Slashdot Mirror
Programmer Automates His Job For 6 Years, Gets Fired, Realizes He Has Forgotten How To Code
An anonymous reader writes: A user on Reddit forum who goes by the alias FiletOfFish1066 (referred to as Mr. Fish hereafter) has been let go by his company after it was discovered that Mr. Fish hadn't actually done anything for six years. Umm, well he did something, but nothing new and productive, his Bay Area-based firm says, which paid him $95,000 (avg) each of these years. When he first got his software testing quality assurance job, he spent eight months automating all of the programming tasks. With all of his tasks fully automated by a computer, he was able to literally sit back and do whatever he wanted. Mr. Fish is pretty despondent in tone after he posted about getting fired from his job. He's upset because he has completely forgotten how to code, having relegated all that work to the computer, and now possesses no marketable skills. But, he also is not stressed financially, having saved up $200,000 during his 6-year long "career."
Fishin for fools...
or perhaps he has skills in other areas... like perhaps, politics, since he could dupe his boss and get paid for 6 years.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
This man is our hero. Isn't that what we all dream about? Is this the ONE man who truly beat the tendency for automation to lead just to more work?
Relevant XKCD:
https://xkcd.com/1319/
It seems like I've heard of something like this before. I'm highly suspicious that this is just a revived urban legend making the rounds again...
He automated his entire workload and ignored development to such an extent that, over a period of 6 years, he forgot how to program? Sounds like bullshit. Things come up. People ask questions. Problems change. This is probably fake.
Good for him for automating everything. Though he could have used his "spare time" to improve himself in any way. He could have possibly become a lawyer or a doctor over those years. Gotten an MBA (god knows we need more of those).
Something, anything. He had to k ow he could only sustain that lifestyle for so long.
Oh, first post :)
Finally I have your secret !
get it together slashdot.
Assuming this story is accurate, he was a paid to do a job, and the job got done.
Perhaps he was fired because once they realized he could be doing something else with his time, and din't know how, then they fired him?
Anyways, this company is dumb to pay someone 95k to do a job that could be automated. I also wonder how he "forgot how to code"...maybe he paid someone to write automation software for him. I've heard of people that contract out their work to India in secret.
I always thought this story is bullshit since I first saw it on Reddit. You cannot automate your job and than, after merely six years, "forget" how to code. You can forget APIs and language constructs, but these are quickly re-learned. But "forget how to code"? I'm not even sure this phrase makes sense at all.
Forgot how to code in six years? Fucking Bullshit.
I'm sorry. I just don't believe this. First of all, what kind of quality assurance job, particularly code review, would allow you to automate most of what you do? I would suggest any programmer capable of so significantly automating their job that they can sit back for over five years and jerk off would be among the most elite programmers on the planet...
Which leads to the absurdity of the second claim, that the individual forgot how to program. Now I can imagine someone getting a bit rusty after four or five years of not coding. I've actually gone through fairly long stretches, as long as a couple of years, over the last decade I've done more management-end work, not doing much in the way of coding, and while I admit that it takes me a day or two to get back into the rhythm when I need to do it, in pretty short order I'm backing in fighting shape. It might mean some refamiliarizing with libraries, and if there's new versions or new tools, I might take a while to get acclimatized, but really within a week I can get on that bike again.
I don't think I'm a genius. I just think that once you actually learn to code, you don't really forget. A long stretch would certainly mean you've got some learning, but if you were a coder of any worth, which someone who can automate their entire job ought to be, you'll pick it up soon enough.
In fact, the whole thing sounds like an absolute load of shit, some anonymous poster yanking chains. Let's see:
1. Essentially claiming absurd levels of technical competence.
2. Bizarre claims of forgetting how to do the very thing he claims he was so competent at.
3. Claims of boatloads of money. This is the real teller for me. Why do these liars always have to invent claims of great amounts of cash?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
straight shooter with upper management written all over him
Allow me to rewrite this by redacting all non-opinion-based claims:
A random reddit user claims he has been let go by his company after it was discovered that he hadn't actually done anything for an unverifiable number of years. Umm, well he did something, but nothing new and productive, his unverifiable area-based firm purportedly says, which paid him an unverifiable sum each of these years. When he first got his software testing quality assurance job, he spent an unverifiable length of time automating all of the programming tasks. With all of his tasks fully automated by a computer, he was able to literally sit back and do whatever he wanted. The man is pretty despondent in tone after he posted about getting fired from his job. He's upset because he claims he has completely forgotten how to code, having relegated all that work to the computer, and now possesses no marketable skills. But, he also is not stressed financially, having saved up an unverifiable sum during his unverifiably long "career."
the only way to do large scale and wide testing is to write code that performs the tests. Be they runtime or libraries at compile time, that task is best left to a machine. If you are turking those tests out I would even argue you are bad at your job.
didn't happen. 95k per year is not much money for someone who can automate testing in the valley.
Tougher to believe for a real company that cares about the bottom line.
So everybody in here is calling out how the story *may* be false etc... but what's even worse is that /u/FiletOfFish1066 is a 2-day-old account (as of June 13, 2016) and has 0 posts and 0 comments. So fake that the guy himself deleted the story as soon as it blew up.
https://www.reddit.com/user/Fi...
I forgot how to code one day. Now I am a Sys Admin
https://developers.slashdot.or...
Arggh! This is the link I meant to paste.... https://apple.slashdot.org/sto...
If he had nothing to do and didn't choose to code during work, he obviously doesn't enjoy coding.
So he's all ready to find a different career.
This is basically just a retelling of someone slaying the minotaur, or throwing the ring into a volcano, or...
"It takes four hundred thirty people to man a starship. With this, you don't need anyone. One machine can do all those things they send men out to do now. Men no longer need die in space or on some alien world. Men can live and go on to achieve greater things than fact-finding and dying for galactic space, which is neither ours to give or to take. They can't understand. We don't want to destroy life, we want to save it!" -- Dr. Richard Daystrom
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I'd sorted all the callouts, finished the workshop repairs, cleaned the workshop,
was setting up a linux boxen to play with.
The boss knew I was always busy, he looked over my shoulder and asked what I was doing.
Told him everything was fixed, he sacked me on the spot.
Fuck I'm Good, Just Ask Me
Go well
I'd have promoted that guy so hard he'd be watching porn all day.
....that he put together scripts and executables so well that he never had to tweak a single thing even once when some unexpected condition in the software he was testing got thrown his way? That he never had one thing, bug or other happen that required him to dive into his program to fix? And he came up with something like this which no doubt took years or decades of practice and training coding other things to be able to to come up with something so intelligent and well written, and now he can't even do basic coding after 6 years?! And I mean not just getting a bit rusty and having to check a reference manual now and then, but not being able to do anything beyond "Hello World"? Either this is bullshit, or he has developed some medical/neurological problem during the past 6 years which in this case, his career is the least of his problems.
There's been many things I haven't touched for years and year that I've picked up again.
With very few exceptions - if they're something I was once good at I get good at them again.
I'll occasionally mess with an OS I haven't touched in a decade - because I booted up an old Novel server or something (less frequent lately). In half an hour I'm working again, in a couple of days I'm nearly as good as I was when I was doing it all the time. I've played video games that I haven't touched in 12 years, before long all the hidden stuff pops back into mind. I'm not actually a proper coder, but when I do write code almost everything I knew before comes back to me - except for a few obscure things that really annoy me and I have to relearn.
Nah, these concepts are fully ingrained. They aren't "use it or loose it" they're "shake the rust off".
Either this article is bullshit or this guy doesn't remember how to ride a bike after a while.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
How many losers sitting in mum's basement say they've forgotten how to fuck? About Mr Fish I'd say, coding wasn't his priority or his passion. Since he was able to analyse workflow and mold it into some simplistic process, I think that's what he should focus on. I don't know how he can turn that into a job.
....that he put together scripts and executables s0 well that he never had to tweak a single thing even once when some unexpected condition in the software he was testing got thrown his way? That he never had one thing, bug or other happen that required him to dive into his program to fix? And he came up with something like this which no doubt took years or decades of practice and training coding other things to be able to to come up with something so intelligent and well written, and now he can't even do basic coding after 6 years?! And I mean not just getting a bit rusty and having to check a reference manual now and then, but not being able to do anything beyond "Hello World"? Either this is bullshit, or he has developed some medical/neurological problem during the past 6 years which in this case, his career is the least of his problems.
WTF is this bullshit. It's like some fantasy tale ripped from the IT department at Hogwarts.
Like other slashdotters here, I too suspect this story is largely BS.
But I have been in a position that could have been about 70% automated. I decided to get out because either I'd be stuck doing it the boring repetitious way, or automate myself out of a job.
The reason it wasn't automated is because the senior "IT guy", I'll call Bob, only knew SQL and only allowed me to do most things in SQL. Lobbying for better tools backfired on me because middle management knew this guy well and trusted his judgment and didn't understand IT. My explanations flew way over their heads. Our immediate boss didn't even know what "business logic" was.
Bob could bend SQL to do almost anything. But the code was very verbose, repetitious, and ugly. His body had to be constantly moving: a Don Knotts kind of nervousness, and mass typing suited him fine (future Carpal Tunnel for sure). He WANTED verbose code.
I began planning ways to simplify my job by a combination of SQL generator scripts, MS-Access for intermediate processing, and building end-user "wizard" and QBE web interfaces to get the queries, reports, and data they wanted by themselves, even though I knew they'd be a hard sell.
Fortunately the economy improved and I found a new gig.
I could perhaps have earned a decent living using my secret SQL generators and be living easy; but I knew I'd get bored. Plus, this SQL guy was kind of a jerk.
Table-ized A.I.
He had the wit and the knowledge to automate his job and made no effort to look for and automate a whole series of other jobs...wasted potential I'd say.
The post says he is a QA not an actual software developer (not in the title though). A lot of smart QA actually automate a good deal of their jobs like regression, system test, etc. They do not use C/C++ (as you may expect), but perl, vbs, other scripting languages (depends on the tested software). The rest they need to test, they do it by hand. Anyway, if real, the guy is lazy as hell ... but his manager is crap ...that's who they need to fire first.
In two years I forgot all my Algebra and Trig. So much that when I took a calculus course, I was completely lost from minute one.
Looks like the company "fixed the glitch", so this guy won't be getting a paycheck anymore. It'll just work itself out naturally.
I mean sure the skills get rusty, you forget specifics, but if you've learned fundamentally how to code, how to think like a computer, that doesn't go away. It is the kind of fundamental knowledge that more or less always sticks around.
I don't code, I dislike it and I'm not great at it. I do systems and network administration. However, I learned how to code as a kid. Did some BASIC of a number of varieties, some C++, some scripting etc. Guess what? When it comes down to it and something comes up, which it does occasionally, and I have to look at some code and see what is going on or work on a simple program, I can make it happen. It all comes back pretty fast. No, I don't generate elegant code quickly like someone who does it for a living does, but I don't sit around going "I have no idea what is going on! This is all so confusing!"
Goes double for if it is something you are actually good at (I was never good at coding, even when I did it somewhat often).
This all sounds like a load of crap.
In California, someone holding a CCAr or multiple CCIEs would certainly command more than $200K.
Each level in the Cisco certification track has many specialties, some pay higher than others. The levels are:
CCENT (Slightly harder than Network+)
Multiple CCNA (several different specialties)
CCNP
CCIE
CCAr
The national AVERAGE salary of someone with one CCIE is $115K. (There aren't enough CCAr holders to get a good average). Someone with multiple CCIE and a CCAr in California would be expected to make over $200K for sure.
Yet, none of the Cisco certifications is in the top 5 highest-paying IT certifications. Other IT certifications pay more. My own experience is that my take-home pay doubled as soon as I added a couple of certs to my resume. Which reminds me, I should get off Slashdot and go back to studying.
Anonymous reader posts story about anonymous programmer who may or may not actually exist that claims to work for an unknown company.... maybe. Oh, and they did a thing programming automation that doesn't sound credible, got busted after 6 years, lost their job, and then became an amnesiac at programming.
News for Nerds! Wow, it's so nice to see that anyone can get a questionable reddit post greenlit... so much for reputable news with links to articles, quotes, and other credible sources!
DOn't know how to code anymore ? No problem. Become a consultant in QA automation. You will get more money still doing nothing and ordering H1B visa to automate they own job so they can be fired. Oh wait ...
Call me strange but if you get all the work done that your employer expects of you, I dont see that it matters which tools you used to do it.
Actually, by using automation he probably sginificantly reduced the number of human errors that would have been made otherwise.
If it's not a fake story, then this guy is my hero.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
If his manager also got promoted.
Had he written article posting software for Slashdot?
I was a mainframe programmer. Using self submitting JCL and creating ISPF pages that my end users could use, I turned my 70 hour a week job into a 15 minute a week job. I used the extra time to read "Macintosh C Programming Primer: Mastering the Toolbox Using Think C" and practiced programming the Mac. That was my start into PC programming. After 5 years, I left and never looked back. I "stalled" at C++, which I learned at Apple Developer University. I am still using C++ and Qt for desktop and embedded development. The OP failed in that they used their down time to goof off. He should have used some of that time investing in himself. Don't get me wrong, I did use some of that time to wander the halls and flirt with women. I married one of them....and then divorced her...but I digress.
I call bull on the article as well. I still remember JCL and ISPF.
This a Jon Katz story? Slashdot trying to relive its glory days? Glad to see Junis from Afghanistan was able to leverage his Commodore64 hacking into a Q&A job in Silicon Valley.
Nice try, but the date is wrong for un poisson d'avril.
Fucksakes, slashdot.
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
$200k won't last long there, especially once the ACA forces him to buy into COBRA. If he doesn't land a job in 6 months or less he'll be close to out of money.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I knew a guy that did something similar in the 90s he worked as a contractor and he made a program that wrote code that continuously fixed it's self and apparently it is very repetitive work and could be automated. He was on the payroll for years however he didn't have to come in and modify his program on each revision. I think was easier to just pay him salary and keep him around to fix a problem if it came up then pay him off and find another programmer to make changes to it if it was ever deemed necessary.
> But, he also is not stressed financially, having saved up $200,000 during his 6-year long "career."
Haha.. That will last him a few months in the Bay area.
That'll last about 6 mo in Cali.
Yeah, you get rusty, and you forget the library function calls, and maybe even some language syntax. But those are just little things you can pick up again easily. It seems unlikely that you would forget how a program is structured or basic data structures and algorithms.
Really? Obvious bullshit.
It's on the internet so it must be true.
The bullshit department at work.
If his job was automatable for 6 years ahead it was not a viable job in the first place.
I expect the reality is that he never knew how to code, he input some generic testing parameters that gave passed results for literally everything put trough it. And it took the company 6 years to realize this.
ACA does not force you to buy COBRA no it let's you pick any plan out or maybe with an income of $0 he can get Medicaid
I RTFA. It was written by someone who read the information on reddit, which was posted by the this anonymous tester, who then deleted it 10 minutes later. That's it. Really, that is it.
I used to be on Slashdot daily back in the day (very late 90s), but got away from it for about the past 8 years or so. I just started re-reading it about a month ago, and I have been quite shocked with the poor quality. I don't know if it's an attempt to stay relevant or what, but this is sad.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
OK, first off I think this is a joke. There's no way someone can be good enough to completely automate their job, then have their skills atrophy so much that they can't get another job. Coding isn't (or at least shouldn't be) just about writing the right magical incantations to get something working - you need some fundamental grounding in logic that you can use to learn the next set of incantations.
That said, I have seen a lot of extremely siloed IT and non-IT jobs in my career working for big companies. Siloed as in, take input work, process it the exact same way, send it on to the next silo. These are the kind of things that stuff like BizTalk, Tibco or others can handle automatically these days. However, I have witnessed situations in which someone manages to convince their boss they're doing a massive amount of work while they've figured out how to cut it down to a fraction of the workday. I've also witnessed people who really don't have any work and are for whatever reason still around. It's not surprising when, say, HP says they're going to cut 30,000 employees. Big companies develop a lot of layers over time, as well as nice quiet corners for people to hide in. When a company gets too big to control, things like this could happen...not saying this particular one did though!
I do worry about this for the future though. Yes, it's a drain on everyone, but there are a lot of people who depend on these jobs to maintain a middle class lifestyle. Think of all the people who still process paperwork or write reports all day long...most are supporting families, paying taxes, etc.
I live in Silicon Valley on $50K per year. CORBA is entirely optional. So is the ACA if you're willing to pay the fine at tax time.
You then have to take the "saved time" subtract the "time spent on solitaire" which I am fairly sure equals negative infinity across the entire MS user base.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Presuming this is a true story, it does lend an interesting slant toward robots/AI. If we can create a (robot/program) to do our job, then why not?! In this case, this guy created a program to do his work. Rather than give it to some corporate monstrosity to exploit and take many other jobs w/o compensating those that loose those jobs, at least he is (was) not another unemployed burden on society!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
the man who outsourced his coding to China and won awards for "his" work until the company ina security audit discovered unusual log activity coming from China lol
Blame the management whom found a way to miss these crucial things during one's yearly review..
Because no private company has ever been mismanaged.
Journalist writes script to scan reddit posts and submit them as news stories.
Fed should hire him
Casteism