Protip: dont be that programmer.

You might think that working hard and putting the weight of everything on your shoulders is honorable and will be rewarded. But, no one will care. No one will care until you stop. When you stop dragging everyone else, when they have to start pulling, they'll blame you. To them, things were going great until you started slouching.

I work 13 hour days, full of the risk of life and death, assault, cleaning up incontinent people, and massive legal liability. I barely make enough to afford a 1 bedroom apartment with my bachelor's in my "professional" degree. When I get my master's, and I get to diagnose conditions and prescribe medications, I'll get ~10,000 more per year.

I’m a proces operator. I think I do on average about 5 hours of actual work per week. Nobody gives a shit as long as the machines are running and they almost always are. Also, that sweet 30% untaxed shift allowance.

Shits’s fucking great!

at the age of 16 I was working for a local ISP doing dialup support when we got a call that couldn't be resolved by level one techs ... but was apparently in the same building, across the hall. After going around and around with them for 4+ calls and realizing we were right there, I just walked over on my lunch break, got hired as their helpdesk, walked back, quit, and started connecting all their desktops up to a novell netware network to use their paired ISDN line instead of having dozens of desktops dialing in for 28.8k

This work went on for 8 months, and I was always struck by how many desktops and offices they had, but so few people were ever there. Slept with my future wife on a couch in the lobby lol. Anyway, after almost a year of this, they were raided by the feds for selling fake 'executive personality analysis' and helping tons of companies pick their c-suites based on woo-woo garbage surveys they were selling to fortune 500 companies for thousands of dollars each. Turns out the entire business was lies layered on lies but I cashed the fuck outta those checks and appreciated not having to work fast food.

never underestimate money laundering and scams, there's shittons out there

Sounds like somebody needs to learn to shut the fuck up.

I was part of a stable of about 50 programmers working for a company that manufactured lubricants circa 2000. For about a month at one point, the entire roomful of programmers spent the entire day calling into Who Wants to be a Millionaire? to try and get on the show. Absolutely nothing happened to the company -- lubricants kept getting manufactured and sent to customers on schedule. The entire operation ran on mainframe applications that dated to the 1970s. I'm not even sure what any of these programmers did other than myself, and all I did was write IE6-based web frontends that sat on top of the mainframe apps (and they're still running to this day lol, which means the mainframe apps are still in use).

In the 70s my grandfather owned a muffler company and they'd all go to lunch at 11 till 3 and get good a drunk. Every day.

I think that’s precisely where the central problem of our time lies: in the imbalance between the value created and the social significance of jobs, on the one hand, and the compensation paid for those jobs compared to administrative and management positions, on the other.

The best example of this, in all its absurdity, is that billionaires are getting richer and richer—or rather, that they exist at all.

The key is recognizing your worth. I'm this programmer from this example where I work. In the last 3 years I negotiated two separate times for higher pay, collectively increasing my pay 80% and it was relatively easy. You have to be willing to walk out the door though if it doesn't work out.

I've been offered the office job twice in my life now. I've always worked in a shop in industrial electrical manufacturing and field service. The first time was my old job, I ended up quitting entirely and walking out on a promotion for drafting, which paid less than my current job's base salary and which has just exploded with raises, bonuses, overtime, double time on Sundays. I'm pretty happy where I'm at. But now my boss just mentioned there's something available in the office at the end of the year and he'll keep me in mind.

I'm kind of at a crossroads. Do I keep the job I physically enjoy doing more and keeps me busy and on my feet and hanging out with people who I enjoy their company? Or do I take the job which is gonna be a lot more boring, a lot of killing time, with relatively boring strangers, but would push me a lot into more knowledge and skills? And I'm genuinely interested in the field and want to learn more and apply myself, but I've never been someone who could sit at a desk all day. I've never had a job like that. But also I'm starting to outgrow my current position and it does get awfully repetitive testing and doing QA all day. I told him I'd think on it.

I have a manual job that I could satisfactorily fulfill in 3 days a week, 2 if I get my head down but no, I waste my time for 5 days/40 hours a week.

I don't get why people are so bitter about this stuff. Jealousy, I guess?

Like, yeah productivity has exploded and now most office jobs that used to take hours of manual work, take minutes of digital labor.

But right, everyone else's job is bullshit except the brave lowly programmer... who is probably totally ignorant of what everyone else's job is, just like they are ignorant of the programmer's job... it's almost that's why you need so many people doing so many specialized tasks.

But I get it, this is bait for the 'engineer/programmers are the only really productive members of society' crowd. And you wonder why most people think you're insufferable twats with complexes...

Anon is a programmer

Hr is addicted to tiktok sounds like an anti HR trope and slightly lessens the credibility of the story so I can't really trust anon without him expanding on that note