Whats a good lesson you learned on the job?
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. 🪿
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.
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.
Thank you Six Finger.
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…
Stupid no fun allowed lessons, next you're going to tell me I can't feed the lions dressed in a zebra costume
Don’t touch the -80°C (-112°F) freezer with your bare wet hands (learned this today :D )
Can confirm, these are excellent lessons.
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".
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.
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
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
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.
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.
No no, everything is test.
Cover Your Ass
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
Keep notes on your work.
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
It usually doesn’t need to be perfect, good enough is often good enough and can be a lot faster where trying for perfection might not get finished in time.
with the era of llms and vibe coding the bar for good enough got way too low.
"Good enough for these clowns." is the key phrase. But I try to leave off the last three words if I say it out loud.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
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.
Just because someone was made a supervisor it doesn't mean they know what they are doing.
I was once made a boss over this particular employee who was better at their job than me, and much older. I made it clear to her that I had no desire to wield any authority over her and that I considered us peers.
If my bosses knew what I'd done I would have been roasted but I feel like I made the right call. And having her respect was more invaluable than anything my bosses ever did.
Managers aren't there to do your job. They are there to clear the way so you can do your job. Handle schedules, handle HR requests, filter bullshit coming from above you.
As a manager, my goal is to have people smarter and better than me under me. Give them the space to do what they do best. While I give them the direction on what they should be working on. Half of what I do is make sure they aren't wasting time focusing on stuff that doesn't actually push the project forward.
And if someone is put in a supervisor position and can't handle those tasks either? I didn't say they didn't know my job, they literally didn't know what THEY were doing.
My manager has been the manager of my department for over 7 years and admitted to my face that she has no idea what we do. 💀... And then did not make any effort in the last 8 months to learn what I do.
I had worked at a theme park a couple summers. I operated one of the rides during a state inspection. It wasn't a simple push the button and off it goes kind of thing, you manually controlled it. There were three big hydraulic motors with tires that powered the moving portion. The goal was to never equal the tires and I was good at it.
A new supervisor was promoted only because her sister was a manager already. She didn't know how to properly operate the ride and was training others. I walked past one day to hear it roaring around one direction then the tires started screeching as it was hammered the other direction. I put in my notice the same day as that was my tipping point of stupidity, I wasn't going to be there when someone was hurt or worse.
The supervisor who promoted her only did it to kiss ass, she complained she hadn't had a single day off all summer because the new supervisor couldn't perform the job.
That's flat out nepotism, and an impending disaster. Good call on getting out sooner rather than later. The pay 100% was not worth the risk.
Ah yeah, well, it was about 8 months ago when she said it to me, and somehow she's gotten away with it because my department knows what it's doing at all times. She's being investigated and has decided this is the time to retire. Good riddance, absolute piece of shite.
At my first internship, they made me go through an entire bookshelf of safety training manuals that felt like they were written by the local staff. They were all full of things like "don't put a pipe on the end of a wrench to give you the leverage you need to do your job" and "don't forget to clock out at lunch or we'll have to assume you were gone for exactly one hour". Took me a moment to realize they were in fact telling me exactly what to do, but in a way that would also cover their asses. Always thought that was clever.
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
Yes, the meeting might result in the same plan you made forever ago. But now everyone knows what, how, and why. The meeting wasn't called because your idea was shit, it was to bring everyone up to speed.
Do NOT let people walk over you. Especially collegues. Especially collegues who have a history
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.
Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups. Always verify to make sure you(and others) got all the necessary information.
You might worry that you’ll come across as inexperienced or unprepared, but people usually appreciate the effort. And it will save you so much headache down the line.
Also, all real assumptions are invisible. The more things you realize were assumptions but are actually questions worth asking the better you actually are at that job or, if not better, the more experienced.
You’re not family
You’re not their friend
They don’t want anything to change.
Always take a long lunch. They are.
You’re not a problem solver, you’re a back massager.
You’re definitely going to get laid off these days, and it doesn’t matter what your performance was like.
Your one-up is probably not coming in to work at all, which is why their help isn’t ever helpful.
You should scrape all their data and source code to see if there’s anything useful you can sell when you get laid off.
Be sure to document everything and save it on your own device. Always check “use Gemini notes” for zoom calls. Screenshot chats where you ask direct questions and never get answers.
Get two jobs, do the minimum at both. Made double money, fuck them.
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.
That's a great question and there are so many good answers in this thread.
Don't expect your superiors to ever back you up. I got burned so many times. I knew I was right, but they didn't have a backbone and only thought about the budget, their reputation, and the work they'd have to put in for damage control. I wanted to shut restaurants for their filthiness, but "Oh noes, what will the community think". Well, if someone dies, then it's on your head. DOCUMENT EVERYTHING.
Even if a conversation or direction was made verbally, always follow up with an email to say "Just to confirm our conversation today, you have directed me to...." Even if it's about holidays. My old boss was such a prick. Him and all upper management are the reason I am suspicious of everyone and everything.
99% of people don't wash their hands properly.
The number of times I've seen people get out of the shitter and just head back to work, is disgustingly too damn high. I used to bring sanitary wipes with to clean every door handle. Now I work from home thankfully.
Now, picture the same people in restaurants preparing your food. It's exactly the same thing 💀
same here, so exhausting.
It's why I ended up quitting that job. I couldn't get ahead because documenting everything took up so much of my time. In the end, the entire chain up to CEO still sided with my shite in the rain of a manager because she sucked enough under the table 🙄
I threatened to call the fire marshal on an employer once if they didn't fix an emergency exit. It got fixed that night, but can't say it ingratiated me with management.
But I had told them about the broken door for almost a month.
I told my boss about the team leader who was bullying others, bullying the business owners, and making extremely sexist and racist remarks to everyone "lower" than him, and then I became thd problem. 🙄 Management are the ones that preach "We're a family" until money or their ego is involved, and suddenly, they're crying and out for blood.
You did what was right. Be proud to have the morals and respect for you and others that they will never have.
for me:
You're represented by your words. It can cost you opportunities.
People (customers and coworkers alike) are generally not very bright, putting it politely. No matter how foolproof you design a system, the human race is out there absolutely cranking out bigger fools than you even imagined.
I'm not obliged to do anything I'm not directly paid for. People put all sorts of massive tasks on me and I now ignore the task. If it is important enough to come back to me from 2 or 3 sources then I might look at it. All core tasks I get paid for come before these "extras".
Always cover your ass. Take notes of everything, send emails out with important details of who was supposed to do what. It'll help you avoid trouble when something goes wrong and fingers start being pointed.
If you're aloof in the office and your campus has several buildings to work at, you can work remote without anyone ever noticing.
It can take them up to a year to realize that I totally lied on my resume and am incompetent, by which time I am no longer so incompetent.
That we have to do that at all is a real scourge of our time, on par with trying to replace everyone with artificial idiots
These are my grandfather's words not mine: no matter how much of an idiot your boss is, he is still your boss
You gotta speak to people where they're at, in words they're willing to hear, and make them feel like you give a shit about what's happening to them.
When you see an opportunity to help without hindering your ability to do your duties, offer. If someone asks for help, try to find a way or apologize that you can't.
Your professional instincts don't impact policy unless you can prove that they're correct.
A good leader takes the blame for their followers and passes the credit forward.
Maintain a nice professional barrier. Your coworkers don't need to know everything about your life. And when people start engaging in shop talk the only white collar person there should be acutely aware of the fact that we're held to higher professional standards of general conduct.
Reward for being even slightly competent and having work ethic is more work. To the point where you are doing everything until you break.
If you do something that needed to be done out of curtesy it'll become your responsibility.
If you want to find someone who understand something about the corporation, look at the basement.
A corollary to your first one: if you take on extra work people will forget it is extra work when it's not delivered on time or has issues. It does not matter how much the first three people fucked it up, you touched it last.
People will only forget, if you let them. I always make sure my contributions are very clearly visible. That of course presupposes that you have meaningful contributions to make visible.
I find people who try to stand out and play up their work insufferable. What I find more insufferable is that this works for getting ahead
Agreed. I only do this when people try to play up their work at my expense.
It seams like you may be well-fit for this type of envoirement.
I've been working in corporate environments for the past thirty years or so. So yeah, I guess.
I was being passive-agressive.
Your boss's priorities are your priorities.
Learn to code switch if you intend to become any sort of leader. Different folks need different strokes to get them to where you need them to be, and learning how coworkers process information can put you in a better position to communicate with them.
Also helps bridge the gap between coworkers who may be talking past each other because they process information differently.
This works going up the chain too. Get to know your management and how they process information as well. Tailoring your reports/slidework to their needs will go a long way in getting them on your side.
It doesn't matter how powerful or pertinent the information is if it's in a undigestable format. I've seen game changing information be scoffed and useless information praised wholly based on how it was displayed. Looking at you, MBAs....
In summation, know your audience. Turns out what they teach you in literary classes is actually useful.
There are acceptable ways to say "I don't know," especially when there's someone else you can refer to. If I had a nickel for every time I said "that's something you have to ask the billing department," it'd match my take home pay
Don't turn the work computers connected to the giant LCD screens outside in public on. They could display something not meant to be seen in public. That's how I learned a co-worker looks at porn on his work computer. Co-worker chewed me out. He brought up the porn. I never went from angry/embarrassed to cracking up in my head so fast.
Same for screen sharing. Do not share your whole screen unless you're ok with your coworkers seeing every open window, including the chat you have currently open.
Know the rulebook backwards and forward.
Because when you break a rule you can show that you tried to do it by the book, and it didn't work.
Never try and improve things, specifically things having to do with how your job, group, division, it whatever works. Don't try and improve efficiency, optimize workflow, or anything like that. Just do what you're paid to and nothing more. If the company wants things to be more efficient then they can have your boss figure it out on their own. If they don't punish you for trying them they won't reward you for success, so don't bother. Going above and beyond never works out.
Keeping things consistent for groups requires regular training and reiterating what is being done.
When to SHUT THE FUCK UP…
The reward for working hard and doing great work is cleaning up other people’s fuck ups and ineptitude.
What people think of you is the bell curve.
The world seems to be led by idiots at every level. Top to bottom. That's not an observation just to bitch; it's meant to let you know that you can aim higher. If your boss is a fucking idiot, if the head of your organization is a fucking idiot, then that should show you how far someone with a brain in their head must be able to go, too. Don't feel defeated and relegated to nothing roles. Be inspired by how apparently easy it is for fucking idiots to do seemingly important or well-paying jobs, and then start thinking about whether you can show them up.
Also, you never realize how important project management is until you work in an environment where no one gives two shits about it. It turns out that writing things down, planning, documenting, agendas, follow-up, attending meetings you said you would attend, being able to back up the things you say, are all very fucking important. It turns out that being an incompetent piece of shit and con artist can get you very, very far, but gradually, people start to realize they've been had; one only hopes that the department or organization are still in one piece by the time and that they have the authority to get rid of you.
This goes for just about anything in life:
“First seek to understand, then to be understood.”
That nobody at work is your friend even if they say so. Got burned pretty bad but now I know.
Bullies go unpunished by corporate unless it's overtly sexual or racist in nature. If you stick your neck out to defend someone getting bullied the company and the victim will leave you hanging in the future when the unpunished bully turns on you next. HR are soulless husks.
Bad things you can change are problems. Bad things you can't change are circumstances. Solve the former, work around or adapt to the latter.
We had big layoffs last year. The order of layoffs was troublemakers that couldn't be fired for other reasons > attendance > performance > how recent you were hired.
They got me before the layoffs started by fiting me after I sought FMLA for my mental health after months of deterioration following discrimination from my director. My discrimination lawyer loved that addition to our case.
Damn I hope you got paid! I meant legit troublemakers like stealing stuff but no one could prove even though we all knew. Not doing work to expected quality. Causing drama within the group.
At least the stories I've heard my company is pretty good about medical and mental issues. I know they kinda forced my old boss into early retirement but they made sure he'd get long term disability until actual retirement which was like a decade away. We've kept in touch and he's happy as a clam with how it turned out.
I already had a lawyer for the discrimination which led to the mental health crisis, so he was happy to throw this in for damages when the time comes. We're still in the courts so we'll see how it goes. Pretty sure a jury would side with me over an evil massive corporation that you would probably recognize, likely because you or people you know are forced to be their customer due to effective geographoc monopolization in the industry.
Glad to hear about your company and old boss. It's always good to know those places are still out there.
I watched a Director level employee get let go during a round of layoffs because he caused to much trouble by fighting for his employees.
Don't give up a stronger position for a weaker one in hopes of avoiding a conflict. You've only undermined yourself when the conflict happens anyway.
I'm an apartment building superintendent. I once confronted a late night trespasser: a junkie looking for a place to shoot up or snort or whatever his thing was. I demanded that he leave, but realized that I was physically blocking the only exit. He was cornered. So I moved out of the way and suddenly I was the one who was cornered. It all worked out in the end, but for a minute there I was facing a large, angry, paranoid junkie with a knife and no way to escape.
I don't know what would have happened if I didn't move to give him an exit, but I know that in doing so I gave up my own exit, and that was dumb.
Re: lesson two
Long time ago, one of my teachers showed the class the data from a survey of managers. It asked them to prioritize a list of things that could lead to a firing. Number one was punctuality/attendance. Number four was theft. This suggested to him that you could be stealing from the company, but if you showed up every day on time you'd be less likely to be fired than if you were always MIA but not a thief. Years in the workplace has only served to confirm this for me.
Probably truth in that, but also possible the question was phrased in a way where the managers weren't prioritizing the things that could lead to firing, but things they were most likely to die someone for, and theft certainly isn't as common as or attendance.
Personally i always put a person's attitude above being on time. Someone who regularly showed up late but was willing to help others who were struggling is better, in my opinion, than someone who was on time everyday but was just watching the clock. That said, it definitely depends on the job. If someone else is waiting for you to get there before they can leave, you are definitely on the block if you're constantly that guy.
People are very bad at asking questions.
Some people will take dumb actions that risk their own lives rather than do something which would require a mild explanation later.
Experience and ability are not completely correlated.
The people you work with are often more important than the job itself in regards to how much you enjoy it.
If you don't show up, you get fired.
When you're 19, this is a valuable lesson.
When I was young, I thought following the rules and procedures was how you got ahead.
Now I realize that while those are not unimportant, what's more important is figuring out how things actually get done and use those processes to get things done. To also help out those who need help getting things done where you can so that they'll help you. It's always amazed me how much people just get shit done regardless of rules and policies.
Also, document everything to make sure can show what you contributed and show that you did your part. If someone like a boss asks you to do something that's not according to written procedures, follow up with an email - "Just wanted to confirm we spoke about X and you told me to do Y" type of thing.
Work will drop you like a hot potato if they decide to let you go. All that extra work you put in unpaid - nobody will remember it, even if they remember it, it's not worth all of that time. You don't have to totally "act your wage" and do the minimum, but do NOT expend extra energy without tangible reward like overtime pay.
You can be friendl with people from work, but work is not your friend, neither are they your family. It is an arrangement whereby you give them energy, labour et cetera in exchange for pay.
Don't put anything in your mouth you didn't bring yourself.
Including coworkers.
It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.
To be cool and not let emotion dictate your behaviour.
It's not just heat that can burn you.
Demonstrate proficiency, not expertise.
What about the differences of tips of say, a city job, or something tied to the government.
Not necessarily desk work, but also the various jobs like say park maintenance.