TBF this was all more than 5 years ago when the job interviewing process at most IT companies involved just putting a moistened finger underneath the candidate’s nostrils. Apparently the programmer job market is pretty horrific these days, although I wouldn’t know since I drive a school bus now.

How about an example from the last 40 years?

MS is waaaay too big to fail.

I was thinking Microsoft employs clever people

As a programmer, I’ve had numerous colleagues who have ended up as software engineers at MS. They were mostly either unbelievably lazy or extremely incompetent. The rest who were both ended up there as managers.

“Comedic” is a better title for this than “Tragic”.

No, that would have been an automod ban – and perfectly understandable.

My cat Martha somehow became “Muffin Sweetie”.

I missed AskHistorians for a little while when I left, but I checked back recently and it’s clear that all the interesting history questions were asked and answered years ago. All that’s left is “what if Hitler had three balls instead of one?” over and over again.

I got banned for racism … for making fun of Vogons. They’re not even a race, and more importantly, they don’t even exist.

I like candy corn but unfortunately I can only eat it in squared fashion. Like, one piece, then two pieces, then four pieces, then eight etc. until the juices are literally running out of my mouth and I have Type XII diabetes.

I was a mobile developer and worked on Windows Mobile and Windows CE (un-ironically called “WinCE” by Microsoft themselves) applications some twenty years ago. It was basically just Windows with a lot of unnecessary cruft stripped out. The basic UI was indeed absurd, with the standard Start menu and utterly dependent on the fucking stylus to work. But for applications it wasn’t actually necessary to even use that shit. You could actually write applications that ran in kiosk mode and had nice big buttons so that users never had to deal with the Start menu or use the stylus at all. And in that mode it was actually extremely powerful – you could do anything that you needed to do programmatically. I never once encountered a situation where something that I needed to do programmatically wasn’t still available in the stripped-down WinCE API.

I have no idea how an engineer working in a software company could trust that thing

Because many of us are fucking morons. I had one colleague who was writing the control software for a baseball-throwing machine. Despite being way past the deadline and way over budget, the client asked him to create a special version of the software so the machine could be used with Little League teams. He decided to do his first test of this version on a field with actual Little Leaguers on it, which resulted in a 125 mph knuckleball (no spin at all so incredibly erratic in flight) a foot above a 10-year-old kid’s head. Which resulted in the only time in my programming career that I had to physically intervene to prevent a fistfight between two people (my boss and the client).

When I read that shit as a kid, I thought Asimov’s laws of robotics were like natural laws, so that it was just naturally impossible for robots to behave otherwise. That never made any sense to me so I thought Asimov was just full of shit.

Limbed Lugubrious Motherfucker

I want my AI to sound like a Speak & Spell.

Excuse me? Comcast belongs on that list.

Stalin’s regime was really reactionary

Even this is a charitable description. The best term for Stalin’s regime is “despotism”.

I actually found Lemmings to be a game that changed my life. I played it just before I became a professional programmer. Solving Lemmings puzzles is not exactly like programming, but it does teach you that there is a solution and if you just keep persistently trying different shit, you will eventually solve the problem. Also, it actually helps to be high as a kite all the time.

Another exploit is to start your own journal and “publish” shit-tons of your own papers. When I was in grad school I was involved in evaluating potential new professor hires. One guy’s entire CV (which was massive) consisted of papers published in journals that he was editor and founder of. He probably would have gotten away with it except that he also listed his editorship of these journals in his CV – like, we didn’t even have to do any research to expose it.

Amazingly enough his application was not immediately tossed out, and he was even flown in for an interview. That is modern Anthropology for you.

As an undergrad, I did all the coursework and thesis writing required for a BS in Physics and a BA in Anthropology, but my college had a policy of not granting dual degrees. For no reason I can remember, I chose the BA in Anthropology. Since I ended up as a programmer, this decision was almost meaningless, except for one job where our billable rate was dependent on our degree and there was a $15 an hour difference between a BA and a BS. This difference translated into how much I was paid, although after stewing over this for a month I threatened to quit and they upped my salary. The joke was on them anyway: it was College Physics and not University Physics!