Programmer Humor

This used to happen to me all the time! Except I always gave an estimate of a minimum, "six weeks". Which was always going to be shorter than the other folks/teams who would always start with a minimum of, "three months".

It was a trick, you see. It meant I was always the first person they asked to do anything which meant I got first pick of any given work coming down the pipe 👍. It was more than that though: From experience I knew which projects were real and which were, "management whims". That is, projects that were going to ultimately get cancelled.

If you know how the system works you can always get a deadline extended. Especially if you, "went out of your way" to try to get it done faster than everyone else. With this knowledge in mind I would accept the, "six week" project with the anticipation that it would get cancelled after a month which happened at least 50% of the time and 100% of the time if it was a, "management whim".

This situation was an extreme disincentive to actually work on any projects at all; because if you spent all day every day working on a project for a month and then in the 4th week it gets cancelled that means you wasted all of your time. You could've been surfing the web or learning new skills/frameworks/operating systems/whatever in that time!

Once I had the system completely figured out I would accept these, "six week" projects and not work on them at all for the first month (I had much better things to do, trust me). If they were still pining over it after that time I'd just request an extra two weeks which would give me a month to actually get it done. Then I'd complete the project--usually in a fucking day or two of dedicated work (e.g. "don't talk to me; I'm not joining any conference calls today"). Then I would deliver the project on the day it was originally due: Two weeks early.

I was a hero at that company. The bosses would regularly throw my name out there whenever someone else's project went over time or over budget, "we should've given this to Riskable!"

Company ended up laying me off and then re-hiring me ~1.5 years later at a vastly increased salary because they, "just couldn't find anyone that delivered" like I did 😁