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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."
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.
He completely forgot to code after just six years, after having been able to code well enough to completely automate his job six years into the future...
I wonder who's going to be dumb enough to believe that story.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
They pay people a hell of a lot more than that to do middle-management work.
I wonder who's going to be dumb enough to believe that story.
One sign that a story is BS is when no actual names are used. The ex-employee is identified only by a pseudonym, and the company he worked for is only identified as "a well-known tech company in the Bay Area". So this story is just an implausible, and completely unverifiable posting by an AC.
Tougher to believe for a real company that cares about the bottom line.
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.
I can figure it out; Liberal arts major trying to write a parable about smartass techs and failing.
Clearly invented by someone who can't code.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Not everyone is driven by money. It's simplistic, it's short-sighted, it's hard to believe sometimes... It's also true. An introvert with all basic meeds net will happily stow away a boatload of money if he/she enjoys the other activities they are able to take part in. Add fuel to that if there's any kind of general or social anxiety in play. Getting social interaction through IRC/chat rooms is quite doable for some people. His gaming would absolutely compound that into a balanced (in his mind) life.
(And yes, hell, yes, I'm projecting! :)
I had a sucky sig.
Exactly. It is stories like this that make me wonder why I even read /. anymore... The title fails the test. The summary fails the test HARD. I admit I didn't RTFA because... are you kidding me?
I don't know why I'd bother with digging deeper but just because:
1) A modern QA engineer's job largely centers around automating as much testing as possible. The more automation you do the better you are at your job (so long as the quality stays high)
2) That being said I've never worked at *any company that could survive on a *fixed set of automation for so long as 6 years. Features change and the automation has to change with it. If this story is even remotely true it would have to be: "Spent 6 months automating all testing; Didn't update the automation for 6 years and by miracle the tests continued to pass and no new features failed in prod (or if they did it was blamed elsewhere); at the 6 year point someone figured out this was happening (aka something broke in Prod HARD and they decided to evaluate the testing)."
3) I could see being obsolete not having written any code in 6 years but forgot it all? rubbish. He learned how to script an automation tool and that knowledge got deprecated. Everything else he didn't have experience doing in the first place which just got worse the longer he continued to not work in the business doing actual work. Bummer.
Even when I don't code, I spend the majority of the day dealing with other people. Meetings, meetings about meetings, planning meetings, scrum meetings, all hands meetings, etc.
A few things sounded false. No friends at work in 6 years. That's a long time at a job to make no friends, not even work pseudo-friends to have lunch with. I have zero social skills and I make friends.
And software QA. Yes you can automate it, but you can't automate it so that it runs for 6 years. New tests have to be written as new bugs and features show up. Even if you automate them all you still have to show up to the meetings to answer what the status of the tests are.