I added a "Show SVG Markup" button toward the bottom of every page so you can see how I did it. This may be a little less overwhelming for some people that View Page Source.
Awesome! Thank you! The only thing is I'm getting. A 404 when accessing any of the item urls. Looking at the xml, its adding a / at the end of each url which is causing the 404. If I remove the / it works. Is that an easy fix. The same thing happens if I try to go to any of the pages manually.
Fixed. Sorry about that. Please try again and let me know.
It's Sunday. I should be drinking beer and watching sports but I'm married to my fantasy project so these things happen.
I didn't think rss was important any more. Thanks for setting me straight.
And thanks again for the kind words. Please drop me an email (on my hn profile or in the footer of every eddiots webpage. I want to stay in touch with any hn friend who uses the word "fantastic". :-)
Author here. Thank you my long time hn friend, jacquesm, for posting this.
I've been programming my entire adult life (and then some). I worked at many enterprises and SMBs. As the character who I live vicariously says on https://eddiots.com/1, "I love programming but I hate going to work." I'll never stop programming but the people at work have worn me out.
I've been posting here for 16 years as well as several other sites. I've always had something to say but have found it increasingly harder to say what I'm thinking without sounding like I'm preaching. Thus the comics. Might as well get it off my chest in a way we can all have a little fun. If I wasn't able to laugh all these years, I probably would have gone back to work at McDonalds.
It's all software driven with only html, css, and svg. (I'll have the markup on every page next week.) No images or media queries. I kept it simple and post something new every weekday. It's just something I have to do. (And way better than all those CRUD apps and standups.)
Thanks to all of you for your kind (and other) words. My jokes are like the weather. If you don't like one, just click for another. Maybe that one will connect.
What you've really captured is the banality and non-sequitur nature of corporate meetings where major participants are in charge of things well beyond their ken. Dilbert did it first, but you took it to new post-modern heights.
Hey, saw your comic from a comment you made on reddit recently, and glad to see it pop up here too. I felt that it was underappreciated, and glad to see it getting the recognition it deserves!
Thank you, romwell. reddit is a strange bird these days. I never know what to expect. I like it because I can post the art right in the thread, not like my feeble attempt here (below). eddiots is way more fun.
Reminds me of the president of a software house that wrote inventory software for large commercial warehouses. One of his customers required "Box ID", an essential capability that not only tells you how many we own, but exactly which boxes they are in. Everyone has it today.
These people attempted to satisfy this customer, but after a year and nothing to ship (it's not that hard!), they backed out and cried, "We'll never do Box ID again!"
LinkedIn's "only useful function" is insufficient to overcome its "deal killer": it's a farce. I have never met an I.T. manager whose LinkedIn profile was remotely close to reality. They all claim the same B.S. (detail oriented, results driven, digital transformation, blah blah blah blah blah blah), enabling them to get hired into roles that ruin the lives of programmers like me. Better they should just be honest and say, "Switch jobs every 3 years when they find out I'm a total poser but I promise to stay out of the programmers' way".
> I have never met an I.T. manager whose LinkedIn profile was remotely close to reality.
I really wish there was a way to flag false information in someone's profile.
I had a guy last year that we fired for substantial cause. He was hired as a mid-level engineer, but honestly was borderline-junior level when we got him. That's fine, he clearly "overstated" his resume. I had actually rang alarm bells about him during the interview process but was overruled by HR because his resume was so amazing.
So I shrugged it off and took him under my wing. I figured we could train him on stuff we needed. No big deal, he has at least foundational experience so its fine.
Fast forward 8 months. It has been nothing but a disaster. His personal attitude has been toxic enough that it drove me to consider leaving and we lost two other employees to his toxic attitude. Furthermore, he had already overstayed his welcome from a performance perspective. He directly caused multiple outages in our system in his short tenure and had failed to complete any significant projects by himself without it needing to be rescued by other teammates. In fact we had a junior engineer during his time that was outperforming this mid-level and used the fact that he outperformed this engineer in order to (reasonably) get a promotion.
After the sixth performance review warning in 8 months, I finally fire him for performance and creating a toxic work environment. Remember, he was a mid-level engineer that was being outperformed by our junior engineers.
Anyway, he was fired and I move on. The department significantly turned around for the better after he left. I really regretted not firing him sooner and spending so much effort trying to save him. The entire team was relieved when he left and happy.
Then one day, about a month later, I am having a 1x1 with an employee in my team who asked why that fired employee was a senior engineer and thought that it should justify a promotion for himself. I explained that he wasn't a senior, not even close and I was then pointed to his linkedin page.
On that page I read what the fired employee wrote about himself. First of all, he gave himself a promotion to "Senior / Lead Engineer". Keep in mind, this was someone who couldn't be trusted for basic junior level tasks by himself. Now he is presenting as a lead engineer.
In his accomplishments he said he lowered our AWS bill by 38.5%. Sounds great. Except that he wasn't even priviledged to our AWS expenses during that time, and furthermore our AWS bill had actually increased by over 20% during the same time period. He didn't just "inflate" his contribution (which is normal on resumes/CVs), but he was in no-way involved in managing the AWS expenses whatsoever.
Another bulletpoint said he had helped "integrate ChatGPT and AI tools into our platform to improve developer effeciency by 26%". Except that our company has (and still does) have a compliance regulation against using ChatGPT at all (we deal with sensitive government data that is restricted) and we were explicitly banned from using AI developer tools during his time here. So this is another entirely false claim.
He also said he was charged with launching an entirely new product for the company, which raised our revenues by 19.6% the first quarter that it was released. No such product was ever released, let along him running it. The companies revenues were mostly flat during his time there.
That wasn't even it, but i've made my point. I went down the 8-10 bullet points on his LinkedIn and only 1 was even based in reality (although exaggerated). The rest were entirely false. On top of that he promoted himself as a lead engineer, of which he was closer to a Junior.
Furthermore he said he worked at our company for 1 year and 3 months. When in reality he only worked there for 7 months and 3 weeks.
It's fine. I was happy to not have him in my life or organization anymore. I wasn't going to sue him over it or anything. But it does bother me that someone else would potentially hire him based on information that is essentially entirely fabricated. Yes they could try to get references. I assume he would cheat or lie his way through that as well, using friends that pose as past managers or something. If they called for an employment verification, the most any company would do is verify the employment dates and _maybe_ job title. But most companies in tech don't even bother with that.
Of course I don't know how much of this is a LinkedIn problem, as just hiring in general. Even if LinkedIn enforced community moderated accuracy, there's nothing to stop him from typing up stuff on his Resume that he sends around.
Then again, for anyone listening that works at LinkedIn, having a community moderated/validated accuracy platform might actually add significant value to LinkedIn for employers. It would probably be more real and trusted than a reference check and make LinkedIn an indispensable tool for employers.
> I had actually rang alarm bells about him during the interview process but was overruled by HR because his resume was so amazing.
Yikes. I have a great cost-cutting proposal for your company, then: don't bother with interviews. Just let HR hire directly based on resumes without ever talking to the candidate. Why would you bother with the interview if this is happening anyway?
> He also said he was charged with launching an entirely new product for the company, which raised our revenues by 19.6% the first quarter that it was released
If you're a public company, this should be easily falsified by the next employer doing due diligence. If not, yeah, hard to know.
> Furthermore he said he worked at our company for 1 year and 3 months. When in reality he only worked there for 7 months and 3 weeks.
This is the one he really should always get caught on. If companies say nothing else when asked about a former employees, they at least say what their tenure was.
> Having a community moderated/validated accuracy platform might actually add significant value to LinkedIn for employers.
Which dating site was it that admitted that they really didn't want their users to find their soulmates, because then they stopped using the dating site? LinkedIn doesn't want you to find your perfect job and work there happily until retirement. Then why would you bother using LinkedIn anymore?
LinkedIn (and resumes / CVs) exist for you to lie to HR and fit into the automated systems to so you can get a job. They don't exist to be uniquely useful. If they were anything but lies then you wouldn't need to deal with technical interviews as you could go off of the candidates LinkedIn or resume. As you say, it's a system that when games gets you through HR. HR doesn't know shit from anything so they pass the candidate along. If you convince HR that your shit doesn't stink they'll be convinced you're the second coming of Christ. That's the game to play.
3 Days late but this is a funny comic! (I'm more WandaWant than say, alGorithm so some of the coding references go over my head but the jokes are funny all the same!)
Don't underestimate yourself. My version of wandaWant would never admit that anything went over her head. She'd just pretend that she knew what we were talking about. So you're way ahead already :-)
Nice catch, ExtraRoulette! You're the first to notice.
This project is new. My plan was to write a "comic generator", where I would just input parameters and it would generate the comics.
It worked even better than I expected. In the last 6 months, it has generated 2700 comics from my inputs.
Then I realized that if I launched 7/1/23, it would take 10 years just to post what I already had, even at one per day.
So I just reset my start date from 1/1/23 to 1/1/14. I wanted to launch with a lot of content so people could explore.
I also wanted the site to be evergreen which is why I try not to dig too deep into specific technologies. But COVID was obviously too big to ignore.
I sorted my backlog a few weeks ago based on many factors, but I guess 344 slipped through the cracks. I think I'll leave it there to see if anyone else notices.
So isn't the real problem that we have 800 billion lines of legacy code that needs to be understood and maintained; it just happens to be written in COBOL?
No.
800 billion lines of COBOL = 1 million lines of BASIC
A gross exaggeration, of course, but after 7 years of COBOL, I discovered BASIC and instantly became 10X of my former self.
I would never go back. I get enough overhead from my bosses. I don't need it from the tech too.
I've been programming for 53 years and have never been burnt out from the act of actually building software. In fact it's been the opposite for me. Every time I've ever had a significant challenge, alone or in a small competent team, to get something built quickly and right, I've savored that challenge. The times I've sat up all night long coding are some of my fondest memories. I remember with startling accuracy every time we struggled getting something to work, got it figured out, and danced. I remember every white board, direct message, even every slice of pizza in the trenches.
I've even commented here on HN many times that I've never been burnt out coding and never will be. I'd be the last one out of here to turn off the lights when everyone else was burnt out.
But now I am most certainly burnt out, not from building software, but from being incarcerated in dysfunctional I.T. hell.
For OP and the posers who think they understand the mindset of serious software developers, here's what really burns us out:
- the same stupid meeting every morning where nothing is raised or closed and no non-programmer has a clue
- taking direction from the same clueless bosses who have never accomplished anything but treat us like their children
- the new technology or philosophy du jour that does everything but address the root of any problem
- management that absolutely cannot grok fundamentals like cause/effect, critical path, detail/issue, urgent/important, diminishing returns, etc.
- continuous leadership bombardment of idiocy and stuff we know can't work
- management's complete failure to solicit or accept feedback from those of us who actually know
- nothing written down and no one remembering anything
- confusion by almost everyone about the difference between activity and achievement
- no written business requirements, technical specs, or test plans, but instead, some new untested methodology
- leaders who don't understand the difference between steak and sizzle
- continuous business failures because of poor leadership, not technology (and they keep doing it!)
- I could go on and on, but I wouldn't get anything done today and be just like my boss.
I'd love to see an OP that addresses any of all of these things I've been suffering from for years, instead of a headline with a precise metric on a misunderstood premise.
I'll suffer all day today and then to get rid of the corporate stink, build something cool for myself later tonight. That's not personal burn out, it's industry burn down.
I largely agree but I would like to add that much software we developers work on today works against developer satisfaction.
Bizarre architecture choices based on trends, tedious build steps, complex development setups with hours spent on configuration, etc.
Software development has become a time sink into things that has nothing to do with the actual task at hand.
This annoys me somewhat more than a clueless manager, who can be forgiven for not understanding software development, because these software architectural problems is something we developers created, willingly.
All these programmers agreeing to IMO the worst culprit to programmer burnout. I still struggle understanding who these people are and why they support this cult. Every excellent programmer I've ever worked with just laughs at this.
My homegrown conspiracy theory is that Agile was invented by project managers that wanted to constantly change project goals.
Broken pleb developer - Why are why yet again changing project goals? We already changed them last week after a long meeting.
Carefree Manager - It is Agile to adapt!
Core of Agile makes sort of sense, that you continuously involve the client and iterate thru the project to create a product that meet client demands. However that also assumes that you are working with clients that are competent, in the real world most clients are clueless. Now you have a clueless client and a clueless manager running the project to the torment of the developers.
In my own experience after working at different management positions (team lead, scrum master, senior developer, project manager, technical project lead, architect etc) is that the vast majority of developers, me included, are uninterested in project management, they just want to code. Thus when I run projects I run it as a dictatorship instead of a democracy (scrum) and give the developers the tasks that fit them based on their skill level. This requires some skill in understanding your developers needs, 1) that they feel that they make a difference, 2) that they have some freedom on how to solve each task, but within the constraints of the architecture and project. It usually works best for everyone involved.
If there are some developers that do enjoy project management (often they are knee deep into scrum theory and such) I handle them separately from the rest of the team and do some project management with them only. No reason to involve the entire team just because a single developer enjoy retrospect meetings. If there any valuable conclusions (rarely) you can introduce it to the rest of the team afterwards anyway.
Scrum and such theories assumes that every developer are equally engaged in the project, in reality that never happens because we have different personalities, different skill level and different priorities, thus making a developer to "freely" pick a task from a board of tasks is just nonsense. We all know in advance who will do what, it is just a charade. Same goes for planning tasks, if you have no idea how to implement a task you can't really help with planning it either.
The common timeboxed two week scrum iteration is probably one of the most common reasons why developers feel stress.
Morning meetings must have an agenda, a chairman and be timeboxed, otherwise it is a waste of time. Personally I find that asking what everyone is doing is a bit unnecessary, most people don't care and wont listen anyways. It tends to be better to use that meeting to inform what is happening next in the project.
Common among developers is that they are a bit socially inept, however many of the scrum ideas force them to into socially awkward situations, I view that as bad company policy.
Clients needs to be handled individually on case by case basis, you can't run an entire project management style based on the assumption that clients know what they are doing. Most clients will accept your decisions if you present them confidently, they view it as they pay a professional so solve their problem, similar how you would hire a carpenter.
I really wanna hear more from people like you about how to survive and thrive for so long in tech.
What kind of work do you do?
What are your tips for a good and long tech career?
I mostly write applications for large enterprises and SMBs. Stuff most people think is boring but is really cool and runs the world: order processing, supply chain, operations, ecommerce, etc. I try to stick to relatively simple and effective technologies, but that's becoming harder and increasingly complex.
What had worked best for me (in descending importance):
1. LOVE building. If you're not getting satisfaction at work, build something for yourself at night. It's my rush.
2. Become excellent at what you do. Think Steve Martin, "Be so good they can't ignore you."
3. Volume. Build. Build. Build. I still think this is the best way to learn and get good.
4. Keep learning. The best way: building something, then learning what you need to build it, not the other way around (class, book -> then build).
5. Understand the people side and the tech side are very different. Embrace both, but differently.
6. Build something that builds something. The nested learning is magnitudes more effective.
7. At some point do a startup. Even if it fails, you will be much better.
8. If it stops being fun, do something else. (I've always stayed a programmer, but if I couldn't keep it fun, I would have become a bartender, or a writer, or something).
[5] is super key. That's what gets you to Staff+ and what gets you paid a lot of money (in real dollars, and especially in equity).
[7] assists you in getting to [5], but if you want something quicker, try consulting or pre-sales. You'll definitely need to build, but 60-80% of the work is driving people that you don't manage towards an outcome or selling people on an outcome (that, ideally, your stuff helps them achieve).
I made one of these years ago in alphabetical order (yea I know stupid). Yours is way better. I can make great use of it.
I use these colors 95% of the time. I call them my "FU colors" (except I user the NSFW pronunciation). Every time someone sees my work, they say either, "How retro," or "You should really hire a designer."
For functionality, they cover almost everything. For "higher purposes" they suck, but I never cared.
I added a "Show SVG Markup" button toward the bottom of every page so you can see how I did it. This may be a little less overwhelming for some people that View Page Source.