For me:
Sometimes it doesn’t matter how hard you work, your going to get laid off either way.
Just showing up can sometimes make the difference.
Your not paid to be a software developer. Your being paid to be a problem solver.
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Never try and improve things, specifically things having to do with how your job, group, division, it whatever works. Don’t try and improve efficiency, optimize workflow, or anything like that. Just do what you’re paid to and nothing more. If the company wants things to be more efficient then they can have your boss figure it out on their own. If they don’t punish you for trying them they won’t reward you for success, so don’t bother. Going above and beyond never works out.
Everybody has a test environment.
Some are lucky enough to also have a production environment.
As a network engineer we don’t even have a test env linked to prod. Everything is prod.
Everything is prod.
No no, everything is test.
Validate your backups regularly.
Also, make backups.
Taking a day to actually test backups by doing a cold reset can save a business, thats for sure.
The horror of being a senior admin is realizing that the whole thing could live or die based solely on your actions and decisions. And that you will be blamed.
This is where you bring Chaos Monkey in and see where your weak points are.
I’ve always wanted to deploy Chaos Monkey for its actual purpose, but I’ve never been in charge of a big enough infra to make it worth the time. I have turned off databases just to see who files a ticket, which seems in the same spirit.
A shout test is what I call that.
Years after the fact I could make the lead developer’s eye twitch just by mentioning the guy who was supposed to maintain the backups but we discovered after the fire that he actually hadn’t been doing it. That guy was fired, but it didn’t bring back the lost code.
If your backups are untested, you don’t have backups.
for me:
Your
Your
Your
You’re represented by your words. It can cost you opportunities.
Your boss’s priorities are your priorities.
This goes for just about anything in life:
“First seek to understand, then to be understood.”
It’s not just heat that can burn you.
Reward for being even slightly competent and having work ethic is more work. To the point where you are doing everything until you break.
If you do something that needed to be done out of curtesy it’ll become your responsibility.
If you want to find someone who understand something about the corporation, look at the basement.
A corollary to your first one: if you take on extra work people will forget it is extra work when it’s not delivered on time or has issues. It does not matter how much the first three people fucked it up, you touched it last.
People will only forget, if you let them. I always make sure my contributions are very clearly visible. That of course presupposes that you have meaningful contributions to make visible.
I find people who try to stand out and play up their work insufferable. What I find more insufferable is that this works for getting ahead
It seams like you may be well-fit for this type of envoirement.
I’ve been working in corporate environments for the past thirty years or so. So yeah, I guess.
I was being passive-agressive.
You can get away with a LOT if you keep people up to date with what you’re doing
If only I’d think of that while doing it.
It’s usually a “This will take 20min or so” and turns into an “I know I am 3 hours into that but I know I am close to fixing it for good!”
But you can get away with the 3 hours on a 20 mins task, if you detail exactly what’s happening with a check-in every now and again, that’s what I mean.
If I would remember doing that! Yeah, sure.
People (customers and coworkers alike) are generally not very bright, putting it politely. No matter how foolproof you design a system, the human race is out there absolutely cranking out bigger fools than you even imagined.
Star Trek lied to us about the competency levels of our co-workers.
To be fair, the story is set a few years in the future.
And revolves around the best of the best. The enterprise is the flagship of the federation
Thats why I like Orville so much, because its just averagely normally competent workers doing space communism things
Don’t put anything in your mouth you didn’t bring yourself.
Including coworkers.It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.
Join a union the first chance you get, they exist to fight against HR, and to fuck over the company if they try to fuck you over
Somehow, I’ve got HR fighting for me. What a great country to live in.
