Beware the terminated techie: Revenge is a dish best preceded by an asterisk
Who, Me? With The Great Resignation upon us, depending on which survey you read, we present a reminder that when a programmer has to go… just let them go. Or face whatever form their vengeance might take. Welcome to Who, Me? We go back to the 1970s for today’s tale, courtesy of a reader Regomised as «Thomas». Thomas was working for a consultancy dealing with a national healthcare provider. The lumbering libraries of today did not exist in those halcyon days. No, back then code was optimized to within an inch of its life to make the best use of very limited resources. «All the code was written in assembler,» Thomas explained, «machine code for those who have never got that deep and dirty.» «The code also had to be as small as possible so many tricks were used to reduce bloat, something maybe we have lost nowadays.» Far be it from this writer to nod sagely and stroke a beard of purest gray. Thomas was a freshly minted programmer and was to take over from a predecessor he opted to call «Dick» for reasons that will become clear.
