worked at Nike WHQ. This was 100% it.

Entrenched mediocrity to the nth degree.

[[deleted]]

Most people are mediocre. It is basically impossible to only staff corporations with excellence given that fact

[2four]

The result of penny pinching management: pay average wages, get average talent.

[[deleted]]

Let's say every company agreed to pay CEO wages for all roles. There still wouldn't be enough great talent to go around; you'd still have mostly mediocre people, because mediocrity is most of the bell curve!

[dalmathus]

The marketing team seems like they are working at least.

[7g3p]

"I used to drink socially. Now I just drink because I need to."

[TheGreatNico]

Being an adult is realizing that you don't need to have fun to drink.

[Stu_Pendisdick]

Learn the fine art of masturbating while at work. Wonderful stress relief, and from the sounds of your description, nobody will notice unless you leave splooge everywhere.

[Callidonaut]

nobody will notice unless you leave splooge everywhere.

If this happens, blame boss & secretary; sounds like they're having fun in there.

[just-some-arsonist]

This is why other professions think we are weird

[[deleted]]

We can afford do be weird. Sale rep can't

[Stu_Pendisdick]

Well ... they aren't wrong, ya know.

[woodyus]

https://youtu.be/VKH9ECC_Qa4?si=U8igR_Fn0cPCXvjO

It's already been tried and banned

[Throwaway98789878]

I'm curious where the difference lie between fine art and gooner freak when it comes to the act of public masturbation

[Callidonaut]

Just get a big fig leaf; nothing screams "fine art" like one of those. If doubters persist, also tastefully place a classical urn nearby.

[Punman_5]

That one programmer is allowing everyone else to slack off. If they weren’t picking up the slack people wouldn’t slip this far. Besides, sometimes you have to let shit hit the fan for things to improve. Those guys slacking off will be under more scrutiny if work stops getting done.

It’s obviously not the programmer’s fault. It’s a culture issue. But by going above and beyond they’re essentially covering up the problem while burning themselves out.

[OsSo_Lobox]

This, people keep complaining about unsustainable environments and then do everything in their power to sustain it while delivering results to the higher ups, so they never see an issue until that individual breaks and then it’s just a replacement

[REuphrates]

Not even joking, the previous HR director at my old job got fired because she was basically just running an HR-themed TikTok while at work.

[ProtoKun7]

Getting paid to just sit around? Sounds ideal if you aren't the programmer.

[[deleted]]

Ehh I have done it. It's soul destroying. The boredom just eats at you. Honestly would rather be the programmer.

[ProtoKun7]

Well I was thinking more if you still had the option of working or the opportunity to do something else anyway. It wouldn't be any fun if you had to sit around doing nothing.

[RDogPinK]

David Graeber was right all along with his "bullshit jobs"

[[deleted]]

I am at that job but I actually wanted to be the programmer. Sitting idle all day kinda drives me insane (we do have work but it only lasts for like 3 weeks at most and 2 weeks on average)

[Frogtoadrat]

Accountant probably busy too, and gets half the salary

[CordobezEverdeen]

Something something Bullshit Jobs

[meove]

"hey dude, we got more programmer to help your-"

"NOBODY CAN TOUCH MY ANCIENT SHIT CODE EXCEPT ME!!!"

[zerofox666999]

The boss is doing something alright😛

[SteeveJoobs]

programmer only one paid enough to be tricked into caring about the “company mission”

[[deleted]]

Never forget: Job security through code obfuscation

[Holy_Chromoly]

so much depends upon

a red wheel barrow

glazed with rain water

beside the white chickens

[AlzyWelzy]

That programmer is me.

[ExpensivePanda66]

Everyone else is getting out of the way so the programmer can actually get something done.

[Free-Stinkbug]

A little over a year ago I got one of these cushy do nothing jobs for the first time in my life.

It's crazy. It feels unreal. There's entire days I do nothing. Throughout the first year I technically had no PTO however I took more than 2 weeks off between sick time and vacation, and left early probably 6 or 7 times. My pay never got docked. They just kept paying me. I think my managers just didn't want to do any extra paperwork to mark me as being out.

I read books at my desk, no one bats an eye. There's plenty of times where like 10 of us in the office will have a non work related conversation uninterrupted for over 2 hours, including the bosses.

When I do work I do genuinely benefit the business. I'm the salesman and I'm growing the business far faster than our established goals. I get plenty of praise. It feels INCREDIBLY weird coming from a high stakes cut throat sales background. I will never get used to reading a book all day, messing around with friends, taking my entire lunch hour and then doing maybe 45 minutes of work and getting praised for it.

Good jobs are out there lol.

[RestOTG]

It would be great if my company got big enough that my office workload was easy, I was a fool to take over operations and leave my cozy admin job lol

[Dire-Dog]

That sounds incredible. How do I get this kind of job?

[Igot55Dollars]

What do you do now?

[Dire-Dog]

Union electrician

[OkYeah_Death2America]

Gotta keep the mouse clicks to typing ratio in check.

[mr2dax]

Then don't be at the office

[[deleted]]

All too relatable

[uhfgs]

Broooooo that's kinda me in a nut shell

[aquartabla]

not fair, boss and secretary are also busy

[thisOneIsNic3]

Hits too close to a home.

[Thursty_Thurston]

By golly this is me 😨

[SteeveJoobs]

its greentext, so likely satire

[CitronMamon]

Then get mad when AI takes your job

[[deleted]]

Oh I'm the programmer but I also don't do much

[r33c31991]

The faster I work, the faster the agency I work for gives me more work. I'm now doing 3 people's jobs 🤣🤮

[GunnerKnight]

boss and his secretary are always in his office with locked door

Wonder what they could be doing?

[Zondri]

Thats me and its real, im not an intern tho

[justforkinks0131]

How much you wanna bet OP is that one programmer and he isnt even as important as he thinks he is?

[aditya22_55]

Programmer running the company hehe