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Search - "“business guys”"
-
Worst dev I've interviewed?
"Archie" ran his own consulting business for almost 20 years. Prior to his interview, Archie sent HR (to send to us) his company's website, where he had samples of code for us to review (which was not bad, this guy did know his stuff).
What I found odd was Archie was the lone wolf at his company, but everything I found about him (the about page, his bio, etc), Archie was referred to as 'Mr. Archie Brown'.
Ex. 'Mr. Archie Brown began his humble career and 'Mr. Archie Brown is active in his church and volunteers his time in many charities ...'
Odd to refer to yourself in the third person on your own site, but OK, I like putting hot sauce on my mac & cheese (no judgement here).
Then the interview..standard stuff, then..
Me: "Given your experience, this is an entry level developer position. Do you feel the work would be challenging enough for you?"
Archie: "Yes, Mr. Archie Brown would have no problem starting at bottom. You see ..."
Almost any time he would reference himself, instead of 'me' or 'I', he would say 'Mr. Archie Brown'. As the interview continued, the ego and self-importance grew and grew.
My interview partner wanted to be done by using the escape clause, "PaperTrail, I'm good, do you have any questions?"
Yes, yes I do. I was having too much fun listening to this guy ramble on about himself. I made the interview go the full hour with the majority of time 'Archie' telling us how great he is.
The icing on the cake was my partner caught his gold cuff-links and tie-pin where his initials and how he kept raising his hands and playing with his tie to show us (which I totally missed, then was like "oh yea, that was weird")
After the interview, talking with HR:
HR-Jake: "How did it go?"
John: "Terrible. One of the worst. We would have been done in 10 minutes if PaperTrail didn't keep asking questions."
Me: "Are you kidding!? I had the best time ever. I wish I could have stayed longer."
HR-Jake: "Really? This guy was so full of himself I wasn't sure to even schedule with you guys. With his experience, I thought it deserved at least a round with you two. You think we should give him a chance?"
Me: "Hell no. Never in a million years, no. I never in my whole life met anyone with such a big ego. I mean, he kept referring to himself in the third person. Who does that?"
HR-Jake: "Whew!...yea, he did that in the phone interview too. It was a red flag for us as well."
Couple of weeks later I ran into HR-Jake in the break room.
HR-Jake: "Remember Mr. Archie Brown?"
Me: "To my dying day, I will never forget Mr. Archie Brown."
HR-Jake: "I called him later that day to tell him the good news and he accused me of being a racist. If we didn't give him the job, he was getting a lawyer and sue us for discrimination."
Me: "What the frack!"
HR-Jake: "Yep, and guess what? Got a letter from his lawyer today. I don't think a case will come in front of a judge, but if you have any notes from the interview, I'll need them."
Me: "What are we going to do?"
HR-Jake: "Play the waiting game between lawyers. We're pretty sure he'll run out of money before we do."
After about 6 months, and a theft conviction (that story made the local paper), Mr. Archie Brooks dropped his case (or his lawyers did).24 -
Scene: Senior developer left, 3 Junior devs(including me) are now loaded with work.
*Intern asks for help*
JuniorDev1: I have 2 projects of which i'm the lead on one. I don't have time to help anyone.
JD2: 2 projects as well dude, speak to me after work, much easier then.
Me: 3 projects, lead on two. Sure how can i help you.
Took less than 5 minutes to help the intern.
2 hours Later. Check in meeting
PM: Our Junior devs are really busy and can't always help you guys. JD1 are you overloaded?
JD1: Yes, is their anyway we can split the one projects work?
PM: Sure. JD2 are you overloaded?
JD2: Not really, but i agree on splitting the projects between the three of us.
Me: *Are these fuckers serious? i have three projects, they have 2 and they wanna give me more work because they are overloaded and don't know how to manage their time*
PM: Ok cool, i'll update it. CooCooK4Choo, i see you building your own game during lunch time. You definitely not overloaded.
Me: Actually! what i do in my lunch time is my own personal work because it's the only time i have to work on personal projects. I actually do feel overloaded with the 3 projects and now more work from them, could we split the work load evenly please.
PM: I thought you said you could handle the 3 projects?
Me: I can, i have been, but with more work coming my way i don't think i'll be able to.
PM: Unfortunately i need the other Junior Devs on demand, so i won't be able to split the work load evenly.
Me: On demand for what? Why not let the interns help?
PM: In case i need their help. The interns are helping the other Junior Devs with things that don't require too much out of them.
Me: *This FUCKEN BITCH!* Cool, I'm done with the 1 project, expect the business rules at the end of the day. I'll see if i can get the other 2 near done by Friday so i can have time to look over the code of the new projects that i'll be splitting with the other Junior Devs.
PM: Cool, glad we all on the same page.
You know what? FUCK this stupid shit of favoring people in the FUCKEN work place.
This is my first full-time job ever, I've been here for a full year today and i can honestly say these people are just giant children with money. I should know, out of work i am a giant child, but from 8:00 - 16:00 i'm a FUCKEN adult.17 -
Last day on the contract from hell. I'd written a project with one other person in our spare time that performed a critical business function. The following conversation was had between myself, the job thief who was handed my job and their manager, with the 10 other IBM GS "dev domain experts" assigned to that team sitting silently on zoom:
Moi: hey all, what seems to be the problem?
JT: how to update the java for requirement?
Moi: I would assume a text editor, have you tried intellij
JTM: she's talking about ticket BS-101, the data is wrong
Moi: ah, well, you might want to fix that
JT: how to fix?
Moi: update the database and update the logic that depends on it
JTM: what changes are those?
Moi: the ones described in the ticket, I would assume, I'm no longer on that project
JTM: didn't you write this application?
Moi: yes.
JTM: ok, so do you know how to fix the issue?
Moi: definitely
JTM: ok... ... Can you tell us how to fix it?
Moi: yes.
*The sound of silence*
JTM: *will* you tell us?
Moi: I would, but I'm already off the clock, and as of an hour ago I no longer have a contract. And even if I did, I don't have a contract or authorization to work on that system. I'm not actually being paid for this call.
JTM: ... What are we going to do about this?
Moi: I have no idea
JTM: ok, so we can look at getting a 1 month contract to support this
Moi: I'm sure our firm has someone who can definitely help you out
JTM: *heavy raging* ... Can you do the work?
Moi: Unfortunatley, I'm already committed to a new contract at another customer. I also don't do one month contracts. I'm an engineer, not a car wash employee
JTM: well, I don't understand how you can just leave us in the lurch like this?!
Moi: well, respectfully, it was your decision to cut me from the budget because you thought you were close enough to end of the project to get it across the line with junior resources.
Interjecting-JT: I am senior!
Moi: Right. So, basically, you took ownership of the product before go live. We advised against it, in writing, numerous times. We also notified you that we would not carry a bench, so the project resources are now working on other things. We can provide you with new resources for a minimum 6 month duration who can help you out. Also, since we've cycled out, our rate has increased per the terms of our MSA.
JTM: we don't have budget for that! How are we supposed to do this?!
Moi: *zoom glare at JT* that question is more appropriate for your finance officer and the IT director. I can send a few emails and schedule a call with your account representative and the aforementioned individuals so you can hash this out.
-_---------------
I'm free! 🥳 That said, still plenty of residual fodder I need to get out of my system on these guys. Might need to start my own Dilbert.12 -
*meeting with boss about a quick site for one of her clients*
Boss- "okay so basically I just want you to copy the content from -already made site- and put it on the new one"
Me- "okay sure do you want it verbatim or "
Boss-"no but something similar"
Me-"okay so you want me to paraphrase this list that's on the homepage?"
Boss-"Well no we dont actually need the list at all as it isnt relevant to us so just take that out"
Me-"okay well that is the only thing on the homepage so what should I replace it with"
Boss-"I dont know, something similar to the list. You can figure something out"
Me-"....I dont know anything about the clients business. I am not going to just make up content, you guys can at least give me some direction there"
Boss-"i didnt think it would be that hard"
Me-"it's really not hard. You're making it harder than it needs to be for me though. Anyway, do you wanna keep the same exact pages as the other site or only transfer some of them or"
Boss-"something that resembles that website but isnt exactly it so some of the pages but not all"
Me-"which ones"
Boss-"the ones relevant to client's business"
Me-*closes notebook, stands up, starts to leave room*
Boss-"where are you going"
Me-"I'm going to get another two cups of coffee cause I didnt have enough this morning for this bullshit"
Boss-*raises eyebrow*
Me-"dont tell me to copy paste a website at first and then continue to tell me its going to be "similar" but different and then further continue to be as vague as possible about what is expected of me to be done in order to make it different! Take the time to decide what it is you want exactly and then tell me, with detail, what you're criteria is so I can do the thing!! I cant read your mind."
Boss-"..... I just didnt think it would be that hard to jot in a few sentences here and there"
I left the room at that point. Irritating as fuck. You dont know tech stuff, don't expect me to know enough about YOUR job to write about it as if I'm a professional. I cant fucking read minds, I have no interest in researching anything just to create the site content myself, and its fucking rude that they wont even take the time to sit down and decide what they want for a website that THEY are paying for. For fucks sake people get your fucking shit together13 -
Ranted about him before but this just came to my mind again.
The fucking windows (to the max) fanboy I had to deal with for too long.
Every time I mentioned something about what programming language to use in a project he was NOT part of:
"I know it's none of my business, BUT I think you should use .net"
(All backend JavaScript and php guys).
Every time I mentioned something about what server system to use:
"I know it's none of my business but I think you should use Windows server"
(All Linux guys)
Every time I'd say something positive about Linux he'd search as long as needed to prove that that was also a windows thing (didn't even come close sometimes)
Every time I told the devs there about a windows security issue (as in "guys they found this thing, install the next update to stay safe :)" - "ahhh will do, thanks for letting know man!") he'd search as long as needed to prove that Linux also had had security issues like that.
(Okay?!? I know?!? I'm just trying to notify people so their systems stay secure and they're genuinely happy with that so STFU)
MOTHERFUCKER.17 -
The windows/microsoft fanboy I've ranted about multiple times.
- wouldn't use anything except for windows. Even if required for a project (I would if really needed, have done that a few times already)
- refused to use any framework/language not written by Microsoft
- tried to get other projects to use windows/.net when it wasn't required and it was only linux/php guys (and that fit the projects perfectly)
- ONLY wanted to use Skype and whatsapp. Always bragged about how he had 10gb of Skype history.
- didn't want to use anything related to linus torvalds or open source because 'those are open source and have no business model so they're bad'
And then: he suggested the use of windows server right after one was hacked (windows vuln that wasn't patched yet) which caused the devops guys to want to install a new Linux server for it.
Even the windows sysadmin pointed to the door when he said that and gave him a huge 'GTFO' face cD
Yeah, fuck him.9 -
I'm 54 y.o.
I think I'm completely outdated in my skill, as in the last 14 years, I worked on a specific business problem, with an old technology: a JSP application + javascript + postgres.
I do understand software development, agile, web application development, linux server, basic/moderate AWS skills, etc.
Now they laid me off instead of including me in the evolution of version 2 of the software. Maybe covid, company had almost no cash-flow. Well they have now...So basically they fired me to find money to rewrite the application.
I feel without hope at my age.
I'm a generalist.
I can understand fairly well everything you'll throw at me, reactnative, angular, nosql, python, but I have little first-hand experience.
I don't have a lot of management skills, even if I've given frequent presentations to C-roles and board, and I implemented a whole agile methodology in my team.
I don't know what to do.
The amount of technology to study is huge nowadays. When I was younger I could get away with some php and java.
Full-stack developer is a big word for me. Maybe I could handle a full stack web application, but not from scratch.
I feel at my age, I'll compete with 20-something guys with better skills and lower salary requests.
I don't think I can pull a night anymore.
I'm trying to shoot high to management positions with no much success.
I'd like to go on developing, I know that there are 50-something developer out there, but who managed to find a new position at 55? at 60?
As soon as I finish the few money I spared, I'll be on the street, I'l be the "website for food" guy.49 -
This was at my first internship (ranted about this before but hey fuck it).
- discovered several high critical vulnerabilities in their product. Wrote them down and kindly gave them to my boss/manager (they were the same person). He looked at me like 'the fuck' but I just went home at the end of the day. Next day, I got called into his office. I was a fucker, cancer guy who knew nothing about security, who would never reach anything and I shouldn't criticize their product (I had no right to because I was an intern).
- Bossman went to a meeting with a coworker to present their product. They came back to the office and it very clearly had gone pretty wrong. (we had nothing to do with anything related to the project including the meeting) he called us all bad things he could think of and it was all our fault and so on.
- I do have a transpiration problem but I can partly contain that when it's not too hot and the stress levels are okay. I was only allowed to sit in front of the window. YES IT WAS A MOTHERFUCKING HUGE WINDOW, 35-40 DEGREES FEELING TEMPERATURE AND NO MOTHERFUCKING AIRCONDITIONING. (okay gotta admit that one of the installation guys fell off the roof during the installation BUT THEN AT LEAST GET FANS OR SOMETHING).
Got called into his office multiple times because I smelled and 'couldnt take care of my hygiene'. I was literally sweating my ass off full-time so what the fuck could I do in those temperatures?!?
- my only project there: Google translating their whole CRM. Took us five weeks and the bossman kept pressure on us at all times which didn't FUCKING help.
Was fired after 5 weeks for hygiene reasons and because I didn't do my work well appearantly (still fuck translating all day).
One of the worst things? He pretended everything to go well until the first review came with my mentor (mentor == awesome guy). Then he talked shit about me like it was no-one's business.
I literally cried when I walked home after being fired.16 -
Inspired by @h3ll, this is a combination of current and former coworkers:
Awkward Wizard:
This guy has the social skills of a microwaved dog turd. He is a genius, but working with him is about as uncomfortable as sticking a grill skewer in your eye and twisting it repeatedly until close of business. He laughs at inappropriate times, and every time he does, an unborn child tears its own ears off. He explains things in a way that only himself and Satan understand, then talks to you like you're a child when you don't follow his logic. He is the guy you hide when the CEO is around. His code is immaculate.
Backstab McGillacutty:
This bowl of bile is the son of a bitch that takes credit for everybody else's work. When you do something good, he was miraculously involved, but when you mess up, this twat is the dicknose that brings it up in retrospective and calls you out by name to the boss. You can usually find these guys talking shit about the CTO, until the boss quits. Then they buddy up with the CTO and become a Joel Osteen-esque evangelist for everything the CTO wants in a shitty, underhanded attempt to climb the ladder. Fuck this guy.
Professor Fuckwaffle:
This coworker used to teach Computer Science classes. Their resume is amazing, and they can speak to the most complex of design principles. This is the shitstain that you hire because of their skill and knowledge only to find out that ol' fuckwaffle can't apply the shit they spout to save their wretched lives. You'll spend more time listening to fuckwaffle lecture than you will reviewing their code (because they cant fucking write any!) You know the saying, those who can, do, and those who can't, teach? Yeah, that shit was written for Fuckwaffle.
Last but not least:
Scrumdumb:
This guy isn't even a coder. This guy is worse than the the scum you pour out of the bottom of a slow-cooker that you forgot to wash last time you made chicken. He's a non-technical PM. You know the type, right? He usually says "cloud infrastructure," "paradigm," "algorithm," "SDLC," etc but has no grasp of any of them. He often opens his dumpster to spout off something like "You can just create a new class for that" while talking about HTML. I won't waste any more breath on Scrumdumb, he already creates enough work for me.3 -
I recently joined the dark side - an agile consulting company (why and how is a long story). The first client I was assigned to was an international bank. The client wanted a web portal, that was at its core, just a massive web form for their users to perform data entry.
My company pitched and won the project even though they didn't have a single developer on their bench. The entire project team (including myself) was fast tracked through interviews and hired very rapidly so that they could staff the project (a fact I found out months later).
Although I had ~8 years of systems programming experience, my entire web development experience amounted to 12 weeks (a part time web dev course) just before I got hired.
I introduce to you, my team ...
Scrum Master. 12 years experience on paper.
Rote memorised the agile manifesto and scrum textbooks. He constantly went “We should do X instead of (practical thing) Y, because X is the agile way.” Easily pressured by the client to include ridiculous (real time chat in a form filling webpage), and sometimes near impossible features (undo at the keystroke level). He would just nag at the devs until someone mumbled ‘yes' just so that he would stfu and go away.
UX Designer. 3 years experience on paper ... as business analyst.
Zero professional experience in UX. Can’t use design tools like AI / photoshop. All he has is 10 weeks of UX bootcamp and a massive chip on his shoulder. The client wanted a web form, he designed a monstrosity that included several custom components that just HAD to be put in, because UX. When we asked for clarification the reply was a usually condescending “you guys don’t understand UX, just do <insert unhandled edge case>, this is intended."
Developer - PHD in his first job.
Invents programming puzzles to solve where there are none. The user story asked for a upload file button. He implemented a queue system that made use of custom metadata to detect file extensions, file size, and other attributes, so that he could determine which file to synchronously upload first.
Developer - Bootlicker. 5 years experience on paper.
He tried to ingratiate himself with the management from day 1. He also writes code I would fire interns and fail students for. His very first PR corrupted the database. The most recent one didn’t even compile.
Developer - Millennial fratboy with a business degree. 8 years experience on paper.
His entire knowledge of programming amounted to a single data structures class he took on Coursera. Claims that’s all he needs. His PRs was a single 4000+ line files, of which 3500+ failed the linter, had numerous bugs / console warnings / compile warnings, and implemented 60% of functionality requested in the user story. Also forget about getting his attention whenever one of the pretty secretaries walked by. He would leap out of his seat and waltz off to flirt.
Developer - Brooding loner. 6 years experience on paper.
His code works. It runs, in exponential time. Simply ignores you when you attempt to ask.
Developer - Agile fullstack developer extraordinaire. 8 years experience on paper.
Insists on doing the absolute minimum required in the user story, because more would be a waste. Does not believe in thinking ahead for edge conditions because it isn’t in the story. Every single PR is a hack around existing code. Sometimes he hacks a hack that was initially hacked by him. No one understands the components he maintains.
Developer - Team lead. 10 years of programming experience on paper.
Writes spaghetti code with if/else blocks nested 6 levels deep. When asked "how does this work ?”, the answer “I don’t know the details, but hey it works!”. Assigned as the team lead as he had the most experience on paper. Tries organise technical discussions during which he speaks absolute gibberish that either make no sense, or are complete misunderstandings of how our system actually works.
The last 2 guys are actually highly regarded by my company and are several pay grades above me. The rest were hired because my company was desperate to staff the project.
There are a 3 more guys I didn’t mention. The 4 of us literally carried the project. The codebase is ugly as hell because the others merge in each others crap. We have no unit tests, and It’s near impossible to start because of the quality of the code. But this junk works, and was deployed to production. Today is it actually hailed as a success story.
All these 3 guys have quit. 2 of them quit without a job. 1 found a new and better gig.
I’m still here because I need the money. There’s a tsunami of trash code waiting to fail in production, and I’m the only one left holding the fort.
Why am I surrounded by morons?
Why are these retards paid more than me?
Why are they so proud when all they produce is trash?
How on earth are they still hired?
And yeah, FML.8 -
Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.
Episode 2: Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
This is a particularly special episode for me, as these problems are taking up so much of my time with non-sensical bullshit, that i'm delayed with everything else. Some badly require tooling or new products. Some are just unnecessary processes or annoyances that should not need to be handled by another human. So lets jump right in, in no particular order:
- Jira ... nuff said? not quite because somehow some blue moon, planets aligning, act of god style set of circumstances lined up to allow this team to somehow make Jira worse. On one hand we have a gigantic Jira project containing 7 separate sub teams, a million different labels / epics and 4.2 million possible assignees, all making sure the loading page takes as long as possible to open. But the new country we've added support for in the app gets a separate project. So we have product, backend, mobile, design, management etc on one, and mobile-country2 on another. This delightfully means a lot of duplication and copy pasting from one to the other, for literally no reason what so ever.
- Everything on Jira is found through a label. Every time something happens, a new one is created. So I need to check for "iOS", "Android", "iOS-country2", "Android-country2", "mobile-<feature>", "mobile-<feature>-issues", "mobile-<feature>-prod-issues", "mobile-<feature>-existing-issues" and "<project>-July31" ... why July31? Because some fucking moron decided to do a round of testing, and tag all the issues with the current date (despite the fact Jira does that anyway), which somehow still gets used from time to time because nobody pays attention to what they are doing. This means creating and modifying filters on a daily basis ... after spending time trying to figure out what its not in the first one.
- One of my favourite morning rituals I like to call "Jira dumpster diving". This involves me removing all the filters and reading all the tickets. Why would I do such a thing? oh remember the 9000 labels I mentioned earlier? right well its very likely that they actually won't use any of them ... or the wrong ones ... or assign to the wrong person, so I have to go find them and fix them. If I don't, i'll get yelled at, because clearly it's my fault.
- Moving on from Jira. As some of you might have seen in your companies, if you use things like TestFlight, HockeyApp, AppCenter, BuddyBuild etc. that when you release a new app version for testing, each version comes with an automated change-log, listing ticket numbers addressed ...... yeah we don't do that. No we use this shitty service, which is effectively an FTP server and a webpage, that only allows you to host the new versions. Sending out those emails is all manual ... distribution groups?? ... whats that?
- Moving back to Jira. Can't even automate the changelog with a script, because I can't even make sense of the tickets, in order to translate that to a script.
- Moving on from Jira. Me and one of the remote testers play this great game I like to call "tag team ticketing". It's so much fun. Right heres how to play, you'll need a QA and a PM.
*QA creates a ticket, and puts nothing of any use inside it, and assigns to the PM.
*PM fires it back asking for clarification.
*QA adds in what he feels is clarification (hes wrong) and assigns it back to the PM.
*PM sends detailed instructions, with examples as to what is needed and assigns it back.
*QA adds 1 of the 3 things required and assigns it back.
*PM assigns it back saying the one thing added is from the wrong day, and reminds him about the other 2 items.
*QA adds some random piece of unrelated info to the ticket instead, forgetting about the 3 things and assigns it back.
and you just continue doing this for the whole dev / release cycle hahaha. Oh you guys have no idea how much fun it is, seriously give it a go, you'll thank me later ... or kill yourselves, each to their own.
- Moving back to Jira. I decided to take an action of creating a new project for my team (the mobile team) and set it up the way we want and just ignore everything going on around us. Use proper automation, and a kanban board. Maybe only give product a slack bot interface that won't allow them to create a ticket without what we need etc. Spent 25 minutes looking for the "create new project" button before finding the link which says I need to open a ticket with support and wait ... 5 ... fucking ... long ... painful ... unnecessary ... business days.
... Heres hoping my head continues to not have a bullet hole in it by then.
Id love to talk more, but those filters ain't gonna fix themselves. So we'll have to leave it here for today. Tune in again for another episode soon.
And remember to always practiseSafeHex13 -
Attended one of the best meetups ever. To give you an idea how awesome it was..
Speaker took the first ~20 minutes introducing himself.
His intro card deck kept referring to himself in the third person (he is the only employee in consulting 'company'). Ex. "Mr. Smith began his humble career .."
The powerpoint presentation began with him clicking each page, not executing the slideshow (ex. pressing F5).
Finally someone asked "Can you make slide bigger?"
S:"You can't read that?..um..sure...I guess .."
Starts fumbling around the zoom ...
Dev: "No, can you start the slideshow?"
S: "I don't know what you mean...there...I zoomed it, is that better? Now I can't see my notes..just sec.."
<fumbles again with the zoom>
Dev: "No, not zoom, start the slide show, press F5"
S: "Oh...you want me to F5 it...OK..."
<he *clicks* the slide show button>
Finally getting into code, trying to get out of powerpoint ...
S: "How do I get out of this fullscreen?.."
Dev: "Hit escape"
S:"No..um.."
<keeps trying to click on 'something'>
S:"I see visual studio, but its not on the big screen... "
<keeps click on 'something', no one is sure whats going on>
Dev: "Hit Escape to stop the slideshow"
<finally hits escape, then able to put Visual Studio on the big screen>
S: "Ahh...there, I figured it out."
Speaker had no end of making wild/random statements like:
".Net Core is the future of Microsoft, if you're using .Net 4.5...forget it, its not even supported anymore."
"When I was at Microsoft Build, I asked them why not put all the required .Net assemblies in one directory. Looks like with .Net Core, they listened to me" (he was serious)
"I don't use SQL Server Mgmt Studio. Its free and it sucks. I use <insert a very expensive SSMS clone>, its great, you guys should check it out", then proceeds to struggle to open a query window to write some SQL.
"When you use .Net Core and EntityFramework, you have to write your own stored procedures. If a developer can't write stored procedures, he shouldn't be in this business."
I was on the edge of my seat, hungry for the next crazy bat-shit thing to come out of his mouth. He did not disappoint. BEST MEETUP EVER!9 -
!rant
So my employer just offered me a 57% raise out of the blue!
Last Friday, I got a meeting invite from the CEO (its a small 15 person company, so he looks after most of the management stuff) titled "{{myname}} - Salary Review". No agenda there. I was fuckin scared that maybe my salary will be chopped short due to the virus and shit. They recently let go of one guy in my team, and are about to hire two new guys. Also, my last raise was this January. So I didn't think any good could come out of this meeting.
I joined the zoom and he asked if I was happy with the current salary. I said "yes" like an idiot, but added that the prices in my country are rising a lot. He made smalltalk on costs of groceries and Corona and my family, and that was it. 57%.
I was smiling like a dumbass at the end of the meeting. This guy is like the Hyman Roth of this business.15 -
Today I felt sorry for my boss.
Story behind it:
My boss always encourages me to do the right thing. One of those right things is to enforce quality gates in our build pipelines which, as many of you know, means that the build fails if certain quality parameters are not met. Now an external vendor team merged the code this past thursday for a large feature that they had been working on and our build failed majestically throwing out the statistics and the offending files and lines of code.
All hell broke loose and there were escalations and what not and people working extra hours and over the weekend to try and get it right. So, I get a call from my boss earlier today to explain to me how important it is to release the feature and how it's going to be very bad if we don't. He was trying to justify his ask which was to lower the quality criteria and let the build pass for this week. Of course the dev in me was furious but then I realized it's not him but the corporate culture. Why would he or anyone would risk losing their jobs over the quality of code?
If you work at a place where IT is a support function of the company's primary business, I understand the moral compromises you guys have to make sometimes to keep the ball rolling. Thank you for your effort to make the world a better place.
So, thank you boss for all your support. I know it's not always up to you to decide on things but keep up the good work.4 -
Once we were going to present a web service to governmental firm. All is going well so far and my boss asks me to host the web application the day before the presentation.
I hosted it and all was good with demo production tests, but I had a bad feeling.
While it was running on our server, I also ran it locally with a reverse proxy just in case.
* Meeting starts *
* Ice broken and down to business *
"And now our developer will run the demo for you..."
* Run the demo from my laptop to double check --> 500 Internal Server Error *
Holy shit!!!
* Opens reverse proxy link on my laptop. Present demo during meeting. Demo works like a charm. *
Firm representative: "Great! Looking forward to go live."
*Our team walks out*
GM: "Good job guys"
ME:4 -
Coding helped me make it this far. Everything in my life has been falling apart lately. My girlfriend left me to marry some other guy. My family's 20years old business shutdown. Things got very rough at work too. Unlike real life, coding makes sense to me. Everything is under control. It is a place where you build beautiful things the way you like them and help others. It has helped me take my mind off all the negativity and has given me a new perspective to life. Everything has a logic behind it. I can calm myself down by realizing the reasons behind the events happening in my life.
I love reading all the rants here. Thank you guys.3 -
( rant || !rant ) && idiots
console.info( this.isLongRant );
console.warn( "contains strong language and wordpress" );
A friend of mine sent two of his "friends" to me because they wanted me to build a website for their new business (~idea).
So I had a meeting with them.
First of all they wanted me to have a look on the current (work in progress) site.
First impression of the frontend:
OH BOY!?
Well, imagine this:
- a 90s/2k background (dotted/pixelated cloud in baby-blueish as backgroud with repeat)
- the logo was made by the sister of one of the guys, it wasn't too bad, but badly aligned, asymmetrical
- some obvious $offTheShelfShopPlugin with $randomStockContent
- the fucking slider had a small loading bar to indicate changes, it appears like an hyperanxious child on ADHS
- below the logo TWO FUCKING GIF SPINNERS to indicate nothing else but how fucking brain amputated these two dudes are, including the dev who is responsible for adding this. (to this point, they only told me, that a webagency did the setup and some basic work on the site, more on that later)
- no styling concept at all, random fonts and stuff everywhere including default styles of the shop plugin.
- FUUUUUCK WTF wil come furtherin this meeting?
After seeing a pile of binary puke fisted out of a 60yo nonstop-intern who changed his jobtitle from dildo-traveling-salesman to fullstack-frontend-dev by wrinting it on a post-it-note, I imagined, there has to be something wrong with the backend as well.
Boy was I right!
Yes, you guessed it! A random Wordpress adminpanel login appeared! OH NO....
I really wanted to levae this meeting immediately.
I was not able to hold my disgust back and I told them right in their face, what a shit pile of nutty squirrel turds this current page is. And that Wordpress is not the right choice at all for a shop.
Then came the best part: They basically told me, that they terminated the previous contract with the webagency because they were too expensive (they are cheap, compared to others, I know people who know their prices) and that they wanted to create A BIG MARKETPKACE with multiple ressellers who can have their shop in their website. Something similar to FUCKING AMAZON. ON FUCKING WORDPRESS!?!?!?
They even asked me if I wanted to be their partner & developer and that they can't pay much at the moment until the marketplace starts to grow.
I more or less told them to go fuck themselves with a rusty pitchfork.2 -
Fuck my life...
Okay, so I’m working on a web app with a small group... the app is basically a lead generator for new business in another country. We just need contact details cause they’re a fucker to buy.
Step 1: prototype to the investors, working with the ceo to make this thing look shiny AF.
Goes well as fuck.
CEO: “when can we get this out?”
Me: “it’s basically done mate, get your guys to look at it and we can talk about marketing”
Que a shower of 10 or so bellends with senior in their title going into a room and coming out with:
Bellends: “so on this page we want the user to confirm and accept the contract”
Me: “cool, makes some sense, that’s what it’s already doing.”
Bellends: “afterwards we want to show them the price and have them put in their banking details.”
Me: “Wait, you what when?”
Bellends: “Yeah, well Jenny says we should have as few clicks as possible to get to the final stage and have the customer accept.”
Me: “Jenny’s on fucking crack, moving the contract formation phase to after the contract acceptance stage is not an option”
Bellends: “Oh it’s okay, Andy in legal said that would be okay”
Me: “Andy’s a fucking moron, tell him that online contract formation laws were updated 2014/2015 and you can’t do that anymore”
Bellends: “No, andy’s legal, surely he knows”
Bellends: “We want all of this above the fold”
Me: “OH FUCKING SUCK A DICK YOU ABSOLUTE BAND OF FUCKWADS... which one of you, which one hasn’t looked at a website this millennia!?”
Needless to say I ignored all their shit, got the lead generator out and told the CEO those ten people are certifiably fucking useless.
Bonus round; recent, but “it has to be on internal infrastructure”
“Why? It’s a mobile app sending rest calls to a third party saas.”
“It just has to, we have this thing called the private cloud and w”
“Wait... you what son, priv 🤦🏼♂️ private what mate?”
“Private cloud”
“You... you mean a server rack?”
“Nah we spent £2mn on it, it’s brilliant”
“Hahahaha you fucking dick, you blew £2mn on server infra with fuckall to put on it!?”
“No, no it’s the private cloud”
“Fucking idiot, aye son, where’s the fucking bean stalk you prick!?”
“It has to go on internal infr”
“Shut up, that won’t work”9 -
Went to my first Hackathon this weekend.
There was 6 of us, 3 devs (including me) and 3 business guys for the presentation and info gathering
The 3 business guys wouldn't show us any of their work, but we're demanding to see all of ours.
Bothering us every 5 minutes to see 2her4 23 are and what's left
Then 1 of 3 business guys accused one of my devs of deleting half of their PowerPoint presentation. That turned out to be bullshit. Looked in the edit history and the business guy was the one who deleted them.
We brought it up to them all, and they got all defensive.
Then, before they revoked our access to the PowerPoint they removed us from the presentation entirely.
Their final presentation contained an app(APK only) we spent an all nighter on, and pictures of a few of the wireframes we did.
I immediately went to an event organizer, filled a complaint. Showed the wireframe project, the source code of the APK they used, and told her they just dropped us and stole our work. She went to them, they couldn't prove they did the work
They are now banned from future hackathons at this place.
I do not appreciate being fucked with, and more so don't like it when you try to fuck my friends. Honestly want to send an email to the business guys workplace and inform them their two top employees are thief's.
The positive thing I took from this is me and my dev team built a stronger relationship and found out we work amazing together.
/Rant about trash humans10 -
I ended up quitting my first job for many reasons, but this talk still haunts me:
"our workers need to input this data and they tab a lot because [...]"
Me: "ok... Where do they get the data from?
"A standard model compiled via web, sent via mail and then printed for them."
Me: "..."
Them: "..."
Me: "how about we make the import automatic?"
Them: "but then what will our workers do?"
To this day I am still impacted by this dialog... Not much for the stupidity from a business logic point of view (there are many bad companies, and this is not the only one I met in my career), but rather for the implications our job has and for the fact bs jobs are a thing because we are SO used to the capitalism that the bad guys are the ones removing boring tasks, rather than the shitty system which forces you to do a repetitive and automatable task and which reduces you to a shell doing a job a machine could do... And thanks for the wasted paper/ink, global warming ain't gonna get worse on its own!2 -
I was offered to work for a startup in August last year. It required building an online platform with video calling capabilities.
I told them it would be on learn and implement basis as I didn't know a lot of the web tech. Learnt all of it and kept implementing side by side.
I was promised a share in the company at formation, but wasn't given the same at the time of formation because of some issues in documents.
Yes, I did delay at times on the delivery date of features on the product. It was my first web app, with no prior experience. I did the entire stack myself from handling servers, domains to the entire front end. All of it was done alone by me.
Later, I also did install a proxy server to expand the platform to a forum on a new server.
And yesterday after a month of no communication from their side, I was told they are scraping the old site for a new one. As I had all the credentials of the servers except the domain registration control, they transferred the domain to a new registrar and pointed it to a new server. I have a last meeting with them. I have decided to never work with them and I know they aren't going to provide me my share as promised.
I'm still in the 3rd year of my college here in India. I flunked two subjects last semester, for the first time in my life. And for 8 months of work, this is the end result of it by being scammed. I love fitness, but my love for this is more and so I did leave all fitness activities for the time. All that work day and night got me nothing of what I expected.
Though, they don't have any of my code or credentials to the server or their user base, they got the new website up very fast.
I had no contract with them. Just did work on the basis of trust. A lesson learnt for sure.
Although, I did learn to create websites completely all alone and I can do that for anyone. I'm happy that I have those skills now.
Since, they are still in the start up phase and they don't have a lot of clients, I'm planning to partner with a trusted person and release my code with a different design and branding. The same idea basically. How does that sound to you guys?
I learned that:
. No matter what happens, never ignore your health for anybody or any reason.
. Never trust in business without a solid security.
. Web is fun.
. Self-learning is the best form of learning.
. Take business as business, don't let anyone cheat you.19 -
Just joined a skype meeting:
Me (software engineer): Am I audible?
Product Manager: Am I audible to you?
Business Development Manager: Hey guys, Am I audible?
After 30 minutes:
Me: Hey guys, Am I audible?
Product Manager: Am I audible to you?
Business Development Manager: Am I audible, guys?6 -
I'm going for longest rant. TL:DR; version here:
http://pastebin.com/0Bp4jX9y
then:
http://pastebin.com/FfUiTzsh
Twat Client,
As per our conversation, here is an invoice for the work you requested on behalf of U.S. Bloom. I realize that you ended up going with another designer, but you did request samples of what my take on the logo design would be. The following line item is indicative of 1 hour of graphic design consultation as per your request via Skype.
As I recall, you mentioned that this is not how Upwork "works" but considering it was you who requested that I converse with you via Skype instead of via the Upwork messenger, and since there were no clear instructions on how to proceed with Upwork after our initial consultation, It is assumed that you were foregoing Upwork altogether to work with me directly, thus the invoice from me directly for my time involved in the project. I would have reached out to you via Skype, but it seems that you may have severed our connection there.
After spending a little time researching your company, I could not find current information for Basic Media Marketing, but I was able to reach out to your former partner Not A. Twat, who was more than helpful and suggested that he would encourage you to pay for the services rendered.
It is discouraging that you asked for my help and I delivered, but when I ask for compensation in return for my skills, you refused to pay and have now taken your site offline and removed me as a contact from Skype.
{[CLIENT of CLIENT]},
I am sorry that I have bothered you with this email. I copied you on it merely for transparency's sake. I am sure that your logo is great and I am sure whatever decision was made is awesome for your decision. I just wanted to make sure that you weren't getting "samples" of other people's work passed off as original work by Twat Media Marketing.
I can't speak for any of the other candidates, but since Twat asked me to conduct work with him via Skype rather than through Upwork, and since he's pretty much a ghost online now, (Site Offline, LinkedIn Removed or Blocked, and now Skype blocked as well) one has to think this was a hit and run to either crowdsource your logo inexpensively or pass off other artist's work as his own. That may not be the case, but from my perspective all signs are pointing to that scenario.
Here is a transcript. Some of his messages have been redacted.
As you can clearly see, requests and edits to the logo were being made from Jon to me, but he thinks it's a joke when I ask about invoicing and tries to pass it off as an interview. Do you see any interview questions in there? There were no questions about how long I have been designing, what are my rates, who have I done work for in the past, or examples of my previous work. There were none because he didn't need them at this point.
He'd already seen my proposal and my Behance.net portfolio as well as my rates on Upwork.com. This was a cut to the chase request for my ideas for your logo. It was not just ideas, but mock designs with criticism and approval awaiting. Not only that, but I only asked for an hour of compensation. After looking at the timestamps on our conversation, you can clearly see that I spent at least 3 hours corresponding with Twat on this project. That's three hours of work I could have spent on an honest paying customer.
I trust that TWATCLIENT will do the right thing. I just wanted you guys to know that I was in it to do the best design I could for you. I didn't know I was in it to waste three hours of my life in an "interview" I wasn't aware I was participating in.
Reply from ClientClient:
Hello Sir,
This message is very confusing?
We do not owe your company any money and have never worked with you before.
Therefore, I am going to disregard that invoice.
Reply from TWATCLIENT's boss via phone:
I have two problems with this. One I don't think your business practices are ethical, especially calling MY client directly and sending them an invoice.
Two why didn't you call or email Jon before copying my client on the email invoice?
Me: Probably because he's purposely avoiding me and I had no way to find him. I only got his email address today and that was from a WHOIS lookup.
Really, you don't think my business practices are ethical? What about slavery? Is that ethical? Is it ethical to pass of my designs to your client for critique, but not pay me for doing them?
... I'LL HAVE TO CALL YOU BACK!
My email follow up:
http://pastebin.com/hMYPGtxV
I got paid. The power of CCing the right combination of people is greater than most things on Earth.14 -
An application based on a single MySQL stored procedure that contained all the application business logic inside of it (plus a poor webapp that simply called it). The stored procedure had 97 (yes, NINETY SEVEN) parameters... and about half of them were boolean flag used for enabling/disabling another parameter. I think that Uncle Bob could follow you holding an AK-47 if he saw that. The saddest part is that the shit was written by a guy having a PhD in computer science, and he knew that was bad, but the boss asked him to do it in that way. The guy left the company before I joined it and I had to maintain that crap. Guys, the first time I saw it I thought that should be a joke. Code generated by decompilers was easier to read, maybe even Brainfuck. I tried complaining with the boss but she said that the system was wonderful and very efficient. This was one of the reasons I moved to another company after some months.3
-
That feeling when the company looses a 120k account and it is blamed on your expert opinion and poor handling off the situation when It's really the fuckwits in sales who in their greed for provisions make shitty pitches.
I got a call to attend a meeting with a customer. Present was also the "developer" from the customers side who was to oversee the projects. The pitch was made earlier, but no information was provided beforehand so I was going in blind, covering for a suddenly absent lead. The point was to roughly present how the project was to be executed and I was told to voice my opinion on development time estimate that the clients expert had given. They were outsourcing and had already fired their whole team.
I gave a number based on the provided information and all hell breaks loose. Suddenly it's a total circle jerk. Shit goes down. The "dev" tells that he can do it himself in half the time and starts showing some shitExcelsOfTotalAbsurdness that prove it. I calculate his claim and end up with a result that he has 60+ hours in his day, so I ask why doesn't he do it then? Why the outsourcing if they could just give him a raise and save a ton of cash.. sudden silence and you just can hear the rusty gears turn while they try to make a new excuse.
Well it went south. Today I found out that the client was our sales guys buddy. so TL;DR of it was that our sales guy was trying to make a quick buck and give a break to his buddy and hang the shitbucket on our team. I pointed out that this was a shitty business deal that would go into the red, but the sales guy turned it around and now "I cost company 120k/month account on a long project" and because I acted unprofessionally customer is unhappy.
I FUCKING HATE THIS SHIT
secretly hoping to get fired over this10 -
I was hired by a company where a senior / dev lead recommended and interviewed me. He said to me that he was tired of broken processes, false promises to customers, micromanagement, pressure, etc. and told me that together we would improve these things. Few weeks later things didn't get any better and I told him that from what I had witnessed, he wasn't making things any better by saying in meetings that this and that would be easy to implement and would only take few minutes - that he was raising unrealistic expectations on the business side, which was clearly one of the reason the business had these high unrealistic expectations and caused all this pressure and micromanagement. He took this the wrong way, quit and hasn't spoken to me or his colleagues since. I didn't at all mean this in a bad way, because I highly respect and look up to him where he's one of the nicest guys and one of the best programmers I've ever met. Was I in the wrong here? What should have I done differently?12
-
Me: well guys, after the 4th attempt and a week of waiting, I’ve gotten a response from the remote backend team about the errors affecting this release. Which are the same issues affecting the last release 2 months ago. The findings are: “there is in fact some issue with the API”.
I’d like to thank everyone who put in so much effort to get us to this momentous step forward. We can expect a fix any year now.
*equally sarcastic colleague on another team listening in*:
oh wow, this months long thing has just been “some issue” all this time? Well that’s fantastic. You should mark the ticket as “done” and reply “thank you” for all their hard work.
..... I laughed so hard at how ridiculous all this is and the joke, that I nearly did, hoping someone from product/business would have to review it1 -
Everyone is posting jokes about GitLab recent incident and how the guys responsible for that must be feeling right now.
Shit happens, sometimes it's you accidentally deleting a branch on your repo and turning that into a major crisis, sometimes is a huge mistake that impacts not only the whole company business, but also it's clients work.
This situation reminds me of a famous quote from Thomas J. Watson (ex lBM CEO):
"Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience"
Those guys at GitLab have probably learned one of the most expensive lessons in IT world and I really wish them to come up with a solution that not only fixes this case, but that helps them preventing future occurrences.6 -
The Steam Community forums for the Planet Zoo beta have really reinforced my decision to stay far away from game development.
A third of the posts are people who clearly have no idea what a beta is - "don't buy, too buggy". Sorry, were you expecting a finished game? You wasted your money, then.
Another third of the posts are people making decisions for the developers. A very common discussion is "Should they delay launch?" which makes my blood boil a bit. First of all, you have no fucking clue what kind of manpower this development team has. You don't manage them, and neither do I. So, neither you nor I should be making assumptions about how fast they can fix the issues, and definitely shouldn't make decisions about if the game should delay launch.
Second of all, neither you nor I know how the game is built. These fixes could mean a line of code, or they could mean a re-write of multiple core systems. We don't know, and I'm guessing you've probably never even written a line of code in your life so you REALLY shouldn't be telling these guys how to do their job.
The last third is benign discussion - people reporting bugs (even though there's an issue tracker, but that thing is fucking jam packed with 250 pages of reported issues), asking how to do xyz, posting feature requests, etc.
But if roughly 60% of the community is behaving poorly and actively working against development by pissing off the devs and drowning out constructive discussion, then yeah; I won't be going near game dev any time soon. Sure, developing business software means dealing with REALLY dumb people but at the very least they are in a business environment and not in a toxic forum of bullshit.
Oh, and as a closing remark, I love this game!14 -
I was engaged as a contractor to help a major bank convert its servers from physical to virtual. It was 2010, when virtual was starting to eclipse physical. The consulting firm the bank hired to oversee the project had already decided that the conversions would be performed by a piece of software made by another company with whom the consulting firm was in bed.
I was brought in as a Linux expert, and told to, "make it work." The selected software, I found out without a lot of effort or exposure, eats shit. With whip cream. Part of the plan was to, "right-size" filesystems down to new desired sizes, and we found out that was one of the many things it could not do. Also, it required root SSH access to the server being converted. Just garbage.
I was very frustrated by the imposition of this terrible software, and started to butt heads with the consulting firm's project manager assigned to our team. Finally, during project planning meetings, I put together a P2V solution made with a customized Linux Rescue CD, perl, rsync, and LVM.
The selected software took about 45 minutes to do an initial conversion to the VM, and about 25 minutes to do a subsequent sync, which was part of the plan, for the final sync before cutover.
The tool I built took about 5 minutes to do the initial conversion, and about 30-45 seconds to do the final sync, and was able to satisfy every business requirement the selected software was unable to meet, and about which the consultants just shrugged.
The project manager got wind of this, and tried to get them to release my contract. He told management what I had built, against his instructions. They did not release my contract. They hired more people and assigned them to me to help build this tool.
They traveled to me and we refined it down to a simple portable ISO that remained in use as the default method for Linux for years after I left.
Fast forward to 2015. I'm interviewing for the position I have now, and one of the guys on the tech screen call says he worked for the same bank later and used that tool I wrote, and loved it. I think it was his endorsement that pushed me over and got me an offer for $15K more than I asked for.4 -
Just got my Christmas present from Shopify:
You have 45 days to integrate with our new Billing API or lose your app on our app store.
Because I just LOVE dropping everything to deal with yet another mandatory Shopify change. Have you guys not heard of backwards compatibility?
My coworker just spent *weeks* getting our app approved, including submitting an obscene amount of information and multiple live reviews and now they're threatening to remove our listing from their app store if we don't adopt their new API by the end of January, requiring a complete re-submission and review to get it back on.
This is apparently a completely normal way to do business to Shopify.4 -
Want to make some friends quickly?
Just go to any pseudo startup incubator in a university (all business people with an idea), mention you are a coder (mimicking the typing on a keyboard to make sure they understand) and all of the sudden you'll have a crowd of people around you that "need to talk to you"
The other guys working with me have to physically protect me every time someone finds out1 -
I quit my job at a startup because the business guys did not respect my advices in business strategy.
just saw the job post for my position where they write:
"experience with MySQL databases (for example redis and git)"
Now I know that I was wrong. These guys seems to have informations that I do not have 😎2 -
Hi guys!
That is my first...well, rant? No, not at all.
I found this community by accident. I was looking for something like this, but did not realize til now. I scrolled through some posts and it is awesome to read awesome stories and rants from awesome people.
I am a 21 year old SAP ABAP developer from Germany. I have finished my bachelor's degree (business informatics/business information management? German: Wirtschaftsinformatik) last August. I have always been interested in web development and teached myself some php basics when I was younger. I would love to do more things like that, but things have changed. There are lots of different frameworks, languages and stuff. It's complicated.
I am not sure if I have understood how this community works, but I am very excited to find out.
And, as I already mentioned, I am German. So please feel free to bash my shitty English. :D25 -
Okay, That right there is pathetic https://thehackernews.com/2019/02/... .
First of all telekom was not able to assure their clients' safety so that some Joe would not access them.
Second of all after a friendly warning and pointing a finger to the exact problem telekom booted the guy out.
Thirdly telekom took a defensive position claiming "naah, we're all good, we don't need security. We'll just report any breaches to police hence no data will be leaked not altered" which I can't decide whether is moronic or idiotic.
Come on boys and girls... If some chap offers a friendly hand by pointing where you've made a mistake - fix the mistake, Not the boy. And for fucks sake, say THANK YOU to the good lad. He could use his findings for his own benefit, to destroy your service or even worse -- sell that knowledge on black market where fuck knows what these twisted minds could have done with it. Instead he came to your door saying "Hey folks, I think you could do better here and there. I am your customes and I'd love you to fix those bugzies, 'ciz I'd like to feel my data is safe with you".
How on earth could corporations be that shortsighted... Behaviour like this is an immediate red flag for me, shouting out loud "we are not safe, do not have any business with us unless you want your data to be leaked or secretly altered".
Yeah, I know, computer misuse act, etc. But there are people who do not give a tiny rat's ass about rules and laws and will find a way to do what they do without a trace back to them. Bad boys with bad intentions and black hoodies behind TOR will not be punished. The good guys, on the other hand, will.
Whre's the fucking logic in that...
P.S. It made me think... why wouldn't they want any security vulns reported to them? Why would they prefer to keep it unsafe? Is it intentional? For some special "clients"? Gosh that stinks6 -
Welp. The startup I'm working for is going under. Ceo gave us zero hints.
I'm the lead dev and been working here for 6 months. Always built features before deadline, zero bugs, and going an extra mile. Can't say the same about the sales and marketing guys.
Kinda scared its gonna look bad. Oh you led a failed startup? Must be your fault.
Guess my side business is becoming full time now. Until new job.
#startup #9/10 #icebergahead2 -
The freaking furniture people didn't complete things on time and our business development department is still not finished. The freaking reception desk is not there yet.
Here I am going to my new office on Saturday morning. Not to code but to monitor those guys to get things done by today.2 -
Story Time.
TL;DR - Because of Corporate PTSD, I replace the word "everyone/folks/guys" with "Team" when I'm addressing my colleagues, whether it be an e-mail or verbally (F2F/Zoom/GMeet).
In 2019, An office job I worked at, a new Vice President joined the company (the same one who told me he saw me in his dream).
We were required, on a daily basis, to form a circle and one-by-one everyone would out-loud say their yesterday's and current day's tasks updates.
So before the VP joined, everyone was free to initiate their turn however they wanted. Phrases like "Hey Everyone", "Good morning all" or "Hi All" was all around acceptable.
But the moment he started joining the stand-ups, he felt the need to change this phrase to a standard "Good morning Team". No other variations of this. Only and ONLY these three words.
Why you ask? Because saying Good morning is good manners and using the word "Team" strengthens the bond between co-workers and increases collaboration and creativity.
Some colleagues were bound to forget this and they did, which resulted in the VP blasting at everyone for doing so. He would show genuine rage over this, almost as if the company would go out of business because of us, not complying to do so.
Now imagine, you get up at 8 AM, get ready, commute, and get ready to speak for the standup and you get yelled at in front of everyone, FIRST THING before you start working.
Needless to say, it would kill everyone's spirit for getting their day started but nobody could speak up against him because obviously, he was the VP of the company then.
And oh yes, our CEO fired him 5 months after that because he (the VP) got slammed with a pedophilia-related lawsuit, by the parents of a 5-year old.6 -
Instead of making business cards, I bought small index cards. The first time ‘round, I carefully taped four or five together with chalkboard tape and then wrote on them with gold pen. Now I’m just using the index cards and black pen since the reaction to that in person’s been positive. What do you guys think? Are people just humoring me in person?20
-
I miss old times rants...So i guess, here it goes mine:
Tomorrow is the day of the first demo to our client of a "forward-looking project" which is totally fucked up, because our "Technical Quality Assurance" - basically a developer from the '90-s, who gained the position by "he is a good guy from my last company where we worked together on sum old legacy project...".
He fucked up our marvellous, loose coupling, publish/subscribe microservice architecture, which was meant to replace an old, un-maintainable enormous monolitch app. Basically we have to replace some old-ass db stored functions.
Everyone was on our side, even the sysadmins were on our side, and he just walked in the conversation, and said: No, i don't like it, 'cause it's not clear how it would even work... Make it an RPC without loose coupling with the good-old common lib pattern, which made it now (it's the 4th 2 week/sprint, and it is a dependency hell). I could go on day and night about his "awesome ideas", and all the lovely e-mails and pull request comments... But back to business
So tomorrow is the demo. The client side project manager accidentally invited EVERYONE to this, even fucking CIO, legal department, all the designers... so yeah... pretty nice couple of swallowed company...
Today was a day, when my lead colleague just simply stayed home, to be more productive, our companys project manager had to work on other prjects, and can't help, and all the 3 other prject members were thinking it is important to interrupt me frequently...
I have to install our projects which is not even had a heart beat... not even on developer machines. Ok it is not a reeeeaaally big thing, but it is 6 MS from which 2 not even building because of tight coupling fucktard bitch..., But ok, i mean, i do my best, and make it work for the first time ever... I worked like 10 ours, just on the first fucking app to build, and deploy, run on the server, connect to db and rabbit mq... 10 FUCKING HOURS!!! (sorry, i mean) and it all was about 1, i mean ONE FUCKING LINE!
Let me explain: spring boot amqp with SSL was never tested before this time. I searched everything i could tought about, what could cause "Connection reset"... Yeah... not so helpful error message... I even have to "hack" into the demo server to test the keystore-truststore at localhost... and all the fucking configs, user names, urls, everything was correct... But one fucking line was missing...
EXCEPT ONE FUCKING LINE:
spring.rabbitmq.ssl.enabled=false # Whether to enable SSL support.
This little bitch took me 6 hours to figure out...so please guys, learn from my fault and check the spring boot appendix for default application properties, if everything is correct, but it is not working...
And of course, if you want SSL then ENABLE it...
spring.rabbitmq.ssl.enabled=true
BTW i really miss those old rants from angry devs, and i hope someone will smile on my fucking torturerant marshall_mathers worklife sugar-free_tateless_cake_decorant_figure_boss missolddays oldtimes_rants5 -
I was in second year of University when I joined the internship, I knew the business idea sucks and he wouldn't be able to carry out the operations either. Little did I know that I will work with the dumbest team ever, literally, the dumbest.
So, the major chunk of the software was outsourced to a consultancy. I was a tech intern, and we were developing an Android App that will save your parking location, let you reserve locations and all etc.
I knew I have stepped on a wrong turf, but again, I had nothing better to do that summer. So, for a very meager stipend, I said yes to a very stupid project. Let the stupidity flow...
~ The boss, had quit his job for this dumb idea with no funding, no team, nothing.
~ He was pursuing a certification course in Android Development from somewhere, where their final project will be a calculator!
~ He had little to no tech skills, hardly knew Java but was leading an Android App Dev project in Java. He had little to no managerial, marketing or sales skills either.
~ For a brief period, I had to work along with the consultancy guys to ramp up their work. They would take backups in a USB drive every evening, and share each others code using the same. VCS died a painful death that day.
~ They hardly wrote functions, rather, wrote very long code in the main (onCreate) function. Code style died of cancer.
~ They couldn't compress an image before sending it to a server. I had to do it for them.
~ Had no concept of creating utility classes.
And best of all,
~ Wrote 20 cases (switch case) with the same code! Instead of using a loop...1 -
Just wanna to share my story:
I just quit my job 2 months ago to ramp up my own startup. I will be funded with 2k Euro per month for 1 year to prepare the founding of my startup. Basicly that means i got one year to build backend/frontend/app. I have a friend that is doing some nontech related stuff like business development and shit. Sounds good until now i guess.
But:
Developing all that stuff in a one man show as a junior-like developer is really hard. I did not find another dev who wanted to join me as a sideproject or something.
Do you guys think thats even possible to ramp up all this by myself or am i to optimistic? I mean, i learn a lot atm, but i am a bit scared to fail too.
That should not be whining or shit, just gathering some input of you guys.
(excuse typos and stuff as i am not a native speaker :) )17 -
Business Intelligence, the most confused market technology has to offer. (Perhaps rivaled only by machine licking. Learning, whatever)
Step 1: develop a product that can replace a company's database guys. Make it cost more than the database guys.
Step 2: Show off product to managers using images of the product that the managers will love, but never have the skills to do themselves.
Step 3: Fucking obviously the managers buy it.
Step 4: Fire half the database staff.
Step 5: Managers give the BI tools to their remaining database guys ANYWAYS and instruct them to use it
Step 6: Database guys spend a month learning the new tool because management "wants to use it too".
Step 7: Database guys now use this new system for reports but have trouble using it for complex use cases, as it was designed for simple use cases. Meanwhile, management will never, ever touch the tool again.
Step 8: Hire new guys for reporting, because the remaining database guys can't complete both their normal tasks *and* the reports.
Step 9: Database guys are expensive. Go to step 1.1 -
So at this startup i was single iOS dude age 34, android had 1.5 dudes, one older, one you ger. That 0.5 younger was tech director, really good, so they churned for two guys. Millenial, nice guy, never making conflict, just being sleazebag.
Nobody explained to boss why iOS was always late with features, even when i complained. So i got help, 10 months later, project was unpolished but stable, codewise. Now i interview and hire a guy, age 27, who was all yeah dude no problem, and that being my first interview, i fell under his friendly appearance. I ignored a fact that he didn’t know 90% of stuff i was asking him, because he was so friendly and outgoing and we will do anything attitude.
The guy knew very little, was childish and irresponisble. He showed at work at noon. He started telling me what to do, his senior collegue who started the project. He argued about everything that i would tell him. So i spent three to four hours a day charting with him, because we were in different cities. He had two uears of experence, but he was below junior level. And he refused any of my advices for learning in free time. No, he said, thats my free time, you will not tell me what to do. Well, how do you plan on being better, i asked. He said, i learn by doing. But, since he was at his job only six hours a day, instead of eight, and since he was productive only for 2, i guess he was lazy.
He would deliver a UI he would make, without business logic, and tell it is done. Then clients would call me and ask why text fields are not saved..
This all took me month to understand. I lost time, i lost trust, and soon he was fired.
But, soon i was fired also, replaced by another two devs who i had interviewd and formed a team. I was discarded as trash, just like that. I have even worked overtime to catch up with android guys, unpaid.
Took me year to recover mentally from this.
Lessons learned: be objective when interviewing. Job is business, not friendship, trust no one, keep neutral on work. Leave honesty for someone else, honesty will be used against you. Never criticize two girls in office who disturb developers by talking about sex and dicks all the time, dressed sexy, they are girlfriends of people ranked above you. Leave code perfection for your projects.3 -
Dev team: This part of the app has a shitty ux. We want to fix it after we finish this feature.
Business: hey guys we think we lack data so we got some users to check our page with shitty ux and see if they think it is shit
User: yeah it’s shit
Great use of resources you chucklefucks6 -
One job I picked up was for an IoT Start Up. It was quite interesting work, reporting to the technical director, who was an electronics engineer, who was designing the hardware himself, they had a couple of firmware guys already, and just needed someone to take care of the software.
So they said they needed something in Azure that they could stream their data to and provide analytics for their clients. It had to be Azure, and it had to be Azure Native, and was to be Multi-client, as they had a deal with Microsoft to showcase how well Azure works in the IoT space at an exhibition/conference in 3 months time.
So I worked flat out for 3 months, on a whole variety of technology, from C++ to get the radio packets from their IoT chip, Python to run on the hub to take the data from the C++ and stream it to the cloud, Azure IoT Hubs in every continent to receive the data and store it an a Cosmos DB, and then Power BI analytics wrapped up in an Angular front end that the clients could log into.
Got it finished 2 days before the show, and they were so pleased I got flown business class to Singapore to be on the stand and talk to customers.
The first sign of trouble was when we arrived at the show to find we just had one of those little circular tables with two stools in the middle of the floor, about two feet across and no power.
No problem, I was able to sort that, swapping laptops in and out.
Microsoft were really happy with what we had, and couldn't believe I had thrown it all together in 3 months.
We picked up a potential customer for the system, a major Asian Telecoms company.
Then when we got home, the CEO swooped in. I had never met this guy before. Imagine one of the VC guys from Silicon Valley, or the CEO from the IT Crowd. You get the picture. Could talk the hind leg of a donkey, and real street smart, but no brains. He insisted on "taking it from here" and flew alone to strike the deal with the customer. Came back with an MOU in his pocket and said to me, their guys will be in touch with you.
Then I got a call. Can you send us the source code and tell us how what servers we have to run this on?
Um, its cloud native.
No, we can't use a cloud it has to be on our servers - your CEO told us that was no problem..
He hadn't even taken the trouble to find out what it was we had built, and what he was selling.1 -
how about that Linux coming to Windows business? i know normal people couldn't give a shit. what about you guys? +1 if you think it's awesome, comment why if you think it's bad.12
-
I have a VP constantly harassing my people about some reports that we need to do as per federal law.
The thing is, these live inside of such system that I get to see exactly how many "hits" they get on a yearly basis. The only traffic we have on those sections is of people going ahead and putting the information from our reports there.
That's it, literally. Our user base does not go there. Federal agencies do not go there. No one gives two blips of shit about those sections. Yet she continuously acts like they are the most important thing in the fucking world. To make it better, I was told not to generate actual analytical data from said reports, since people with PHDs will come down on me to ask me who the fuck do I think I am from gauging them with such systems. So shit is a mute point on all fucking accounts.
I told my VP I can generate traffic information to let them know that shit is not really the most important thing in the fucking universe. His eyes glowed.
I don't want to see head rolls, but from staying till the next morning awake trying to give the best to our userbase, and just to be called out on shit like this as if I did not do enough for our people just.....well....it fucking hits man.
The worse part was me literally getting 30 minutes of sitting down after an all nighter, doing something for my users, to get to a meeting the next morning (I should not have driven there honestly) to hear this bitch complain about us not doing enough or not caring or whatever other bullshit she would spew.
I was livid, lack of sleep makes me dangerous. I turned to say something when my boss stopped me and took care of business. I seriously love this man. By all accounts and generational gaps a boomer, but one of the few good golden ones.
I just hate how unappreciated the realm of software development is by people that think that our shit is as simple as making a fucking powerpoint presentation.
Consolidate that with a director from another department taking all fucking glory during a major event of an application that I built by myself with 2 fucking weeks of no sleeping. And shit just gets glorious.
I have considered moving to other places, and heck, have gotten amazing offers, what with having a degree with a big fucking GPA and having the credentials of a senior, lead, full stack and manager role, the sky is the limit. But i know that if I leave then my users suffer, and I just can't fucking have that.
I have heard them speaking about doing something with X app that I built (with my department) I have even heard one of them saying "how is this made?" and a part of me hoped that it would be a good time to grab them and tell them of the field and the things that they can do. But I don't like announcing myself that way, always seemed to presumptuous, so I just smile, fuck yeah, my users are doing their thing with what I built to better their lives, what more can I have?
I have gotten criticisms from them, one recognized me, told me about his pain points and how it makes it hard for him to do what he must. Getting the data from the user base in an effort to make shit better for them drives me, my challenge being "how about this? better eh?"
But fucking execs man, think only of themselves, not the users, they forget about the users. Much like a shitty rock band forgetting about the music, about the fans.
I can't let that slide. But this fucking field. I sometimes fucking hate it, and I hate it because of the normies that don't understand and do not want to understand.
I do way too much, my guys do way too much and all I want is for the recognition to go to them. They do not need the ego boost, but to see my guys sitting in a meeting in which some dumb fuck is trying to drill us for taking to long, not doing something and what not, it fucking pisses me off. As their boss I always stand up and tell bitches off, but instead of learning, the bitches just keep pressing on their already defeated points.
Everything in human life gets fucking erradicated by: humans. People really do fucking suck.
I sometimes wish to go back, redo my diesel tech license and just work there, where I think one would be better of talking to an engine. But no, even then you get people, you have to interact with people, deal with people, and I am so far up my game and in my field that starting from scratch is a fucking mute point.
Maybe I need to keep fucking with stocks, get rich and just keep investing on bullshit. Whatever the fuck it takes me from having to feel the urge to choke a motherfucker in public.1 -
Rant r = new Rant(Rant.TEAM_PROBLEM);
Three months ago, a senior, one year older than me, decided to join me in doing startups. He said he's good at finance stuff (his parents are fund managers), and he is interested in startups just like I am. He treated me very nicely, so I gladly accepted him.
I'm currently working on many projects, and some of them won me quite a few awards, most notably on the national competition. I also got invited into startup incubator programs, met some awesome people and offered free scholarships at universities in my country.
He frankly said he joined because he wanted to learn about startups and have those "privileges" too, and I'm cool with that.
Anyway, the problem is that I'm the one doing all the work. He's really nice, doesn't claim anything whatsoever, but the thing is he doesn't have any skills whatsoever except soft skills like communicating. So, I'm horribly tired from working alone.
My tasks mostly involves full-stack development, such as planning the specs, designing and developing frontend for mobile apps and progressive webapps, developing microservices for the backend, up to deploying and maintaining the servers. It's a lot of work for a single person to handle in such a short timeframe.
Not only that, but I'm also the one handling the business/marketing part, albeit I'm still learning. From doing paperworks, pitches, business models, up to creating advertising materials for the product.
I'm obviously not the smart ones like the people out there, but I keep focusing on improving my skills.
So, he said he could help me, and I let him try. What did you think he did?
He made pitch decks using default fucking PowerPoint themes, shooted a demo video with his phone cam in 320p potato resolution and expect me to "add some effects", gives me loads of requirements when all we needed was a simple feature, copying and pasting prior documents in my paperworks which doesn't make any fucking sense at all, and quite a lot more.
Also, he said I should stay in the developer zone only while he maintains the business, whilist he obviously can't do much in the business part either. Seriously...?
I'm okay with his lack of experience, considering he's nice and all, unlike the other business guys I've met in the previous rants. However, I keep questioning myself why he is here in the first place when I'm the one doing everything anyway.
What should I do? Maybe just keep him and recruit more experienced people to join us, as he's not that much of a burden? What do you devRanters think?
Thanks for reading, fellow devRanters! 😀8 -
How do you guys/girls explain to potential new customers that you can perfectly work in a structured business environment and follow the rules, but also that you're assertive enough to oppose desicions being made based on bias, misunderstanding, fanboyism, or grave stupidity.
I just got informed from a freelance position that they would have hired me if it were not for my 'rebellious nature towards customers'
I don't oppose customers, i oppose stupidity unfounded.
Example from experience
> me working in a helodesk support position, all windows computer.
> new mgr comes into office, is a douche and complete mac fanboy
> wants all computers that are FINALLY working decent for some time in the entire department replaced with mac's... Back at 2010.
> whole team, even disliking microsoft themselves, are telling mgr that's a bad, dangerously dumb idea, expensive too, different OS, different software mgmt making, back then integration microsoft and apple was beyond diarhea... Several other issues the senior devs and admins pointed out
>mgr: 'but aple is soh much better, like a billion times better, hurrduurrrrr'
His decision passed somehow to the board..
> All stations from our customers get changed...we don't get a single machine to try out problems because overspending
> we are most of the time unable to help out customers because we still have pc's...
> mgr asks team why performance drops after 1 month
> we compared performance graph with his starting date of mgr, see clear drop after mgr's plan implemented...
> board stilll stands by mgr, gets praise for 'bold changes in the company', but appears to be some associate's son
> two main seniors leave after 15 years of employment, in three months, 80% of staff leaves.
> we canr fix the problems, we are not dev's , we get shit from all sides, i was still a junior in the industry so i worked as a slave inside that job.
> eventually get fired due to 'bad performance'
> mgr loses entire team... 'Hey why don't we outsource this dept to south africa, it's a lot cheaper! '
now that company is an it hellhouse where everyone get clinically depressed from sitting atbtheir station...
This is what i wish to oppose!
How to make that clear!4 -
Hello fellas! 👋
I recently told you that I’m planning to pull out Chaaat – a fully open source messenger that doesn’t track you and doesn’t share your data: https://devrant.com/rants/1549251/....
The project is also mentioned here: https://devrant.com/rants/1570178/...
So, I’m here to tell you good news – a great developer, @not-a-muggle, decided to join me, and now we made a team!
I also made some conversations and acquired “chaaat” name from another team on Heroku, so now we have consistent domain name on both Heroku and GitHub Pages.
We have Trello board with very well described tasks almost anyone can do. We also have Slack to have both business and free conversations.
If you’re seeking a place to contribute and gain some NodeJS / React / PWA / WebRTC experience with detailed code review from experienced developer, just mention me here or shoot me an email on hello@miloslav.website. Provide your email so I’ll be able to contact you.
Our main goals are:
1. Have fun and some experience
2. Make it to Chrome Experiments mention
Marketing/advertising help is much appreciated.
Feel free to email me anytime!8 -
I hate silicon valley.
They enable so much of the state's and federal government's bullshit, the corporations and the banks subversion and destruction of society.
It's time to pop their fucking tech bubble.
From here on out, any time you hear or read the words 'startup', be sure to comment with "you mean speculative marketing investments?"
Because most tech runs on shit-tier semi-polished iterations of glorified CRUD anyway, thats all most of it is. And it 100% relies on grabbing network share through massive advertising and presence campaigns. A lot of vc money is being flushed straight down the toilet and this is a point to emphasize. Crash the fucking tech sector. Do it.
It'll have a knock on effect to the advertising space, which will put the hurt on google's bottom line when they and their ilk are already under pressure for all the poisonous, monopolist shit they pull like helping china build their surveillance tech.
Extra points for emphasizing "pot-fueled ideas sketched out on napkins while sitting in fucking chipotle, in unwashed sweater vests, originated by guys who are fresh out of college and never ran a business in their life. 90% of them fail in the first year. VCs and investor are losing their shirts." etc.
The entire dishonest fucking trade relies on other people's money, being bought out in either techno land-grabs or turf-protection e.x. atlassian acquiring trello, a **glorified todo app**.
Thats the business model. Hell go build your own and make a buck.
Build your own. Build something better and most of all... *fuck silicon valley*.
Let it burn, let burn, let it burn.10 -
Ok guys, its a Sunday afternoon. Who is hustling like me right now? I'll do whatever it takes to create my own business and depend on myself 👊
I regret lots of wasted time playing games. I should have used all of that time to escape the rat race 💪
No one wants to become a high paid slave forever.8 -
!rant
Sometimes I think I am (a developer) is similar to a samurai or a yakuza. Once we get into this business, we just cannot get out of it. :?
// I am starting to get drunk. It is lucky for you guys that we have 2 hours interval. I don't expect my next post to be any good.4 -
Guys I need your help. I'm a student working at a very small development business as a developer ( who would have thought) and I really love working there ( nice colleagues, I learn something every day) but recently I don't get enough work. it really feels like half of my day is spend running after the seniors asking for work and it starts to get really annoying not only for my but for them too. and most recently I'm just going home early because I don't want to just sit there unproductivly :/ but this is not really a solution either because at the moment I'm trying to work 40 hours ( I get paid 20) to get some overtime to not have to work as much as soon as my university starts. but now I don't get my hours and have to chase for work... does anyone have any advice for me?6
-
We have Jira to keep track of bugs and allow users to inform issue with our in-house software. One fucker created ticket, "Hi Guys, I cannot sign-in to Skype business". He even put the screenshot.
What the fuck he expected us to do. Everyday have to deal with low mentality peasants.3 -
How do you guys handle a client who is two months behind in payments?
I am building a website for a local business and the owner is very far behind in paying. I am a bit behind in the development schedule, but he is in the know about the status and progress of the website and I’ve reminded him multiple times.14 -
story which happened yesterday and ended in mixed emotions
big changes in our company were announced, non tech employees changed positions, new business plan, people changing teams, shattering my plans of relocation back to my home country on the end of this year... told my manager I'm not happy, scheduled a call with manager on the highest position I'm in contact with
the call BB - big boss
BB: things are changing, it was decided like this, must be like this, can't do anything with it, other manager bla bla
ME: yes, but you knew I wanted to relocate, now my only option of relocating is to leave the company
BB: well, yes, thats unfortunate, but we would like you to stay, manager bla bla about growth, good work environment
ME: yes, but you're leaving me in this team as a only developer with people who not just don't have any tech background, they don't have a clue about dev stuff, like... at all * me = very not happy *
BB: but you know all our systems and work processes which will stay in place and you can teach new people, we need you * stopped, because probably realised what he said *
ME: * arrogant little laugh * well, i mean, I think i can live with it, but really wanted to talk about this, so you guys know I don't agree with what is happening here
BB: * sigh * ok, well.. yes, I mean, we were counting on this, we can give you a raise, but not much, maybe x%
ME: x% sounds good, I guess I can learn to live with this situation for a while
* everybody laughs *8 -
!Rant
Awesomeness ensues!!!!!
I finally quit my day job at the place I was working to finally go full time with my business, TerraNimbus. I was able to secure a small loan to cover business and personal expenses until I can drum up enough business to keep things a float.
I’m super fucking stoked because I’ve been wanting to branch out and do this for about 4 years now and finally feel like I have the right pieces in play to make it work. I’m as nervous as hell but so fucking excited too!
I just needed to share this here cause the DevRant community is world class and you guys/gals are fucking killing it everyday being AWESOME!!! And you all feel like extended family members to me all going through the motions in each of your lives and keeping ‘in touch’ through devRant on a daily basis. So I wanted to share my story with everyone here.4 -
I am making my first dashboard/summary page without a tutorial! Once I learn D3 via a Udemy course, this will be 93% done!
I just want want to see what you guys think?
Some text is removed as I shared it on FB and the business I am making it for is following me and they have NO idea that I am doing it for them.5 -
Many years ago, when I moved from a semi-experienced developer to an absolute beginner project manager at another company, my very first project was an absolute clusterfuck.
The customer basically wanted to scrape signups to their EventBrite events into their CRM system. The fuckery began before the project even started, when I was told my management that we HAD to use BizTalk. It didn't matter that we had zero experience with BizTalk, or that using BizTalk for this particular project was like using a stealth bomber to go down to the shops for a bottle of tequila (that's one for fans of Last Man on Earth). It's designed to be used by an experienced team of developers, not a small inexperienced 1-person dev team I had. The reason was for bullshit political reasons which I wasn't really made clear on (I suspect that our sales team sold it to them for a bazillion pounds, and they weren't using it for anything, so we had to justify us selling it to them by doing SOMETHING with it). And because this was literally my first project, I was young and not confident at all, and I wanted to be the guy who just got shit done, I didn't argue.
Inevitably, the project was a turd. It went waaay over budget and time, and didn't work very well. I remember one morning on my way to work seriously considering ploughing my car into a ditch, so that I had a good excuse not to go into work and face that bullshit project.
The good thing is that I learned a lot from that. I decided that kind of fuckery was never going to happen again.
A few months later I had an initial meeting with a potential customer (who I was told would be a great customer to have for bullshit political reasons) - I forget the details but they essentially wanted to build a platform for academic researchers to store data, process it using data processing plugins which they could buy, and commersialise it somehow. There were so many reasons why this was a terrible idea, but when they said that they were dead set on using SharePoint (SharePoint!!!) as the base of the platform, I remembered my first project and what happened.
I politely explained my technical and business concerns over the idea, and reasons why SharePoint was not a good fit (with diagrams and everything), suggested a completely different technology stack, and scheduled another meeting so they could absorb what I had said and revisit. I went to my sales and head of development and basically told them to run. Run fast, and run far, because it won't work, these guys are having some kind of fever dream, it's a clusterfuck in the making, and for some reason they won't consider not using SP.
I never heard from them again, so I assume we dropped them as a potential client. It felt amazing. I think that was the single best thing I did for that company.
Moral of the story: when technology decisions are made which you know are wrong, don't be afraid to stand up and explain why.3 -
Business: "should we use this technology?"
Developers: " probably not but we will do a full investigation and give you a report on the pros cons and our professional opinion... No we should not use that technology"
Business: "oh yeah why you guys were off seeing if it would work we did the deal so now we have to use it"2 -
I’ve been out of steady work for almost 2 whole months now but things are starting to look up...
I’m super stoked for some potential client projects!!! I have one client that wants me to completely rebuild their businesses infrastructure, PC refresh, server upgrade, network overhaul for 3 sites, and more. This new client has a business partner with another side business and wants to discuss potential work/projects. And I’m going to be discussing a potential contract deal on Thursday to develop a custom software for another client.
Guys! My startup is starting woot!!!3 -
So, I departed for a month long Erasmus in Portugal and got to work for an education related business. From day 1, all my tasks consisted in transcribing data from paper to excel sheets, and then using that data for various different tasks. It became obvious that I wouldn't have had much programming to do by default, so I started creating a series of Python scripts to automate part of my work or aid me in some bothersome areas of it, and what at first seemed a grueling series of boring and repetitive work soon actually became fun. From this point on I challenged myself to make the scripts better and better under as many aspects as possible. I eventually ended up concluding all my daily tasks in a matter of 15 to 30 minutes everyday, as that's the time it took to adapt the scripts to the new document formats of the day :P Jokes aside, this truly proves a point though: small businesses like this one, that very much depend on manual labor for tasks that can easily be automated by 50 lines of code, truly would benefit from a prepared IT and development team, and it shocked me to see how little these guys know, and are even afraid at times, about innovative techniques to speed up work substantially. Truly a great and humbling experience for very young devs like me :)2
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Our agile scrum team has finally shattered into two parts.
On the one hand we have front-end guys.
On the other hand we have backend- /dev-ops guys.
The FE guys don't care about the BE guys business.
They don't join pairworking and only noticing things that went bad, when a Backend guy has caused it.
Goodbye fullstack dev-ops team...
I really dislike that arrogant basterds.
Frontend Hobo-Bitches...! -
A Rant that took my attention on MacRhumors forum.
.
I pre-calculated projected actual overall cost of owning my i5/5/256 Haswell Air, which I got for $1500.
After calculations, this machine would cost me about $3000 for 3 years of use.
(Apple Care, MS Office Business, Parallels, Thunderbolt adapter to HDMI, Case... and so on).
Yea... A lot of people think it's all about the laptop with Apple. nah... not at all. There's a reason Apple is gradually dropping the price of their laptops.
They are slowly moving to a razor and blade business model... which basically is exactly what it sounds like - you buy the razor which isn't too expensive, but you've got no choice but to buy expensive additional blades.
I doubt Apple is making much money from laptop sales alone... well definitely not as much as they were making 5 years or so ago (remember the original air was about $1800 for base model, and if i remember correctly - $1000 additional dollars to upgrade to 64GB SSD from the base HDD.
Yes, ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS FOR 64GB SSD!
Well, anyways, the point is that Apple no longer makes them BIG bucks from the laptop alone, but they still make good profits from upgrades. $300 to go to 512GB SSD from 256, $100 for 4GB extra ram, and $150 for a small bump in processor. They make good profits from these as well.
But that's not where they make mo money. It's once you buy the Macbook, they've got you trapped in their walled garden for life. Every single apple accessory is ridiculously overpriced (compared to market standards of similar-same products).
And Apple makes their own cables and ports. So you have to buy exclusively for Apple products. Every now and then they will change even their own ports and cables, so you have to buy more.
Software is exclusive. You have no choice but to buy what apple offers... or run windows/linux on your Mac.
This is a douche level move comparable to say Mircrosoft kept changing the usb port every 2-3 years, and have exclusive rights to sell the devices that plug in.
No, instead, Intel-Microsoft and them guys make ports and cables as universal as possible.
Can you imagine if USB3.0 was thinner and not backwards compatible with usb2.0 devices?
Well, if it belonged to Apple that's how it would be.
This is why I held out so long before buying an apple laptop. Sure, I had the ipod classic, ipod touch, and more recently iPad Retina... but never a laptop.
I was always against apple.
But I factored in the pros and cons, and I realized I needed to go OS X. I've been fudged by one virus or another during my years of Windows usage. Trojans, spywares. meh.
I needed a top-notch device that I can carry with me around the world and use for any task which is work related. I figured $3000 was a fair price to pay for it.
No, not $1500... but $3000. Also I 'm dead happy I don't have to worry about heat issues anymore. This is a masterpiece. $3000 for 3 years equals $1000 a year, fair price to pay for security, comfort, and most importantly - reliability. (of course awesome battery is superawesome).
Okay I'm going to stop ranting. I just wish people factored in additional costs from owning an a mac. Expenses don't end when you bring the machine home.
I'm not even going to mention how they utilize technology-push to get you to buy a Thunderbolt display, or now with the new Air - to get a time capsule (AC compatible).
It's all about the blades, with Apple. And once you go Mac, you likely won't go back... hence all the student discounts and benefits. They're baiting you to be a Mac user for life!
Apple Marketing is the ultimate.
source: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...3 -
Sometimes life takes unexpected turns:
I studied mechanical engineering and did some "computer stuff" in my free time, you know, "programming" with Java, toyed around with HTML/CSS/PHP a few years ago, some local server stuff with a raspberry pi, nothing fancy.
Half a year ago i got hired as engineer first but they said they needed an "IT Guy" also.
What i did since then
*Researching, Testing and Planning the introduction of an ERP software
*Planning, coordinating and (partially) setting up a new server for the company (actually two cause redundancy (heavy lifting got done by our IT partner, its not like i suddenly know how to do the entire windows server administration)
*Writing 3 minor tools for some guys in the company in java
*Creating numereous excel vba scripts that make work a lot easier
*doing all the day to day business that comes up when absolutly noone know how to use a pc in the company
*consulting the boss about webshops and websites in general and finding a decent partner
*and some engineering
Did i mentioned that i studied mechanical engineering? I know nothing about all this, or rather, i know enough to know that i know not enough.
My current side project is creating a small intranet, so creating a new VM in Hyper V, setting up some OS (probably slim CentOS), getting a Webserver running and making it somewhat secure. Then i need to create some content, i am very close to just install a mediawiki and call it a day. If i write anything in PHP i fear that i make way to many erros or just reinvent the wheel, on the other hand, i couldnt find anything resembling what i need. I also had to create the front end side, i knew CSS around 2010, there is probably tons of stuff i dont know and i will make so many errors.
This is frustrating, everything i touch feels like i am venturing the beaten path but noone ever showed me the ropes so everything i do feels like childs play. I need an adult. Also the biggest Question remains: What i am?1 -
I am a good person. I can even say I am a good programmer. I have worked hard to get where I am and that shows perseverance. Although, where I am right now is not what I expected, I am somewhere. I can do something. I have good intentions.
Someday, I will build software which will be used by millions of people around the interwebs. And they will love me, for I will have made their lives better....in some way. Some will even consider paying me for it. Not because the well placed and non intrusive donate button I put there, but out of pure adoration and bare necessity to preserve someone as brilliant and precious as me. I shall be the definition of success. But I long for neither adoration nor wealth, for I am humble or at least that is how I will be perceived.
Like flies to the honey my success will attract big evil corporations to acquire my business. And I shall spit on their wretched face....at first. I would like to be wooed. Such display of integrity shall inspire generations of programmers. Let ye be inspired. There will be those who envy my achievements and they will be mocked and shunned by my true believers. But being the kind soul that I am, I will bring back my minions, for it could a PR nightmare.
All these events will take place in a not too distant future. Sure, I am going through a dark time now, it will pass. 'tis nothing but me transitioning from a lame ass PHP coder moth to this totally badass software engineer who is also a cool bro. This eclipse of my brain shall pass. My neurons will fire in all directions like photons from the sun during late winter, for it may overheat and we definitely don't want that.
I pray to the gods of engineering to grant my wishes. Trust me guys, you will be thanking yourselves when donate my money to charities that will help me set up. But that's another scheme. Amen.4 -
So we’ve taken over from a project team that disbanded... read: “cut their contracts because fuck this, I can earn more working for better people”.
Me and one other guy have been tasked with saving this heap of shit.
Obviously the project guys left saying “it’s nearly done, just this one feature”. Because cut contracts are easier to deal with if “everything is almost done”.
We jump on and find that’s not the case at all... this thing, is a beast, a big old stats analysis program... so we’re like “cool, let’s see what’s going o...OH MY GOD”.
The “recalculation” function was core to this POS. The contractors had done it in C# through entity framework... it took 24 hours to run, over a reasonably small data set that was due to double every 2-5 years.
So... here’s the deal, it ran over night.... then failed. And no cunt had noticed. Entity framework “can’t commit because I’m muddled up as fuck, did you really just put the whole db in EF in memory to work with it?” Exception.
Que 6 months of me and my lead doing the job properly.
Anyway, the failure: I ended up in Hospital again with a Crohn’s flare up... about 5 months in.
Fuckall to do with all this nonsense I just wanted to tell a story. it was an interesting/fun project to fix and my lead was a legend... so happy days.
Similar story, different set of contracted devs... they’d been defining requirements with the business users using the term “Risk” which the business users knew as a group of risks.
The domain model had been written RiskGroup<>— -
Morning guys. How are your desks? Do you use normal desk or maybe standing one? Do you keep your desk clean or maybe it's more like a mess? Haha!
If someone is curious about my hardware on the photo:
- Dell XPS 15 9550
- Marshall Mode Headphones
- 16gb pendrive that's in business card format but just the important part of it as you can see
Post your desks!
Greetings from my coding buddy cactus 🌵12 -
So Is it just me thinking that no one would pay for my work (web dev, IT stuff etc...), because it is so easy to build a website for example. I'm kinda beginner, what's your opinion on wordpress? But mybe I'm just rushing things, we want to build a webdev business with my friends and I'd like to hear some idea/experience from you guys :)6
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I own a start up with two friends of mine - one is great with business, and the other tries to be both a developer and on the business side. I'm fully on development and I find it extremely frustrating to work with him. He copies and pastes code, doesn't understand it, and worse still will never admit it and digs himself in deeper into the hole he's dug. He doesn't code as a hobby and it's purely just assignments in university that he spends any coding time on. I've tried helping him to improve over the past few months, but nothing seems to ever do anything as there's no desire to solve problems - just really dollar signs in his eyes is probably the only reason he's in computer engineering. Recently we got a contract with an organisation to make an extremely simple app for android and iOS as the first stage of their planned development. As I did the most of the work on another project during the summer (while juggling a job with another company as an internship), I asked if he could take this so he can try to improve and equalise work so he does his share. Not only did it take 3 weeks, but it's shoddy as hell and looks like it was done in the space of an hour. In reality it took days for him. It's unbearable! The android code I saw was clearly just copied from various sources and mashed together - there was no planning, no understanding of abstractions, and was legit a giant class or two with extreme amounts of redundancy. Hell, he even asked me for help for trying to implement fragments when I pointed out that making screens with buttons and such will be extremely difficult if he is only passing in strings. Any of you guys experiences something like this before? I'm planning on bailing in the coming weeks once my exams are over with for university as it's becoming unbearable.6
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An annoying type of colleague: the kind that refuses to cooperate and insists on doing shit their own way because they have done it that way for years and they become little crybabies whenever someone new tries to work with them.
Somehow managers accept their baby-like behavior because they've been producing output. However, like my Business Processes professor said: "Don't focus on output".
It's just annoying trying to work with these guys. -
I work with a few 'idea' and marketing guys. The quicker we can turn out a project, the quicker we can make money. Some days, I can get 3 quick, easy projects out. But sometimes, these guys get 'ideas' that are out of the norm so they can take a few days to get going.
One of the guys had an idea I knew was going to take longer than a day, especially with the rest of my daily tasks. This guy loves reading 'how to run a business' books and tries to say we need it today, 'nothing is impossible' (because it was in his book).
I explain reality to him and he gets all pissy. The following day he tried again, with something that would take less time. 'so, which one do you want? Yeah, I can do that one quicker, but the first one will take longer then.'
This guy don't get it. I will burn everyone of his fucking books.2 -
!rant
I know this may not be the typical post on Devrant and it may be a little off topic, but I could really use some advice from fellow colleagues here.
The thing is, I just finished engineering school and I got my first job as a software engineer. So far so good. I've never been a natural talent in this field, and I suck at writing code. I find things like architecture, system design, innovation, requirementsspecification, management and business development much more interesting.
These past weeks as a software engineer has been really challenging for me. I seem to be totally "in over my head", and fuck everything up. I can't understand how the code I'm supposed to write works, and can't solve even the simplest of tasks that are assigned to me if they involve any implementation of code, or fiddling with Github or build servers.
Is it normal to feel like this as an engineer with zero experience? Will things get better, or should I just resign or wait to be fired?
What would a natural next step for a software engineer who'd like to move more into business and management be? A MBA? Project management courses?
I hope to get some advice from you guys. Maybe you've felt like this when you started out as well? Anyway, any constructive feedback would be really much appreciated.7 -
I need some opinions on Rx and MVVM. Its being done in iOS, but I think its fairly general programming question.
The small team I joined is using Rx (I've never used it before) and I'm trying to learn and catch up to them. Looking at the code, I think there are thousands of lines of over-engineered code that could be done so much simpler. From a non Rx point of view, I think we are following some bad practises, from an Rx point of view the guys are saying this is what Rx needs to be. I'm trying to discuss this with them, but they are shooting me down saying I just don't know enough about Rx. Maybe thats true, maybe I just don't get it, but they aren't exactly explaining it, just telling me i'm wrong and they are right. I need another set of eyes on this to see if it is just me.
One of the main points is that there are many places where network errors shouldn't complete the observable (i.e. can't call onError), I understand this concept. I read a response from the RxSwift maintainers that said the way to handle this was to wrap your response type in a class with a generic type (e.g. Result<T>) that contained a property to denote a success or error and maybe an error message. This way errors (such as incorrect password) won't cause it to complete, everything goes through onNext and users can retry / go again, makes sense.
The guys are saying that this breaks Rx principals and MVVM. Instead we need separate observables for every type of response. So we have viewModels that contain:
- isSuccessObservable
- isErrorObservable
- isLoadingObservable
- isRefreshingObservable
- etc. (some have close to 10 different observables)
To me this is overkill to have so many streams all frequently only ever delivering 1 or none messages. I would have aimed for 1 observable, that returns an object holding properties for each of these things, and sending several messages. Is that not what streams are suppose to do? Then the local code can use filters as part of the subscriptions. The major benefit of having 1 is that it becomes easier to make it generic and abstract away, which brings us to point 2.
Currently, due to each viewModel having different numbers of observables and methods of different names (but effectively doing the same thing) the guys create a new custom protocol (equivalent of a java interface) for each viewModel with its N observables. The viewModel creates local variables of PublishSubject, BehavorSubject, Driver etc. Then it implements the procotol / interface and casts all the local's back as observables. e.g.
protocol CarViewModelType {
isSuccessObservable: Observable<Car>
isErrorObservable: Observable<String>
isLoadingObservable: Observable<Void>
}
class CarViewModel {
isSuccessSubject: PublishSubject<Car>
isErrorSubject: PublishSubject<String>
isLoadingSubject: PublishSubject<Void>
// other stuff
}
extension CarViewModel: CarViewModelType {
isSuccessObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
isErrorObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
isLoadingObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
}
This has to be created by hand, for every viewModel, of which there is one for every screen and there is 40+ screens. This same structure is copy / pasted into every viewModel. As mentioned above I would like to make this all generic. Have a generic protocol for all viewModels to define 1 Observable, 1 local variable of generic type and handle the cast back automatically. The method to trigger all the business logic could also have its name standardised ("load", "fetch", "processData" etc.). Maybe we could also figure out a few other bits too. This would remove a lot of code, as well as making the code more readable (less messy), and make unit testing much easier. While it could never do everything automatically we could test the basic responses of each viewModel and have at least some testing done by default and not have everything be very boilerplate-y and copy / paste nature.
The guys think that subscribing to isSuccess and / or isError is perfect Rx + MVVM. But for some reason subscribing to status.filter(success) or status.filter(!success) is a sin of unimaginable proportions. Also the idea of multiple buttons and events all "reacting" to the same method named e.g. "load", is bad Rx (why if they all need to do the same thing?)
My thoughts on this are:
- To me its indentical in meaning and architecture, one way is just significantly less code.
- Lets say I agree its not textbook, is it not worth bending the rules to reduce code.
- We are already breaking the rules of MVVM to introduce coordinators (which I hate, as they are adding even more unnecessary code), so why is breaking it to reduce code such a no no.
Any thoughts on the above? Am I way off the mark or is this classic Rx?16 -
In all the companies i worked at so far, never seen any employee (in any department) above age 50..maybe the ceo or some lawyer, but thats it.
Where do all the 50+ ppl go in tech?
I'm not sure the tech world will be what it is now even in 10 years.. but I'm just wondering do any of u guys think/worry about where we'll work when we stop being young and cool?
Looks like it's either u start your own business, which not everyone can, or..
what is option B exactly?!?18 -
Guys, I have an interview Friday to a company I don't necessarily want to work for but I need the job because I just finished a coding boot camp not too long ago. What are some templates for Fintech, business macho companies that I can work on? Also, my resume sucks ass. Any advice is appreciated.5
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we're doing a massive database migration and trying to fix a lot of shit that was done for years in the db. problem is, i have to cater to a business major asshat that doesn't know the first thing about working with data and he's responsible for 99% of the shit we're trying to clean up.
his response to the problem i brought up in his stuff? "we can deal with it later, right now i need it like this". this is why you guys have a shit database, because we have to spoil this idiot. then they complain everything takes forever to run and the database is bloated and somehow it is our fault.
I'm really holding myself right now, because i already went off on him once and he basically called me hysterical, and our boss likes him too much to antagonize the bastard. but god i wish i could run over him11 -
"Hey guys we originally set the demo date to August 5th and thus far I have not seen any previews before that, what's going on here?"
Ok see, that is the kind of thing that I would take to me own lil broken heart IF:
1 It was coming from a product manager at where I work
2 He would never get any sort of updates or would just plain not know about us
3 He would be I dunno....fucking paying us?
This is the thing, a friend offered the chance to help him build a product for a business man somewhere down in the land of tacos. Being in a "fuck it" mood and not wanting to say no since it sounded interesting enough I said yes. The "owner" said that he would not be able to pay since he already had hired a team of developers before that did not deliver and as such he was instead offering a part of the company.....sounds familiar?
Not wanting to let my friend down, I told the owner that I would help just as long I get complete CTO power over the product and not crying about the stack being used or ME NOT GIVING THE PRODUCT MY FULL ATTENTION BECAUSE HE WAS NOT FUCKING PAYING.
He said ok.
Of course he did not like it, but he said ok.
He has been asking for the code, the platform, demos and a bunch of other shit which I continue to refuse since he has not offered me or my boy a copy of the legal documents that we require.
Him: "You will get them soon enough, I still need to see the product just to make sure everything is ok"
Me: "You wouldn't even know where to begin looking unless you have a third party that could verify the code, last time I checked I was to be the only one good for this"
Him: "Yeah and you and <friend> are, but I just need to see the product"
Me: "I send you videos and demos, sorry dude, but no binding document == no code. I know you think I am young, give me some fucking credit because this is not my first rodeo"
Him: "I am not trying to play you or anything, you can trust me"
Me: "No, not really. Talk to me about this when you get the documents"
Him: "Well its cuz this is taking too long...."
Me: "Tssss I know!!! It sucks right? Want a good product, built with all the bells and whistles and YOU DON'T WANT TO PAY? guess what dude, I do have a full time job, your product gets my minimal attention, right there at the bottom next to taking a shit, meaning that I will give your product the same time and attention as I would going to the throne. Aye don't feel that bad, I normally take about 1 hour on the shitter, you get that for fucking free."
To be fair ladies and gents I normally don't just explode on people like this. But I just can't fathom not paying someone for a rather large software product, with only a promise that "it will sell" and then telling them to hurry up.
Far as I am concerned this product will flop, but he seems to think it is the next big thing(of course).
He can go choke on some chode.
Fucking prick.1 -
The longer I live, the longer I am unsure what the meaning of my life is.
TLDR; 42
Yes I am a creative person in a way that I can create something out of nothing, but unfortunately all my work is almost invisible. Is the meaning of a developer guy to be a magician? He does something and *wooosh*
//magic happens here
there is a thing which he forgot how it works within a month. Why can't I just talk about my work with other people than those from the IT business? I don't think to be that important, but sometimes it appears that without you and me nothing will really work nowadays.
And to be honest with you guys, I am too slow. I can adapt new concepts and new programming languages, but I feel like getting overruned by all that new stuff appearing each day. Am I supposed to be that super hero named"superbrain"? Is that still healthy?
wtf, my life is a miracle, an oracle and a hurricane (and some times it is even great)!
I am confused!1 -
Shady business practices. You see a lot of stories of people getting fucked over on here. Companies giving applicants a "coding test" to get work done for free, or guys promising to pay when the work is done(and then bailing), deserve to be thrown screaming from helicopters.
Some quick advice for people starting out:
1. If it's important, get it in writing. Promises are worth precisely dick, unless it's legally binding.
2. Exercise caution in interviews. The shadier companies know a lot of applicants are desperate, and they take advantage of that fact if they're allowed to.
Not sure if I'm rambling at this point, but fuck it. 🤣 -
I have fucking HATED Windows 10 from day one. Now I'm hearing there are new vacillations of this genius programming train wreck that I think is designed to force monetize Microsoft's business model.
After a short while I managed to get to a point where I can maintain W 7. In fact, I'm using my old computer right now. Because I could not get this rant to load onto Devrant website. If you are reading this we know that it is because 10 sucks consistently.
I save my files onto a backup hard drive so I can find 'paper file' type solution for whatever random crap might block me at the keyboard. In fact, I still use paper and file cabinets so "technology" doesn't bring me to a screeching halt every time something like "no record of that account" or "wrong password".
Why the hell does my PASSWORD work from W7 but not from W10?! And it's getting WORSE by the day! I'm about to take a fucking hammer to my new fucking computer. And to that guy who smarmy says something to the effect of 'don't be such a pussy... just fix it and you will be happy.' Well. Fuck you too!
Now. That being said. Anybody have a suggestion on what to try next? And don't say something like, 'take your computer to Micro Center or Geek Squad'. I've done those guys twice each. And for a small phenomenal fee they have each time made things slightly worse plus lost parts of my saved data each time.
Oh. And "reset to previous" doesn't work either.
Suggestions?
Probably better at this point to attempt to solve my own problems wrong for free at this point. Maybe I'll learn to program in Linux or some such thing.
Forrest
for suggestions please contact me at
res0naza@yahoo7 -
Early on in my freelancing career I learned something important. Even with seemingly tame nerdy stuff, sh*t can get real, real quick. This story describes the very start of my career in web development and hopefully will serve as a warning to newbies out there.
A young teen, I had just learned some basics of wordpress, I was confident I could hack together something that worked and looked okay with minimal effort and knowledge. One day I was approached by a guy who wanted a job board board site. Knowing there were already clones out there I figured this would be an easy gig, man was I wrong.
In addition to the fact I didn't know about contracts or the scope creep from hell, I had somehow gotten myself involved with a criminal business front.
These guys operated a scam business to rip off investors. Me and my designer buddy were used to make the business look legit. What they would do is hold job fairs where people are supposed to pay to rent a booth, but instead they would give everyone a booth for free and then lie about what all businesses were coming. They would then show this info, along with the website and marketing materials to investors. They would take the money from the investors and launder it for drugs.
The real story starts the day of one of the worst hangovers I had ever had. I was at a random friends house sleeping for most of the day.
Apparently one of the guys who was operating the scam business was about to strike a deal with one of the investors when something on the website didn't work (it was working as designed). This guy, Manny we'll call him, had been blowing up my phone all morning. I check my voicemails and there are threats on my life; saying I will be sleeping with the fishes, or if they ever find me, they'll fuck me up. Needless to say this really freaked me out, either way I decided to head back to my dorm.
When I come back home, my designer buddy tells me that some guys were in the house looking for stuff. Apparently this guy hired two nerds to "break into my computer and steal the website", fortunately they didn't know what they were doing.
After a while I got another call, Manny wanted to sit down and "talk things out". Being naive I accepted and we met up. The two nerds were there with one of his body guards. He said he wanted to have those two nerds take over the project. While this was going on, his bodyguard flashed his gun at me several times making eye contact. I agreed to, but I still wanted to get paid. I asked about getting paid and he said we never signed a contract and that he owned the host and domain. I was pretty much screwed.
This is where the story should end, but I wasn't a very smart guy back then. I gave up the site but I created a back door into it. Every week or so, they would get "hacked". Because the two nerds didn't know what to do, they ended up coming back to me for help. This is when I finally got paid. Totally not worth it. -
My company is getting a new website. This involves getting new hosting.
I made the old one, and it's all just static html. I'm not that attached to it but it's an important detail.
The bosses want the switch to the new site to happen instantly, but I pointed out that with DNS propagation times etc it can't really happen that way.
So I suggested the new web guys host our old site for a few days and we change the DNS now. Then when they want to launch we don't have to wait for the DNS and they can just swap it out.
This involves dropping 10MB of html files into the web directory on the new server.
For this service they are charging us for 2 hours of their time!
I guess I'm in the wrong business... -
Alright, fellow coders, I need your help this time <3
I was thinking about getting a full stack developer position after school, with mean/mern stack. (Yes, I love js, but you can hate me for that later)
So, I just got an offer for a front-end developer position that I didn't apply to but was recommended for by my full stack prof.
Everything is great about that company, but! I'm not sure I'm good for that!
My question is: does being a front-end developer mean being good at putting together nice looking website?
I'm good with angular, but suck at material or just CSS in general.
I can implement business logic, but anything more complex than grids causes my eye to twitch.
So, is front-end developer supposed to be good at design part of it or not?
Google says yes, but I got other opinions from my friends, but they are still students too!
All hope on you guys! Thank you8 -
Not as much a rant as interest, but did any of you guys recently start a business or witnessed the start of one? I really wanted to know how those find the services and tools that get them off the ground or enhance the business, is there lists with "must have" services for specific business categories etc?14
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I once met a guy who said tech guys chose windows over Mac's because windows goes wrong often so it keeps the tech guys in work!
And Mac's hardly ever break so they didn't want their business to use them
He clearly hasn't met tech guys we don't want to be dealing with your fucking problems
It made me furious internally... I said nothing.
Seriously do you think all tech guys in the world joined a union and went 🤔 how can we make sure we have more work ... Fuck off you ponsy twat6 -
[Seeking Advice / Legal / Opinion]
Hello world, (TLDR at the bottom)
I'm the co-founder of a small startup and looking for advice from people of legal background or similar situations. (Any help making the reddit post more active will also help a lot: https://reddit.com/r/legaladvice/...)
Just as a backstory for better understanding:
a couple of years ago, me (early twenties, male) and another guy (late thirties, male) started an entrepreneurial journey, got in an accelerator program and some investment, and things always looked well.
We opened the company and started working / selling our services. Step by step we started recruiting, and getting some clients, and business is going well... ("well" as in, small revenues but not spending more than we earn).
The thing is that me and my co-founder's relationship has been degrading over time and I think it would be better for us and the company to split up and go our own way. He has the majority of the shares and I don't mind leaving it all behind for the sake of the company and mental health.
This is in US, if it helps, and we both have At-Will employment contracts.
My main question is, *if I do sign a termination contract*, from what I read, I'm obliged to remain reachable for a period of 12 months (plus all those IP related stuff, not sharing confidential info, etc).
[1] Is there anything I should be careful about and get some kind of protection or get some more information before resigning?
I'm afraid that if I leave the company it affects the business negatively, as we both work 16 / 20 hour shifts many times and my work would not be easily replaced by anyone in the current team. We are hiring more people right now, and some seniors, and I was thinking on staying one month dedicated only to training them... [2] Could this be specified in some contract that I am resigning from "today", but stay 30 days focusing on training new people, or anything similar?
I don't mind staying in touch and help whenever they could need, but I will not be available 24/7 and I will obviously need a job to pay living expenses, so I don't want to affect negatively my time in other jobs or personal life and be kind of protected against anything that he could do to make me stay continuously connected or compromised.
I'm interested in knowing any opinions and advice you guys may have, and feel free to ask some questions if you need extra details.
I just want the best for the startup but cannot hold much time in the current environment.
TLDR: Relationship between me and co-founder is getting worse, thinking on resignating but want to keep some sort of protection against anything that could make me keep compromised to the company.7 -
Guys,
I'm in kind of crappy situation. We are in dire needs of some improvements to our infrastructure. I've told that to the person who is responsible for it several times to get it improved. But because of his incompetency or laziness he just do some hacky solutions which gonna blow up on the the very next day and makes things worse.
I've raised my concern to my supervisor several times. He is also kinda slow in pushing things.
These infrastructure changes are for testing purposes so it doesn't have an immediate impact on their business. But it is kinda productivity killer for all.6 -
Question for you desktop guys. I was thinking of making a desktop app with a GUI as a side project. It's mostly going to be business-like CRUD, no fancy stuff. I was thinking of using electron (since I'm a web developer) but I read that it's slow and bloated. On the other hand I would like learning something new. I don't want to spend too much time on the GUI so I would prefer a framework/language that already has some nice open source gui packs available. I have only ever used JavaFX before for a tutorial, is that a good choice? Also, I would like it to work on both linux and windows.10
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rant(){
So, yesterday I was explaining one of our sales guys why I wouldn't be able to finish a task for his client, since I had passed the last days recovering from a major db breakdown, and had plenty of work on wait before I could get to what he asked.
The prick goes and tells my PM he's about to loose the business because of me, and screws all my timetable for the week...
What should I do to make sure he never messes with devs anymore?
}7 -
So with the current project that I am working on, I'm in charge with creating various base classes, libraries, and helpers. The problem is that the other developers on the team just want to dive straight into developing the API endpoints without designing what the request and response formats should be, let alone decide what the URL structure should be!
So in the middle of their development work, they keep telling me how this and that don't work, or they can't figure out why Laravel is throwing this particular error. It's starting to piss me off that I'm having to do an architect's job whilst also teaching these guys how to use Laravel because they don't bother reading the documentation.
The worst part is that once they've completed their implementation, I'll have to end up fixing it because it's either missing a bunch of business rules, or it doesn't account for any error handling. -
I've always wanted to do something in IT Support, but I didn't know where to start. I've been helping my co-workers optimize their system and even helped retrieve photos from a tablet that had a broken screen; her service plan said along the lines of "if they weren't there they were lost," I was able to retrieve them in a matter of hours (Really guys! I'm shocked! It was just a broken touchscreen, the storage was just fine. I think I'll remember this moment).
And because my growing impopularity, I started a new business called The Webnician. The company is split into two sections, the Technician, and the Web Developer. Hence, The Web(Tech)nician. I am proud of my name choice.
Then I wanted to become a certified technician, so I did some research on how to become one and found out I need to take the CompTIA A+ 220-901 and 220-902 exam and... I couldn't be more excited!
I've always loved computers, and maybe my late father had some say into it. Nevertheless, I am excited to begin my journey, even though it took awhile to find where I needed to go. I hope you all can follow me on my journey and support my new business.
I don't have anything else to say, so I'll just leave here.1 -
Hello Devrant. I really need a second opinion on this one. I work in this promising start-up and our current evaluation is about 10 mill $. I have a vesting opportunity in the company where I earn 2.5% of none dilutable shares in the company over three years. I also get salary of about 500$ a month just to survive. Though it is the plan that I get a decent salary once we have more funding secured.
I'm the CTO of the company where we are 10 employees in total and 5 are in the development team.
I've been programming for about one year now so I'm not that experienced and some of the guys I lead are much more experienced than me. Which is good because I grow my skills quickly, but it is a challenge sometimes.
I'm really in doubt if I have got a good deal in the company. I started working in February and back then the company was valued at around 1.5 mill $. I have always been loose about not demanding money right away and said to the CEO that we will figure that out about the money eventually and I trusted him blindly. When he gave the offer of 2.5% vesting I just accepted it right away, because I was a beginner in coding and I just wanted to learn. Also I was traveling around the world for a few months at the time and it was a great way to get a little money quickly.
I also study together with two colleges who are some of my best friends. We study business development at university and have round 1.5 year left. It's a lot of work
but we've managed to only study about 1 week in advance of the exams and still pass. So we all still working full time on the company.
I've never known how many shares the other guys had, but yesterday me and the other partners had a meeting about some contract and the CEO pointed out how many shares everybody had. I was stunned to hear that the my two other colleges that I study with have 10% each. And the reason for that is that they helped start the company from the beginning and I've only joined when it was around 6 months old. Still I find it difficult to that that it's fair that they should have 4 times as much as me. I would say the amount of value we provide to the company is about the same. One of the guys is only the son of the CEO, which should not change anything.
For me it's not all about the money but I don't want to be taken advantage of. I can't determine if I'm being overdramatic about this and whether it is a good deal or if it sucks and I should find another place to work. Also my studies at the University are pretty much intertwined with the company by now. All our school projects are something that creates value to the company and if I leave I would have to dramatically change the direction of my education.
I know that there is a lot of information here and that I'm not the best at writing, but what would you have done in my situation?7 -
Yesterday whole 12 hours we were working on deployment about a feature X that has deadline yesterday itself.
Everything damn perfectly running on Test env but not on Prod.
We made Prod into Dev/Test/Fucking garabage env. Haha.
I was laughing to myself at same time crying hard in my deep heart.
Business guys chasing PM
PM chasing us
And from morning till night we were in same room. Had lunch, and dinner only went out for toilet and to refil water bottles.
And found that feature Y is not working at same time that is related to our feature X. Fucking we have been wasted hours on it.
One of my devs got so fucked up emotionally that he messed up the code (not his fault) he didnt had his lunch and dinner. Had to console him later that its not his fault. Poor guy not sure whether he slept or not; will find out in few hours.
Anyways reported a bug.
But that bug assigned to us for fixing.
Are you fucking kidding me.
Anyways no choice. Had to do it.
Hope today everything goes good or horribly bad. FYI no deployments on Friday damn we are in stalememt till Monday.
Fuck that bug
Or
May be fuck our stupiditiy while makiing mistakes.1 -
I love this wk108 tag. Have a lot of stories related to it.
For me , my mentors are the reason i am what i am today. In this crazy selfish world where people only want to run faster than the others, having nice helping people around is great.
(Val titanLannister=xx)
(1)class 6-10th, xx is a curious, but poor boy with no desktop/mobile , but still loves cs classes due to various ,caring teachers.
(2) class 11th end,programming for the first time that year, hates programming, one day when everybody goes out for lunch, xx tears down while talking to his cs teacher "why can't i score good marks when i was the best till 10th? Is programming so tough?" . I remember him giving me a little but greatest motivational lecture followed by 40 minutes of the most basic concepts in which i might had asked him a 1000 questions. "You are my chaempion", he used to say😂 (bad accent) . But god, if he hadn't motivated me that day, i swear i would have left all this and go for business. Thank-you, lokesh sir💗💗
First year : tried to go for a competitive learning course. Mann, am not cool in that stuff. Again was about to break (i was among the top scorers in school boards and had designed many small games back then. I should have been good here too, but nah... the other guys were like bullets .)
Oh my, my deepest bow to this amazing teacher SUMEET MALIK (oh sir, you were so good) .
How this guy taught? Well, he first explained the concept. Fo those who understood, he gave them question 'A', for those who didn't, he repated . For those who understood , can do question a again, and those eho did A already gets an even advance question B. And this cycle went on until the weakest student(usually me) understood the concept.
And no, it never happened even once that class finished with even a single child not doing all questions he gave.he used to teach very less concepts each class and would go to everybody's desk to check they understood the concept, the question, its working, weather we implemented or not and weather our implementation is correct or not +our doubts. Hell , i even took doubts with him for hours after the class and he always just smiled💗(oh sir, am so sorry for being so dumb)
Real Doubt classes, doubts on whatsApp, revision assignments , tests , competitions,... damn, i haven't seen a teacher with this much dedication. At one point of time, that institution was famous for our Sumeet sir's classes 😂
Then last year, i got another mentor . Harshit bhiya. The guy is awesome, and a little extra swaggy 😂. He got a lot of chill, with his big AAD badge, a bag full of stickers and his every day association with people at udacity and google. As always i tried to overwhelm him with my ton of doubts in class, but he use to just give me a few pointers/links, after which i was like quiet for the complete session😂. He gave me a lot to think/work upon and i got a kind of career to work on.
I also think of mentioning a fucked up depressing-bot assholic friend of mine, but he don't deserve to be in this list of my best people. Just fuck you mann with a blockchain of dicks, if you are reading this.1 -
I subscribe to many copywriting newsletters. Here's an article that shows how it's like on "the other side", marketers struggle, too.
How Kevin's Massive Mistake
Completely Changed His Life
Kevin H. made a huge mistake.
The biggest, he would say, if he could tell you himself.
And he knew it immediately.
It was, he said, "instant regret."
Within milliseconds, he was asking himself "What have I done..."
Kevin, see, had just jumped the rail of the single most popular suicide spot in the world, the Golden Gate Bridge.
On average, the site gets another distraught jumper every two weeks. Kevin was one of them.
It wasn't like he hadn't tried to quiet the voices in his head. Therapy, drugs, hospitalization.
Time to die, those voices still said.
And yet, in the minutes his bus dropped him off at the bridge, he hesitated and paced with tears in his eyes.
"I told myself if just one person comes up to me and asks if I'm okay... if one person asks if they can help... I won't do it. I'll stop and tell them my whole story..."
But nobody did, so he jumped.
It was in those next milliseconds, he would later say, he knew it was the biggest mistake of his life.
He didn't want to die.
But now, he was sure, it was too late.
From its highest point, it's a 245-foot plummet into the icy bay waters below.
Out of the 1,700 people that have jumped from the bridge since it first opened in 1937, only 25 have survived.
Kevin, against all odds, would be one of them.
He slammed into the water like hitting concrete. Three of his vertebrae instantly shattered.
When he surfaced, he couldn't hold his own head above water. But, incredibly, a sea lion kept pushing him up.
The Coast Guard soon arrived and pulled him out.
From there, he began a long recovery that required intense surgery, physical therapy, and psychiatric care.
While still under treatment, a priest urged him to give a talk to a bunch of seventh and eighth graders.
Afterward, they sent him a pile of letters, both encouraging and full of their own pained thoughts.
He also met a woman.
Today, Kevin lives in Atlanta and he's been happily married for the last 12 years.
And he tours the country, sharing his story.
So why re-tell it here?
Obviously -- I hope -- you don't get lots of copywriters looking to snuff it after a flopped headline test.
Just the same...
We've talked a lot in this space about the things one needs to get by in this biz.
My friend and colleague Joe, over at the publishing powerhouse Agora Financial, likes to list requirements.
You need intense curiosity...
You need a killer work ethic...
And you must, MUST have... resilience.
Meaning, you must have or find the capacity to bounce back from failure and flops, even huge ones.
Now, again, Kevin's story is an extreme and in this context -- I hope -- a hyperbolic example of somebody giving up. In the worst way possible.
It is also, though, a metaphor.
See, I get a lot of notes from some of you guys... and at conferences, I get to talk to a lot of people...
And I often get the sense, from some folks, that they're feeling a little more overwhelmed than they let on.
Some are just starting out, and they've got a lot on the line. For some, it's everything. And some are desperate to make it work.
Because they have to, because their pride or livelihoods or a family business is at stake, because it's a dream.
And yet, they're overwhelmed by all the tips and secrets... or by piles of confusing research or ideas...
For others, even had some success, but they're burned out, feel antiquated, or feel like "imposters" that know less than they let on, in an industry that's evolving.
To all those folks... and to you... I can only say, I've been there. And frankly, go back there now and again.
Flops happen, failures happen. And you can and will -- even years and decades into doing this -- make the wrong choices, pick the wrong projects, or botch the right ones.
The legendary Gene Schwartz put it this way, according to a quote spotted recently in fellow writer Ben Settle's e-letter...
" A very good copywriter is going to fail. If the guy doesn't fail, he's no good. He's got to fail. It hurts. But it's the only way to get the home runs the next time."
Once more, nobody -- I hope -- is taking the trials of this profession hard enough to make Kevin's choice.
And believe me, I don't mean to make light of the latter. I just want to make sure we hit this anvil with a big hammer. To drive home the point that, whatever your struggle, be it with this biz or something bigger, that you don't want to give up. Press on.
As Churchill put it, "Success, is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm."
Or even more succinctly when he said, "If you're going through hell, keep going."
Because it's worth it.
.
John Forde -
Business Rep: Hi dev guys, you know that priority 1 work you were doing? We've decided GDPR is important, can you sort it for Friday? OK, thanks, bye.
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So i have some SQL skills. and I ended up some shitty business reports .
My boss will to implement something she read on internet (scrum).
I recommended her to manage her expectations. IMHO After implementing scrum, no shit is gonna change and obviously I was ignored and treated as a negative thinking being
Do you guys think this could work? Since we're a 4 people team and each one of us have different and non related activities10 -
is being a tech/dev person, a dead end job?
i have been thinking about this for sometime. as a dev, we can progress into senior dev, then tech lead, then staff engineer probably. but that is that. for a tech person :
1. their salary levels are defined. for eg, a junior may earn $10k pm , and the highest tech guy (say staff engineer) will earn $100k pm, but everyone's salary will be spread over this range only, in different slots.
2. some companies give stocks and bonuses , but most of the time that too is fixed to say 30% of the annual salary at max.
3. its a low risk job as a min of x number of tech folks are always required for their tech product to work properly. plus these folks are majorly with similar skills, so 2 react guys can be reduced to 1 but not because of incompetency .
4. even if people are incompetent, our domain is friendly and more like a community learning stuff. we share our knowledge in public domain and try to make things easy to learn for other folks inside and outside the office. this is probably a bad thing too
compare this to businesses , management and sales they have different:
1. thier career progression : saleman > sales team manager> branch manager > multiple branch manager(director) > multiple zones/state manager (president) > multiple countries/ company manager (cxo)
2. their salaries are comission based. they get a commission in the number of sales they get, later theybget comission in the sales of their team> their branch > their zone and finally in company's total revenue. this leads to very meagre number in salaries, but a very major and mostly consistent and handsome number in commission. that is why their salaries ranges from $2k pm to $2-$3millions per month.
3. in sales/management , their is a always a room for optimisation . if a guy is selling less products, than another guy, he could be fired and leads could be given to other/new person. managers can optimise the cost/expenses chain and help company generate wider profits. overall everyone is running for (a) to get an incentive and (b) to dodge their boss's axe.
4. this makes it a cut-throat and a network-first domain. people are arrogant and selfish, and have their own special tricks and tactics to ensure their value.
as a manager , you don't go around sharing the stories on how you got apple to partner with foxconn for every iphone manufacturing, you just enjoy the big fat bonus check and awe of inspiration that your junior interns make.
this sound a little bad , but on the contrary , this involves being a people person and a social animal. i remember one example from the office web series, where different sales people would have different strategies for getting a business: Michael would go wild, Stanley would connect with people of his race, and Phyllis would dress up like a client's wife.
in real life too, i have seen people using various social cues to get business. the guy from whom we bought our car, he was so friendly with my dad, i once thought that they are some long lost brothers.
this makes me wonder : are sales/mgmt people being better at being entrepreneur and human beings than we devs?
in terms of ethics, i don't think that people who are defining their life around comissions and cut throat races to be friendly or supportive beings. but at the same time, they would be connecting with people and their real problems, so they might become more helpful than their friends/relatives and other "good people" ?
Additionally, the skills of sales/mgmt translate directly to entrepreneurship, so every good salesman/manager is a billionaire in making. whereas we devs are just being peas in a pod , debating on next big npm package and trying to manage taxes on our already meagre , "consistent" income :/
mann i want some people skills like these guys10 -
So guys at the moment Im working at a medical company as a business temp but I really like it here. At the moment they know me as the tech guy. I want to be the official systems administrator here but don't know how to go about doing that.
I have a strong Linux background but everyone here uses windows.
I think that they need a server but I don't think I can just go up to my boss and say "hey, I know I'm not certified yet but hows about you give me money so I can set up a server for you?"
I need advice.5 -
as you guys know this is still related on my prev rants, today i just found out that we cant bring or use headphone while we are on our work stations and guess what you cant chat with your team mates too unless its official business regarding the project other topics such as hobbies or anything are not allowed and you will get reported to the boss...
like G*d dammit you cant code since everything is blocked.. you cant install dev tools and sh*t you cant browse any websites *good thing is the did not block this site.. so far* ... you cant talk... its just staring at the ceiling for 8 freaking hrs -_- someone pls kill me8 -
This is a part rant-part question.
So a little backstory first:
I work in a small company (5 including me) which is mostly into consultation (we have many tech partners where we either resell their products or if there is a requirement from one of our clients, we get our partners to develop it for them and fulfill the client requirements) so as you can see there is a lot of external dependencies. I act as a one-hat-fits-all tech guy, handling the company websites, social media channels, technical documentation, tech support, quicks POCs (so anything to do with anything technical, I handle them). I am a bit fed up now, since the CEO expects me to do some absurd shit (and sometimes micro manages me, like WTF I am the only one who works there with 100% commitment) and expects me to deliver them by yesterday.
So anyway long story short, our CEO finally had the brains to understand that we should start having our own product (which i had been subtly suggesting him to do for a while now!).
Now he came up with a fairly workable concept that would have good market reach (i atleast give him credits for that) and he wanted me to suggest the best way to move forward (from a both business and technical point of view). The concept is to have an auction-based platform for users to buy everyday products.
I suggested we build a web app as opposed to a mobile one (which is obvious, since i didnt want to develop a seperate website and a mobile app, and anyway just because we can doesnt mean we have to make a mobile app for everything), and recommended the Node/react based JS tech stack to build it.
At first he wanted me to single handedly build the whole platform within a month, I almost flipped (but me being me) then somehow calmed down and finally was able to explain him how complicated it was to single-handedly build a platform of such complexity (especially given my limited experience; did I mention that this is my first job and I am still in college, yeah!!) and convinced him to get an experienced back-end dev and another dev to help me with it.
Now comes the problem, I was to prepare a scope document outlining all the business and technical requirements of the project along with a tentative cost, which was fairly straightforward. I am currently stuck at deciding the server requirements and the system architecture for the proposed solution (I am thinking of either going with AWS - which looks a bit complicated to setup - or go with either Digital Ocean or Heroku):
I have assumed that at peak times we would have around 500-1000 users concurrently
And a daily userbase of 1000 users (atleast for the first few months of the platform running)
What would be the best way forward guys?
I did some extensive (i mean i read through some medium blogs! and aws documentation) research and put together the following specs (if we are going through AWS):
One AWS t3.medium ec2 instance for the node server (two if we want High Availability by coupling with the AWS load balancer and Elastic Beanstalk)
The db.t3.small postgres database
The S3 Storage bucket (100gb) for the React Front end hosting
AWS SNS for email/sms OTP and notification
And AWS CloudMonitor for logging amd monitoring.
Am I speculating the requirements properly, where have I missed??
Can u guys suggest what is the best specification for such a requirement (how do you guys decide what plan to go with)?
Any suggestions, corrections, advices are welcome3 -
I'm tired. I don't want to do these tests anymore. These vague test scenarios I have to decrypt on my own lest asking business shows signs of weakness. I'm slow to test and going way beyond the hours the client estimated and you folks just accepted. How can I finish this when I get pulled to meetings which I am not the decision maker but I'm supposed to be the technical one to help them decide. In between this testing I get emails to help check on issues I'm not even a part of. Production issues I can understand because those have a feel of critical and priority but if you pull me to that I lose time testing. I'm trying. But I'm truly very slow at this. I'm a slow tester for this set of test cases. I'm hating myself every minute as the hours inch to the deadline which is today. I want to sleep but I want to finish as well. Shitty days of drone work that could have been given to somebody else but I can't say no to because you guys accepted. Someone from management just see please, don't give this to me. But you can't see. You probably don't even understand. They asked, you caved because you can't see the list of tasks and level of detail that comes with each thing they ask. This testing is a ridiculous use of my time but I can't say that to the client. You could have. I want to. I truly want to say "Fuck these tests". I tried to push back. But the client of course reasoned back and it was understandable to ask. To do what's good and what's best. How can I say no to that?! I'm almost depleted. I'll just finish this somehow.
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So I am working in this startup at Stockholm for 6 months and 1 week ago decided to leave.
I am still under probation period(5 days left until probation period is over), so I should have actually given 1 months notice. However we had many meetings about this and we decided that I will give 2 months notice.
Like we decided, previous week I gave founders a notice of 2 months and they agreed to it. I sent them e-mail and they confirmed it so I have proof.
This week all of a sudden they are saying that their plans have changed and there won't be much work to do for me so they are are forcing me to leave after 3-4 weeks.
I understand their point of view. Since my salary is 41k, they are spending totally 53k sek on me monthly. So their idea is to save extra 53k sek by forcing me to leave 1 month earlier. Also I've heard that they plan to hire another person 2-3 months later after I leave, so essentially they will save 150-200k sek and that's fine, I get it, it's business as usual right?
What I don't understand is how can they be so inhumane?
We agreed that notice is 2 months. I informed all my relatives (since I will be leaving Sweden). I gave notice to my landlord (deposit is 10k sek) and etc. I wanted to have 8 more weeks to plan what I'm going to do when I leave.
When asked wether I can leave by the end of this month I didn't know what to answer. I said that I will need to think about it and now I'm "thinking" about it. First of all I mentioned to them that I am risking to loose my deposit. Instead of offering any compensation, they keep asking me how they can help me to leave as soon as I can?
Situation is really messed up.
Since according to the contract I am still under probation(even though I started working earlier than stated in contract, so technically I shouldn't be under probation) I have no idea what they can do if I don't agree to their terms.
As far as I know they are obligated to give me 1 months notice if they are firing me while I'm under probation, so it doesn't seem that I would have much power in this situation.
If I would try to force them to keep me around for total 8 weeks, they can just officially fire me while I'm under probation and I will have to leave in 4 weeks. However after one week I will become a permanent employee and then they will have to give me 2 months notice if they want to fire me. So it seems that they are trying to save their face by trying to force me to leave earlier on my own will.
My current plan is to agree with them and actually leave at the end of this month. But with conditions.
First I need to get in touch with my landlord, explain the situation and hope that he would give back my deposit even if I'm leaving 1 month earlier than I've told him before.
Also, since these guys decided to mess up my plans by trying to save some money, I think I should demand for some compensation? Like 10-15k? I had plans goddamit and we agreed that notice will be 2 months via e-mail after all.4 -
Sydochen has posted a rant where he is nt really sure why people hate Java, and I decided to publicly post my explanation of this phenomenon, please, from my point of view.
So there is this quite large domain, on which one or two academical studies are built, such as business informatics and applied system engineering which I find extremely interesting and fun, that is called, ironically, SAD. And then there are videos on youtube, by programmers who just can't settle the fuck down. Those videos I am talking about are rants about OOP in general, which, as we all know, is a huge part of studies in the aforementioned domain. What these people are even talking about?
Absolutely obvious, there is no sense in making a software in a linear pattern. Since Bikelsoft has conveniently patched consumers up with GUI based software, the core concept of which is EDP (event driven programming or alternatively, at least OS events queue-ing), the completely functional, linear approach in such environment does not make much sense in terms of the maintainability of the software. Uhm, raise your hand if you ever tried to linearly build a complex GUI system in a single function call on GTK, which does allow you to disregard any responsibility separation pattern of SAD, such as long loved MVC...
Additionally, OOP is mandatory in business because it does allow us to mount abstraction levels and encapsulate actual dataflow behind them, which, of course, lowers the costs of the development.
What happy programmers are talking about usually is the complexity of the task of doing the OOP right in the sense of an overflow of straight composition classes (that do nothing but forward data from lower to upper abstraction levels and vice versa) and the situation of responsibility chain break (this is when a class from lower level directly!! notifies a class of a higher level about something ignoring the fact that there is a chain of other classes between them). And that's it. These guys also do vouch for functional programming, and it's a completely different argument, and there is no reason not to do it in algorithmical, implementational part of the project, of course, but yeah...
So where does Java kick in you think?
Well, guess what language popularized programming in general and OOP in particular. Java is doing a lot of things in a modern way. Of course, if it's 1995 outside *lenny face*. Yeah, fuck AOT, fuck memory management responsibility, all to the maximum towards solving the real applicative tasks.
Have you ever tried to learn to apply Text Watchers in Android with Java? Then you know about inline overloading and inline abstract class implementation. This is not right. This reduces readability and reusability.
Have you ever used Volley on Android? Newbies to Android programming surely should have. Quite verbose boilerplate in google docs, huh?
Have you seen intents? The Android API is, little said, messy with all the support libs and Context class ancestors. Remember how many times the language has helped you to properly orient in all of this hierarchy, when overloading method declaration requires you to use 2 lines instead of 1. Too verbose, too hesitant, distracting - that's what the lang and the api is. Fucking toString() is hilarious. Reference comparison is unintuitive. Obviously poor practices are not banned. Ancient tools. Import hell. Slow evolution.
C# has ripped Java off like an utter cunt, yet it's a piece of cake to maintain a solid patternization and structure, and keep your code clean and readable. Yet, Cs6 already was okay featuring optionally nullable fields and safe optional dereferencing, while we get finally get lambda expressions in J8, in 20-fucking-14.
Java did good back then, but when we joke about dumb indian developers, they are coding it in Java. So yeah.
To sum up, it's easy to make code unreadable with Java, and Java is a tool with which developers usually disregard the patterns of SAD. -
I have an idea of starting my own business and I need your feedback guys. Literally appreciate any kind of feedback.
So Im an android dev who has 3 years experience under his belt. I am working fulltime and I think its time to scale. I want to open my own agency where I would take on big clients and build apps for them. I personally am able to manage/see through the whole project, handle all communication and also work on the android side if necessary. I would start from smaller projects worth of 30-40k for startups, basically create MVP for them and charge for support after that.
Problem is that as far as I understand if you want to "open your own kitchen" you need to be well connected. I dont know any big clients who would trust and purchase my services, because after all who I am? Im nobody just a dev at this moment. So I need a strategy to build some relationships with businesses.
So Im thinking long game. What if I would first open a recruitment/hiring agency? I would focus in specifically mobile dev recruitment. I have the soft skills and I already participated in dozens of recruitment processes. I also have the tech skills, I would be a competent recruiter. Maybe I could do that for a year, just communicate between devs and clients and place devs. My thinking is that in around one year I would be able to build a massive network of clients and devs.
And then, I could try opening my own dev agency. Using my gathered contacts hopefully I could land some decent projects for start and build my team or outsource from that point on.
Ofcourse Im not sure if I could pull this off alone, I would need a detailed strategy and some mentoring. But what do you think is this a viable plan?2 -
Glad I spoke to you guys, great support... I went to this business show its still happening... People seem to be loving us!
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I feel like i am being forced to own a shitty module in our codebase.
It was developed by previous owners and they made a frankenstien monster out of it: Its one part of codebase that is very huge, does not follow the code standards, is making complex kinds of api calls and using very niche components. It gets bugs once in a while BUT IT WORKS.
It fuckin works and is one of the important steps before customer purchases a company product, so kinda part of revenue generation flow.
But this module was never a part of our codebase which we would usually touch. it was owned by another team, they would add enhancements , new features to it and fix the bugs .
When i joined the team, i was once asked to help those guys as a "resource" because they wanted to get something shipped and were low on bandwidth. So i just worked on one of the screens, added a small bugifx and voila, task is done and am back to other part of the app.
But now out of random, they decided to pass on the ownership to ur team, gave a small KT which didn't really explained a lot of actual codebase, but rather the business functionality of it(and that too poorly). And my TL is saying that i should own it because "I worked on that module before"
I don't know how to deal with this frankenstien monster. Earlier a bug came and i was out of my wits to understand why this bug came. their logging is weird and not explaining a lot, their backend devs help provide aws logs but those aren't very helpful either .
the best i could do was declare that their technical approach is wrong and we should modify it, but that idea was quickly squashed.
ITs quite possible that company isn't going to change this module or add any new features further. but everytime a bug would come, i would be getitngfrustrated looking at their frankenstien monster5 -
How do you guys learn? As we all know, we have a lot of stuff to learn in our field and it's growing and growing and growing. Other than the programming itself, we also have to learn the other stuff like algorithm designs, programming paradigms, big o notations, git, etc. And if you are working, you also need to learn the business rules your clients might have. And if you're unlucky with your job, your boss might even assign you to tasks with a programming language you have zero knowledge about.
So I was wondering, how do you guys balance your life, your family, your studying and your job? And how do you keep your head from exploding with information?4 -
Inb4: I swear I am not an asshole.
Ok, I did a year of business, judge me all you want. Now I'm in CE. So we were learning VBA basically for those managment files that you preprogram to do your enterprise finances...or your grocery store list. Anyway, I was not paying attention to the classe, we were learning "For", so I was on Facebook and doing nothing along with my friend. The teacher caught us and decided the whole class would take a surprise quiz right that moment, because "some people think they know it all". So, all the class got bad grades because he was pissed at two students out of 56. Dick move!
PS:I got an A, so I am just stating that he was a dick to the others guys for no reason -
Hey guys, first time writing here.
Around 8 months ago I joined a local company, developing enterprise web apps. First time for me working in a "real" programming job: I've been making a living from little freelance projects, personal apps and private programming lessons for the past 10 years, while on the side I chased the indie game dev dream, with little success. Then, one day, realized I needed to confront myself with the reality of 'standard' business, where the majority of people work, or risk growing too old to find a stable job.
I was kinda excited at first, looking forward to learning from experienced professionals in a long-standing company that has been around for decades. In the past years I coded almost 100% solo, so I really wanted to learn some solid team practices, refine my automated testing skills, and so on. Also, good pay, flexible hours and team is cool.
Then... I actually went there.
At first, I thought it was me. I thought I couldn't understand the code because I was used reading only mine.
I thought that it was me, not knowing well enough the quirks of web development to understand how things worked.
I though I was too lazy - it was shocking to see how hard those guys worked: I saw one guy once who was basically coding with one hand, answering a mail with another, all while doing some technical assistance on the phone.
Then I started to realize.
All projects are a disorganized mess, not only the legacy ones - actually the "green" products are quite worse.
Dependency injection hell: it seems like half of the code has been written by a DI fanatic and the other half by an assembly nostalgic who doesn't really like this new hippy thing called "functions".
Architecture is so messed up there are methods several THOUSANDS of lines long, and for the love of god most people on the team don't really even know WHAT those methods are for, but they're so intertwined with the rest of the codebase no one ever dares to touch them.
No automated test whatsoever, and because of the aforementioned DI hell, it's freaking hard to configure a testing environment (I've been trying for two days during my days off, with almost no success).
Of course documentation is completely absent, specifications are spread around hundreds of mails and opaquely named files thrown around personal shared folders, remote archives, etc.
So I rolled my sleeves up and started crunching as the rest of the team. I tried to follow the boy-scout rule, when the time and scope allowed. But god, it's hard. I'm tired as fuck, I miss working on my projects, or at least something that's not a complete madness. And it's unbearable to manually validate everything (hundreds of edge cases) by hand.
And the rest of the team acts like it's all normal. They look so at ease in this mess. It's like seeing someone quietly sitting inside a house on fire doing their stuff like nothing special is going on.
Please tell me it's not this way everywhere. I want out of this. I also feel like I'm "spoiled", and I should just do like the others and accept the depressing reality of working with all of this. But inside me I don't want to. I developed a taste for clean, easy maintainable code and I don't want to give it up.3 -
Started this business. Would love feedback from you guys before I get whacked on programming subreddits. Link: https://dvlprstash.com
Thank you2 -
i come from a very closely knit family and i kinda like it. i am in close proximity to my parents, they are growing old so i do a lot of home chores. meanwhile a lot relatives and dad's business friends live nearby , and the whole area around my home feels like a place of known people. my free time goes with 5-6 friends , who again live nearby, or with gym buddies. this is a nice life, which could further expand with a wife and my kids in future .
at the same time, i have seen the "work" life. my office is in a different state, 90% of people there are people like me who would be renting a home nearby and living alone/with strangers. their main "family"(well pseudo-family) will be their coworkers, and that's also not a bad thing.
in the workplace the reasons to be happy will be a lot (as parties or celebrations will occur on multiple birthdays/ company growths and other achievements) , and so will be the reasons to feel sad ( company failure, teammates leaving, missing family)
at the end of the day , when you are living an office life, you are a corporate rat running for the cheese you are never gonna (or , if you are a glass half full person, let's say that you are a "dedicated work professional giving your 100% to the company")
but here comes the dilemma : with AIs like chat gpt coming around and redefining nthe expectations from a software engineer, you will no longer be expected to be resourceful but rather how much of a corporate rat you can be. ( https://twitter.com/bajicdusko/...)
so 1) is it the only way forward for an upcoming engineer's lifestyle? to be like a soldier for their company , while their family and friends await for their long return? 2) if yes, what is the positi8 aspsct we can take away from this?
PS : what a stupid profession those AI/ML guys work in. they put out their minds together to make a sword which is gonna cut the heads of s/w engineers, their own breed. not lawyers, not doctors, not even the fucking peons, but their own freaking brothers5 -
So a friend of mine paid someone to develop a website for his business (holiday lets, property management and cleaning) and the developer has started up a competing business taking all the content from his site and other local info sites, holiday let sites ect and putting up them up on his site. Sounds like the guys a bit of a cunt to me giving us a bad name, thoughts?4
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#opinion {
popular:false;
}
not to continually bring up net neutrality, but I'm starting to understand the stance of people who defend net neutrality. there is a very obvious con in repealing it - the "results" the FCC cites are actually experimental, and we know that title II regulations have successfully levelled the playing feild for ISPs. It just works.
The competition that would be generated after repealing T2 would incentivize companies to lower prices, if they only had a single "package", or to make the delegated sets of packages they produce affordable. it's common sense guys - If we can't afford the packages, they can't afford the business loss. Contrary to popular banter, smaller companies will not "just get pushed out" of business. Providers are going to scramble to find "the best deals" for their customers and, in the end, companies like Verizon might actually be the ones going under.
just a little thought ig1 -
How much cost to design a restaurant website?
Hello Community Guys, How are you? I require your suggestion? are using website design cost calculators such as ( https://branex.com/website-cost-cal... ) significant in calculating the cost of a small business website.7 -
How did you guys get your business running once you were freelancing? Did you do subcontract work for your old employee or just start fresh with a bunch of customers?1
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Question: What do you guys think of this logo?
Anyway, here's my rant..
I'm starting to get pissed off with my relative for whom I'm doing a project.
He's coming up with the ugliest logo and fonts I have ever seen in 2018.
I mean it's business so I don't have much say in what he decides esp since he seems to have taken it upto himself to design the logo and managed to make a logo suggestion I made even terrible.
I have told him multiple times to avpid the knockoff wierd fonts and use simple fonts that looks normal.
And yet, he comes back everytime by changing colors in one of the letter n the words 🤦♂️
Maybe it's because we are from different generations and we have different visions on what it should look like.
He is the kind of guy who goes on and on about how he used computers and internet back in the 90s everytime we meet!
He probably uses MS Word to design the logo! This is the newest logo he came up with.
If I were to be honest, I would be probably rude in his eyes, since it is his "work".
What do you guys think of this logo? Can only show that much of the logo to maintain some privacy.14 -
Right guys and gals, I need your opinions.
Recently was approached by a recruiter who thought I’d be a good fit for a role, a role that is a step up from senior dev but without moving into people / project management.
More like a bridge between architects and senior devs.
I thought what the hell, why not. So I agreed to go for it.
It could be quite a decent payrise (though that wasn’t my motivation for going for it) and I like the idea of doing more mentoring, design and research than I do now. It would involve stuff like learning new tech, coming up with examples and implementations of how the dev team need to use it to churn out user stories.
For the last few years I’ve been mainly a back end developer, which didn’t start by choice and I always liked to be full stack.
But the recruitment process for this role has been quite slow (number of reasons) and since then I’ve been given a new piece of work at my current employer doing some greenfield angular work, plus the c# back end.
I’m really, really enjoying this angular work. Haven’t done it for a while and it feels great to get back into it. Seem to be picking it back up with no problems, like the old magic is still there.
Also the money at my current place is good enough.
So now I’m wondering if I should bail on this other role in favour of seeing this out and maybe going back to being full stack (tho for reasons I’ll outline below in the long term that might have to be elsewhere)
But I’m also trying to remind myself that up until enjoying this work there’s a reason I decided to go for this other role.
Current place is a small company that has no project management process. It’s chaos, and everything’s an emergency. There are no requirements for anything, not enough people etc. No one has a clue how to run an IT project.
The one thing we do have is good development practices in our team and we have been greenfield for the last 12 months working on a new product. But we do tend to be pigeon holed into looking after a specific service/area.
But this new place if I got the role, is a bigger company (I’ve worked in small, medium and massive companies so I know what the difference is like), they’re a household name, they have resources for learning, putting people through aws certs, etc. They give people time each week to invest in themselves. Much more agile.
And thinking about it now you don’t often see a role that allows you to ‘move up’ without having to take on people/project management and still having time to be hands on.
(Just maybe more hands on with strategic work than delivering user stories for business as usual)
So just in general, what do you think? -
Honestly, I'm kinda sick of programming. I would like to work in some other area of systems engineering, like business intelligence or network security, I don't know. Do you guys have any experience on other fields besides programming?3
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So I've been studying masters in business analytics and big data. So far it's been 2 months and I don't have a clear picture about what big data actually is.
I guess that's normal and no cause of concern right guys ? -
Friday morning's meeting:
CTO: Ok guys, deadline is next Friday so today we close the last big issues and next week no more new features, only bug fixing.
Monday morning's meeting:
Business: So here is the new mock-up for the search feature (basically they changed the whole behavior).
😐1 -
Finally after 3 fucking months, 15-20 fucking meetings, I got sign off for a feature release. The development took 3 weeks and was completed in March end.
I know being a financial institution and feature was regarding system handling funds, business guys need to worry a bit as any mistake in code can mess up the funds disbursal. But fuckers took 3 months to give sign off.
However, it's finally released and I can relax for now. #peace -
Hi all,
I've got a question about Google Maps and Contacts that's driving me up the wall.
I'm trying to add a business with address, phone number, website etc. to contacts from Google Maps.
There is an option that looks like it should do it, but when I select it, it just tries making a new contact that I have to manually type out?
I'm wondering if you guys have come across something that would allow me to do this without having to copy/paste every damn detail.
If it helps, I'm on LineageOS 14.1 with Open Gapps... -
how do you handle the salary question among friend circles/relatives/strangers?
i come from a lower middle class background, and my friend circle's family were in similar ranges(some had richer families).
my parents struggled hard to get me into tech and fortunately tech is hot right now, so currently the today's situation is that if counting the individual's income (not the family) then i maybe the highest warner among them (1 is a lawyer , another is a teacher, another is an amazon delivery manager, plus there are a few others).
my problem with this question is that its none of their business. firstly, i am all that my family has. these guys have richer brothers, fathers and sisters their total income is way more than mine. and even if i earn more, i don't earn to be the rich spender of the group. and i neither can be their sole source of hope in case anyone ever needs any money.
and more so fucked up shit is the fact that friends are ruthless and starts discussing this stuff anywhere. like we are among the strangers for fucks sake!! and knowing the state i live in , some of these guys could follow me and burst my guts in the name of money, which i fucking don't have!6 -
Hey guys! I'm a founder and CTO of a Buffalo, NY based startup. I graduated last year and I have been working on the startup ever since. I came to the US on a B1 Visa, which allows me to set up the business here but not earn a salary. So I have been working from India (my home country) as a contractor. I travel occasionally to USA for meetings etc. It gets really annoying because of the massive time zone difference, I'm not able to work as efficiently. We are pretty early stage so I can't get an H1b and since I don't have an entity in India, not eligible for l1 visa either.
Can anyone tell me if i have any other options in US/Canada as Canada is just an hour away from Buffalo. I looked at startup visa in Canada but I don't have any investors in Canada hence not eligible for it.2 -
Hey guys,
What books had the biggedt impact on how you live your life, conduct your business, the way you code or make decisions?
I'm reading "Zero to One" for the second time now and love reading it all over again.10 -
Im in the startups of starting my own business, a web agency. Any of you guys that has any previous experience or any "good to think about"? That you want to share?1
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Ok so I have a software quality exam tomorrow and I'm studying the theory the teacher gave us. This thing is repeting all the time that the best way to ensure quality is by using BPMS (Business Process management Systems) like Bizagi and the one from IBM, which generate software apps without coding, just defining processes. What do you guys think about this?6
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Any advice guys, frustrated from the work.. no salary increase and low income maybe i need to create an startup business, don't know how to start..2
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I‘m currently working fulltime in IT, i would say as a business analyst/ requirement engineer. I do this job for 2 years now and its no fun for me because its only interfaces we work on.I am also studying software engineering in the evenings.
At the UAS programming is really fun for me and seeing progress instead of only interfaces really makes me happy..but i am scared to not have skills for starting as a developer fulltime and get called dump or something like this. Do you guys have any advice for me? Is it ok to start as a junior directly after UAS? -
so I offered to help a guy with his startup idea which is in the making for a year at least. (A telemetry data collection device, mind you). It's an unpaid internship with no strings attached, no contract, mind you.
I am nowhere near the programming pro like most of you guys here, so that's what I want to focus on improving.
First thing he tells me to do is a market research on competitors.... I thought I left that bullshit behind when I left business school..
If I want to work without getting paid, I'd rather stay at home and learn c++ and opencl, and work on the MSc thesis full time, thanks.
Do you think it's the right thing to do or should I give it time?10 -
Hey peeps just asking for some suggestions. We are currently having difficult times financially. My dad used to have food business but its now completely shut down and he is doing some sales job. My mom is somewhat educated (she completed till class 12th i guess) and knows very little abouts computers and stuff but she is interested in getting some job that's remote and computer based.
What things should i give her to learn that she could land a job in computer field?
Like am not talking about programming or development but other non tech fields people get paid for... Like data entry , emails writings etc. Currently i have given her courses to learn ms excel, ms word and basic English.
(Personally am also looking for a job but i know how you guys hate job postings . Checkout my website if you have something for me)3 -
I'm kind of lost guys 🤔(from the point of view of the career path).
Currently I'm unemployed and looking around for a new job inside and outside Italy, but most of them are quiet mediocre, from the point of view of salary(is hard to reach 40K pre-tax in Italy) or actual interesting work to do.
Leaving that aside, up to now I was always able to deal with any job that I had at hand, despite the industry, and this leaves me with an empty goal in the software development career because I feel capable to adapt to any technical environment.
The business side was always a second thought because it's quite boring most of the times(but I might change mind I think, given the chance).
And if you ask me what I like, I would say anything technically interesting/challenging, so no real preference here 😕
Have you ever had such period in your career?
Did you get the chance to find a way to move on?1 -
Just saw this rant:
https://devrant.com/rants/4683684/...
Then I remember an article about MS business groups being unproductive in remote work mode:
https://geekwire.com/2021/...
Are you guys more productive in the office or remote? If going a hybrid setup, what would be a good office/remote ratio for you?4 -
So udemy are currently doing sales
Can you guys recommend me some courses to buy? Of whatever subject you like (development, business, etc...)1