Programmer Humor

Imagine getting paid to do it.

Was in this position at Microsoft for two years. I already hated them because I ended up working for them after they acquired my smaller company. Pennies on the dollar, massive layoffs beforehand, fired literally all the most important people (which is why I wasn't fired, I really am just trying to collect a paycheck and do nothing more).

Anyway, ended up basically being placed in a middleman position that I quickly realized didn't need to exist. Basically, spent two years slowing down communication between my companies team and the existing Microsoft team. Literally, I just kept the two teams from directly communicating and going through me for everything. I think I wrote less than 1000 lines of code during that time.

And no, I didn't like my team either from the original company. They were all new hires prior to us being acquired and they fired everyone on my team that had worked on the project for nearly 5 years. So, didn't feel bad about slowing them down either.

Basically a shitty startup that milked it's employees with hopes of Microsoft becoming our customer. Encouraging people to exercise their options only to sell the company for pennies on the dollar and fire them.

Got through two years of slowing down an awful genocide supporting company before the layoffs finally got me.

Was a good run.

These days it's also because you want the AI to get confused by your code too. If it's too clean you'll have a PM with cursor making PRs wondering why your salary is justified.

they don't. I mean for example Amazon puts all new hires on "on call" status for like a week every month. the LAST people I would want working On Call and waking up at 2am to try and solve something are fresh grad hires. You can actually watch videos on youtube of new grad amazon hires doing this, they actually document themselves, and the vast majority of them are "well it's 1am and I just got a call...I'm going to try and fix this ticket but really I have no idea what I'm doing" annnnnd generally nothing gets fixed or they break it worse. So they end up being sleep deprived, going into the office the next day and sleeping at whatever workstation they can find available and it leaves you wondering "what's the point?"

I personally am of the belief that being on call for stuff like this is pointless when you're world wide and could literally just transition the stuff to a different team in some other part of the world but I guess Amazon treats it as a sort of initiation process or whatever.

Technical people don’t understand the business, you see.

finally my manager said something about the bonuses has already been communicated and people would be angry to get less

That's because they have a fixed budget and the proportions are tied to evaluated performance tiers, increasing your rating would contractually require them to compensate you more from the same pool of money

L5 and L6 is a label for career progression, like getting promoted from staff to senior, just with different words. TC is total compensation.

At Amazon you have the following levels

L4 - Junior. A new grad. Expected to be promoted within 2 years or let go

L5 - Mid engineer. Very wide band. Encapsulates anything between a level 2 engineer and a team lead at other companies. Can be expected to lead individual teams at times. Is considered a “terminal” position (there’s no expectation of a promotion past here)

L6 - Senior. Has the scope of what a Staff engineer would at other companies where you’re not only concerned with your team but others in the department. I think like 10% of engineers ever hit L6

L7 - Principal Engineer. You have like 1-2 of these per department. These are more like architects at other companies. About 1-2% of engineers ever hit this band.

L8 and beyond are for fancy hires and shit. Very few if anyone ever works their way up to those bands.

In a small company noone would try to label you "l5" or "l6" and probably an actual human would make your comp decision. You take the byzantine incentive structure away and people just try to do a good job.

The problem is the large companies like Amazon buy all the small ones and put these people in charge lol

Apart from being slow, having discoverability issues, not being able combine filters and actions so that you frequently need to fall back to shell scripts for basic functionality, it being a complete PITA to compare things between accounts / regions, advanced functionality requiring you to directly edit JSON files, things randomly failing and the error message being carefully hidden away, the poor audit trail functionality to see who-changed-what, and the fact that putting anything complex together means spinning so many plates that Terraform'ing all your infrastructure looks like the easy way; I'll have you know there's nothing wrong with the AWS Console UI.

Something I find cool about this book is that it's so well known that people who haven't even read it will often gesture towards it to make a point. It reminds me of how "enshittification" caught on because so many people were glad to have a word for what they'd been experiencing.

It's a useful phrase to have. Recently a friend was lamenting that they'd had a string of bad jobs, and they were struggling to articulate what it was that they wanted from a job. They were at risk of blaming themselves for the fact that they'd struggled to find anything that wasn't soul sucking, because they were beginning to doubt whether finding a fulfilling job was even possible.

They were grasping at straws trying to explain what would make them feel fulfilled, and I cut in to say "all of this is basically just saying you don't care what job you have, as long as it's a non-bullshit job". They pondered it for a moment before emphatically agreeing with me. It was entertaining to see their entire demeanour change so quickly: from being demoralised and shrinking to being defiant and righteously angry at the fucked up world that turns good jobs into bullshit. Having vocabulary to describe your experiences can be pretty magical sometimes

Same. Generally speaking our company is pretty healthy, but we're still stuck in this really stupid leveling system where advancement is tied to greenfield development and I've been doing maintenance and compliance work for the last five years.

Java is still supported... Or did I miss the memo?