this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2025
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Fuck AI
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Yikes.
I feel bad for those engineers. Hopefully they have people skills.
Not really two positively correlated things, probably negatively correlated.
I’m an engineer with people skills. We get hired as Solution Engineers. Work for sales teams as technical experts. Great pay. Typically.
My point is that Engineers with good people skills and the patience to provide support to regular people aren't common, not that there aren't any (the business of IT Consultancy, for example, relies on those).
Also they're a lot more expensive than the typical first line support workers.
Grabbing a bunch of random engineers and having them do first line support on a mass market service is thus both idiotic and seriously desperate.
I've got great people skills, no problem.
Now this is a pretty simple problem to fix. First open your IDE, and we'll need to create a quick node project with a couple dependencies. You don't know what an IDE is... Can you open a pull req... No, don't know what that is either. ok sure but this is entry level... Right ok well maybe we can find a way to do this in an online REPL... click beep beep hello? No? Ok guess they figured it out. Job well done. Ticket closed.
Just run my script, here's a link to my public internal GitHub project, you have GitHub access right? Oh, and you need devx setup, I'm not sure how to get the AWS keys otherwise. Oh, you need to be on a Mac and install coreutils with brew because my script uses GNU's tools instead of BSD's because the BSD ones don't have flags I needed.
Are you kidding? What I wouldn't give to be my company's customer support.
"Hi-... Wait, hang on. There's a specific thingyyy... we... are.. sup-poooooooost-AHAH. Here it is, okay. [In sarcastic fancy voice] How can I help you? Lol, I should have been like "Welcome to Costco, I love you" right? hilarious. Idiocracy. And we are living it now. Sad. So... How can I help you?"
...
Oh wow, that's quite the conundrum. Hey, you should get assistance. Hah, jk. Gotcha. No this is an easy one. I mean, you've definitely got a PEBKAC issue but no worries. Let's start by-
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Hey, you and me both. In fact most of the people I work with prefer to work with someone else, hah. But hey, wysiwyg, right? So, let's go. Before we start though, just FYI, it's pronounced comfortable.
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Uh, actually, no you didn't. You said "I'm not comf-TER-a-ble with you helping me." What you should have said was "I'm not com-FORT-a-ble with you helping me - com FORT a ble. See?
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Fair enough, but it's not my fault you skipped the first day of pronunciation school. Baby's first grammar lesson amiright? Hello?"
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Hello?
Whoa, that was under a minute! Mark it on the board. Mark it zero! Donny. Remember that? Oh wait, no, it was Walter! Because he would always say, shut the FUCK up, Donny. That's why I got them mixed up. I always do that with Big Lebowski. Walter. Calmer than you are hah. Good movie. Oh shit, was I supposed to answer that?
Is this how an autistic person communicates because if so I may be one.
I am fully spectrummed, so you may be. But I'm also ADD comorbid with a truckload of trauma so I don't where that puts me any more. I mean, other than psychotherapy. Because that is absolutely figuratively where it has put me. And I can't think of an actual place I'd rather be. You are invited to my birthday party.
OH OH OH!!! I know a lot of really cool bridges. I won't tell you. You have to find them. But you will enjoy them.
Yes. For the job interviews they're doing, to kick this stupid employer out of their lives.
Yeah, the engineers with people skills are probably looking for another job or at least leveraging this to get a raise.