jobasaurus

Yesterday a nice woman who sits near me announced she had to leave the company for family / personal reasons. It's too bad when someone nice / fun / bubbly / chipper / female like her leaves, because they're the kind of people that make office life slightly less unbearable. Everyone that she told-- from peons like myself to even upper level management-- reacted with the requisite sadness and, more importantly, everyone let her know that they were jealous in their own way. Some said 'take me with you' in a mock-joking fashion, while others blatantly said things to the effect of 'I wish I could do that.' Hearing others' reactions to her announcement made me even more confident in my decision to drop everything and try to realign my life into doing something that I could potentially wake up every morning and want to do.

I managed to keep my head from collapsing on the boardroom table during a completely mind-numbing two hour meeting yesterday by trying to pay attention to what everyone was talking about and thinking about just how ingrained corporate inefficiencies are in our minds around here. It seems that priority #1 for managers (at least around here) is to get their paperwork done correctly and to make sure their teams do all their paperwork correctly too so they don't get shat upon by the next rung up in the ladder. But the shit they were talking about in the meeting yesterday... man, was it dumb. Call me sexist, but I almost felt emasculated listening to grown men with degrees in engineering (and with higher-ranking engineering roles than me) making a big deal about 'concatenating files' (read: copying and pasting text) and 'SLOCing files' (running a tool that takes 10 seconds to count lines of code so our managers can be happy with our 'productivity rates' (how many lines of code we've written, which is really a complete bullshit measurement of productivity, but that's neither here nor there (if you want to read a good article about what a pile of crap SLOC productivity is, read this article about Bill Hertzfeld's work on the original Macintosh))). To all my friends that think a degree in computer science or a career in computer programming directly correlates to computer savviness, you would be surprised at how often that is an exception rather than the rule. I then amused myself by coming up with quick computer program ideas that would do all the work these girlie men were bitching about and the manager was perparing to allocate many 'man-months' to accomplish.

How would it feel to be replaced by a shell script?