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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Not everyone in my position is a sniveling little shit, as much as you may think. I do get paid more than my team, but not by some ridiculous margin. The lowest paid person gets 70% what I do and the highest paid person is at 95%. When I took over it was no shit closer to 40% for the lowest paid member. I fought for that to be fixed and burned up a lot if political capital doing it too.

    When COVID came along and pay cuts and layoffs were a real threat, I told my boss to cut my salary before anyone else’s. We never had to, thankfully, but I literally told him I would quit if they cut one of my subordinates pay or laid them off without first taking out of my pocket.

    I had a direct report who, for three years wanted to be in a leadership role. I fought for a new position for him and put my own ass on the line recommending him for promotion every chance I got. He’s been promoted past me and I hope (since I can’t see his salary anymore) he is getting paid more than me because he’s earned it.

    I’m not some superstar manager, but I do feel like I keep my team out of the political battles and turf wars so they can focus on doing what they do best without dealing with all that crap. That’s my job. When something goes wrong, I’m accountable. So when the people doing the work get it wrong and take a critical system offline by fat fingering a command, I’m the one answering the phones and taking all the shit for it and smoothing things over with stake holders. And unless it was a result of gross negligence, I’m not going to give them hell for it either because I’ve fucking been there before.

    I didn’t even want this damn job. I was perfectly happy being the technical lead and not having job recruiting and performance reviews to do, but I took it because I knew at the very least I would do my best to advocate for the people I care about, and that’s not something I could say about everyone who applied.

    So you can make snap judgements and assume because I manage a team that I’m just collecting a paycheck while everyone else does all the hard work, but I don’t and I won’t because it’s unethical and shitty and despite your own insecurities, I actually give a fuck about other people.


  • Absolutely. As someone who manages a small team, my duties are advocating for the people who work for me, listening to the people closest to the problem, mediating disputes between people with different solutions, and ensuring we are all working towards the same overall goals. Most of the success of the team is directly attributed to their work. My biggest contribution is making sure they have what they need to do their job.


  • I got pulled over in Germany with weed from Amsterdam in the car (I’m an American, visiting my friend). I’m leaving the country the next day, I show them my plane ticket, so instead of giving me a ticket, they have us follow them to an ATM instead and give them 200€. They take my weed, my brand new bubbler, and most of my remaining money. All I was left with was this story.

    Another time, was camping with friends for a week. We have an ounce with us, at the time a big problem if we got caught. We’re on day 1 of 7, sitting on the tailgate of my car, smoking a one hitter and eating PBJs. Cop wheels around the corner, catches us. Started searching my car, I have no fuckin clue where my buddy stashed the bag. I’m sweating bullets. Cop tears the car apart looking for what he knows must be there, but finds nothing. Eventually leaves us with a minor ticket and takes our grinder and our piece. Immediately after he leaves I turn to my friend “where the fuck is the weed!?!” He’s laughing hysterically, lifts up the loaf of bread that was sitting right next to us on the tailgate the entire time, it’s just chilling there in plain sight.



  • I used to think that omniscient and omnipotent god would directly conflict with the idea of free will, which is pretty important for this whole salvation thing. The alternative being that god created you so you would go to hell/heaven and there is nothing you can do to change it, right?

    But as I’ve thought about it, I can’t really get around the idea that an omniscient and omnipotent being could choose to not know something. It seems like there would be no direct conflict with omniscience as long as the things you don’t know, you could know at any moment, should you decide to.

    It’s all academic really since this is one of the least ridiculous things about religion and the idea of supernatural beings having control over our lives. But it doesn’t feel as ironclad a contradiction as I once thought. I’m curious if others in this community can weigh in with a rebuttal.



  • Graphics used to be the hallmark of a great game. Back in the early days, if your game didn’t come with improved graphics, it was trash (like, '90s era games I’m talking about). These days, good graphics can be achieved pretty easily, so it’s not nearly as important as it used to be when trying to stand out from the crowd. If I had to pick the tipping point for this trend, I would have to say Minecraft was the game that proved definitively that graphics < gameplay.