Excel automation will haunt my dreams forever. Hang in there.

Ugh, the pain.

If you’re not breaking stuff, you’re not working hard enough. Nice work - you kept it together and fixed it.

Ugh, hope it’s benign and nothing to worry about.

So sorry to hear that, sounds like she had a wonderful and long life.

Because it all needs to end.

@Grumm hahaha, love the buzz word blizzard!

@tosensei that’s a good point, never thought of it like that.

My condolences.

And people wonder why I want to leave this field

This is hilarious, great post!

@MammaNeedHummus thank you for the kind words. You’re right, it could be a lead by example opportunity.

@MammaNeedHummus Yeah, I just need to toughen up and make the move. I legit feel sorry for those I’d be leaving behind, it’s such a crap show.

@jestdotty mmmmm, beer. Solid advice.

That’s a big problem these days - companies want a full stack dev/project manager/tester/dev ops/24x7 support person. They see no issue with this because they feel they pay well enough for us to do all that work. Sure, there’s a manager somewhere in the org going to planning meetings or something, but they want you to run the team and do all the tech work.

It’s too late, someone said “automate”, so you have to do it. They’ll just hit you with: So your solution is to do this task manually (room shrieks)

What ultimately happens in this case is that the “prolific” manager pushes a ton of low quality code out to prod. It will then be your job to fix all the issues plus do your own job. The manager will own zero of this and blame it on you. If you’re lucky, the manger will blame “tech debt” instead of you, at which point everyone will high five and try and find the right AI solution using various power points and meetings where nothing will get done besides getting you more work to do.

Sounds like he didn’t want to do his job as a lead. Didn’t want to help you prioritize and just wanted you to spend all your free time delivering for the company against impossible deadlines. I think the “how is this company still in business” question gets asked a lot by IT/Dev folks because we don’t realize that for every $1 wasted on stupidity, the company takes in $100 on some sort of deal/contract.

What, no deployments tonight?

I think the question is: Even if you are capable of all that, would you really want to do all that at once for a job?

This is every day of my life. Services hell.

At least you had a reason to start drinking at 2pm, what’s my excuse? 😂

Another item to add to this discussion: it’s worth noting that a lot of IT/Dev work is one of the few work items that is easily and immediately measurable by organizations. As opposed to say, a new marketing plan. For example, if you “brick” a core router for a large organization, your job (and in the USA your family’s health benefits) will be on the line. If you take down a major e-commerce’s system with a mistake, again, your family’s entire livelihood could be on the line - not just money, but their healthcare too. I still agree it’s not warfare or surgery, but it’s still a lot of pressure which leads to stress.

I never understood those studies that show software dev as a super low stress career. Certainly, a surgeon experiences more stress, but I feel that IT/Dev stress is it’s own special animal. I think it’s the long term frustration that really elevates our stress to very high levels. Answering to fools, working long and odd hours at the expense of our families and often for no good reason, dedicating years of effort to build something that’s gone the second the business sponsor leaves the company, etc. It’s the absurdity of it all that gets me and the annoyance to my family concerning the hours.

At least in the USA, it’s seems like the corporate IT job market is still a bit hot. This is based on just anecdotal evidence and talking with some recruiters. It’s been really hard to find quality folks that actually want to work and not just give presentations on AI.

@fjmurau Luckily it has been accompanied with salary raises which I certainly do appreciate. The company recognizes the work for sure, and I’m lucky to have that. It’s just that I absolutely loathe the work, and the oddball hours are wearing on my family. This operations type role requires frequent evening and weekend hours. It was advertised as a dev role with a rotational on-call schedule, but I’m essentially on call all the time.

I feel your pain. I started a new dev job 5 years ago as an attempt to get out of management and back into programming. I crushed all their coding tests and interviews, but they still put me into a sys admin type role, which is soul sucking for me. Changing everyone’s system passwords for compliance, handing all vendor interactions, doing all OS upgrade projects, etc. The dev team lead is talentless and everything he produces needs to be re-written by me in my time off. Some of the “completed” apps won’t even compile sometimes. I’ve tried to move around, but they “need” me here. Sure, I get treated well with “hero” status and a nice promotion for saving the day time and time again. But I got two young kids and life - and I hate this. I agree with you that the only solution is to quit - they’ll never force another to do the shit work unless you leave.

@hjk101 yes!

I like this analogy a lot. Taking it a bit further: Boss, frustrated with chef’s responses, hires consultants behind chef’s back. Consultants recommend that the kitchen was originally created with the wrong refrigerator and oven and should have had an inventory management system with automatic replenishment ordering. The consultants also happen to be experts in the inventory software. They of course inform boss that chef’s skills are outdated because of how the kitchen was started. Chef wasn’t here when the kitchen was started, but I bet boss was.

This is one of the most accurate statements I have ever read.