Fnord wrote:
Yes, tech is a cutthroat career. I've had to keep two sets of notebooks -- one full of random diagrams and half-baked ideas, and the other full of Concepts The Actually Work. The former I leave scattered around my lab and office at work, and the latter I keep locked away and after scanning them onto an encrypted thumb drive.
Every now and then, a new hire will find one of my notebooks, see something that he or she likes, and then try to present it to the higher-ups as his or her own original idea. That's how I learn whom I can and cannot trust.
Then there are people who claim that one of my successful ideas originated with them, even after I've provided proof that I originated the idea long before they were hired.
As long as you document everything you do, your reputation is safe. As long as you document everything everyone else does, your reputation is even safer.
I'm at a small company so thankfully it's not programmers trying to jack eachother's work. What I do have is client contacts bungling project planning and it seems like I don't only have to hold their hand, do their job for them, and do their thinking for them on what it is they even want but I have to fix their engineering math on spreadsheets and correct them when they come back to me when my program varies from the spreadsheet. The other thing that was really fun a) I had to move at psychopath-optimist pace, b) I was learning how to program as I went - no one at my company knew that we could do the couple dozen things we promised in the contract, it was on faith, and I probably scooped out of my own health last year to keep my boss out of a lawsuit. I'd add - this comes with coworkers trying to stab me out for lack of perfect social conformity and showing signs of stress who had no clue what I was doing or how well or badly I was doing it.
The thing I should probably ask my dad's niece one of these days more directly - I get that she's deeply catholic, absolutely anti-socialism, how does she feel about the business and tech worlds turning into Hunger Games? I'm not so sure we're making much of a future for properly functioning humans, more like burning most hope of that down and unless everyone agrees that the current pace of 'devil take the hindmost' is perfectly okay and this is really what we want - I think there's a lot of cognitive dissonance going on and still worse polar dogmas about what options we actually have to not have this turn into an all-out Game of Thrones dystopia as AI keeps making people redundant in the workplace.
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The loneliest part of life: it's not just that no one is on your cloud, few can even see your cloud.
24 Feb 2019, 11:49 am
