A while back, one of my kids and his girlfriend and some mutual friends of theirs went to Las Vegas to celebrate her birthday over a long weekend. As young people are wont to do, they booked the crappiest hotel for the cheapest price, to have more money to hand directly to the casinos. I did exactly the same thing when I was their age.
But Vegas has changed, and fraying carpets and broken sinks are not the only terrors that away you on the low end anymore.
I have been a programmer for a very (very) (very) long time and it is my considered (and correct) opinion that the best software development methodology is not Agile or Waterfall or Spiral or Scrum or Kanban or Rapid Application Development or Feature-Driven Development or Test-Driven Development or Extreme or Lean or Joint Application Development or any of a couple of dozen others produced by people with books to sell and seminars to schedule.
The best software development methodology consists of one person with a list of things to do in a text file. If a piece of software cannot be development via this method, it should not be developed at all. Such things have only gotten us in trouble.
In very, very rare circumstances — operating systems, the space program, any AAA video game I like — the second-best software development methodology is allowed. This consists of a team of four or five people who share the text file and go out to lunch together every day but don’t talk about work.
We are — as all good people are — Dodgers fans, and so we get taken out to the ballgame, and we root, root, root the home team, and if they don’t win it’s a shame, and then we go get milkshakes.
I can’t tell you how we started doing this — other than a vague sense that there should always be milkshakes — but I do know that any time a game ends, we take the Academy exit, turn onto Stadium Way, and then merge with Riverside. A couple of miles down the road, at the intersection with Fletcher, there’s Rick’s.
Rick’s is… an institution. That’s a polite way of saying it’s got three and a half stars on Yelp. I’ve never actually eaten their food, but the shakes are good and it’s got a greasy-spoon charm and they’re open after games and it is an institution.
During the pandemic, they put “SPAGHETTI IS BACK” on their marquee, and it went viral, because we were all kind of nuts in 2021.
Yesterday, as a buddy and I were driving-through to get milkshakes — Dodgers: 12, Marlins: 7, in a game that had more bad fielding than I’ve seen before in my life, combined — the sign had this:
(Yes, I know it’s a bad photo. My windshield was so dirty, the phone focused on that instead of the actual sign. Leave me alone.)
It said, “HAPPY BDAY CRASHOVERRIDE”. Which, no, it couldn’t possibly have.
“Crash Override” is the hero from the much-beloved and genuinely bad 1995 nerd movie “Hackers,” which posits that technically proficient people look like Jonny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie in their mid-20s.
How? Why? What?
Maybe it was the release date? No, “Hackers” came out on September 15. Miller’s birthday? No, that’s November 15. Maybe they filmed some of the movie at Rick’s? No, it was shot in New York. Maybe they meant “HAPPY BIDET CRASHOVERRIDE”? I don’t know.
And so I committed the smallest act of journalism possible, which should qualify me for a Pulitzer given how things are going: I called the restaurant.
I said, “This is a weird question, but I came by last night after the game and saw the marquee said ‘HAPPY BDAY CRASHOVERRIDE’ and I was wondering if you knew why?”
And the poor woman who happened to be standing closest to the phone when it rang said: “I don’t know. The customers write stuff down and we put it up and we don’t know what it means.” Which, I admit, is disappointing and leaves me with no ending to this story.
Good milkshakes, though.
My son calls the achy-muscled, sticky-mouthed aftermath of falling asleep on the sofa while watching TV “waking up on Roku Road.”
My wife and I went to the pub tonight to watch the Dodger game, and accidentally discovered that you can tell the blood-alcohol level of a room by playing “Take Me Home, Country Roads” and seeing how many people sing along.
John Denver: Drunkometer.
On February 24, Greg Knauss was asked to remove himself from his place of employment.
That request came from his boss.
[The “Odd Couple” theme starts to play, but instead of a saxophone, it’s a tuba, which is somehow both sadder and much funnier.]
I had never been laid-off before, so I’m going to use that as the excuse for not knowing what was coming, and not that I’m a monumental naif. When a one-on-one with your manager appears on your calendar late Friday afternoon for early Monday morning, I can now state with confidence that it’s not going to be a good thing. They’re trying to do you a favor by not ruining your weekend.
I was also surprised to find out that I’d be given two weeks notice — like if the company was quitting me. “We’ve enjoyed our time here, Greg, but have an opportunity that we feel we can’t pass up.”
I’d just had a good review, with a raise and a bonus, and I’m pretty sure my manager would have assured me that I wasn’t being dropped over the side for performance reasons if Legal allowed them to say anything that wasn’t absolutely, litigationally neutral. I’d wager the “I’m sorry” was reviewed and approved. It took all of fifteen minutes.
Since I am a giant bundle of OCD ticks and reward triggers, I used the two weeks to finish some documentation, host an in-person knowledge transfer, test and check-in the last of my code, and give a presentation to a large group of senior engineers on an architectural change that I’d made and was proud of. My wife made me remove the strike-through over my title on the first slide: “Greg Knauss, Expert Engineer”.
Well, I thought it was funny.
All told, getting laid-off seems to have gone as well as it could have, other than the whole not-having-an-income thing. They offered generous severance, plenty of support services, and that two weeks where I could say my good-byes and tidy up. I genuinely valued that.
I signed the non-disparagement agreement to get my severance, so the only real complaints I have are ████ ███, ████ ██ ████, and that motherfucking █████ ███ bullshit.
Ahem.
As of today, I’m two months out from my notice, and the various services will start to wind down through the start of the summer. I’m paying for my own health insurance. In two weeks, my “preferential re-hire period” ends and I won’t be considered for another role at the company for a full year. It’s like when the girl who dumps you blocks your number, but in a way that’s intended to encourage you to move on. Also, stop driving by her apartment, man; it’s creepy. It’s not your business whose car that is.
I think the biggest worry I have about all this is that it probably means my career is over, at least as a living, growing thing. I’m 57 years old, and I have no managerial aspirations or interest. IC4LIFE, baby. I’m good at what I do — sometimes very good — and I’ve been lucky enough to get paid increasing amounts of money to do it over the past 40 years. I’ve maybe, possibly, perhaps improved the lives of the people who use my software a little.
But 150,000 programmers were laid-off in 2024, with another 22,000 so far in 2025. There’s a global recession coming because Biff Tannen is in charge of the economy, and wants to see if he can do a wheelie. Oh, and anyone with a Cursor subscription and a big hole where their common sense should be thinks they’re going to start writing production code.
That’s not (much of) a lament. I’ll be (mostly) fine. If my career is over, employment probably isn’t. I feel sorry for the people who didn’t have the foresight to be born into literally the best job market for nerds in the history of the planet. Sorry, kids. It honestly seemed like the party would go forever.
It’s my emotional well-being that I have the biggest worries about, which is a very old-white-guy thing to have worries about after getting canned. I have yet to even begin the re-framing that I thought was still a decade away. If I’m not a professional, career programmer, who am I? Yeah, yeah: father, husband, friend, sexual dynamo, I know, I know. But I’ve put an awful lot of my conception of myself — the me that I think of when I think of me — into making software. “What do you do?” doesn’t really cover it — it’s more “Who are you?”
I’ve been encouraged by various smart and emotionally healthy people to see this as an adventure. But, of course, the Chinese word for “adventure” uses the same glyph as “unsettling disconnect between the current state of reality and the previous one, where you inextricably linked your self-identity and self-esteem to the recognition provided by the corporate reward cycle.” It’s a complex and beautiful language.
I sold my first piece of software when I was 17, and I’ve been doing basically that same thing in the four decades since. If I’m being honest, the idea of having that particular often-upward avenue closed off — by economic forces, by the biases of the culture, by the fact that various industry whims and fads that are treated as roadmaps — scares me, and I haven’t found a good way to deal with it yet.
Where am I going with this? I was hoping you’d know.
It’s so weird that it took years for Clarence Thomas to be removed from the Supreme Court and tried for accepting bribes even after it had been proven that he’s taken millions in “undisclosed gifts.”
…Wait, what?
I’m honestly a little surprised at how many people would burst into flame if I could suddenly set things on fire with my mind.
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