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Was lead developer at a small startup, I was hiring and had a budget to add 3 new people to my team to develop a new product for the company.
Some context first and then the rant!
Candidate 1 - Amazing, a dev I worked with before who was under utilized at the previous company. Still a junior, but, she was a quick learner and eager to expand her knowledge, never an issue.
Candidate 2 - Kickass dev with back end skills and extras, he was always eager to work a bit more than what was expected. I use to send him home early to annoy him. haha!
Candidate 3 - Lets call him P.
In the interview he answers every question perfectly, he asks all the right questions and suggests some things I havent even thought of. CTO goes ahead and says we should skip the technical test and just hire the guy, his smart and knows what his talking about, I agree and we hire him. (We where a bit desperate at this stage as well.)
He comes in a week early to pick up his work laptop to get setup before he starts the next week, awesome! This guy is going to be an asset to the company, cant wait to have him join the team - The CTO at this stage is getting ready to leave the company and I will be taking over the division and need someone to take over lead position, he seems like the guys to do it.
The guys starts the next week, he comes in and the laptop we gave him is now a local server for testing and he will be working off his own laptop, no issue, we are small so needed a testing stack, but wasnt really needed since we had procedures in place for this already.
Here is where everything goes wrong!!! First day goes great... Next day he gets in early 6:30am (Nice! NO!), he absolutely smells, no stinks, of weed, not a light smell, the entire fucking office smells of weed! (I have no problem with weed, just dont make it my problem to deal with). I get called by boss and told to sort this out people are complaining! I drive to office and have a meeting with him, he says its all good he understands. (This was Friday).
Monday comes around - Get a call from Boss at 7:30am. Whole office smells like weed, please talk to P again, this cannot happen again. I drive to office again, and he again says it wont happen again, he has some issues with back pain and the weed helps.
Tuesday - Same fucking thing! And now he doesnt want to sign for the laptop("server") that was given to him, and has moved to code in the boardroom, WHERE OUR FUCKING CLIENTS WILL BE VIEWING A DEMO THAT DAY OF THE PRODUCT!! Now that whole room smells like weed, FML!
Wednesday - We send P a formal letter that he is under probation, P calls me to have a meeting. In the meeting he blames me for not understanding "new age" medicine, I ask for his doctors prescription and ask why he didnt tell me this in the interview so I could make arrangements, we dont care if you are stoned, just do good work and be considerate to your co-workers. P cant provide these and keeps ranting, I suggest he takes pain killers, he has none of it only "new age" medicine for him.
Thursday - I ask him to rather "work" from home till we can get this sorted, he comes in for code reviews for 2 weeks. I can clearly see he has no idea how the system works but is trying, I thought I will dive deeper and look at all of his code. Its a mess, nothing makes sense and 50% of it is hard coded (We are building a decentralized API for huge data sets so this makes no sense).
Friday - In code review I confront him about this, he has excuses for everything, I start asking him harder questions about the project and to explain what we are building - he goes quiet and quits on the spot with a shitty apology.
From what I could make out he was really smart when it came to theory but interpreting the theory to actual practice wasnt possible for him, probably would have been easier if he wasnt high all the time.
I hate interview code tests, but learned a valuable lesson that day! Always test for some code knowledge as well even if you hate doing it, ask the right questions and be careful who you hire! You can only bullshit for so long in coding before someone figures out that you are a fraud.16 -
6pm - arrive home from work, log into my computer and start working on side projects.
4am - Finally go to sleep after staying up all night setting up arch in a vm.
7am - Start drive to work in the snow and ice.
7:20am - car runs out of wiper fluid.
7:30am - round corner so that I’m driving towards the sun, windshield is covered in mud and I have 2% visibility.
7:35am - take off ramp towards gas station so I can buy fluid and wash window.
7:36am - Car mysteriously parked in center of off ramp, nearly smash it but have a narrow miss.
7:40am - can’t find the freaking pully in new car to pop hood
7:41am - found it.
7:50am - drove the back way to work because it cuts out traffic, but includes many steep hills that I forgot existed, come to a skid at bottom of one and am pushed out into the main road, luckily nobody is coming and I’m able to continue on my merry way.
8:01am - sit down in desk, lead staff person comes over evoking Lumbergh from Office Space and lets me know I need to be on time to work and that the snow doesn’t give me an excuse. I agree and smile and suck up and he leaves.
8:02am - pull out phone to write down notes about personal project that I thought of on drive here, phone dies. I forgot to plug it in last night.
8:04am - found power bank charger thing in desk but it uses a micro-b type usb and I only have usb type c on me.
8:10am - borrow usb from old headset in office surplus.
8:11am - writing notes. Have sudden realization that I didn’t shut down my vm and that when my computer went to sleep and subsequently locked it probably halted virtualbox and everything would be lost for the second time.
8:12am - got on devRant.4 -
Worst dev team failure I've experienced?
One of several.
Around 2012, a team of devs were tasked to convert a ASPX service to WCF that had one responsibility, returning product data (description, price, availability, etc...simple stuff)
No complex searching, just pass the ID, you get the response.
I was the original developer of the ASPX service, which API was an XML request and returned an XML response. The 'powers-that-be' decided anything XML was evil and had to be purged from the planet. If this thought bubble popped up over your head "Wait a sec...doesn't WCF transmit everything via SOAP, which is XML?", yes, but in their minds SOAP wasn't XML. That's not the worst WTF of this story.
The team, 3 developers, 2 DBAs, network administrators, several web developers, worked on the conversion for about 9 months using the Waterfall method (3~5 months was mostly in meetings and very basic prototyping) and using a test-first approach (their own flavor of TDD). The 'go live' day was to occur at 3:00AM and mandatory that nearly the entire department be on-sight (including the department VP) and available to help troubleshoot any system issues.
3:00AM - Teams start their deployments
3:05AM - Thousands and thousands of errors from all kinds of sources (web exceptions, database exceptions, server exceptions, etc), site goes down, teams roll everything back.
3:30AM - The primary developer remembered he made a last minute change to a stored procedure parameter that hadn't been pushed to production, which caused a side-affect across several layers of their stack.
4:00AM - The developer found his bug, but the manager decided it would be better if everyone went home and get a fresh look at the problem at 8:00AM (yes, he expected everyone to be back in the office at 8:00AM).
About a month later, the team scheduled another 3:00AM deployment (VP was present again), confident that introducing mocking into their testing pipeline would fix any database related errors.
3:00AM - Team starts their deployments.
3:30AM - No major errors, things seem to be going well. High fives, cheers..manager tells everyone to head home.
3:35AM - Site crashes, like white page, no response from the servers kind of crash. Resetting IIS on the servers works, but only for around 10 minutes or so.
4:00AM - Team rolls back, manager is clearly pissed at this point, "Nobody is going fucking home until we figure this out!!"
6:00AM - Diagnostics found the WCF client was causing the server to run out of resources, with a mix of clogging up server bandwidth, and a sprinkle of N+1 scaling problem. Manager lets everyone go home, but be back in the office at 8:00AM to develop a plan so this *never* happens again.
About 2 months later, a 'real' development+integration environment (previously, any+all integration tests were on the developer's machine) and the team scheduled a 6:00AM deployment, but at a much, much smaller scale with just the 3 development team members.
Why? Because the manager 'froze' changes to the ASPX service, the web team still needed various enhancements, so they bypassed the service (not using the ASPX service at all) and wrote their own SQL scripts that hit the database directly and utilized AppFabric/Velocity caching to allow the site to scale. There were only a couple client application using the ASPX service that needed to be converted, so deploying at 6:00AM gave everyone a couple of hours before users got into the office. Service deployed, worked like a champ.
A week later the VP schedules a celebration for the successful migration to WCF. Pizza, cake, the works. The 3 team members received awards (and a envelope, which probably equaled some $$$) and the entire team received a custom Benchmade pocket knife to remember this project's success. Myself and several others just stared at each other, not knowing what to say.
Later, my manager pulls several of us into a conference room
Me: "What the hell? This is one of the biggest failures I've been apart of. We got rewarded for thousands and thousands of dollars of wasted time."
<others expressed the same and expletive sediments>
Mgr: "I know..I know...but that's the story we have to stick with. If the company realizes what a fucking mess this is, we could all be fired."
Me: "What?!! All of us?!"
Mgr: "Well, shit rolls downhill. Dept-Mgr-John is ready to fire anyone he felt could make him look bad, which is why I pulled you guys in here. The other sheep out there will go along with anything he says and more than happy to throw you under the bus. Keep your head down until this blows over. Say nothing."11 -
You can't imagine how many lines of pure and utter horseshit, seemingly written in PHP, I had to dig through this whole weekend. (relating to my 2 previous rants)
How is it even possible to write code this unbelievably ugly?
Examples:
- includes within loops
- included files use variables from parent files
- start- and endtags separated to different files
- SQL queries generated by string concatenation, no safety measures at all (injection)
- repeating DB calls within loops
- multiple directories with the same code (~40 files), only different by ~8 lines, copied
- a mixture of <?php echo ... ?> and <?= ... ?>
- a LOT of array accesses and other stuff prefixed with "@" (suppress error messages)
- passwords in cleartext
- random non-RESTful page changes with a mixture of POST and GET
- GET parameters not URL-encoded
- ...
My boss told me it took this guy weeks and weeks of coding to write this tool (he's an "experienced dev", of course WITHOUT Git).
Guess what?
It took me only 20 hours and about 700 lines of code.
I must confess, since this task, I don't hate PHP anymore, I just simply hate this dev to death.
Addendum: It's Monday, 5:30am. Good night. 😉12 -
!dev
I live next to a nightclub and went outside for a fag.
It’s wet, 2:30am and kinda cold.
A girl and her boyfriend come out of the club..
Her feet hurt because of her high heels so she takes them off, walking on the wet, cold road barefoot now.
Her boyfriend sees it and tells her to put them back on.
She denies.
He takes off his shoes and gives them to her (good boyfriend...) she puts them on, almost falling over cause she’s hammered as fuck, takes them off again and says they don’t fit and look stupid on her..
WTF, I understand taking the shoes off When she’s drunk but I don’t understand how the fuck she could care if it looks good at half 2 in the morning in an empty town..
I’ve seen it all now..
#onlyInIreland17 -
Cool, I found a bug in Ruby!
And it’s preventing my debugging from working!
Asjfkladfsj
It’s 2:30am and I want to finish this crap.
No, I’m not doing any work tomorrow. I’m taking the day off to sleep.15 -
Step 1: Run to the store to buy a USB card reader because all of a sudden you have a need to use a 16Mb CF card that was tossed in a junk drawer for 20 years (hoping it still works, of course), but that was the easy part...
Step 2: Realize that the apps - your own - you want to run on your new (old) Casio E-125 PocketPC (to re-live "glory" days) are compiled in ARM format, not MIPS, which is the CPU this device uses, and the installer packages you have FOR YOUR OWN APPS don't include MIPS, only ARM (WHY DID I DO THAT?!), so, the saga REALLY begins...
Step 3: Get a 20-year old OS to install in a Hyper-V VM... find out that basic things like networking don't work by default because the OS is so damn old, so spend hours solving that and other issues to get it to basically run well enough to...
Step 4: Get that OS updated so that it's at least kind/sorta/maybe (but between you and me, not really!) safe online, all without a browser that will work on ANY modern site (oh, and good luck finding a version of Firefox that runs on it - that all took a few hours)...
Step 5: Okay, OS is ready to go, now get 20-year old dev tools that you haven't even seen in that many years working. Oh, do this with a missing CD key and ISO's that weren't archived in a format that's usable today, plus a bunch of missing dependencies because the OS is, again, SO old (a few MORE hours)...
Step 6: Get 20-year old code written in a language you haven't used in probably almost that long to compile, dealing with pathing issues, missing libs, and several other issues, all the while trying to dust off long-dormant knowledge somewhere in the deep, dark recesses of your brain... surprisingly, it all came back to me, more or less, in under an hour, which lead to...
Step 7: FINALLY get it all to work, FINALLY get the code to compile, FINALLY get it transferred to the device (which has no network capabilities, by the way, which is where the card reader and CF card came into play) and re-live the glory of your old, crappy PocketPC apps and games running on the real thing! WOO-HOO!
Step 8: Realize it's 3:30am by the time that's all done and be VERY thankful that you're on vacation this week or work tomorrow would SSUUCCKK!!!!
Step 9. Get called into work the next day for a production issue despite being tired from the night before and an afternoon of errands, lose basically a whole day of vacation (7 hours spent on it) and not actually resolve it by after midnight when you finally say that's enough :(
Talk about your highs and your lows.6 -
Argh,
Today - you son of a bitch.
It all started with a 2 hour flight out of town for business, and I mean started as in I needed to be at the airport at 4:30am!
Despite 2 coffee's to get me out of bed I proceeded to indulge myself in the magic juice, 3 cups later and it felt like my heart belonged in a Grand Prix.
Now here is the sticky part, we where briefed that we would only be doing 2 site meetings and that was it.
Low and be hold it got worse, turns out that we would be pitching our product to 3 highly regarded CEO's, now bare in mind that my position on this trip is as the lead developer, and don't get me wrong I am well up to date on every aspect of the business, hence why they sent me.
So more coffee down the gullet, and eventually the conversation leads back to a project that I had developed to allow authorization of debit orders online, now usually I'm quite a well presented person in these types of situations, but you don't realize how quick this can change.
A quick jump to the geography of the location I was doing business. Johannesburg, South Africa - its as dry as hell, smoggy and at a very higher altitude "as in above sea level".
Now unfortunately none of the above factors where helping me much at all.
Now back to where I am being asked about my project, and never in my life have I tripped over my own words, I went completely blank, I'm surprised I didn't pass out to be honest.
Now despite the death stare and my colleague kicking me under the table, I am feeling pretty terrible, fortunately I had a kick ass team that was able to cover my ass!
Luckily I was able to recover ( 2 muffins and about 3 bottles of water later). We where able to salvage the meeting and it turned out pretty well, I regained my energy and we made it happen!
Must say the flight back was amazing! Almost empty and we all had a row of seats to ourselves, which resulted in some major comfort stretching!
Thanks for tolerating my essay, I'd love to hear if anyone has had anything of the sorts happen to them.
2 -
Working from home routine (Lockdown edition):
1. Wakeup at 8am
2. Meeting at 8:30am
3. Next 3 hours just focus on coding
4. Push code to source control
5. Focus on myself6 -
Its 1:30am (South Africa) just had my 8 drive raid 50 fail on one of our main servers after 3 sudden drive failures at the same time after lightning struck our network and blew 2 Cisco 48 port switches...
Its gonna be a longgg fucking night.1 -
!dev
Just wanna share yesterday nights story because I really really enjoyed it..
Have been to Galway with a friend.
Went to the pubs and 2 Irish girls tried to speak French - just for fun. A French guy wanted to flirt with them and said: “you British girls are so cute when you try to talk French.”
The girl completely freaked out and screamed at him: “ DONT YOU FUCKING DARE TO CALL AS BRITISH..” and the second girl started singing in the middle of all the people: “Come out ya Black and Tans, come out and fight us like a man”..
Ended with those girls trying to stop other Irish guys from beating up that French guy.
Few pubs later at 2:30am walking to the car (driver didn’t drink) when the “irish Jesus” (YouTuber) walks by and asks us if we have “something”, he really needs to get stoned 😂
Best night ever..
No offense to the British here, I assume you’re familiar with your shared history;)3 -
left the office early today to see my 2 years old son before he goes to bed.
it's 11pm and I'm working from home, gonna wake up around 5:30am to commute to work.
I really need to move closer to work3 -
Ah yes, the sound of me still working at 2:30am. Marvelous.
Gotta grab a coffin and a castle and pretend im dracula, wouldnt make much of a difference.8 -
Update on this rant: https://devrant.com/rants/1322051/...
The server only boots into emergency mode now, and all data is lost.
Moral of the story: Its NOT okay to trash the home partition xD -
It was about 2:30am.. The darkness had been dominating the outside for a while, and I was having issues with my partitions on my CentOS server. Yup that's correct. I think.
I really wanted to go to bed. Last thing I had to do, was re-allocate some space from centos-home to centos-root. But I fucked up, of course I did.
After about half an hour of making food and trying different stuff to solve the "Can't read superblock error" error, I found an answer that just lead to "Can't read secondary superblock error, sorry".
At least they apologize now lol.
I ended up trashing the centos-home volume (is volume and partition the same ?) and just smashing it all onto centos-root. I lost some data, but screw that, stuff is working and I'm not going to bed.
Yeah, stuff is working. I hope. No errors encountered yet.
Moral of the story: Home partition isn't needed and it's okay to kill it1 -
I'm wondering if the computer let me win...
Up to now it was ahead and got me on the ropes... Granted I haven't played an actual Go game in years...
But then somehow it made a mistake? here... A 100 point game turning mistake... which I don't notice until 30+ moves later
Maybe I should just goto sleep.... It's actually 2:30am here...
3 -
Getting ready at midnight.
Driving to town at 1:30am to get the bus to the airport at 2:30am.
Will arrive at 5am to get my flight at 6:45am and fly for 2h.
Arriving at 11am local time.
Will reach final destination around lunch time..
No sleep tonight then...
Never taking the early flight again, no matter that it’s cheaper..3 -
So, just a random thought.
I'm attending my 2nd year of university and I'm thinking about what should I do after I get my degree (I should get it the next year). Most of my classmates want to get a master in something but I would like to work because I want to demonstrate to myself that I can do whatever I want but at the same time I feel like I'm not enough yet and that I will fail all the interviews so I'm in a fucking limbo between two choices. Aaaand that's it, sorry if I made some mistakes but it's 2:30AM in Italy and I'm pretty tired.3 -
Been working on redoing my desktop lately. Currently the specs are:
-FX-8350
-Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3P motherboard with a broken USB 3.0 header lmao
-GTX 660 (Gonna upgrade to an RX 580 at some point, I don't do any hardcore gaming so I know I don't need a top of the line GPU)
-Crucial BX500 240gb SSD
-WD 500gb HDD (gonna upgrade to a bigger one eventually)
-Some like $60 Dynex PSU I bought a while ago, waiting on my Corsair RM650x to come in
At this very moment, it's running Windows 7 Ultimate x64. Once I get to a point where I'm happier with the build, I'll switch it over to Linux and start ricing. It has Windows right now cause I'm just using it for some games and when I last fucked with the hardware, it was the middle of the night so I didn't want to spend too much time setting up a Linux distro the way I want it and everything right then, just putting that off for later (especially cause I use Arch btw)
I have been playing some Half Life 2 lately. I forgot how fucking fun that game is.
Aside from my PC, my birthday was technically yesterday (it's about 2:30AM as of writing this, and I've been up for a while, so I still consider it today). Now I'm 2 years away from being able to legally drink (and smoke since the law change, although I still do both anyways).
I'm gonna stop rambling. Life is fairly decent right now. Not too much to "rant" about except for shit with my roommates, but I won't bore everyone with that1 -
3 days when I had to complete documentation for an audit. I only returned to my room to shower and change clothes for the next day. That too I left at 8AM and returned at 09:30AM.
2 days when I had to complete setting up the office network over the weekend. Note that this was over a weekend.
And this is without counting the many hours I've spent semi-working at hackathons. I've gone up to 60 hours without sleep, coding the shit out of my brains.2
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