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Search - "advice needed"
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*Haxk20 "rant"*
Its been around a year or even more since i switched to Gentoo from Arch.
Dont regret a thing. Made my experience of using my system and working better and faster.
Dont try it just because you want to be part of some gentoo gang or whatever. Its a system. Its a tool. Not some badge you wear. And this tool is a tool you never knew you needed. Takes time to set it up. But once you do. You dont need to reinstall nearly ever. And it will take care of you if you do the same sometimes.
Advice i wish i had when i went into this: Read the news. If you have your config and you get a ton of conflicts. Best chances are that it will be there with explanation how to resolve it all.
There is ofc FAR more i could say. But i doubt anyone wants to hear me talking for entire char limit about the experience.. Tho if people want it i can *shrug*. Its been mostly positive either way.17 -
If the project goes overbudget it's because you fucking gave away the custom made software for too fucking cheap.
Not because of the amount of hours building this piece of shit site which btw I was never consulted on the estimates and not even mentioned about the 2 different designs for the same fucking site or even how it needed to be architected.
As a contractor you depend on your time, not on a fixed salary. No perks, nor fucking swag.
My advice is if the company thinks that working remotely is a perk, then fucking run away. -
Are you ready for the only really useful advice on devRant that is not judgmental, simple, and instantly applicable?
Here it goes. If you have hiccups,
1. Inhale your full lungs until you can’t inhale anymore
2. Hold your breath as long as you can
3. Exhale carefully
This will “reboot” your breath cycle, and that conflict between breathing and other things that causes hiccups will go away.
Repeat if needed. Breathe slowly and carefully after you finally exhale.6 -
So, some years ago, my old firm was bought by a much larger company.
A couple years later, my CTO resigned, as he needed a week deserved break. I acted as interim CTO for half a year, with the full support of the CEO.
But then higher management removed my CEO for a politician 🤡. His first move is to ask my ex-CEO who to consider for CTO.
He adamantly vouches for me, but in the end, I'm not "political" enough. (Sure I admit I'm not the most organized person, and do not sweeten arguments to suits, but I had won the full trust of my previous superiors *and* fellow devs, and had people to cover for organizational stuff, and have successfully navigated situations with the world's biggest tech orgs).
So I'm again a dev, and they hire this new CTO at twice my salary. But as you can probably guess, who ends up still doing all the CTO work on top of his dev work? Yeah.
That drove me to quit, not because of the demotion, but for a denied minor raise when I was doing the work of someone with twice my paycheck.
As could be expected, once I quit, the CTO barely lasted 6 months.
Fun part is, I've been freelancing (successfully) from them on, and I've been contacted by this CTO, trying to hire me to do some work in his new company...
I'm torn whether to tell him to bite me, charge him a shitton of money or any other funny ideas.
Mind you, I don't dislike the guy, and he's not particularly annoying to work with, so I guess this doubles as a rant against corporate clowns, and a bit of advice seeking.8 -
i was hired to join a team of old devs (40+) in an unnamed European country "yay goodbye 3rd world it's time to enjoy the quality of life" assist with enhancing already existing software and creating new solutions.
prior to my arrival most things were slow and super buggy, looking at the code base it shouldn't be a surprise, amateur hour everyone, logic implemented that is not needed, comment driven development, last time code review was done back in 1996. lots of anti patterns.
i swear there is a for loop that does nothing but it loops through a 100+ elements list, trunk based development with tfs since git is "not really needed"
test projects are not there.
>enter me an educated fool, with genuine passion for the craft and somehow a decent amount of knowledge.
>spent the last year fixing stuff educating people on principles and qualities.
> countless hours of training and explaining. team is showing cooperation, a new requirement comes in to develop with react.
> tear my ass creating reusable shit and self explanatory code with proper naming etc using git with feature branching, monday is first deployment day.
> today a colleague was working on an item submit a pull request and self approve it
> look at the code..... WTF the dumb fuck copied and pasted the whole code from different kendo components but somehow managed to refractor the name to test component, commented out all the code that he didn't use did the api call directly from the component, has 2 useeffects that depends on the a fucking text box changes for no reason, no redux implementation, the acceptance criteria is not achieved, and it doesn't work it just look right.
> first world country shit cannot scold, cannot complain, lead by example.
>asked him why you did this, the response was yeah probably i shouldn't have done that, i really didn't understand anything in the training but didn't want to waste time!!!!
> rest of the team created a different styled disaster with different flavors they don't even name their shit the same way.
fellow developers I'm stuck in a spaceship with a bunch of imposters, seriously i never cried in my entire life now I'm teary and on the verge of a break down.
talk with management "improving needs time" and offers me to join a yoga session to release the stress as if reaching nirvana would deliver shit on monday.
i really don't know what do is this a rant, is this a cry for help, I'm not sure, any advice is welcomed.7 -
This is more of an advice seeking rant. I've recently been promoted to Team Leader of my team but mostly because of circumstances. The previous team leader left for a start-up and I've been somehow the acting Scrum Master of the team for the past months (although our company sucks at Scrum generally speaking) and also having the most time in the company. However I'm still the youngest I'm my team so managing the actual team feels a bit weird and also I do not consider myself experienced enough to be a Technical lead but we don't have a different position for that.
Below actions happen in the course of 2-3 months.
With all the things above considered I find myself in a dire situation, a couple of months ago there were several Blocker bugs opened from the Clients side / production env related to one feature, however after spending about a month or so on trying to investigate the issues we've come to the conclusion that it needs to be refactorised as it's way too bad and it can't be solved (as a side note this issue has also been raised by a former dev who left the company). Although it was not part of the initial upcoming version release it was "forcefully" introduced in the plan and we took out of the scope other things but was still flagged as a potential risk. But wait..there's more, this feature was part of a Java microservice (the whole microservice basically) and our team is mostly made of JS, just one guy who actually works as a Java dev (I've only done one Java course during uni but never felt attracted to it). I've not been involved in the initial planning of this EPIC, my former TL was an the Java guy. Now during this the company decides that me and my TL were needed for a side project, so both of us got "pulled out" of the team and move there but we've also had to "manage" the team at the same time. In the end it's decided that since my TL will leave and I will take leadership of the team, I get "released" from the side project to manage the team. I'm left with about 3 weeks to slam dunk the feature.. but, I'm not a great leader for my team nor do I have the knowledge to help me teammate into fixing this Java MS, I do go about the normal schedule about asking him in the daily what is he working on and if he needs any help, but I don't really get into much details as I'm neither too much in sync with the feature nor with the technical part of Java. And here we are now in the last week, I've had several calls with PSO from the clients trying to push me into giving them a deadline on when will it be fixed that it's very important for the client to get this working in the next release and so on, however I do not hold an answer to that. I've been trying to explain to them that this was flagged as a risk and I can't guarantee them anything but that didn't seem to make them any happier. On the other side I feel like this team member has been slacking it a lot, his work this week would barely sum up a couple of hours from my point of view as I've asked him to push the branch he's been working on and checked his code changes. I'm a bit anxious to confront him however as I feel I haven't been on top of his situation either, not saying I was uninvolved but I definetly could have been a better manager for him and go into more details about his daily work and so on.
All in all there has been mistakes on all levels(maybe not on PSO as they can't really be held accountable for R&D inability to deliver stuff, but they should be a little more understandable at the very least) and it got us into a shitty situation which stresses me out and makes me feel like I've started my new position with a wrong step.
I'm just wondering if anyone has been in similar situations and has any tips or words of wisdom to share. Or how do you guys feel about the whole situation, am I just over stressing it? Did I get a good analysis, was there anything I could have done better? I'm open for any kind of feedback.2 -
i am feeling angry and frustrated. not sure if it's a person ,or codebase or this bloody job. i have been into the company for 8 months and i feel like someone taking a lot of load while not getting enough team support to do it or any appreciation if i do it right.
i am not a senior by designation, but i do think my manager and my seniors have got their work easy when they see my work . like for eg, if on first release, they told me that i have to update unit tests and documentation, then on every subsequent release i did them by default and mentioning that with a small tick .
but they sure as hell don't make my work easy for me. their codebase is shitty and they don't give me KT, rather expect me to read everything on my own, understand on my own and then do everything on my own, then raise a pr , then merge that pr (once reviewed) , then create a release, then update the docs and finally publish the release and send the notification to the team
well fine, as a beginner dev, i think that's a good exercise, but if not in the coding step, their intervention would be needed in other steps like reviewing merging and releasing. but for those steps they again cause unnecessary delay. my senior is so shitty guy, he will just reply to any of my message after 2-3 hours
and his pr review process is also frustrating. he will keep me on call while reviewing each and every file of my pr and then suggest changes. that's good i guess, but why tf do you need to suggest something every fucking time? if i am doing such a shitty coding that you want me to redo some approach that i thought was correct , why don't you intervene beforehand? when i was messaging you for advice and when you ignored me for 3 hours? another eg : check my comment on root's rant https://devrant.com/rants/5845126/ (am talking about my tl there but he's also similar)
the tasks they give are also very frustrating. i am an android dev by profession, my previous company was a b2c edtech app that used kotlin, java11, a proper hierarchy and other latest Android advancements.
this company's main Android product is a java sdk that other android apps uses. the java code is verbose , repetitive and with a messed up architecture. for one api, the client is able to attach a listener to some service that is 4 layers down the hierarchy , while got other api, the client provides a listener which is kept as a weak reference while internal listeners come back with the values and update this weak reference . neither my team lead nor my seniors have been able to answer about logic for seperation among various files/classes/internal classes and unnecessary division of code makes me puke.
so by now you might have an idea of my situation: ugly codebase, unavailable/ignorant codeowners (my sr and TL) and tight deadlines.
but i haven't told you about the tasks, coz they get even more shittier
- in addition to adding features/ maintaining this horrible codebase , i would sometimes get task to fix queries by client . note that we have tons of customer representatives that would easily get those stupid queries resolced if they did their job correctly
- we also have hybrid and 3rd party sdks like react, flutter etc in total 7 hybrid sdks which uses this Android library as a dependency and have a wrapper written on its public facing apis in an equally horrible code style. that i have to maintain. i did not got much time/kt to learn these techs, but once my sr. half heartedly explained the code and now every thing about those awful sdls is my responsibility. thank god they don't give me the ios and web SDK too
- the worst is the shitty user side docs. I don't know what shit is going there, but we got like 4 people in the docs team and they are supposed to maintain the documentation of sdk, client side. however they have rasied 20 tickets about 20 pages for me to add more stuff there. like what are you guys supposed to do? we create the changelog, release notes , comments in pr , comments in codebase , test cases, test scenarios, fucking working sample apps and their code bases... then why tf are we supposed to do the documentation on an html based website too?? can't you just have a basic knowledge of running the sample, reading the docs and understand what is going around? do i need to be a master of english too in addition to being a frustrated coder?
just.... fml -
Need advice about switching to contracting.
TL;DR;
So I had 2 years of exp as an android dev, then I had a 1.5 year gap from doing android and now for the past 6 months Ive been doing android again fulltime. Im thinking of switching to contracting due to my debts and boring project and life crushing slow corporate processes in my current fulltime job, so I need tips and advices as to where should I start looking for new contracting gigs and in general what should I pay attention to. If it helps, I am based in EU, but am open to any EU/US gigs.
Now the full story:
Initially when I joined my current fulltime job after a break I had zero confidence, lowered my and employers expectations, joined as a junior but quickly picked up the latest standards and crushed it. Im doing better than half devs in my scrum team right now and would consider myself to be a mid level right now.
Asked for a 50% bump, manager kinda okayed it but the HQ overseas is taking a very long time to give me the actual bump. I have been waiting for 10 weeks already (lots of people in the decision chain were on and off vacations due to summer, also I guess manager sent this request to HQ too late, go figure). Anyways its becoming unnaceptable and I feel like its time for a change.
Now since I have mortgage and bills to pay, even with the bump that I requested that would leave me with like maximum 700-800 bucks a month after all expenses. I have debts of around 20k and paying them back at this rate would take 3 years at least and sounds like a not viable plan at all.
Also it does not help that the project Im working on is full of legacy and Im not learning anything new here. Corporate life seems to be very slow, lots of red tape kills creativity and so on. I remember in startups I was cooking features left and right each sprint, in here deploying a simple popup feature sometimes takes weeks due to incompetence in the chain. I miss the times where I worked in startups, did my job learned nre skills and after 6 months could jump on another exciting gig. Im not growing here anymore.
So because my ADD brain seems to be suited much better for working in startups, and also I need to make more money quick and I dont see a future in current company, I am thinking of going back to contracting. All I need right now is to build a few side apps, get them reviewed by seniors and fill my knowledge gaps. Then I plan of starting interviewing as a mid level or even a senior for that matter, since I worked with actual seniors and to be honest I dont think getting up to their level would be rocket science.
Only difference between mid and senior devs that I see atleast in my current company is that seniors are taking on responsibility more often, and they also take care of our tools, such as CD/CI, pipeline scripts, linters and etc. Usually seniors are the ones who do the research/investigations and then come up with actual tasks/stories for mids/juniors. Also seniors introduce new dependencies and update our stack, solve some performance issues and address bottlenecks and technical debt. I dont think its rocket science, also Ive been the sole dev responsible for apps in the past and always did decent work. Turns out all I needed was to test myself in an environment full of other devs, thats it. My only bottleneck was the imposter syndrome because I was a self taught dev who worked most of my career alone.
Anyways I posted here asking for some tips and advices on how to begin my search for new contract opportunities. I am living in EU, can you give me some decent sites where I could just start applying? Also I would appreciate any other tips opinions and feedback. Thanks!3