He Spent 18 Months Quietly Patching Broken Code Written by Senior Devs Making Double His Salary—Then He Stopped Auto-Correcting Their Commits
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Burnout comes quickly when you’re the only competent person in a room.
An engineer working at a facility full of PhDs and technical staff found himself spending his days fixing avoidable problems created by overpaid coworkers who clearly didn’t understand the basics of their own jobs.
From cranes that didn’t fit buildings to air conditioning units engineered around a completely wrong unit of measurement, the pattern of costly errors never seemed to end.
What made it worse was realizing these mistakes weren’t isolated incidents, they were symptoms of a much bigger, more frustrating system this employee was growing tired of just ignoring.
Keep reading for the full story.
I’m surrounded by idiots
I know a lot of people say that, but I am seriously surrounded by very educated people who should know better.
This workplace is far from what it seems.
If I told you where I work, you would imagine people with PhDs and lab coats.
There’s definitely a few PhDs, but every day I have to go fix a new problem generated by an incompetent person who makes 3x my salary.
This fed-up employee gives examples.
For instance, they rented an overhead crane to move some heavy equipment.
They decided to do some additional framing in that part of the building, and now the crane has to be bought from the rental company, cut apart with a torch, and sent to a scrap yard.
These colleagues seem to lack foresight — and common sense.
They bought a few trailers to use as office space, set them down in the parking lot, then realized that we don’t have a good space to permanently install them.
They will likely be sold at an auction at a huge loss.
In a different building, they put in a new custom built overhead crane, but they didn’t measure it right and now we have to permanently lower safety railings so the crane will fit.
Then there’s the matter of the air conditioning.
They installed a 40 ton air conditioner. For air conditioning, 1 ton means 12,000 BTUs per hour, not weight.
The person who bought them didn’t know that and engineered a concrete slab built for 40 tons of weight. It is huge, expensive, and makes me laugh whenever I see it.
That’s not all though.
Lastly, every single bathroom has a sign reminding people to not flush paper towels or t-shirts down the toilet.
I get now why people hate us engineers.
Not everyone who got this job really earned it.
The guy who graduated with the minimum GPA and can’t figure out how a wrench works is still an engineer at the end of the day.
And due to nepotism, he is in charge of the big decisions. Us engineers at the bottom spend all day fixing their mistakes until we get fed up and go work for some other idiot.
This is all one big yikes.
What did Reddit have to say?
Incompetent people tend to be rewarded in the workplace more than penalized.
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This user issues some assigned reading.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who got the perfect revenge after being told he can’t work from home.
This user gets a kick out of this story.
This kind of exhaustion doesn’t come from one bad day, it comes from watching the same avoidable mistakes happen over and over with no real consequences.
Being the person who fixes six-figure errors while earning a fraction of the salary of the person who caused them is its own kind of demoralizing.
Nepotism explains a lot here, but it doesn’t make cleaning up after it any less draining.
Maybe finding a better job is the only long-term solution here.
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