Sounds to me like this guy could be a great employee if he were properly managed.
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I never said it only takes three minutes to write a three minute song. What I was implying is that there is an inherent injustice in the way we allow some people to monetize and protect their work product, and others not.
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Sure, and that coder likely spent years learning to write task automation but is being fired for employing it exclusively.
His employer wasnāt paying for the 50 hours of actual work he did but rather the years it took him to learn that skill. The problem here is that they think they should only pay for the 50 hours.
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Yep. If for SIX YEARS he set up and monitored one āautomatedā smoke test and never updated it as the software changed, my guess is that he got it tuned to simulate success and didnāt actually delve into the actual workings of the software.
That is, if itās not fake, which it seems to be the more I think about it.
Just another sad Reddit storyteller looking for upvotes with a naive view of development and a gullible audience.
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This is not how fulltime employment at software developers works, and this is not what even happened in the story as told.
Maybe not where you workā¦
Isnāt it? Where did I stray from the story?
That does sound fishy. And so does a developer forgetting how to code. In the rare instances that I am able to earn myself some wiggle room through automation, I often use the free time to learn new ways to code.
I donāt think I know any developers who donāt enjoy coding for their own purposes.
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My ending did sound a bit Paul Harveyesque, huh? I ran out of time to write the story because I was ā¦ um ā¦ writing it at work.
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You claim that he was fired because they wanted to pay him for āonly 50 hours of workā. They fired him because he only did 50 hours of work total in 6 years.
A moot point because this is not likely a real story. Itās just fantasy designed to appeal to bored non-engineers.
Iāve been a programmer for 20+ years. When you are an employee that is most definitely not how it works. The company who was paying you to work own what you produced. Those who produced it have zero ownership rights. You forked those rights over explicitly when you signed stuff on your first day. Even if you didnāt sign anything, thatās how it works. And generally the same is true of contractors. The exception would be if the contractor is more like a vendor who comes to the table with a product offering.
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Letās not debase the discussion with semantics. I say tomato you say tomato.
As for it being a real story or not, neither of us can make that call so I wonāt dismiss it unless I see something to indicate I should. Uninformed speculation doesnāt really make my radar.
Iām in a position where I hire coders. If I find one who can do their job via automation, Iām not going to fire them. Iām going to be happy I hired someone who is skilled enough to automate their job. If they miss a day, go on vacation, or move on then we can still benefit from their skills. Iām going to retain them because I want coders who think outside the box and who create solutions for problems even when I donāt know they exist.
Then again, I work for a small B2B firm and we care more about results than attendance.
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So youād pay a contractor 6+ years of above market rate for QA salary for somehing a barely competent coder (he āforgot how to codeā) could gin up in slightly more than a week with literally no changes to the software as the underlying architecture changed around it?
You must defraud your clients a great deal if that sounds ethical to you. Thatās not āresultsā unless you directly address the automation project your employee has developed.
In some cases they donāt even work once. Remakes of remakes? Plots based on amusement park rides?
(sarcasm)
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Thereās a few types of laziness Iāve personally observed:
- Automate everything you do and then fuck around until you find a new job or get fired (like this guy ā even though 6 years is a long time to get away with it)
- Fuck around until you come up to a deadline and then slap something together before finding a new job and making it someone elseās problem.
- Make your work as shitty as possible to make yourself seem invaluable (this guy is the only one who knows how this stuff works, we canāt possibly ever replace them!).
These are all incredibly shitty and selfish work ethics that are actually very detrimental to the rest of the team that you work with. Iām all about āworking yourself out of a job.ā In tech that should be considered a good thing so you can grow and move on to the next big thing.
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Who said anything about a contractor? I donāt do contracts. Yes, I do pay above market rate. No, I donāt hire barely competent coders.
Hereās how it works. I have a need for a coder to do task X. To me, it does not matter if task X is a series of ongoing repetitive tasks or one off projects to meet changing client requirements. Either way, current staff are otherwise occupied and cannot take on task X. So, I go looking for a coder in the field that ecompases task X. I do not hire people who need to be micro-managed. Why would I?
So to me, it does not matter if task X takes the person 50 hours to setup automation or sits there every day repeating the same tasks. Task X simply needs to be done. When I hire the new coder we negotiate a salary rate for performing task X. As a salaried employee, I do not track their time or attendance but you bet your ass I check to see that task X is performed as needed.
Honestly, I canāt imagine why you have a problem with this.
And oh yes, as far as customers go, we charge based on tasks performed. When I began in this position 8 years ago, we had 9 companies who competed with us nationally. Now there is only one other company doing what we do. How? Not only did we price them out of business we deliver a superior product and donāt waste our time and energy making sure a person is sitting at a desk writing new code every day. We focus on results because really, thatās all that matters.
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I feel zero pity for him. After automating his job he shouldāve asked for more work/promotion anything. At a bare minimum he shouldāve been coding open source projects or doing something to keep his skillset sharp instead of playing games.
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Iām flipping to the side of calling bs on this one. Couple reasons but my experience leads me to these top ones
- if the guy automated his own job heās bright and likely a solid developer. Solid developers donāt forgot how to develop no matter how many years passed. So the line about āforgettingā how to code tips me off that itās all bs.
- Not buying the guy was not given more work in 6 years. I can barely go a week without something else brand new to me ending up on my plate.
- Not buying that his coworkers stood for this. And yeah they would have known
- itās hard to be bright enough to automate your own job AND be stupid enough to do everything else this guy supposedly did.
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I work in IT mainly network/server management although some help desk type stuff too. Iāve automated huge parts of my job and only do a fraction of the stuff I was originally hired to do because Iāve automated it. Iāve also picked up a ton of new projects because of the extra time and twice a year I get together with my manager and we brainstorm for an hour or so about āwish listā items. Things that would make our job or other employees jobs easier and generate about a page of projects that I have hanging next to my monitors at my desk. When I hit a slow period where Iāve gotten everything I need to done I dig into one of the wishlist projects and start working on that. I canāt say Iāve ever worked an IT job where I was able to slack all day long most of the time and a job like that would probably drive me crazy from boredom, but then again one of my favorite things about IT is that weāre constantly learning new things and we always have interesting challenges that sometimes require some real interesting problem solving to get working.
āIFā this guy actually did automate his job and then didnāt do jack for six years that really just sounds like a horribly unmotivated, but skilled lazy ass. In six years he could done so much to expand his knowledge and become an even more valuable employee.
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The fact that they let you do this shows a remarkable disregard for anything resembling online security.
If you were hourly, maybe, arguably. If salaried, almost certainly not, even in California. However, it sounds like none of them were competent enough to realize that.
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