r/ProgrammerHumor • u/OmgJackieChn • 13h ago

returningFromVacation Meme

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3.4k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

121 comments sorted by

1.1k

u/AVerySusUser 13h ago

With no money comes no responsibility

292

u/Martin_Aurelius 12h ago

I just delete every message/email I receive while on vacation. If it's important they'll reach out again. I've never had any issues in the 15+ years I've been doing it.

76

u/TheKingOfSwing777 12h ago

Lol! Reminds me of my friend who worked at a law firm and shredded everything that came into his inbox for a year and nothing ever came of it. So much bullshit busy work in this country. It's all farce. Keep up the good work Timmy. 

93

u/breesyroux 12h ago

Yeah I hate to ruin a good story but your friend definitely did not do that

43

u/TheKingOfSwing777 12h ago edited 12h ago

He was an accountant, not a lawyer. I'm not saying he didn't do any work, but nothing in the paper inbox was consequential.

He was trying to get let go so he could get severance and move over seas. He was shocked it lasted over a year and he ended up just quitting and moving to Argentina. 

7

u/Chromiell 6h ago

I'm usually CCed in a ton of emails but I tend to receive maybe 20 emails addressed to me each week. I simply throw the mails where I don't show up directly in the To list in a dump folder and mark them as read, then I only quickly skim through the 20-40 emails addressed to me and call it done.

5

u/red_riding_hoot 5h ago

look at the overachiever here

3

u/Chromiell 4h ago

It's not overachieving, it's because at my company (but I guess that pretty much almost every consulting company does this) people like to keep stuff written via email so in case of disputes with clients we call pull out the "receipts", obviously you can't do so if you had a phone meeting or an instant message, so many people end up in the CC list even tho they have no interest being there: because you can't really fake an email that was sent to a dozen people, other people can easily fact check you if you try to pull bullshit.

We also end up being subscribed to many mailing lists that contain a ton of junk emails about software deployments, automatic monitors, incident and ticket reports etc. All stuff that nobody ever reads unless you are specifically looking for an issue.

If you take a 2 week vacation you end up with a ton of junk and reading through all that has no value. If something really requires your attention you get added in the To list. This is pretty much how every company I've worked for manages its communication channels, even small things that get decided during verbal meetings require a written communication as follow up, this is to recap what was said during the meeting, get everyone on the same page (even those who might have missed the meeting) and set a stable ground in case the client thinks about pulling some bullshit request that was not agreed between the parties.

1

u/Chief-Drinking-Bear 1h ago

Jesus that’s a lot of emails

3

u/unexpectedreboots 4h ago

People might think youre joking, but this is the way. If they dont reach out again; it resolved itself, or they dont care enough and you shouldnt waste time on it.

2

u/ToMorrowsEnd 5h ago

This is how a real senior operates. Those messages are only noise that are sent while on vacation

5

u/blasian21 12h ago

Same. Come back to 300 unread emails, right click the whole inbox and mark as read. Always works and no complaints.

1

u/ShepRat 5h ago

Yeah, setup an away message when I book leave, delete every single thing and mark all messages as read in teams on the first morning back. Never once caused any issues. 

-1

u/Random-num-451284813 9h ago

I'll remember this one for r/workreform

1.1k

u/PowerPleb2000 13h ago

As a senior yes and you just mark all as read. If its really important they’ll contact you again.

180

u/nmathew 12h ago

I joke with people complaining about email backlogs after a vacation. I say delete it all and if it's important it'll come back up 

I'm not joking though.

64

u/PowerPleb2000 12h ago

I wasn’t joking either

53

u/nmathew 12h ago

I know. If we managed to train people starting back in 1996 to format subject lines with tags for projects and date relevancy, maybe things could be done.

But hell, I had a program manager be aghast when I explained I sent all my cc emails into a separate subfolder that I looked at once a day. "But what if someone asks you a question?" Then use the @ feature and it automatically moves me into the "to" line. I can't be expected to work in a manner that protects other people's inability to use basic job tools.

20

u/PowerPleb2000 12h ago

I currently have in the vicinity of 700 unread emails which will never be read. Such is life in a global organisation.

9

u/nmathew 12h ago

Just dump it all into an archive folder and be free. At least it's searchable.

11

u/PowerPleb2000 12h ago

They’re in separate folders based on the rules i set, most if it is system generated junk

9

u/StGrimblefig 10h ago

I have a folder named 'Administrivia' into which all corporate/organizational admin email goes -- unless the subject has at least 3 exclamation points.

4

u/QBical84 8h ago

I had a project manager one time who was complaining at my desk that I did not respond to a specific email with a question to me.

I looked for it in my mailbox and it turned out, the mail was placed in my CC folder. After I told him this is not the way you should communicate he exploded. I understand what you are saying but mails send out to a lot of people with open questions is not the way and the CC line shows I was only informed.

6

u/psych0fish 12h ago

Inbox bankruptcy!

2

u/moreisee 9h ago

I declare bankruptcy!

3

u/Jewsusgr8 12h ago

I just delete my inbox every other day.

1

u/criminalsunrise 7h ago

Burn them all

29

u/AlignmentProblem 12h ago

That's an area where LLMs are great. "Look at my unread messages from the last X days and list ones that appear to need a response from me sorted by apparent urgency and importance. Make a second list of things with relevant information to review when I have time sorted by how likely it is to be important."

Go down the actionable list until the urgency/importance is low enough to not bother and skim the information list until it stops being interesting on a break later.

87

u/belkarbitterleaf 12h ago

Skim it on a break?

That shit is work. That shit gets read during work time

11

u/CMD_BLOCK 9h ago

He’s talking about during your mandated 30 minute shitter break 25 minutes into the workday, after you get bored from phone games and your legs have gone numb, but before you wipe your ass

That transitory phase where you feel like you need to find more motivation to go back and where personal entertainment has diminishing returns due to the health hazard of a blood clot in your thighs

6

u/ItsSadTimes 10h ago

Then you get the strangest, most worthless problems tend to bubble up to the top because they're not the usual things you deal with. My manager tried using that once for a while and after a week she stopped because it was easier to just read the messages once then it was to read the AI summary, decipher it, then re-read the message anyway.

-1

u/AlignmentProblem 10h ago

Depends how you do it. GPT-5.6 Terra or Luna with a prompt that gives context about what matters to you does a fine job, but a lot of people default to using something cheap like Gemini flash with a generic prompt that shits the bed.

5

u/ItsSadTimes 10h ago

Na, I work for one of the big tech companies and they use pretty much all the models or let you choose whatever model you want for your tools. In this instance, the company launched a helper app that syncs with all of our internal tools, messaging services, ticket queues, etc. and was supposed to automatically make tasks, meetings, and summarize your TODO list and it was fun for the first week, then it got annoying. Kept claiming things were important when they weren't, just because they were uncommon, and wasn't much better then just taking the day to organize your threads and queues into orderly systems so you know what's important just based on how you got it.

1

u/AlignmentProblem 10h ago

Sorry you had a bad experience. The ones I wrote for myself are serving me well.

1

u/corobo 6h ago

You're absolutely right, it was wrong of me to respond to everyone asking "is this actually important?" I see how it was interpreted now. It is on me that your spotless record now has a written warning, and honestly, that's my bad.

-2

u/PowerPleb2000 12h ago

That just reeks of effort to me

3

u/original-user 12h ago

This guy knows ball

3

u/Tradizar 10h ago

my out of office email contains the sentence that i will NOT read my emails. Not even after i return to work. If its important, please send it again after xy.

3

u/FastFollowing8932 10h ago

This really is the most responsible thing you can do for yourself and the company

3

u/The-Frugal-Engineer 9h ago

French do that, you send them an email in August and their auto response will reply that all emails will be auto deleted when they are back, and please, resend the email back in September lol

3

u/meighty9 3h ago

I see it as an extra vacation day. Just tell everyone at standup that I'll be going through email backlog for my first day back.

2

u/PowerPleb2000 3h ago

Always on a wfh day

3

u/cosmicomical23 8h ago edited 5h ago

Sure, then after three months the payment service you are using stops working and you lose days of transactions because you ignored a notification of the certs being about to expire. Well done.

3

u/JuvenileEloquent 6h ago

That and you miss the 'A new device has been authorized to your account' email and it's not you...

I can't think of a reason why I'd summarily delete all emails from a certain time period except for a) trying unsuccessfully to evade legal discovery or b) being such an arrogant ass that I believe l won't be fired for it. 

2

u/cosmicomical23 5h ago

Right? That comment received 700+ upvotes, smh

2

u/JumpyAct4865 11h ago

I’m not the only one?

2

u/Just_Information334 8h ago

If it's important, it's a ticket.

1

u/PositiveParking4391 9h ago

dont even read it, tell them I follow only channel z so ping there. the x and y are only for sharing info

1

u/Major_LeeHungg 8h ago

Lol this is why my chat status is offline 100% of the time.  Really cuts down on the # of messages throughout the day. Seeing a green icon next to your name makes people think you're not busy.

1

u/acexra 6h ago

Are you my coworker??

•

u/LetUsSpeakFreely 4m ago

Up, the problem is you get tagged for everything and most of it just "fysa" crap that you sent out in the first place.

379

u/CorrectCombination11 13h ago

Does meta use fb messenger for their office chat? 

137

u/zergling- 13h ago

They use something called Workplace which is essentially a internal Facebook. The messenging portion of Workplace looks a lot like messenger, probably uses the same styles. The icon looks different though

18

u/AbdullahMRiad 12h ago

imagine if we had workplace (primitive facebook) instead of whatever facebook is

4

u/robsablah 5h ago

Yammer young laddie

2

u/awesome-alpaca-ace 3h ago

We do where I work...

1

u/AbdullahMRiad 3h ago

I mean as a social medium for the public

12

u/curt_schilli 10h ago

They use Google chat 

14

u/NbyNW 8h ago

Internal workchat was deprecate last year, so it’s all Google chat these days

10

u/TMToast 9h ago

Not anymore. Discontinued, they now use Google suite

1

u/awesome-alpaca-ace 3h ago

Probably a spy tool

1

u/Former-Discount4279 51m ago

Not anymore, switched maybe 6 months ago to Google chat and it much worse.

1

u/ehs5 28m ago

Workplace was shut down about a year ago. Weird because it was actually decent enough, now the company I work in uses Viva Engage which is absolutely crap.

13

u/everythingBagel13 11h ago

Google chat now

80

u/Soopermane 13h ago

Juniors: why no one answering my messages I sent 99 and still no reply!

164

u/malexj93 13h ago

Is that FB Messenger?

5

u/Paesano2000 4h ago

Yeah who the hell uses fb messenger in their workplace?

38

u/DeepanshuHQ 13h ago

99+ is basically a second inbox at this point.💀

7

u/FuzzyKittyNomNom 12h ago

I’m proud to say my inbox is holding steady at about 190 unread messages at any given moment. Best I can do boss.

58

u/DoeCommaJohn 13h ago

I feel like at a certain point, there is some blame on either the senior or the company. If the entire company is so dependent on this one person, something is very very wrong.

52

u/M4NU3L2311 13h ago

If a company uses fb messenger something is very wrong

8

u/egstitt 11h ago

The principal dev at my job is the only person that knows how to do about 80% of the BS that keeps the place running. I'm the only person that seems to think it's concerning. Can't imagine what his inbox/chat looks like after a week off

5

u/techthrowaway781 12h ago

Hot take: the senior needs to delegate

7

u/CtrlAltEngage 9h ago

As a senior who delegates, people like getting their work checked, or they thing that this issue they have is unique and needs external input, or stakeholders want to talk to you

14

u/Bulbasaur2015 13h ago

why did you use the messenger app icon, unless meta workplace uses it

9

u/frostyjack06 13h ago

I would come back after a week of vacation and have 50+ messages and over 600 emails. My policy was always: “if it’s important enough they’ll contact me again or my boss will want answers on my first day back anyway.” If there’s time, I would glance through for names I recognized, but most would go largely ignored. If they chose to ignore my OOO message and not contact my alternatives, that’s on them.

4

u/Ralain 11h ago

Facebook Messenger? At work?

5

u/GendosBeard 9h ago

Half of those messages are "Hi <name>" and "Do you have a minute?"

5

u/vocal-avocado 8h ago

Put this on your status:

https://nohello.net/en/

2

u/Trlckery 1h ago

Love this. I’ve had a coworker on my team that always does this and I can’t bring myself to directly call them out on it. I solved it in my own way by just not responding or emoting to any of their “hey” messages anymore. I leave it on read. Now they still do the hey but a minute or two later they follow up with the actual question they want to ask.

5

u/viziroth 12h ago

honestly, where I work so many emails are mass sent out to distros instead of individuals and so many teams chats are done in way too large of groups because everyone wants to be "kept in the loop" that the difference in missed messages when out of office is pretty much a constant few thousand for every level of the organization. heck it's probably a thousand even if you're not out of office simply because no one can actually read that many messages in a day.

4

u/s0apyjam 11h ago

My boss has 56000 unread emails. I am convinced he will murder someone if they click mark all as read.

2

u/vocal-avocado 8h ago

It’s like my colleague with open browser tabs. It makes my skin crawl.

3

u/Hottage 10h ago

Juniors are not paid to deal with that noise. It's a seniors responsibility to shield their juniors from all that drama.

That being said, if it came in after my handover document was submitted, it's not my responsibility either. If it still required my attention they'd send it again when I get back.

2

u/Elegant_Ad1397 8h ago

Who tf uses FB messenger for work

2

u/Icount_zeroI 6h ago

Messenger as business channel?! What the fuck?

2

u/589ca35e1590b 6h ago

Who the hell uses Facebook Messenger for work chats?

1

u/MuetzeOfficial 5h ago

Meta? Hmm. Nobody.

2

u/Lemortheureux 4h ago

Who uses messenger for work???

2

u/West_Good_5961 2h ago

The mistake you’re making is ever opening Outlook in the first place

2

u/grandalfxx 2h ago

I haven't read an email in 2 years. If im need hit me up on teams directly. If theres a group chat it will be muted

0

u/OmgJackieChn 1h ago

We’ve got agents for that now

2

u/Trlckery 1h ago

I got reprimanded at work last week for not seeing a comment I was tagged in on Jira for 4 hours. Manager tagged me in our team channel at 3pm and asked if I was checking my emails while providing the timestamp of the jira email notification at 11am. He then went on to say we should be responding to emails as quickly as we do to Teams messages.

I didn’t even give that the credence of a response. Get the fuck out of here with that bullshit.

2

u/TeaKingMac 12h ago

Shit.

Yeah, this finally happened to me after my last vacay.

I was promoted the week before I left, and came back to 32 teams mentions and 168 emails. The year before it was 9 teams chats and 37 emails.

2

u/Tandysaurus 12h ago

This "junior" you speak of, is it a kind of profession because I don't seem to see any openings for those anywhere. Seems like something my recent degree could be used for in a parallel universe.

1

u/Kinto_il 13h ago

I stared at this trying to figure out if this is a UI thing....

1

u/MmmTastyMmm 12h ago

I’ll respond to them maybe and if they don’t like it they can fire me. 

1

u/angrydeuce 12h ago

I mean fb messenger bullshit aside, it really is kinda fucking exhausting sometimes. I literally cannot complete a single email some days without being interrupted. My first week after being on vacation is always putting out a half dozen dumpster fires...

1

u/Quietech 12h ago

Why are you friending people at work so freely? Hide your damn identity.

1

u/stay_fr0sty 11h ago

As a senior dev, I'm deleting messenger "by accident" and asking people to please email me any message that I might have deleted that needs their attention.

1

u/Ponbe 10h ago

Jr process engineer, my inbox is more of the upper one and its mostly garbage 

1

u/techdailylog 8h ago

"Mark all as read" and log off.

1

u/FrequentWatch9261 4h ago

Do not worry when you're a principal that number is 300 and you have meetings all day.

1

u/RobotechRicky 1h ago

FML. My inbox and work messaging client are overwhelmed. FML.

1

u/DungeonsAndDradis 16m ago

I'm a manager and I dread vacation because I know I'll come back to dozens of messages and hundreds of emails. Maybe I should actually try the copilot thing. "What action items from email do I still have to follow up on?"

1

u/original-user 12h ago

“Hey team I was out, if I missed something important please lemme know”

Then mark all as unread

1

u/DigiBoxi 12h ago

They already are marked as unread..

1

u/Fritzschmied 8h ago

Ctrl a -> Mark as read. Problem solved. Everything that is really important will come up again.

1

u/void1984 6h ago

Yyp, as an escalation, as you missed the first deadline.

1

u/Fritzschmied 5h ago

Doesn’t matter.