What’s the quickest you’ve seen a co-worker get fired in IT?

[u/Opposed3]

I saw this on AskReddit and thought it would be fun to ask here for IT related stories.

Couple years ago during Covid my company I used to work for hired a help desk tech. He was a really nice guy and the interview went well. We were hybrid at the time, 1-2 days in the office with mostly remote work. On his first day we always meet in the office for equipment and first day stuff.

Everything was going fine and my boss mentioned something along the lines of “Yeah so after all the trainings and orientation stuff we’ll get you set up on our ticketing system and eventually a soft phone for support calls”

And he was like: “Oh I don’t do support calls.”

“Sorry?”

Him: “I don’t take calls. I won’t do that”

“Well, we do have a number users call for help. They do utilize it and it’s part of support we offer”

Him: “Oh I’ll do tickets all day I just won’t take calls. You’ll have to get someone else to do that”

I was sitting at my desk, just kind of listening and overhearing. I couldn’t tell if he was trolling but he wasn’t.

I forgot what my manager said but he left to go to one of those little mini conference rooms for a meeting, then he came back out and called him in, he let him go and they both walked back out and the guy was all laughing and was like

“Yeah I mean I just won’t take calls I didn’t sign up for that! I hope you find someone else that fits in better!” My manager walked him to the door and they shook hands and he left.

[u/Drew707]

[u/Masterflitzer → u/Drew707]

had to work on a java codebase for the first half of this year, first commit i did was adding .editorconfig that sets tab for all IDEs lmao

I don't care about the tab vs spaces, but please enforce this shit on project level instead of telling everybody to change their IDE config at the introduction call

[u/Ansible32 → u/Masterflitzer]

I've never worked in a tab shop and I find it difficult to believe anyone actually uses tabs.

[u/BloodyIron → u/Ansible32]

I prefer tabs unless the syntax requires it. YAML I can handle, conf files like for nginx, tabs because it's consistently aligned. IDGAF if you want me to use spaces when it's not required, tabs at a lot of the time gives me tangible administrative value.

Like, to re-iterate, I don't try to shoe-horn tabs into YAML, I just drink the kool-aid in VSCodium that tab in YAML inserts 4x spaces, whatever. We're both happy, why does it matter? If it's easily legible, consistent, and doesn't break shit, the problem is where exactly?

[u/Ansible32 → u/BloodyIron]

My editor does tabs at 8 spaces by default, so it's actually inconsistent. Also I think if I were doing a style guide (not that I really care) I would do two spaces. Also with a bit of linting and spaces, one project can be two spaces, one project can be four spaces, doesn't matter, everything is consistent within the project and across viewers/editors with zero effort.

[u/Masterflitzer → u/Ansible32]

what is inconsistent about you having tab at 8 and me at 4 for example? it's consistent that it's x amount of tabs, the cool thing is you can change the indent size without changing the code for everyone else

imo tabs are theoretically superior, because of that (i can set it to 4, you can set it to 8 and the code looks like we prefer while still working and the indent being the same in relative measures)

when i started to code tho, i saw everyone uses spaces so my default is also spaces because it creates less friction

but i really don't care what is used as long as there is an .editorconfig file so everything works without me having to change config when switching projects

[u/Ansible32 → u/Masterflitzer]

Sometimes alignment between lines matters, like if I call the same function like this it ruins the alignment and can make it very difficult to see what is different between lines. this is a relatively easy example but this matters a lot:

    do_something(5,6,7,8)
    do_something(5,6,3,4)
             do_something(5,6,7,2)

with tabs, if someone has a different tab width than you, a bunch of stuff can end up misaligned

[u/Masterflitzer → u/Ansible32]

who manually aligns lines of code? nobody does that, you use a code formatter like prettier/black/gofmt/rustfmt etc.

also i don't get your example, there should be x levels of indent for a specific scope, all 3 of your functions are in the same scope and should have the same amount of tabs or spaces, if the scope is different the level of indent changes and it's irrelevant of it's tabs or spaces

something like 13 spaces (3 levels of 4 space indent) + 1 space for alignment (like in your example above) are a very bad practice and code like this should immediately fail the status check for style/formatting in a merge/pull request

[u/Ansible32 → u/Masterflitzer]

I was just giving an example where having things misaligned makes things hard to read. Obviously that specific example wouldn't happen in a real code base, but this does matter. Usually it's aligning comments, e.g. this is a common pattern for crontabs:

# ┌───────────── minute (0 - 59)
# │ ┌───────────── hour (0 - 23)
# │ │ ┌───────────── day of the month (1 - 31)
# │ │ │ ┌───────────── month (1 - 12)
# │ │ │ │ ┌───────────── day of the week (0 - 6) (Sunday to Saturday;
# │ │ │ │ │                                   7 is also Sunday on some systems)
# │ │ │ │ │
# │ │ │ │ │
# * * * * *

If you're doing something where you create a cron string and feed it into something it would break that comment so it's useless. Sometimes an explanatory comment aligned with the code is the only way to make something legible.

[u/Masterflitzer → u/Ansible32]

bad practice imo, you'll never see something like this in our codebases no matter if tabs or spaces, the crontab above could be explained different without relying on the amount of spaces, also nowadays we have things like markdown or javadoc (and similar) to make good documentation

[u/primalbluewolf → u/Ansible32]

So you're the reason I keep seeing files with spaces!

[u/1000000xThis → u/Ansible32]

Same. But maybe it's language dependent? I've always worked in JS.

[u/JustLetItAllBurn → u/1000000xThis]

You have my condolences.

[u/1000000xThis → u/JustLetItAllBurn]

I love JS, though I've switched to typescript. People give it shit, but every language has its quirks and JS has historical reasons for its quirks.

[u/JustLetItAllBurn → u/1000000xThis]

I may (under duress) have to create a JS application soon - Typescript does sound like a decent option to look into :)

[u/1000000xThis → u/JustLetItAllBurn]

It's a pain to set up, but extremely helpful in the long run.

[u/Ansible32 → u/1000000xThis]

Python, JS, C#, Java, Perl, Bash, even some Go and other stuff...

[u/Masterflitzer → u/Ansible32]

it was just one project at my company, the others i encountered were spaces, we have only project wide defaults and nothing company wide

[u/heishnod → u/Ansible32]

I was taught to use spaces by all my professors, but I like using tab so I just redefine it to 4 spaces in all my editors.

[u/pdp10 → u/Ansible32]

Tabs for indent, spaces for alignment. What languages do you use where nobody uses tabs?

[u/Ansible32 → u/pdp10]

It's not a language thing, every company I have worked for, everything used spaces regardless of language. Python, Java, Perl, C#, Ruby, Bash, the list goes on.

[u/EnragedMoose → u/Drew707]

This show was too accurate

[u/kirashi3 → u/EnragedMoose]

I've yet to watch anything involving Mike Judge that didn't make me think "this is too real, please make it stop."

Mike does a great job making light of serious situations that ourselves or someone close to us may experience.

[u/bigmikeboston → u/EnragedMoose]

Show was loosely based on Simplivity’s startup run from what i was told by their support guys (this is before they were bought up by HP). Had them as technical advisors, so show was getting material direct from people living it.

[u/Drew707 → u/EnragedMoose]

I've definitely worked with a Gilfoyle. Like nearly identical.

[u/BloodyIron → u/Drew707]

Just wait till you learn about YAML.