• (disco)

    TRWTF in this story is, that he stayed on the same position on the same company for 14 friggin years.

  • (disco) in reply to redwizard
    redwizard:
    In 1988, I recall being a hopeful teenager asking my dad for a computer to help with schoolwork, so I can learn about computers too, etc. His response: "I don't want you playing games when you should be studying! You need to learn something that is useful, that earns you pay, so you can survive in real life!" (Picture old world Eastern European serious lecture attitude.) Of course I walk away thinking WTF. bla bla bla rest of the story

    Some time before 1988, my high-school guidance counselor suggested that I get into computers because I was good with math. (There were no computing classes of any kind in high school at that time; in fact, a classmate of mine triggered a controversy because he'd brought a four-function calculator to math class.) Said that in earlier times I would have been encouraged to take up business because apart from the teaching profession (where nobody makes or ever has made a decent living) the place math is used is accounting and bookkeeping, but in the years to come all that stuff would be done by machines and the real growth opportunity was being one of the guys who run the machines. Only in third-world countries like India would accounting continue to be done by human beings.

    Flash forward twenty years. I'm working in an office, programming for a Fortune 100 company. I've got a math degree but I haven't done anything more mathematically sophisticated than long division since getting out of college. I'm not actually doing much programming either, despite my job title, because the company has brought in contractors to take care of that, and I'm explicitly discouraged from doing anything that even resembles coding. Instead, all my time is taken up filling out time sheets with made-up numbers about how I'm spending my time, making sure to satisfy several factions that each and every one of them is getting 100% of my effort and not going over unspoken thresholds set by at least two other factions that are in direct conflict with one another.

    And the people doing the actual coding? They're from a previously-mentioned third-world country.

    If I ever get my time machine working, the first thing I'm going to do is travel back to the Gerald Ford administration and paste my guidance counselor one right in the face.

  • (disco) in reply to Offf256

    As I read it, he was at the same company but not in the same position, moving upwards as he acquired experience and value.

  • (disco) in reply to da_Doctah
    da_Doctah:
    I'm working in an office, programming for a Fortune 100 company. I've got a math degree but I haven't done anything more mathematically sophisticated than long division since getting out of college. I'm not actually doing much programming either, despite my job title, because the company has brought in contractors to take care of that, and I'm explicitly discouraged from doing anything that even resembles coding....

    The How To Demoralize Employees: A DIY Guide for Terrible Companies is :arrow_backward: :arrow_right: that way.

    Hope you find the escape route soon.

  • (disco) in reply to da_Doctah
    da_Doctah:
    And the people doing the actual coding? They're from a previously-mentioned third-world country.

    Reminded me of this with regard to technical support:

    http://blog.considertheheavens.com/2010/01/31/school-bus-in-japan-and-india/

  • (disco) in reply to redwizard

    Pay bargain basement prices for support? Get bargain basement service when you call…

  • (disco) in reply to aliceif

    Nope, this is me.

  • (disco) in reply to CaptainOblivious
    CaptainOblivious:
    Underlining was backspace followed by underscore.
    Actually underlining was achieved by prefixing undercore and backspace, in case you typed the document to a VDU, in which case the underlining/bold would just be invisible (unless like me you wrote a shell script that searched for backspaces and inserted the appropriate VDU control codes to turn on bold (well, inverse video) or underlining as appropriate (and on those VDUs that used magic cookies, I even tried to delete the appropriate number of spaces too)).
  • (disco)

    Article title should be sereMdipity...

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