this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Sign of a shit manager/boss, usually.
Good boss who sees this will go "oh thank God now you have your time freed up to do that thing you've been telling me we really need to get around to doing", cuz there's always at least like, 5 to 10 of those on the backlog anyways.
Seriously this.
Been in the industry for going on 15 years. Never happened the way this comic makes it out to be.
There is always work to be done. That employee ends up being a tech lead or IC and promoted.
Companies don't fire a whole team. They'll find ways to maximize that solution that automates a lot of work. Oh, you can automate a DB? Can you automate more things or train others to do the same?
And the whole team gets better and more creative work. I've watched my team evolve over and over. Ive jumped to a bunch of companies and continue seeing it happen.
It's hard enough getting good devs, so unless you work at a shit company, many hire real slow and often don't fire devs unless they're real bad apples.
And finally - Who the fuck wants to spend 8 hours making SQL queries manually? If your 40 hour job can be automated with a script, you're going to be unemployable regardless.
Yes, this is completely unrealistic. No tenured IT professional is just going to announce that they've doubled workflow efficiency overnight. They'll slow play the improvements until it becomes absolutely necessary to reveal them, and then act like they've been putting in extra work when in reality they've been spending 6 hours a day writing new Quake 3 mods.
As they should. These people don't care about us.
No sometimes the bosses are told, because rather than having someone sit on nights for 2+ weeks doing tedious shit in production, a worker/dev/whatever would rather say "I think I might a solution that can automate this". I've done it, seen it happen, collected attaboys, moved on to the next problem that's screaming for a better solution, etc
But Of course I do agree with you completely, if you automate your tasks, better to keep that on the downlow for your own mental wellness :)
There are no good bosses.
The system is shit.
If they really needed to get around to doing that, the boss would've already hired another employee to do that task.
Not doing so implies that paying someone just for that task wouldn't be worth it.
That does not change when a worker becomes available from somewhere else.
This one made me laugh pretty hard, very great joke hahahaha
(Almost always, no, no one was hired to do the thing, its been on the backlog for a year now but everyone is way too busy to do it)
If the boss has no problem keeping it on the backlog forever, then apparently it isn't an issue worth dealing with.
Boy I sure wish that was the case.
See the thing is, typically your boss hires specialists for tasks, because your boss doesnt know how to do it themself. In a large company your boss typically knows how to run the business and some form of problem domain the business cares about.
Your boss probably doesnt know how to manage something like a scaled database or your kuberetes cluster running on AWS... thats what he hired Steve to handle, because Steve went to school for several years to learn how to do that.
As a result, Steve knows how important is to do, but Steve can't just willy nilly do whatever he wants, he needs approval to go and do it.
This puts you in the situation where the Boss, who has no clue how works, is in charge of making the call of whether Steve is allowed to go spend a few days doing
Steve can sit and explain in great length and detail how incredibly important is, but at the end of the day its the Boss's call if it actually happens. And the Boss, who has no clue how the fuck works, can absolutely (and VERY often does) make the call to decide that , despite being important, is not as important as , purely because doesnt directly put money in the company's pocket, and does.
Even though Steve knows that failing to do will have a lot worse long term implications that might result in the company suddenly not having any more to do, because it shit the bed and everything stopped working, or perhaps a failure to comply with will long term cost the company a fuck tonne of money.
Or long term a failure to do will just result in Steve leaving the company because he doesn't want to be responsible for people dying or important info being exposed or some other shit like that.
But yeah, in an ideal world, the Boss would trust Steve when Steve tells him is super fucking important, and he'd let Steve go do it because he trusts Steve.
But very often, Boss's dont give a shit unless directly makes them money and enables them to buy their fourth house.
If you do find yourself a Boss that trusts their Steve's though... You cherish those bosses and stick with them, they are rare but the best.
Until you get fired because Nina automated your job
You missed the part where the employee was the one saying it was important, not the boss. And a lot of those tasks aren’t things you can just hand off to a new person, anyway - e.g., tech debt on software.