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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."
Fishin for fools...
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.
I almost believe the organization chart bit, but the "some people" was probably a handful of people at most and how much equipment could a single person be allowed to check out at once? A router and a switch? I doubt you're backing up a moving van to the loading dock to get one of everything.
Everything I've always heard about the CCIE certification, though, sounds like winning the lottery. I had a Cisco instructor tell us it was REALLY hard exam-wise, and the practicum was a two-day on-site affair at your own expense.
Day one was a really complex setup of multiple devices and protocols with "but that won't work" dependencies that actually could be made to work and if it didn't work just right, you were done and had to go home.
Day two was trying to fix that same setup they broke while you were gone in very subtle ways under a time deadline and knowing how it was broken.
The instructor I had said that if you passed, a recruiter from Cisco was next in line after the person who handed you your certification.
My instructor said he knew a guy (don't they all?) who had a CCIE and worked as an independent contractor making six figures for about six months of work a year.
It's probably all grossly exaggerated, of course, but it's still a complex and difficult certification that demonstrates an extremely deep networking understanding. The problem is despite that level of knowledge, how valuable is a single person? Even in the gogo dot-com peak, one person wasn't going to single-handedly setup an entire carrier network or even a major branch office. Too much equipment, too much deadline, too many places to be at the same time, too much monkey work for someone making that kind of salary.