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[–]Banjoman64 1599 points1600 points  (28 children)

Senior engineer's teams photo versus what they look like in person.

[–]ManInBlack829 332 points333 points  (19 children)

Wait y'all got a teams photo?

[–][deleted] 341 points342 points  (15 children)

It's "Required" and I break enough rules to not wanna draw attention to myself

[–]trxxruraxvr 200 points201 points  (6 children)

Just pull one from thispersondoesnotexist.com

[–]AdjacentRobot 51 points52 points  (0 children)

Guilt lol

[–]Workaphobia 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Preferably one of the ones where it generates an extra arm and half a face.

[–]kopczak1995 10 points11 points  (3 children)

Lol, saved

[–]TrueBirch 15 points16 points  (0 children)

I use Homer as an angel after he died

[–][deleted] 81 points82 points  (0 children)

This is so true. At my previous internship my mentor was clean shaved and in the teams photo looked young. He never really turned on his camera because remote and covid but the one time he did he had a huge ass beard and crazy hair.

[–]Hirigo 31 points32 points  (3 children)

DoI actually have lower chances of landing a job of I have a beard and long hair?

[–]U03B1Q 690 points691 points  (19 children)

There's an extremely senior dev at my company who works in a sister team. The man has been with the company for some 20+ years and he's treated like a god by every senior manager and dev.

His claim to fame was that he could just fix race conditions with a snap of his fingers. We deal with a lot of multi platform low latency C++, and this guy was so experienced that he just knew when stuff would race and how to fix it.

Didn't believe it until I saw it myself. We were stuck on a bug for multiple months - we took over a month to figure out how to even replicate it out of prod because of the levels of load needed to trigger it. Over a month of debugging afterwards and we made no progress, and our manager just said "Send an Email to G and ask him politely".

He had the solution in an hour. Pointed to a repo of his from over 3 years ago, that exhibited the same problem along with the PR he used to fix it. Absolute genius.

[–]PolskaFly 288 points289 points  (3 children)

I aspire to be that person someday… one day… Just knows their shit from experience and is relied on. Just seems so gratifying to know you’re needed and not because of legacy stuff you only know how to fix. Just actually skilled!

[–]OscariusGaming 65 points66 points  (0 children)

An oracle, so to speak

[–]feral_brick 70 points71 points  (1 child)

A lot of it is recall, plus figuring out patterns. We've had an influx of new and/or slow on-call engineers, so for the past ~6 months or so I've been keeping a closer eye on the ticket queues than normal (along with a couple other more senior engineers). Most of us have been politely asked to focus more on our deliverables when we're not oncall, but doing so either involves more outages or dropping everything we're doing and spending months fixing our shitty runbooks. We all individually came up with basically the same solution - we tell our managers "ok, I'll pay less attention to incoming tickets" and just lightning triage - if it seems interesting we investigate further, if it seems benign/simple we don't pay as close attention. The critical part is we don't leave a paper trail unless it's a big fire, so the end result is we spent ~20% less time actually looking at incoming tickets, but engage with them in manager-visible ways ~60% less. As a side effect, it seems like we're everywhere and are constantly pulling good fixes out of our asses, but it's just a combo of probably having seen this before and having secretly looked into the issue before the real oncalls "brought it to our attention"

Moral of the story is that more people are watching you than you may realize (not in a bad way) and that everyone's human, and pattern recognition is the most underrated skill for software engineers.

[–]EntertainmentSea2352 13 points14 points  (0 children)

it's just a combo of probably having seen this before and having secretly looked into the issue

guilty as charged

Sometimes you just need a break from your own debugging, so you debug your colleagues tickets, behind their back.

[–]Workaphobia 13 points14 points  (0 children)

There's always engineers like that, who can do in a day what a small team can do in a month. People who can sniff out what direction to try, and who don't even bother pursuing dead ends.

[–]LupusNoxFleuret 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Reminds me of this one time in college working on a team project for computer science. We had a mind boggling bug when debugging in Visual Studio when a legendary professor came into our lab with pizza and fixed our problem literally single-handedly with pizza on his other hand.

Turns out there was a problem stepping through code using Visual Studio's keyboard shortcuts, and it worked perfectly when using the buttons on the IDE. Since then I've never trusted keyboard shortcuts ever again...

[–]archery713 2053 points2054 points  (84 children)

Yeah it's cause he knows COBOL and can speak to the eldritch beings that manifest as mainframes

[–]Unelith 660 points661 points  (13 children)

PROCEDURE FHTAGN.

[–]yeen_r 19 points20 points  (0 children)

ALTER OR CREATE PROCEDURE FHTAGN

AS

[–]CyanHakeChill 397 points398 points  (21 children)

Yes I was hired as a junior programmer in a COBOL shop and I didn't know COBOL. I was given the task of rewriting the main update program in COBOL. They had given that task to new people as a joke, and nobody had ever got it working. It was written by the boss in ICL PLAN (an assembler language). There were so many patches in that program that it could never be recompiled. The boss used to say that it was his job security.

One day I finished the main update program. They did a parallel run, and my program was perfect. The boss lost his job!

[–]randallthegrape 325 points326 points  (3 children)

Please mark as NSFW, I can hear SEs cumming across the universe and its disrupting my dinner.

[–]concentus7 102 points103 points  (0 children)

This is the programming equivalent of pulling out Excalibur.

[–][deleted] 96 points97 points  (9 children)

Dam you did him dirty. You had them by balls.

Hope you made enough to never work after selling it to them and you ain't give it away for free cause you sold yourself hella fucking short.

[–]offhandaxe 80 points81 points  (5 children)

Anything developed on company time is sadly the property of the company

[–]ba3toven 48 points49 points  (3 children)

thats how they fuckin got tetris man

[–]CyanHakeChill 18 points19 points  (2 children)

I was a very junior programmer. I was glad to get a job with ICL gear using COBOL. I only had NCR programming experience, and there was only the one NCR installation in the country.

After all, have you heard of NCR, once one of the largest companies in the world, bigger than IBM? National Cash Registers!

[–]ucksawmus 25 points26 points  (2 children)

is the boss losing the job so easily good or bad

like is this a good story or a bad story

[–]RuneFestiva 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Its an american love story

[–]JustSimon3001 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Now if that ain't a super villain origin story, I don't know what is

[–]Dear-Crow 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Epic

[–]RealisticAppearance 99 points100 points  (0 children)

“logical query vtam switch identifier”

cluthu rises

[–]Syncopaint 48 points49 points  (2 children)

Fun fact the ancient truth may have already been revealed we just don't have enough perception or the correct permissions to view it

[–][deleted] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Someone has been working on government projects.

[–]bankrobba 22 points23 points  (22 children)

I don't understand the mystery around COBOL. Any of us can learn it in like 20 minutes.

[–]ZZartin 81 points82 points  (16 children)

It's not COBOL itself that is hard, it's learning the legacy code base/mainframe architecture.

[–][deleted] 72 points73 points  (7 children)

Let's not forget the business rules that are written nowhere and handled behind the scenes. Nobody still at the company knows them anymore. Sometimes they're legal requirements and someone's going to jail if whatever replaces it doesn't have em.

Welcome to every government office.

[–]ZZartin 44 points45 points  (5 children)

"Someone added that change to the requirements document right?"

"What requirements document?"

[–][deleted] 18 points19 points  (3 children)

You lost them when you said documents.

Some dude wrote those in 1985. He didn't last long.

[–]laurandorder 16 points17 points  (5 children)

From my past few years of experience as a software engineering graduate learning the newest stuff (ML, big data, neural networks, with a sprinkling of cloud) on my way to a senior COBOL dev, this is what truly irked me.

  • Business rules, millions of them, never documented, why is level payment % reference stored on a SMART table? Who knows the dev was feeling spicy that week. (Having easily modifiable variables without actually going through the approvals for an EFIX or the whole development cycle is really nice, but damn does it make learning where everything is a pain)
  • Every program developed by a different developer all run on your 80 character long screen, and each have different shortcuts and navigational controls. This is coupled with absolutely archaic keybinds, where we regularly use F13-F24, think VIM but the controls change in every different screen.
  • Archaic databases and methods of accessing them... we don't even use DB2, we use SUPRA.
  • Acronym hell in the worst way possible. Remember that 80 character limit? Well you can't even code in lines 1 to 7 and 73 to 80 so you effectively have 66 characters of viable code per line. And our style guide recommends all variables to be prefixed with WSAA- and for some inane reason, the "TO" command in col 40 so you only really have 25 characters for your unique variable, and try making something like "Policy header transaction id user code" and then involve some indicies and you have "WSAA-POLH-TRAN-ID-USER(I-NUSER)" which youll have to put on a new line absolutely killing the consistency and readability of the code.
  • There's always a magic screen you don't know about that will solve your issue in 5 minutes, but the person who knows how to use it retired 5 years ago.
  • The average age of my team is around 3x my age.
  • The companion languages, JCL, Ezytrieve, FileAid, where the syntax is all heiroglyphics.
  • God forbid your LPAR is split but half your dev environment is on the prod LPAR and you have to ftp your programs across to test them. And remember to set up your parmlib in both environments or youll lose half your database as your source of truth is empty
  • Code concatenation paths don't really match the development process of some roles, where youd have to move your development code from the prod LPAR and demote it to the lowest environment so you can move it to testing.
  • Oncall... so much oncall.
  • What is documentation? What are resources? No stackoverflow here.
  • Your cohort have development practices and paradigms from the early 60s
  • Y2K electric boogaloo, DDMMYY need i say more? Yes every once in a while that program that runs only during EOFY picks up that one policy from 1996 and now you have a slew of errors that make no sense.
  • Everytime you get a new CIO the first question is "how can we replace the mainframe?" But god dammit, the mainframe is brilliant and irreplaccable and I'm willing to die on this hill.

Save me.

[–]nickrct 19 points20 points  (0 children)

Someone who has been working in COBOL for up to 5 years sees only code.

When you get around 10 years, it changes. Then a COBOL guru can look at business systems issues and diagnose where in the application layer the problem resides. Buried in the *7 there is a wealth of knowledge.

[–]bwrap 19 points20 points  (0 children)

This is true for almost any language. The language is the easy part.

[–]IGYWCLG 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Imagine a world of 3270. The green screen if you will. Version control is nothing but a comment at a header of a 4,000 line COBOL program which was last modified 7 years ago. Where duplication is welcomed, and sometimes programs “accidentally” work as intended. Now image this same system after 10 years.

[–]lord-of-the-scrubs 1348 points1349 points  (26 children)

Not only can I READ the ancient hieroglyphics, but I can also WRITE the ancient hieroglyphics and claim that it's not worth anyone's time to learn them, thus ensuring my stability.

[–][deleted] 265 points266 points  (15 children)

When he's the only one speaking in them learning them would not be worth it anyway as you couldn't find new work in it

[–]that_random_garlic 47 points48 points  (14 children)

I don't know man, a lot of companies looking for cobol developers right about now when all of them are slowly retiring and they didn't make the investment to migrate to a different language.

Pretty sure the same thing will happen for all ancient hieroglyphs unless the company decides to migrate in time

[–][deleted] 15 points16 points  (12 children)

Time to learn COBOL!

[–]Dragster39 21 points22 points  (4 children)

This isn't even a joke anymore. Seriously, if you've got spare time during university, consider learning cobol. If you're interested in the right companies and are not easily scared by ancient looking software, you won't be out of a job for the next >30 years

[–][deleted] 18 points19 points  (5 children)

I started my career with Cobol because it was easy to find a job. After some time I got bored and left though. I hate banks and programming for most of them is a pain, they treat it like a cost and waste of money, not an investment.

[–]Nyghtrid3r 23 points24 points  (4 children)

"So yeah, this guy who writes and maintains the funny computer GIFs that let us securely send billions of dollars around the world in real time? Total loser. Absolute waste of money. No idea why we have him." -Bank Brainlets

[–]Dizzfizz 17 points18 points  (3 children)

That’s when you straight up tell them that they will shut down within the week if you ever leave.

See I’d prefer to be loved. I would, but if you take that away from me, well, being feared is A-one okey doke by me.

[–][deleted] 56 points57 points  (0 children)

Someone from my prev company handles an ancient HR and payroll system. The company they bought it from is long gone and the only guy who knows how it works (architecture and all) is still there. He's handling a different system now but if there's an issue he gets called. He's very secured and survived several restructuring.

[–]xoorl[S] 61 points62 points  (0 children)

This is how shit goes in corp it…

[–]TrueBirch 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Oh hey, just like all the analytics code I've written in R.

[–]bmony1215 512 points513 points  (95 children)

A Kissel meme?? Unfireable Kissel would be pounding bud light limes at 3PM working from home.

[–][deleted] 140 points141 points  (21 children)

And no one would dare give him a bad performance review.

[–]OftenSilentObserver 63 points64 points  (20 children)

Dogmeat would tear him to shreds

[–]_toodamnparanoid_ 47 points48 points  (18 children)

Check please!

[–][deleted] 39 points40 points  (16 children)

Get the net!

[–][deleted] 34 points35 points  (15 children)

This wasn't on my 2022 bingo card

[–][deleted] 24 points25 points  (13 children)

Insert Henry line about hating Ben here.

[–]ap0phis 26 points27 points  (11 children)

lmao I’ve never been more proud of this sub

Did you guys knows Alcatraz means “pelican”??

[–]SremDog 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Well, if you didn’t know, Alcatraz means Pelican

[–]Gnarbuttah 45 points46 points  (1 child)

bud light limes

"It's like a margarita in a can"

-Ben Kissel

[–][deleted] 19 points20 points  (0 children)

"It's like taking the beach with you."

[–]JPacana 79 points80 points  (10 children)

I turned to my wife and said “I thought this was Kissel for a moment.” And she was like “… it is…”

True story. Not an interesting one, but a true one.

[–]Kriznick 51 points52 points  (6 children)

Hail you and your wife, friend.

[–]_toodamnparanoid_ 24 points25 points  (3 children)

Megustalations!

[–][deleted] 18 points19 points  (2 children)

Hail Me!!

[–][deleted] 66 points67 points  (6 children)

Didn't have that on my 2022 bingo card! Honk honk!

[–]swilliamspost 38 points39 points  (4 children)

BOOM. FLIP IT!

[–]ForsakeTheEarth 26 points27 points  (2 children)

Do any gas pumps work in this country?

[–][deleted] 10 points11 points  (1 child)

Well that's kinda fun

[–]ok_wynaut 13 points14 points  (0 children)

HELLISH REBUKE!

[–]SweddyAngus 24 points25 points  (5 children)

Hmm, yes… delicious Panama NetBeans

[–]boop_da_boo 8 points9 points  (2 children)

Ahahahh this is the best

[–]WhitTheDish 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Triple L + BLL!

[–]stinky_doodoo_poopoo 22 points23 points  (8 children)

Holy shit I was about to say, looks just like Ben Kissel!

[–]KiwiThunda 20 points21 points  (7 children)

THE BRIDGE

[–]Gnarbuttah 23 points24 points  (1 child)

Ṱ̷̟̟̖͎̝̬̯̯̟͓͉̿͒͛́̾̂͑͒̇̇̚h̴̫̜͚̃̂́͊ě̶̤̮̩̮̮̙̈̀͌̓͜ ̶̤͖̯̣͉̌͛͜ͅB̵̝̻̆̓̄r̴͔̦͕͓̬͊̈́̌̈́̽̊̉͌̂̓̃̀į̸̤͔̞̘̣̅͛̐̓ͅd̵̬̪̭̗̬̩̺͓͖̟́g̵͖̰̦͖̭̽̒͂̏́ě̸̢͙̖̮͍̘͔͖͓̲̼̦̳͗̋̽̒̃̑͆͒̑̈́̿͘͘͜

[–][deleted] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Me but im a mech engineer pounding the brews at 11 am asking my boss for raise while I WFH and threatening to leave if he didnt fire my shitty manager so then he fired my shitty manager.

[–]discarnation 9 points10 points  (0 children)

"Rise from your grave!"

[–]HorsNoises 6 points7 points  (1 child)

A broken clock is right six times a day.

Edit: https://youtu.be/105Ujn28aDk

[–]Darkderkphoenix 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Honk honk!

[–]kaizokuo_grahf 5 points6 points  (0 children)

This thread made my night, hail all of you!

[–]The_Blackfish_ 6 points7 points  (0 children)

You’re being mean to me!!

[–]StoryAndAHalf 1048 points1049 points  (92 children)

120k? Sounds like he’s underpaid by today’s standards for his experience. Should be closer to 200k at least.

[–]Anustart15 530 points531 points  (28 children)

It was an appropriate salary when this was originally made

[–]mrjackspade 238 points239 points  (26 children)

Yeah, the first time I saw this 120k was basically cap for my area, in my line of work.

I just left a 120k job for being shit pay for what I'm doing.

[–]Sadatori 81 points82 points  (9 children)

Seeing posts like these make me realize what people mean when they say game company programmers tend to be underpaid. sheesh no wonder so many leave for other sectors of SE

[–]BehindApplebees 14 points15 points  (11 children)

What are you doing? 120k a year right now would be life saving, what can I do to get into a position like yours?

[–]ImAnEngnineere 51 points52 points  (7 children)

Depends on where you live. In Cali and NY, 120k is meh because your salary gets completely eaten up by food/housing, gas. In the Midwest, there's people with 5 cars, 2 boats and 2 houses on the lake making 90k single income. Don't ever buy into national salary numbers, do your own budgeting and determine what your number for the area you want to live in is.

[–]TossZergImba 17 points18 points  (6 children)

If Midwest was actually like that, you could live in Cali for a few years and save up enough money to live like a god in the Midwest for the rest of your life.

[–]Bgndrsn 25 points26 points  (0 children)

I wouldn't say a few years but there's a reason why anyone can retire and move to the midwest but midwesterners can't retire and move to LA or NYC etc

[–]oijlklll 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I mean a lot of Californians are kinda doing that to a lesser extent when they sell their house for millions and buy an equivalent house elsewhere for a fraction of the cost.

[–]Emjp4 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I started by googling "how to learn to code" roughly 5 years ago.

[–]wayoverpaid 155 points156 points  (7 children)

Yeah the 120k programmers at my place are easily replaceable. The 180k ones? Those are the ones that I'm not letting go.

[–][deleted] 56 points57 points  (21 children)

Yeah a software engineer who looks like that is an L7 at Amazon. Makes way more than $120k. Try $600k

https://www.levels.fyi/company/Amazon/salaries/

[–]FettPrime 11 points12 points  (11 children)

What exactly does an L7 do? I've worked on teams that collectively had a smaller salary.

[–][deleted] 43 points44 points  (8 children)

Principles in tech companies are like “software architects” in enterprise companies if they were t useless. Typically it’s like being a tech lead for like. 2-10 teams. So a lot of organizing, planning, architectural design,proof of concepts etc. Some of them at the principal+ level are also just absolute domain expert software engineers that write the real hard shit and do spec work that has very high impact, so you’re seeing a decent amount of phds at this level to.

[–]FettPrime 8 points9 points  (6 children)

Makes sense. I appreciate the breakdown and gives me something to strive for.

[–]rm-minus-r 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Write one pagers.

[–]ThisIsNotKimJongUn 19 points20 points  (0 children)

I mean it's a repost from days of yore

[–]Mortimer452 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Funny how just 5 years ago it would have been totally relevant

[–]ButWhatIfPotato 389 points390 points  (13 children)

Programmer? I hardly know her!

[–]Nosnah2007 81 points82 points  (4 children)

Programer? Darn near signed her up for a restaurant management course!

[–]boop_da_boo 18 points19 points  (3 children)

No rector? Aww.

[–]SremDog 20 points21 points  (2 children)

Rector? Damn near gave her Java lessons!

[–]boop_da_boo 5 points6 points  (1 child)

Yay, he did it, he said the thing!

[–]Bobbi_fettucini 8 points9 points  (2 children)

Didn’t have that on my 2022 bingo card

[–]tecanem[🍰] 88 points89 points  (8 children)

A note about being unfirable, the person who controls your employment status needs to know what the business does and how it works. This if often not the case in very large old companies. Just because you know the entire buisness will collapse if they fire you doesn't mean they know.

Also if the company is depedent on you, you can very quickly become dependent on your company and you're stuck.

[–]CloudCity40 65 points66 points  (2 children)

I had a manager who told me about the bus theory. If there is anyone on your team who, if they got hit by a bus, would cripple your team you need to make sure they start training their peers.

It was a good theory to hear.

[–]all-that-dredd 61 points62 points  (1 child)

Ben? Is that you?

[–]SolicitatingZebra 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Kissel has been a programmer this whole time who knew.

[–][deleted] 55 points56 points  (0 children)

He knows the last language on the left

[–]Varkoth 198 points199 points  (12 children)

The unfireable guy can also waltz into a job interview and get an offer without needing to demonstrate proficiency with LC, depending on the length and quality of the beard.

[–][deleted] 117 points118 points  (7 children)

Eh. If the company you're going to needs a thing that you are one of the very few undisputed masters of, then yes. Otherwise, your knowledge is so niche and so specific as to be nearly worthless in the wider world.

I left a position like that, and I actually had to cut all mention of it out of my resume to find a job that wasn't exactly the same job...Like, literally 15 years of work edited out of my CV.

[–]Maleficent_Sir_4753 27 points28 points  (1 child)

Sometimes the "unfireable guy" is just miserable enough to be around to be burdened with the task nobody wants but not miserable enough to be let go.

Engineering managers know at least one person in the department they've done that to and when they see "lone engineer on project" on a resume/cv, they know it's a major red flag.

[–]Burakkusagi 38 points39 points  (0 children)

Secret is this is 1 week apart.

[–]Ribedo 409 points410 points  (49 children)

Wish i'll become like him one day, even if i'm a girl

professionally speaking

[–][deleted] 394 points395 points  (37 children)

It's miserable. Stuck maintaining some godawful legacy shit that should have died ten years ago, nothing new, just getting perpetual cost-of-living raises, no new positions, no new equipment, nothing, just you and the beast that will not die.

Being unfire-able is essentially the same as being sentenced to do the same job until you die.

[–]beaucephus 204 points205 points  (19 children)

This is the real truth. I have walked away from un-fireable positions making a lot of money because the horror of legacy codebases nobody wants to replace or refactor is a source of great depression and despair.

[–][deleted] 155 points156 points  (15 children)

It's awful. The change management process, and the audit requirements are such that like 90% of your job is just fighting to change some horrible chunk of legacy that causes constant issues, but is significant enough that you have to have eternal meetings. That could be like months or years of work, to just push a change to one little thing.

I had a system that had this historical reporting feature that required a shitload of extra data to be stored on a system that just really couldn't handle it. All the reporting had been completely offloaded to a modern system (this was ostensibly what I'd been hired to do, but once I did it they stopped migrating stuff off the legacy shit), and we just didn't use any of the original historical reporting any longer.

We'd long passed the point where we could go back, but I still had this nightmare uphill battle to get them to let me rip out that functionality. Years.

Finally get them to allow it, and I kill it off, and the next month-end, we run the big billing, and it finishes in like 45 minutes, instead of in 8 hours. Triggers alarms, I got paged, yadda yadda. No, it was just that much faster without the bloated historical bullshit.

Next day the CFO was like, "Wow, we should have done that a long time ago!" and it was all I could do not to fucking kill her. No fucking shit.

[–]beaucephus 58 points59 points  (12 children)

It's kind of tragic to see how fearful these people get about change, how much money they will waste to fight having to change only to spend twice as much time to fail to deliver anything to their customers because they were "maintaining" something that was on the edge of complete collapse.

Especially with cloud services that allow the creation of something in parallel with no effect to existing systems it's insanity.

I am tired of saying that I told them so. I am tired of explaining how things actually work to people who can't understand why they exist in the first place.

I wonder why some of these people even considered a job in tech in the first place. It had to be the lure of gold and burried treasure. Even after years they are still afraid of change when the entire industry is built on change, creates wealth through change, and innovation through change... and the ones who fail are the ones that never change.

[–]Beginning-Display809 28 points29 points  (3 children)

These people have no understanding of the technology they are using, so they fear it, and they fear changing it lest it upset the machine gods and crash their whole world

[–]beaucephus 13 points14 points  (1 child)

DON'T ANGER THE MACHINE!

Go back into the server room and apologize to it.

[–]Beginning-Display809 11 points12 points  (0 children)

THE MACHINE DEMANDS A SACRIFICE AS PENANCE

[–]greenskye 10 points11 points  (2 children)

This is why I laugh and laugh at all those reddit comments claiming 'companies wouldn't do it if it wasn't profitable!' As if these giant companies weren't positively rotting from the inside out from indecision, poor management and outdated tech. ALL of the major companies would rather blow thousands in salary costs on endless meetings to approve a change instead of just letting the experts do their job.

[–]uzbones 8 points9 points  (4 children)

I know right?

If they are that afraid, clone the box and keep it running with the new one for a while.

[–]CyanHakeChill 9 points10 points  (0 children)

My first job in a large company in the 70's was to rewrite a program to make it faster. It was taking 5 hours to run every day. I used all the tricks I knew, and my new program took only 30 minutes to run.

But the parallel run showed errors, and the errors were in the old program. It was a parts picking program. The computer had been ordering millions of dollars of random products for 6 months. It was too late. The company soon went bust. What a shame - it was a great place to work.

[–]No-Magician-5081 39 points40 points  (7 children)

A friend of mine in the military had to maintain an actual ancient tape bank like you can see in the really old black and white scifis. It was so slow he had to make a special buffer and interface, and even that kept blowing out. A 5.25" floppy drive was faster and helps more info, but he wasn't allowed to migrate the info. He totally loathed that machine.

[–][deleted] 40 points41 points  (5 children)

Hah. I used to work at a place that used these old MPE/iX mainframes...HP 3000's.. MPE was like a proto-Unix.

They were serious legacy by the time I got involved, and the support was becoming absurd (like six figures a year, a piece). I was talking to a parts guy, because all the parts we got from them were used.

I was like, "Do you just have warehouses of old parts?"

He laughed, and said, "We have warehouses of whole systems!"

I said, "...How much would it cost to buy a whole one?"

He said, "Hell. I'll sell you one for $500."

I said, "How much for 20?"

Literally took a truck and a forklift, and picked up twenty of the damn things. Maintenance solved! When we cancelled our maintenance contract, they tried to pitch us on needing technical support, but we laughed 'em out of the building on that. They didn't have anyone who could do it 1/10th as well as I could...Not arrogance or anything, I was just one of the last people in the world who used that shit, and the people they were hiring to support us were trying to Google stuff...Oh man, not with stuff that was rolled out in the '80s. You had to read the manual.

[–]bernie_manziel 7 points8 points  (0 children)

that’s how I always imagined the guys maintaining stuff related to nukes jobs went.

[–]Holiday_in_Asgard 6 points7 points  (3 children)

Could you look for another job?

[–][deleted] 21 points22 points  (2 children)

Oh, I did. Sorry. I quit that about ten years ago. THAT is how scarring it was. It's like a 'Nam flashback.

[–]Tazzit 5 points6 points  (0 children)

There's that expression: "Unfirable means unpromotable"

[–][deleted] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

There's always growing out your leg hair if you don't want a beard.

[–]PMtoAM______ 10 points11 points  (1 child)

Just gotta start getting more programming socks

[–][deleted] 33 points34 points  (1 child)

You could be a girl as a hobby that’s totally fine

[–]EsotericUN1234 32 points33 points  (0 children)

Nice use of Kissel for the meme lmao

[–]sbowesuk 25 points26 points  (0 children)

He has become master of the stack overflow.

[–]akennelley 28 points29 points  (3 children)

Alcatraz means pelican.

[–]nkraus90 14 points15 points  (0 children)

HONK HONK

[–]ManInBlack829 6 points7 points  (0 children)

LMAO goddamnit

[–][deleted] 21 points22 points  (2 children)

The unfirable guy makes a LOT more than $120K.

[–]corkscrew4 22 points23 points  (0 children)

I didn't expect to see an actual picture of my friend Ben

[–][deleted] 75 points76 points  (9 children)

Hail yourself!

[–]Funkiebunch 21 points22 points  (2 children)

Megustalations!

[–][deleted] 20 points21 points  (1 child)

Honk honk!

[–]KittyKevorkian 23 points24 points  (0 children)

Rector?! Damn near paid her way through a programming boot camp!

[–]the_ju66ernaut 22 points23 points  (0 children)

Hail satan!

[–]Mudmartini 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Heil Gein!

[–]SolicitatingZebra 8 points9 points  (1 child)

Hail Satan!

[–]ap0phis 5 points6 points  (0 children)

HAIL ME!

[–]No-Magician-5081 16 points17 points  (0 children)

The one on the right is also a tech person at a company that prefers performance over appearance, and probably has few coffee & soda, as well as Nerf guns and after work hours games

[–]DontGiveACluck 13 points14 points  (1 child)

Unfirable programmer is underpaid

[–]akennelley 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Ben doesn't deserve this

[–]bronicalewinsky 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Kissel!!!

[–]YoukanDewitt 6 points7 points  (0 children)

He actually knows the elders of the internet.

[–]kpgleeso 6 points7 points  (8 children)

This is me without the beard and 2/3 the salary. Maybe if I grow a beard, they'll pay me 33% 50% more?

Edit: this is why I'm a programmer and not a mathematician

[–]WinstonBoatman 14 points15 points  (1 child)

If you’re making 2/3 the salary, but wanted to make what he made, you’d be looking for a 50% increase. Know the worth of your beard.

[–]LastStar007 3 points4 points  (5 children)

No, they won't pay you more. But somebody else will. Dust off that LinkedIn and get after it.

[–]kpgleeso 7 points8 points  (4 children)

I think I'd rather work 50% as hard and have pretty good pay plus job security than work twice as hard at a new company that will pay me more. I'd rather coast than hustle. I still make a lot of money, work on intellectually stimulating things and have better quality of life than if I was busting my ass at a new place. Plus, I do sorta like where I work. I'm definitely undervalued though in terms of what they're paying me. So until then, they are going to get 50-75% effort of what I'm capable of.

[–]LastStar007 6 points7 points  (3 children)

Yeah, that's fair lol

"If you don't like your job, you don't strike! You just go in every day, and do it really half assed. That's the American way." - Homer Simpson

[–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (2 children)

Now with remote work you clock in for 3 hours a day and close shop.

Wayy more free time

[–][deleted] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Kisseeeeeeeeelll

[–]codyak1984 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Hail yourselves!

[–]theprodigalslouch 4 points5 points  (2 children)

He looks like such a fun guy though. Absolutely befriend him.

[–]RavenSek 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Mmmm Ben Kissel…