For me:
Sometimes it doesn’t matter how hard you work, your going to get laid off either way.
Just showing up can sometimes make the difference.
Your not paid to be a software developer. Your being paid to be a problem solver.
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Being right doesn’t matter if you can’t convince others.
Also that the best way to convince others that your ideas should be done is to make them think it is their idea. Worrying about getting credit works against getting things done.
When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.
And then you get laid off. 🪿
You can’t go in and give 100% every day. You will burn out. Give 70% regularly. Only give 100% when shit really hits the fan. People will think you are a miracle worker.
Plus, companies will abuse you.
Not even companies, other coworkers or your manager
People are really fucking stupid. I work in IT. I’m a helpdesk tech at an MSP, and I see profound idiocy all day every day. People have no critical thinking skill and seem proud of the fact they don’t know shit about anything. People young and old say they’re tech illiterate like it’s a good thing.
Any sort of thinking, even reading and sharing the fucking error message is a foreign language to these assholes. The error message tells me exactly what to do to help, and you fucking closed it and can’t reproduce the error now!? Good luck.
On the other hand, can you please share an actual error message other than “something went wrong” and requiring me to reproduce the error while on live chat because there are no server logs?
The informatics nurse took a second to register that I was just gonna give her the IP address to remote in. She had this whole spiel ready ready to walk me through finding the device number (that wore off years before I even started). I was like girl I have the network settings open do you just want the IP address I just need you to make the new EPIC update behave let’s get to it.
I wish every user was as good as you. The best users that I’ve encountered are my immediate family. I’ve trained them up over years and when they need my help, it’s not a nightmare lol
Don’t touch liquid nitrogen with your bare hands.
Don’t touch glowing metal with your bare hands.
Don’t touch exposed wire with your bare hands.
Spending your own money on super high quality gloves is absolutely worth it.
Pff! Where’s the fun in that?
So if I put a pair of nitrile gloves on, I should be able to touch those things with no problems? brb gonna go try it
Don’t forget to grab something out of the heavy machinery
Don’t put your dick in it either. :/
No that’s actually perfectly okay.
Well I’M Homer Simpson! —Grimey
Stupid no fun allowed lessons, next you’re going to tell me I can’t feed the lions dressed in a zebra costume
So you’re saying that as long as the bare wires are soaked in liquid nitrogen, they’re fine to touch!
I mean you would think…
Thank you Six Finger.
Can confirm, these are excellent lessons.
Don’t touch the -80°C (-112°F) freezer with your bare wet hands (learned this today :D )
No matter what, under no circumstances should you ever believe the company or place you work for will back you up.
If a company was placed in a situation where they can get rid of you for any reason, they will and they will do it as fast as possible.
Even if you believe you are irreplaceable, a company will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get you out of the equation.
Even if you have been with the company for 20+ years, if the company sees a way to save a hundred bucks by getting rid of you, they will.
Even if you and your boss and their bosses are buddy buddy and they are the godparent to your child and if you donated them a kidney, they will replace you.
Even if you show that you work the most, bring in the most sales, work the longest, get paid the least, and do work so everyone can slack off, they will replace you.
Also HR is never there for you. It is there to protect the company first and foremost. If you go to them for any reason, you are on a list to be the first to go.
Even if you ARE irreplaceable and crucial to success, the company will only realize it a month after you’re gone.
Even if you ARE irreplaceable and crucial to success, the company will only realize it a month after you’re gone.
So true.
But it is still fucking hilarious, to watch go down.
Pro tip: Make sure some colleagues have your contact info, so you can enjoy the news right away when your former boss gets fired for incompetence. It doesn’t fix anything, but it feels nice.
I remember reading of the lady who donated her kidney to get boss and then got fired
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Star Trek lied to us about the competency levels of our co-workers.
To be fair, the story is set a few years in the future.
And revolves around the best of the best. The enterprise is the flagship of the federation
Thats why I like Orville so much, because its just averagely normally competent workers doing space communism things
Yeah, when they had flip phones.
My favorite quote of all time is from the web series PeopleWatching when on character compare the present to Star Trek saing “We have the ships, but not the crew”.
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Literally an hour ago my boss tells me he doesn’t think I’m working fast enough because things aren’t always getting finished. I tell him that six months ago the labour budget was reasonable and but now I have half as many hours to do the same amount of work.
He tells me it can’t be helped, the labour budget is what it is. I tell him that the work can’t be helped without more labour, because it is what it is.
Anyway, I guess what I learned on the job is if you use management’s own words against them you’ll get written up
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yup, did it some time ago, boss yelled in a meeting, wrote an email ‘for confirmation of understanding’ with word for word, he did NOT like it. and ofc I did not understand what all the yelling was about.
Boss said, last year’s performance met expectations, so we are all not getting any bonus.
What?? Hold on. It’s a performance-based bonus. This directly translates to a bonus-based performance, effective immediately.
Fuck the company, I don’t work for peanuts.
Join a union the first chance you get, they exist to fight against HR, and to fuck over the company if they try to fuck you over
Somehow, I’ve got HR fighting for me. What a great country to live in.
Hard skills are important for doing the underlying job, but soft skills matter more if you want to progress in the career as well as financially.
You could be the smartest person alive, but if you don’t communicate effectively and play nice with others you’re almost useless.
I’m in this comment and I don’t like it.
Validate your backups regularly.
Also, make backups.
Taking a day to actually test backups by doing a cold reset can save a business, thats for sure.
The horror of being a senior admin is realizing that the whole thing could live or die based solely on your actions and decisions. And that you will be blamed.
This is where you bring Chaos Monkey in and see where your weak points are.
I’ve always wanted to deploy Chaos Monkey for its actual purpose, but I’ve never been in charge of a big enough infra to make it worth the time. I have turned off databases just to see who files a ticket, which seems in the same spirit.
A shout test is what I call that.
If your backups are untested, you don’t have backups.
Years after the fact I could make the lead developer’s eye twitch just by mentioning the guy who was supposed to maintain the backups but we discovered after the fire that he actually hadn’t been doing it. That guy was fired, but it didn’t bring back the lost code.
Wait, you didn’t have some git-based thing with an off-site upstream?
Everybody has a test environment.
Some are lucky enough to also have a production environment.
As a network engineer we don’t even have a test env linked to prod. Everything is prod.
Everything is prod.
No no, everything is test.
Cover Your Ass
You can get away with a LOT if you keep people up to date with what you’re doing
If only I’d think of that while doing it.
It’s usually a “This will take 20min or so” and turns into an “I know I am 3 hours into that but I know I am close to fixing it for good!”
But you can get away with the 3 hours on a 20 mins task, if you detail exactly what’s happening with a check-in every now and again, that’s what I mean.
If I would remember doing that! Yeah, sure.
HR protects and represents the company, not you as an employee.
Complaining to HR is more effective when you can frame it from a company liability position.
Keep notes on your work.
- Its proof of the work you have done
- A lot of people forget things, including yourself.
- It helps you reflect back. Helps with projects that are spaced apart as well.
On three separate occasions over the course of many years, I ran into an issue and searched Stack Overflow for anyone else having the same problem. The approved answer was exactly what I needed, and went to go hit the upvote button, only to realize I can’t upvote it because I was the author of the answer.
I get this like 6 times a year.
Wait. Are you my alt account?
I hate doing that but it saved one of my colleague’s job.
One of our employees pretty much unfairly accused him of loads of things but when he showed his written personal log of work, he got a new chance at staying in the company.
I’m happy for the guy. He’s really nice. It’s a shame everyone is so damn grumpy at my company.
I kind of have a silverbullet instance to keep work notes but it’s not nearly organized enough. and keeping it organized with all the things going on would require soo much time.
I know not all companies may let you use it but I found Logseq to be quite useful for this. No real organizing, just write in the daily notes and search later.
It uses links to connect notes together, as long as there are common words. Obsidian is similar but logseq emphasizes daily notes more.
yep, silverbullet is in the same category and it’s a docker, and i use docker to work, so they can’t block it
