Manager: Hey what was that that you closed on your screen just now?

Dev: That popup? That’s NVIDIA letting me know that a new driver for my GPU is available.

Manager: Isn’t that for video games?

Dev: I mean that’s the reason many people opt into having a GPU but It’s not the on—

Manager: You are NOT allowed to play video games on your work computer!

Dev: This is my personal computer. It’s just an older GPU I popped onto this computer since otherwise it was just sitting in a drawer. My work computer is out of commission.

Manager: Well where is your work computer? How come you are not using it?

Dev: …Because of that blue screen of death issue we talked about yesterday.

Manager: Ok but that doesn’t give you permission to play VIDEO GAMES on your *WORK* computer.

Dev: …

For the love of god, leave that unholy place

Did you ever talk back like "you're just full of shit", maybe using a less drastic wording?

Sounds like you need a new job. And to tell the manager "okay well since I'm not on my work computer I guess I shouldn't be doing any work. So either I don't do any work until my work computer is fixed, or you let me do work on my personal computer and don't complain about something on my personal computer needing an update"

I would not be able to stop from sniggering in his stupid face.

Hmmmm.
two options:
Can you email me that? then turns off personal pc, and proceeds to do nothing, until work computer is fixed. by someone else. A week later.
When asked what happened, point towards that email.
Second option is to ask "do you call that work??? that is a childsplay! give me some actual work! and until then: byeeeeeeee!"

@Frederick “Manager” in my posts is any one of the +5 people I’ve worked for at my current job, usually it’s the most recent one though.

Yeah unfortunately I’m not making these conversations up, I just deal with them by writing them down 🥲

@Fast-Nop Best not to back talk I’ve learned, just creates more drama that takes me away from coding. It’s not like he’ll remember giving this order or follow up. All bark no bite.

I don‘t know if it‘s a lack of trust in you that you are not actually playing games instead of working, or if the manager is actually as dumb as a potato as he isn‘t able to add 1 and 1 together and conclude that no work will be done at all if he forbids you to use your private computer.
Maybe it‘s both.

@magicMirror Haha, I did tell him I could just refuse to use my personal computer sometime after this and get nothing done while we waited for a fix to my work computer (IT is so slow that would mean potentially months of delay). He quickly backed off and left me along for quite awhile and was all sunshine and rainbows to me for the next couple days. He’ll be back at it again soon enough though, old habits die hard.

@Lensflare Lets go with potato

Your second answer should've been something like: no, that's a GPU driver.

You better dust off that CV ASAP!

"Nvidia driver is not for gaming, it's for machine learning. I'm using artificial intelligence to increase our baseline performance and boost our quarterly key performance thingamajigs"

Just gotta speak manager language.

@bittersweet how about "i was trying to train an AI to do your job, but i had to downgrade the drivers so it matches your performance"?

@tosensei Managers should always be stabbed with a dagger in the back -- not the front.

@bittersweet if you do a good stabbing job, it doesn't really matter ;)

Realistically though, most GPUs are for mining, not gaming.

@electrineer

"No boss, I'm not gaming, I'm mining crypto and decensoring hentai"

@bittersweet

Boss: "WHAT?! Why are you mining crypto?"

Dev: "Well, because you said that we need to use more blockchain!"

Boss: "Ah, that makes sense! Nevermind."

@boombodies so how these people managed not to get darwined in the span of their miserable and useless lives? Luck?

Your manager is like a character in a comic strip

@rov3rand0m you just gave me a horrible thought. What if @boombodies and his manager are both imaginary comic characters? I mean it would make sense. No manager can be that dumb and no dev can endure that much crap from a manager. Unless….

@Lensflare I wish this was the case, I’m pretty decent at handling shit especially when the pay is good. I’m not able to leave since devs with the same experience as me are willing to work for 40k less even though I can code them all under the table. Most HR departments don’t understand that though and are just looking at the $ cost per year experience.

I don't know how those "managers" get jobs

@Charith47 somehow they manage to get them.

@Charith47

95% of being a manager is using specific language.

It's all about disguising bullshit as not-bullshit.

Words about measuring performance, especially for factually unmeasurable concepts. Pretty phrases about company culture, when in reality that "culture" is a fake thin layer, cult-like behavior forced upon employees. Essays about creating alignment, which are warm fuzzy meetings completely devoid of content or progress designed to "kick the process forward" in the least effective way possible.

When another manager recognizes your skills in speaking this language, it gets your through the job interview.

When upper management feels you are particularly good at creating cultsy clouds of fake productivity and instilling positive emotions amidst ambiguity, you get a promotion.

Then you get to be in charge of hiring more of these medium-intelligence rhetoric-slinging charlatans!