The first time I realized I wasn't as good as I thought I was when I met the smartest dev I've ever known (to this day).

I was hired to manage his team but was just immediately floored by the sheer knowledge and skills this guy displayed.

I started to wonder why they hired outside of the team instead of promoting him when I found that he just didn't mesh well with others.

He was very blunt about everything he says. Especially when it comes to code reviews. Man, he did /not/ mince words. And, of course, everyone took this as him just being an asshole.

But being an expert asshole myself, I could tell he wasn't really trying to be one and he was just quirky. He was really good and I really liked hanging out with him. I learned A LOT of things.

Can you imagine coming into a lead position, with years of experience in the role backing your confidence and then be told that your code is bad and then, systematically, very precisely, and very clearly be told why? That shit is humbling.

But it was the good kind of humbling, you know? I really liked that I had someone who could actually teach me new things.

So we hung out a lot and later on I got to meet his daughter and wife who told me that he had slight autism which is why he talked the way he did. He simply doesn't know how to talk any other way.

I explained it to the rest of the team (after getting permission) and once they understood that they started to take his criticism more seriously. He also started to learn to be less harsh with his words.

We developed some really nice friendships and our team was becoming a little family.

Year and a half later I had to leave the company for personal reasons. But before I did I convinced our boss to get him to replace me. The team was behind him now and he easily handled it like a pro.

That was 5 years ago. I moved out of the city, moved back, and got a job at another company.

Four months ago, he called me up and said he had three reasons for us to meet up.

1. He was making me god father of his new baby boy
2. That they created a new position for him at the company; VP of Engineering
and
3. He wanted to hang out

So we did and turns out he had a 4th reason; He had a nice job offer for me.

I'm telling this story now because I wanted to remind everyone of the lesson that every mainstream anime tells us:

Never underestimate the power of friendship.

The programmer and the interns part 2.

We will discuss numerous events that happened over the past week or so.

Case 0:
We had our weekly engineering meeting. The interns were invited as well.
We hold meetings in the generic, big, corporate meeting rooms with a huge table in the middle.
There were more than enough chairs for everyone yet the most motivated and awkward intern (let's call him Simon) chose to stand, cause "it's cool man, I always stand". At this point we all know that he probably read about Agile stand up meetings and is confusing it with this one. Otherwise he's simply trying to stand out from the rest. (See what I did there?)
Anyway the meeting has started way later than planned (what a surprise) and took much longer than Simon expected. Everybody is sitting and listening to the CTO while occasionally glancing at the weird looking intern standing awkwardly and refusing to sit because it would make his original intentions pointless. He even tried to nod whith a serious face and his hands crossed when the CTO said something and looked at his general direction. The meeting was about a hour and a half long but with the delay it was at least 2.5 hours.
At the end Simon was so exhausted that he fell asleep on the office puff, was forgotten and locked inside. 3 hours later when I was home I received a call from him with his sleepy-trying-to-sound-awake voice telling the news. Lucky there's a 24/7 Noc team that could rescue him.

Case 1:
An intern who was late on his Linux test connected to every test VM (should I remind you that each one has a personal VM but they share passwords for their roots?) and tried to reset it with "sleep 10s; shutdown -h now".
He took down all 13 of those so I had to turn them on and switch passwords again.

Case 2:
One of the interns didn't do any of his training chores. Apparently he forgot what he was told to use, ignored all online documentation and used Windows CMD with Linux commands for almost a week already.

Case 3:
Simon uses Vim to write all text possible. Even mails, he then selects all and copies into the mail body. He spent half a day on a homework task I gave them. He wrote everything inside one text file using Vim. When he was done he saved the file and quit the editor. He then said "Oh shit! I've forgot to sign my name!". I explicitly told him that theres absolutely no need for that because I see which mail the file was sent from. He said "I don't even need a program for that!" and gave a couple of strokes on the keyboard.
Later I received an email from him with a .txt attachment. When I opened it the only text that was inside was "by Simon ;)".
I logged to his machine and checked the last command ran on the file:
echo "by Simon ;)" > linuxtasks.txt

Case 4:
The girl here uses a MacBook. She keeps getting confused with the terminal windows and rebooting her own machine instead of the remote VM.

Case 5:
Haven't checked yet how this happened but one of the interns deleted the gui from his local Centos.

!rant

New job (first CS job).

Day 1: Install Ubuntu
Day 2: Dev said "it was so cute when he asked if he could uninstall windows." Also, first pair programming with engineer of 12 years. First commit (he did all the work, I just tried keeping up."
Day 3: "Here, try this bug " nearly get there. Have to leave early. Team event (Group VR experience, was wicked fun with drinks afterwards. Turns out boss man is a total bad ass. Swam with sharks and giant Wales)
Day 4: Fix bug. Notice odd behaviour. Fix that too. (All on my own). Code review: "This, that but works and is good." Get asked if I want to go to customer to do A, B and C. Tell Boss I only know B. He said "Tell me what you need for A and C."

I'm so God damn happy.

Man I really need to get this off my chest. So here goes.
I just finished 1 year in corporate after college. When I joined, the team I got was brilliant, more than what I thought I would get. About 6 months in, the project manager and lead dev left the company. Two replacements took their place, and life's been hell ever since.

The new PM decided it was his responsibility to be our spokesperson and started talking to our overseas manager (call her GM) on our behalf, even in the meetings where we were present, putting words in our mouth so that he's excellent and we get a bad rep.

1 month in, GM came to visit our location for a week. She was initially very friendly towards all of us. About halfway through the week, I realized that she had basically antagonized the entire old team members. Our responsibilities got redistributed and the work I was set to do was assigned to the new dev (call her NR).

Since then, I noticed GM started giving me the most difficult tasks and then criticizing my work extra hard, and the work NR was doing was praised no matter what. I didn't pay much attention to it at first, but lately the truth hit me hard. I found out a fault in NR's code and both PM and GM started saying that because I found it, it was my responsibility to fix it. I went through the buggy code for hours and fixed it. (NR didn't know how it worked, because she had it written by the lead dev and told everyone she wrote it).

I found out lately that NR and PM got the most hike, because they apparently "learnt" new tech (both of them got their work done by others and hogged the credit).They are the first in line to go onsite because they've been doing 'management work'. They'd complained to GM during her visit that we were not friendly towards them. And from that point on if anything went wrong, it would be my fault, because my component found it out (I should mention that my component mostly deals with the backend logic, so its pretty adept at finding code leaks).

What broke my patience is the fact that lately I worked my ass off to deliver some of the best code I'd written, but my GM said in front of the entire team that at this point "I'm just wasting money". She's been making a bad example out of me for some time, but this one took the cake. I had just delivered a promising result in a task in 1 week that couldn't be done by my PM in 4 weeks, and guess what? "It's not good enough". No thank you, no appreciation, nothing. Finally, I decided I'd had enough of it and started just doing tasks as I could. I'd do what they ask, but won't go above and beyond my way to make it perfect.

My PM realized this and then started pushing me harder. Two days back, I sent a mail to the team with GM in cc exposing a flaw in the code he had written, and no one bothered to reply (the issue was critical). When I asked him about it, he said "How can you expect me to reply so soon when it's already been told that when anything happens we should first resolve within the team and then add GM in the loop?" I realized it was indeed discussed, but the issue was extremely urgent, so I had asked everyone involved, and it portrayed him in a bad light. I could've fixed it, but I didn't because on the off chance if it broke something, they'd start telling me that I broke the tool, how its my fault and how its a critical issue I have to fix ASAP, etc. etc., you get the idea.

Can anyone give me some advice of how to deal with this kind of situation? I would have left but with this pandemic going on, market being scarce and the fact that I'm only experienced by 1 year, I don't think I qualify for a job switch just now.

Be me, new dev on a team. Taking a look through source code to get up to speed.

Dev: **thinking to self** why is there no package lock.. let me bring this up to boss man

Dev: hey boss man, you’ve got no package lock, did we forget to commit it?

Manager: no I don’t like package locks.

Dev: ...why?

Manager: they fuck up computer. The project never ran with a package lock.

Dev: ..how will you make sure that every dev has the same packages while developing?

Manager: don’t worry, I’ve done this before, we haven’t had any issues.

**couple weeks goes by**

Dev: pushes code

Manager: hey your feature is not working on my machine

Dev: it’s working on mine, and the dev servers. Let’s take a look and see

**finds out he deletes his package lock every time he does npm install, so therefore he literally has the latest of like a 50 packages with no testing**

Dev: well you see you have some packages here that updates, and have broken some of the features.

Manager: >=|, fix it.

Dev: commit a working package lock so we’re all on the same.

Manager: just set the package version to whatever works.

Dev: okay

**more weeks go by**

Manager: why are we having so many issues between devs, why are things working on some computers and not others??? We can’t be having this it’s wasting time.

Dev: **takes a look at everyone’s packages** we all have different packages.

Manager: that’s it, no one can use Mac computers. You must use these windows computers, and you must install npm v6.0 and node v15.11. Everyone must have the same system and software install to guarantee we’re all on the same page

Dev: so can we also commit package lock so we’re all having the same packages as well?

Manager: No, package locks don’t work.

**few days go by**

Manager: GUYS WHY IS THE CODE DEPLOYING TO PRODUCTION NOT WORKING. IT WAS WORKING IN DEV

DEV: **looks at packages**, when the project was built on dev on 9/1 package x was on version 1.1, when it was approved and moved to prod on 9/3 package x was now on version 1.2 which was a change that broke our code.

Manager: CHANGE THE DEPLOYMENT SCRIPTS THEN. MAKE PROD RSYNC NODE_MODULES WITH DEV

Dev: okay

Manager: just trust me, I’ve been doing this for years

Who the fuck put this man in charge.

I'm disappointed with my boss.

I've always felt that the company I work for was different, I'm a web dev in a foreign country, finding a job as a fresh graduate wasn't easy at all.

before joining this company, all the employers I've met expected so many skills from foreigners like me, while they sat the bar so low for local fresh grad candidates.

Except my current boss, after the second interview he said that he believes in my potential and he wants to take this risk, the risk of hiring a foreign fresh graduate.

After I joined I worked my ass off and after 9 months I became a team lead.

And my boss said to me that the risk he took was completely worth it and I exceeded expectations.

Now I'm involved in assessing candidates applying for web development role at this company, we have 3 candidates 2 local and 1 foreigner.

Ironically the foreigner proved great potential and understanding of web technologies that exceeds a fresh entry role.

The other 2 local were alright, need training but they pass the criteria for an entry level role.

I reviewed this objectively and urged the same man that hired me to consider hiring the foriegner.

He said no, because of Visa costs and because of the lengthy legal process employers need to go through to hire a foreigner, and asked me to move forward with the 2 locals and not lose them to another company.

I felt that, if i were in the foriegner candidate's shoes I would've felt that there's something wrong with me for that no one wants to hire me for my skills and what I've worked hard to achieve was all not enough, it would make me feel like an outcast.

I know that I should do what I'm told, after all he's the employer, but still.. this feeling is bothering me, in a way I feel like I've cheated or I was just lucky and I didn't really earn this job.

Story Time:

When I first started working where I currently am, the manager at the time decided to send us off to a conference about one of the products our institution was purchasing at the time. She also thought that it would be a good way for me, the new guy, to bond with the rest of the staff.

During the presentations we found out that the people surrounding us were not exactly developers because of a couple of things:

1. Some examples were done with php and javascript for adding functionality to said product. The product gave you the opportunity to script on top of it (think of some sort of CMS, but it does not use PHP as its backend language) EVERYONE from the "class" in this particular workshop said they were developers. But at the sight of php in a group of 80 people or so, only about 7 recognized it, including myself and my team.

2. When they showed an example with Javascript, in particular jquery, one of the dudes in the workshop said (with extreme senior level confidence might I add) "yeah I never liked Javascript because you really can't connect it to any database in a website" <--- my face went 0.o and one of the actual developers doing the presentation did a Jim from the Office and looked at some out of screen camera.

3. During a conf talk, one PHD dude showed an example in the template language the CMS used (an obscure Java based template language)in which he was proudly calling out a technique he used to include one snippet of code into another one.....at that time, one of my coworkers squinted his eyes in disbelief, got close to me and said "is this man telling everyone in here that he discovered how to include a file? like, as a new thing?" me: "lol yes", him: "this is a waste of time, do the docs for this thing show how to do it or is he doing some sort of strange maneuver for something the platform does not support?" me: "let me check....nope, it is included, for some reason he made a function that takes the...name of the file he wants to include and passes it over to that call inside of the body....which as per the docs it is the include function...." him: ".....fuck, what a waste of time and money, fuck it lets spend a couple of more minutes here and then go get a drink or something"

That last part was my favorite really, the man speaking was not just any phd holder, but a comp sci phd holder. To this day my dude would walk into my office and say shit like "I DISCOVERED HOW TO INCLUDE A FILE WITH PHP!"

Back in the day, I joined a little agency in Cape Town, small team small office with big projects, projects they weren’t really supposed to take on but hey when the owner of a tech business is not a tech person they do weird things.
A month had passed and it was all good, then came a project from Europe, Poland to be specific. The manager introduced me to the project, it was a big brand - a segment of Lego, built on Umbraco (they should change the name to slowbraco or uhmmm..braco somewhere there) the manager was like so this one is gonna be quite a challenge and I remember you said you are keen on that, I was like hell yeah bring it on (genuinely I got excited) now the challenge was not even about complexity of the problem or code or algorithms etc you get my point… the challenge was that the fucking site was in polish - face palm 1 - so I am like okay code is code, its just content, and I already speak/familiar with 13 human languages so I can’t fail here ill get around it somehow. So I spin up IIS, do the things and boom dev environment is ready for some kick ass McCoding. I start to run through the project to dig into the previous dev’s soul. I could not relate, I could not understand. I could not read, I could not, I could not. - face palm 2 - This dude straight up coded this project in polish variable names in polish, class names in polish, comments in freaking polish. Look, I have no beef with the initial guy, its his language so why not right? sure. But not hey this is my life and now I should learn polish, so screw it, new tab - google translate, new notes, I create a dictionary of variables and class etc 
3 days go by and I am fucking polish bro. Come at me. I get to read the previous devs soul through his comments, what a cool dude, his code wasn’t shit either - huge relief. So I rock on and make the required changes and further functionality. 

The project manager is like really, you did it? I am like yeah dude, there it is. Then I realise I wasn’t the first on this, this dude done tried others and it didn’t go down well, they refused. - face palm 3 -

Anyway, now I am a rock star in the office, and to project managers this win means okay throw him in the deep - they move me to huge project that is already late of course and apparently since I am able to use google translate, I can now defeat time, let the travelling begin. - face palm 4 - I start on the project and they love me on it as they can see major progress however poland was knocking on the door again, they need a whole chunk of work done. I can’t leave the bigger project, so it was decided that the new guy on Monday will start his polish lessons - he has no idea, probably excited to start a new job, meanwhile a shit storm is being prepared for him.

Monday comes, hello x - meet the team, team meets x

Manager - please join our meeting.

I join the meeting, the manager tells me to assist the new dev to get set up.

Me: Sure, did you tell him about he site?

Manager: Yes, I told him you knocked it out the park and now we just need to keep going

Me: in my head (hmm… that’s not what I was asking but cool I guess he will see soon enough -internal face palm 5 - )

New dev is setup, he looks at the project, I am ask him if he is good after like an hour he is like yeah all good. But his face is pink so I figured, no brother man is not okay. But I let him be and give him space.

Lunch time comes, he heads out for lunch. 

1hr 15mins later, project manager is like, is the new dude still at lunch.

We are all like yeah probably. 

2hrs pass 

3hrs pass

Now we are like okay maybe something happened to him, hit by a car? Emergency? Something… 

So I am legit worried now, I ask the manager to maybe give him a ring. 

Manager tries to call. NOTHING, no response. nada.

Next day, 8am, 9am, 10am no sign of the dude. 

I go to the manager, ask him what’s up. 

Manager: he is okay. However he said he is not coming back. 


We have 1 guy managing everything. He develop our CMS, customers email client, manage our network, servers, domains (our own domain servers), billing system, SSL certificates... In short: everything (as well as bugs). The entire company relies on 1 guy, pretty much.
Brings the phrase "all for one, and one for all" to a whole new meaning.

So we're working on a few initial apps for a hackercamp and finetuning the OS. We've been coding for like 17-18 hours trying to finish this off without a day 1 patch on the event itself, when someone starts swearing like a sailor. We walk past him take a look at his code and see that he's started an array at 3 instead of 0. He's one of the more experienced members on the team so this is a lack of sleep bug rather than a not knowing. To this day whenever someone makes an array error in their code someone always shouts "Arrays start at 3 right"!

Maybe not the most satisfying bugs but man is it funny as hell.

Conversing with developers can be frustrating.

Here is a good one from today. 2 people 1 women (let’s call her W) and one man (let’s call him M)

W: “Hey guys! Our team is looking for lots of great developers. Front end, back end, data, dev ops. At above market salaries with a great team! Reach out to me is you want to chat. I would love to hear from you.”

Translation: I have a great offer and want to help others achieve and strive in their careers.

M: “also, guys/less-gendered-alternative plz” proceeds to chastise this women about using the word guys.

Translation: I have no level of social awareness, but I have a need to feel big and important. So I’ll take offence for those who aren’t offended to make me feel better about my lack of fucking personality.

————

I’m not really concerned about opinions about the gender issue. It isn’t about that.

It’s just tiring dealing with these people’s bullshit.

It’s time to grow up folks, stop arguing on the fucking internet.

————

I also once saw a developer chastise 2 women we worked with while we were out for drinks for the exact same thing; using the word guys.

He was so busy “defending” them from themselves that he ended up making them uncomfortable and then they left.

He was saying “don’t exclude women” while fucking excluding the only women there.

What a fucking douche.

Inmates are trying to take over the asylum again.

Got a message from the web team manager deeply concerned because since switching to the new logging framework, the site is significantly slower.

She provided no proof or any data to what 'significantly slower' means.

#1 The 'new logging' has been in place and logging for 5 years. We only recently depreciated the ILogger interface ('new' ILogger interface only has 1 method instead of 5)
#2 The 'old logging' was modified 5 years ago, so even if you were using the 'old' interface, the underlying implementation is still the same.

She tried to push the 'it wasn't this slow before' argument, so I decided to do some fact based analysis.
Knowing they deployed their logging changes couple of weeks ago, I opened up AppDynamics, looked at the average call time to Splunk (along with a few other http calls they are doing)
- caching services - 5ms
- splunk - 30ms
- Order Service - 350ms
- Product Data Service -525ms

Then I look at the data they are logging, for the month of June, over 5 million messages. At 30ms each, that's almost 42 hours spent logging errors...yes errors. Null reference exceptions, Argument exceptions, easily fixable stuff.

So far for the month of July (using the 'new' logging), almost 2.5 million errors. Pretty close so far with June's numbers.

My only suggestion was to fix the bugs in their code so they don't log so many errors.

Her response.."Can we have one of our developers review your logging code? We believe we can find ways to optimize the http requests"

Oh good Lord. I'm not a drinking man..but ...I might start.

So in my 6 ppl dev team management had to do cuts and pulled a jira report of story points sum of the past 10 months, it went like this:

1. 307
2. 307
3. 283
4. 274
5. 257
6. 220

The 6. Guy is a teamlead so he was safe. 4 and 5 guys were fired with zero notice and 1 weeks severance pay (we are contractors).

Best part is that remaining 2. And 3. devs produce very low quality code. But hey, they have enough story points. Managament didnt even bother to discuss with teamlead about who to keep. Workload is the same, we were told to "level up".

You can't make this shit up. US based startups man.

Ever fuckinn "townhall meeting" at previous workplace. It was such an utter waste of time that even after leaving that place I still rage when thinking about it.

Every 4-6 months they would setup this useless crap of a meeting that drags on for over 1-1.5 hours of execs talking themselves up and trying to convince how great they are. And since they were cheapskates they would send out an email asking everyone to not join from their desks but congregate in the conference rooms to save on the dial-in. The conference rooms didn't have adequate chairs, vantilation or good enough aircon to handle twice/thrice the capacity of people standing in the room.

The marketing exec would go on and on about how great the media visibility is, how many views/likes they had on a linkedin post last month. The sales exec would blabber on about how their team is great and that the customers themselves are lining up and there is no competitor. Straight after the CFO would lecture on how the year is still difficult financially (in disguise justifying the peanuts of pay). The last exec, no matter who that is would specifically raise a point that the previous speakers didn't mention his/her team while thanking others.

This is also not a small company, the total headcount was just over 900 and roughly 500-700 people would be attending these townhalls. Imagine the amount of man hours wasted on that shitshow.

Worst documentation I've seen?

Our "Coding Standards" 20+ page document. The team who put it together got so detailed, there wasn't much 'wiggle room' for natural deviations in a developer's coding style. For example, a section devoted to no abbreviations. So if you had a variable 'invoiceId', they complained you violated 'standards', even though 'invoiceId' matched a field name in a database table. Using Dapper or another ORM that relied on the 1:1 name match? Nope, you were still forced to inject your own mappers so the code didn't violate standards.

As you can probably guess, such a long, detailed document would have contradictions. I pointed out one of the contradictions. Example:

Page 5: Section B, sub-section B-5, paragraph 3 : "To minimize network traffic, when querying the database, request all the data necessary for the application."
Page 8: Section K, sub-section K-2, paragraph 4 : "For maximum performance, when querying the database, request only the most minimum amount of data necessary for the application ."

In a review I pointed out this contradiction (there were several more)
Me: "If we satisfy A, one could say the code is in violation of B. Which is it?"
<Pointy-Hair-Boss throws his pencil on the table>
PHB: "WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM WITH STANDARDS! It couldn't be more clear! We are a company of standards because without standards <blah blah..straw man argument..blah blah>"
<deciding not to die on that hill, I move on>
Me: "On page 12, paragraph 9 code is in violation if a method has more than 3 parameters. That seems a little restrictive given our interaction with 3rd party products."
PHB: "There you go again. As stated in the document, ALL code used by the company will comply to our standards. What part of 'ALL' do you not understand?"

Was he bluffing about requiring 3rd party vendors complying with our standards? Heck no. That's a story for another day.

I like like my boss and my coworkers and the place I work but for the love of goat cheese this org has the attention span of a toddler on meth.

Seriously, it's like this is your #1 priority, next week, wait we have a different emergency you have a new super critical urgent thing, then "hey team Y has a vendor coming in next month to integrate these two pieces and they need you to have half of it wired up by then so make sure you get that done." Like SERIOUSLY SERIOUSLY

HERE"S SOME LIFE ADVICE IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT YOU PLAN OR SCHEDULE OR PRIORITIZE IF YOU END UP CHANGING ALL OF IT EVERY WEEK!

It's like painting a mural of a field, and then 10 minutes in you decide you'd rather paint a space ship, then you realize you don't like the space ship so instead you decide to change your painting to Elvis with a mullet, and you keep doing this. The end result is not beauty it's the mad deranged scribbles of a man past the point of sanity.

But for the love of Haliburton if they ask me why X or Y wasn't done I'll probably end up going full BOFH on somebody.

I fucking got scammed.

Scenario 1: Had literally no experience in B2C, no experience in experimentation, 0% fitment.

Verdict: got hired in just one round in a top domestic brand which is a profit making startup.

Scenario 2: A friend from ex-org got referred in a global brand for an international location. Hadn't interviewed for 4+ years. Created his resume in 15 minutes, got shortlisted, screened, interviewed, and hired in less than 2 weeks.
(This guy is a good friend I am incredibly happy for him and that he scored the gig and in now way I wish bad for his outcome).

Scenario 3: I also got a strong refferal for the same brand and location. I have been interviewing for past 6 months, resume is super polished where companies like FAANG spoke to me.
Got rejected in shortlisting. The referral guy got me in the pool because it was his team
In screening round, I was a good fit, answered everything well. Yes, I wasn't concise as much (and that's the feedback I kept getting and I was working on it).
Verdict: rejected. They didn't ask me relevant questions and rejected me on the basis of not having the required experience.

Seems like the hiring manager didn't want me to clear so came up with reasons.

And now it feels that, if the HM wants you, they'll hire you irrespective of anything and if they don't they'll kick you out for lamest of the reason.

My life is split in two part, the first three decades were surely shit and this was my last chance of making sure the next three are worth remembering on the death bed.

I failed. Miserably. For the factors outside of my control. Not that I haven't failed in past. Not that I didn't try again.

But man, I am doing persisting. The game is rigged. One cannot win without extreme luck.

Millions of dreams shattered. A shitty day, is now a shitty life.

Being born in third nation is a fucking curse.

coming back from monday OoO to this email chain from user 1. "hey i get an error please help" 2. cc teammate 3. cc my boss. 4. cc his boss. 5. meeting between him and someone on a different team who'll 'take care of it'
Get pinged in slack before i even sit down 'please help'
"hey man, whats the error?"
'oh i get a java exception in $application_completely_unrelated_to_anything_weve_ever_worked_together_on and you've fixed errors like this for me before can you do your magic . #bro

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.

I know I’ll get mixed views for this one...

So I’ll state my claim. I agree with the philosophy of uncle bob, I also feel like he is the high level language - older version of myself personality wise.. (when I learned about uncle bob I was like this guy is just like me but not low level haha).

Anyway.. I don’t agree with everything because I think he thinks or atleast I get the vibe he thinks everything can be solved by OOP, and high level languages. This is probably where Bob and I disagree. Personally I don’t touch ruby, python and java and “those” with a 10 foot pole.

Does he make valid arguments, yes, is agile the solve all solution no.. but agile ideas do come natural and respond faster the feedback loop of product development is much smaller and the managers and clients and customers can “see things” sooner than purly waterfall.. I mean agile is the natural approach of disciplined engineers....waterfall is and was developed because the market was flooded with undisciplined engineers and continues to flood, agile is great for them but only if they are skilled in what they are doing and see the bigger picture of the forest thru the trees.. which is the entire point of waterfall, to see the forest.. the end goal... now I’m not saying agile you only see a branch of a single tree of the forest.. but too often young engineers, and beginners jump on agile because it’s “trendy” or “everyone’s doing it” or whatever the fuck reason. The point is they do it but only focus on the immediate use case, needs and deliverables due next week.

What’s wrong with that?? Well an undisciplined engineer doing agile (no I’m not talking damn scrum shit and all that marketing bullshit).. pure true agile.
They will write code for the need due next week, but they won’t realize that hmm I will have the need 3 months from now for some feature that needs to connect to this, so I better design this code with that future feature in mind...

The disciplined engineer would do that. That is why waterfall exists so ideally the big picture is painted before hand.

The undisciplined engineer will then be frustrated in the future when he has to act like the cool aid man thru the hard pre mature architectural boundaries he created and now needs links or connections that are now needed.

Does moving to agile fix that hell no.. because the undisciplined engineer is still undisciplined.

One could argue the project manager or scrum secretary... (yes scrum secretary I said that right).. is suppose to organize and create and order the features with the future in mind etc...

Bullshit ..soo basically your saying the scrum kid is suppose to be the disciplined engineer to have foresight into realizing future features and making requirements and task now that cover those things? No!
1 scrum bitch focuses too much on pleasing “stake holders” especially taken literally in start ups where the non technical idiots are too involved with the engineering team and the scrum bastard tries to ass kiss and get everything organized and tasks working so the non technical person can see pretty things work.

Scrum master is a gate keeper and is not needed and actually hinders the whole process of making a undisciplined engineer into a disciplined engineer, makes the undisciplined engineer into a “forever” code grunt... filling weekly orders of story points unable to see the forest until it’s over because the forest isn’t show to the grunt only the scrum keeper knows the big picture..... this is bad this is why waterfall is needed.

Waterfall has its own problems, But that’s another story for another day..

ANYWAY... soooo where were we ....

Ahh yess....

Clean code..

Is it a good book, yes.. does uncle bobs personality show thru the book .. yes lol.
If you know uncle bob you will understand what I just did with this post lol. I had to tangent ( at least mine was related to the topic) ...

I agree with the principles of the book, I don’t agree with the extreme view point. It’s like religion there’s the modest folks and then there are the extremists. Well he’s the preacher of the cult and he’s on the extreme side.. but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.. many things he nails... he just hits the nail thru the wall just a bit.

OOP languages are not the solution... high level languages do not solve everything.. pininciples and concepts can be used across the board and prove valuable.. just don’t hold everything up like the 10 commandments of which you cannot deviate from.. that’s the difference here I think..

Good book, just don’t take it as the Bible as a beginner, actually infact DONT read this book as a beginner. Wait a bit learn then reflect by reading this.

We use at our company one of the largest Python ORM and dont code ourselfs on it, event tough I can code. Its some special contract which our General Manager made, before we as Devs where in the Project and everything is provided from the external Company as Service. The Servers are in our own Datacenter, but we dont have access.

We have our Consultants (Project Manager) as payd hires and they got their own Devs.

Im in lead of Code Reviews and Interfaces. Also Im in the "Run" Team, which observes, debuggs and keeps the System alive as 3rd-Level (Application Managers).

What Im trying to achieve is going away from legacy .csv/sftp connections to RestAPI and on large Datasets GraphQL. Before I was on the Project, they build really crappy Interfaces.

Before I joined the Project in my Company, I was a Dev for a couple of Finance Applications and Webservices, where I also did coding on Business critical Applications with high demand Scaling.

So forth, I was moved by my Boss over to the Project because it wasn't doing so well and they needed our own Devs on it.

Alot of Issues/Mistakes I identified in the Software:
- Lots of Code Bugs
- Missing Process Logic
- No Lifecycle
- Very fast growing Database
- A lot of Bad Practices

Since my switch I fixed alot of bugs, was the man of the hour for fixing major Incidents and so on so forth. A lot of improvements have been made. Also the Team Spirit of 15+ People inside the Project became better, because they could consult me for solutions/problems.

But damn I hate our Consultants. We pay them and I need to sketch the concepts, they are to dumb for it. They dont understand Rest or APIs in general, I need to teach them alot about Best Practices and how to Code an API. Then they question everything and bring out a crooked flawed prototype back to me.

WE F* PAY THEM FOR BULLCRAP! THEY DONT EVEN WRITE DOCUMENTATION, THEY ARE SO LAZY!

I even had a Meeting with the main Consultant about Performance Problems and how we should approach it from a technical side and Process side. The Software is Core Business relevant and its running over 3 Years. He just argumented around the Problem and didnt provide solutions.

I confronted our General Manager a couple of times with this, but since 3 Years its going on and on.

Im happy with my Team and Boss, they have my back and I love my Job, but dealing with these Nutjobs of Consultants is draining my nerves/energy.

Im really am at my wits end how to deal with this anymore? Been pulling trough since 1 year. I wanna stay at my company because everything else besides the Nutjob Consultants is great.

I told my Boss about it a couple of times and she agrees with me, but the General Manager doesnt let go of these Consultants.

Even when they fuck up hard and crash production, they fucking Bill us... It's their fault :(

"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.

TL;DR Shit programer trying pass off stealing code as "Recycling"

Backstory:
Client hires senior dev. He lied and knows nothing. Has been causing havoc in production since day 1. My crusades to defend production have been without much success.

Since he wants to LITERALLY put his name on every big project, he finds any reason to make a new version of it (or make a slight astetic modification) to say he did something.

The client doesn't know or care about the programming side of things. Which means it is incredibly difficult to get him to understand the issues this brings. Not to mention that the "senior dev" is acting as a consultant to the client, altering the facts.

Story:
The piece of shit, is trying to make a new version of a big project. It was originally made by my mentor. Again, if you are using someone else's work to complete your own, I don't care. But if you take 99% of another person's work and then say...

"I took and existing project, which was similar to what I'm trying to make. Then I modified it to fit our needs."

Fuck you man!

You took someone else's work. Now you're trying to present it as your own. No references to our team. Again, there is literally nothing new about this project. It's exactly like the original. The client didn't even ask for this.

One of our team mates is based out of the US office. We are physically distant, but after our manager's departure, we lost touch because our scope of work was different.

Me and two other team members work closely with each other from India and dude is alone, working out of the US.

Super smart, very polite, and a fun person to work and be with. Even when our interaction was less, I learnt so much from him.

Since, I am facing some challenges, I decide to use it as an excuse to connect with him for a coffee and also seek his guidance because he is senior to me.

Some things he mentioned,

1. Our new line manager asks him to do things on spot with no heads up. He has to drop everything and complete the ask.

2. Often times, poor guy, is asked to join meetings on immediate basis. Even while he is having his lunch.

3. He never got support from our new manager. Infact, based on the conversation, I realised that the manager supports me more.

4. He is facing same, if not more, issues with tech. And he didn't have any guidance on how to handle the issue.

5. A lot of times he is facing process and system problems which he isn't able to solve because the org culture is that of working in Silos. And he doesn't get any support from manager.

6. Tech has clearly pushed him back when he asked for help and other teams never respond to him.

My man was still smiling bright and was looking things from a positive lens that all of this is interesting and adds to the learning experience which will be valued when we decide to move on from this job.

These are the people who inspire me. Smiling in the time of adversity.

Even when he had his own challenges, he was ready to guide me and hear my frustrations. I offered him help and will make sure to stay connected so he doesn't feel left out and alone in the team only because we don't work together in physical space.

One thing I have learned over time is, while I am facing problems, someone out there is facing more and difficult problems then me. I always tend to blow up my problems out of proportion then what they actually are.

I am the dumbest person that I know and mark my words, I'll die because of my empathy. I wish I could help my team mate in any possible way.

Impostor syndrome is too real. I frequent feel stress about tasks that are getting delayed. Saying yes to any task given to me (even if there isn't really time for it).

Most recent I had a 1 man project (which I hate, cause I always think it's better to work in teams). It was estimated to take 1 week and ended up being done 2½ weeks after. Remembered I took 1 sick day, just feeling awfull about the project being so delayed and couldn't get my self to go to work.

Well week after the project was done, I had a "employee development conversation" with my CEO and my boss. (like I do every half year). As always they loved to have me on the team and thought I was doing a great job. Same thing I always hear to these meetings.

Deep inside I know I am doing a good job. Keeping up with new things. But my problem is always taking to much on my plate. In the middle of all the code and stuff, I always seem to forget that I am doing a good job and doing my best and start feeling worse again. It's a really bad cycle and causing me to take "fake" sick days just to cool down again. (which often makes me feel even worse, for letting the project getting delayed more).

// DevRant / DevConfession

Man...

Why is it by any means helpful to know whether the ENIAC had 1 000 000 vacuum tubes, or not? (Spoiler: it had far less)

We have this fucking inevitable optional c(o)urse for the last year and last semester at my Uni, called History of Computer Science. It would be totally fine, if we had learnt something really useful, or at least something really close to general knowledge, but no... Instead we should fucking know, who wasn't part of the team designing the ENIAC from a list of 6 people.

I guess our teacher should really go and rest as she is way over the minimum retirement age... and this is way below my expectations about our teachers being on the academic level...

If I weren't a dev I'd be doing IT support.

Back in 2018 when I was doing level 1 support as part of an internal IT call center, I applied for two jobs elsewhere in the same company, one doing level 2 support and the other in a different department doing cloud infrastructure engineering or whatever they're calling it now. I almost took the support job because the cloud job was really dragging their feet with my final interview with my boss-to-be.

I probably should have taken that as a sign of things to come, since it ended up being such a pain to work for him until our team got moved under a new manager.

The support team starts pressuring me for an answer and I eventually fire off an email to the cloud guys saying, "I already have a job offer and I can't delay any longer. If I can't be interviewed soon then I will have to withdraw my application."

Got my interview the next day, and he made the offer the same day. Turned out to be a very good choice in the long run, but man were the first couple years full of massive frustrations.

Interesting definitions

1. Project Manager is a Person who thinks nine Women can deliver a baby in One month.

2. Developer is a Person who thinks it will take 18 months to deliver a Baby.

3. Onsite Coordinator is one who thinks single Woman can deliver nine babies in one month.

4. Client is the one who doesn’t know why he wants a baby.

5. Marketing Manager is a person who thinks he can deliver a baby even if no man and woman are available.

6. Resource Optimization Team thinks they don’t Need a man or woman; They’ll produce a child with zero resources.

7. Documentation Team thinks they don’t care whether the child is delivered, they’ll just document 9 months.

8. Quality Auditor is the person who is never happy with the PROCESS to produce a baby.

9. Tester is a person who always tells his wife that this is not the Right baby.

To add a bit more context to my last rant.

The following situation happened today and similar situations are at the moment common as fuck.

Situation started roughly 1 1/2 months ago as a deployment failed.

Seemed to be a DNS problem for the devs, so my basic assumption was that they checked their shit.

As I was and I am currently more than swamped, told them it had to wait if it is an DNS issue...

Well.

Backstabbing product manager complained to upper management as it took so long.

Backstabbing manager even went so far to propose alternative solutions - think of switching product to work around issue and throwing away a year of development of a 5 man team...

So additional to my work I had to deescalate and prevent complete nonsense.

Today I finally found time for the problem.

After 2-3 hours of turning every stone inside the DNS setup, cloudflare, loadbalancers, etc...

Well. Devs. Don't trust them.

Turned out the devs misconfigured the environment entirely.

Its not so obvious in this product as it is rather complicated, though the devs documentation explicitly mentioned that if one overrides the configuration for e.g. several languages, one has to make sure to set two env variables for TLS mode...

There was only one set.

:(

8 fucking weeks of backstabbing and blaming others while they could have just read their own fucking documentation and fixed that shit in 5 minutes.

During my small tenure as the lead mobile developer for a logistics company I had to manage my stacks between native Android applications in Java and native apps in IOS.

Back then, swift was barely coming into version 3 and as such the transition was not trustworthy enough for me to discard Obj C. So I went with Obj C and kept my knowledge of Swift in the back. It was not difficult since I had always liked Obj C for some reason. The language was what made me click with pointers and understand them well enough to feel more comfortable with C as it was a strict superset from said language. It was enjoyable really and making apps for IOS made me appreciate the ecosystem that much better and realize the level of dedication that the engineering team at Apple used for their compilation protocols. It was my first exposure to ARC(Automatic Reference Counting) as a "form" of garbage collection per se. The tooling in particular was nice, normally with xcode you have a 50/50 chance of it being great or shit. For me it was a mixture of both really, but the number of crashes or unexpected behavior was FAR lesser than what I had in Android back when we still used eclipse and even when we started to use Android Studio.

Developing IOS apps was also what made me see why IOS apps have that distinctive shine and why their phones required less memory(RAM). It was a pleasant experience.

The whole ordeal also left me with a bad taste for Android development. Don't get me wrong, I love my Android phones. But I firmly believe that unless you pay top dollar for an android manufacturer such as Samsung, motorla or lg then you will have lag galore. And man.....everyone that would try to prove me wrong always had to make excuses later on(no, your $200_$300 dllr android device just didn't cut it my dude)

It really sucks sometimes for Android development. I want to know what Google got so wrong that they made the decisions they made in order to make people design other tools such as React Native, Cordova, Ionic, phonegapp, titanium, xamarin(which is shit imo) codename one and many others. With IOS i never considered going for something different than Native since the API just seemed so well designed and far superior to me from an architectural point of view.

Fast forward to 2018(almost 2019) adn Google had talks about flutter for a while and how they make it seem that they are fixing how they want people to design apps.

You see. I firmly believe that tech stacks work in 2 ways:

1 people love a stack so much they start to develop cool ADDITIONS to it(see the awesomeios repo) to expand on the standard libraries

2 people start to FIX a stack because the implementation is broken, lacking in functionality, hard to use by itself: see okhttp, legit all the Square libs, butterknife etc etc etc and etc

From this I can conclude 2 things: people love developing for IOS because the ecosystem is nice and dev friendly, and people like to develop for Android in spite of how Google manages their API. Seriously Android is a great OS and having apps that work awesomely in spite of how hard it is to create applications for said platform just shows a level of love and dedication that is unmatched.

This is why I find it hard, and even mean to call out on one product over the other. Despite the morals behind the 2 leading companies inferred from my post, the develpers are what makes the situation better or worse.

So just fuck it and develop and use for what you want.

Honorific mention to PHP and the php developer community which is a mixture of fixing and adding in spite of the ammount of hatred that such coolness gets from a lot of peeps :P

Oh and I got a couple of mobile contracts in the way, this is why I made this post.

And I still hate developing for Android even though I love Java.

i need some advice on how to deal with office culture. i am a covid graduate and this is my first wfo job. it is technically hybrid but quickly turning into full time office, and there are several examples of scenarios, where i am not only feeling just frustrated, but hurt and retaliation.

my whole team is in a different city except 4 of us : pm, sr ios dev, me(android dev) and a sr android dev. in our office, there are 50 more people , but i rarely need to contact anyone except my team from another city or these 3 folks. also, we 4 are new joinees like just joined in last 2 months.

so let's discuss the problems.

1. there have been very shitty decisions that are leading to loss of everyone just because a few are unlucky. here's an example. on may 1, international labor day, we 4 had a leave showing. but it was not showing for other people. maybe because ourbleave calender was aligned to other city or maybe coz we are new, idk. but someone told the boss of manager, and he mailed to us that there is no leave :/ wtf

2. another news: our is shifting from we work to another co-working space. it is being heard that office will be now 3/5 days instead of 2/5 . when we joined, it was showing 3/5 days in our hr portal, but hr assured that it is 2/5 days. and we would still go 2/5 days only. but like that holiday scenario, people are buzzing and talking, and they might end up getting our 2/5 culture tonget fucked too. this is very stupid, since i am wasting 4 hrs everyday travelling.

3. let's talk about the snakes in the 4 ppl group. the ios dev and manager are sweet looking girl snakes. ios girl is the meek snake and pm is the wicked snake. once i discussed with ios girl about how we need to rush every morning at 8 am to reach office as our standup is at 10. i told her that i would raise this matter in standup and when i did, she was just mum as fuck. didn't even voted a fucking yes when the boss said "ok let's have a vote on it" . i mean man what the fuck are your scared of? the boss won't kill you bitch for clocking 30 mins late

4. the other snake is pm. i am pretty sure she was one of the people for which that leave was not showing and she informed the boss's boss. day before that i told her jokingly that once i leave the office, I won't be opening my laptop and since today it was decided that tomorrow is the holiday, I am unreachable and therefore enjoying the vacay due to lack of latest info.
the bitch fucking whatsapped me to say that she got a call from boss that tomorrow's a working day. it would have been the perfect fucking leave.
I am pretty sure a lot of people are hating me for leaving so early too. i oeave at 5pm , as i have to be at gym by 7. also 1 minute past 5 and i would be travelling in a jam packed metro, so yeah, no thanks. but this bitch is definitely telling my boss about this.

5 finally the biggest snake is this *cough-cough* "sr" android guy. dude's code is so shittu and hacky, i can sense that he didn't tried to understand the class and just added a function at any place he felt fit. he also is a schemy bitch, as he has somehow convinced noss to let him wotk just 1/5 days in wfo.

but i didn't cared about him much until now. yesterday i sent a link regarding latest Android dev update in the official channel as a fun read, and his reply was "probably should have seen theeynote yesterday" bitch it wasn't even mentioned in that keynote! i just checked its summary after his message, but then it was too late to retaliate.

and now that i see, he always tries to be smug and cool. not that i care, roast me all you want in front of your crush, I won't mind, but if you're trying to show people that am not an able dev, then buckle up bitch, either you or me are counting last breaths.