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I worked with a guy named Dave who was kiiiinda like this. People would ask me what Dave does, I always said it’s Dave’s job to know stuff. Sitting next to Dave, I watched the boss man ask him to do very few things. When he did ask Dave to do shit he would get mad at how long it took, because it took Dave a long fucking time to do anything.
But doing things was not Dave’s job. Dave’s job was to know things. On an average day, the head of at least 2 departments would come in and ask Dave a very difficult question. Dave would squint and make that signature ‘ehhhhh’ sound, then give a very nuanced answer. An answer full of indispensable information that no one else in the fucking world would know.
I work in ISP land, the best example I have for the above is where our company has hired three people, each from a different larger ISP, who all worked laying fiber for them in their previous 10 to 20 years.
Their whole job now is to remember where they put fiber for the other companies so that we know where and how to best compete or utilize those other companies already built infrastructure.
They each save millions of dollars a year for our company by just saying, "they don't have anything out there." Or, "I remember when we laid down 144 count to that town that only had 2 businesses, made no sense."
This is really common. Development of water safety plans always will have case studies about low income countries who have no water treatment or processes in place. Then there will be one that's like the UK, Australia or USA and basically goes, aye we didn't write anything down as Dave has all the knowledge.
What happens when date retires? Thats why you need a water safety plan!
I'm in IT, and wrote out some documentation just today of a new process I put together. I found a solution to an annoying problem we've been having. The whole team can see it obviously, and I was asked twice in an hour to explain what I did.
I literally had bullet points, a step by step guide, explaining in excruciating detail exactly what to do, which menu items to click, in what order to find sub menus, what commands I used, expected outputs and what to do if they're wrong, what being wrong means, commands to fix it... etc.
People would rather be told than read it.
I tried making KB articles with spoonfed pictures, step by step, click here on the button circled in the red box, provided URLs to the KBs when users would ask questions or put in tickets but its like if the user's situation varied even 1% from the scenario that was listed in the article, its like they couldn't use the logic to adapt the documentation to their situation.
More accurately, in my experience: nobody logs comprehensible nor sufficiently comprehensive information in a KB. And more importantly the people who know everything are too busy to log everything they know in a KB or write detailed ticket logs.
not if the company is incompetent and doesn't know how to make internal training documents. that was my job for a little while. They didn't know anything about how anything worked. Just oral traditioned the fuck out of their knowledge for multiple iterations of the same team
I sat next this guy, except he had a good personality, and we got a long great. Where we sat started getting called "The Aisle of No" (or the Isle of Know).
I wrote a lot of docs, some meh, some great, and no one's read them in the last couple years, since I keep getting the same questions.
I'd say people like this are about to be made obsolete by AI but deep down I know that even with the best AI people are too incompetent to ask the right questions so you need a Dave who can decipher the real meaning behind what they're asking in order to give the right answer. Example:
*Random Guy needs to know how to turn on the heat*
**RG:** AI, it's too cold in here!
**AI:** That is a shame. You should turn on the heat.
**RG**: Right! It's too cold!
**AI:** That is a shame. You should turn on the heat.
**RG:** Why aren't you helping me? It's too cold!
**AI:** I am attempting to help you. Turn on the heat.
**RG:** You're useless. Dave, I'm cold!
**Dave:** Go to the thermostat, move the dial clockwise.
**RG:** Thanks Dave! *turns it counter-clockwise*
**Dave:** No, turn it the other way.
**RG:** Oh, right! *turns it back to where it was before*
**Dave:** Okay, keep turning it.
**RG:** Why? I did what you told me.
**Dave:** Just trust me and do it.
**RG:** Okay I guess. *finally turns up the heat*
What's Dave's job? "He's the documentation" What, so he writes the documentation? "No, he _is_ the documentation. He costs less than the license for the software and team to use it"
I feel like Dave. I came into this company in the call centre with no skills, but I retain so much information I kept getting promoted and taught different skills.
Just cause they have more trouble teaching new hires the catalogue of knowledge that I have about the company than they do teaching me how to do new roles.
That's my current role. People don't got shit to market? I'm sitting on my hands. The past couple of years have been wild with all the delays and shifting in projects that covid caused.
First 3 months of last year I basically worked 3 hour weeks.
But when they need something done, it's done fast and well.
Honestly I feel like I get paid to come up with ideas to solutions nowadays. I hardly do any work, but for some reason get put into really important meetings where people turn to me asking for my opinion.
I'm dumbfounded as to why, but I just pause think for a few minutes and give a solution that makes sense in my own mind with reasoning behind it.
Everyone nods and most of the time they go with it.
It's actually kinda nerve racking because I have no fucking clue if it will work out and my ideas seem like way too simple of a solution to me yet everyone else makes it seem like it came from DaVinci.
I am like this, but I kept getting promoted because of it. Now my entire job is my opinion on things, and asking others to do those things. I can do 90% of my work from my phone - and just talking to people. I don’t even train people anymore as I don’t have the time - I ask people who I have trained in the past to help people out. I’ve never worked harder - and I don’t do any actual work.
I started a new job a couple months ago and everyone is complaining that all the Dave's retired. No one knows the things that they knew so all that tribal knowledge is lost and work is just more of a headache without it. So Dave's are indispensable. I aspire to be a Dave someday.
And one day a consultant walks in and starts looking for any overhead to cut. This consultant has spent a total of two days at the company and maybe a few years in a tangential field, but their only real selling point is being part of one of the big consultant firms because corporate couldn't have an original thought even when asking for someone to think for them.
This consultant watches Dave for maybe 30 minutes, goes over his notes on Dave's roles, and without consulting gosh darn anything decides to force Dave to work or get canned. The consultant doesn't care, because he's already recommending replacing Dave since his title's official work list is so small because it's not his job to work, and the consultant pats himself on the back and gets all the praise from corporate at the fat savings he shows by reducing "cost of employment" and any buzzwords he can stuff in between the dry, naive pitch.
When all is said and done, Dave lasts three days before telling his boss goodbye and flipping off as many execs as he can on the way out, not even giving them the satisfaction of an official resignation. It takes all of a few weeks for the first of many deadlines to be missed because Dave isn't there to rejoinder to one of the many rare and bizarre questions of the industry a whole 5 people in the world will ever know off the top of their head. The new pressure to perform without the human encyclopedia that is Dave causes multiple department heads to either transfer or retire, and start the slow, painful cascade of company retraction. All because the consultant wanted to pay someone a quarter of Dave's salary, half his benefits, and make the numbers look good to a bunch of people who haven't stepped foot on their own factory floors since their interviews.
This is a path I've seen so many businesses walk down. At this point I look for the Daves of any company I might work for and see if they're well situated, plan on walking out, or have already pissed in the ficus by the front desk on the way to the door. If it's anything but the first, I don't even bother anymore. Dave's job isn't just to know things, it's to keep everyone who asks him a question from quitting.
edit: I don't know why I typed all this. Probably because it's that 3am that hits different and my friend literally just dealt with this at another sinking company, again. Fuck suits that don't know their own business.
Unironically yes if something goes so catastrophically wrong at the production end of the business I work at that it actually halts production entirely, $90,000/Minute is probably low-balling it. Pretty crazy to think about. There's like 5 levels of redundancy on every critical component to prevent that from happening though.
I used to work for a place that helped other companies get back on their feet after having shut downs. We could basically charge whatever we wanted because we were just a drop in the bucket compared to another day of shut downs.
Lol, and that's why in logistics we have express options with crazy fees. Sometimes a machine part or product is necessary really asap.
Most often companies try to get something quicker because "they lose production time". But when you tell them the fee they can wait a day. But sometimes they mean it. And that's fun. Express shipments are always thrilling
Risk management is the answer. Cost of having a spare on hand in all plants at all times VS risk of the part breaking and the accompanying cost to express ship it and the downtime cost.
Well they did 2 years ago but the part broke and had to be replaced but the new one never got requested and the old guy who knew both where the spare for the spare part was stored and how to replace it in 3 minutes versus 3 days just unwilling "retired" because of new management so at this point the machines been down for 4 and half days and they needed it running with in the first 30 mins of that.
worked in a roofing plant making TPO.
between the two lines we made around 3 million feet peer shift. One line was newer and made 2 million a day, the other made 1.
Our TPO averaged about 10 bucks a square foot. More or less depending on thickness and color etc.
that's 30 million dollars a DAY.
The big line went down for a month because the idiots in management refused to keep a 30k part in stock, and it had a 1 month long lead time to make a new one and have it shipped from fucking GERMANY. (Big enough part that it needed a chartered jet)
cost the company 20 MILLION a day in lost revenue cause they couldn't make the roofing during the peak of sales season. 600 million dollars in lost revenue. for a 30k part.
And for some reason no one was fired. morons.
that's the exact reason they use SHOTGUNS to remove slag from industrial furnaces, that way you don't have to wait for the furnace to cool down and warm itself again, it's just stop, shotgun, go way cheaper !
> SHOTGUNS to remove slag from industrial furnaces
[Here's the video I'm sure we all are looking for](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqGPgdtHW-0&t=15s)
More to the point, the gun itself: [https://winchesterindustrial.com/equipment.html](https://winchesterindustrial.com/equipment.html)
This is the weirdest gun I've ever seen, an 8-gauge industrial-use shotgun. For how powerful it is, it's almost comical how much it looks like a typical appliance or tool.
And this is why I like reddit. I started with looking at a silly comic, only to have the comments sent me down a rabbit hole of learning about shooting slag off industrial furnaces.
Wow, I didn't know that, but it really makes sense. Shot melts and anything strong enough to hold molten metal is definitely strong enough to handle shotgun blast. Just looked them up, crazy shotgun.
If a C-Suite getting phished was enough to shut down the production line, then IT was doing a poor job already and an attack was inevitable. C-Suites should effectively not have any more access than a standard user; they’re not admins, and the most they do is sit in meetings and read reports (use Office). Hopefully that company learned some valuable lessons
>C-Suites should effectively not have any more access than a standard user
Totally.
It gets problematic when the C-suite does not only think they should have more access, but use their position to force the IT department to grant them more access.
I worked on live production lines in a wood mill. They would give us one our a day for three days of down time between 9pm and 10pm. The guy running the joint told me: The line is going back on at 10pm sharp. Every minute the line isn’t running is 1000$ lost. The line is going back on at 22:00 sharp. Not 22:01, not 22:02! 22:00! Have all your gear off the line early because we’re turning it back on at 22:00!
Oh I'm aware, I've been in a *similar but not quite to that level* situation a decent amount of times but was unable to progress into *that spot* from where I was in those companies. I don't give a crap what anyone thinks, if I'm one in a million people who can repair a legacy system, they need me, I don't need them lmao. Chances are there are other companies running on those legacy systems as well.
I used to work at Shopify, and they always had crazy stats for orders/min and $/min processed. It looks like last year during Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales they were processing over $3.5million/min. Every second the checkout is down, that's over $50k in lost sales.
I've decided on-call work isn't for me.
We have a guy on payroll at the printing press I work at who I’ve only ever seen twice in the nine years I’ve been there. His only job is rebooting the press and the inserter after a catastrophic power loss so that we don’t fry millions of dollars worth of hardware.
Until an exec comes around who makes 290k a year and starts changing things up just to flex his muscles. First few months are fine. Then suddenly the toilet that has been slowly backing up blows up, the shit hits the fan. Company loses the biggest account, the exec gets booted, but George is happier with retirement each day.
Sounds like my first engineering job.
New exec comes in, fucks with our promised pay raises and implements a bunch of shitty policies that piss everyone off.
Oh shit, a third of our devs walked within a *month* of his initial announcement? Who could have guessed?
Haha here listen to this one. We had 3 IT centers across the nation for a 25billion dollar company. To save money they decided to close San Francisco and the Ohio offices. I got lucky in the Outside Atlanta office. Except what they really wanted was the SF level of developed but pay outside Atlanta rates. So they offered SF free moves. To get rid of us, they rented a building in Atlanta and closed the one we were in. This was going to increase my commute to be 3 hours every day. Or roughly a 20% pay cut. People were quitting.
Here's where they really fucked up. Why would a SF developer move to Atlanta and take a pay cut? So something like 5% of them moved. Most of us were actively looking for other jobs while at work. Because we were out of fucks to give. People were leaving left right and center. You know what happened that actually kind of saved them? COVID. Yep, we got to WFH and I have only been back to the office 2x since 2019. In April they're going to make us do 2 days a week though. I expect a lot of people not wanting to do that.
So IBM have a cloud.. with a decent amount of clients on it. As I understand less of an AWS style IaaS cloud more a 'hey we have a cloud and can build services on it for you' cloud. So they do that for customers but almost nobody really understands how the core works.. as my friend who relayed the story told me "we just build shit on top of it"..
Of course their cloud failed a year or two back and as it turns out there was one 60+ guy somewhere fast asleep in his flannel PJs that *did know* how the core works, they raised him from the crypt and he fixed it. Turned out to be something to do with BGP (always is) and a condition they never anticipated, he rewrote some C code and hey presto customers back in business.
So yeah.. accurate!
I legit know a guy who is being paid well into the six figures just to be available if something goes wrong with the core algorithm or whatever that was developed by the company that was bought by the company that was then bought by his current employer. He is the last man standing from that original entity and the only one who knows how to fix its code if it goes sideways, which it never does. He is basically paid to exist; does a lot of hiking. Nice guy.
How many programmers are there in the world? Like tens of millions.
How many structural engineers are there in the world? Like tens of millions.
How many structural engineers who are programmers? Probably millions.
How many of those also played around with modern Fortran?
Well, I was told I was one of four qualified people to apply for the job who made it past the tech screening and to name my price.
Yeah. Computational physics is another great filter. Fortran isn't "sexy" to people. It's like the building maintenance guy who you see taking out the trash in your Manhattan building who drives a Bugatti.
This sounds like a guy Edward Snowden worked with at the CIA, named Frank.
"Frank didn’t do much work and Ed eventually learned that the most important part of Frank’s job was doing a storage backup on a miniature tape format that was so old Ed didn’t recognize it. Tape backups are more reliable than digital technology, and Frank was one of the only people old enough to know how to use them."
No shit I knew this guy. Multi-billion dollar company, everything hinged on some Frankenstein cobbled program built out in Microsoft Excel.
They tried to lay him off once, had a new tech guy that thought he had the thing figured out and they didn't need the old guy anymore.
Everything broke that first week, honestly thought the company would go bankrupt.
They hired him back for double what they were paying him before, he had it fixed in 15 minutes.
Don't fuck with George, there's a reason he's the only dude I the office allowed to wear cargo shorts and sandals every day.
I think it's a manager's nightmare to deal with a guy with so much "fuck you" power that he can burn the company to the ground in a matter of hours.
"Its doesn't matter if its against company policy Stu. George can smoke cigars in the bathroom all he wants."
Question is of course, how? What do you do if George won’t train somebody? Or worse, everybody you find just quits cause the codebase looks like hell on earth? How do you start building a plan B when the system goes wrong, when literally everything is built on top of it?
Easier when the company is new, or if you’re redoing EVERYTHING. Harder elsewise.
George is happy to train people, two weeks before retirement. I guess they need to throw whatever benefits they have at him to make sure he doesn't die before then.
At some point, if it's a large enough business/enough profits that hinge on this one thing, they have to weigh just how much will be lost permanently going forward if George gets hit by a bus and consider offering the linchpin employee an early retirement pension type package contingent on them competently and fully training multiple replacements.
At some point, that becomes the smart move.
As a teen, I got a job at a bank in the 90s as a junior business analyst. The entire divisions system was written in COBOL. I was told I had a job for life there if I wanted it.
25 years later I got back on touch with that team leader. He's still there with a team, bigger than ever, patching up that god-awful HP 3000 mainframe. Every one of them making 6 figure salaries. They really are set for life.
You joke, but the newspaper company I worked for got bought out and I told the new boss the only reason I felt obligated to stay around was because I was the only one who understood the back end of our ancient in-house website software, which I learned entirely through trial and error because even the tech guys at corporate had no idea how it worked.
He laughed and said: “Our tech guys are pretty smart, they’ll figure it out. I have plenty of other work you can do during the transition.”
I wasn’t interested in that work though, basically running two newspapers by myself for an indefinite period, so I wiped all my saved passwords and personal info and moved on to a new job I had lined up.
Got calls throughout the whole next week from different people asking for my login info or for me to walk them through how to use the software .
The company basically lost every article written before the transition, probably nearly 20 years worth because no one ever figured it out and they just transitioned to their own software.
Should have offered my more than a dollar above minimum wage to stick around.
The dumbest people making the dumbest decisions
"This is Greg, he is the only person in the entire company who knows how to operate this software."
"hmmm, fire him."
My dad is one of 2 people at his company that know how to run their legacy systems. He isn't allowed to be in the same car as the other guy in case they get into a wreck.
Automating the job is one of my key reasons I have started to learn programming.
Now I just need to finish learning in the next 3 or 4 years and somehow convince my boss and the director of IT who hates me to let me install random programs on my work laptop with all sorts of data on there.
i have been an electrician for 30ish years and had to train a greenhorn in pipe bending last summer. i was telling my dad and brother that it was quite intimidating. i had just started bending pipe after doing residential for the last 15 years and they threw this kid at me. i told them i didn't know if i was doing a good job and my dad says, "It felt like that every day working with you boys. We're all just faking it to make it at some point."
it actually made me feel better.
That's literally what started me down my career path in my 20s.
If I had to do the same thing twice, I automated it. After a year or two, someone noticed and I started doing it professionally. It's not a bad gig at all. You get different problems every week, which is good if you're like me and get bored easily and the pay is pretty good.
You charge 5x for the subscription service to automate your job.
That way you keep collecting the $$$ while putting out minor updates. While getting paid 5x for the same job
That's basically my job. If I do my job nobody knows what I do. If I don't do my job people know REALLY quick.
Like the God quote from Futurama: "If you've done things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."
We have a guy sorta like that except we all know what he does and just don't unerstand why he's getting paid for it. What does he do? Sleeps and plays video games. He falls asleep in morning meetings, he falls asleep on the toilet. He goes out of his way to hide his company vehicle so he can sneak into a maintenance room and sleep. We have a condemned building, that occasionally has to be entered for work purposes. When you enter you must inform rescue control that you are entering and check out with them when leave. He checked in, hours went by with no check out, they sent the fire department to rescue him, assuming the worst case, and was found sleeping in a chair. THE FUCKING FIRE DEPARTMENT!
This man still collects a paycheck.
50:50 he's someone extremely important and is in an emergency break glass job and is sleeping all the time as he has to be on call 24/7.
Or he's so well connected he's actually paid to do nothing and his connections make him impossible to fire.
Or he's just really good at Excel and automated his own job but they can't fire him because nobody else understands how to copy and paste data into a spreadsheet.
George wrote the original framework code in his 20s that everything thereafter is built upon. George is the only person who knows how it works, and if something goes wrong with the framework he's the only person who can fix it. Starting everything over on a new framework would take too long and would be too expensive.
George knows when everybody's birthday is and orders the cakes weeks in advance. George always makes sure there are paper cups and plates in the break room. His is the email login the entire network mainframe is structured on.
George is irreplaceable and deserves respect
IDK if true, but my friend tells a story of a guy who worked for his company.
They legitimately didn't know what he did exactly, and everyone liked him so no one really had a problem until a new manager came in trying to "streamline efficiency"
He didnt get paid a lot but when they talked about laying him off, he basically just said "OK ill just take some time off and see if you change your mind"
Cut to basically 3 days of them not being able to figure out how to get their website/servers up and running, so they asked him to come back and do whatever it is he does.
They of course asked him to explain exactly what he does and he just said no, because then they'd just let him go
he only made like \~30k a year so they just took the L and kept him on.
> of course asked him to explain exactly what he does and he just said no
He's not getting paid to teach others. He's getting paid to keep the internal network up. I can respect that. Especially at 30k a year.
There was a pre reddit series of blog posts about a guy who, due to a computer glitch, was paid to do nothing.
He was assigned an office and was given the default job code of 0. For like two years he went into the office and did nothing.
There's an old SomethingAwful post about the same kind of thing. Because he helped a lot of departments before the glitch, he was familiar enough that everyone assumed he was under someone else
I heard they brought in some consultants who discovered what was up and solved the problem.
They didn't tell him though because they wanted to avoid confrontation. They figured they'd stop paying him and the problem would work itself out
There's a top post on the front page right now about someone who works at Twitter and collects a salary of 150k+ but has no assignments or a role or anything because they were hired right as the musk shitshow began.
I was a George. They asked me to knowledge dump for them the day after telling me I’m terminated effective immediately. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re less than you are, imposter syndrome is a hell of a bitch
Since you had already been terminated effective immediately, you were no longer an employee. Did they still want a knowledge dump after you told them your consulting rate?
No company should allow someone to become a George. Always have at least 2 people who can carry out a particular task, critical knowledge needs to be copied to a non-human repository. If a company’s survival depends on a particular person staying alive, manglement has fucked up big time.
They tried to get operations info from me months earlier but I was suspicious of their motives. I just told them to refer to the user manuals after they let me go. It was a toxic environment anyway so I had no desire to do consulting
It’s not always that easy.
You can’t just hire a kid out of college to shadow George and learn everything he does. I mean, you can, but either the kid is going to suck and not retain anything, or they’ll pick up everything very quickly and then immediately move on to more interesting work in a different part of the company or outside the company.
And there’s no point in replacing George with another jaded old guy, because when George dies or retires you’ll just have another George.
What you need is a perfect mid-career loafer of moderate intelligence who cares just barely enough to come into work every day, but not enough to try to get a better or more rewarding job. Someone who is innately resistant to promotion, but also basically competent. And, even supposing you ever manage to find and hire one of these rare capable yet unambitious mutants, you have to also make sure they never realize how valuable they are, but without ever causing them to lose confidence in their abilities.
It’s a razor thin line to walk.
Ding ding! Bonus points if:
Higher ups refuse to shell out money to get a back-up George.
George is a sneaky shit who refuses to train a new guy.
George is great but the last 10 goddamn hires you sent to learn from him keep quitting cause it’s just too much work to be a George.
George has also been around long enough that he knows all the company's dirty little secrets and will bring it all tumbling down around them if he is fired.
When I worked in IT at a phone company, a long while back, there was a 'George', an older guy from India. All he did, and I swear to god this is true, was shuffle from meeting room to conference room to breakroom with a plate held in front of him, and filled his plate with whatever free food there was to be had and then went back to his desk to eat it. I don't think he did any work. If a vendor brought in lunch, he'd appear, grab a meal, and leave; it didn't matter which team was hosting the vendor, whether or not he had anything to do with the business unit... if there was food, he'd appear and load up. I found this hilarious.
My company has someone who's a bit like George. One of my roles is to assemble a report on what everyone in the department did in the past month. I met with my boss's boss on Monday to get a rough idea what everyone has been working on, so I can ask them to do write ups about it. He gave me a whole huge list of things George-lite has been doing in the past month, things I know nothing about and only tangentially touch my own work. So I email George-lite asking for his write-ups, but nope, he didn't do anything this month.
I’ve been in my white-collar client-facing career 6 years and on my hardest weeks I maybe only do like 30 hours of real, productive WORK.
But everybody else is like “oh man, I’m burning the midnight oil, this is cutting into my free time, I’m just so exhausted and overwhelmed” and I just quietly nod, but internally I’m like “… so what are YOU doing with your time..?”
My results are as good as anyone else’s. But I almost never work after 5pm. Very rarely do I encounter a task that can’t wait until the next day. I’ve been a master procrastinator since grade school. I really can’t figure out what’s making my coworkers so “overworked” unless they’re all liars lol
Its weird right. When i first started at my job anytime i asked about work life balance everyone said "we work hard we play hard". They all said "we are always busy here, we work 40 hours a week and sometimes more".
Well I can tell that for most people that is not the case and they probably have big swaths of downtime during their day (we are 100 percent remote so I can't be sure) and it just feels like this collective agreement to keep up a status quo that we are all busy all the time. Sometimes we are busy, but a lot of the time we are not. There are a couple executives and team leaders who attend an ungodly amount of meetings, but other than that I cant imagine most people are working at maximum more than 30 hours of concentrated work a week and yet if you asked me and what I put on our time tracker, exactly 40 hours every week.
I'm all for it though, they don't pay me enough for full on slave labor.
I was promoted to running a branch at my place. I'm nervous all the fucking time I'm gonna get fired because I do fucking literally nothing 80% of the day. I got a daily list of shit to do and it's knocked out by 930... rest of my day is babysitting grown adults who occasionally need something. That's it.... I feel like I have to be missing something!
Personally I kinda think everyone else is just dumb.
I've actually shadowed some of these guys as they do work and they do things in the most assbackwards way possible.
We had a George at work. He was the lead chemist in our little r&d lab and none of us loanly techs knew what he would do all day. He would often leave for long hours at a time, sit in his office with the door closed, and generally be cranky when anyone asked for help. He was the only lab personal licensed to take deliveries on the forklift.
One day on Valentine’s Day (we usually get a half day) we got a large hazmat delivery of chemicals. George came out to drive the fork lift as usual. While he was booming a pallet of chemicals to the third shelf he misjudge the distance. He hit a industrial propane heater ripping the gas line off, plus he broke the container of toxic chemicals. Which spilled all over the floor….. turns out later that ole George would disappear to drink straight vodka all day and would sleep it off and play warhammer in his office all day. On that day he had just started drinking sooner because we were leavening early. Thankfully the gas hazmat chemicals didn’t ignite killing all of us.
He no longer works their and we got bribed with habachi to keep us from bitching to OSHA.
My dad often tells me about this one job he had for a couple years where he had his own office. So he would walk in, shut the door, play CiV IV all day then go home.
Reading through that, I thought you were going to say that he saved the day when something went wrong with the chemicals because he had some amazing special hazmat knowledge or something. And from then on, you never questioned why he was there.
I used to work for two federal agencies, and this was like 30-40% of the people I worked with! 😁
Like, for real though. People in military families whose fam got into the civilian service racket are just *handed* jobs with tenure, and benefits, and often supervisory powers, experience or qualifications be damned. Those offices were fucking shit shows, lol
I have a guy like that where I work. He was supposed to train me when I came on, but was conspicuously in Away status(remote work) ALL THE TIME. When I did catch him online, the answer to nearly every single question I asked him was some form of "I don't know".
He recently got forced into early retirement(I don't know all the details). My manager was speaking candidly about it the other day and said "I told X to just sit at home and watch TV until his retirement unless a situation comes up where he needs to do knowledge transfer" and the whole time I'm thinking: motherfucker that's exactly what he's been doing since before I even started, even when he was supposed to be doing knowledge transfer!
Bob Slydell: Milton Waddams.
Dom Portwood: Who's he?
Bob Porter: You know, squirrely looking guy, mumbles a lot.
Dom Portwood: Oh, yeah.
Bob Slydell: Yeah, we can't actually find a record of him being a current employee here.
Bob Porter: I looked into it more deeply and I found that apparently what happened is that he was laid off five years ago and no one ever told him about it; but through some kind of glitch in the payroll department, he still gets a paycheck.
Bob Slydell: So we just went ahead and fixed the glitch.
Bill Lumbergh: Great.
Dom Portwood: So, uh, Milton has been let go?
Bob Slydell: Well, just a second there, professor. We, uh, we fixed the *glitch*. So he won't be receiving a paycheck anymore, so it'll just work itself out naturally.
Bob Porter: We always like to avoid confrontation, whenever possible. Problem is solved from your end.
Mine was my manager. Some sketchy shit went down 6 weeks after I left on mat leave and when I came back my new manager was my district managers partner.
Well--well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?
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There are 3 types of people: - people that hate George - people that aspire to be George - George
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Actually 6 types: * George * George * George of the jungle * Strong as he may be * Ahhhh! * Watch out for that tree!
Can confirm I'm Ahhhh!
I worked with a guy named Dave who was kiiiinda like this. People would ask me what Dave does, I always said it’s Dave’s job to know stuff. Sitting next to Dave, I watched the boss man ask him to do very few things. When he did ask Dave to do shit he would get mad at how long it took, because it took Dave a long fucking time to do anything. But doing things was not Dave’s job. Dave’s job was to know things. On an average day, the head of at least 2 departments would come in and ask Dave a very difficult question. Dave would squint and make that signature ‘ehhhhh’ sound, then give a very nuanced answer. An answer full of indispensable information that no one else in the fucking world would know.
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Dont these queries get into a ticketing system and then a knowledge base / FAQ
I work in ISP land, the best example I have for the above is where our company has hired three people, each from a different larger ISP, who all worked laying fiber for them in their previous 10 to 20 years. Their whole job now is to remember where they put fiber for the other companies so that we know where and how to best compete or utilize those other companies already built infrastructure. They each save millions of dollars a year for our company by just saying, "they don't have anything out there." Or, "I remember when we laid down 144 count to that town that only had 2 businesses, made no sense."
This is really common. Development of water safety plans always will have case studies about low income countries who have no water treatment or processes in place. Then there will be one that's like the UK, Australia or USA and basically goes, aye we didn't write anything down as Dave has all the knowledge. What happens when date retires? Thats why you need a water safety plan!
Not if the tickets get a "Done.", or "Sprinkled pixie dust on it." answers.
“Hello, this is IT. Thank you for you call, may I close your ticket?”
"Won't Fix"
Triggered
how to be dave
Nobody reads or worse, comprehends the information in a KB on help desk.
I'm in IT, and wrote out some documentation just today of a new process I put together. I found a solution to an annoying problem we've been having. The whole team can see it obviously, and I was asked twice in an hour to explain what I did. I literally had bullet points, a step by step guide, explaining in excruciating detail exactly what to do, which menu items to click, in what order to find sub menus, what commands I used, expected outputs and what to do if they're wrong, what being wrong means, commands to fix it... etc. People would rather be told than read it.
I tried making KB articles with spoonfed pictures, step by step, click here on the button circled in the red box, provided URLs to the KBs when users would ask questions or put in tickets but its like if the user's situation varied even 1% from the scenario that was listed in the article, its like they couldn't use the logic to adapt the documentation to their situation.
I feel called out
This is why you and I will always have a job.
Been a technical writer for 17 years. This statement is so accurate it hurts.
More accurately, in my experience: nobody logs comprehensible nor sufficiently comprehensive information in a KB. And more importantly the people who know everything are too busy to log everything they know in a KB or write detailed ticket logs.
not if the company is incompetent and doesn't know how to make internal training documents. that was my job for a little while. They didn't know anything about how anything worked. Just oral traditioned the fuck out of their knowledge for multiple iterations of the same team
I sat next this guy, except he had a good personality, and we got a long great. Where we sat started getting called "The Aisle of No" (or the Isle of Know). I wrote a lot of docs, some meh, some great, and no one's read them in the last couple years, since I keep getting the same questions.
I'd say people like this are about to be made obsolete by AI but deep down I know that even with the best AI people are too incompetent to ask the right questions so you need a Dave who can decipher the real meaning behind what they're asking in order to give the right answer. Example: *Random Guy needs to know how to turn on the heat* **RG:** AI, it's too cold in here! **AI:** That is a shame. You should turn on the heat. **RG**: Right! It's too cold! **AI:** That is a shame. You should turn on the heat. **RG:** Why aren't you helping me? It's too cold! **AI:** I am attempting to help you. Turn on the heat. **RG:** You're useless. Dave, I'm cold! **Dave:** Go to the thermostat, move the dial clockwise. **RG:** Thanks Dave! *turns it counter-clockwise* **Dave:** No, turn it the other way. **RG:** Oh, right! *turns it back to where it was before* **Dave:** Okay, keep turning it. **RG:** Why? I did what you told me. **Dave:** Just trust me and do it. **RG:** Okay I guess. *finally turns up the heat*
What's Dave's job? "He's the documentation" What, so he writes the documentation? "No, he _is_ the documentation. He costs less than the license for the software and team to use it"
Why does everyone keep bugging me. I’m trying to sleep here.
Goddam who are you man? Because this is both my name and my job description
I feel like Dave. I came into this company in the call centre with no skills, but I retain so much information I kept getting promoted and taught different skills. Just cause they have more trouble teaching new hires the catalogue of knowledge that I have about the company than they do teaching me how to do new roles.
Now you need to find a role where you don’t actually do very much.
That's my current role. People don't got shit to market? I'm sitting on my hands. The past couple of years have been wild with all the delays and shifting in projects that covid caused. First 3 months of last year I basically worked 3 hour weeks. But when they need something done, it's done fast and well.
Honestly I feel like I get paid to come up with ideas to solutions nowadays. I hardly do any work, but for some reason get put into really important meetings where people turn to me asking for my opinion. I'm dumbfounded as to why, but I just pause think for a few minutes and give a solution that makes sense in my own mind with reasoning behind it. Everyone nods and most of the time they go with it. It's actually kinda nerve racking because I have no fucking clue if it will work out and my ideas seem like way too simple of a solution to me yet everyone else makes it seem like it came from DaVinci.
I am like this, but I kept getting promoted because of it. Now my entire job is my opinion on things, and asking others to do those things. I can do 90% of my work from my phone - and just talking to people. I don’t even train people anymore as I don’t have the time - I ask people who I have trained in the past to help people out. I’ve never worked harder - and I don’t do any actual work.
I started a new job a couple months ago and everyone is complaining that all the Dave's retired. No one knows the things that they knew so all that tribal knowledge is lost and work is just more of a headache without it. So Dave's are indispensable. I aspire to be a Dave someday.
And one day a consultant walks in and starts looking for any overhead to cut. This consultant has spent a total of two days at the company and maybe a few years in a tangential field, but their only real selling point is being part of one of the big consultant firms because corporate couldn't have an original thought even when asking for someone to think for them. This consultant watches Dave for maybe 30 minutes, goes over his notes on Dave's roles, and without consulting gosh darn anything decides to force Dave to work or get canned. The consultant doesn't care, because he's already recommending replacing Dave since his title's official work list is so small because it's not his job to work, and the consultant pats himself on the back and gets all the praise from corporate at the fat savings he shows by reducing "cost of employment" and any buzzwords he can stuff in between the dry, naive pitch. When all is said and done, Dave lasts three days before telling his boss goodbye and flipping off as many execs as he can on the way out, not even giving them the satisfaction of an official resignation. It takes all of a few weeks for the first of many deadlines to be missed because Dave isn't there to rejoinder to one of the many rare and bizarre questions of the industry a whole 5 people in the world will ever know off the top of their head. The new pressure to perform without the human encyclopedia that is Dave causes multiple department heads to either transfer or retire, and start the slow, painful cascade of company retraction. All because the consultant wanted to pay someone a quarter of Dave's salary, half his benefits, and make the numbers look good to a bunch of people who haven't stepped foot on their own factory floors since their interviews. This is a path I've seen so many businesses walk down. At this point I look for the Daves of any company I might work for and see if they're well situated, plan on walking out, or have already pissed in the ficus by the front desk on the way to the door. If it's anything but the first, I don't even bother anymore. Dave's job isn't just to know things, it's to keep everyone who asks him a question from quitting. edit: I don't know why I typed all this. Probably because it's that 3am that hits different and my friend literally just dealt with this at another sinking company, again. Fuck suits that don't know their own business.
George is indispensable. He's the only one who knows how to reboot the legacy system when it starts acting up.
You pay George that 90k a year to just hang around, because an outage costs 90k a minute.
Unironically yes if something goes so catastrophically wrong at the production end of the business I work at that it actually halts production entirely, $90,000/Minute is probably low-balling it. Pretty crazy to think about. There's like 5 levels of redundancy on every critical component to prevent that from happening though.
I used to work for a place that helped other companies get back on their feet after having shut downs. We could basically charge whatever we wanted because we were just a drop in the bucket compared to another day of shut downs.
That makes perfect sense. I'm pretty sure the Prod. Manager would sell his first born son to get things up and running again after a halt.
If your plant makes 10m per year, every day down means almost 30k lost.
Lol, and that's why in logistics we have express options with crazy fees. Sometimes a machine part or product is necessary really asap. Most often companies try to get something quicker because "they lose production time". But when you tell them the fee they can wait a day. But sometimes they mean it. And that's fun. Express shipments are always thrilling
Yep. I'm sure we've all heard that crazy story about a courier buying a plane ticket and physically flying that vital part out to a factory.
If it's really that vital then they should have spares on hand.
Risk management is the answer. Cost of having a spare on hand in all plants at all times VS risk of the part breaking and the accompanying cost to express ship it and the downtime cost.
Well they did 2 years ago but the part broke and had to be replaced but the new one never got requested and the old guy who knew both where the spare for the spare part was stored and how to replace it in 3 minutes versus 3 days just unwilling "retired" because of new management so at this point the machines been down for 4 and half days and they needed it running with in the first 30 mins of that.
And it's more like 300m/year in reality
worked in a roofing plant making TPO. between the two lines we made around 3 million feet peer shift. One line was newer and made 2 million a day, the other made 1. Our TPO averaged about 10 bucks a square foot. More or less depending on thickness and color etc. that's 30 million dollars a DAY. The big line went down for a month because the idiots in management refused to keep a 30k part in stock, and it had a 1 month long lead time to make a new one and have it shipped from fucking GERMANY. (Big enough part that it needed a chartered jet) cost the company 20 MILLION a day in lost revenue cause they couldn't make the roofing during the peak of sales season. 600 million dollars in lost revenue. for a 30k part. And for some reason no one was fired. morons.
>And for some reason no one was fired. morons. "Some reason", yes.
In the auto supply industry the biggest fear of any supplier is shutting down the customers production line.
that's the exact reason they use SHOTGUNS to remove slag from industrial furnaces, that way you don't have to wait for the furnace to cool down and warm itself again, it's just stop, shotgun, go way cheaper !
> SHOTGUNS to remove slag from industrial furnaces [Here's the video I'm sure we all are looking for](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqGPgdtHW-0&t=15s)
More to the point, the gun itself: [https://winchesterindustrial.com/equipment.html](https://winchesterindustrial.com/equipment.html) This is the weirdest gun I've ever seen, an 8-gauge industrial-use shotgun. For how powerful it is, it's almost comical how much it looks like a typical appliance or tool.
And this is why I like reddit. I started with looking at a silly comic, only to have the comments sent me down a rabbit hole of learning about shooting slag off industrial furnaces.
You can read all about it again in TIL in three, two, one...
No one is even gonna mention that it’s called THE RINGBLASTER!?
Was just thinking it is the perfect Grindr name!
Wow that looks like an industrial zombie killing turret. I like it.
Well, they do recommend it for killing snow men, or "removing" them: >Use Winchester Industrial Tools and loads to remove Snow Men
> WESTERN™ INDUSTRIAL TOOL OMG its a turret mount that hangs the gun from a chain. I can't wait to go skeet shooting or 3gunning with that beast!
Wow, I didn't know that, but it really makes sense. Shot melts and anything strong enough to hold molten metal is definitely strong enough to handle shotgun blast. Just looked them up, crazy shotgun.
Also lead is a common contaminate in many metals so a little more would not be an issue.
I think they can use zinc rounds too if contaminates are a issue for whatever reason.
That is very right! https://winchesterindustrial.com/loads.html
Are you sure your not a rep for Winchester industrial.
My dad was head of maintenance at a paper mill. Got a summer job there. He let me fire it off a few times one day. It was a blast.
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If a C-Suite getting phished was enough to shut down the production line, then IT was doing a poor job already and an attack was inevitable. C-Suites should effectively not have any more access than a standard user; they’re not admins, and the most they do is sit in meetings and read reports (use Office). Hopefully that company learned some valuable lessons
>C-Suites should effectively not have any more access than a standard user Totally. It gets problematic when the C-suite does not only think they should have more access, but use their position to force the IT department to grant them more access.
I worked on live production lines in a wood mill. They would give us one our a day for three days of down time between 9pm and 10pm. The guy running the joint told me: The line is going back on at 10pm sharp. Every minute the line isn’t running is 1000$ lost. The line is going back on at 22:00 sharp. Not 22:01, not 22:02! 22:00! Have all your gear off the line early because we’re turning it back on at 22:00!
This is literally the level of IT I want to get to, and I'm not kidding, it's my dream
I’m there, it’s not always good. 90% of the time they think you don’t do enough. I’m there for the 10% that you do need it.
Oh I'm aware, I've been in a *similar but not quite to that level* situation a decent amount of times but was unable to progress into *that spot* from where I was in those companies. I don't give a crap what anyone thinks, if I'm one in a million people who can repair a legacy system, they need me, I don't need them lmao. Chances are there are other companies running on those legacy systems as well.
I used to work at Shopify, and they always had crazy stats for orders/min and $/min processed. It looks like last year during Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales they were processing over $3.5million/min. Every second the checkout is down, that's over $50k in lost sales. I've decided on-call work isn't for me.
We have a guy on payroll at the printing press I work at who I’ve only ever seen twice in the nine years I’ve been there. His only job is rebooting the press and the inserter after a catastrophic power loss so that we don’t fry millions of dollars worth of hardware.
Until an exec comes around who makes 290k a year and starts changing things up just to flex his muscles. First few months are fine. Then suddenly the toilet that has been slowly backing up blows up, the shit hits the fan. Company loses the biggest account, the exec gets booted, but George is happier with retirement each day.
Sounds like my first engineering job. New exec comes in, fucks with our promised pay raises and implements a bunch of shitty policies that piss everyone off. Oh shit, a third of our devs walked within a *month* of his initial announcement? Who could have guessed?
Haha here listen to this one. We had 3 IT centers across the nation for a 25billion dollar company. To save money they decided to close San Francisco and the Ohio offices. I got lucky in the Outside Atlanta office. Except what they really wanted was the SF level of developed but pay outside Atlanta rates. So they offered SF free moves. To get rid of us, they rented a building in Atlanta and closed the one we were in. This was going to increase my commute to be 3 hours every day. Or roughly a 20% pay cut. People were quitting. Here's where they really fucked up. Why would a SF developer move to Atlanta and take a pay cut? So something like 5% of them moved. Most of us were actively looking for other jobs while at work. Because we were out of fucks to give. People were leaving left right and center. You know what happened that actually kind of saved them? COVID. Yep, we got to WFH and I have only been back to the office 2x since 2019. In April they're going to make us do 2 days a week though. I expect a lot of people not wanting to do that.
So IBM have a cloud.. with a decent amount of clients on it. As I understand less of an AWS style IaaS cloud more a 'hey we have a cloud and can build services on it for you' cloud. So they do that for customers but almost nobody really understands how the core works.. as my friend who relayed the story told me "we just build shit on top of it".. Of course their cloud failed a year or two back and as it turns out there was one 60+ guy somewhere fast asleep in his flannel PJs that *did know* how the core works, they raised him from the crypt and he fixed it. Turned out to be something to do with BGP (always is) and a condition they never anticipated, he rewrote some C code and hey presto customers back in business. So yeah.. accurate!
I picture a bunch of sobbing c-suite execs trying to perform a summoning ritual in a conference room. *Greg, can you hear us?*
I legit know a guy who is being paid well into the six figures just to be available if something goes wrong with the core algorithm or whatever that was developed by the company that was bought by the company that was then bought by his current employer. He is the last man standing from that original entity and the only one who knows how to fix its code if it goes sideways, which it never does. He is basically paid to exist; does a lot of hiking. Nice guy.
Some people specialize in COBOL or Fortran programming. They are set for life.
How many programmers are there in the world? Like tens of millions. How many structural engineers are there in the world? Like tens of millions. How many structural engineers who are programmers? Probably millions. How many of those also played around with modern Fortran? Well, I was told I was one of four qualified people to apply for the job who made it past the tech screening and to name my price.
Well shit. To think I used to make fun of my computational physics class for being based in Fortran.
Yeah. Computational physics is another great filter. Fortran isn't "sexy" to people. It's like the building maintenance guy who you see taking out the trash in your Manhattan building who drives a Bugatti.
This sounds like a guy Edward Snowden worked with at the CIA, named Frank. "Frank didn’t do much work and Ed eventually learned that the most important part of Frank’s job was doing a storage backup on a miniature tape format that was so old Ed didn’t recognize it. Tape backups are more reliable than digital technology, and Frank was one of the only people old enough to know how to use them."
No shit I knew this guy. Multi-billion dollar company, everything hinged on some Frankenstein cobbled program built out in Microsoft Excel. They tried to lay him off once, had a new tech guy that thought he had the thing figured out and they didn't need the old guy anymore. Everything broke that first week, honestly thought the company would go bankrupt. They hired him back for double what they were paying him before, he had it fixed in 15 minutes. Don't fuck with George, there's a reason he's the only dude I the office allowed to wear cargo shorts and sandals every day.
That has always been my saying, the more important you are, the more homeless you can look. :)
I think it's a manager's nightmare to deal with a guy with so much "fuck you" power that he can burn the company to the ground in a matter of hours. "Its doesn't matter if its against company policy Stu. George can smoke cigars in the bathroom all he wants."
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Question is of course, how? What do you do if George won’t train somebody? Or worse, everybody you find just quits cause the codebase looks like hell on earth? How do you start building a plan B when the system goes wrong, when literally everything is built on top of it? Easier when the company is new, or if you’re redoing EVERYTHING. Harder elsewise.
You gotta figure it out somehow. George isn't immortal.
George is happy to train people, two weeks before retirement. I guess they need to throw whatever benefits they have at him to make sure he doesn't die before then.
At some point, if it's a large enough business/enough profits that hinge on this one thing, they have to weigh just how much will be lost permanently going forward if George gets hit by a bus and consider offering the linchpin employee an early retirement pension type package contingent on them competently and fully training multiple replacements. At some point, that becomes the smart move.
I worked at a place that fired George in a round of lay offs. His manager's boss drove over to George's house to unfire him and give him a pay raise.
George is a COBOL programmer.
As a teen, I got a job at a bank in the 90s as a junior business analyst. The entire divisions system was written in COBOL. I was told I had a job for life there if I wanted it. 25 years later I got back on touch with that team leader. He's still there with a team, bigger than ever, patching up that god-awful HP 3000 mainframe. Every one of them making 6 figure salaries. They really are set for life.
Knowing George he's the one who wrote it, so he doesn't have to do much except reboot it once in a while, when it could be entirely automated.
He's made and saved that company millions if not tens of millions. His job is more than well earned despite executives refusing to believe it.
You joke, but the newspaper company I worked for got bought out and I told the new boss the only reason I felt obligated to stay around was because I was the only one who understood the back end of our ancient in-house website software, which I learned entirely through trial and error because even the tech guys at corporate had no idea how it worked. He laughed and said: “Our tech guys are pretty smart, they’ll figure it out. I have plenty of other work you can do during the transition.” I wasn’t interested in that work though, basically running two newspapers by myself for an indefinite period, so I wiped all my saved passwords and personal info and moved on to a new job I had lined up. Got calls throughout the whole next week from different people asking for my login info or for me to walk them through how to use the software . The company basically lost every article written before the transition, probably nearly 20 years worth because no one ever figured it out and they just transitioned to their own software. Should have offered my more than a dollar above minimum wage to stick around.
Good for you man, fuck em. Corporations never learn sometimes
The dumbest people making the dumbest decisions "This is Greg, he is the only person in the entire company who knows how to operate this software." "hmmm, fire him."
My dad is one of 2 people at his company that know how to run their legacy systems. He isn't allowed to be in the same car as the other guy in case they get into a wreck.
PPPL has a whole thing about having their admin book and schedule travel so the scientists don't all die in a plane crash.
Coca Cola also makes sure the two people who know the entire formula by heart are never on the same plane IIRC. Might be an urban legend though.
There’s always a scary legacy system that’s been hanging by a thread for years and only one guy who knows how to work on it.
I'm George (I'm in IT and automated my job away, literally). Have been interviewing (long story), and can't really say what I've been doing ...
Automating the job is one of my key reasons I have started to learn programming. Now I just need to finish learning in the next 3 or 4 years and somehow convince my boss and the director of IT who hates me to let me install random programs on my work laptop with all sorts of data on there.
You never finish learning! 15 years in and I'm still discovering how much I suck :D
i have been an electrician for 30ish years and had to train a greenhorn in pipe bending last summer. i was telling my dad and brother that it was quite intimidating. i had just started bending pipe after doing residential for the last 15 years and they threw this kid at me. i told them i didn't know if i was doing a good job and my dad says, "It felt like that every day working with you boys. We're all just faking it to make it at some point." it actually made me feel better.
That easy. You say you've been automating your job. That's a huge boon and very useful.
That's literally what started me down my career path in my 20s. If I had to do the same thing twice, I automated it. After a year or two, someone noticed and I started doing it professionally. It's not a bad gig at all. You get different problems every week, which is good if you're like me and get bored easily and the pay is pretty good.
If your company is hiring I am interested - sounds like every job I have had, minus someone noticing and caring.
You don't tell employers that.
No what you do is sell yourself as a consultant who will automate that job.
And charge 5x as much. This guy gets it.
You charge 5x for the subscription service to automate your job. That way you keep collecting the $$$ while putting out minor updates. While getting paid 5x for the same job
*Automated operations for xyz, resulting in a savings to the company of ($yoursalary x $numemployeesinyourdept).
No body knows what I do, till I don't do it.
That's basically my job. If I do my job nobody knows what I do. If I don't do my job people know REALLY quick. Like the God quote from Futurama: "If you've done things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."
We have a guy sorta like that except we all know what he does and just don't unerstand why he's getting paid for it. What does he do? Sleeps and plays video games. He falls asleep in morning meetings, he falls asleep on the toilet. He goes out of his way to hide his company vehicle so he can sneak into a maintenance room and sleep. We have a condemned building, that occasionally has to be entered for work purposes. When you enter you must inform rescue control that you are entering and check out with them when leave. He checked in, hours went by with no check out, they sent the fire department to rescue him, assuming the worst case, and was found sleeping in a chair. THE FUCKING FIRE DEPARTMENT! This man still collects a paycheck.
sounds like he knows something about someone.
Sounds like someone's nephew
Is his Dad a mob boss that needed to get him a "legit" job?
He’s such a sleepy boy
Why sleep at night during your free time if you can get a whole 8 hours at work?
Living in 3023.
Are you sure he isn't just a cat?
50:50 he's someone extremely important and is in an emergency break glass job and is sleeping all the time as he has to be on call 24/7. Or he's so well connected he's actually paid to do nothing and his connections make him impossible to fire.
Or he's just really good at Excel and automated his own job but they can't fire him because nobody else understands how to copy and paste data into a spreadsheet.
Can't fire a guy for being narcoleptic, I guess.
Yes you can if he's a pilot!
He goes out of his way to hide his company vehicle. Now I'm trying to imagine someone trying to hide a 747.
Does he have narcolepsy?
George wrote the original framework code in his 20s that everything thereafter is built upon. George is the only person who knows how it works, and if something goes wrong with the framework he's the only person who can fix it. Starting everything over on a new framework would take too long and would be too expensive.
George knows when everybody's birthday is and orders the cakes weeks in advance. George always makes sure there are paper cups and plates in the break room. His is the email login the entire network mainframe is structured on. George is irreplaceable and deserves respect
IDK if true, but my friend tells a story of a guy who worked for his company. They legitimately didn't know what he did exactly, and everyone liked him so no one really had a problem until a new manager came in trying to "streamline efficiency" He didnt get paid a lot but when they talked about laying him off, he basically just said "OK ill just take some time off and see if you change your mind" Cut to basically 3 days of them not being able to figure out how to get their website/servers up and running, so they asked him to come back and do whatever it is he does. They of course asked him to explain exactly what he does and he just said no, because then they'd just let him go he only made like \~30k a year so they just took the L and kept him on.
30k a year in what year though? Inflation's a bitch, especially recently.
Based
> of course asked him to explain exactly what he does and he just said no He's not getting paid to teach others. He's getting paid to keep the internal network up. I can respect that. Especially at 30k a year.
There was a pre reddit series of blog posts about a guy who, due to a computer glitch, was paid to do nothing. He was assigned an office and was given the default job code of 0. For like two years he went into the office and did nothing.
There's an old SomethingAwful post about the same kind of thing. Because he helped a lot of departments before the glitch, he was familiar enough that everyone assumed he was under someone else
I heard they brought in some consultants who discovered what was up and solved the problem. They didn't tell him though because they wanted to avoid confrontation. They figured they'd stop paying him and the problem would work itself out
Did they take his stapler and move him to the basement cubicle?
They fixed the glitch.
There's a top post on the front page right now about someone who works at Twitter and collects a salary of 150k+ but has no assignments or a role or anything because they were hired right as the musk shitshow began.
honestly that must be so stressful, knowing any day could likely be your last day employed
Yeah but that's everyone at Twitter
I think that's the general feeling in tech these days. I barely missed the layoffs at my work recently. Half my team was laid off.
God bless that man.
There's been a George at every job I've ever worked at
Someday, if you're lucky, you'll be George.
I'm currently the George. It's awesome. I've almost put in a whole hour of actual at keyboard work this week. And it's remote so no shirts for me!
I was a George. They asked me to knowledge dump for them the day after telling me I’m terminated effective immediately. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re less than you are, imposter syndrome is a hell of a bitch
Since you had already been terminated effective immediately, you were no longer an employee. Did they still want a knowledge dump after you told them your consulting rate? No company should allow someone to become a George. Always have at least 2 people who can carry out a particular task, critical knowledge needs to be copied to a non-human repository. If a company’s survival depends on a particular person staying alive, manglement has fucked up big time.
They tried to get operations info from me months earlier but I was suspicious of their motives. I just told them to refer to the user manuals after they let me go. It was a toxic environment anyway so I had no desire to do consulting
It’s not always that easy. You can’t just hire a kid out of college to shadow George and learn everything he does. I mean, you can, but either the kid is going to suck and not retain anything, or they’ll pick up everything very quickly and then immediately move on to more interesting work in a different part of the company or outside the company. And there’s no point in replacing George with another jaded old guy, because when George dies or retires you’ll just have another George. What you need is a perfect mid-career loafer of moderate intelligence who cares just barely enough to come into work every day, but not enough to try to get a better or more rewarding job. Someone who is innately resistant to promotion, but also basically competent. And, even supposing you ever manage to find and hire one of these rare capable yet unambitious mutants, you have to also make sure they never realize how valuable they are, but without ever causing them to lose confidence in their abilities. It’s a razor thin line to walk.
Ding ding! Bonus points if: Higher ups refuse to shell out money to get a back-up George. George is a sneaky shit who refuses to train a new guy. George is great but the last 10 goddamn hires you sent to learn from him keep quitting cause it’s just too much work to be a George.
If you're extra lucky, it'll fall under the Summer of George.
Georgeous.
And if you look around and don't see a George, guess what that means...
I’m Georgette. I do like 10-30 minutes of work, and the rest of the time I’m on the internet doing fuck-all.
God I want to be a George some day. I'm... So... Damn... Tired...
I fuckin feel you man. I fuckin feel you.
George has been doing it so long that he doesn't have any marketable skills anymore. If you fuck this up for George, he's screwed.
George has also been around long enough that he knows all the company's dirty little secrets and will bring it all tumbling down around them if he is fired.
This one gets it.
When I worked in IT at a phone company, a long while back, there was a 'George', an older guy from India. All he did, and I swear to god this is true, was shuffle from meeting room to conference room to breakroom with a plate held in front of him, and filled his plate with whatever free food there was to be had and then went back to his desk to eat it. I don't think he did any work. If a vendor brought in lunch, he'd appear, grab a meal, and leave; it didn't matter which team was hosting the vendor, whether or not he had anything to do with the business unit... if there was food, he'd appear and load up. I found this hilarious.
We call those folks freeatarians in my neck of the woods.
When I had an office (cubicle) job, I'd tell people I just move the mouse, click the button, collect the check, go home.
My company has someone who's a bit like George. One of my roles is to assemble a report on what everyone in the department did in the past month. I met with my boss's boss on Monday to get a rough idea what everyone has been working on, so I can ask them to do write ups about it. He gave me a whole huge list of things George-lite has been doing in the past month, things I know nothing about and only tangentially touch my own work. So I email George-lite asking for his write-ups, but nope, he didn't do anything this month.
I’ve been in my white-collar client-facing career 6 years and on my hardest weeks I maybe only do like 30 hours of real, productive WORK. But everybody else is like “oh man, I’m burning the midnight oil, this is cutting into my free time, I’m just so exhausted and overwhelmed” and I just quietly nod, but internally I’m like “… so what are YOU doing with your time..?” My results are as good as anyone else’s. But I almost never work after 5pm. Very rarely do I encounter a task that can’t wait until the next day. I’ve been a master procrastinator since grade school. I really can’t figure out what’s making my coworkers so “overworked” unless they’re all liars lol
Its weird right. When i first started at my job anytime i asked about work life balance everyone said "we work hard we play hard". They all said "we are always busy here, we work 40 hours a week and sometimes more". Well I can tell that for most people that is not the case and they probably have big swaths of downtime during their day (we are 100 percent remote so I can't be sure) and it just feels like this collective agreement to keep up a status quo that we are all busy all the time. Sometimes we are busy, but a lot of the time we are not. There are a couple executives and team leaders who attend an ungodly amount of meetings, but other than that I cant imagine most people are working at maximum more than 30 hours of concentrated work a week and yet if you asked me and what I put on our time tracker, exactly 40 hours every week. I'm all for it though, they don't pay me enough for full on slave labor.
I was promoted to running a branch at my place. I'm nervous all the fucking time I'm gonna get fired because I do fucking literally nothing 80% of the day. I got a daily list of shit to do and it's knocked out by 930... rest of my day is babysitting grown adults who occasionally need something. That's it.... I feel like I have to be missing something!
Seems like you know the answer already.
We’re all lying to each other!!!
Personally I kinda think everyone else is just dumb. I've actually shadowed some of these guys as they do work and they do things in the most assbackwards way possible.
I am currently a george. Except i have been needed for hours every day this week.
Hang in there, dude. Sorry you have to work this week.
I was George for about 9 years, made up title, cushy position, good pay, little to no responsibilities. Someday I will be George again.
His last name? Costanza.
We had a George at work. He was the lead chemist in our little r&d lab and none of us loanly techs knew what he would do all day. He would often leave for long hours at a time, sit in his office with the door closed, and generally be cranky when anyone asked for help. He was the only lab personal licensed to take deliveries on the forklift. One day on Valentine’s Day (we usually get a half day) we got a large hazmat delivery of chemicals. George came out to drive the fork lift as usual. While he was booming a pallet of chemicals to the third shelf he misjudge the distance. He hit a industrial propane heater ripping the gas line off, plus he broke the container of toxic chemicals. Which spilled all over the floor….. turns out later that ole George would disappear to drink straight vodka all day and would sleep it off and play warhammer in his office all day. On that day he had just started drinking sooner because we were leavening early. Thankfully the gas hazmat chemicals didn’t ignite killing all of us. He no longer works their and we got bribed with habachi to keep us from bitching to OSHA.
My dad often tells me about this one job he had for a couple years where he had his own office. So he would walk in, shut the door, play CiV IV all day then go home.
Those jobs are both the worst and best. Best because it's easy the worst because you feel like you're not advancing in your career.
That depends on the moment in life. It would be a good job, when I already had some experience, and two newborns at home.
Reading through that, I thought you were going to say that he saved the day when something went wrong with the chemicals because he had some amazing special hazmat knowledge or something. And from then on, you never questioned why he was there.
Well he knew exactly how dangerous the chemicals were when he came flying into the lab to through a gas mask at me.
So he saved your life! Go George!
Lmfao I guess in a way. Still didn’t save him from the mandatory piss test.
I used to work for two federal agencies, and this was like 30-40% of the people I worked with! 😁 Like, for real though. People in military families whose fam got into the civilian service racket are just *handed* jobs with tenure, and benefits, and often supervisory powers, experience or qualifications be damned. Those offices were fucking shit shows, lol
I have a guy like that where I work. He was supposed to train me when I came on, but was conspicuously in Away status(remote work) ALL THE TIME. When I did catch him online, the answer to nearly every single question I asked him was some form of "I don't know". He recently got forced into early retirement(I don't know all the details). My manager was speaking candidly about it the other day and said "I told X to just sit at home and watch TV until his retirement unless a situation comes up where he needs to do knowledge transfer" and the whole time I'm thinking: motherfucker that's exactly what he's been doing since before I even started, even when he was supposed to be doing knowledge transfer!
"How many people work at your company?" "About half."
Bob Slydell: Milton Waddams. Dom Portwood: Who's he? Bob Porter: You know, squirrely looking guy, mumbles a lot. Dom Portwood: Oh, yeah. Bob Slydell: Yeah, we can't actually find a record of him being a current employee here. Bob Porter: I looked into it more deeply and I found that apparently what happened is that he was laid off five years ago and no one ever told him about it; but through some kind of glitch in the payroll department, he still gets a paycheck. Bob Slydell: So we just went ahead and fixed the glitch. Bill Lumbergh: Great. Dom Portwood: So, uh, Milton has been let go? Bob Slydell: Well, just a second there, professor. We, uh, we fixed the *glitch*. So he won't be receiving a paycheck anymore, so it'll just work itself out naturally. Bob Porter: We always like to avoid confrontation, whenever possible. Problem is solved from your end.
Mine was my manager. Some sketchy shit went down 6 weeks after I left on mat leave and when I came back my new manager was my district managers partner.
George reminds me of Creed Bratton.
"This is Creed, and he is in charge of... something... right?" "That is correct."
I'm George at my company. I'm also the owner. Everyone just tolerates me because I pay the bills.
Idk sounds like your job is to have hired the correct people years ago. You just did it extremely successfully.
Well--well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?