I’m in our daily standup and it’s turned into exchanging fucked up sysadmin redundancy tales.
One place I worked lost a machine room. They’d fired people so fast that nobody remembered where the boxes were any more.
I knew, but they didn’t ask me. Oh well!
The cycle of IT binge and purge is eternal. Post your tales here.
Well, our company is trying really hard to make my whole department redundant at the moment.
Some months ago our CEO went to Silicon Valley to “talk to some people”, although I have no idea what he really did there. We’re also from Europe and don’t even sell anything in the Americas, so that trip was really unusual. And ever since he came back, he’s been completely AI-brained, and here’s some things that happened since then:
Worst of all, though, our development department consists of two people including me, and the other guy mostly does organizational stuff so I am more or less alone responsible for the entirety of our production-critical code. We are understaffed and I am working on a project for which I was promised two juniors early next year … now however, I was being asked to evaluate whether we can do that with AI instead, and the hires have been shelved.
And I don’t think I’m allowed to submit “lol no”.
My semi-serious suggestion:
“That sounds great. I’m going to need to take a course in how to best utilitize AI, and the existing timeline will probably need to change. To really engage at expert level, I will go look at best-practices from experts. You’ll sign off on reasonable expenses, right?”
Then book a trip to [interesting place] and get it expensed. Then look for a new job while promising great things in a few months time, maybe a year or so.
if only there were whistleblower bounties for gross GDPR violation
I actually flagged this with our DSO, still waiting for the results.
(Somehow MS Teams itself did go through years ago, which also surprised me.)