How not to keep a job

[Roger Feeley]

That's interesting! I've never heard of Decoderscript but a google search shows some info, quick-start guide, a video, and what appears to be some kind of manual.

I mostly stuck with C, Fortran, and a bit of Pascal. I often did UI and logical prototyping in Visual Basic since it was so quick, then did the real coding in C. This was long ago, I have no idea what's available now!

like I said Decoderscript is proprietary to Frontline products. Most of my career was in C, assembly, html and other mainstream languages. Having Decoderscript on your resume probably isn’t going to help you a lot on that next job. That’s why I was a good match. I had no intention of ever having a next job.

Since my departure, they went back to having all software engineers knowing the language. Instead of one Decoderscript programmer, they divided it up. Somebody got Bluetooth. Somebody got Near Field Communication and so on. So, really, the company is better off without me. I guess you could say that I was the band-aide covering a human resource problem.

[Mark Hennebury]

I can really help in this department;

Another way to not keep your job, is to take the boss at his word when he says that he wants someone that can make improvements to benefit the company. I found that company owners think that they want change and improvement, but few are actually willing to pay the price. A new set of eyes in a place see things, sees what's wrong and why, sees the way things could be improved and who has to change, quite often it may be everyone. People don't like being told that they could be doing things better, not your fellow employees, not the managers, a certainly not the owners. Try it.

Or the ones that hire you because they have seen what you have done, and want that creativity in their place, then a short time later tell you that if you want to work with them, you have to work their way.
I will give you an example of this.

I got hired at a new job, and was tasked with designing a new mechanical safety switch. I was given all of the requirements, and told to pick up the original switch for reference.
I did not pick up the original switch, but instead designed a switch based on the requirements that I was given.
I presented the design, and was promptly read the riot act for not picking up the old switch. I was told that I had to sit down, don't speak, take notes and do as I was told.
I was then given a mock-up switch that another employee had made and not finished. This switch was based on the original, and the employee had tried to take the same design and modify it, to no avail.
I was told to take this and make it work. I played with it for an hour and threw it in the trash. He didn't finish it because he couldn't. The original switch was a good design and there was no way to simplify it.
My switch worked, met all of the requirements and was simple and efficient. It was a totally different approach to the original one. The original switch had two cables and two horizontal linear plungers, mine had one rotary disk and one cable! I didn't pick up the original one because i didn't want to be influenced by the original design.

I lasted 30 days before getting the boot.

So my advice would be, if you want to lose your job, concentrate on doing your job, if you want to keep your job, concentrate on keeping your job.

[Roger Feeley]

A short sidebar,
I don’t remember the exact date of my layoff but I can find out by calling my local woodcraft. I got the phone call as I was pulling the woodcraft parking lot to buy a Domino. Woodcraft is one of the few places that I allow to keep my personal information.

[Malcolm McLeod]

... train someone ...

Well said.

I also think its smart to know if you are an outlier in a company of team players, or vise-versa. The two rarely mix well, and so many are incapable of acknowledging their own style - and so their 'insolubility' in that mix.

[Jerome Stanek]

I worked many jobs when I was young. Then I got the chance to start my own business maintaining drugs stores in my area. From that day on I felt that I didn't work anymore and just did what I was happy doing. when that came to an end I was ready to retire but worked for other companies and that was work.

[Brian Elfert]

I worked many jobs when I was young. Then I got the chance to start my own business maintaining drugs stores in my area. From that day on I felt that I didn't work anymore and just did what I was happy doing. when that came to an end I was ready to retire but worked for other companies and that was work.

I would never do construction/carpentry work as a career. However, until COVID, my father I did volunteer construction/carpentry work for a week at a Scout camp every spring. I rather enjoyed doing the work and the time flew by. We worked very hard during that week and would have a hard time driving home at the end of the week due to fatigue. Volunteer work can be rewarding compared to doing the same work for pay. It also helps that it is only a week instead of all the time. I hope to be able to go back next year.

A side note: The Scout camp cancelled the camp fix up event this year because they didn't want 100 extra people at camp due to COVID. However, they ended up holding a huge memorial for the long term camp cook who died on the weekend the fix up event was supposed to on. 300 people came for the weekend for the memorial. Can't have 100 people working in small groups to fix up the camp due to COVID, but you can have 300 people in large groups for a gathering.

[Roger Feeley]

Stan,

My first boss told me the same thing. I credit him with my staying with the same group of people over 30 years and 3 takeovers. He stepped in to right the ship after the previous boss had caused a mass resignation. He is the kind of guy you just didn’t want to let down. Under him we looked for people that had a family and a life. We worked a 37.5 hour week. He used to say that if you couldn’t get your work done in that much time then there was something wrong with us. I never missed any kind of school thing with my daughter. There was no sick leave policy. He said, “We want you here and we want you well. If you aren’t well, we don’t want you here.” That kind of culture persisted long after he had moved on. I think back and marvel at just how much his corporate culture affected all our lives. I was truly blessed.

[Roger Feeley]

Ok, not every day at my original job was all roses. One time I was given the task of writing a serial feed arbitrator. We had packets that were transmitted over two very separate paths. My job was to read both feeds and produce one good feed. A VP gave me and a guy in New York some C code and told us to plug it in. For the life of me couldn’t understand his complex scheme of gates and states. I went home and sat at my little Apple II+ to sort of walk a mile in the vps shoes. I came to realize that he was trying to answer the wrong question. He was thinking of data streams when he needed to think of packets. I simply blended both streams and threw away the duplicates. Sure, I had to have a way to handle the case where a packet is dropped on both feeds. But other than that, it was pretty clean, simple and maintainable. The bonus was that my scheme could handle any number of feeds.

The VP was a bit of a tyrant so I never told him that I didn’t use his code. Maybe his scheme would work on some
computers. I was working on Tandems and my solution was very Tandem-like” .

My opposite number in NY struggled. He never asked me for help so I kept my trap shut.