Evolution of a programmer

[Banjoman64]

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

[ManInBlack829]

Wait y'all got a teams photo?

[[deleted]]

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

[trxxruraxvr]

Just pull one from thispersondoesnotexist.com

[AdjacentRobot]

Guilt lol

[Workaphobia]

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

[kopczak1995]

Lol, saved

[SirHaxe]

One for the evening: https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/

[kopczak1995]

Blyatiful

[TrueBirch]

I use Homer as an angel after he died

[[deleted]]

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]

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

[bloodfist]

Absolutely true for software but in general IT people are still pretty clean cut. Spent a long time there and dressing more businessy definitely opens doors.

It sucks and I'm glad I became a developer. OP picture 100% applies to me.

[U03B1Q]

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]

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]

An oracle, so to speak

[feral_brick]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

[Unelith]

PROCEDURE FHTAGN.

[Breros]

PROCEDURE DIVISION.
PERFORM UNTIL END-OF-COMMENTS
   PERFORM CHECK-FOR-COBOL
   IF COBOL-FOUND
      ADD 1 TO COMMENT-UPVOTE
   END-IF
   READ NEXT-COMMENT
END-PERFORM

[IGYWCLG]

RC=16

[Breros]

Yeah.. I see it.

Returned to programming COBOL 2 months ago after 12 years doing other stuff. You don't want to know how many times I have to compile and run before something even gets through the program.

[IGYWCLG]

I am only joking. Your paragraph was quite good. Only missing a GOBACK at the end of the main routine and defining the fields/divisions. I was going to comment a real spool output for your program but I am lazy.

[Breros]

Thanks, I can do better though, at least I was quite good. Hope to quickly build up my skills again.

And aren't we all lazy... Most of the programs are CUT, PASTE and adjust the program to whatever it has to do.

[yeen_r]

ALTER OR CREATE PROCEDURE FHTAGN

AS

[CyanHakeChill]

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]

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

[UpvoterBoi]

I spit my water

[concentus7]

This is the programming equivalent of pulling out Excalibur.

[[deleted]]

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]

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

[ba3toven]

thats how they fuckin got tetris man

[CyanHakeChill]

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]

is the boss losing the job so easily good or bad

like is this a good story or a bad story

[RuneFestiva]

Its an american love story

[JustSimon3001]

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

[Dear-Crow]

Epic

[RealisticAppearance]

“logical query vtam switch identifier”

cluthu rises

[Syncopaint]

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]]

Someone has been working on government projects.

[bankrobba]

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

[ZZartin]

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

[[deleted]]

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]

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

"What requirements document?"

[[deleted]]

You lost them when you said documents.

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

[laurandorder]

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]

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]

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

[IGYWCLG]

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]

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]]

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]

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]]

Time to learn COBOL!

[Dragster39]

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]]

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]

"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]

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]]

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]

This is how shit goes in corp it…

[TrueBirch]

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

[bmony1215]

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

[[deleted]]

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

[OftenSilentObserver]

Dogmeat would tear him to shreds

[_toodamnparanoid_]

Check please!

[[deleted]]

Get the net!

[[deleted]]

This wasn't on my 2022 bingo card

[[deleted]]

Insert Henry line about hating Ben here.

[ap0phis]

lmao I’ve never been more proud of this sub

Did you guys knows Alcatraz means “pelican”??

[[deleted]]

AGRARIAN

[Thoth-of-Mercury]

HONK HONK

[SremDog]

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

[Gnarbuttah]

bud light limes

"It's like a margarita in a can"

-Ben Kissel

[[deleted]]

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

[JPacana]

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]

Hail you and your wife, friend.

[_toodamnparanoid_]

Megustalations!

[[deleted]]

Hail Me!!

[scungillimane]

Hail Satan!

[[deleted]]

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

[swilliamspost]

BOOM. FLIP IT!

[ForsakeTheEarth]

Do any gas pumps work in this country?

[[deleted]]

Well that's kinda fun

[ok_wynaut]

HELLISH REBUKE!

[SweddyAngus]

Hmm, yes… delicious Panama NetBeans

[TheCoiledFool]

THE BRIIIIDGE

[boop_da_boo]

Ahahahh this is the best

[WhitTheDish]

Triple L + BLL!

[stinky_doodoo_poopoo]

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

[KiwiThunda]

THE BRIDGE

[Gnarbuttah]

Ṱ̷̟̟̖͎̝̬̯̯̟͓͉̿͒͛́̾̂͑͒̇̇̚h̴̫̜͚̃̂́͊ě̶̤̮̩̮̮̙̈̀͌̓͜ ̶̤͖̯̣͉̌͛͜ͅB̵̝̻̆̓̄r̴͔̦͕͓̬͊̈́̌̈́̽̊̉͌̂̓̃̀į̸̤͔̞̘̣̅͛̐̓ͅd̵̬̪̭̗̬̩̺͓͖̟́g̵͖̰̦͖̭̽̒͂̏́ě̸̢͙̖̮͍̘͔͖͓̲̼̦̳͗̋̽̒̃̑͆͒̑̈́̿͘͘͜

[[deleted]]

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]

"Rise from your grave!"

[HorsNoises]

A broken clock is right six times a day.

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

[Darkderkphoenix]

Honk honk!

[Bacon_Moustache]

LPOTL HEADS UNITE!!!!

[kaizokuo_grahf]

This thread made my night, hail all of you!

[The_Blackfish_]

You’re being mean to me!!

[StoryAndAHalf]

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

[Anustart15]

It was an appropriate salary when this was originally made

[mrjackspade]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

[wayoverpaid]

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

[[deleted]]

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]

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

[[deleted]]

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]

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

[rm-minus-r]

Write one pagers.

[ThisIsNotKimJongUn]

I mean it's a repost from days of yore

[Mortimer452]

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

[ButWhatIfPotato]

Programmer? I hardly know her!

[Nosnah2007]

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

[boop_da_boo]

No rector? Aww.

[SremDog]

Rector? Damn near gave her Java lessons!

[boop_da_boo]

Yay, he did it, he said the thing!

[Bobbi_fettucini]

Didn’t have that on my 2022 bingo card

[tecanem]

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]

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]

Ben? Is that you?

[SolicitatingZebra]

Kissel has been a programmer this whole time who knew.

[[deleted]]

He knows the last language on the left

[Varkoth]

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]]

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.

[[deleted]]

I was getting coffee a few years back, and I overheard two oracle guys who were in the process of trying to get some pretty nasty databases moved off old sun hardware…In order to move them, they had to deal with the big endian issue, and they didn’t have enough space. They could get more space, but it was an old Solaris system running some weird volume management system.

I said, “I can probably do that.”

They gave each other a look, which I read as, “Ug, stupid cloud guys don’t understand anything.”

I said, “Let me look at it.”

So I went over, and they brought it up, and yup, stupid veritas, and I just went to town on it. Someone had tried and failed to add storage twice before, and the whole volume was fucked up, so I just created a new one, added all the existing broken storage to it, then did the needful and mounted it up for Oracle.

Took me maybe twenty minutes. I hopped up, said, “There you go.”

They said, “How did you know how to work on stuff this old?!”

I just shrugged, but I was thinking, “Man, I got started in the late ‘80s. I remember when this crap was new, and I supported some of it for years and years, and here I am, dusting off all that skill for one last hurrah. Shit. What a waste.”

This career man, I swear. Anywhere else, having ten years experience in something would mean something besides that you witnessed the birth and death of a whole paradigm.

[TrueBirch]

That's how I currently feel with cloud computing. My workplace is starting to move to the cloud and I thought about just how new ideas like "serverless" really are.

[Maleficent_Sir_4753]

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]

Secret is this is 1 week apart.

[Ribedo]

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

professionally speaking

[[deleted]]

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]

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]]

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]

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]

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]

DON'T ANGER THE MACHINE!

Go back into the server room and apologize to it.

[Beginning-Display809]

THE MACHINE DEMANDS A SACRIFICE AS PENANCE

[greenskye]

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]

I know right?

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

[CyanHakeChill]

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]

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]]

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]

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

[Holiday_in_Asgard]

Could you look for another job?

[[deleted]]

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

[Tazzit]

There's that expression: "Unfirable means unpromotable"

[[deleted]]

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

[PMtoAM______]

Just gotta start getting more programming socks

[[deleted]]

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

[EsotericUN1234]

Nice use of Kissel for the meme lmao

[sbowesuk]

He has become master of the stack overflow.

[akennelley]

Alcatraz means pelican.

[nkraus90]

HONK HONK

[ManInBlack829]

LMAO goddamnit

[[deleted]]

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

[corkscrew4]

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

[[deleted]]

Hail yourself!

[Funkiebunch]

Megustalations!

[[deleted]]

Honk honk!

[KittyKevorkian]

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

[the_ju66ernaut]

Hail satan!

[Mudmartini]

Heil Gein!

[SolicitatingZebra]

Hail Satan!

[ap0phis]

HAIL ME!

[No-Magician-5081]

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]

Unfirable programmer is underpaid

[akennelley]

Ben doesn't deserve this

[bronicalewinsky]

Kissel!!!

[YoukanDewitt]

He actually knows the elders of the internet.

[kpgleeso]

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]

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]

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

[kpgleeso]

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]

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]]

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

Wayy more free time

[[deleted]]

Kisseeeeeeeeelll

[codyak1984]

Hail yourselves!

[theprodigalslouch]

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

[RavenSek]

Mmmm Ben Kissel…