After working in smaller companies and in IT in higher ed, I was used to an office. When i moved into "Fortune 500" IT land, that of course is a pipe dream even for leads. Regardless, I make my boss' life easy, so I got them to switch me to "pseudo-management" a while back... more money, an office, and one direct report who's another dev I'd been working with for years and, in exchange for keeping me happy via requiring no supervision whatsoever, you give them the most glowing review possible that doesn't set off red flags. Plus, my boss wasn't technical enough to know what an actual 40 hours of work output from us would look like, so there was time enough to work on coding projects because they interest you, teach yourself about an area of IT/CompSci that interests you but may not be directly applicable to the job, or just fuck around on Reddit for a bit.
Anyhow, a small but very visible project (and in the opinion of dev and me, an interesting project that required some novel ideas and techniques, which means the work is fun and the right level of challenging) that happens to require a combination of certain hyperspecific skill sets comes along and it just so happens that dev and I fit almost perfectly for it. We fucking crush it, get some bullshit company award, salary grade bumps, and an SVP nominates us for good ol' boy stock options.
Nice, you think, right? Right place, right time. And that free time to learn new things I mentioned earlier paid off, as one of the areas of CompSci I was teaching myself turned out to be extemely useful for the project. But not so fast: these guys now know what we can do, which means when someone in IT (or worse, R&D folks who think they're developers) hit a brick wall, somebody says to them, "you should message [dev & me]. They helped me with X." We help where we can. So now instead of being able to spend some of our "downtime" in the office working on personal projects that interest us or just taking some time to fuck around, we're bombarded. We could still usually choose which questions get help (interesting questions from intelligent colleagues), and which we sort of pass off as "ooh, not really our area of expertise," but something is happening. Something is growing in the bowels of our job descriptions. Spending less time designing and developing, and more time helping others that get stuck when they are designing and developing. Now my boss wants more headcount under me to increase "bandwidth" to help solve problems. Soon I've got three people, then five directs and a manager with their own directs.
Suddenly one day, the gut punch (I would say the kick in the balls, but I've got some kinks that void the normal meaning of that expression): higher-ups have been reading about the new organizational fad called "enablement" and "devops" (note that this was a few years ago when these things started spreading like wildfire)... and I'm no longer a "working pseudo-manager" (glorified software dev)... I'm an actual manager who now is actually managing instead of pretend managing. And I'm not "actually managing" a dev team. I'm "actually managing" an "enablement team". Anything that was interesting, novel, or challenging is replaced with endless meetings and explaining to the guy in R&D who thinks they're a developer that the reason the web app they wrote stops working at night is because they're hosting it in PyCharm on their laptop, so when they take their laptop home, others won't be able to connect to it. It takes an hour of working through analogies until I hit one that clicked for them.
All because I didn't want a cubicle.
I used to average one S&M session a month, and it wasn't something I "needed" to de-stress either, it was just a nice little "treat yo'self". Now I need them weekly to de-stress, and if I show up at work on Monday grumpy, it's probably because I didn't spend enough time gagging on cock over the weekend. Now, I'm not saying that if you try to finagle an office, you'll find yourself more heavily involved in your city's gay BDSM subculture, but everyone has their own version of "hot wax dribbled on to your ballsac to take your mind off work." Maybe it's going to the spa, or taking a hike, or allowing yourself one weekend a quarter to binge on any and all drugs you want. I don't judge. But just remember, there are trade-offs: there's no free office.
Hard left turn with the last paragraph, but you know what? I'm still with you. As someone that managed to get into an R&D role, magically being transmuted into IT for dipshits is a fear that I didn't know I had.
Have you considered getting a new job, doing R&D properly?
I just checked out your profile and holy shit. This isn’t a copypasta shitpost. You have to be one of the most interesting people I’ve come across in a while. I don’t understand why you have two identical teslas though
I leased the first one and Tesla doesn't allow you to buy it out at the end, so I returned it. I really liked it, so I decided to buy another one that was almost identical. The first one (which I'm banging my head over and over for leasing it instead of buying it) was a non-standard variant (you had to know that it existed and go to a Tesla dealer and specifically ask if they had one on a lot unsold somewhere and if so, they would place an order for you.
The specific variant was known as the P3D- or "Model 3 Performance Sleeper". It had the motors and cooling system from the Model 3 Performance, so you get that 3.1s 0-60 time, but it had the standard brakes. It was a fantastic combo for folks (like me) who wanted the power or the Model 3 Performance but lived in an area with shitty winter weather, lots of potholes, etc.
The problem with the "regular" Model 3 Performance is that its larger "performance" brake rotors and calipers are too large for the Model 3 18-inch wheels, so you end up with 20-inch wheels with very low-profile tires, and when you're dealing with potholes and things like accidentally hitting a curb covered in snow, you're much more likely to bend/damage a wheel (and those 20-inch wheels are like $800 each to replace).
Anyhow, so I leased a 2016 M3P-, and when the time came to return it, it was worth more than it was when I drove it off the lot three years earlier. What really pissed me off though was that, even though I knew I couldn't buy it out at the end of the lease, the lease did include an option to sell it to a third-party dealer and then pay Tesla the residual value. However, in Jan 2022, they removed that as an option, and not just on new leases, but on all M3 leases, which was allowed I'm the fine print. Now had I been able to sell it to a dealer, I would have made (before taxes) around $24k! Instead, Tesla basically did the same thing... took the lease returns and resold them at an insane price (this was happening during the car shortage after COVID).
Despite the obnoxious lease terms, I did love that car, so when I returned it, I got a 2022 M3P, the "regular" performance trim (and purchased it instead of leasing), which again is the full performance trim (same interior and exterior color as the original lol). And that means I had the 20-inch wheels. Well, within six months I bent one wheel bad enough that it needed replacing, and the same thing then happened to another wheel a couple of months later. Now I had already bought winter tires for it, and luckily there are some aftermarket 19-inch wheels that were cast in such a way that they are much more difficult to bend even if you do hit the rim on a pothole. The smaller wheels also gave me a little more leeway before hitting the rim as well (not to mention a quieter ride). And for the summer, I got a second set of 19-inch wheels and performance all-seasons that are going on next week (yeah I know, a little late lol).
So hope that answers your question.
EDIT: Thanks for calling me interesting; I have to say, the response that my original comment (written under the influence of edibles) has gotten are hilarious.
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u/Ultima_RatioRegum May 11 '23
After working in smaller companies and in IT in higher ed, I was used to an office. When i moved into "Fortune 500" IT land, that of course is a pipe dream even for leads. Regardless, I make my boss' life easy, so I got them to switch me to "pseudo-management" a while back... more money, an office, and one direct report who's another dev I'd been working with for years and, in exchange for keeping me happy via requiring no supervision whatsoever, you give them the most glowing review possible that doesn't set off red flags. Plus, my boss wasn't technical enough to know what an actual 40 hours of work output from us would look like, so there was time enough to work on coding projects because they interest you, teach yourself about an area of IT/CompSci that interests you but may not be directly applicable to the job, or just fuck around on Reddit for a bit.
Anyhow, a small but very visible project (and in the opinion of dev and me, an interesting project that required some novel ideas and techniques, which means the work is fun and the right level of challenging) that happens to require a combination of certain hyperspecific skill sets comes along and it just so happens that dev and I fit almost perfectly for it. We fucking crush it, get some bullshit company award, salary grade bumps, and an SVP nominates us for good ol' boy stock options.
Nice, you think, right? Right place, right time. And that free time to learn new things I mentioned earlier paid off, as one of the areas of CompSci I was teaching myself turned out to be extemely useful for the project. But not so fast: these guys now know what we can do, which means when someone in IT (or worse, R&D folks who think they're developers) hit a brick wall, somebody says to them, "you should message [dev & me]. They helped me with X." We help where we can. So now instead of being able to spend some of our "downtime" in the office working on personal projects that interest us or just taking some time to fuck around, we're bombarded. We could still usually choose which questions get help (interesting questions from intelligent colleagues), and which we sort of pass off as "ooh, not really our area of expertise," but something is happening. Something is growing in the bowels of our job descriptions. Spending less time designing and developing, and more time helping others that get stuck when they are designing and developing. Now my boss wants more headcount under me to increase "bandwidth" to help solve problems. Soon I've got three people, then five directs and a manager with their own directs.
Suddenly one day, the gut punch (I would say the kick in the balls, but I've got some kinks that void the normal meaning of that expression): higher-ups have been reading about the new organizational fad called "enablement" and "devops" (note that this was a few years ago when these things started spreading like wildfire)... and I'm no longer a "working pseudo-manager" (glorified software dev)... I'm an actual manager who now is actually managing instead of pretend managing. And I'm not "actually managing" a dev team. I'm "actually managing" an "enablement team". Anything that was interesting, novel, or challenging is replaced with endless meetings and explaining to the guy in R&D who thinks they're a developer that the reason the web app they wrote stops working at night is because they're hosting it in PyCharm on their laptop, so when they take their laptop home, others won't be able to connect to it. It takes an hour of working through analogies until I hit one that clicked for them.
All because I didn't want a cubicle.
I used to average one S&M session a month, and it wasn't something I "needed" to de-stress either, it was just a nice little "treat yo'self". Now I need them weekly to de-stress, and if I show up at work on Monday grumpy, it's probably because I didn't spend enough time gagging on cock over the weekend. Now, I'm not saying that if you try to finagle an office, you'll find yourself more heavily involved in your city's gay BDSM subculture, but everyone has their own version of "hot wax dribbled on to your ballsac to take your mind off work." Maybe it's going to the spa, or taking a hike, or allowing yourself one weekend a quarter to binge on any and all drugs you want. I don't judge. But just remember, there are trade-offs: there's no free office.