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Reminds me of a classic story that makes a good programming parable: Back in 2011, my girlfriend was working at a catering company that announced shifts via a
by galdosdi 2y ago
Reminds me of a classic story that makes a good programming parable:
Back in 2011, my girlfriend was working at a catering company that announced shifts via a webpage and workers had to sign up for them. Other workers tended to pick them up very quickly, so it was hard to get too many shifts.
I wrote a quick web scraper to automatically accept any shift offered and email her.
For a couple weeks it was great, suddenly she had all the work she needed.
Then one day she woke up late to find a voicemail telling her she was fired.
Earlier that morning the script had detected a last minute job announced just an hour before start time and immediately accepted it, resulting in her not showing up to it. I had not accounted for the possibility they would announce a job so last minute, since it had never happened before.
- roughly 2y agoAs they say, Unix gives you enough rope to shot yourself in the foot.
- qup 2y agoHow'd she take it?
- galdosdi 2y agoWell, while we obviously were both upset and sad about the situation, she was very understanding, for which I am thankful. We were in it together. It helped that she managed to find a slightly better job pretty shortly thereafter. Nevertheless I felt really guilty about it and as a result the obvious relevant professional programming lesson was instantly and indelibly burned into my brain: you can fix bugs, but you may never be able to undo the real world user level consequences of the buggy software's time in production before being fixed. I was just out of college then and it solidified more respect for the power of the machine.
- satvikpendem 2y agoI've favorited your top-level comment. This is an incredibly important lesson to learn, one that I wish I learned earlier in life, but your favorited comment will be a reminder for me in the future.
- galdosdi 2y agoI'm deeply gratified. Thank you.
- omerhac 2y agoGreat story. Did they fire her for that one time she didn't show up? Thats tough
- galdosdi 2y agoThis was in 2011, just after the Great Recession. It was a tougher labor market then. It was normal for low skill jobs to fire people on the spot for no show / no call. The labor market has changed in that sector since then.