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Manager: Good news everyone, I made a big giant announcement this morning that the app upgrades will be released today!
Dev: They definitely won’t be, we need another 2 weeks minimum. I told you yesterday
Manager: Ok well I already made the announcement that today was the day so too bad for you.
Dev: Doesn’t change the state of things
Manager: 😡 This announcement is supposed to motivate you to work faster! You guys are making me look bad when you don’t support me like this!
Dev: Working as fast as we can, it’s a 2 person dev team for 4 separate applications so it’s quite a bit to get pushed through
Manager: Ok well then stay extra then, we have to get this out asap. Tell your spouses they are not going to be seeing much of you until this work is done. People are starting to ask questions!!!!!
Dev: Not my problem, it’s done when its done. I’m not staying extra.
Manager: !!
// *************
Might be blowing my cover a little but what are they going to do? Fire me? Good luck getting this out without me. They’ve tried to replace me in the past but the cheapest person they could find was 60k more expensive than me and still couldn’t keep up. Probably they’ll ship the work overseas and the code will die in a dumpster fire and cost them even more. Ah well, just another company that doesn’t deserve code.21 -
#3 Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?
A 20-something dev, 'A', back in the early days of twitter+facebook would post all his extracurricular activities (drinking, partying, normal young-buck stuff). The dev mgr, 'J', at the time took offense because he felt 'A' was making the company look bad, so 'A' had a target on his back. Nothing 'A' did was good enough and, for example, 'J' had the source control czars review 'A's code to 'review' (aka = find anything wrong). Not sorting the 'using' statements, and extra line after the closing }, petty things like that. For those curious, orders followed+carried out by+led by 'T' in my previous rant.
As time went on and 'T' finding more and more 'wrong' with A's code, 'J' put A on disciplinary probation. 'A' had 90 days to turn himself around, or else.
A bright spot was 'A' was working on a Delphi -> C# conversion, so a lot of the code would be green-field development and by simply following the "standards", 'A' would be fine...so he thought.
About 2 weeks into the probation, 'A' was called into the J's office and berated because the conversion project was behind schedule, and if he didn't get the project back on track, 'A' wouldn't make it 30 days. I sat behind 'A' and he unloaded on me.
<'A' slams his phone on his desk>
Me: "Whoa...whats up?"
A: "Dude, I fucking hate this place, did you hear what they did?"
<I said no, then I think we spent an hour talking about it>
Me: "That all sucks. Don't worry about the code. Nobody cares what T thinks. Its not even your fault the project is behind, the DBAs are tasked with upgrades and it's not like anyone is waiting on you. It'll get done when it's done. Sounds like a witch hunt, what did you do? Be honest."
A: "Well, um...I kinda called out J, T, and those other assholes on facebook. I was drunk, pissed, and ...well...here we are."
Me: "Geez, what a bunch of whiney snowflakes. Keep your head down and you'll get thru it, or don't. Its not like you couldn't find another job tomorrow."
A: "This is my first job out of college and I don't want to disappoint my dad by quitting. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing. All J told me was to get better. What the fuk does that even mean?"
Me: "He didn't give you any goals? Crap, for someone who is a stickler for the rules, that's low, even for J."
Fast forward 2 weeks, I was attending MS TechEd and I was with another dev mgr, R.
R: "Did you hear? We had to let 'A' go today."
Me: "What the hell? Why?"
R: "He couldn't cut it, so we had to let him go."
Me: "Cut what? What did he do, specifically?"
R: "I don't know, 'A' was on probation, I guess he didn't meet the goals."
Me: "You guess? We fire a developer working on a major upgrade and you guess? What were these so-called goals?"
R: "Whoa...you're getting a little fire up. I don't know, maybe not adhering to coding standards, not meeting deadlines?"
Me: "OMG...we fire people for not forming code? Are you serious!?"
R: "Oh...yea...that does sound odd when you put it that way. I wish I'd talk to you before we left on this trip"
Me: "What?! You knew they were firing him *before* we left? How long did you know this was happening?"
R: "Honestly, for a while. 'A' really wasn't a team player."
Me: "That's dirty, the whole thing is dirty. We've done some shitty things to people, but this is low, even for J. The probation process is meant to improve, not be used as a witch hunt. I don't like that you stood around and let it happen. You know better."
R: "Yea, you're right, but doesn't change anything. J wanted to do it while most of us were at the conference in case 'A' caused a scene."
Me: "THAT MAKES IT WORSE! 'A' was blindsided and you knew it. He had no one there that could defend him or anything."
R: "Crap, crap, crap...oh crap...jeez...J had this planned all along...crap....there is nothing I can do no...its too late."
Me: "Yes there is. If 'A' comes to you for a letter of recommendation, you write one. If someone calls for reference, you give him a good one."
R: "Yea..yea...crap...I feel like shit...I need to go back to the room and lie down."
As the sun sets, it rises again. Within a couple of weeks, 'A' had another job at a local university. Within a year, he was the department manager, and now he is a vice president (last time I checked) of a college in Kansas City, MO.11 -
Root: Fleshes out missing data in some factories. Tests affected code and finds the change breaks some specs (but shouldn’t).
Root: Reaches out to spec author.
Root: Messages thundercunt (the ticket’s code reviewer) on slack about the specs and the reaching out. No response.
Root: Works on another ticket while blocked.
Root: Logs off.
Root: Talks with spec author chick in the morning. Decide to pair on specs later.
TC: Still no slack response.
Root: Gives update in standup. Mentions factories and broken specs. Mentions pairing with spec chick.
TC: Still no slack response.
Root: Pulled off tickets in favor of prod issue. Gets ignored by everyone else diagnosing prod issue. Investigates prod issue by herself. Discovers prod issue isn’t from bad code, but bad requirements — code works as requested. Communicates this with details. Gets ignored by people still diagnosing prod issue. Tries again. Gets ignored. Gives up. Works on non-blocked tickets instead.
TC: Still no slack response.
Hours later:
TC: Comments on PR telling me I broke specs (how did I not notice?), that I need to reach out to spec chick and work with her, and that I can’t resolve the ticket until it’s fixed and passes code review.
TC: Still no slack response. (21 hours later at this point)
TC: Logs off. Still no response (25 hours at this point)
———
Ignoring the prod issue for the moment…
I broke specs. No shit.
I need to talk with spec chick. No shit.
I can’t resolve the ticket. No shit!
Bitch, I told you all of this 21 fucking hours prior, and again 3 hours prior during standup. But no, I clearly “don’t communicate” and obviously have no bloody clue what I’m doing, either, so I need everything spelled out for me.
And no, I didn’t resolve the fucking ticket. Why the fuck would I if it still has pending changes? Do you even check? Ugh!
And what the fuck with that prod issue? I’m literally giving you the answer. fucking listen! Stupid cunts.
Why is it all of the women I work with are useless or freaking awful people? Don’t get me wrong, many of the men are, too, but I swear it’s every single one of the women. (Am I awful, too?)
Just. Ugh.
I can’t wait to leave this sewer of a company.
Oddly still a good day, though. Probably because I talked to recruiters and sent out my resume again.16 -
In the darkest of days, I discovered how to remote login to my computer at work through the company vpn. I then proceeded to work overtime at night in secret for a week or so, writing documentation and refactoring code.
I finally woke the fuck up and realized that I shouldn't be obsessing over proprietary codebases that do not belong to me, and I should put this misguided energy into my own projects.
So yeah, as a bad dev habit I'm working on fixing, this fits the bill.4 -
expect([
row[‘blah’][0][1],
row[‘blah’][1][1],
row[’blah’][2][1],
row[‘blah’][3][1],
row[‘blah’][4][1],
]).to contain_exactly(
a.name(user), # “John doe”
c.name(user), # “John doe”
e.name(user), # “John doe”
b.name(user), # “John doe”
d.name(user), # “John doe”
)
(Note: The comments are mine.)
See the problem? No, not the ugly code (which is actually worse than what i posted here).
It’s using the same ridiculous getter (if you can call it that) that pulls a name out of the passed user object, and then expecting each row to have that name, in order. Not that order matters when they’re all the same.
Upon inspection, all objects created by the spec have the exact same name, so the above test passes (as long as there are 5 rows). It passes, but totally not because it should: those aren’t the objects that are actually in the table. All of the specs — all 22 of them — only check for that shared name on various rows, and no other data. And it’s not like this is the only issue, either.
Fuck me these are bad.
And this guy is a senior dev earning significantly more than me. Jesus what the fuck Christ.19 -
god i hate this company's product.
Visit merchant-facing sandbox -> 404. works after a refresh.
Log into sandbox with admin account -> redirects to a different signin url -> 500s -> signin no longer works.
wheeeeee!11 -
Senior colleagues insisting on ALWAYS returning HTTP status 200 and sticking any error codes in the contained JSON response instead of using 4×× or 5×× statuses.
Bad input? Failed connections? Missing authorization? Doesn't matter, you get an OK. Wanna know if the request actually succeeded? Fuck you, parse potential kilobytes of JSON to get to the error code!
Am I the asshole or is that defeating the purpose of a status code?!15 -
I'm a tech lead for a digital agency.
Digital agencies are universally known for being shite. Why? Because they typically push through sub-optimal code with very little testing over tiny deadlines for maximum profit. Maybe I've just had bad experiences but this is the 5th digital agency that I've worked at that does this bollocks.
I am currently sitting on a Teams call at 8:39pm because the fuckwit project/account managers are unable to face up to the big scary client and ask them terrifying questions like "Is this bug a blocker for the deployment?" or "We don't have enough time to fix/change these things, can we delay another day?". They just assume that A - We will work into the evening, and B - that all the issues are P1 and that we should all 'pull together' as 'team players' to get this done in time.
No, Me and my team have to work into the evening for seemingly free because these pricks can't do their jobs properly.
The funniest thing of all? When I speak to the CTO about overtime payment he tries to make me feel bad about "we don't typically pay for overtime..."
Fuck Everyone.
Time to find a new contract.11 -
What an absolute fucking disaster of a day. Strap in, folks; it's time for a bumpy ride!
I got a whole hour of work done today. The first hour of my morning because I went to work a bit early. Then people started complaining about Jenkins jobs failing on that one Jenkins server our team has been wanting to decom for two years but management won't let us force people to move to new servers. It's a single server with over four thousand projects, some of which run massive data processing jobs that last DAYS. The server was originally set up by people who have since quit, of course, and left it behind for my team to adopt with zero documentation.
Anyway, the 500GB disk is 100% full. The memory (all 64GB of it) is fully consumed by stuck jobs. We can't track down large old files to delete because du chokes on the workspace folder with thousands of subfolders with no Ram to spare. We decide to basically take a hacksaw to it, deleting the workspace for every job not currently in progress. This of course fucked up some really poorly-designed pipelines that relied on workspaces persisting between jobs, so we had to deal with complaints about that as well.
So we get the Jenkins server up and running again just in time for AWS to have a major incident affecting EC2 instance provisioning in our primary region. People keep bugging me to fix it, I keep telling them that it's Amazon's problem to solve, they wait a few minutes and ask me to fix it again. Emails flying back and forth until that was done.
Lunch time already. But the fun isn't over yet!
I get back to my desk to find out that new hires or people who got new Mac laptops recently can't even install our toolchain, because management has started handing out M1 Macs without telling us and all our tools are compiled solely for x86_64. That took some troubleshooting to even figure out what the problem was because the only error people got from homebrew was that the formula was empty when it clearly wasn't.
After figuring out that problem (but not fully solving it yet), one team starts complaining to us about a Github problem because we manage the github org. Except it's not a github problem and I already knew this because they are a Problem Team that uses some technical authoring software with Git integration but they only have even the barest understanding of what Git actually does. Turns out it's a Git problem. An update for Git was pushed out recently that patches a big bad vulnerability and the way it was patched causes problems because they're using Git wrong (multiple users accessing the same local repo on a samba share). It's a huge vulnerability so my entire conversation with them went sort of like:
"Please don't."
"We have to."
"Fine, here's a workaround, this will allow arbitrary code execution by anyone with physical or virtual access to this computer that you have sitting in an unlocked office somewhere."
"How do I run a Git command I don't use Git."
So that dealt with, I start taking a look at our toolchain, trying to figure out if I can easily just cross-compile it to arm64 for the M1 macbooks or if it will be a more involved fix. And I find all kinds of horrendous shit left behind by the people who wrote the tools that, naturally, they left for us to adopt when they quit over a year ago. I'm talking entire functions in a tool used by hundreds of people that were put in as a joke, poorly documented functions I am still trying to puzzle out, and exactly zero comments in the code and abbreviated function names like "gars", "snh", and "jgajawwawstai".
While I'm looking into that, the person from our team who is responsible for incident communication finally gets the AWS EC2 provisioning issue reported to IT Operations, who sent out an alert to affected users that should have gone out hours earlier.
Meanwhile, according to the health dashboard in AWS, the issue had already been resolved three hours before the communication went out and the ticket remains open at this moment, as far as I know.5 -
It's nice wanting to follow the best practice but many Java programmer have the bad habit to overdo it making lasagna code which causes painful headaches to who needs to maintain it afterwards. This is just a little sample of the "paranoia driven development" many does in my company.
17 -
The gym I go to has an app for user's to scan a QR code when they arrive and it has multiple HUGE issues.
This app shows the credit card info used for the direct debit without anything being redacted.
When the gym is signing up someone they give them a password so they can login, not too bad except the password is always the person's first name with the first letter capitalised.
This gets worse when you figure out that their is no way to change the password given to you AT ALL.
And just to top it all off, when you click the "Forgot Password" link on the login screen, the app just sends you an email with your password (your first name) in plain text.
The app also doesn't log you out or notify you if your login is used on a different device.
So I have tested this with 2 of my friends that go to the same gym and, with only knowing their email and first name (which I could have gotten from their email if I didn't know them), I can get into their app and see their credit card info without them being any the wiser.6 -
* Calls themselves "Software Engineer"
* Doesn't know what a thread is.
I swear these coding boot camps are churning out code monkeys whose real skill is building shitty React apps.
I believe a CS degree is necessary if you want to work on something more than CRUD applications.
Nothing against devs without degrees, but at least make an effort because my head will explode next time I have to explain to someone what a thread is and why it's a very bad idea to run blocking code on the main thread.27 -
I've told the same story multiple times but the subject of "painfully incompetent co-worker" just comes up so often.
I have one coworker who never really grew out of the mindset of a college student who just took "Intro to Programming". If a problem couldn't be solved with a textbook solution, then he would waste several weeks struggling with it until eventually someone else would pick up the ticket and finish it in a couple days. And if he found a janky workaround for a problem, he'd consider that problem "solved" and never think about it again.
He lasted less than a year before he quit and went off to get a job somewhere else, leaving the rest of our team to comb through his messy code and fix it. Unfortunately, our team is mostly split across multiple projects and our processes were kind of a mess until recently, so his work was a black box of code that had never been reviewed.
I opened the box and found only despair and regret. He was using deprecated features from older versions of the language to work around language bugs that no longer existed. He overused constants to a ridiculous degree (hundreds of constants, all of which are used exactly once in the entire codebase, stored in a single mutable map variable named "values" because why not). He didn't really seem to understand DRY at all. His code threw warnings in the IDE and had weird errors that were difficult to reproduce because there was just a whole pile of race conditions.
I ended up having to take a figurative hacksaw to it, ripping out huge sections of unnecessary crap and modernizing it to use recent language features to get rid of the deprecation warnings and intermittent errors. And then I went through the same process again for every other project he'd touched.
Good riddance. -
My level of frustration with Microsoft is growing to a point that I'm unable to contain it.
They buy Github, it was a great tool for developers because is FUCKING WORKED! New features were never beta tested on users unless they requested it.
Why in the absolute fuck am I getting all these new experimental bullshit features that literally make it harder for me to do my god damned job?
They provide me NOTHING but grief and sleepless weekends while I fix the god damned pipeline that's worked perfectly fine for YEARS.
Your business model is bad and your products are SHIT.
Fuck you Microsoft, I cannot even stress it enough. If I had a time machine that could go back 5 years and my options were: Tell the world about Covid, make sure Trump never became president, or stop the Github purchse. I would hunt down and brutally attack the team of executives that decided to buy Microsoft.
Words cannot adequately describe how much I want Microsoft to fuck off. If the company was a person and they died in a house fire it wouldn't be enough.
I just want a VCS that does what it's supposed to do. I don't need pipelines, I don't need image repos, I don't need static code analysis.
I JUST NEED A FUCKING VCS THAT CONTROLS VERSIONS OF SOFTWARE YOU IGNORANT FUCKS.
20 -
Worst collaboration experience story?
I was not directly involved, it was a Delphi -> C# conversion of our customer returns application.
The dev manager was out to prove waterfall was the only development methodology that could make convert the monolith app to a lean, multi-tier, enterprise-worthy application.
Starting out with a team of 7 (3 devs, 2 dbas, team mgr, and the dev department mgr), they spent around 3 months designing, meetings, and more meetings. Armed with 50+ page specification Word document (not counting the countless Visio workflow diagrams and Microsoft Project timeline/ghantt charts), the team was ready to start coding.
The database design, workflow, and UI design (using Visio), was well done/thought out, but problems started on day one.
- Team mgr and Dev mgr split up the 3 devs, 1 dev wrote the database access library tier, 1 wrote the service tier, the other dev wrote the UI (I'll add this was the dev's first experience with WPF).
- Per the specification, all the layers wouldn't be integrated until all of them met the standards (unit tested, free from errors from VS's code analyzer, etc)
- By the time the devs where ready to code, the DBAs were already tasked with other projects, so the Returns app was prioritized to "when we get around to it"
Fast forward 6 months later, all the devs were 'done' coding, having very little/no communication with one another, then the integration. The service and database layers assumed different design patterns and different database relationships and the UI layer required functionality neither layers anticipated (ex. multi-users and the service maintaining some sort of state between them).
Those issues took about a month to work out, then the app began beta testing with real end users. App didn't make it 10 minutes before users gave up. Numerous UI logic errors, runtime errors, and overall app stability. Because the UI was so bad, the dev mgr brought in one of the web developers (she was pretty good at UI design). You might guess how useful someone is being dropped in on complex project , months after-the-fact and being told "Fix it!".
Couple of months of UI re-design and many other changes, the app was ready for beta testing.
In the mean time, the company hired a new customer service manager. When he saw the application, he rejected the app because he re-designed the entire returns process to be more efficient. The application UI was written to the exact step-by-step old returns process with little/no deviation.
With a tremendous amount of push-back (TL;DR), the dev mgr promised to change the app, but only after it was deployed into production (using "we can fix it later" excuse).
Still plagued with numerous bugs, the app was finally deployed. In attempts to save face, there was a company-wide party to celebrate the 'death' of the "old Delphi returns app" and the birth of the new. Cake, drinks, certificates of achievements for the devs, etc.
By the end of the project, the devs hated each other. Finger pointing, petty squabbles, out-right "FU!"s across the cube walls, etc. All the team members were re-assigned to other teams to separate them, leaving a single new hire to fix all the issues.5 -
"A good software developer writes good code. Better software developer deletes bad code."
Me, after using Generic types in some source code and deleting 250 lines effectively.7 -
At a large enterprise-sized company, you are protecting the code and product from outside / bad actors constantly trying to break in. (🧠)
At a medium or small-sized company, you are protecting the code and product from clueless customers or users who can potentially break things for themselves. (🧠🧠)
At a sTaRtUp, you are protecting the code and product from being destroyed by the incompetent owners themselves. (🧠🧠🧠+)4 -
Some years ago i attended to a summer school abroad. I instantly built a connecection with this one girl, we spend the whole week together, talking, sharing humor, deep conversations etc. We also won the prize for the best project together. I guess it looked like the beginning of a love story for the rest of the course. For me it didn't exactly, actually I didn't had much romantic feelings for her; she was the arrogant, manipulative type I thought I could handle a friend but never as girl friend. We shared some darkness so to say. But I really hoped for a new close friendship. Since she had a boyfriend back home i thought she most likely wanted just the same. Anyway I was a bit worried she might want more because she made me quite a lot of compliments and told me how she liked me.
And yes, she wanted more: Whenever we talked on the phone after the summer school or met (she lived in a city not far away from mine by coincidence) she begged me for help with coding. She had a well paid as extremely interesting PHD position with a topic between political science and computer science. Besides classical humanities methods her topic would require a lot of coding though. But she had zero, absolutely zero clue of programming, and, as it turned out, zero interesst. I told her from the beginning she would have to learn quite a lot or pay someone to code for her. It was far too much to do as a favour by a friends or such. And, since it was part of her fucking PHD it would have been cheating somehow of she didn't do it herself. But instead, she kept texting me if I could 'help to fix some bugs', sending me unrelated code fragments she copied from SO and not even tried to understand. So I told her to fuck off at one point. After all it was not that we have been friends for decades; we only knew each other for a couple of months an spent only one week together. So thats it.
But I still think of it from time to time and it makes me angry because it feels like she was only nice to me because she thought i am this nerd guy who falls instantly in love to a charming good looking girl and does everything for her. I did neither at all but indeed wanted to be friends with her, thats bad enough. It even makes me more more angry that she actually has this awesome PHD project about politics in the fucking digital world and think of programmers like this. And that she will succeed without understanding anything bacause in the end there would have been a dude who did all the work for her I bet.8 -
Rule number 1 in performances debug :
It's always I/O.
If it's not IO, then the code should be REALLY bad.12 -
Buffer usage for simple file operation in python.
What the code "should" do, was using I think open or write a stream with a specific buffer size.
Buffer size should be specific, as it was a stream of a multiple gigabyte file over a direct interlink network connection.
Which should have speed things up tremendously, due to fewer syscalls and the machine having beefy resources for a large buffer.
So far the theory.
In practical, the devs made one very very very very very very very very stupid error.
They used dicts for configurations... With extremely bad naming.
configuration = {}
buffer_size = configuration.get("buffering", int(DEFAULT_BUFFERING))
You might immediately guess what has happened here.
DEFAULT_BUFFERING was set to true, evaluating to 1.
Yeah. Writing in 1 byte size chunks results in enormous speed deficiency, as the system is basically bombing itself with syscalls per nanoseconds.
Kinda obvious when you look at it in the raw pure form.
But I guess you can imagine how configuration actually looked....
Wild. Pretty wild. It was the main dict, hard coded, I think 200 entries plus and of course it looked like my toilet after having an spicy food evening and eating too much....
What's even worse is that none made the connection to the buffer size.
This simple and trivial thing entertained us for 2-3 weeks because *drumrolls please* none of the devs tested with large files.
So as usual there was the deployment and then "the sudden miraculous it works totally slow, must be admin / it fault" game.
At some time it landed then on my desk as pretty much everyone who had to deal with it was confused and angry, for understandable reasons (blame game).
It took me and the admin / devs then a few days to track it down, as we really started at the entirely wrong end of the problem, the network...
So much joy for such a stupid thing.18 -
daily.
me: i looked into the customer dev's project and even though it's C#, i can use it as a source of inspiration for my own C++ library.
PM: okay, maybe we can even still use it, so that you use a C# dll with your C++ code.
me: ...
other colleague: that's a bad idea. it can already be a challenge to use unmanaged c++ in dotnet, but the other way round it's even more difficult. C# and C++ are languages that behave quite differently and it will be hard to implement a correctly working interface.
PM: okay. well... then please analyze this project's complexity in terms of LOC and create a class diagram, so we get an idea of how complex it is.
me: sure.
PM: hmm... maybe we should split this topic. since dev x will also rely on your library, analyze this project together with him, each of you look at another part of the classes.
me: that's.... i think that's a bad idea. implementing this functionality in this library is my job, not of dev X. he won't be involved in implementing any of the funcionalities and for him, it shouldn't matter how this works.
PM: yeah, but since we are prototyping, maybe we should just violate the "separation of concerns" rule.
me (internally): (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻
in the end i could convince him to do it my way, but for fuck's sake... when was the last time he actually succesfully implemented something? 🤦♀️ -
It’s been so long since I posted but this time it’s juicy again.
I got a coworker, no prio experience but already a year and few months into the job. He’s bad.
Magnitudes of bad!
We’re trying to teach him but to no avail. Everything about him sucks, major ballsack to be exact.
His attitude is to avoid every task, finishes nothing and then starts something new.
„Did you do X like we told you to?“
„No I started on Y, because I thought it [looks better, seems more interesting, thought that X is useless…]“
When you ask him much is done he is always „almost“ finished and needs your help on the „last 5-10%“. Yeah fuck that!
But that guy has a talent, his talent is to always give you technically correct answers which actually are complete bullshit.
„What are you doing at your job?“
„Staring at a screen and typing things.“ dude what?
That guy used the excuse „I can’t do maths“ on everything.
For an exam he had to calculate how long it would take to reach a certain amount if you would get some interest in that every year.
He asked the teacher for the formula. During the exam! And when the teacher didn’t want to give it to him he wrote plainly „can’t do maths“ on the paper and left
His code is of a quality as if he would write his first line in a week and then has the audacity to blame me and the colleagues for not explaining it right.
Ok you might think now we’re teaching him bad, or are too impatient. But honestly if you have to explain how to do a for loop for over about 15 months and get that attitude I think you get the right to be angry. I don’t mind explaining on how things work, even for the hundredth time, but then don’t tell me you understood, go behind my back, complain at a colleague how bad I explained, get explained by him and then do it again until you whored yourself through the whole staff!
It’s like he got the mind swiper from Men in black at home. Every day he hits the reset button.
He had a week of just changing indentation on a html file. Why? Because he wanted to find his style.
Yeah his style
if(a==b){
console.log(a);
}
else {
console.log(b)
}
And to produce code like that it takes him atleast 4 hours of trial and error.
And at the same time he goes arround and boasts what a super good programmer he his and that he can do some project work for them.
How we found out? Because he started working in those projects during work time at the office and asked us how to do things.
And he does so like a complete bastard!
Broken sql query? “No that query is perfect as it is, it’s supposed to show no results! But, just in theory, if I wanted to show some results, what would I need to change?”
I’m so mad about it and pissed on a personal level because he goes around blames everyone and the world for his short comings8 -
The scary thing about burnout is that you usually don't realize you are burning out before it's too late.
Personally, at least, I've worked on projects that just felt a little intense at the time, but after taking a step back due to holidays or hitting some milestone I realize I never want to have anything to do with it ever again. One project makes my stomach drop even today every time I see the code; Not because the code is bad, but how it takes me back to how miserable I was without admitting it to myself.
The biggest red flag I look for is when I'm tempted to work on stuff in my free time. When this starts seeming like a solution there's a serious problem with the project that needs to be addressed.2 -
You all know that these AI dev tools are reading your code right?
It is sending it back to a data center and doing evaluations on the code. This is like handing your code to an unknown entity with no guarantees for privacy or copyright protection.
This concept bothers me and I would have to consult with my employer to even determine if we wanted to take that risk. I think it is just a matter of time before a bad actor takes advantage of this and rips off a company somewhere.8 -
Here I am for three months trying to implement TypeScript in this project that was a dump when I picked it up.
And then some morons get assigned to the project and just start adding @ts-nocheck everywhere?
Like, WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?
And then you wonder why the project is bug-ridden??
FUCK THESE PEOPLE THAT CALL THEMSELVES JAVASCRIPT ENGINEERS!! NO WONDER JS GETS SUCH BAD PRESS WITH ALL THESE CLUELESS IDIOTS TO WHOM STATIC TYPING IS JUST AN OBSTACLE TO THEM CHURNING OUT LINE AFTER LINE OF "CODE"3 -
I have been working on this software for 3 years now. The code base was a working prototype made by my boss before I came, not more, not less. Php + Angular. Have been refactoring a lot, backend is backed with hundreds of tests now, frontend still lacks a lot. Still a lot of programm structures are still the same weird ones my boss once created in a rush between two meetings while learning Angular to get the prototype finished. Now it's used in production which makes hard to refactor, because we have to maintain backwards compatibility. Neither the parts I added or refactored completely are satisfying, because they are built on this structures, because i never got any feedback for anything I decided and because I changed my own paradigms over time.
So I am all alone on this project. All genuinly new projects are assigned to the new team members (i was the first one, no we are five plus my boss) because I wont have time, have to maintain the old one. So I never can do something new which is quite frustrating.
I did a little side tool, the only thing I invented and did completely by myself in our repertoire - and now some stakeholder shows big interest onto this. Instead of giving me the task to make a real project from this my boss wants to give it to them to develop it. Why? Because I need more time for the main application.
Also the more the software is used the more bug tickets and feature requests come. I was crying for help for months but the others had appareantly more important stuff to do.
This might be true to some extend. Yesterday we had some kind of crisis meeting and my boss wanted again to assing pur junior to help me, who has a shit load of other things to do and is a student. I insisted that this would not be enough, and one of the fulltime devs has to get involved because the thing is our core application and I am only part time btw. So my boss said we wont decide today but one of them should do it. They should have some time to figure out who which is understandable but it's not that I didn't keep saying this for months. Now they are all like whimp whimp when I have to do php i will quit. The new projects are all typescript, with node backend if any. But alas, one of them even said yesterday he doesn't want to do js anymore. Okay... but... this is our tech stack then get another job allready?
And I should do the same probably. But then again I feel very sorry for my boss who helped me in very dark times of corona and more. If both of us leave, the project he worked on for decade (including convincing poeole, collect money..) might be suddenly at it's end while he is so exited about it's access today...
I also get insecure if it's really that they hate php so much or that they don't want to work with me personally because maybe I am a bad team Player or what?
I experienced the same at my old workplace, got left alone with big parts of the project because they didn't want to do php and js in this case and it ended up five devs doing the python backend and me doing the frontend and the php cms part all alone. Then I quit and now everything seems to happen again.
And then again I think I am only fucked up so hard by this stuff because I do not really like being a developer at all. I only do it for the money and because I am good at it (at least i think so. Nobody ever bothers to ever to read my code and give me feedback, because you know, php and js). So I guess I would hate any other job in the field maybe likewise?
This job *is* convinient, salary, office
position, flexibility could not be better. At the end of the day it's not that stressfull. And i don't have any second of freetime (due to family) or energy i could offer a new and more demanding employer, can't work over time or even take a fulltime position, can't home office, can't earn less, can't travel very long to the office and especially can't go back to school to learn something completely new. Some of these constraints are softwe then other naturally but still my posibilities at the Moment are very limited. That might change in about five years if the family situation changed. So it would most likely be reasonable to stay until then at my current job? And bear being alone with this app, don't getting involved on any new project, don't learn anything new, don't invent anything.
There was one potential way out, they considered offering me PHD position to the upcoming ml part of the project... But I learned that I would attend to a bunch of classes at university first, which i would like to, but I don't think i have the time.
I feel trapped somehow. I also feel very lonely in the Office because those fucktards keep saying in home office.
Man, I don't want to go to work today.6 -
Have you ever encountered a situation like this before?
You worked in a team, made many adjustments in the codebase, and all the changes you've made are the best practice (after some research or asking the community).
But the team leader decided to go with the "messy" version of the code and the team leader does adjust the principle of "bad code" in favour of your coworker, just because he/she is a friend of the team leader.
So, whatever you adjust or contribute is simply nullified but any adjustments made by your coworker are considered "new updates".5 -
I'm writing a ML course that explains concepts by going through/getting the reader to write simple implementations of concepts. I've written a decision tree in 250 lines of code (including plotting it), that is 100 times faster than another (hilariously bad) attempt at a simple decision tree, and it's far more readable than anything else I've seen.
I'm having a good day.9 -
That feeling when you’ve got a reputation of preciseness etc, and the code you just submitted for review has so many silly little mistakes you just want to do that ostrich thing. Gosh, how can I suddenly suck at my job this bad?
Okay, the changes affect EVERYTHING in our codebase (a major change in core business logic), and there is no way I could’ve tested every possible case by myself without a decent coverage of automated tests - which we obviously don’t have. So yet another argument for it (damn management, won’t you listen?!)… but still, some of the mistakes found during code review make me seem like a complete idiot.9 -
The primary concept of reactive programming is great. The idea that things just naturally re-run when anything they rely on is changed is amazing. Really, I think it's the next step in programming language development and within a decade or two at least one of the top 5 programming languages will be built entirely on this principle.
BUT
Expecting every dependency to be used unconditionally is stupid. Code that checks everything it might need all the time even if a decision can be made from much less information is simply bad, inefficient code. If you want to build a list of dependencies automatically, you have to parse the source.
And I really hate that there are TONS of languages that either make the AST readable at runtime or ship with a very powerful preprocessor that could be used to analyse expressions and build dependency lists, but by its sheer popularity the language we're trying to knead into something it was never and still isn't meant to be is JavaScript.3 -
So, I've had a personal project going for a couple of years now. It's one of those "I think this could be the billion-dollar idea" things. But I suffer from the typical "it's not PERFECT, so let's start again!" mentality, and the "hmm, I'm not sure I like that technology choice, so let's start again!" mentality.
Or, at least, I DID until 3-4 months ago.
I made the decision that I was going to charge ahead with it even if I started having second thoughts along the way. But, at the same time, I made the decision that I was going to rely on as little external technology as possible. Simplicity was going to be the key guiding light and if I couldn't truly justify bringing a given technology into the mix, it'd stay out.
That means that when I built the front end, I would go with plain HTML/CSS/JS... you know, just like I did 20+ years ago... and when I built the back end, I'd minimize the libraries I used as much as possible (though I allowed myself a bit more flexibility on the back end because that seems to be where there's less issues generally). Similarly, any choice I made I wanted to have little to no additional tooling required.
So, given this is a webapp with a Node back-end, I had some decisions to make.
On the back end, I decided to go with Express. Previously, I had written all the server code myself from "first principles", so I effectively built my own version of Express in other words. And you know what? It worked fine! It wasn't particularly hard, the code wasn't especially bad, and it worked. So, I considered re-using that code from the previous iteration, but I ultimately decided that Express brings enough value - more specifically all the middleware available for it - to justify going with it. I also stuck with NeDB for my data storage needs since that was aces all along (though I did switch to nedb-promises instead of writing my own async/await wrapper around it as I had previously done).
What I DIDN'T do though is go with TypeScript. In previous versions, I had. And, hey, it worked fine. TS of course brings some value, but having to have a compile step in it goes against my "as little additional tooling as possible" mantra, and the value it brings I find to be dubious when there's just one developer. As it stands, my "tooling" amounts to a few very simple JS scripts run with NPM. It's very simple, and that was my big goal: simplicity.
On the front end, I of course had to choose a framework first. React is fine, Angular is horrid, Vue, Svelte, others are okay. But I didn't want to bother with any of that because I dislike the level of abstraction they bring. But I also didn't want to be building my own widget library. I've done that before and it takes a lot of time and effort to do it well. So, after looking at many different options, I settled on Webix. I'm a fan of that library because it has a JS-centric approach. There's no JSX-like intermediate format, no build step involved, it's just straight, simple JS, and it's powerful and looks pretty good. Perfect for my needs. For one specific capability I did allow myself to bring in AnimeJS and ThreeJS. That's it though, no other dependencies (well, at first, I was using Axios because it was comfortable, but I've since migrated to plain old fetch). And no Webpack, no bundling at all, in fact. I dynamically load resources, which effectively is code-splitting, and I have some NPM scripts to do minification for a production build, but otherwise the code that runs in the browser is what I actually wrote, unlike using a framework.
So, what's the point of this whole rant?
The point is that I've made more progress in these last few months than I did the previous several years, and the experience has been SO much better!
All the tools and dependencies we tend to use these days, by and large, I think get in the way. Oh, to be sure, they have their own benefits, I'm not denying that... but I'm not at all convinced those benefits outweighs the time lost configuring this tool or that, fixing breakages caused by dependency updates, dealing with obtuse errors spit out by code I didn't write, going from the code in the browser to the actual source code to get anywhere when debugging, parsing crappy documentation, and just generally having the project be so much more complex and difficult to reason about. It's cognitive overload.
I've been doing this professionaly for a LONG time, I've seen so many fads come and go. The one thing I think we've lost along the way is the idea that simplicity leads to the best outcomes, and simplicity doesn't automatically mean you write less code, doesn't mean you cede responsibility for various things to third parties. Those things aren't automatically bad, but they CAN be, and I think more than we realize. We get wrapped up in "what everyone else is doing", we don't stop to question the "best practices", we just blindly follow.
I'm done with that, and my project is better for it! -
It's funny how you start feeling bad for the next dev taking over your project because it turned into a total spaghetti code shit show that will be impossible to maintain in the future with new features coming in.
Honestly... if a projects starts out with a certain scope which then gets extended EVERY FUCKING WEEK with requirements that can't even be met in the initial timeframe it's no wonder the code quality will decrease over time.
This just reminds me daily how important good project management (and I'm not talking about suit wearing pain-in-the-ass-managers) and the inclusion of devs in the planning process really is.
It's so fucking crazy that companies run like that with people up front that have NO FUCKING CLUE what they are doing, nor do they understand the mechanics, tech and effort that go into certain features. They're like "beep, boop, it's done by Friday you fuck!".
The funniest part of this stupid charade is that the closer we get to a new "deadline" (we will not meet the deadline anyways) the more nervous the "managers" get. WHY didn't you properly plan this shit in the first place? WHY didn't you care for the last six months where all this fucking bullshit could still have been prevented?
Meanwhile I'm just so sick and tired of this shitty project and this sucky company that I just don't have any motivation left to keep on working. It's so fucking hard and painful to work on projects that suck ass, are poorly designed. I just got to the point where coding is no fun any more. Thank god I'm out of here soon... fml5 -
I always had this mentality that I shouldn’t rely on a certain library or framework for my entire project because what if one day they stop supporting it. (Yeah I’m talking to u vuetify) That’s why I came up with this code structure that for everything that I wanna do I have a ‘driver’ library all coded by myself that interacts with that third party framework or library so if they stop supporting it I could just change a couple of lines of code in my driver file and my codebase should be working again. But I feel like this ‘driver’ approach is not the most efficient way of going in terms of memory usage. Do you guys think I should keep it simple and directly use those libraries or this is actually not a bad approach.7
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Today was a bad dev day working on a shitty React project. Not that React in itself is bad, but it can be hell to work with when the code is a big pile a crap full of anti pattern code. I spent the day refactoring to try to fix a bug, but to no avail. It would take days if not weeks to put some order in this mess and to prevent such bugs.6
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I'm notoriously bad at Git. By that I mean I REALLY REALLY SUCK AT IT. And I have the curse of short memory and an even shorter ability to retain the how-to, muscle memory knowledge of things if too much time passes.
So, I was staring down the gullet of merging two separate repositories onto my local machine and then pushing the result to a remote server. Not having the benefit of someone else to bounce this off of, and always finding the usual Git docs too dense and obtuse, I turned to ChatGPT to help me sort it out.
Guys, where has this been all of my life? I know it's not perfect and it can make mistakes. I knew that going into it, so I made preparations in case this failed. BUT. IT. WORKED! I feel like it has put me into the Star Trek:TNG universe where I can say "Computer, do the thing." and it does that thing. Here's the prompt I used and which it answered perfectly.
"Play the role of a git coach. I have two git repositories. One is on Bitbucket. The other is on GitHub. The branch named "master" on Bitbucket has the latest code. The branch named "master" on GitHub needs to be updated to what's on the Bitbucket "master" branch. Please write the series of git commands that I will need to accomplish this."10 -
!RANT
Web Devs - I need your opinions.
To make a long story short, when my fiancé and I first moved in together I changed cities. One day at the grocery store we ran in to one of his old buddies, whom I had never met. His buddy works as a counselor at a non profit organization for mental illness. His friend asked me some questions to get to know me and found out I was a web developer. He instantly got exited and told us they needed a new website for their non profit, and asked me what I charged. Being shy, put on the spot, newer to the industry (uncomfortable talking $ due to inexperience) and seeing the guy was paralyzed I felt I HAD to say yes. I also said I would consider donating the site to them, as I knew my other web dev friends had done that for other non profits.
They were easy to work with and the build went smooth. We chose Wordpress so that they could go in and update the site on their own. I was under the assumption that I would create the site for them, but that they would take care of changes on their own, that I wouldn't be "supporting it". I even trained the friend 2-3xs on how to use Wordpress and make changes, but they ALWAYS have changes every month, including slides and content creation. Being a noob at the time, I KNOW it's my fault for not being more clear on the I'll build it but not make changes thing, and I've tried to kind of get them to see that I'm too busy, politely.
We'll, 3+ years later I've now found success in a different career path that takes up ALL of my free time after my 9-5 corporate web dev position, and am no longer interested nor able to do freelance work, including supporting existing sites. Since we don't have a contract in place, and they've never given me a cent, i was thinking of giving them a notice at the end of this month saying as of 2018 I will no longer be able to take care of their website, and that they'll have to find someone else by that time? I feel bad because it's a non profit and they don't have a lot of money. I'm afraid they won't find someone else nor be able to afford it. The situation is a little more sticky since this is my fiancés friend and I don't want them to feel like I'm leaving them high and dry, cuz I know they're very thankful for the site. I just wish they understood that I never promised to do changes for them every month. Even if they offered me money, I just don't have the time. I'm 100% fine if they want to keep the site and my code, although they really could use a redesign anyways cuz my code back then was terrible. What are your thoughts on this? Is 5 months fair? Am I doing the right thing?8 -
I’m so fucking tired of having to work with shitty code day in and day out and not being able to optimize it. I want to quit so bad without having a job lined up… I fucking hate being a developer now thanks to these fucking pieces of shit.7
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I was asked to make proof of concept small frontend app with some simplified requirements, they asked me because it should be written in the stack I done most of my career work with. I do it in 3 days instead of 5, using those 2 days to optimise the app and explore different approaches. I noted down my findings, what to avoid and reasons and also what is good to use and reasons and shared with everyone.
We waited for the project to start, I started working on another project in the meantime and there was a big rush to make project go live etc., so I was consumed 100% on that new project.
So they put in charge backend php developer to do frontend js work. I said ok, do you need help in starting out? Nah, my proof of concept repo is enough.
4 days before that small project goes live they asked me to do code review. All things I noted down to avoid are in the codebase, few bad practices but everything is over-engineered (in a very bad way), some parts should be more flexible as current setup is very rigid, having almost all kinds of CSS, I saw SASS, CSS variables, 2 different CSS-in-JS tools with some additional libraries that is used to toggle classes.
I don't know how to approach this as I am not asshole as a person and I don't want to say to my colleague that his codebase is completely trash, but it is.
The worst parts: They called me to help finish the app and budget is almost spent!
I would rewrite the whole app as the state of the current app is unusable and everything is glued with bad Chinese ducktape that barely holds.
Additional points because it won't bundle as everything is f**ked.
I am seriously thinking of duplicating master branch and refactor the whole fricking app but won't do that as I am burning midnight oil on other two projects. Don't worry overtimes are paid.
I hate those shitty situations, this project was supposed to be tiny, sweet and example of decent project in this company but it is instead big fat franken-app that will be example how smart it is to avoid putting backend dev to do frontend work (I also agree for vice versa)! -
No, the language is not stupid :) No, it is not a problem of the language, it's just the fact that you don't really understand how to use it properly :) i think this is something each of us hates to hear while frustated but needs to hear afterwards, bad design is a posibility tho, but 99.999% of the cases is our fault. face it, nd overcome it! and finally, to grow beyond it 😄
<<edited with my potato phone's standard image editor>>
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Today in Windows Clang misadventures from one past wtf
I have 0 fucking clue what is happening, so I am starting to think that this is a windows 11 only bug.
If I (say for example) compile all of my headers into a .dll and then link them to my executable program, an executable will be generated.
If I use the dll to be linked into my executable, but DON'T use any of the code inside, then no executable is generated.
I need to at least use something from within the headers that I create into the main program for it to build and actually throw out an executable.
I could argue that doing this would be the proper way to setup a project in some scenarios, managing your headers and what not.
The only bad part is that it essentially removes the ability for newcomers to just install clang and hello the fucking world into existence.
Mind you, using the Mingw installation is possible still. I-just-don't-fuckig-understand-why-the-fucking-official-build WORKS
THIS is why people are trying to jump into other languages. My dude's shit is solved, but this fucking infuriates me. ANd go on, try googling "clang not building executable" and see how this shit is nowhere to be fucking found sdfksakjdfa3 -
Killing people is bad. But, there should be a law to allow killing people who don't write proper unit tests for their code. And also those "team leaders" who approve and merge code without unit tests.
Little backstory. Starts with a question.
What is the most critical part of a quoting tool (tool for resellers to set discounts and margins and create quotations)? The calculations, right?
If one formula is incorrect in one use case, people lose real money. This is the component which the user should be able to trust 100%. Right?
Okay. So this team was supposed to create a calculation engine to support all these calculations. The development was done, and the system was given to the QA team. For the last two months, the QA team finds bugs and assigns those to the development team and the development team fix those and assigns it back to the QA team. But then the QA team realizes that something else has been broken, a different calculation.
Upon investigation, today, I found out that the developers did not write a single unit test for the entire engine. There are at least 2000 different test cases involving the formulas and the QA team was doing all of that manually.
Now, Our continuous integration tool mandates coverage of 75%. What the developer did was to write a dummy test case, so that the entire code was covered.
I really really really really really think that developers should write unit tests, and proper unit tests, for each of the code lines (or, “logical blocks of code”) they write.20 -
Now that I have to use Microsoft Teams chat, I don't find Slack that bad anymore. Teams doesn't support threads, source code is poorly formatted without any syntax highlighting, and emojis look shitty.11
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One of my bad dev habits is that I tend to take up too much work because a lot of devs I had to work with seemed not competent enough. It's a bad habit because I get way overworked which influences code quality and deadlines.
I have to learn to trust more in others and give up some responsibility... it's hard though.
I think a big influence on my mindset has been that I never worked in a team bigger than 4 developers and I had way more experience in web dev than the others.
I sometimes may appear as an arrogant prick, but it's not intentional.9 -
I spent 4 months in a programming mentorship offered by my workplace to get back to programming after 4 years I graduated with a CS degree.
Back in 2014, what I studied in my first programming class was not easy to digest. I would just try enough to pass the courses because I was more interested in the theory. It followed until I graduated because I never actually wrote code for myself for example I wrote a lot of code for my vision class but never took a personal initiative. I did however have a very strong grip on advanced computer science concepts in areas such as computer architecture, systems programming and computer vision. I have an excellent understanding of machine learning and deep learning. I also spent time working with embedded systems and volunteering at a makerspace, teaching Arduino and RPi stuff. I used to teach people older than me.
My first job as a programmer sucked big time. It was a bootstrapped startup whose founder was making big claims to secure funding. I had no direction, mentorship and leadership to validate my programming practices. I burnt out in just 2 months. It was horrible. I experienced the worst physical and emotional pain to date. Additionally, I was gaslighted and told that it is me who is bad at my job not the people working with me. I thought I was a big failure and that I wasn't cut out for software engineering.
I spent the next 6 months recovering from the burn out. I had a condition where the stress and anxiety would cause my neck to deform and some vertebrae were damaged. Nobody could figure out why this was happening. I did find a neurophyscian who helped me out of the mental hell hole I was in and I started making recovery. I had to take a mild anti anxiety for the next 3 years until I went to my current doctor.
I worked as an implementation engineer at a local startup run by a very old engineer. He taught me how to work and carry myself professionally while I learnt very little technically. A year into my job, seeing no growth technically, I decided to make a switch to my favourite local software consultancy. I got the job 4 months prior to my father's death. I joined the company as an implementation analyst and needed some technical experience. It was right up my alley. My parents who saw me at my lowest, struggling with genetic depression and anxiety for the last 6 years, were finally relieved. It was hard for them as I am the only son.
After my father passed away, I was told by his colleagues that he was very happy with me and my sisters. He died a day before I became permanent and landed a huge client. The only regret I have is not driving fast enough to the hospital the night he passed away. Last year, I started seeing a new doctor in hopes of getting rid of the one medicine that I was taking. To my surprise, he saw major problems and prescribed me new medication.
I finally got a diagnosis for my condition after 8 years of struggle. The new doctor told me a few months back that I have Recurrent Depressive Disorder. The most likely cause is my genetics from my father's side as my father recovered from Schizophrenia when I was little. And, now it's been 5 months on the new medication. I can finally relax knowing my condition and work on it with professional help.
After working at my current role for 1 and a half years, my teamlead and HR offered me a 2 month mentorship opportunity to learn programming from scratch in Python and Scrapy from a personal mentor specially assigned to me. I am still in my management focused role but will be spending 4 hours daily of for the mentorship. I feel extremely lucky and grateful for the opportunity. It felt unworldly when I pushed my code to a PR for the very first time and got feedback on it. It is incomparable to anything.
So we had Eid holidays a few months back and because I am not that social, I began going through cs61a from Berkeley and logged into HackerRank after 5 years. The medicines help but I constantly feel this feeling that I am not enough or that I am an imposter even though I was and am always considered a brilliant and intellectual mind by my professors and people around me. I just can't shake the feeling.
Anyway, so now, I have successfully completed 2 months worth of backend training in Django with another awesome mentor at work. I am in absolute love with Django and Python. And, I constantly feel like discussing and sharing about my progress with people. So, if you are still reading, thank you for staying with me.
TLDR: Smart enough for high level computer science concepts in college, did well in theory but never really wrote code without help. Struggled with clinical depression for the past 8 years. Father passed away one day before being permanent at my dream software consultancy and being assigned one of the biggest consultancy. Getting back to programming after 4 years with the help of change in medicine, a formal diagnosis and a technical mentorship.3 -
Computer science vs software engineering?
Software engineering is all about people. You have to communicate with the business, realizing their needs, figuring out their processes, optimizing them, all this before the first line of code is written. Then, you have to manage your direct reports, and if you have none, write code with people in mind, people who will read it after you. As they say, code is for people, not for computers. Then, you have to improve the app listening to users, again, people.
I can’t assign a software engineer a role higher than middle if they’re bad with people.
If you wanna do cool stuff with computers and be a misanthrope, do computer science! It’s a very prestigious field where you are left alone with scary math and fundamental concepts. If you’re successful there, you’ll have a mad asocial scientist card, and no one will ever insist to you that people is important. They will just accept that they shouldn’t annoy you, and you are “allowed” to yell at them because you’re “special” and a “genius”. You can hate them 24/7.2 -
i had an epiphany today, in a discussion with the software architect of our new project.
i'm having the epic job to design & implement a prototype for a C++ library in a new software project and collected some inspiration in our "old" software, where i'm maintaining the module that fulfills the same functionality (i thought). i've been maintaining this module for around a year now. i analyzed the different features and stuff to consider and created a partial model of the new library.
when i showed it to the architect today, he was like "oh my god, no no no, you don't need all this functionality, this shall not be part of the new library!"
this was the moment when i realized how deeply fucked up the code base of the old module is.
imagine it like this:
you want to automate the process of making yourself a good ol' cup of coffee.
the reasonable thing would be to have
- a smart water boiler where you set parameters water temperature and amount of water to be fetched from the water supply
- a smart coffee bean grinder where you can set type of beans, amount of beans and grinding fineness
- a component where water and ground coffee are joined to brew the coffee, where parameters like duration, pressure etc. are set
- a milk tank where amount of milk, desired temperature and duration / speed of foaming can be set
- a sugar dispenser where amount of applied sugar can be set
- optionally, additional modules with spices, syrup, ice cubes, whatever for your very personal coffee experience
on requesting a coffee, you would then configure and orchestrate all components to your wishes to make you a fine cup of coffee. you can also add routines like "makeCappucchino()", "makeEspresso()", or whatever.
our software is not like this.
it is like this:
- a smart water boiler consisting of submodules that know how to cook water for e.g. "cappucchino with sugar" or for "espresso without sugar, but with milk and ice cubes"
- 5 smart bean grinders that know how to grind beans for e.g. cappucchino, espresso, latte macchiato and for 73ml of water preheated to 82°C
- a very smart sugar dispenser that knows how to add sugar to 95, 98 and 100°C coffee and to coffee made of BOTH coffee arabica AND coffee robusta beans.
etc. etc., i think you're getting the gist.
when i realized this, it was like, right in front of my eyes, this terrible pattern emerged like a foul, corrupted caleidoscope of chaos, through the whole code base of this module.
i've already known how rotten from the core this code base is, but today i've actually identified a really bad pattern that i hadn't realized before. the whole architecture is so bloated that it is hard to have an overview of the whole thing. and it would require a LOT of refactoring to repair this pattern.
but i guess it would also be infinitely satisfying because i could probably reduce the code base for 30% or something...
but unfortunately, this is never going to happen, because screw refactoring.
it's a great feeling to start this new library from scratch, tho...6 -
Switching workplace after new year.
Already told boss I'm quitting last week. And it is like as soon as It was official I lost all patience with the company bullshit and lost the little interest I had left for my daily work. The codebase seemes bad before but now it feel 100x worse.
Work ethic keeps me from doing nothing but man I just want to get out.
Will be so nice to work with a new project and code base.1 -
Bad day already, code to upload to to sites and the network goes down. while working to restore network, laptop battery goes. plugged in laptop and now it won't boot in to Xfce!!!! totally FML day.1
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Does anyone think tech recruiters are failed used car salesmen?
Bad experiences this week
One reached out to me on clearance jobs to apply for a job that I applied for, interviewed and was turned down for because of course they do not know Javascript is not Java and they were looking for a Java developer. She didn’t remember and then never responded. Out of spite I replied all to the last email that company sent me but of course no one responded.
This person who says that she is a recruiter for GOOGLE does not know the difference from UX designer and UX developer.
“ UX design still involves coding... idk where you got information that UX designers don't code but they absolutely do. UX designers are simply front end software engineers that work on refining the user experience of a particular program app or website.”
I don’t know because I used to be a fucking UX developer and used to work with UX designers??? Who didn’t code because figuring out what humans what is tough enough on it’s own. UI designers may know html/css but that is it.
I know we are going into a recession and I need to start being nice to these dumb recruiters because I may need them one day.2 -
For now I decided to give less shits about bad code and the job. Unfortunately I am not resolute enough right now to steer a ship going in the wrong direction. Once clock hits 5 this homeboy is out.
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when people attribute you as the author of bad code you didn't write, as you receive PR feedback to update it
when you are updating something different in the same area3 -
This is more of an advice seeking rant. I've recently been promoted to Team Leader of my team but mostly because of circumstances. The previous team leader left for a start-up and I've been somehow the acting Scrum Master of the team for the past months (although our company sucks at Scrum generally speaking) and also having the most time in the company. However I'm still the youngest I'm my team so managing the actual team feels a bit weird and also I do not consider myself experienced enough to be a Technical lead but we don't have a different position for that.
Below actions happen in the course of 2-3 months.
With all the things above considered I find myself in a dire situation, a couple of months ago there were several Blocker bugs opened from the Clients side / production env related to one feature, however after spending about a month or so on trying to investigate the issues we've come to the conclusion that it needs to be refactorised as it's way too bad and it can't be solved (as a side note this issue has also been raised by a former dev who left the company). Although it was not part of the initial upcoming version release it was "forcefully" introduced in the plan and we took out of the scope other things but was still flagged as a potential risk. But wait..there's more, this feature was part of a Java microservice (the whole microservice basically) and our team is mostly made of JS, just one guy who actually works as a Java dev (I've only done one Java course during uni but never felt attracted to it). I've not been involved in the initial planning of this EPIC, my former TL was an the Java guy. Now during this the company decides that me and my TL were needed for a side project, so both of us got "pulled out" of the team and move there but we've also had to "manage" the team at the same time. In the end it's decided that since my TL will leave and I will take leadership of the team, I get "released" from the side project to manage the team. I'm left with about 3 weeks to slam dunk the feature.. but, I'm not a great leader for my team nor do I have the knowledge to help me teammate into fixing this Java MS, I do go about the normal schedule about asking him in the daily what is he working on and if he needs any help, but I don't really get into much details as I'm neither too much in sync with the feature nor with the technical part of Java. And here we are now in the last week, I've had several calls with PSO from the clients trying to push me into giving them a deadline on when will it be fixed that it's very important for the client to get this working in the next release and so on, however I do not hold an answer to that. I've been trying to explain to them that this was flagged as a risk and I can't guarantee them anything but that didn't seem to make them any happier. On the other side I feel like this team member has been slacking it a lot, his work this week would barely sum up a couple of hours from my point of view as I've asked him to push the branch he's been working on and checked his code changes. I'm a bit anxious to confront him however as I feel I haven't been on top of his situation either, not saying I was uninvolved but I definetly could have been a better manager for him and go into more details about his daily work and so on.
All in all there has been mistakes on all levels(maybe not on PSO as they can't really be held accountable for R&D inability to deliver stuff, but they should be a little more understandable at the very least) and it got us into a shitty situation which stresses me out and makes me feel like I've started my new position with a wrong step.
I'm just wondering if anyone has been in similar situations and has any tips or words of wisdom to share. Or how do you guys feel about the whole situation, am I just over stressing it? Did I get a good analysis, was there anything I could have done better? I'm open for any kind of feedback.2 -
Best:
Seeing ALL the members of my team finally coming into their own. One person tackled our entire not-at-all-simple CI/CD setup from scratch knowing nothing about any of it and, while not without bumps in the road, did an excellent job overall (and then did the same for some other projects since he found himself being the SME). Two of my more junior people took on some difficult tasks that required them to design and build some tricky features from the ground-up, rather than me giving them a ton of guidance, design and even a start on the basic code early on (I just gave them some general descriptions of what I was looking for and then let them run with it). Again, not without some hiccups, but they ultimately delivered and learned a lot in the process and, I think, gained a new sense of self-confidence, which to me is the real win. And my other person handled some tricky high-level stuff that got him deep in the weeds of all the corporate procedures I'd normally shield them all from and did very well with it (and like the other person, wound up being an SME and doing it for some other projects after that). It took a while to get here, but I finally feel like I don't need to do all the really difficult stuff myself, I can count on them now, and they, I think, no longer feel like they're in over their heads if I throw something difficult at them.
Worst:
A few critical bugs slipped into production this year, with a few requiring some after-hours heroics to deal with (and, unfortunately, due to the timing, it all fell on me). Of course, that just tells us that next year we really need to focus on more robust automated testing (though, in reality, at least one of the issues almost certainly would not - COULD NOT - have been caught before-hand anyway, and that's probably true for more than just one of them). We had avoided major issues the previous three years we've been live, so this was unusual. Then again, it's in a way a symptom of success because with more users and more usage, both of which exploded this year, typically does come more issues discovered, so I guess it tempers the bad just a little bit.2 -
not sure if actual bad habit, or just a natural consequence of what i'm writing often being de-facto "exploratory code" so the "bad habit" is actually the right choice, or...
but very often when i finish a functionality and look at the first version of the code, and realize how bad it is, and how it blocks me to implement following features... rather than just fix/improve that code, i just want to nuke all of it and write it from scratch again, and "better this time", because it seems like much less work and effort than trying to gradually fix it "in-place".
it definitely feels like a bad habit though, because it often results in me deleting and implementing to completion the same thing 4 times in a row. -
Does anyone even use AWS CDK?
I saw something about CDKv2 getting released and immediately made up my mind about it and just want to validate my opinion.
I'm having a hard time thinking of a case where I would need to use yet another layer of bullshit to deploy cloud infra.
It's bad enough with terraform(which I far prefer over cloud formation). But now you can use python or node? What's next, deploying with XSLT?
I'm partially ranting, because I know someone on my team is going to show this as the "new thing" and I'll be stuck maintaining my code...as code--and that really pisses me off.
I'm also legitimately curious on how many of you have run across this being used successfully and for what problem did it solve?10 -
CSP: the thing that finally makes me jump out a window.
It's not that it's bad per se... well, I mean, it is, in several ways... but I can cope with it.
But when you're being pushed to apply a very strict policy to an app that is (a) itself 10 years old (predating CSP and most modern practices entirely you'll note), (b) has code that originally came from a 15-year old app at its core, and most critically (c) uses a third-party library that is at the very heart of it all and that simply can't ever play nice with CSP due to its fundamental nature... well... that's a recipe for an awful lot of head-meet-wall.
And you're not going to do a ground-up rewrite of an app that cost literally millions to develop (and is constantly being grown to this day) and which is now mission-critical and very highly regarded by the most important clients.
FML. -
I am fairly new to "enterprise" programming, but have some experience with self-study and open source. I'm getting more frustrated by the day because the code quality of our software is appallingly bad: functionality that should be centralised isn't, assumptions about internal structures and functionality of objects are made throughout the code, concerns are not separated, and so on. In my current team, we explicitly disabled SonarQube because "someone would have to fix it and our software wouldn't pass even after a month of work".
While I understand the concerns that companies would rather see new features than "quality improvements", so what? Every time we want to add something, we either have to restructure half the source code or add it in a really horrible way (and get pressured to do it that way).
Is it normal that code quality in companies is so bad?10 -
getting mogged by people with less experience and/or spending less effort
it's almost a talent for me to be this bad at being a code monkey -
I’ve become so indecisive in terms of knowing what I want from my career.
All I know is what I don’t want (to end up a in management)
I’m definitely getting a new job and right now it looks like I’ve got 3 offers on the table
Option 1, a previous company I worked for. Still the same problems with the company there as before but the work was interesting and unusual. and my line manager was a good guy.
They have practically no legacy code.
Not much in the way of company benefits but they’re local and it would be nice to see friends again.
So feels like the pull to this is strong.
Option 2, a fully remote company that I’ve been referred to by an ex-workmate.
They’ve not even tech tested me because they’ve read my blogs and GitHub repos instead and said they’re impress. So just had a conversation with them. I feel honoured that they took the time to look at what I’ve done in my own time and use that in their decision.
Benefits are slightly better than option 1 (more hols)
But they’re using .net 6 and get a lot of heavy use on their system and have some big customers. I think the work is integrations to start with and moving services into docker and azure.
Option 3, even though I’ve got an offer from this one but they can’t actually explain the work until We can arrange a call next week (they recruit and then work out what team your in, but Christmas got in the way of me having a call with them straight away)
It’s working on government systems and .net is their least used stack so probably end up switching to Java. Maybe other tech stacks too.
This place has much better benefits than option 1 and 2 (more hols and more pension), but 2 days a week in office.
All of the above pay the same salary.
Having choice feels almost as bad as having no choice.
It’s doing my head in thinking about it , (even tho I might as well not think about it at all until the call with option 3 happens).
On the one hand with option 3, using a tech stack that’s new to me might be refreshing, as I’ve done .net for 10 years.
On the other hand I really like c# and I’m very good at it. So it feels a bit like I should be capitalising on that and using my experience to shape how the dev is done. Not sure I and I can do that with option 3, at least for a while.
C# feels like it’s moving forward nicely and I’m not sure I can say the same for Java or other languages.
I love programming and learning new stuff but so unable to let things go. It’s like I have a fear that c# will move on without me and I’ll end up turning into one of those devs whose skills are a decade out of date.
Maybe the early years of my career formed me in this way.
Early on I worked at a company where there was a high number of Cobol devs who thought they had a job for life.
But then redundancies came and many left. Of those who stayed they had to cross train to Java and they just couldn’t do it.
I don’t think the tech was hard for them, I think they were just so used to not learning that they could no longer adapt.
Think most of them ended up retiring after trying to learn Java for a few years.8 -
Am I right? Is this micro management?
So, in my new team, I have another coworker is my buddy, we are same level and I doubt here coding techniques as I have seen very bad code written by her.
The thing is, whenever I need to pick up a new jira, she starts telling me what code I need to change, without me understanding the ticket or the code.
She forced a code change which was obviously a bad one.
She asked me what did I do yesterday and said that I could have worked on this jira.
Although this is a start but I don't want yo waste my time working with someone who is trying to micromanage when I clearly have the potential to be working without her micro-managemnt.
The problem I see is that her priority is not learning but I don't know what is that but she worked on the tasks which are clearly not our teams work, in the initial informal chat she was too concerned with people being young in the company like who is married who is not etc.
I don't see her as a good developer.
Should I move to other project? or am I overreacting?7 -
Ok......so we working on this system with a friend
we have deadline today
he's the one who wrote the code
I'm just implementing some features
maaan the dude is just not responsive to questions
and project structure and code is bad AF no comments or docs
WTF!!!!!!! -
My programming class kinda sucked. Here's why.
1. They taught C++. To students who had never seen a line of code in their lives. The language with 90+ keywords.
2. The teacher. We had to use switch statements to do something. It took around 300 loc. I used an array and shortened it to 5. He took some points away for not doing it correct. IT LITERALLY WORKS THE SAME AND IS SHORTER. This was not the first time I had shortened something/made it more readable and been docked points on the assignment.
3. Commenting. He told us to comment as much as possible, which is not correct. Comment what needs commenting. Not everything.
4. The compiler. We worked on windows with an online compiler. He decided teaching us to set up a compiler was too hard. We used onlinegdb, which isn't inherently bad. However, onlinegdb is based on Linux. He compiled our programs with a windows compiler.
Maybe these are just problems because I've programmed before that, but I still think they are red flags. What do you think?3 -
"Good job coworker X for making a hotfix, that fixed crashes".
I don't get it. Poor code, no tests, bad QA and at the end of the day people get praised for fixing the crash. Cool, I guess I know how you get promoted.6 -
Anytime I write a line of code that works correctly the first time, I’m ecstatic. If I write a whole block or function that works right the first time, I freak out with happiness. Yes, I’m that bad at coding. The rest of y’all probably do such things on the regular and it no biggie. But for me, it’s vanishingly rare.
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VS Code terminal is so bad... it is basically the worst part of VS Code; the devs can never fix it
The terminal in VS Code breaks for me all the time; it is so easy to break it; all it takes is change the size of the terminal window and bam, it is broken
The devs should either fix their shitty terminal or remove it entirely because it confuses people; I literally see wrong output from my program because of their terminal1 -
⛔ Rust error: expected Config, found ().
💡 Actual error: process is undeclared.
The actual error has no relation to the error reported by the Rust code checker. So bad
7 -
update : we are at hr round baby!!!
part 1 : https://devrant.com/rants/5528056/...
part 2 (in comments) : https://devrant.com/rants/5550145/...
the tech market is crazy mann! it's one of the top indie fintech companies in our country and has a great valuation.
i totally felt that they i am crashing the interviews , and am seriously not trying to be humble. before the dsa round , i was trying to mug up how insertion sort works 🥲
--------
now my dilemma is should i switch if i get the offer. in a summary:
current company:
- small valuation but profitable (haven't picked funding for last 3 years , so poast valuation is some double digit million $, but can easily be a unicorn company)
- very major b2b player in my country. almost all unicorns (including this fintech company) and some major MNCs are their client and they have recently acquired a few other companies of us and eu too, making them- a decent global player
- meh work : i love being a cutting edge performer in android but here we make sdks that need to support even legacy banking apps. so tech stack is a lot of verbose java and daily routine includes making very minor changes to actual code and more towards adding tests , maintaining wrapper sdks in react/cordova/unity etc, checking client side code etc.
- awesome work life balance : since work is shit and i am fast enough, i am usually working only 2-4 hours a day. i joined gym, got into shape , and have already vsited 5 places in last 6 months, and i am a guy who didn't used to have time even on sundays. here, we get mote paid leaves than what i would usually need.
- learning opportunities: not exactly from the company codebase, but they provide unlimited access to various course learning platforms like linkedin learning, udemy and others, so i joined some web dev baches and i now know decent frontend too. plus those hybrid sdks also give a light context to new things
new company :
- positives : multi billion valuation, one of the top players in fintech , have been mostly profitable ( except a few quarters)
- positive : b2c so its (hopefully) going to put me back into racing shoes with kotlin, jetpack and latest libraries.
- more $$$ for your boy :)
- negetive : they seem to be on hiring spree and am afraid to junp ship after seeing the recent coinbase layoffs. fintech is scary these days
- negetive : if they are hiring people like me, then then they are probably hiring people worse than me 😂. although thats not my concern what my main concer is how they interviewed. they have hired a 3rd party company that takes interviews of people FOR THEM! i find that extremely impolite, like they don't even wanna spare their devs to hire people they are gonna work with. i find this a toxic, robotic culture and if these are the people in there then i would have a terrible time finding some buddy engineer or some helpful senior.
- negetive : most probably a bad wlb : i worked for an year for a fast paced b2c edtech startup. no matter how old these are , b2c are always shipping new stuff and are therefore hectic. i don't like the boredom here but i would miss the free time to workout :(
so ... any thoughts about it?4 -
#Suphle Rant 6: Deptrac, phparkitect
This entry isn't necessarily a rant but a tale of victory. I'm no more as sad as I used to be. I don't work as hard as I used to, so lesser challenges to frustrate my life. On top of that, I'm not bitter about the pace of progress. I'm at a state of contentment regarding Suphle's release
An opportunity to gain publicity presented itself last month when cfp for a php event was announced last month. I submitted and reviewed a post introducing suphle to the community. In the post, I assured readers that I won't be changing anything soon ie the apis are cast in stone. Then php 7.4 officially "went out of circulation". It hit me that even though the code supports php 8 on paper, it's kind of a red herring that decorators don't use php 8 attributes. So I doubled down, suspending documentation.
The container won't support union and intersection types cuz I dislike the ambiguity. Enums can't be hydrated. So I refactored implementation and usages of decorators from interfaces to native attributes. Tried automating typing for all class properties but psalm is using docblocks instead of native typing. So I disabled it and am doing it by hand whenever something takes me to an unfixed class (difficulty: 1). But the good news is, we are php 8 compliant as anybody can ask for!
I decided to ride that wave and implement other things that have been bothering me:
1) 2 commands for automating project setup for collaborators and user facing developers (CHECK)
2) transferring some operations from runtime to compile/build TIME (CHECK)
3) re-attempt implementing container scopes
I tried automating Deptrac usage ie adding the newly created module to the list of regulated architectural layers but their config is in yaml, so I moved to phparkitect which uses php to set the rules. I still can't find a library for programmatically updating php filed/classes but this is more dynamic for me than yaml. I set out to implement their library, turns out the entire logic is dumped into the command class, so I can neither control it without the cli or automate tests to it. I take the command apart, connect it to suphle and run. Guess what, it detects class parents as violations to the rule. Wtflyingfuck?!
As if that's not bad enough, roadrunner (that old biatch!) server setup doesn't fail if an initialization script fails. If initialization script is moved to the application code itself, server setup crumbles and takes the your initialization stuff down with it. I ping the maintainer, rustacian (god bless his soul), who informs me point blank that what I'm trying to do is not possible. Fuck it. I have to write a wrapper command for sequentially starting the server (or not starting if initialization operations don't all succeed).
Legitimate case to reinvent the wheel. I restored my deleted decorators that did dependency sanitation for me at runtime. The remaining piece of the puzzle was a recursive film iterator to feed the decorators. I checked my file system reader for clues on how to implement one and boom! The one I'd written for two other features was compatible. All I had to do was refactor decorators into dependency rules, give them fancy interfaces for customising and filtering what classes each rule should actually evaluate. In a night's work (if you're discrediting how long writing the original sanitization decorators and directory iterator), I coupled the Deptrac/phparkitect library of my dreams. This is one of the those few times I feel like a supreme deity
Hope I can eat better and get some sleep. This meme is me after getting bounced by those three library rejections
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i thought whiteboarding turning into leetcode mediums or harder correctly in 20 minutes or less was bad
now codesignal is fucking us over, tried my first one without researching any of the code score shit
anybody have tips for gaming the system there? i heard claims that speed trumps correctness for their point system (e.g. faster but not passing for all test cases may score higher than slower but all test cases pass) additionally code cleanliness/readability isn't weighed as heavily as the other factors
and to do problems individually to completion further rather than spreading yourself out across multiple problems in an exam
wont deny im still a salty scrub at the end of the day -
My team and me nearly finished a big new feature for our website.
I am a junior dev and this was the first big thing I was in charge of and now that I see how it unfold I feel really bad.
It consists of php backend (integrated into a 20 years old monolith) and vue frontend (punctually jumpstarted by a clusterfuck of typescript files included into php rendered html) and especially the frontend part looks so bad.
Vue is relatively young in our project and almost nobody has a clue about it. I learned so much about vue in the process, but the result is a behemoth of awfulness that grew over several months.
I have a really strong desire rewrite the whole mess, but I will never be officially allowed because it works and practically all the flaws in our code base are subject to the classic
"well, someday, somebody probably has to do something about that, but for now let's start this shiny new feature"
So for now I think about doing it secretly and pass it to my buddy to review it. I guess chances are high that not even the colleagues in my team (apart from my buddy) are going to notice, since they aren't as interested into vue as I am and don't have the overview over this features code as I do, but on the other hand it feels like something I could get in trouble for and apart from the cursed code base my company is great.
Have you ever bin that disgusted by your own production code before it was even one year old?3
Wow, some guys here have the means to travel to the future!! Cool!! I too want some of that action!