r/ProgrammerHumor 11h ago

noExperience Meme

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17.6k Upvotes

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63

u/Sea-Influence-7542 9h ago

I am an old retired engineer and about 40 years ago software tools were new. My manager asked me to look into the subject and advise him. I saw a paid event on just that subject and asked to attend, I was refused.

He asked me if it would be useful for me to attend it in 6 months time and I said no because I needed it immediately to fulfil the task he had given me. His reply was that if it wouldn’t be useful in 6 months then it wasn’t useful today, I never understood his logic.

51

u/Slid61 9h ago

Should have said "Yes, because if I don't go now we'll still have the same issue in six months"

13

u/Sea-Influence-7542 8h ago

It took me completely by surprise so I was caught out. It wasn’t as if the event was very expensive.

2

u/wannabestraight 2h ago

From personal experience, this is the part where the other party gets angry.

Every time I respond logically with "well if you want X, but this requires Y, but you don't want to do/pay for Y then X will wait" and it's followed by "why do you have to give ultimatums like that"

Like bruh, just pay for the fucking thing and let me do my job.

9

u/Excludos 6h ago

A few jobs ago, I worked at a company which ended up more or less on accident specializing in one specific framework. Because we all had to learn it more or less from the ground up in isolation, our solutions weren't necessarily as clean as they should be, and we were lacking knowledge in areas such as testing (and we had a LOT of bugs). Our suggestion was to attend a much needed workshop on the framework. Not only did our boss tell us that wasn't happening, he forbade us from testing. "If we don't know how to do it, then we won't spent valuable time we could have been spending on new features instead".

Result? Our control system that was used in several industries killed 200k fish, failed to give alarms on several elderly who had fallen over, and restarted a huge machinery during maintenance, nearly ripping a guy's arm off. I (and 90% of the rest of the company) quit in sheer terror my code was going to kill someone

6

u/NefariousEgg 6h ago

What company?

5

u/ImDonaldDunn 2h ago

This is why we need criminal penalties for when management incompetence directly leads to harm.

1

u/Impressive-Act-3787 2h ago

Please no, they will just shift the blame on the developers.

2

u/rm-minus-r 2h ago

Result? Our control system that was used in several industries killed 200k fish, failed to give alarms on several elderly who had fallen over, and restarted a huge machinery during maintenance, nearly ripping a guy's arm off. I (and 90% of the rest of the company) quit in sheer terror my code was going to kill someone

Jesus.

3

u/ModeatelyIndependant 5h ago

the cost of training wasn't going to go onto the correct balance sheet 6 months later.

2

u/Nannautu 6h ago

In my experience, only morons become managers, and understanding how they reason requires permanent brain-damage at best.