it will be fast, I said
it will be clean, I said

it was neither of those things

so here’s the tea.

i’m a Chinese dev working in a Japanese company. they’ve got this decently sized project a full web app and backend stack and yeah, I’m handling both ends. full-stack life. not a problem. I’ve seen worse.

but the maturity level in this place? the passive-aggressiveness? is different level. have you ever worked somewhere where your coworkers act all sweet on the surface, but lowkey make it feel like everything is your fault in the most obvious way possible?

so here comes the fun part.

the Stripe exchange rate endpoint we were using? deprecated. not globally — just regionally in Japan.

i did my homework. contacted Stripe support. got the chats, screenshots, docs, confirmations, evidence, not .........vibes.

solution? easy. i integrated a third-party API that returns the same exchange rate data. built a cron job to pull and cache the values daily. stored it locally. frontend grabs the user’s currency via IP, backend returns the rate, no stress, no wasted API calls. boom. problem solved.

my manager? totally got it. said it was efficient.
but the founder? man acted like a toddler.

he flipped. said it was my fault.
told me i just "no communicate well...uh...very confuse..." like bro… what even? do I look like I own stripe or do I look like I secretly working for them? plus, i explain in full, still not understand.

he got heated in meeting, so I clapped back in the meeting: you want to argue all day and get nothing done? or you want to understand what’s going on, and let me go back to building stuff that actually works? pick one.

he didn’t like that.
pretty sure he’s shopping for my replacement now. well, doesn’t take a genius to see it.

but I’m not here to babysit egos. I’ll do my job clean, document everything, and keep it professional. meanwhile yeah, I’ve already started looking for something else.

I don't know if I'm one of the only ones who struggles performing at their job.

I have a good foundation in Computer Science and a few degrees, yet I somehow always struggle, especially in Business Analysis. I know it's partially my specific situation since I need to catch up on some studying.

I want Software Development to be comfortable, not agony where 80% of the time I'm pulling my hair out trying to understand how something works. It just makes the job unpleasant. I currently hate algorithms, databases and custom client logic.

For me, Software Development is either fun solving a problem, or dealing with a convoluted, annoying business problem that has to be solved in a very custom way, coupled with tons of headaches about how to engineer things. I don't want that. I want fun and discovery, not agony and wishing I weren't in this industry.

That moment in the morning you realise today is going to be a shit day

How can something called SOAP be such filthy shit. No wonder people wanted to build local-only software back then.

What in the Anus?

Interviewer: Where do you see yourself in five years?

Candidate: Well, I checked your LinkedIn... and most employees leave in two years.

Interviewer: Uh... welcome to the team?" 😂

Our scrum master planned a 1-on-1 to go over everyones tasks when he is off for 20 days (paternity leave) one day before his wife is expected to give birth

Now he is surprised this plan fell through for obvious reasons

power outage, raaaghhh

There was this one time when a coworker needed to update the Xcode.

IIRC because his Mac mini was low on storage space, the update failed && the Xcode became corrupted.

He found that out when he tried to open the Xcode, at which time he was presented w/ an error akin to:
'Xcode was found to be corrupted && was moved to the Recycle Bin'.

C: 'Good, it belongs there!'.

I had a suggestion a week ago. I was told to do a different (simpler) approach. The current approach doesn't work and I'm about to point out the problem basically means I've got to go do what I originally said.

We just had a server outage this morning and my colleague was heading to the office. He was already in a meeting on his phone and got stopped by the police for calling while driving.

He got a fine, lost his driving license for 2 weeks and has to go police court for it. That's an expensive server outage for him

Mmmmm drunk food 🐓🦃🧀🥯🍳

Managers decided that the support contract with one of our most important third party servers is not worth the money.

Take a guess which server caused an outage for all customers twice already :D

CEO is blaming a frontend bug for a backend outage. The server simply did not scale with new active clients ))))))

I'm changing my coffee breaks at work for nap breaks.

Inspired by jestdotty's comment:

> *makes spooky JavaScript noises*

What would be a noise or sound that most accurately represents JS?

I‘ll start with two suggestions and we can vote for the most fitting one.

The industry is so incredibly demanding beyond measure.

Please be proficient in:
- Java, C#, Python, TypeScript, ReactJS, AI, UX, COBOL, AWS, DevOps, security, SecOps, Linux, Unix, System Administration, Database Administration,...

Yeah? Give me six years then before you try to overload me with stress in having to deliver top quality code using these.

I actively try to diminish stress in my life and the major cause of stress is my job.

What is your longest remote desktop chain. Mine is currently at five!

HomePC-WorkPC-JumpStation-FARM3-OperatingPanel

Sometimes we are ping pong balls being smashed from one side to the other. This is me, I'm currently studying a technology. Oops! Change of assignments! Plz study new tech! Ok thanks for the constant context-switching.