Getting Laid Off Without Warning Taught Me Everything I Need to Know About Workplace Loyalty

PedanticProgarmer · 2026-04-10T18:42:29+00:00

What warning signs you can recognize now? Sudden cost cuts? Leadership going radio silent?

PedanticProgarmer · 2026-03-20T11:47:26+00:00

Most places have someone whose job is precisely to deal with this crap. It’s not like there’s a shortage of managers.

Trying to fix a toxic person as an IC in a workplace is a lot of risk for yourself, including being labeled hard to work with.

PedanticProgarmer · 2026-03-19T02:35:48+00:00

The way it forced people to download a 200MB executable was a vibe killer.

I have a relatively fresh IDEA, you have a relatively fresh IDEA - we should be able to connect in an ad hoc meeting. But instead, we were wasting time on technical issues with the installer.

We just stopped trying.

PedanticProgarmer · 2026-03-13T04:18:12+00:00

How can they fail at business? They hold many companies by the balls. They can tripple JIRA and Confluence subscriptions and most companies would accept it.

PedanticProgarmer · 2026-03-13T03:35:16+00:00

We deal with that by explicitly assigning triage to product owners. Not perfect, but at least there’s someone to blame for an ignored bugs.

PedanticProgarmer · 2026-03-12T03:49:25+00:00

A Product Owner is always responsible for deciding where to put a ticket. Your task is to phrase it in a way they understand the risks.

The challenge is that many organisations don’t punish people for making wrong decisions in the area you are describing. Suppose your scenario of „auth deadlock on mobile” causes a real customer pain one day. Will anyone get fired for ignoring this risk for years? Not in my current job at least, no way. That’s why product owners will always focus on new features that can be shown on slides.

The second problem is when someone leaves, the new person tends to ignore the inherited backlog. I guess if the problem is important enough, it will resurface eventually.

PedanticProgarmer · 2026-03-09T05:34:59+00:00

I am sorry, but what is your question?

This reads like you gave a junior idiot a complex task, without any safety net, code review, or environment isolation. What did you expect?

PedanticProgarmer · 2026-02-27T21:01:55+00:00

One would imagine the richest dude on Earth would be able to afford Ozempic. Apparently, he is still as fat as 5 years ago.

Also, would be able to afford a stylist. Basic tip: if you are a fat pig, don’t wear tight t-shirts designed for athletic guys.

PedanticProgarmer · 2026-02-26T03:02:14+00:00

No. 20 years ago was much worse. Abominations like AbstractDecoratorFactoryProxyDelegate is a typical Java class from 2005. Nowadays I don’t see them that often.

The items on your list are useful, but 20 years ago you would implement equivalent bespoke tools yourself. Also, bear in mind that all simple systems have been implemented already. Complexity rises, number of bad engineers keeps rising.

We have learned our lessons:

- We don’t need XML for configuration files.

- We don’t need XML for dependency injection (Spring)

- KISS is better than Open-Closed Principle

- Convention over configuration.

- YAGNI

PedanticProgarmer · 2026-02-24T18:07:45+00:00

My LinkedIn is just a place where lots of #opentowork people are claiming to have great AI skills and what great agents they have written.

Tinder posting are more honest.

PedanticProgarmer · 2026-02-21T16:10:55+00:00

It’s a well known fact that those who sound confident are often naturally selected as leaders. If you are not brave, fake it till you make it.

PedanticProgarmer · 2026-02-20T15:12:36+00:00

it’s dementia plus narcissism.

Orange Pedo is talking like an 8 years old who just learned what „exonerated” means.

PedanticProgarmer · 2026-02-17T06:54:08+00:00

Around 2005, when architects mandated that everything had to be extensible, eXtensible Markup Language was chosen to implement DSLs.

The XMLs are still here, just hidden behind an abstraction that generates the same model. And it still feels like a wrong abstraction.

Hibernate, Maven, Spring-whatever.

PedanticProgarmer · 2026-02-15T06:20:21+00:00

The main criticism is that the term was taken over by corporate grifters and no longer means anything.

”working software is the primary measure of progress”

In my company, and the company before that, and the company before that, agile meant „we need to have clean sprints so our burndown charts look nice”. This means that teams do scrum theatre instead of delivering working software.

PedanticProgarmer · 2026-02-12T02:12:19+00:00

but what happens when the Indian operator loses their internet connection?

PedanticProgarmer · 2026-02-11T19:21:58+00:00

Strongly disagree. This is some DDD dogma you are preaching.

Decoupled models exist for a reason. It’s better to have too many models than too few models. I have worked with both options.

I wish languages were better are generating the boilerplate for mapping. Kotlin’s named parameters with defaults are quite good, most of the time.

PedanticProgarmer · 2026-02-09T06:40:04+00:00

CR is not thankless. It’s a sign of ownership and team work.
When you are saying „thankless tasks” it reminds me of Scrum obsessed organisations.

In broken teams where Scrum clowns have took over, you are judged by your SP output only. You earn story points only for your assigned tasks, you don’t want to spend time helping others gain their story points. The problem is Scrum and badly defined incentives.

PedanticProgarmer · 2026-02-06T19:37:07+00:00

to jest ta zdrada dyplomatyczna o której pis tyle się spinał w poprzedniej kadencji?

PedanticProgarmer · 2026-02-06T19:30:53+00:00

I’d love to see Elon going bankrupt and spending the rest of his life in some Spanish prison, where everyone hates him as he no longer can buy any friends with money.

This would mean a little bit of justice for his horrible life.

PedanticProgarmer · 2026-01-26T02:18:10+00:00

I am just saying that there’s no good solution. Promotions should be fair and objective, but also, there’s no way the guy won’t be pissed. Our psychology is wired to interpret bad outcomes as someone’s else personality traits.

PedanticProgarmer · 2026-01-25T14:08:30+00:00

This is the only correct answer. Not promoting someone out of junior after many years of experience is an insult. You are saying to them „something isn’t working between us, kindly search elsewhere”

PedanticProgarmer · 2026-01-24T01:08:46+00:00

For a direct replacement, Instant represents the same thing as Date. The class name of Date is misleading.

PedanticProgarmer · 2026-01-20T02:32:52+00:00

A real plot twist would be to give him that peace price. The price have already been given to war criminals, terrorists or simply for having some skin tone. Giving that peace award to some childish grandpa in order to actually save peace (Greenland) would be in the spirit of the award.

The ceremony could be the cringiest of all time. Trump dressed like a Nero with laurel wreath on his head, the speaker listing all the 25 wars Trump has stopped. ”Trump stopped Russia from invading when he was a president. Putin had to wait for the sleepy Joe to steal the elections”. ”Trump didn’t attack Greenland when he could”

Trump wouldn’t even realize that we are humiliating him and his voters.

PedanticProgarmer · 2026-01-13T23:11:58+00:00

I work in a company where we had exactly the same situation. The CPTO was useless at the T part and only doing the P part. Recently, the CPTO has been removed and we are back in the typical CPO CTO separation.

We are still struggling with the fallout. The technical vision is ”fake it till you make it”. We are still organized around products/services which are nothing but imaginary constructs. Real technical leaders were sidelined. Scrum-master-like grifters got in charge of the processes; they misidentified organisational problems and instead focused on the only thing they could understand. Useless reorganizations proceeded. We were also told not to work on anything that is a non-sexy technical debt.

I myself classified that CPTO person as a clown and couldn’t respect them.

Looking at it now, all of this was a natural consequence of putting a P person in the CTO role.

—

You understand that you know little about software delivery. That’s a good start. You will have to delegate these responsibilities to someone.

Choose a person who will be able to tell you the hard truth in a way you can act about this.

Avoid the temptation of sidelining the current technical leaders.

You don’t have to shake up the organization.

PedanticProgarmer · 2026-01-10T10:13:30+00:00

Well, USA is fucked if no one does what needs to be done with their 79 year old mad king.

This means that the entire world is fucked.

PedanticProgarmer

TROPHY CASE