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Am electrician, can confirm.

To be fair, I don't get called out to fix good work. If something's fucked, it's usually because some "handyman" who "totally knows what he's doing" was there before.

Between that, and the fact that most of the people involved in wiring up houses are just laborers under an electrician's supervision (ostensibly), yeah, I get plenty to complain about.

It also makes it easier, I feel, for customers to stomach the bill if I can adequately explain how much better off they are now that I've done my job.

My previous house was a new build. I had some weird electrical problems. I called the builder and they sent someone out.

The guy looked at my panel and said, "Oh yeah, I remember this house. We had to fire the electrician who wired your house because he was always showing up high."

What’s fun is criticizing someone’s code and lack of proper comments/documentation, and then realizing you wrote it 3+ years ago.

I work in municipal development. I was driving by and saw a hellscape development starting up and blocking traffic in the middle of Rush hour. So I pulled over, put on my City reflective vest, and went out to see who the hell authorized them for this bullshit.

They pulled out a permit with my signature on it.

I was doing some construction work this past weekend, and encountered some wiring that I did about 20 years ago. I spent the first 5 minutes complaining about the crazy asshole who wired it up, knowing full well that it was me. I am in this picture and I do not like it.

I always tell every apprentice i work with that they need to make sure they weren't the last guy to touch ut when they start bitching about the dumbass that came before them

That is part of my job description (SW Engineer)

I have a couple of colleagues in the kitchen where I work who stand babbling, as if in a daze, if they see a mistake's been made, sometiems for up to a minute. Very frustrating for me, as I prefer to just solve the problem. I remember one time holding my hand out to ask for the pan as my colleague stood with it, stirring it with a pair of tongs, repeatedly muttering that there weren't enough peas in the linguine, and I was saying, fine, then give me the pan and I'll chuck more peas in, but she just kept yammering away. Really fucks me off, haha.

Turns out that if you were doing software development but using wires instead, it's even more cumbersome, difficult and open to shitty solutions that other idiots before you tried out, and will also be fixed by idiots after you.

Because you know, solutions to problems are hard. And we all suck.

So instead... You look at the situation in disbelief, cursing, complaining, scoffing. Then you see a comment line and realise it's your code from two years ago and you had the audacity to put your name to it like it might be a legacy worth preserving one day.

I worked on one project that was essentially one main app and then a plugin architecture where other companies could write modules that would be run inside the main app. My explicit instructions were to make it very difficult to actually write one of these modules (so that our competitors could not actually be competitive) and boy did I deliver! If my company had really wanted to deliver something like this that actually worked (in the sense of other companies being able to make real contributions) it would have been trivial to make everything HTML-based web apps.

I had to endure a roasting session where some junior developers laid into "grampa" for his absurdly bad design decisions. I suppose I deserved it, though, for my poor ethical choices.

As a software developer and sometimes home electrician, I am so glad that house wiring doesn't support git blame, but it would be nice to know who not to hire because the work in my house when I purchased it was appalling

This right here is the proof that programmers are engineers.

git blame

Ah, shit.

I was about to say "Yeah, but electricians are pissed off because if they fuck up, fire happens."

But then I remembered THERAC-25.

My dad was a carpenter who did some electrician work. Can confirm. Living in any house not built by him was worth two years of complaining and a year of fixing it. Other than that, it was hard to frustrate him with anything else. Cool as a cucumber. Did beautiful work, too.

The worst is when you're also the previous engineer

Yup. I had the furnace guy over and he complained about a surge protector the previous guy put on (apparently put in on wrong). It guess it comes w/ the territory.

The worst, for either career, is working out that it has to be this awful. Like there's an obvious right way, and that doesn't work because of some aggravating circumstance, and the simple workaround wouldn't fit the use-case, and properly doing what's necessary would be hideously inefficient... so... bodge.

Clunk clunk get it done.