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."

Comments

Smells Like A Fish Story

[zenlessyank]

Fishin for fools...

Re:Smells Like A Fish Story

[mwvdlee]

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.

Re:Smells Like A Fish Story

[MightyMartian]

I feel like I just read a Weekly World News article. The next article must have been "Bat Boy gets job programming in Bay Area! Seen buying a cafe late at Starbucks!"

Re:Smells Like A Fish Story

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:Smells Like A Fish Story

[TheGratefulNet]

I'll be willing to believe a lot.

but a bay area person keeping a job and not getting laid off in 6 yrs?

yeah, something sure does smell fishy about that, right there.

Re:Smells Like A Fish Story

[Space cowboy]

Hmm. Been here 11 years now. *looks over shoulder* ...

I'm a PEOPLE PERSON, DAMMIT.

Re:Smells Like A Fish Story

[irving47]

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! :)

Re:Smells Like A Fish Story

[Matheus]

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.

Re:Smells Like A Fish Story

[Darinbob]

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.

A hero!

[Robotbeat]

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/

Re:A hero!

[snowsmann]

And the other relevant xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/1205/
He went way off this chart! lol

Sounds like bullshit

[AlphaBro]

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.

Re:Sounds like bullshit

[Verdatum]

No one ever makes things up on Reddit! Even if they did, surely they wouldn't delete the post and their account when the story blows up!

Re:Sounds like bullshit

[barc0001]

Probably fake? I'd say 110% fake. Let's leave everything else out, how many "well known" software packages could be properly tested by an automated unit test that was written last year, let alone 6 years ago? Nobody adds features or changes UIs around?

Re:Sounds like bullshit

[swb]

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.

Sounds like bullshit

[MightyMartian]

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?

Re:Why was he fired again?

[JasonM314]

They pay people a hell of a lot more than that to do middle-management work.

real programmers don't stop coding

[ionymous]

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.

Re:I don't really believe it

[HornWumpus]

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.