I just reviewed a resume that has 18 pages. I thought I've seen the worst. I have three stories so hopefully, the people having a hard time finding a job would get something out of this. Some people just don't make sense.

Candidate no. 1: The guy has a specific section for "Personal Details" with information that includes the following:

Gender: Male
Race: <citizenship>
Nationality: <name of his country>

In the work experience, he indicated his responsibilities and one of them was "protect the name of the company at all costs". Wow, my pee pee hard. He has a shitload of Apple certifications and cancelled an interview before. On the date of his re-scheduled interview, the recruiter couldn't contact him. Probably died from an overdose of whatever drug he was on. Thank god, I did not want to waste both of our time.

Candidate no. 2: One of those "proactive" egotistical junior developers. So eager to trash other languages, elitist little fucks, and one of those "Windows bad, reeeeee" types. He said he only uses Linux but he can also use Windows because he would run a virtual machine in Windows that has Linux in it. Big brain 2020. I checked his LinkedIn profile and voila, the most recent of his activities was a shared post saying it should be illegal to push code that doesn't follow PEP8 standards. I crossed my fingers not to see an "HTML is not a programming language" shit in there.

I checked his portfolio, bloated piece of shit that has one of those rounded boxes in the middle. 50% nothing and 50% box that has all the details. He has menus named "Face" and "Emoji Events". He says there "I'm a pedantic programmer" and right after that statement are grammatical errors in various states of decomposition.

Interview day, he didn't miss the chance to tell me about how he wants everything to follow the standards and that his current company doesn't have good documentation so he's looking for other jobs. Strict about standards such as naming conventions but doesn't know data structures and algorithms. Epic priorities.

"Okay." I give him the assessment exam and left him alone for 30 minutes. I told him that he doesn't have to answer all of it and it's just a way to assess his knowledge (hint: try your best and be honest). I came back and he's browsing on his phone. He said he's looking for answers in SO but the connection went down.

"Okay." I checked the exam, no answers for most of it and the ones with answers are all wrong. Technically, you already cheated and yet you didn't get to answer all of it and you didn't even get anything right.

"Okay." He asks, "Do you use a lot of Math in the project?" I was confused. He then said that the exam has a lot of Math in it. The exam was a basic programming exam - how to swap the values of two variables, data structures, what is the time complexity of this and that, method resolution order, etc.

Candidate no. 3: A "full stack" developer. When you see that title, you know you're in for a carnival ride. Senior developer, almost 20 years of experience, has a Master's degree in a reputable university. Every page has a small box with some artsy style on it and a small chunk of information like where he graduated and shit. It's like a scrapbook of pain. This pattern repeated for the rest of the pages. I feel like I read a whole book and got nothing. Like you can ask me what the book I've been reading all day is about and I can't answer you because I don't fucking know. The amazing part is he would often have titles that look like this:

Software Develope
r

System Administrato
r

The fuck? I checked his LinkedIn and of course, I see that "Dear recruiters, if you're looking for blah blah blah, that's an entire IT department" cancer.

"Okay."

Gonna start a blog where i take medium articles by retards and explain why is what they write stupid

Developer: Can you upgrade my machine to Windows 10? I need it for SQL server 2019.

IT Guy: Sure.

Some time later...

IT Guy: Good news, Windows 10 is loaded. Bad news, I need to update TPM to enable Bitlocker but the firewall is blocking me from downloading the update. I will need to download it from home tonight.

Developer: But you're the IT administrator...

IT Guy: Yes...

Developer: ...

Continued…

The company that I’m working for has done lots of subtle racist things surrounding diversity policy. There was a major blowout between execs and suddenly all went quiet. The guy that was hired against my recommendation was gone. Until early January when he showed up at our building to raid our kitchen. WTF. It turns out HR decided to move him to the other office and out of sight so my team wouldn’t see him. He isn’t working on a project and is getting paid on the bench for more than the 100% billable devs.

After I saw him bumming around, I replied to a recruiter that has been trying to recruit me to their company.

The position pays 25% more 😲 and comes with a an amazingly relaxed development environment. Developer time is managed and allocated by someone in a dedicated role. 80% of the time is sprint work and the rest is self-driven projects or learning. Teams are stable, mostly local, and there is very low turnover. Developers get Mac or Linux computers.

I’m doing an executive meet and greet at the other company tomorrow. They will be the ones that will make me the final offer. I feel pretty good about it too because they will let me sign up to start in a month and a half so I can give a long notice, work until the end, and my current company can hire me back as a consultant in a pinch. It softens the blow for my current company and it makes it easy for me.

Worst case scenario I don’t take the position but use it for leverage. Who am I kidding? I’ll definitely jump ship when negotiation is done tomorrow.

https://devrant.com/rants/2338969/...

Manager: "If needed, are you willing to work overtime this month?"

Developer: "Yes. [ ... pause ... ] would you give me some over my salary for sometime?"

Manager: Yes, increment happens every 6 months.

Developer: "I am thinking beyond it".

Manager: "No, it is not possible"

Developer: "Okay"

** alarm clock vibrates **

Developer: "It is 5:00 PM now. I need to leave. See you on coming Monday at 9:00 AM sharp"

[Developer left]

Manager: "Byeeeee ... "

Email from me to IT:

Hi,

Can I please have Paint.NET and <name of open-source screen grabber and annotation software> installed? I’m frequently creating procedure and training documents and using MS Paint can be frustrating.

Many thanks.

Reply from IT:

We are trying to standardise our OS image and will not be able to install this type of software. Open source software especially had no place on our corporate network.

Paint and the standard Windows screen clip will be sufficient.

Me:

Unpopular opinion: AI is overrated.

Please make an entire webshop with animated shopping cart in react + redux within a week 👍

We will then reject you for the position and thank you for rewriting our tech stack for the frontend 😂 K THX BAIII

It's maddening how few people working with the internet don't know anything about the protocols that make it work. Web work, especially, I spend far too much time explaining how status codes, methods, content-types etc work, how they're used and basic fundamental shit about how to do the job of someone building internet applications and consumable services.

The following has played out at more than one company:

App: "Hey api, I need some data"
API: "200 (plain text response message, content-type application/json, 'internal server error')"
App: *blows the fuck up

*msg service team*

Me: "Getting a 200 with a plaintext response containing an internal server exception"
Team: "Yeah, what's the problem?"
Me: "...200 means success, the message suggests 500. Either way, it should be one of the error codes. We use the status code to determine how the application processes the request. What do the logs say?"
Team: "Log says that the user wasn't signed in. Can you not read the response message and make a decision?"
Me: "That status for that is 401. And no, that would require us to know every message you have verbatim, in this case, it doesn't even deserialize and causes an exception because it's not actually json."
Team: "Why 401?"
Me: "It's the code for unauthorized. It tells us to redirect the user to the sign in experience"
Team: "We can't authorize until the user signs in"
Me: *angermatopoeia* "Just, trust me. If a user isn't logged in, return 401, if they don't have permissions you send 403"
Team: *googles SO* "Internet says we can use 500"
Me: "That's server error, it says something blew up with an unhandled exception on your end. You've already established it was an auth issue in the logs."
Team: "But there's an error, why doesn't that work?"
Me: "It's generic. It's like me messaging you and saying, "your service is broken". It doesn't give us any insight into what went wrong or *how* we should attempt to troubleshoot the error or where it occurred. You already know what's wrong, so just tell me with the status code."
Team: "But it's ok, right, 500? It's an error?"
Me: "It puts all the troubleshooting responsibility on your consumer to investigate the error at every level. A precise error code could potentially prevent us from bothering you at all."
Team: "How so?"
Me: "Send 401, we know that it's a login issue, 403, something is wrong with the request, 404 we're hitting an endpoint that doesn't exist, 503 we know that the service can't be reached for some reason, 504 means the service exists, but timed out at the gateway or service. In the worst case we're able to triage who needs to be involved to solve the issue, make sense?"
Team: "Oh, sounds cool, so how do we do that?"
Me: "That's down to your technology, your team will need to implement it. Most frameworks handle it out of the box for many cases."
Team: "Ah, ok. We'll send a 500, that sound easiest"
Me: *..l.. -__- ..l..* "Ok, let's get into the other 5 problems with this situation..."

Moral of the story: If this is you: learn the protocol you're utilizing, provide metadata, and stop treating your customers like shit.

Colleague got a few statical electricity (or however you say that) shocks.

After yet another one:

Colleague: seriously, again?
Me: damn, that's quite shocking!
C: *blank stare* bro.... 😐

😄

LOL.

Whoever implemented the data import in Numbers on Mac needs to be lined up against a wall and shot with needles until they wish they were dead.

Why on all of gods unholy green and shitty earth would i want data i import (EVEN IN CSV FOR FUCK SAKE) to be delimited by an arbitrary text width? WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK

WHY WHY why would I EVER want to delimit my carefully structured data by fucking text width instead of new line or comma? AAAAARRRHHH

And what fucking big brain genius made this the DEFAULT SETTING for imported text AND CSV FILES. IT STANDS FOR COMMA SEPARATED FILE YOU FUCK BOI MAYBE JUST MAYBE I WANT IT SEPARATED BY FUCKING COMMMMMMMAAAAASSSSSS

When a normal person says "IMHO", it means "In my humble opinion"

When a programmer says "IMHO", its means "You are wrong".

I've been away... for too long. But today I have an announcement.
I've finally resigned from the Navy.
Little backstory: I have been thinking to resign since my last year as an Ensign, and I finally gained enough skill (and confidence) to make a CV and send it to a few companies. And lo and behold, a company actually was interested.
To be stupidly honest, maybe other factors certainly have played a part, but hey, I actually got a position in the sector I am interested and somewhat good: networks, sysadmin and security.
The CO and XO at my ship were mostly like "meh, he will retract his resignation, why would he want to leave, he is not serious". Until a few days ago, when they realised that I do not operate that way. And now panic has spread among them. I have designed and deployed quite some systems on the ship, both hardware and software, and now... history repeats again. This had happened to EVERY ship I've served before, but now, it will be permanent. And, oh boy, their faces and behaviour when the facts finally sank in... to quote a big mind of YouTube, "Not enough popcorn on Earth".
So, no more new Navy tech stories, but at least I am gaining my sanity back. I've even halved my cigarette and coffee consumption. I'll try to keep in touch with DevRant, but things are quite chaotic now (for them, anyway). But, for now, all I can think of is...

if it works...

About a year ago I switched my job.
At the start everything seemed like magic. I was the It director, I've finally was able to call the shots on technologies, on new software architecture.
First step was to check the current state of the company.
"qqqq" as each pc password? Ok
No firewall from outside? Lovely
Servers running on Windows Server 2008? Spectacular
People leaving pc on after work and left the machine unlocked just not to type the password? Hell yeah
The IT dude playing games instead of working? But ofcourse
Plaintext passwords publically accessible eshop? Naturally.
The list goes on and on.
After all this time, I'm working to fix every hole like that like crazy and because it doesn't show results, I'm soon to lose my job. Well better luck next time as an intern I guess :')

It was for a job interview, I wouldn't specify what the challenge is but they said I could use any language I want; I chose Python. They said I failed the coding interview because it was not Java.

Google is getting smarter with their recruiters, if those recruiters are even people at all. I have this recruiter message me once a month and her messages are so targeted and specific.. like.. she ACTUALLY read my profile. She writes a lengthy message that includes my previous company's name, work experience, and even the projects I have on Github (as in specific questions, not just the name of the repository or some shit that can easily be scraped). She mentions events specific to the area where I live in, etc.

SUSPICIOUS.

She's doing these things that I've been planning to do. Maybe a web crawler and a game of adlib to make people think you actually read about them and cared one bit when in reality, you're just a bot who have access to public information. You just bind them all together and fill in the blanks and then send it away.

Maybe you have a few message templates and use a bit of code to shuffle some words a little bit, make them less perfect and more human. Throw in a few "unintentional" mistakes to make it look more casual, add some warmth to your cold, metallic, robot heart. With all these, you get more variety on the messages you send. Maybe apply some machine learning or some shit, have it listen/read from different people, and give it an illusion of a personality.

But what's this? She did not send the message on an "o'clock" time. It wasn't 12:00 AM at all, or 7:00 PM, or 4:00 PM. The follow-up email was sent on 12:20 AM. Was all the messages queued and the job runs at 12:00 AM but she's sent it to so many that it reached me 20 minutes later? Nah. Or maybe this is intentional, some low-key "I'm not a bot, I don't operate at exactly 12:00 AM. I don't have a cron, I have a heart." But if I were to make one, I would send it at times like 9:34 AM, a little less suspicious. I want to see if there's a pattern on what time she sends these things but I only see the date on the previous messages now because I didn't care enough to read it before.

Also, this is LinkedIn, they give scrapers a hard time but then again, this is Google and they have the money to pay for abuse. Now I want to check our time difference. What time did she actually send this and was it really rainy in Ireland that time OR ARE YOU LYING TO ME, CLAUDIA? I thought you cared about me? Was it all a fucking lie? Do you know me at all? Or was it all just a clever game to get into my pants?

Now I want to make a new account that has almost the same details to see if she messages that one but I don't want to go back to the asylum, I know how deep it goes. I either hunt down this bot or make a counter-bot to cross-check all the shit she and other recruiters are telling me.

Or maybe this is exactly what they want to happen.. For me to lose my mind and post in a forum where I would "unintentionally" spread the word and they can attract/trap more people.

Fuck it, early onset dementia.

Interviewer : So what frameworks and library you usually use?
Me : i use volley for networking, gson for parsing, livedata/architecture components for architecture and observability , room for database and java for app development

I : ok so make this sample app using retrofit for networking, moshi for parsing, mvrx for architecture , rx for observability , sqldelight for db, dagger2 and kotlin for app dev. You have 8 hours

Me :(wtf?) But i never used those libs or language!
I : we just want to check how easily you adapt to different surroundings.

Me : -_-

Honestly i don't know of it was a great experience or a bad one . I was stressed the whole time but was able to adapt to almost all of those libraries and frameworks.
At the end i got selected but decided not to go for those ppl. That was just a lucrative opening of a venus fly trap, they would have stressed the hell out of me

Trust me, I've been doing this for years.

Best way to deal with numbers in JavaScript:

let x = "1"
x += "1" // add one
x.length // get value of number, 2