Got this from a recruiter:

We are looking for a **Senior Android Developer/Lead** at Philadelphia PA

Hiring Mode: Contract

Must have skills:

· 10-12 years mobile experience in developing Android applications
· Solid understanding of Android SDK on frameworks such as: UIKit, CoreData, CoreFoundation, Network Programming, etc.
· Good Knowledge on REST Ful API and JSON Parsing
· Good knowledge on multi-threaded environment and grand central dispatch
· Advanced object-oriented programming and knowledge of design patterns
· Ability to write clean, well-documented, object-oriented code
· Ability to work independently
· Experience with Agile Driven Development
· Up to date with the latest mobile technology and development trends
· Passion for software development- embracing every challenge with a drive to solve it
· Engaging communication skills

My response:

I am terribly sorry but I am completely not interested in working for anyone who might think that this is a job description for an Android engineer.

1. Android was released in September 2008 so finding anyone with 10 years experience now would have to be a Google engineer.
2. UIKit, CoreData, CoreFoundation are all iOS frameworks
3. Grand Central Dispatch is an iOS mechanism for multithreading and is not in Android
4. There are JSON parsing frameworks, no one does that by hand anymore

Please delete me from your emailing list.

Tips for all the programmers out there:

- A programmer is not a PC repair man, just no one seems to remember about that

- Programming is thinking, not typing.
Counting starts from zero, not one.

- Even after completing a degree and courses and working on IT projects, learning never stops. If you want to stay competitive you should also work on personal projects that force you to use languages and software you never work with on the job.

- You don’t need serious math skills to be a developer. However, you’ll need basic algebra, logic, strong problem-solving skills, and most of all, patience.
- You don’t need a degree to be a developer - programming is like almost any profession: if you’re good at it, people will pay you for your skills, regardless of how you got there.

- Sleeping with a problem, can actually solve it.

People in my office sing me praises for what I can do with Linux even though I joke with them that “I have no idea how to do that - but give me half an hour and an internet connection and I’ll figure something out for you.” I even once specifically said in response to my boss commenting on my skills, “You do realize that I just like…google stuff when you ask me to do something with Linux that I don’t know how to do, right?”

But his praise didn’t change at all. There was no “Wait, that’s all it is?”

Instead, he said “Yes, but the fact that you think to do that - and that you know exactly how to phrase your searches and how to sift through the results to get the right answer, and you then integrate what you’ve learned and use it going forward - is still so much more than any of the rest of us can do. To you, it’s “just googling stuff,” but it’s still a unique and valuable skill you bring, so don’t shrug off the compliments so cavalierly, okay?“

And this was coming from an executive with an MBA. Don’t undervalue your googling skills, kids. It’s not lying if you know you can figure it out.

Right. So my company is advertising an opening in Java JUNIOR Development.... And they all of these skills:

I mean, really?

My linkedin profile = ~7 years as an iOS developer. All of my job titles are "iOS Developer", "iOS Engineer" or "Mobile lead".

Recruiter: Hi, your profile looks great, I have a number of open roles matching your skills. Would you be free for a call to discuss your salary expectations, skills, what you are looking for etc.

Me: Hi, sorry I don't have time for a call right now, here are answers to your questions. Can you send me on any iOS job specs you have and i'll review. <answers>

Recruiter: Sorry I have no open iOS roles at this time.

Bitch ... ima find you and make you understand

Weirdest co-worker was a loner(he prefers to be left alone) and he has no social skills.
One day, everyone in the office received an invitation letter. All of us were invited to our weirdest co-worker's wedding!

After that, everyone became his friend :)

I need to hide myself, my computer, programming skills and computer knowledge from people. Then only, I will be safe..

Friend: Heeey, you're good with computers right?

Me: No! 😑

Friend: Come-on bro. I know you are.

Me: What do you want?

Friend: I want you to check and book flights for me for country X.

Me: Are you ok? How does this have anything to do with someone being good with computers and stuff?

Friend: Haha, see? You're good with computers. *starts laughing. Anyway, since you're good, you can find the best prices. I know you know how to search sites and how to find things online.

Me: WTF?!?!!! All, you have to do is type in your search. If you don't like the results, you simply refine it.

Friend: See, all this tech stuff I'm not really good at it.

Me: But you're good at searching for other things online, right? Do the same for your flights.

*Picks my laptop and walks away.
How can a young man not be able to search for flights online but knows how to use several gadgets. Nonsense.

Devs regularly complain that our skills are not valued enough and that people think what we do is easy.

But, we don't really help the cause when we run around casually claiming to be "full stack" and not turning down work that clearly isn't in our area of competence.

We act more like Victorian amateur scientists.

Every seen a "full stack" doctor when you go to hospital? "Brain to feet---I can do it all."

OK, we have general practitioners, but they are really the BAs of the medical world. When it comes to getting into the weed, everyone specializes.

Full stack lawyer? "Hey, you did an excellent job of dealing with my house purchase. I've just been accused of murder. Can you represent me?"

While we continue to say that we can provide a high quality "full stack" experience I think we are signaling that this stuff *is* easy.

Learning soft skills.

I'm about as direct with coworkers and managers as I am on devRant. And I still think being painfully direct is often better than playing the heavily politicized office game of thrones.

But sometimes it's better to say:

"CTO, I think we need your skills to build bridges to other departments and manage recruitment. You're the only one who understands both technology and people, so drop your developer role and become our ambassador"

Instead of:

"Dear CTO, your code makes my eyes bleed. Your CS degree was a fucking waste of tax money, and it's quite clear that cheap college beer washed out all of your reasoning skills. We should fill the space you're taking up with a beanbag chair, because you're providing negative value to the company. How many investor cocks did you have to deep throat to get where you are?"

Now, I just pick option one, smile politely, and tell him we need to increase department budget as indemnification for having to work with a retard like him. Uh I mean... "to get developer salaries up to a competitive level so we can retain knowledge"

Pranks again today. Mother of God the level of those pranks is becoming high as fuck.

Define high?
Having to debug shit at system (cron, firewalling, users, sometimes even digging through logs/dmesg) level because weird shit happens all day long.

This is upping my Linux skills a lot though! I love it 😍

Not sure yet. I finished my study for Software Engineering and I'm currently working as a Linux engineer.

But, my current boss didn't give a fuck about whether or not I had a diploma or whatsoever at all, as long as I had/have the required skills.

I am a female manager at a small, mostly male company, and directly manage several people (all male). One of the six has worked for me for multiple years. Since he began his employment, I always felt he had a “crush” on me and kept my distance (as much as I could as his manager).

His crush has gotten increasingly more obsessive over the past year: constantly staring at me, using absurd reasons to contact me through email/messenger/texts, whether at work or evening/weekends, and getting extremely emotional/upset if I do not frequently talk with him or provide feedback for his every task. He never says anything inappropriate or makes any advances but is making me increasingly more uncomfortable.

My tendency to avoid the employee combined with my obvious annoyance with his increasingly absurd reasons to interact with me is reflecting poorly on my management skills — to the extent that my manager is questioning my abilities to manage.

1.) Complete knowledge and understanding of C++.

2.) Fast and accurate typing skills.

3.) Ability to sleep peacefully all night.

#2 Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?

Back before we utilized stored procedures (and had an official/credentialed DBA), we used embedded/in-line SQL to fetch data from the database.

var sql = @"Select
FieldsToSelect
From
dbo.Whatever
Where
Id = @ID"

In attempts to fix database performance issues, a developer, T, started putting all the SQL on one line of code (some sql was formatted on 10+ lines to make it readable and easily copy+paste-able with SSMS)
var sql = "Select ... From...Where...etc";

His justification was putting all the SQL on one line make the code run faster.
T: "Fewer lines of code runs faster, everyone knows that."

Mgmt bought it.

This process took him a few months to complete.

When none of the effort proved to increase performance, T blamed the in-house developed ORM we were using (I wrote it, it was a simple wrapper around ADO.Net with extension methods for creating/setting parameters)

T: "Adding extra layers causes performance problems, everyone knows that."

Mgmt bought it again.

Removing the ORM, again took several months to complete.

By this time, we hired a real DBA and his focus was removing all the in-line SQL to use stored procedures, creating optimization plans, etc (stuff a real DBA does).

In the planning meetings (I was not apart of), T was selected to lead because of his coding optimization skills.
DBA: "I've been reviewing the execution plans, are all the SQL code on one line? What a mess. That has to be worst thing I ever saw."
T: "Yes, the previous developer, PaperTrail, is incompetent. If the code was written correctly the first time using stored procedures, or even formatted so people could read it, we wouldn't have all these performance problems."

DBA didn't know me (yet) and I didn't know about T's shenanigans (aka = lies) until nearly all the database perf issues were resolved and T received a recognition award for all his hard work (which also equaled a nice raise).

> Gained the skills to atleast land an internship
> Hyped asf
> Start applying for jobs
> Hyped asf
> Days go by without a response
> Hype starts dying
> Gets a REAL email delivered to my inbox asking to come in for an interview
> Hype levels regenerated
> Interview goes great and both founder and senior dev are fine with hiring me
> Founder needs to talk with co-founder first before giving the go and said he will get back to me in a day or two.
> The hype is too real
> 5 days go by without a reponse
> Hype levels: all time low
> Decide to follow up, founder said he left for a conference before the co-founder came back to talk about it and said he will get with her and let me know in a few days.
> The hypening is back
> A week goes by with no response
> I'm dead inside rn.

who ever has this as their skill set are legends!!
made me laugh going through thousands of lines of skills :D
"
A little bit of Lua in my life
A little bit of JS is all i need
A little bit of bash is what i see
A little bit of JSON in the sun
A little bit of Python all night long
A little bit of TCL here i am
A little bit of this makes me your dev
"

On today's episode of Fucked Up Office Drama-Rama: useless project manager finally gets her desired outcome after 6 months of whining to her boss about a team member being "difficult to work with". She has only been with us for a year and is the only one that has had any "issues" with him, and the problem has simply been that he has called her out when her lack of planning, lack of effort, lack of common sense and lack of technical understanding has caused the team extra work and pressure. His contract gets terminated, she stays on, and on top of it all she's managed to hire a replacement without consulting anyone and therefore has the complete wrong skills compared to what we need. We needed someone with frontend skills, she decided on a senior backend / architect arrogant fuck that after only a few weeks is already showing us it's not going to be fun.

Fuck my life. Time to look for a new client.

This is a sad rant. Today I went over to one colleague to discuss one technical appetite I had. This colleague of mine is a very good in his skills and I never had any issue sharing my problems. Then this other colleague come over and jumps in "what's the problem tell me". I just tell him of some things I do not understand then this 2nd colleague the fucker asshole starts loudly pinpointing my lack of understanding of this and to prove I don't know more he starts asking very deep questions on the same topic. I am surprised and furious and feel like fucking him out. Above this he pats on the 1st colleagues back and start talking in things which they solved and skills they possess above the rest and admiring each other

You tit of the asses you fucker 2nd colleague go fuck yourself if you have so much attitude.

I left with mixed sadness and this huge rant against that fucker colleagues who think they stand above all because it's fuckers like you with your shit attitude of nothing.

New to this but here's my rant I suppose. It bothers me how "non-tech" people kind of devalue what tech people do. Like they have zero understanding of it, so you make something in 30 minutes or an hour that took years of building said skills and involved complex logic and understanding of relational data and because it only took you 30 minutes or an hour it must have been "easy". Or the way you are everybody's free tech advisor with family and friends... And things are said like "I'm not good with this stuff, but you're so good with it". For the record nobody is just "great" at technology or coding from birth its been a 2+ decade craft that I've experimented with and learned and put effort into. So taking into consideration all this effort I have put in to understand all this you say you'll never remember to push that button so you'll just ask me again when the problem arises. Yes because its so fun for me to constantly maintain your electronics because you can't bother to remember to push a button.

Went to recruit some interns at a CS school in my area. Talked to their teacher in charge of internships and asked her about their students skills in Java. She said they all are very solid in JavaScript. I left immediately.

Life of a junior self-taught dev with a sysadmin job:

1)At work, desperately try to script and automate every task, even when it isn't nessecary.

2)Learn dev skills from tutorials and web courses at every minute of your free time.

3)When returning home get self-guilt because you're procrastinating instead of doing an all-night development like your dev friends

4)The only productive thing you do is more tutorials and courses because you feel your dev skills aren't high enough for a self project

Frustrated.

I'm a shit programmer

I'm 29 and I assumed that by this point I'd be successful some way or another, either by being financially abundant or technically complex.

I am not, just mildly accomplished instead.

Here'a list of thing I consider challenges that I have:
* I tend to tunnel vision ideas that are terrible or execute them poorly because of said tunnel vision.
* I don't hone my skills, I usually consider my potentials the same as my actuals, as if I achieved everything already, probably product of ny huge ego.
* I communicate poorly with my boss, I sidetrack into thing he didn't ask
* I'm a mess when it comes to reading documentation online, I have the attention span of a fucking fish.
* I work alone, I have 0 networking status or skills.
* I take huge amounts of time to finish my side projects
* Of all the side projects I started I only finished one, the ones that I couldn't finish usually bevame insabely stressful things, so much and so many that I questioned myself many times if I should be a programmer or not.
* I have little discipline or organization, if I work in more than one thing at a time, i get really anxious and stressed.

I am not saying I'm not competent, I think I am (I'm looking at you imaginary scary recruiter googling this online), I'm just not really proud of myself

Hi Dev Ranter,

My name is John Smith and I came accross to your resume on Linked In and I was very impressed. Would you be interested in a 5 min call?

Job Details:
Required skills (all expert levels): C#, JAVA, Clojure, C, PHP, Frontend, Backend, Agile, MVP, Baking, Redis, Apache, IIS, RoR, Angular, React, Vue, MySQL, MSSIS, MSSQL, ORACLE, PostgreSQL, Access, Python, Machine Learning, HTML, CSS, Fortran, C++, Game design, Book writing, PCI - Compliance
Salary: $15/Hours no benefits
Duration: 2 Months (possible extension, plus we can fire you at will)
Place: Remote (with work tracking software)
Hours: 5am - 1pm, 6pm - 11pm
Expect to work on weekends

You will be managing people as well as building applications that had to be running as of yesterday. Team culture is very toxic and no one cares about you.

We care about you though (as long as you deliver)

Looking forward to talk to you.

John Smith
Founder, CEO, Director of Staffing, Entrepeneur
Tech Staffers LLC ( link to a PNG posted on facebook)
Est. 2020

My dev skills currently feel like England in the mid 1600's.

Everyone around me has already conquered some projects while I sit in the side fighting a civil war with myself while having very humble accomplishments.

But I'll show them. I'll show them all. While they grow weak and weary over the ages, I'm slowly but surely getting stronger.

In the end I will conquer and rule the waves like no other. I will build a dev empire that will be remembered for years to come.

Now that I passed 5k, I think it's time to thank this awesome community.
Literally all of you people are absolutely awesome. I have nobody to talk to about programming stuff in RL, but you really got me back on track. I lost motivation, but this network is...different. It's inspiring.
I learned a multitude of languages and strengthend my skills. So many people are awesome here, I cannot listen them all.

I just want to say...Thank you.

begin_rant()

I like that coding is becoming more and more popular.

I like that more and more people are taking steps to manifest there ideas and potentially change the world.

But for fuck's sake... can't geeks be allowed to be the fat pimply introverts of the olden days?? This used to be a realm for the misfits, and now the same assholes who tormented said misfits are joining in and making the rest feel inadaquit all over again. You can't just be a coder anymore, now you have to be a good looking and health crazed professional with great personal skills and then somehow be able to also be a master of your craft.

I don't want to hear about how you write code in between your 100 pushups and avocado toast and having a few cold ones with the boys after your <insert sport here> game. I want to hear about how you ate pizza with one hand and crushed your build with the other in between sips of shitty soft drinks and fistfuls of candy while pulling an all nighter for the nth time cuz daylight is for pussies.

Too much pressure these days as it is, and this isn't helping.

break

When you have to do some live coding in front of highly technical people during a presentation, and the coding Gods decide to take away all your typing skills.

I'm one of those people who have literally no value of education and skills between family members, yes as soon they hear I'm doing bachelors in computers they all come too me with *Can you please fix my phone*

But today a letter came it was from devRant and it had stickers for me, my uncle received the letter and you can't imagine how surprised he was and asked me who sent me letter from NY, I explained him that we are an awesome community and this letter is just a way to motivate us. It's the first time something come for me and even tho it's just some stickers but meant alot to me.

Thankyou devRant and the community for making me feel this awesome 😊

Suddenly it hits me.
It’s 01:20 here but i get it.
It’s ALL a budget thing.

No dedicated tester means less expenses.

No personal parkspot?
No expenses!

And no good staging or testing environment? Less expenses!

Meanwhile every developer can setup, work on, and maintain about 20 websites on their shitty local Windows machine, that doesn’t even have a proper SSD installed, and we are setting impossible deadlines to figure out who will sink and who will swim.

Ow, here is a SSD.. Figure out the installation yourself because we have no IT knowledge or budget for people that do.

You want a challenge? How about 40 other people that are distracting you all day long.

Meanwhile everybody has to improve their skills in js, react, html5, ccs3, angular, .net and razor so money can made faster.

It would be nice if you could build apps as well.

You had a question? Sorry, no time. Expect some feedback 14 days later.

You finished the site?
Great!

But here are 101 bugs to solve before next week.

All hail their crazy company!

A shout out to Dear ImGui developers - super amazing job! Took me 1-2 hours to figure how things work from the examples.
A few C++ files is all I needed to integrate the GUI into my project, and it was rather painless.
My UI/UX skills are poor, so the awful interface is on me :)

I love the skill requirements section of a junior Dev job advertisement.

To summarise "Basically you'll need all the skills and experience of a senior, but we are gonna pay you much much less". 😔

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.

I doubt my skills all the time, imposter syndrome is a bitch.

Hello "friend", whom I haven't seen or talked to in years. How have you been? Please don't mind me, my life is boring as shit and nothing happened to me since. Yes, I'd gladly make an app for your company because you agreed to do it but apparently you lack the skills. Oh, you've been fucking around for a month doing nothing? That's sad but sure, I can do it by Sunday, I don't have plans for the weekend anyway. You say you can't pay me more than what I earn in six hours doing my day job? And your boss should think you did it all by yourself? Well, let me consider this cool little opportunity. I'll be in touch, talk to you "soon"!

Best advice for dev job hunting is work on your soft skills. Don't be a fucking hero, prove your teamwork ability.

Remember all the rules of all religions and social communities can be summed up in one line: "Don't be a dick!"

I've been away, lurking at the shadows (aka too lazy to actually log in) but a post from a new member intrigued me; this is dedicated to @devAstated . It is erratic, and VERY boring.
When I resigned from the Navy, I got a flood of questions from EVERY direction, from the lower rank personnel and the higher ups (for some reason, the higher-ups were very interested on what the resignation procedure was...). A very common question was, of course, why I resigned. This requires a bit of explaining (I'll be quick, I promise):
In my country, being in the Navy (or any public sector) means you have a VERY stable job position; you can't be fired unless you do a colossal fuck-up. Reduced to non-existent productivity? No problem. This was one of the reasons for my resignation, actually.
However, this is also used as a deterrent to keep you in, this fear of lack of stability and certainty. And this is the reason why so many asked me why I left, and what was I going to do, how was I going to be sure about my job security.
I have a simple system. It can be abused, but if you are careful, it may do you and your sanity good.
It all begins with your worth, as an employee (I assume you want to go this way, for now). Your worth is determined by the supply of your produced work, versus the demand for it. I work as a network and security engineer. While network engineers are somewhat more common, security engineers are kind of a rarity, and the "network AND security engineer" thing combined those two paths. This makes the supply of my work (network and security work from the same employee) quite limited, but the demand, to my surprise, is actually high.
Of course, this is not something easy to achieve, to be in the superior bargaining position - usually it requires great effort and many, many sleepless nights. Anyway....
Finding a field that has more demand than there is supply is just one part of the equation. You must also keep up with everything (especially with the tech industry, that changes with every second). The same rules apply when deciding on how to develop your skills: develop skills that are in short supply, but high demand. Usually, such skills tend to be very difficult to learn and master, hence the short supply.
You probably got asleep by now.... WAKE UP THIS IS IMPORTANT!
Now, to job security: if you produce, say, 1000$ of work, then know this:
YOU WILL BE PAID LESS THAN THAT. That is how the company makes profit. However, to maximize YOUR profit, and to have a measure of job security, you have to make sure that the value of your produced work is high. This is done by:
- Producing more work by working harder (hard method)
- Producing more work by working smarter (smart method)
- Making your work more valuable by acquiring high demand - low supply skills (economics method)
The hard method is the simplest, but also the most precarious - I'd advise the other two. Now, if you manage to produce, say, 3000$ worth of work, you can demand for 2000$ (numbers are random).
And here is the thing: any serious company wants employees that produce much more than they cost. The company will strive to pay them with as low a salary as it can get away with - after all, a company seeks to maximize its profit. However, if you have high demand - low supply skills, which means that you are more expensive to be replaced than you are to be paid, then guess what? You have unlocked god mode: the company needs you more than you need the company. Don't get me wrong: this is not an excuse to be unprofessional or unreasonable. However, you can look your boss in the eye. Believe me, most people out there can't.
Even if your company fails, an employee with valuable skills that brings profit tends to be snatched very quickly. If a company fires profitable employees, unless it hires more profitable employees to replace them, it has entered the spiral of death and will go bankrupt with mathematical certainty. Also, said fired employees tend to be absorbed quickly; after all, they bring profit, and companies are all about making the most profit.
It was a long post, and somewhat incoherent - the coffee buzz is almost gone, and the coffee crash is almost upon me. I'd like to hear the insight of the veterans; I estimate that it will be beneficial for the people that start out in this industry.

Staring at cursed blinking cursors.
Repairing work of worst thinking workers
Reverse merges or it'll murder the servers, it nurtures despair
Amateur managers, dimwitted savages interrupt all of us janitors
Cleaning up damages, spills and experiments using skills in embarrassment
Explicit foulness, in a minute it's straight to the bowels with weapons of limitless vowels
A bittersweet hateful machete, eviscerates stateful spaghetti
The slow disease flowing from keys knowing it's going to please
The growing unease, no one agrees, there's no guarantees with your useless degrees
Need more drugs, keyboard's crawling with bugs, falling as I chug
A bottle of cognac gotta love all the hacks, no poise for code that lacks
All the noise, gotta relax, before I destroy the syntax.

Excuse me for not making sense.
Too gloomy, aching and tense.

I'm getting so fucking tired of frontend development...

I still like part of it, but I really hate CSS, browser compatibility, stupid users, dumb requests from product owners and fucking weird designs. And to top it all, it's the frontend team that handles all the pressure when the deadline comes up and the project's late, even if it was the product/design/whatever phase that took too much time.

Being a frontend developer is very stressful and has so many annoyances and I'm getting sick of it.

My company's been promising giving me some backend work because there are some backend-heavy projects coming up and they know I have the skills, but they just keep giving me frontend work. Also, one of our frontend developers is on leave, which means more work for the rest of us.

Why did I ever decided to do frontend development?

Rant about a german problem in english

I think we as the people should just sue the german government for neglect of progress and neglect of the education system. If your not familiar with the state of german IT we have worse internetspeeds than uganda or the notoriously shitty australia, our neighbourstates look at us in disbelief while laughing in optic fibre. Our school system seperates all students after 4th grade in 3 tiers, the lowest one gives you the future perspective as a social security case. The second and highest tier require masses of useless knowledge, so called "competences"(Kompetenzen) which are totally useless skills with no real world application because they are derived from real skills, a median ground between all possible applications of that skill. And while doing that they terribly insist on doing everything the "proper" way, meaning handwritten. Most people you would expect to have basic computer literacy, meaning age 40 and below, are incapable of using basic functions of a non-smartphone computer and do not understand the slightest of what they are actually doing or supposed to do. And I mean nothing technical. Germans are the reasons they still put word as a job requirement for devjobs because this disqualifies half of our population. This leads to many people having the archaeic "we versus the machines" mentality, thinking that if they ever let the computer do parts of the job, they will then lose all of it to the machines. Thats why you never strive past basic mathematical principles in mathematics, which is a big misnomer because you never do actual mathematics, only calculating and basic calculus and statics. If you get to use your calculator, its some basic casio with no actual functionality then standard operations. And even using that is shunned upon. How is this country ever supposed to become something more than it was in the 90's, if we teach people nothing of use and kill all progress in its root.

After creating a logo *for free* for a client who I thought was a friend, they started getting really ungrateful and demanded me to do things in a not very calm way ("DO THIS", "DO THIS RIGHT NOW") (yes, it was actually in caps). I kindly asked them to stop using the graphics while informing them that the license used didn't let me actually force them to remove it. After that, they started yelling about how "he'd have to redo all the graphics again". All he did was put the vector logo inside a raster circle and change the font. Yes, he really did convert vector graphics to raster and didn't use the originals at all. Not only this, but he also used *aliased* raster images.
He ended up using them anyway, informing me in a cheeky way after being kicked out of a group chat (which I wasn't even the moderator of). See the picture attached for how he did that, red is the client, orange is the moderator who banned him.
TL;DR: Don't do free stuff, regardless of how bad you think your skills are.

Long rant, sorry.

I’m pretty upset, or let’s say: I want to kick asses and chew gum but I’m all out of gum(The duke TM).

Yesterday we had a discussion in the office about salary basically.

Context: The company has about 150 employees and earns a lot of money. I’m the lead dev for about 1.5 years since I joined.

So I talked to our CEO/HR about a raise since I was hired as a normal fullstack dev(title is lead dev now) but have to:
train my junior(PHP), frontend guy(react), our QA(Automation with cypress atm), our junior devop(gitlab, jenkins, docker) and even assist marketing with GTM and adword campaigns.

I’m a jack of all trades basically since I was a freelancer for big brands for a long time.
I’m fine with helping/training, I like it a lot but I still have to watch everything and be fast with my own stuff. If anything goes wrong, people call me.

That will change since I train them all(They will all be independent soon) but still, doing everything for the same pay feels wrong.

Bottom line: CEO told me it’s cool that they can use all my skills but I won’t get a raise.

The worst/strangest was: My coworkers heard about that(as always in an office) and were like: Everybody should get paid equally because we’re all a team. Uhm, ok?

I just contacted the head hunter which got me that job. I guess I’ll just see what the market has to offer.

It should never be about money but this was confusing. People telling me we should all be equal who are on their mobiles 3h a day and feel underpaid. Check yourself, really.

People who think their pure presence is enough.. Germany -.-

When starting a project at work:

My name everywhere. Every file, every change-list I proudly put my name to prove my skills.

Program goes for validation:

Thousands of bugs.

Realize that I've written shit code. Slowly removing my names from all over the code.

Being the only dev in a media company, I believe my coworkers looked upon me as the evil Internet reincarnated into a living person.

Most of them avoided me like a leprous, and I experienced long periods being almost isolated.

I did almost quit so many times I've lost count.

I eventually found another job, where there's lots of love, caring and we all embrace each other's skills. It feels like I'm a butterfly who finally got to break out of my miserable cocoon.

A fucking rant to me from myself.
I want to take control of my life. I want to fucking change my life. Want to move my lazyass and want to work on myself. Want to build awesome stuff want to help others want to change something for good. Want to learn new stuffs want to learn new skills want to travel want to go see new place want to know about other countries and learn about their culture and want to tell them "we are fucking humans stop finding stupid reason to hate each other for literally any fucking small reasons. Stop fighting yes there are bad guys, really fucking bad guys who deserves to die. Then kill them and finish the matter stop fucking keep making complicated and keep involving more and more. There are little kids who keep dying and need our helps it's feel so helpless sometimes and we sitting on sofa eating popcorn and complying about government there are kids in every country who don't even fortunate enough to have basic human needs and there are people who fucking throw food over there mood. A fucking Mood. Gosh I hate people sometimes so much.
Don't know why fucking writing all this on a Devrant supposed to talk about our devshit but couldn't control more.
A introvert don't got many friends to talk this shit and most of them worrying about there Instagram followers fuck this shit .
And here I am fucking trying really hard to pass on fucking useless boring exams for fucking degree which doesn't speck about your skills or show to the world anything besides you are good at memorizing shit.

Look right here at this beauty, one of my students wrote :D They were supposed to find all dividers of given number :D makes me question my whole teaching skills :(

Friday I left my then current company as I felt my technical skills were not being appreciated, forget about growth. I am all set to join much nimble organization where technical skills seems to be much required. Such a relief as struggle to continue working at a place where appreciation is almost non-existent is over.

An Architect is born.

According to my predecessor, nothing showcases your SQL skills quite like generating the entire page (markup, JavaScript and all) from a single 2500 line query.

As a trainee in my very first company I was comparing myself to my mentor too much.

And I just couldn't compete.

He had deep knowledge, was more productive, had amazing skills in different departments and his side projects were astonishing.

Turned out: I wasn't expected to.
Turned out: Even among nerds, he was an extraordinary unicorn. Other developers in the company had huge respect and were humbled by his skills.

Yet nevertheless, I doubted my career choice when I was struggeling for 4 hours on a seemingly tiny problem, then when I approached him he would come in and write the code down in 15 minutes.

He made it look so god damn easy.

Little did I know that the main difference between him and I was: experience.

He had much more of it. I still had to make some mistakes and he greatly helped me avoid some of them.

It really helped me that one day he talked to me and set my head straight that I wasn't expected to perform on the same level as him. He was getting a salary, I merely some peanuts, after all.

!rant

boombodies here. Just wanted to thank this community for being there over the last year. This place has been an absolute haven that has welcomed my frustrations with open arms. As much as I love to bitch, it has been an absolute privilege working in this profession. After spending my 20s in a completely different field host to a vastly different set of values, learning to dev and continuing to hone my skills finally feels like home. And by home, I mean like hearth-coaxed sweat dripping from the balls of a blacksmith and the cocoa at the cottage in the middle of nowhere patiently waiting for his return. I wish each and everyone of you a treacherous and catastrophically dreadful 2023…A burden in which you all bear successfully, and emerge greater and grander than ever.

Actually can you action that by EOD instead? I already promised it to the client.

guys, i've got an amazing idea that will make us all rich!

now - hear me out - we start putting publicly available scooters in major cities around the world

these scooters are ingeneous and differentiate us from any competition because they are yellow instead of green or blue!!!

we're hiring now!!! who wants to join me?!?!? we're a dynamic, motivated, and hard working team. we don't have amazing benefits, a relocation bonus, an office, a tech gear stipend just yet, or a salary, but we do offer a generous 0.5% equity and our series A is just around the corner - promised - within a few weeks time! we're looking for a candidate with 10+ years experience in all of the following: PHP, MySQL, TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, C#, C++, Rust, Go, and Fortran. Additional skills, but not totally required include blockchain development, prompt engineering, and building GPT sized LLMs. DM me for details!

I feel terrible making $3,634/year at my current job in Nigeria with all my skills and experience.
I've applied for jobs in Germany and had a couple of interviews but they fell through.

It's difficult been a software engineer in Nigeria. 😔

1. Ability to freeze time... (except for internet & computer speed). Too many ideas, not enough hours in a day. Sleep should be declared optional as well.

2. Ability to not eat/drink at all, or eat/drink in copious quantities without negative effects. I enjoy a cognac, pizza & chocolate binge more than nausea, upwards BMI creep and hangovers.

3. True Virtual Reality. None of this headset crap, but immersiveness rivaling reality itself, with voice-controlled AI-assisted interfaces to "program" anything by simply describing it, iterating over details to add increasing complexities. Not even for porn reasons... my head just overflows with creative ideas for "holonovels" and interactive worldbuilding, but I don't have the patience nor artistic skills for game development.

Finally resigned.
I didn't hate my work but I need to grow. I was 4 years experienced and I was working on entry level positions. That's because for getting promoted I need to work like I'm on the next level for a year consistently, I don't know if I was working on next level but I felt confident that I can, so I switched companies finally. I don't know if work will be a lot what will I do but I have enough hard skills, my soft skills might not be that good but I'm finally doing something to achieve growth in that area. I'll be scared, anxious, helpless and all but let it be. I'll sprint, rest and repeat.

Long rant 😤😤😤

Today I was going to hit my project manager in the face. I can't stand people like him. In every fucking meeting he starts talking about his past successes and we are forced to listen to him. In this sprint, we had a tough task which took more time than planned. So we didn't finish it till the deadline. After working hard all night long I finally managed to get the job done. And today guess what happened? He didn't fucking appreciate it. All he was talking was mediocre look of the module we've developed for the website. And it's not even my job to make a beautiful design as a back-end developer. At a point I wanted to resign. I don't know how much I will stand this situation. He has always been like this since he came to the company. The worst part is, he is not a senior developer or something. Al he talks about is some fucking old jobs he has done we don't know if they are real or not. From every meeting we suspect his skills are limited. He just knows how to talk. He has never reviewed a single line of code because he doesn't know PHP (yes I know, I know). Hell he doesn't know any back-end language and he is supposed to create a new architecture for the website. He don't have enough database skills neither. All he says he has worked as a mobile and front-end developer. So now I'm home and don't know If I should resign or not.

data science is just a sexy word for statistics.

1% programming skills
99% practically all science thats not computer science

Oh boy. Gotta love having a team member (For a School project) be in charge of the Database functionality/design, who has almost no communication skills and basically no clue about how to store data in a data base.
Im talking dates stored as varchar(5), column sizes being way way to small, overall table design being rather terrible, no primary/foreign keys, pretty much... Actually no, everything was being stored as a varchar.
Not only that, but there was a hell lot of data that needed to be stored that wasn't even accounted for in the DB design. He made some code that could be used by our team members for queries, creating tables, inserting data (etc), almost 2,000 lines of it.... And basically nothing was fucking documented at all. I'm talking comments like "Insert data into cities table" and nothing else. More complicated functions had as much, or less documentation. Complete mess.

I'm doing my CV in Vue with Bulma and everything is all nice and neat. I have a nice and neat 'skills' section that you can see pictured, and it's nice and neat. However, what is not very nice and neat is Firefox (and chrome's) print to PDF thing which ignore the nice little semi meaningless dots that I have, which is so fucking asdfghjkl;

You know what's funny?
When every job post requires you to know atleast 20 things.. but then you find yourself stuck at a job that needs you to do 1 stupid thing. And you need to actually FIGHT to not lose all the skills and knowledge you collected till now :(

'exp that makes u doubt your skills'

Nearly all popular repos on GitHub.

* A job application followup email I received:

Hi [programmerName],
Thank you for your interest in joining [companyName].

While we appreciate your application, we decided to move forward with other candidates whose skills and experience are a closer match to our requirements for this specific role.
Feel free to check back, as we are always adding new positions.

Best of luck with your career search!
-The [companyName] Team

* My (probably trashed) reply:

Hello

I personally ignore this precompiled stuff you HR people send.
I feel this answer will be probably trashed somewhere but I feel the need to write this.

You know absolutely nothing about my skills because you didn’t even talk with me.

Maybe I am not the best person in writing a resume or an introduction letter, the key skill appreciated in companies doing head hunting instead of building a solid corporate culture and cultivating talent. Or at least HR people in such companies.

Please consider that, maybe you didn’t like my resume or I didn't write a list of words matching your check list, but at least I honestly wrote my experience instead of trying to hack my way to a job interview writing a fake one that triggers usual HR patterns.
Consider that I do a job for a living and I don't live or have the time to make the perfect resume, I don’t even apply for all companies I see, I only apply for the ones I believe I can work well because I like them. I am not a professional job searcher, jumping from a company to another.

You keep posting this very same add since October 2019 and probably even earlier.
This sounds to me like:
- or your selection process does not work well and you end up hiring the wrong people
- or maybe your work place is not that good as you describe it, so that you have zero retainment despite your high salary.
But I cannot be sure because, guess what, I could not check personally.

If you want to talk about my skills and compare me to other people please test me otherwise don’t write (copy/paste) this offensive trash.

Best of luck with your career as a HR person in a tech company!

-A person tired of HR managers that do not give a f**k about the word “human” in their job description.

!rant

New years resolutions:

1. Reading all 16 books on my goodreads list
2. Learn Clojure
3. Switch job to a company which appreciates my skills more
4. Be the best dad my son could wish for

One day browsing the internet, I find a website that is hiring web developers. I was curious, so I decided to see the requirements.

Job : To manage this website
Skills Required

6+ years Experience of
HTML
CSS
JavaScript
Node.js
Vue.js
TypeScript
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Ruby on Rails
ASP.NET
Perl
C
C++
Advanced C++
C#
Assembly
RUST
R
Django
Bash
SQL

Built at least 17 stand alone desktop apps without any dependencies with pure C++

Built at least 7 websites alone.
3+ years Hacking experience
built 5 stand-alone mobile with Java, Dart and Flutter
7800+ reputations on stack overflow.
Answered at least 560 questions on stack overflow
Have at least 300 repositories on GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket.
Written 1000+ lines of code on each single repository.

Salary: $600 per month.

If he learnt all languages one by one at age 0, he will be 138 now!

If you don't feel good enough with your programming skills, keep practicing but don't be sad, there are dogs all around the world that love you

so management decided that the PM/PO/SM role has to be split and that SM shall be done by someone else.

PM in retro: so i will give away this role because i cannot fulfill all roles adequately, not because of missing skills, but because of missing time. this is also why i couldn't finish my development task for this sprint. so, someone of you guys has to do the job. i expect the future SM to be always available for me in the morning and the afternoon, so due to timezone shift this has to be someone from the German colleagues. I will have to explain to that person what exactly I as a PO expect from the SM and the SM will have to follow this guideline. also, being SM is no excuse for not delivering your stories, it just takes very little time.

...i don't need to comment on this at all, he already makes a perfect clown of himself 🤡

No crazy prep, ever.

I always go in with a 'this is me, these are my skills, that's all you're going to get' mindset.

I of course do some research (about the company, their culture, technologies and stuff like that) but I find it kinda weird to spend a big amount of time on interview prep when there is a chance of rejection. (personal opinion)

Looking for a job as a developer, any type of developer:

Requirements: all skills starting with letters A to M.

Nice to have: all skills starting with letters N to Z.

Well, thanks :/

Ugh first week in Google Udacity scholarship and they all just directly want to start a start up 🙄😮😒
Yeah best of luck with that shit with your amazing html skills...

I was in second year of University when I joined the internship, I knew the business idea sucks and he wouldn't be able to carry out the operations either. Little did I know that I will work with the dumbest team ever, literally, the dumbest.

So, the major chunk of the software was outsourced to a consultancy. I was a tech intern, and we were developing an Android App that will save your parking location, let you reserve locations and all etc.

I knew I have stepped on a wrong turf, but again, I had nothing better to do that summer. So, for a very meager stipend, I said yes to a very stupid project. Let the stupidity flow...

~ The boss, had quit his job for this dumb idea with no funding, no team, nothing.

~ He was pursuing a certification course in Android Development from somewhere, where their final project will be a calculator!

~ He had little to no tech skills, hardly knew Java but was leading an Android App Dev project in Java. He had little to no managerial, marketing or sales skills either.

~ For a brief period, I had to work along with the consultancy guys to ramp up their work. They would take backups in a USB drive every evening, and share each others code using the same. VCS died a painful death that day.

~ They hardly wrote functions, rather, wrote very long code in the main (onCreate) function. Code style died of cancer.

~ They couldn't compress an image before sending it to a server. I had to do it for them.

~ Had no concept of creating utility classes.

And best of all,
~ Wrote 20 cases (switch case) with the same code! Instead of using a loop...

I don't get people..

He is a good person and and realy tries..

Tries what?! To annoy coworkers that have to fix every single thing he does?!

Some people will justify anything with 'he is a nice person and tries hard'. WTF?!

So if someone is a nice person, likes to talk a lot, has 'good' social skills but writes crappy code he doesn't test at all.. or tests and see that it's glitchy and still doesn't fix it.. so he is a good worker for that?! Dafaq?!

So if he is a 'lovable' person, he deserves to be here, doing more damage than helps.. he deserves to have a job, with same pay (or even more) than me?! WTF?! How?!

Why is this ok?! If we were heart surgeons and he killed a person or two due to lack of skills or negligence, what would happen?!
He'd get fired on spot!! Why can't it be the same with devs?!

Why on fucking earth do we need to put up with people who try their best and fail?! Especially if their best is lowest of all, lower than the 'I don't give a fuck, just doing sth so the boss stops nagging'?!

Fuuuuuuuu!!!!

But ok, some people are not cut out for some work, I get it.. but why the fuck do other people justify that with 'he tries'?! Dafaq?!

Maybe next time 'I'll try' to perfom brain surgery on you..and you'll end up a fuckin plant.. is that ok with you?! I'll be trying (not really) and do my best (well I will try not to use a chainsaw when cutting open your head).. will that be ok with you?!

Fuck!!

End of adventures of the COO and Start of a new beginning

It takes years to improve a company and takes only a few months for a dumbass with shit for brain to take it all down

After four years working ( underpaid ) in a digital advertising agency helping the company grow, getting global exposure and few awards later, last Friday was my last day

To all the future and current CEO's out there, Don't hire someone just cause you know them, hire them for their skills or their brain power

I've seen fucking clay pots with more brains than this COO

I feel like a piece of shit because I don't want to help my "friend" who has been faking being a web developer for years. He now has a real project he must develop that actually requires writing code (It's a serious project that requires real Javascript skills) and he's basically fucked.

He usually would hop on the web and download a template, edit it and get paid. But then again I don't want to help him because he always comes to me and I do all the work and save his ass while he does nothing.

I'm in a rock and a hard place right now because I'm also a dev and I actually have a lot of work to do, unlike his lazy ass.

Remember the post about bruce's constant?(4.5099806905005)

Well apparently theres a convergent series for it found all the way back in 2015.

Apparently its an actual thing. Which connects e to the square root of this series.

And it converges on (bruce-1)**0.5.
I confirmed it myself.

The two people who found the series that converges are N. J. A. Sloane and Hiroaki Yamanouchi

Thank you Sloane and Hiroaki!

The actual formula is a series of embedded square roots with the repeating numbers 1,4,2,8,5,7
like so...
sqrt(1+sqrt(4+sqrt(2+sqrt(8+sqrt...

What this means is you can find e using this series.

All you do is run the series, raise by a power of 2, add 1, calculate J and K like so

J = log(2, 1.333333333333333) / log(2, 2)
K = log(2, 1.333333333333333) / log(2, 3)

then calculate (J+K)-(bruce-1)
and out pops our buddy e:
2.7182818284591317

I guess I bullshitted myself for so long, that I didn't believe people like scor when they said they legit witnessed by math skills grow.

Or maybe a blind squirrel occasionally DOES find a nut.

Pretty cool find either way.

Enough!!

There is to much hate in the world already without hating on Windows because you are a Linux user, or vice Versa.

All I'm reading is windows is shit! Linux is for supreme devs.

More to life than hate! Respect each other's skills. Skills are like race all are unique and no one race is superior and don't discriminate because of skills.

Why in the world IT work is so stressful?
I never been like that since I start developing code professionally, 8 years ago.
Since then, I had many health problems due stress, and some were really scaring (heart problem).

I'm trying to adapt to a healthier way of work, but I'm starting to doubt if that is possible.

Work in technology seems cruel and soulless sometimes. The constant pressure to learn new things all the time, to specialize in a lot of skills, simultaneously. The urgency nature of ALL tasks - even a simple form field slightly out of place seems to be an issue of life and death for clients.

Easy and quick communication made some people lost boundaries and respect. Many times I received calls and messages after midnight, about things like elements alignment.

And the worst is when clients blame you about their business problems. If they are not selling well this week, it's fault of the website you did ( which they are using for months now).

This actually happened to me today, first thing in the morning. After I slept just 3h, because I worked until late yesterday (oh yeah many more of these life/death updates).

What happens in this industry? Will this ever be different some day?

My fellow dev (a younger guy) and I have been having a lot of disagreements with the lead dev (obviously a more experienced, older guy).
We can have arguments with him all day long, to explain and convince him that he's not that right, or not right at all.
Or we can keep silent and wait for shit to happen.
I'm already applying the stfu strategy myself... Because the other way round is exhausting.
At the same time, naturally, I'm looking for opportunities somewhere else. And, naturally, in those job ads, they state "X years of experience".
This further sets me off.
I'm sick of having an argument shut down because someone has X more years of experience, at a higher position, thinks he is better.
I am starting to hate people who boasts his years of experience instead of having the real knowledge and skills to create value.

I am starting to think of creating my own company when I finish school.
If all these rejections keep on continuing, I honestly think of doing that.
I just took a look at local "PC docs" and software companies. Like the ones in the same city.
Their websites are looking like those from the 90s.
And most of the things they do... I can do them myself, as well, without needing an apprenticeship. I already own these skills.

!question to freelancers:
So do all of you have own built websites (of you) to show your skills, self-marketing and so on?

I just wanted to get this off my chest.
There we go, that time is finally coming: all of my friends are starting to look for jobs; we are all about to graduate, but i feel no desire to move forward... I wish i had their optimism, but all i feel is terror and panic every time they bring up the topic...

I have no plan, no idea of what might happen, and i don't feel like i am particularly competent in anything: I do not have much to offer to society, surely not in terms of technical skills: i'm a real shitty programmer with the attention span of a goldfish.
I am passionate about a bunch of topics, but i am not competent at them in any meaningful way: I like reading about x86 Assembly or Operating System design, but if you'd ask me to write them i wouldn't be able to really. Its all superficial, i read these things for fun but i never really accomplished anything.

And i know this is all in my head, that as soon as i find anything its probably gonna be fine, i just wish i had the enthusiasm and drive that people around me seem to have, instead of acting like a little bitch :)

I got an interview with a big multinational software company as a senior dev - the kind of place I never thought I would be privileged or knowledgeable enough to work for and wasnt expecting to get In to...

I aced it. They gave me an offer but - FOR DEVOPS 😬

basically my skills fit in perfectly with the server/ scaling issues they have and are far more valuable there. I know they do, I also know I can fix the issue and will have alot of fun coding it - I just dont think I want to monitor it or anything else.

I mean I do devops stuff all the time in aid of anything I code but their stack is a full time job- im scared that once the toolchain is automated ill be pulled towards sys admin like duties and lose touch with my craft... what do you guys think? Anyone shifted from dev to devops?

"We're promoting you to be a Team Leader, since you proved your skills to handle tough tasks and bring good solutions, and we're raising your salary by 25%."

That sounded good for me, until I realized that all they need is an interface between them (the boss) and other employees to force their style and monitor every fucking thing that could be different from a dev to another. But since the boss is a sEnIoR with mOrE tHaN 10 years of experience but he does not have any clue about good practices and how to make a code that does not push you to be humiliated by the client, he still thinks that he's the fucking programming God.

That's a shit

Rant r = new Rant(Rant.TEAM_PROBLEM);

Three months ago, a senior, one year older than me, decided to join me in doing startups. He said he's good at finance stuff (his parents are fund managers), and he is interested in startups just like I am. He treated me very nicely, so I gladly accepted him.

I'm currently working on many projects, and some of them won me quite a few awards, most notably on the national competition. I also got invited into startup incubator programs, met some awesome people and offered free scholarships at universities in my country.

He frankly said he joined because he wanted to learn about startups and have those "privileges" too, and I'm cool with that.

Anyway, the problem is that I'm the one doing all the work. He's really nice, doesn't claim anything whatsoever, but the thing is he doesn't have any skills whatsoever except soft skills like communicating. So, I'm horribly tired from working alone.

My tasks mostly involves full-stack development, such as planning the specs, designing and developing frontend for mobile apps and progressive webapps, developing microservices for the backend, up to deploying and maintaining the servers. It's a lot of work for a single person to handle in such a short timeframe.

Not only that, but I'm also the one handling the business/marketing part, albeit I'm still learning. From doing paperworks, pitches, business models, up to creating advertising materials for the product.

I'm obviously not the smart ones like the people out there, but I keep focusing on improving my skills.

So, he said he could help me, and I let him try. What did you think he did?

He made pitch decks using default fucking PowerPoint themes, shooted a demo video with his phone cam in 320p potato resolution and expect me to "add some effects", gives me loads of requirements when all we needed was a simple feature, copying and pasting prior documents in my paperworks which doesn't make any fucking sense at all, and quite a lot more.

Also, he said I should stay in the developer zone only while he maintains the business, whilist he obviously can't do much in the business part either. Seriously...?

I'm okay with his lack of experience, considering he's nice and all, unlike the other business guys I've met in the previous rants. However, I keep questioning myself why he is here in the first place when I'm the one doing everything anyway.

What should I do? Maybe just keep him and recruit more experienced people to join us, as he's not that much of a burden? What do you devRanters think?

Thanks for reading, fellow devRanters! 😀

Those of you who like "The Imitation Game", you probably want to check out "Hidden Figures" (2016). It's on Netflix now.

About a team of female African-American mathematicians who wanted to "break the glass ceiling" in NASA.
- Dorothy : conquered the (recently acquired) IBM frameworks using Fortran and taught her team to program it
- Mary : appealed to court to be allowed to study in a all-white school to get her qualification to be an aerospace engineer
- Katherine : her skills in analytical geometry enabled her to be the first female African-American in the Space Task Group in calculating the momentous capsule launch into orbit

My lazy ass just can't fathom how someone who deals with so much math and pressure can still smile to their family after work. My grumpiness nature will surely turn me into a monster.

And now I know what "human computers" means.

About starting your career at a medium-bigger company that's well-established, versus starting at a smaller company.

That's my point of view:

It's always wiser to begin at a company that's more established (you will also be sure that you will get paid on time). I started at a well-established company, and I managed to buy gear, travel, do stuff, and then I realised that I wanna do more, not only live to work 😎.

Smaller companies are kinda risky, think of it, their goal is to reach the level of a well-established company, which is some levels lower than that. On the other hand, if you do well at a smaller company, your next goal will be to work for a bigger company, which will surely be nicer, more professional and will pay better. So you will have managed to et there with all the skills in your pocket already, which will come in handy later!

Bigger companies are excellent if you have a family (wife and kids), they provide stability, that's the most important thing, but I believe that in order to get "settled" in a company like that, you should at least have tried something else first, like doing your own thing or get challenged in more complicated gigs that require you to up your skills.

In the end, it's all sun and fun, with you code editor by your side 😉. I'm interested to see your opinions.

dev, ~boring

This is either a shower thought or a sober weed thought, not really sure which, but I've given some serious consideration to "team composition" and "working condition" as a facet of employment, particularly in regard to how they translate into hiring decisions and team composition.

I've put together a number of teams over the years, and in almost every case I've had to abide by an assemblage of pre-defined contexts that dictated the terms of the team working arrangement:

1. a team structure dictated to me
2. a working temporality scheme dictated to me
3. a geographic region in which I was allowed to hire
4. a headcount, position tuple I was required to abide by

I've come to regard these structures as weaknesses. It's a bit like the project management triangle in which you choose 1-2 from a list of inadequate options. Sometimes this is grounded in business reality, but more often than not it's because the people surrounding the decisions thrive on risk mitigation frameworks that become trickle down failure as they impose themselves on all aspects of the business regardless of compatibility.

At the moment, I'm in another startup that I have significantly more control over and again have found my partners discussing the imposition of structure and framework around how, where, why, who and what work people do before contact with any action. My mind is screaming at me to pull the cord, as much as I hate the expression. This stems from a single thought:

"Hierarchy and structure should arise from an understanding of a problem domain"

As engineers we develop processes based on logic; it's our job, it's what we do. Logic operates on data derived from from experiments, so in the absence of the real we perform thought experiments that attempt to reveal some fundamental fact we can use to make a determination.

In this instance we can ask ourselves the question, "what works?" The question can have a number contexts: people, effort required, time, pay, need, skills, regulation, schedule. These things in isolation all have a relative importance ( a weight ), and they can relatively expose limits of mutual exclusivity (pay > budget, skills < need, schedule < (people * time/effort)). The pre-imposed frameworks in that light are just generic attempts to abstract away those concerns based on pre-existing knowledge. There's a chance they're fine, and just generally misunderstood or misapplied; there's also a chance they're insufficient in the face of change.

Fictional entities like the "A Team," comprise a group of humans whose skills are mutually compatible, and achieve synergy by random chance. Since real life doesn't work on movie/comic book logic, it's easy to dismiss the seed of possibility there, that an organic structure can naturally evolve to function beyond its basic parts due to a natural compatibility that wasn't necessarily statistically quantifiable (par-entropic).

I'm definitely not proposing that, nor do I subscribe to the 10x ninja founders are ideal theory. Moreso, this line of reasoning leads me to the thought that team composition can be grown organically based on an acceptance of a few observed truths about shipping products:

1. demand is constant
2. skills can either be bought or developed
3. the requirement for skills grows linearly
4. hierarchy limits the potential for flexibility
5. a team's technically proficiency over time should lead to a non-linear relationship relationship between headcount and growth

Given that, I can devise a heuristic, organic framework for growing a team:

- Don't impose reporting structure before it has value (you don't have to flatten a hierarchy that doesn't exist)
- crush silos before they arise
- Identify needed skills based on objectives
- base salary projections on need, not available capital
- Hire to fill skills gap, be open to training since you have to pay for it either way
- Timelines should always account for skills gap and training efforts
- Assume churn will happen based on team dynamics
- Where someone is doesn't matter so long as it's legal. Time zones are only a problem if you make them one.
- Understand that the needs of a team are relative to a given project, so cookie cutter team composition and project management won't work in software
- Accept that failure is always a risk
- operate with the assumption that teams that are skilled, empowered and motivated are more likely to succeed.
- Culture fit is a per team thing, if the team hates each other they won't work well no matter how much time and money you throw at it

Last thing isn't derived from the train of thought, just things I feel are true:

- Training and headcount is an investment that grows linearly over time, but can have exponential value. Retain people, not services.
- "you build it, you run it" will result in happier customers, faster pivoting. Don't adopt an application maintenance strategy

/rant

Did a lot of IT coordination and managing web sites as a Webmaster the last 3 years.
Now every other company wants me to know every damn framework and multiple years of experience in each... Well I know fuckin' HTML 5 and CSS3 and some JavaScript and can create most web sites easily.

Feeling like 13 yo kids with some Angular 2 skills take all my jobs. Thank you, NOT!

A little background of me. I’m a firm believer of knowledge is power, skill is practice and hard work. Especially for this field, it’s easier to self learn the skills or language these days without having to take loans or burn a huge hole in ur wallet and stuff. But i personally feel, it’s hard to follow an effective path of learning when the info is everywhere. So have to be careful with that. (that’s why I’m here to learn from experts, lurking around)

Sure, degree is just a paper or validation that this person has completed this and that. But doesn’t reflect their actual skill. Especially for this field where u can just show ur skills by making projects. If ur potential boss is impressed by ur skills, u are hired. BUT if ure in Singapore, they require u to have degree by law. No matter how skilled u are, u only get specific amount of salary within a preset range. The range goes by Diploma, Degree, Master, PhD. Etc. U will still get hired by a company if they like u, but won’t get more than a preset range.

I was contented with just my Diploma. But decided to get degree cuz I wanted to earn more. And now considering to go for ms, just cuz my current company gives sponsorship.

Aside from salary, I do think getting a degree in University is one of the important phases of the life, where ure working hard, trying to juggle different things. Also, u do get other perks being a uni students, like discount for books, get access to latest devices if the uni has.

But all in all, whatever floats ur boat, right.

The emphasis on "team" to the exclusion of the individual (thanks in no small part to Scrum) is destroying the software developer career. It's a pendulum. There are always team/company goals AND personal goals. However, these days, the rhetoric is ALL about the team: everybody on a team has the same title, get rid of people who don't conform to some "collaborative", "open space", "colocated" ideal, etc. OKRs are entirely about giving everybody the exact same goals. I remember sitting down with managers throughout my career to talk about where I want to be in a year. What skills I wanted to explore. There were no guarantees, but the generally accepted idea was that nurturing the employee helped retain the employee. Now, there is only the idea that every developer should have the same "T-shaped" skillset, that all team members are the same, that all teams are interchangeable, that all developers are nameless cogs. It is demoralizing. If I were to give any advice to those looking to enter the industry as a developer right now, it would be "Don't". Because you will be told that being a "hero" is a bad thing. In what other industry does management tell its producers that they don't want people to go "above and beyond", and that if they do, they won't get credit for it because the credit always belongs to everybody.

My rant is that I low key hate devRant.

I'm 23, I'm an average software engineer, with some expertise in machine learning and with a decent job.
But seeing all your cool stories, skills and rants makes me feel like I don't know shit and everyone else is just more driven, skillful and passionate, taking care of a 1000 pet projects at a time and dominating their work routine.

Oh impostor syndrome, how I've missed you!

P.S.: I still love your rants, keep them coming.

Man, I'm a second week intern at a company, and the anxiety that I have is making me stupid. I literally lose all of my coding skills, stuff that I could do at home in 15 minutes takes hours at work.

Am I crazy, or will this go away.

( am a naturally stressed and anxious person, I know this is not good)

I have been commenting a lot recently on linux ranters who rant about windows for stupid reasons.
To all these people who think linux is better and they are smart(er) than windows users, i say:
We use windows in the company I work for. And if you are a linux user, you're just not welcome and your skills are just a waste for the company. And yes it is a successful company with 100s of millions of euros as net revenue.
Our users have windows machines and we offer topnotch Microsoft solutions for them.
When you ask me to switch to linux because of a problem i had in a Windows machine, it makes me feel that you are a stupid person who knows about linux and gives solutions based on his stupidity and on zero knowledge of the scenario.
Please be professional and think about the solution you are offering. It would be best if you did not offer any solution at all in fact.

something like a 3.96 undergrad GPA

ivy league masters degree + scientific publication

first job -> $4500/month for first 3 months (some dumbass 'intern' rule even though i had a masters -> then $6000 -> then $6400/month (insane amount for me, at least IMO)

second job -> $4000/month

third job -> $3600/month

in each one, skills and responsibilities increased

and now i can't get hired 🤷‍♂️

pretty sure i did it all backwards

just remember kids, nothing that society tells you is actually true. everything in the corporate world is controlled by emotions and narratives, not logic, hard work or anything actually valuable

just get that cozy 9-5 and kill all your hopes and dreams before they start

To all the developers with a permanent job:

Do you guys still reference the web when working on a project or you know everything and code everything perfectly w/o help?

Just wanted to know if I need more practice with my skills or am I good to go.

All this started around an year back. In college we had this subject of web programming where we were given a mini project to do. The topics were given related to college stuff. Mine was an attendance system. Made a simple website using all i knew about bootstrap, jquery, etc since i had some previous experience with web. The professor liked it and asked me to further improve it so that it can actually be implemented. This was six months back.

Since that day, to this date, that guy asks me to add a new feature or just modify something every two weeks. These guys just want free work and think everyone is just free. Neither does he help a bit... just demands... god knows when this forever loop would end! It has become frustrating now...it just feels as though why i showed my skills in the first place 😐😖

These commercials for the Earnin app are cancer.

"I know you don't get paid until tomorrow why are you buying [stupid shit]?"
-- what kinda psycho knows when their friends get paid?

"I'm using the Earnin app to get paid today so I can buy my dog some food."
--If your budgeting skills are so shitty that you have to rely on an app to pay you before you check, then perhaps an animal is something you don't need to have with your current financial situation.

Like Jesus Christ the situations are all illogical and make 0 sense, yet they're fucking EVERYWHERE.

@Android Question

Does all android devs use Async Task for their Json calls or you prefer to do them on Main Thread ?

Am just asking to improve my skills and get some senior programmers opinion

Finished downloading lots of tutorial videos. Now time to watch all of this. This is like Netflix for me. I don't watch much Netflix instead I watch lots of tutorial videos and practice them. Skills development rather than Netflix and chill. 😀

~ The Feelings ~

The feeling when someone thinks you can fix his laptop/phone/other electronic device because you know how to program.

The feeling when someone tells you that you can't program because you are bad at math, but you realize majority of the time that breaking down mathematical formulas into code requires no mathematical skills, in fact you learn it better that way.

The feeling when someone calls programming 'legos for autists' and you can't legally lock him up in your basement for few months.

The feeling when one of programming languages finally gets an update with a feature that existed in all other languages you didn't learn for few years now and they call it a big 'breakthrough'.

The feeling when someone learned basic programming and says he'll make a game, with his own engine and starts listing features he can't have any clue about.

..I'm done, for now :)

I feel like there should be "dev recruiter" position that people with developer skills could fill. Every time I go to an interview, I just know the person asking me dev related stuff has no fucking clue about anything I'm saying, it's printed all over their faces.

A good developer almost instantly knows if you know your craft or not.

Let's not keep wasting everyone's time

Had an interview last week set up by a recruiter. Interview went well, aced the tech part, got on well with the interviewers, etc. They had one more interview the next day and would make the decision. Got feedback from recruiter the next day. I was in the top 2. Was told I had the best experience and skills. Thought I had this. Later that day got told they went with the other candidate because my recruiters presented me for $5000 more than the employer's posted upper limit. The employer just felt my salary requirements would push their budget too much so they went with the cheaper, less qualified candidate.

Not happy with my recruiter at all!

I dedicate this to all of those hr gurus from top tech companies that rejected me cause they think I won’t fit their culture despite me crushing all their technical interviews, fuck them and their soft skills stupid questions.
I won’t fit there anyways cause I can express my own thoughts using sarcasm and irony and I’m not scared of doing it cause I don’t care about your amazing company culture that prefer robots not people with a little sense of humor. I don’t care about my failures cause there was so many I don’t give a fuck. And by the way if you ask me why I want to work in your amazing company I would always say cause you asked me to work for you and now you treat me like shit. Then 10 years later you blame everyone for toxic culture lol.

After a couple years working mainly on back end, I just decided to start working on my front end skills to get myself into a full stack path a couple days ago...

I feel like I've never coded before in my life. My girlfriend is a front end developer and she's been laughing out loud at my html all these days...

Now she tells me she wants to learn some back end in a near future.
I'll let you know how much I laughed after that.

Udemy is full of crap.

I got some course that had been "discounted" from $200 (I already mentioned it is an ugly trick) and it was over in like 20 minutes. The fuck?!

All the info they gave was either common sense or something you could find on the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article on the given topic (it was a soft skills course, not a technical one).

Just junk.

Maybe there are some gems out there, but I'm not sure I would risk it again.

Udemy feels like the Booking.com of courses in terms of deceitful UX, but it's not nearly as useful.

Maybe you guys have found something good there that you could say is a bargain? If so, please let me know.

My first project, ever, was a very unproud thing that was developed...

A little detail - I was 12 back then.

So, a distant family member had a business of selling things that they brought to the country. They, of course, needed a website and my parents knew that I had some skills in development so suggested them my services.

Discussion started and well, what came out was this:

1. They need a site with items list.
2. It had no actual design plans, no actual requirements, just a list.
3. Oh. It had to work perfectly on IE4 or IE5 (can't remember).

So what was actually done, was a site full of divs, clearfixes and so buggy that opening in any other browser than IE - resulted in a total failure.
We have sat down and I, with all the respect told them that my skills are not sufficient to make all of the browsers work equally (I've been on HTML/CSS for more than 6 months back then. And all of it was after school). They calmed me down and said that it's ok, they can give me as much time as I need to figure things out. Yet, my English wasn't good back then so I couldn't... (I was 12, with 3 years of basic English as a non-native speaker).

We sat around the table, discussed what could be done and if I could investigate that and re-do when I'm fully ready. I agreed. The site was launched for IE only as it worked fine and others were just throwing an error to visit it with IE.

They were happy, people were using it and they didn't say that anything was bad. Of course, management was thru FTP and editing LIVE files because, well, no php, no control panels, nothing... I felt ashamed that the site wasn't what they wanted but they were ultra happy with it - first customers rolled in from there. They paid me around 60EUR at that time (it was ~12 years ago) and I've spent a month there. (minimum monthly wage here was around 90-120EUR at that time...

So, all in all, this project that I still think I failed - pushed me to the world of devs and... I've never regretted it. Of course, when I actually met with them after years - they have dropped the site as it was not needed anymore but they said that it was exactly what they needed and there was nothing wrong, even if it didn't work perfectly.

Having to fill skills field in my internship CV suddenly makes me realize that i actually am not really good at anything.

Some friends say that i'm a can-do-it-all person when i actually just learn how to do what i need to do on the spot.

The interview wasn't so bad, but it was deceiving, not to the fault of the company though. During the interview process, they were asking all sorts of questions about my Angular and front-end skills. I was to take over a project that used Angular heavily, and none of their devs knew angular. At the time, this was going to be my dream job! After I got the job, and met with the contractor who was handing over the project. He told me that he spent that weekend rewriting the whole thing on rails and ember. When I brought it up with my boss, he was not happy. I would have been fine working on it, but instead I got put onto Wordpress projects with the evergreen promise that I would transition to that project or another one like it. Never happened, built up my skills contributing to Open Source, then left.

// first rant

So this isn't really a "dev" rant but I'm a developer taking my first ever design class. It's a senior level, group based class where we design a mobile OS from the ground up, using any inspiration we like. I love it because I'm the developer and designer for all of the Android apps I've worked on so far. I get to practice my design skills and have a portfolio addition. Neat! It's a pretty easy class too.

But my group. Oh God my group.

I spent a week and a half designing the style guide and it was jam packed with anything we'd need. Typography, icons, rationales, you name it!

But noooo, they can't use it because it's not in sketch. As a Windows user, this is infuriating. So three weeks go by and all this work is done that's SUPER INCONSISTENT. Bad colors, elements off by 3px... I mean even the font sizes are just 1 or 2 off. Seriously, I wish I could just be frank with them and tell them to put in the 1% effort to make it right. It's really not that hard. I just don't want to screw up the peace in my group..

All i want to do is write code. Give me time, space, and stop bothering me so often and I can fix the shitty outsourced code. I can do it, really. I can write a ton of resdesign docs and improve so much shit. But I can't do ANY OF IT BECAUSE THESE FUCKS ARE ALWAYS PAWNING OFF WORK ONTO ME AND REFUSING TO LET ME GET MY HANDS DIRTY.

Stop asking me to email people. Stop asking me to update documentation that isn't for my features. Stop bothering me. Stop. Fucking. Bothering. Me. All. The. Goddamn. Damn.

Stop it stop it stop it fucking stop. I don't care about the PM's dumbfuck braindead statements and always wanting to pick a fight with me. I don't care that x environment is down. I don't care that your shitty overseas programmers can't tell their own ass from their head. I do care that I have the skills to fix it if you would give me the fucking time and space.

Instead of having me do all the mundane tasks that your shitty ape programmers could do overseas, let me have some fucking room to breath and I can fix this shitty fuck of a project and Maybe I can save it before it collapses on itself you dumb fucks

Holy shit im pissy today

I'm writing a book that teaches everything I have learned in the past 20 years about writing small niche software and selling it.

Need some help from my fellow DevRanters.
Anyone who comments here with something constructive gets a free copy when it's done.

When I say:
"Why don't you just write your own software and sell it to end users"

What is the first thing that pops into your head?

Is it "I don't know how to advertise"
or
"that's a pipe dream"
or
"I tried starting my own business, but _______"
or
"I am doing that, i have this side project "
(how long have you spent on that side project?)

I need to know all your concerns questions fears, skepticism etc around the idea of writing your OWN software.

After 20 years I have like, so much knowledge, but it's sometimes hard to get it all out, UNLESS someone has a question or concern, then, out it comes.

So, I'm going to (hopefully) collect all the questions here ... and answer them, and it'll help me out a lot to extract this knowledge.

A lot of stuff I do without even thinking and realizing all the years it took to even know that.

What would you like to know the most?

You have the skills, you have the know how, you can probably see it in your head, so what's stopping you from making the leap?

I absolutely hate software to the point where I started converting from sysadmin to becoming more like a dev. That way I could just write my own implementations at will. Easier said than done, that's for sure. And it goes both ways.

I think that in order to be a good dev, you need these skills the most:
- Problem solving skills
- Creativity, you're making stuff
- Logical reasoning
- Connecting the dots
- Reading complex documentation
- Breaking down said documentation
- A strong desire to create order and patterns
- ...

If you don't have the above, you may still be able to become a dev.. but it would be harder for sure, and in some cases acceptance will be lower (seriously, learn to Google!)

One thing I don't think you need in development is mathematics. Sure there's a correlation between it and logic reasoning, but you're not solving big mathematical monsters here. At most you'd probably be dealing with arrays and loops (well.. program logic).

Also, written and spoken English! The language of the internet must be known. If it's not your first language, learn it. All the good (and crucial) documentation out there is in English after all.

One final thing would be security in my opinion, since you're releasing your application to the internet and may even run certain services, and deal with a lot of user data. Making those things secure takes some effort and knowledge on security, but it's so worth it. At the most basic level, it requires a certain mindset: "how would I break this thing I just made?"

!rant real talk though.

I am frustrated. Lately i have been having a slow time on the job, and it somehow dulled me down a lot.

In games you often have to think about transforms and rotations and offsets and hell knows what else.

I am usually pretty good at 3d object manipulation, it's one of those IQ test skills i generally score well on.

However lately i have not been able to come up with jack shit, i am simply unable to coherently think through a set of positioning and rotation changes to aquire the correct outcome for a mechanic and it pisses me off.

I have to fall back to slow as all hell trial and error and i don't even know what to do otherwise. It's been months now, do i have brain cancer or some shit? Arrrrrrg!

Sometimes i want to erase all my programing skills to learn it all over again, it felt great when i instructed computer to do something, rather these days i'm asked to make computer do something, first hello world was nothing but that i what i wanted to do 😊

Curious. What's your definition of a full stack developer?

Is it just about knowing all necessary languages? Does it also include various business oriented soft-skills? What about handling server and stuffs?

It is a new term I have been seeing a lot lately (especially after 2016, if I'm not wrong). Of course, I could google and look for the answers but I prefer to know devrant community edition 😀

There's this online game I like to play, basically you can play against 2 or 3 other people / robots. It's been free to play for almost a decade, but recently they decided to limit how many games you can play each day, unless you buy membership. It's not much, about 2€ per month, so I bought it to support the devs, they're doing good work and they're not spamming players with ads, so they need to get money for those servers somewhere.

But now I kinda regret it; there used to be a whole lot of casual players online all the time, now casual players reach their daily limit and when I log on in the evening, there are almost exclusively paying members left, giving you absolute shit for the tiniest mistakes.

On a completely unrelated note, what casual / relaxing multiplayer games would you recommend that don't require too much thinking & long-term skills?

!Rant
Do you guys know any website that challenges​ you into coding little programs (for me, php) to solve problems ?
I mean, it would be to train my skills with actual kind of real world problems, not just hello worlds or simple "how-to" codes.

I signed up to a contest recently and I felt really dumb not to be able to find solutions faster or with more efficiency (FYI : I was ranked 1049/2300 all languages included :( )

many many times in the past I had this impostor syndrome in various situations but I never lost faith in my dev skills!

you have to be humble to realise that this situations are fine and that you will learn something from it (not necessarily tech things, but also how life works). Also you have to realise that development as everything else in life is just never ending learning endeavour! When you accept all of that, impostor syndrome goes away forever.

It's been around 3 years since I felt like impostor for the last time because I accepted who I am as a person.

It crawled up on me last week in a different way - I was thinking of myself - what if I am just really good at googling things and understanding how those things work but I am also very capable problem solver so I can understand the principle and apply it to my code.

Then I realised - ok, that's what programmers do! So that's the story of how the impostor syndrome actually become confirmation syndrome!

Folks, believe in yourself, be forgiving to yourself as we all were there, give yourself some time as people don't become good developers overnight - and this is OK.

full of contradiction.

If u try freelancing nobody would pay you shit coz theres always someone who'd do it for 100$.

If you do get a good budget freelance project, any Dev you'd consider outsourcing to to split the work with will ask for more than the project is worth.

There's a lot of competition but it's basically made up of

- people from fancy universities who dont know shit coz they think their degree is worth something on its own and expect high salaries off the bat.

- people who figured out the first group are idiots and tried to self learn, so they joined bootcamps that spoon fed them some Laravel and React and now think they are high tier engineers but may not even know their way around a bash terminal

- people who actually know their shit, went through hell to get the skills they have now, could probably spin up a startup on their own

group 3 all left the country tho

I am working for one of the FAANGs. I will soon be completing 4 years in industry. For me I should be an level 2 developer or at least working for level 2.
In my current company I don't think I will get promoted this soon and also, switching internally might now benefit as if I will switch my work at the company won't give me enough feedback to get promoted soon in the new team.
I am thinking of switching to some other company with a level 2 position and work at that level.
Should I continue working at FAANG as it has a nice name and all or switch to some other company with a promotion to grow my skills.

Even at my current company I am. learning a lot but the promotion is an issue.

So the other day my car broke down and since the shop wanted a lot of money I asked a friend of mine who knowns his way around cars for help.
Just when we finished repairing it I was like "whenever the Zombie apocalypse starts you'll be really useful, me instead won't be since no one might need computers anymore" . His response was epic:
"Nah, you will simply build a terminator with your computer skills and it will kill all Zombies!"
Now I am actually looming forward to the Zombie apocalypse!

TL;DR: us geeks will build terminators in case of zombies!

I think some of my co-workers see me as real life human version of Google search engine.

Hope they would understand that just because I'm little bit more up to date in tech knowledge and an accidental Google nerd doesn't make me a know it all..

But i understand their tendency to trust my recommendation over their googling skills

They want me to find

1- best freelancing website
2- best platform or service for someone who wants to do online teaching

Results that I'm aware of:

1- freelancer, guru, upwork
2- YouTube, udemy, Pluralsight, skillshare, thinkific

Any other recommendations?

Watching the small interpreter that I am building compile and run as I want it to is my big highlight, I am working on a project that a lot of people will hate really (I am trying to bring back VBScript for the web, but adding a ton of shit to it to make it a proper PHP alternative, this is a side project really)

But before that? Understanding the neckbeard rants in hacker news, legit, I used to browse there trying to find perspective of what experts would think, would not understand shit, eventually, skills came (and so did the degree) and I was able to fully understand them and even interact with them.

that also squandered all notions of impostor syndrome.

While in Mec engineering university program I was in a robocup team (small robots playing soccer against an other team of robots using AI).

I designed the mechanical structure of the robots. After 2 years of development (while all those years our goal was to participate in the upcoming international tournament) we realized the software part of the project was mismanaged and really far behind. I couldn't accept that and learned how to code over night. Couldn't let the project I put so much time in die because of someone else.

With the help of others that came from other backgrounds than software, we made it the to tournament and the following two others after this one.

Now my job involves programming more than standard mec engineering. It also pushed me to do a masters in robotics in which I developed my coding skills even more.

Dads of DevRant: Will I ever be able to work on personal projects again? I have a half-complete project that was going really well, that I have immense enthusiasm and drive for, but I just can't get to it, kids/family takes up 100% of my time & it's honestly depressing me. I'm finally at a stage in my career/skills where I could complete this; the technicals and business are all within my grasp, but I've fucked myself by having a family, my life isn't mine any more, I gave it up. Not their fault. But will it ever get better? Maybe someone out there understands this pain; nobody around me does, I keep it inside.

The guy who leads the Objective Programming classes/labs told us that we have to make a game or an app to pass this semester.

I was so hyped, I've instantly started reading up on creating a 2D engine in C++ (which I don't like as much as C# but that was his conditions).

..as soon as I've created base for the engine, he said that the first version has to be console based.. so I'm like - okay, how do I show my 2D _graphical_ engine in a console?
So I came up with showing basic vector maths like movement towards a bearing angle and whatnot.

..now I've been pointed out that we are supposed to make a documentation, except it's supposed to contain info on ALL libraries and ALL classes our project will have.. which is insane, how can one predict what he'll need to accomplish the task? You can only know the half of the things you'll need, unless the project is way too simple.

I'm just plain annoyed, because this whole 'wow, I can showoff my mad skills' turned into 'wow, I have to do shit the tedious way and I'm already crying that I've picked a 2D engine and not a simpleton game like crosses and circles.

Somehow I keep thinging that dyson is judging my cooking skills when I see this, all I smell is spices and herbs but nooooooo

Mr air quality do not approve

First of all sorry for the bad picture. Let's move on...
Deleting this method like:
Who the hell did this nonsense?
I just took a picture of it so I could post it here and rant about it.
Sure felt stupid after deleting it for not thinking about a protected method in the parent class that is part of an API.
So... Yeah....
I was feeling too confident in my skills lately anyway

I only finished my CS degree last year but while I was a student and after I got my degree I went for a few interviews and none of the companies really asked me what degree I have or didn't ask at all, some just asked what I was studying. All of the companies asked what I can do and what my skills are. If I can do it, they were happy to hire me even if I didn't have a degree.

So to answer the question, a degree is not useful if you still don't know how to program (for example) or if you don't know your field well. If you are good at what you do, you will earn crazy money with or without a degree.

I know a few people that don't have a CS degree but their programming skills are crazy good...probably much better than a uni graduate with a CS degree.

What have I been working absolutely all fucking day? FUCKING PRINTERS. I am so fucking tired of printers, everything to do with the stupid pieces of shit.

Then, some fuck stain has called me 6 times in the last hour trying to get me to drop all the things I’m doing and make him priority #1... Even though it has nothing to do with the computer and everything to do with the lack of fucking skills he has to preform his god damn job.

For fuck sakes, FUCK OFF!

I have been coding for 2 years, 1 month at a company

Teammate1 has been coding for a year, a genius, learns everything in a week, knows all major js frameworks, refuses to adhere to any rules except no rebase on pushed (luckily)

Teammate2 has been coding for a year, learns slowly, very reliable, has no common sense at all

Teammate3 the designer, really has the skills but always busy, never has time for a meeting, gets very mad if it looks different from her original plan.

We're all college students short of money so they all want to work for clients. I don't have the leadership skills / charisma for this.

I do not have the capacity to look for a job. I hate trial-and-error, I can't lie and I suck at talking to people in all but a cooperative context. I'm a decent webdev and I'm willing to learn, but to be able to do it I need skills that I don't have and I wouldn't need.

I learned coding the best way: While getting paid. I was an Excel junkie (still consider myself as one) and a colleague taught me PHP. This gave me the skills to apply for real programming jobs. Eventually I was hired at a company as a PHP developer who would need to be flexible enough to transition into a C# developer within the next 6 months. It wasn't easy, but after about 8 months and a 1-week course later I was programming in C# .NET with grace. Not looking back at PHP now at all. Naturally, today I can apply for a whole bunch of different jobs that I definitely could not three years ago.

I have the dearth of good programmers to thank for this of course and I am grateful every moment when I understand how lucky I've been.

Yo guys, all the ranting aside, I just wanted to remind you that you ALWAYS have a choice, that you should speak up when something bothers you for too long and that you should be aware about all your strengths and unique skills! Just as a reminder ✌️

My company uses a management software to store all sorts of documents. A colleague wanted to test their API.

In a meeting with management he reported that a backup of all receipts was done in a couple of minutes.

They initially thought he had download the files one by one using the browser interface and copy/paste to individual folders... Mad mouse skills my colleague has 🖱

I’ve done it again. I started a new online business thinking that some out of the box solutions would work for managing it. Turns out, in spite of my initial thinking that I had covered the bases, it turns out that none of those solutions fully matches my business requirements. So now I have to either rely on my own wits and poor coding skills to roll my own solution or spend money I don’t have to pay someone smarter than me to code my vision all while hoping I’ll find enough customers to recover the cost. What was I thinking?!

Top do-over... I was extraordinary in biology and microbiology. For some reason, I still remember every little detail, everything that I was learning regarding it felt so natural and easy for me. My heart was pulling me to IT, in the end, I become an average, okayish IT guy, with reasonable programming, networking, and other IT skills, but I had to suffer the hell out of studying to reach here. I never was in love with biology, but damn, it frustrates the heck out of me that I'm so freaking good at it... So, my do-over would be to go all-in with Biology.

Just did my interview with Turing & OMG!

2 questions, total of 30 mins to answer both questions, and there's a dude with access to your screen, camera & microphone watching your every move.

Went horribly. Utter failure. Not expecting to hear back from them.

Questions weren't related to the skills I said I had. They were general questions that could be answered in any language. I honestly wasn't ready to write code to split an array of numbers into 3 equal parts whose values when added would equal.

FML. Fuck this shit. I'm tired of all the bullshit (mine included)!

Quitting nicotine and caffeine and all the letters on the screen are fucked up. How have I made it this far without killing myself? Nobody actually wants to be around me anymore and I’m haunted by my isolation. Fading skills and fading life force.

thinking about getting a laracasts subscribtion, is it worth it at all? I've recently been working with PHP a lot, and my OOP skills are pretty narrow tbh, I wanted to learn more OOP and laravel, because there are a lot of job's that require you laravel knowledge.

Hmm.. I've noticed a trend in teams at companies: they always seem to have similar personalities, rather than similar skills.

For example, if the team leader is a pathetic, pretentious, sarcastic, frigid, lifeless loser who pretends he's happy, then he usually has a herd of equally pathetic and frigid losers following him. I notice that every time I apply to a company that has such a group, they instantly disqualify me as a member. Interesting, interesting..

The same goes for a company that has down-to-earth people like myself, then the team is usually a down-to-earth manager and down-to-earth, warm-hearted colleagues.

It all makes sense now.

When you apply to a job and almost, but not quite, have all the skills needed.

Whelp! Time to get my Google on!

Reasons to NOT be a dev sounds rather negative so I'd like to propose 3 things that you need to BE a dev as to frame it in a positive light:

- When a problem peaks your interest you want to solve it, you may even be obsessed by it.
- You enjoy learning, not necessarily enjoy school, just enjoy learning new things (even better if it's by your own means)
- Failure may get you down, but you learn and don't give up until you have exhausted all paths to success.

You may need other skills like math, logic and reasoning abilities, being able to handle deadlines, attention to detail, and cope with stress. I've seen people being crap at all of those and if they have the former 3 they, in time, will hone the others enough to make them a productive dev.

No need to be a 9-9-6 code monkey willing to be squeezed by Big Corp for massive profits and a low salary or a 1337 purist coder that only focuses on the crafting side of developing software. That may make you a great coder but not a well rounded developer or individual. Remember, you program machines but you are NOT one.

Loosing faith...

Interesting question.

I don't think skills have something to do with faith.

If you don't know something, ask someone who does.

Even If I cannot solve a problem or deem a problem unsolvable, I usually don't doubt myself.

There are rare moments where I throw a fit, but that's not loosing faith, thats just being angry because my stubborn thick skull cannot make sense of it, which annoys me.

Might sound cocky, but in my opinion dev skills are not "do or die". Problem could be solved at a later time, maybe never. Who cares?

Loosing faith would mean to me that I define myself in some way on the ability to solve sth that doesn't have to be solved at all.

XD

After all, if it doesn't work, I don't give a fuck.

*Cheers*.

It’s very annoying that at my school we barely get any coding at all and to top it off it’s in a typing class using block coding. Considering it’s in a TYPING class you’d think they’d’ve used their typing skills to use but no, they instead use block coding meant for like 4th graders. This is why I say we need more coding classes in schools. Not only that but make it more mainstream

"The Phoenix project" alternative ending:

Bill Palmer manages to avert disaster with heroic efforts, working 18 hours per day for weeks.
His wife files for divorce. He starts to sleep at office, next to the servers room.
At the last moment a huge hacker attack almost destroys everything, but he finally manages to announce that Phoenix is ready on time, security auditing passed and any kind of great improvements.

Steve, the CEO, calls him and says: "are you crazy? we put you on an impossible project with short notice to make you fail! All our investors have been secretly short selling our stocks, so now they are waiting a big failure to cash in. We also paid korean hackers to bring you on your knees. But you are really stubborn! "

All Phoenix Project is rolled back, huge shit happens, stocks fall, investors ripe great benefits. All IT is outsourced to an external company (owned by members of the board)

Bill is fired. His reputation tainted by the failure, he can't find job anymore. his technical skills and knowledge are out of date.
As he didn't have time to take care of divorce he has lost also all his personal wealth.

He writes a book about his experience, well, actually a rant, but the company sues him forcing him to pay more money.

In the final scene, police arrests him, drunk while trying to burn a server farm with matches.

Being drunk I keep thinking I can't get back the years I didn't spend programming when I was 16-20. What do now? Want to do Web but all I know is a micro part of everything. I can make a demo in old Unity. I have shitty basic skills in Java, Python, Pascal, JS + React. Also basic UX, Adobe design programs like AI, PS and ID. Nothing proper, and home projects just don't seem to cut it. Irl bards can't get no work

There was a rant earlier of someone working a 9 to 5 job now which i can't seem to find, wanted to answer in regards to wk26

They were complaining about it being a boring job with boring processes and not learning anything new..

you can't say that you haven't learned something new, i bet you haven't learned a new language or technology but there are plenty of other skills to be picked up from a company that have worked for this all their lives..

I mean, these kind of companies have either seen it all already and had tons of bad experiences they are trying to avoid, or then never experienced any of them but are still trying to avoid them.

I once worked for a Japanese company in Europe. All decisions (big or small) were taken by answering with the phrase : If it isn't broken, don't fix it. As a result they had an excel with over 64k complaints in them (1 row per complaint) and their website was running on 19 Sun servers, load balanced, using php 4.2 because the technology was just too old.

Point being, plenty of things to learn, getting new experiences, even if they are bad, at least now you know, how not to do things in a certain way, but all in all, working at different places, even bad ones, gives you perspective..

And perspective is important.
Perspective is experience.
It's the bit that glues the knowledge together.

Go out and explore, don't be afraid, everyone needs bad experiences, even if it was only so we can identify the good ones.

My college years was actually quite helpful.

I'm from a college that value academic proficiency over industrial skills. There are only 2-3 courses top that are focusing more on coding or software development. The others are theoretical and focus more on the math behinds everything (with fun projects tho, so they are not boring at all).

The importance is that, you could easily learn coding and software dev practice from good examples in your workplace, probably way better what you can get in college. But chances are that our daily job rarely touches hardcore algorithm and mathematical principal behind. Where when you actually need it (bi-weekly scenario), your knowledge and research experience in college comes to play.

And of course, by all means, that was an enjoyable college life!

Was hiring a front-end dev once. Job ad was for basic html/css and graphic design skills. Perfect part-time job for intern or high school kid to get their feet wet. Boss sits in on interview and after I asked all the necessary questions related to position, boss starts asking him programming related questions similar to my position. (php, Mysql, apis, managing vps, custom shopping cart code )

Way to drop a bomb on a kid who is potentially interested in working here.

I'm getting pretty tired of all those fuck faces calling themselves "evangelists" and are talking constantly and euphorically about "digitalisation" and "industry 4.0", as if their "skills" (using a smartphone to share kitten videos and making pointless PowerPoint slides using stock images showing some stupid motherfucker with VR goggles making weird gestures) would help them to rise to the pinnacle of "the future" (as conceived by them), while those stupid shit heads are exactly those we'll get rid of first as soon as somebody develops a bullshit generator AI for technobabble (with an export function to PowerPoint), putting those morons out of business for good.

It's going to be a tough week at home. We'd have to leave our house and find new accommodation. And I just find solace in the fact that, at least, I'm a developer and when all the dust is settled, I can earn enough to get out of this mess.

Special thanks to my best friend who supported me as I spent my college time trying to build my development skills!

Yo vim what the fuckin fuck.

I like vim, i try to use it as much as possible since i feel more confident with just using a keyboard BUT WHAT THE FUCK.

I am developing an application to improve my python skills and I chose vim to do so. I made some “big” changes today to it using vim. Every time i made a change that i had to test, i was saving it with :w and then running it on my second screen. All good until now.

Then i wanted to make a minor change using vscode because i thought it will be easier there. Anyway, i used :x, opened vscode AND MY CHANGES WERE REVERTED to the first condition my file was when I opened it today.

Vim is awesome, maybe it was all my bad, but how the hell did that even happen?

Went to boarding school in England and our physics/maths teacher was a Cambridge graduate. Real bad sense of humor, probably took a bath once a month and wore the same suit all year. Skinny, glasses, clean shaven and ate Marmite and boiled eggs every day. Poster child for nerd world but boy did this guy help advance my math skills and love for physics.

I tried to apply to TrippleByte just to see if I could get a job through them...
Their tests are soo hard imo
It's not like I lack skills in programming its just that they require you to have a VERY varied background and only give you about a min to answer each question which can take a slow code reader that long to read without having even processed what the answer may be ;u;

This isn't making me feel good about my white boarding skills since I have yet to be in one of those. I'mma need all the help I can get @_@

Last internship : I learned modern opengl, libav and ffmpeg. I even was the only dev on some big contracts. Was a fucking cool internship because I learned everything I wanted to. But my manager had really low social skills. So been able to teach myself all of that was a good thing for everybody, but not for him. When the internship was over I got the worst mark of my promotion for the business with for comment that I didn't enough ask for help Oo wtf dude. Still get the best final markof the promotion and the only one who didn't work on web technologies :p but fuck you should have tell me sooner man...

Meeting for a warehouse job, where computer skills were required...
Worked 9 months there.
Me and boss was fired, he had very personal Wird ideias... And cause was a know it all never asked, never researched...
His ideia: take work from the office by giving werehouse employees full access to clients...
Best compensation I ever got by behing fired... And gained my worst enemy.

I was moved from a team I loved where I felt my tech leads were competent, where my tech leads valued my skills and my manager was fabulous and excelled at making sure everyone had the resources they needed and was rewarded for good work, to a team where my tech leads are inconpetent and constantly treat all the junior devs with condescension. Additonally, although my new manager seems nice and has good intentions, she is focused too much on the results of work and not the morale of her team. Consequently, she consistently ignores the negative feedback that is given about the tech leads because "the tech lead gets the results"

I brought this up before, but what’s with these claims of getting a job after learning to code for a few months? Can this profession be learned that quickly? Am I just dumb for taking years to get my degrees and land a great paying development job and gaining skills and experience to become proficient? My self esteem takes a huge hit after reading these things but what they leave out is whether these jobs are internships, how much they were paid, where they worked etc.

Sorry, just a little incoherent and cranky bc i slept for just a few hours due to a toothache. I’m not blaming these people at all, I’m just kinda questioning my abilities atm

You know something's truly off when you're being challenged for all the wrong reasons. When all it seems you ever do is apply a band-aid every time instead of making the time to fix it properly and for good. Or when the people who should be making your work easier to do instead suggest new tools and features to integrate into your workflow or project because they plug the holes in their management process and can ignore the leaks for the time being.

I need to push myself out of this place and ramp up my skills and update my personal projects so I can prove myself capable and move on to a better employer. Because I'm starting to hate the stopgap short-term approach that keeps getting shoehorned into our work, and only proceeds to make us look bad even if it's the whims of our bosses causing it in the first place.

Thanks for reading.

I remember learning how to program 5-6 years ago. It was completely broken. All of these “courses” just teach the syntax of a language. They usually don’t even teach how it works or what it’s used for. Knowing the syntax is great and all, but what’s important is learning to apply it to solve problems.

A lot of other basic things are often overlooked as well. For example, introducing a text editor and the command line would have been incredibly valuable.

For a long while I was using online editors and logging the output of functions instead of actually making projects.

I’m glad I kind of created my own way of learning: by making projects. Just hopping into something was the best way to learn from me. If I got stuck, I’d simply look it up. As a result, I was able to actually apply my skills to learn.

I hate web development
I mean why it has to be everywhere and so important.
I joined college my friend calls 4 days before my quantum physics test. Asks if I wanted to do internship. My reply sure.
( Level of knowledge at that time no idea what API is, what react is but it's just making webpages ) made a nice homepage within 4 hours of YouTube 2 tutorials and 2 developing that. Friend appreciated his manager also liked.
But failed to deliver the complete e-commerce website's frontend.

Comes next, hackathon nothing related to Android specific( I like coding for Android) need webdev in one way or other. One senior asks if want to go together sees my GitHub and rejects politely by my skills ( I would have too).
Went on with my 2 more friends with thought of making an all Android app guys team, next week team breaks. I then got offer from a friend to join with them in web development I agreed now prepare for web development.
Team was rejected internal politics of organizers ( would take no all fresher's team).

Dropped learning webd.
Now started flutter and it feels good and comfortable but stability isn't permanent.

Now seeing GSoC
Sigh...Most requirements are for web , hacktober fest also had things related to web maybe I don't recall. Still thinking about it sigh...

Got selected for college app development team. The head had to be one with excellent webd skills.

Now college provides funding for projects and ideas, prototype requires making prototype. Most easiest thing to work on
.
.
.
.
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web development.

Some times I like to think what would I do with my life if suddenly all electronics stopped working...

It's scary as shit, but I think I would survive. I have some other skills (wood working and construction).

Would you?

I've been editing sound effects, animations, image assets, creating things from scratch if I don't have what I need, all while I am hired as a software engineer.

We are supposedly an interactive contents company, while we have only two designers (none of which specializes in software design) for half a dozen projects, no sound engineer, and no animator.

I've been using Krita and Audacity as much as VS Code these days - my hobby skills I never thought would use in a professional environment. I wonder how did my predecessors work, surely not every software engineer also happens to be a hobbyist artist.

Recruiters on LinkedIn:

"Apologies for this direct approach, I'm sure you're not looking right now and get messages like this all the time, but I have this opportunity that I think you'd be perfect for.

It's not in a language you know or a framework you're even aware of, but I know you're right for the job. It's not anywhere near you either. Hell, it's not even on the same planet as you, but fuck it, let's give it a whirl!

If you think this right for you, or not, just call me and we can talk some more about this (even though I have no idea what THIS is!). If not, forward this on to 1000 other people or you will be eaten by a dinosaur tomorrow!

To be honest, I don't really know who you are or what your skills are. I'm just spamming you through InMail.

Laters, Nerd!"

Is it me or is Software Development basically just Web Development?

I don't hate web development, in fact, I'm learning to become a web dev myself, but everywhere I look, everyone is a web developer.

When looking for a job all the requirements describe skills that are commonly associated with a web developer role despite the title saying Software Developer, all the developer communities I visit are filled with web developers and web dev topics, any topics pertaining to other fields of software development are close to non-existent, and when I go looking into resources for learning the Web Development courses and paths are much more well-supported than other fields.

At first, I was thinking of becoming an Android dev than maybe later learn some web dev but it looks like it would be a better idea to become a web developer since it would be much easier to ingratiate myself into the communities, find resources, communicate with other developers, find a job and I could even use the web dev skills to make mobile apps or apps outside of the web.

Should I stick with Web Dev or continue learning Android?

I feel like it might be a tiny bit (not much) better among React developers, but I ended up within one of those enterprise Angular till death companies, and it seems like nobody would ever doubt their Typescript skills, yet nobody actually understands Typescript at all.

In theory, I love Typescript. But you can abuse it to a point where it's almost as painful to work with as normal JavaScript.

It's not that I'm a master of Typescript.
But while I feel like I'm the only one understanding the mental model behind Typescript and also get stuff like mapped types or why you might wanna replace your enums with as const assertions, the rest calls themselves Typescript developers in their CV, no doubt. But It's way to easy to write whatever Typescript, while it's not as easy to reel get the hang of it.

Sometimes I feel like I don't improve as a developer. I'm referring to the net amount of information that must be flowing into my head on any given day just to keep up with it all. As soon as I focus on, say, upgrading my CSS skills, I lose track of new developments in, say, jQuery, or any of dozens of other things I need to stay on top of. I don't improve. I just stay afloat.

Head hunters reaching out with a "position that might intrest you".. with a stack of skills that are not on my CV at aaaaall

Also Headhunters after answering back: oh you have only 1 year experience with that tool? They want at least 3, goodbye.

All just a phishing scam to get u to give them an updated CV version.. no real "relevant position" in sight. Smh.

how am i supposed to be interested in a company if they list all the requirements of what skills i HAVE TO HAVE, they list EVERYTHING except HOW MUCH FKING MONEY THEY PAY?

Reading code takes time!

Everytime I read:
"var" or "auto" Add: 10s
- Just use the type

Everytime I read:
if(Expression1 && Expression() ? GetNumber() : 0 > 0) Add: 30s
- Just write two if statements or create two bools the line above.

Everytime I read:
delegate = () => {} Add another 5 minutes of reading time.
- Just write a separate function for it. It helps with searching and understand what it does

Please code like the person that needs to check your code or change it just knows basic coding skills and logics.

I do know all these concepts I just never use them because it makes the code unreadable. hard to follow, mistakes that can happen everywhere. difficult to search.

And it frustrates that I need to read 10 extra lines to understand code flow or hover my mouse in an IDE to figure out what type object it is.

It's properly just me... I just like clean readable code. that is logical and failsafe and strict and deterministic with its behavior

Having developer skills comes sometimes in handy in certain situations.

In my case I visited a new website but first I had to choose their cookies.. but.. it was a list of about 150 radio buttons (150 advertisers), I shit you not.
And so I was like: "No, I refuse to click each one of them". I kept thinking.. hm.. how am I going to do a mass-toggle-off? And then it hit me: if the button "toggle all" toggles all buttons.. then that means if I invert the logic of the call, it means I will turn them all off! And it worked.. it was something like: "toggleAll(!-1)" and I did "toggleAll(0)".

That sure saved me some time! Oh yeah and there are of course other situations when you don't want to use a scraper for getting all the;. I don't know.. menu links out of a page. Console > import jQuery > select all elements with 'a' and text() on their DOM node! It can be done with native JavaScript as well document.getElementsById() but yeah, there are plenty of examples.

Hooray for being a developer!

After all this time, I've finally managed to apply my programming skills in my day situation (thing I really wanted to happen).

A website had a block of text reeeally long and I couldn't select it all. Grabbed my terminal, opened vim and did a program to grab that block of text and save it into a file. Ran it and worked perfectly. I mean, isn't the best thing I've ever done but I feel very proud of myself. :)