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Search - "bad frontend"
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For this episode of practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker were going to move past developers and go straight to a CEO.
*sitcom audience oooooohhhhhhh*
I know! , always risky, everyone has a bad story, but lets try bring it home. Here we go, Most incompetent co-worker, candidate 2, "R".
R was ... now how do I say this ... R was a special kind of Bastard. A perfect blend of impatient, arrogant, a dickhead and to borrow a phrase from family guy "below the line of mental retardation".
I've actually spoken about him recently here: https://devrant.com/rants/1141873/...
I won't bother duplicating the content here, but its worth a read.
Some of the other highlights of R include:
- Not understanding that my first demo was UI / Frontend only (despite frequent explanations). I didn't slack off for the next 2 weeks, I was busy making all those buttons actually do stuff and connect to the server. Shockingly "Test 1", "Test 2" and "Lorem ipsum" wasn't our content.
- He once asked how long a bunch of tasks was going to take, I told him 2 weeks and he gave me 2 and a half days. He pulled me into a meeting the next week to see where it all was, and I literally sat there saying "I asked for 2 weeks" over and over until he shut up.
- R's favourite phrase was "when I was a developer", typically followed by some sort of insult, forever labelling him "asshole" by everyone who has ever worked for him.
- When apple launched iOS 7 and changed the UI and the methods you could use, he refused to invest the time in upgrading to iOS 7, but demanded the app look like an iOS 7 app. No amount of "There is no method to access the status bar in iOS 6" could make him comprehend the issue at hand.
- The worst was when I was dealing with an issue to do with 64bit being introduced (which I tried to explain ... christ give me strength). When another dev fixed a similar but unrelated issue he stood up in front of the office and said loudly "pfft practiseSafeHex tried to tell me this was something to do with 64bit, which made absolutely no sense, guess he doesn't know what he's talking about"
Thankfully I handed in my notice ... after less than 2 months, making in abundantly clear why. Will R make it to the top of the list of most incompetent?
Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!12 -
A while ago (few months) I was on the train back home when I ran into an old classmate. I know that he's a designer/frontend/wordpress guy and I know that he'll bring anyone down in order to feel good. I also know that he knows jack shit about security/backend.
The convo went like this:
Me: gotta say though, wordpress and its security...
Him: yeah ikr it's bad. (me thinking 'dude you hardly know what the word cyber security means)
Me: yeah, I work at a hosting company now, most sites that get hacked are the wordpress ones.
Him: yeah man, same at my company. I made a security thing for wordpress though so we can't get hacked anymore.
Me; *he doesn't know any backend NOR security..... Let's ask him difficult stuff*
Oh! What language did you use?
Him: yeah it works great, we don't get hacked sites anymore now!
Me: ah yeah but what language did you use?
Him: oh it's not about what language you use, it's about whether it works or not! My system works great!
Me: *yeah.....right.* oh yeah but I'd like to know so I can learn something. What techniques did you use?
Him: well obviously firewalls and shit. It's not about what techniques/technology you use, it's about whether it works or not!
That's the moment I was done with it and steered the convo another way.
You don't know shit about backend or security, cocksucker.16 -
The last two frontend devs I interviewed.
First:
He had 15 some years of experience, but couldn't answer our most basic of technical questions, we stopped asking after the first couple.
Based on a technical test I got the impression that he couldn't distinguish between backend and frontend.
So, I posed a simple question "Have you interfaced with REST API'S using Javascript before?"
Which lead him to talk about arrays. I shit you not he droned on about arrays for five minutes.
"I have experience using big array, small arrays, breaking big arrays into littler arrays and putting arrays inside other arrays."
Never been in an interview situation where I've had to hold back laughter before. We refer to him as the array expert.
His technical knowledge was lacking, and he was nervous, so he just waffled. I managed to ease his nerves and the interview wasn't terrible after that, but he wasn't what we were looking for.
Second:
This was a phone interview.
It started off OK he was clearly walking somewhere and was half preoccupied. Turns out he was on his way back from the shop after buying rolling papers (we'd heard him in the shop asking for Rizla), and he was preoccupied with rolling a joint.
We started asking some basic technical questions at which point he faked that he'd seen a fight in the street.
We then called him back five minutes later you could hear him smoking "ah, that's better". After that the interview was OK, not what we were looking for, but not bad.
Top tip: If you require a joint to get through a phone interview, roll and smoke it before hand.17 -
Today was my last day of work, tomorrow i have officially left that place. It's a weird feeling because i'm not certain about the future.
The job was certainly not bad, and after all i read on devrant i'm beginning to believe it was one of the better ones. A nice boss, always something to eat/drink nearby, a relaxed atmosphere, a tolerance for my occasionally odd behaviour and the chance to suggest frameworks. Why i would leave that place, you ask? Because of the thing not on the list, the code, that is the thing i work with all the time.
Most of the time i only had to make things work, testing/refactoring/etc. was cut because we had other things to do. You could argue that we had more time if we did refactor, and i suggested that, but the decision to do so was delayed because we didn't have enough time.
The first project i had to work on had around 100 files with nearly the same code, everything copy-pasted and changed slightly. Half of the files used format a and the other half used the newer format b. B used a function that concatenated strings to produce html. I made some suggestions on how to change this, but they got denied because they would take up too much time. Aat that point i started to understand the position my boss was in and how i had to word things in order to get my point across. This project never got changed and holds hundreds of sql- and xss-injection-vulnerabilities and misses access control up to today. But at least the new project is better, it's tomcat and hibernate on the backend and react in the frontend, communicating via rest. It took a few years to get there, but we made it.
To get back to code quality, it's not there. Some projects had 1000 LOC files that were only touched to add features, we wrote horrible hacks to work with the reactabular-module and duplicate code everywhere. I already ranted about my boss' use of ctrl-c&v and i think it is the biggest threat to code quality. That and the juniors who worked on a real project for the first time. And the fact that i was the only one who really knew git. At some point i had enough of working on those projects and quit.
I don't have much experience, but i'm certain my next job has a better workflow and i hope i don't have to fix that much bugs anymore.
In the end my experience was mostly positive though. I had nice coworkers, was often free to do things my way, got really into linux, all in all a good workplace if there wasn't work.
Now they dont have their js-expert anymore, with that i'm excited to see how the new project evolves. It's still a weird thing to know you won't go back to a place you've been for several years. But i still have my backdoor, but maybe not. :P16 -
( rant || !rant ) && idiots
console.info( this.isLongRant );
console.warn( "contains strong language and wordpress" );
A friend of mine sent two of his "friends" to me because they wanted me to build a website for their new business (~idea).
So I had a meeting with them.
First of all they wanted me to have a look on the current (work in progress) site.
First impression of the frontend:
OH BOY!?
Well, imagine this:
- a 90s/2k background (dotted/pixelated cloud in baby-blueish as backgroud with repeat)
- the logo was made by the sister of one of the guys, it wasn't too bad, but badly aligned, asymmetrical
- some obvious $offTheShelfShopPlugin with $randomStockContent
- the fucking slider had a small loading bar to indicate changes, it appears like an hyperanxious child on ADHS
- below the logo TWO FUCKING GIF SPINNERS to indicate nothing else but how fucking brain amputated these two dudes are, including the dev who is responsible for adding this. (to this point, they only told me, that a webagency did the setup and some basic work on the site, more on that later)
- no styling concept at all, random fonts and stuff everywhere including default styles of the shop plugin.
- FUUUUUCK WTF wil come furtherin this meeting?
After seeing a pile of binary puke fisted out of a 60yo nonstop-intern who changed his jobtitle from dildo-traveling-salesman to fullstack-frontend-dev by wrinting it on a post-it-note, I imagined, there has to be something wrong with the backend as well.
Boy was I right!
Yes, you guessed it! A random Wordpress adminpanel login appeared! OH NO....
I really wanted to levae this meeting immediately.
I was not able to hold my disgust back and I told them right in their face, what a shit pile of nutty squirrel turds this current page is. And that Wordpress is not the right choice at all for a shop.
Then came the best part: They basically told me, that they terminated the previous contract with the webagency because they were too expensive (they are cheap, compared to others, I know people who know their prices) and that they wanted to create A BIG MARKETPKACE with multiple ressellers who can have their shop in their website. Something similar to FUCKING AMAZON. ON FUCKING WORDPRESS!?!?!?
They even asked me if I wanted to be their partner & developer and that they can't pay much at the moment until the marketplace starts to grow.
I more or less told them to go fuck themselves with a rusty pitchfork.2 -
Client: "the content is pretty confusing and inconsistent. Would you say the frontend is ready?"
Me:"please do not ask that way."
Client: "i just asked a question. What do you mean?"
Me: "well.. you basically say that is bad and then asked me if I thought it was bad."
Client:" i was asking a question. It is your problem if you find that offensive. You were to deliver a finished design until 3pm. "
Me:"you just reviewed it and came up with new input..and apart from that there were just some buttons in the wrong shade."
Client:"yes but I expect that kind of critical input from the developer. "
Me: "I understand, but this was a tiny project for 300 cash. I can't go all out on a budget like this. "
Client:"but all the other jobs I gave you lately were paid much better.."
Me: "yes. Those were other jobs, right? Should I feel obliged to work overtime I eager expectation of more and different work?"
Client: "you used to be more excitable...."
:/1 -
it's funny, how doing something for ages but technically kinda the wrong way, makes you hate that thing with a fucking passion.
In my case I am talking about documentation.
At my study, it was required to write documentation for every project, which is actually quite logical. But, although I am find with some documentation/project and architecture design, they went to the fucking limit with this shit.
Just an example of what we had to write every time again (YES FOR EVERY MOTHERFUCKING PROJECT) and how many pages it would approximately cost (of custom content, yes we all had templates):
Phase 1 - Application design (before doing any programming at all):
- PvA (general plan for how to do the project, from who was participating to the way of reporting to your clients and so on - pages: 7-10.
- Functional design, well, the application design in an understandeable way. We were also required to design interfaces. (Yes, I am a backender, can only grasp the basics of GIMP and don't care about doing frontend) - pages: 20-30.
- Technical design (including DB scheme, class diagrams and so fucking on), it explains it mostly I think so - pages: 20-40.
Phase 2 - 'Writing' the application
- Well, writing the application of course.
- Test Plan (so yeah no actual fucking cases yet, just how you fucking plan to test it, what tools you need and so on. Needed? Yes. but not as redicilous as this) - pages: 7-10.
- Test cases: as many functions (read, every button click etc is a 'function') as you have - pages: one excel sheet, usually at least about 20 test cases.
Phase 3 - Application Implementation
- Implementation plan, describes what resources will be needed and so on (yes, I actually had to write down 'keyboard' a few times, like what the actual motherfucking fuck) - pages: 7-10.
- Acceptation test plan, (the plan and the actual tests so two files of which one is an excel/libreoffice calc file) - pages: 7-10.
- Implementation evalutation, well, an evaluation. Usually about 7-10 FUCKING pages long as well (!?!?!?!)
Phase 4 - Maintaining/managing of the application
- Management/maintainence document - well, every FUCKING rule. Usually 10-20 pages.
- SLA (Service Level Agreement) - 20-30 pages.
- Content Management Plan - explains itself, same as above so 20-30 pages (yes, what the fuck).
- Archiving Document, aka, how are you going to archive shit. - pages: 10-15.
I am still can't grasp why they were surprised that students lost all motivation after realizing they'd have to spend about 1-2 weeks BEFORE being allowed to write a single line of code!
Calculation (which takes the worst case scenario aka the most pages possible mostly) comes to about 230 pages. Keep in mind that some pages will be screenshots etc as well but a lot are full-text.
Yes, I understand that documentation is needed but in the way we had to do it, sorry but that's just not how you motivate students to work for their study!
Hell, students who wrote the entire project in one night which worked perfectly with even easter eggs and so on sometimes even got bad grades BECAUSE THEIR DOCUMENTATION WASN'T GOOD ENOUGH.
For comparison, at my last internship I had to write documentation for the REST API I was writing. Three pages, providing enough for the person who had to, to work with it! YES THREE PAGES FOR THE WHOLE MOTHERFUCKING PROJECT.
This is why I FUCKING HATE the word 'documentation'.36 -
When you start a new job as a Senior Developer, and start asking questions about the code, and you have these collections of conversations with other front-end people:
Exhibit 1:
Me: Ahh so I see the filtering and pagination is all done with Javascript in the front end...
Random dev: No, it's done with Angular.
Exhibit 2:
Me: I think we should add frontend pagination to this page. There will be too many elements on it if you're a customer with 2000 servers.
Random dev: Don't bother, there's no pagination in the API call... So that will not gain any performance.
Me: But it wouldn't take long to implement and it would improve the user experience, why would you want to show ALL the elements, when you have an option not to... Also, it WILL be a major performance hit, especially on mobile.
Random dev: People will use search anyway.
😥🔪
Also, there are no coding standards, every file looks different, and my opinion is being disregarded in everything, and I thought my last job was bad...
Seriously how are some people hired as front-enders?
Since I just took this job, I feel obligated to stay a couple of months... But hey, don't cry for me, I might have more rants for you. 😂
Sorry for the long rant, here's cake: 🍰5 -
Making a contest site for a client. It's 2 parts, a static part and then a "hub" where the contest actually takes part. I did most of the static part, and uploaded it to show her. She likes it, but wants to be able to change the content automatically without having to talk to me. Ok, I think. The harder part is the contest site, so she's not gonna run away with my code. I give her access to the ftp and teach her what to do.
To my amazement she takes a liking to html. And starts adding some (super simple) tags. They ruin some of my designs but they look fine. Whatever.
Today she messages me saying that the top picture is off. Hmm, I'll check it out. Turns out almost the entire page is ruined. What's even worse is that she inserted a link to a facebook image she has on top of everything, a picture I don't have access to, and yet she's refusing to admit that it was her mistake. It's not even wrapped in an img tag, it's just pure text!!!
Fine. I'll revert to the version I had. No! cz apparently I can't undo all the changes she's worked hard on. So now I have to go through all the markup and check what's causing this -- and I hate frontend!!!
Worst part of this all? She can't fucking be bothered to type out what her whore infested lying mouth wants to say. She has to send me voicenotes, a few minutes long, filled with uhhh ummm let me think, because that brain who thought learning to write <br/> and <em> is bad ass can't FUCKING formulate a thought before sending it. She has to have me stop my music, and stop my concentration just so she can tell me maybe she pasted it by mistake IN A 5 MINUTE VOICE NOTE. tbh the money isn't even that good. I don't know why I'm still here.
PS: it's not missing an include. I checked.undefined html client fuck clients too bad i'm an atheist i need jesus right now when clients think that they are jesus7 -
I swear to god, I'm going to track down the dipshit who just made my day hilariously painful.
So here I am, finishing up this project that's been going on for what feels like an eternity, when I get an email "why doesn't order X show up in this other system?".
I mean, it's a common thing they can take 15 minutes to push across, so the usual quick glance and what do you know, it's just sitting there as if it's waiting to be pushed through, than an hour later... it's still there, so I start digging, maybe a data issue, nope looks all good, customer details, payment details, products...
just another order, jump on the logs and all looks fi......... wait.... why does this postcode have 3 digits and not 4 , Australia has 4 digit postal codes fyi, looks at order again, 3 digits, look at log, 3....hold on why's it only 3 digits, checks code, handled as string... ok..... where the fuck would it drop a digit.... frontend requires 4 digits, validation requires 4 digits... how the fuck did you get 3 digits in... I can't see anything anywhere that logically makes sense for this🤔
Drops address into google and it's a postcode starting with 0.
Jumps on DB and the fucker is an int in the postcode table. For all you playing at home 0123 <> 123
I don't know if I should feel bad, or impressed, it's been 7 years since this table was created, and 7 years before someone managed to live in one of these parts of the country with a leading 0.
QA didn't spot this years ago,
No one tested this exact scenario,
The damn thing isn't even documented as a required delivery area, but here we are!
Kudos good sir, you broke it! 🤜 🤛
You sir may get your order now!rant cover every possibility always suspect the unexpected my problem now! not my fault 😅 data how dafuq was that even missed11 -
It's enough. I have to quit my job.
December last year I've started working for a company doing finance. Since it was a serious-sounding field, I tought I'd be better off than with my previous employer. Which was kinda the family-agency where you can do pretty much anything you want without any real concequences, nor structures. I liked it, but the professionalism was missing.
Turns out, they do operate more professionally, but the intern mood and commitment is awful. They all pretty much bash on eachother. And the root cause of this and why it will stay like this is simply the Project Lead.
The plan was that I was positioned as glue between Design/UX and Backend to then make the best Frontend for the situation. Since that is somewhat new and has the most potential to get better. Beside, this is what the customer sees everyday.
After just two months, an retrospective and a hell lot of communication with co-workers, I've decided that there is no other way other than to leave.
I had a weekly productivity of 60h+ (work and private, sometimes up to 80h). I had no problems with that, I was happy to work, but since working in this company, my weekly productivity dropped to 25~30h. Not only can I not work for a whole proper work-week, this time still includes private projects. So in hindsight, I efficiently work less than 20h for my actual job.
The Product lead just wants feature on top of feature, our customers don't want to pay concepts, but also won't give us exact specifications on what they want.
Refactoring is forbidden since we get to many issues/bugs on a daily basis so we won't get time.
An re-design is forbidden because that would mean that all Screens have to be re-designed.
The product should be responsive, but none of the components feel finished on Desktop - don't talk about mobile, it doesn't exist.
The Designer next to me has to make 200+ Screens for Desktop and Mobile JUST so we can change the primary colors for an potential new customer, nothing more. Remember that we don't have responsiveness? Guess what, that should be purposely included on the Designs (and it looks awful).
I may hate PHP, but I can still work with it. But not here, this is worse then any ecommerce. I have to fix legacy backend code that has no test coverage. But I haven't touched php for 4 years, letalone wrote sql (I hate it). There should be no reason whatsoever to let me do this kind of work, as FRONTEND ARCHITECT.
After an (short) analysis of the Frontend, I conclude that it is required to be rewritten to 90%. There have been no performance checks for the Client/UI, therefor not only the components behave badly, but the whole system is slow as FUCK! Back in my days I wrote jQuery, but even that shit was faster than the architecuture of this React Multi-instance app. Nothing is shared, most of the AppState correlate to other instances.
The Backend. Oh boy. Not only do we use an shitty outated open-source project with tons of XSS possibillities as base, no we clone that shit and COPY OUR SOURCES ON TOP. But since these people also don't want to write SQL, they tought using Symfony as base on top of the base would be an good idea.
Generally speaking (and done right), this is true. but not then there will be no time and not properly checked. As I said I'm working on Legacy code. And the more I look into it, the more Bugs I find. Nothing too bad, but it's still a bad sign why the webservices are buggy in general. And therefor, the buggyness has to travel into the frontend.
And now the last goodies:
- Composer itself is commited to the repo (the fucking .phar!)
- Deployments never work and every release is done manually
- We commit an "_TRASH" folder
- There is an secret ongoing refactoring in the root of the Project called "_REFACTORING" (right, no branches)
- I cannot test locally, nor have just the Frontend locally connected to the Staging webservices
- I am required to upload my sources I write to an in-house server that get's shared with the other coworkers
- This is the only Linux server here and all of the permissions are fucked up
- We don't have versions, nor builds, we use the current Date as build number, but nothing simple to read, nonono. It's has to be an german Date, with only numbers and has always to end with "00"
- They take security "super serious" but disable the abillity to unlock your device with your fingerprint sensor ON PURPOSE
My brain hurts, maybe I'll post more on this shit fucking cuntfuck company. Sorry to be rude, but this triggers me sooo much!2 -
Hi,
I'm not a ranty person so I never actually thought I'd post anything here but here it goes.
From the beginning.
We use ancient technologies. PHP 5.2, Symfony 1.2 and a non RFC complient SOAP with NO documentation.
A year ago We've been thrown a new temporary project. An VOIP app for every OS.
That being iOS, Android, MAC, PC, Linux, Windows mobile. With a 3 month deadline. All that thrown at 4 PHP developers. The idea being that They'll take it, sign the delivery protocol, everyone happy. No more updates for the app needed. They get their funds they needed the app for and we get paid.
Fast forward to today...
Our dev team started the year with great news that We'll most likely have to create a new project. Since the amount of new features would be far greater than current feature set, we managed to finally force our boss to use newer technologies (ie. seperate backend symfony4 PHP7+/frontend react, rest api and so on). So we were ecstatic to say the least. With preestimates aimed at a minimum 3 month development period. Since we're comfortable with everything that needs to be done.
Two days later our boss came to me that one of our most annoying clients needs a new feature. Said client uses ancient version written on a napkin because They changed half of the specification 2 weaks before deadline in a software made not by a developer but some sysadmin who didn't know anything. His MVC model was practically VVV model since he even had sql queries in some views. Feature will take 3 days - fixing everything that will break in the meantime - 1-2 months.
F*** it, fine. A little overtime won't kill me.
Yesterday boss comes again... Apparently someone lost a delivery protocol for a project we ended that half a year ago. Whats even better at the time when we asked for hardware to test we never got any. When we asked about any testing enviornment - nothing. The app being SEMI-stable on everything is an overstatement but it was working on the os'es available at the time. Since the client started testing now again, it turns out that both Android app does not work on 8.1/9 and the iOS app does not work on ios12. The client obviously does not want to pay and we can do little with it without the protocol, other than rewriting the apps.
It will take months at least since all of those apps were written by people that didn't know neither the OS'es nor the languages. For example I started writing the iOS one in swift. Only to learn after half of the development time, that swift doesn't like working by C Library rules and I had to use ObjC also. With some C thrown in due to the library. 3 unknown languages, on an unknown platform in 3 months. I never had any apple device in my hand at that time nor do I intend to now. I'm astonished it worked out then. It was a clusterf**k of bad design and sticking everything together with deprecated apis and a gum. So I'll have to basically fully rewrite it.
If boss decides we'll take all those at the same time I'll f***ing jump of a bridge.8 -
Why does almost everyone act as if the world they live in is perfect, or is supposed to be perfect?
This is about approaching IT infrastructures, but goes way beyond IT, into daily lives.
Daniel Kahneman wrote about the "Econs" - a mythical creature that behaves according to rules and rational thoughts, that everybody is guided by, as opposed to Humans, who are irrational, intuitive and emotional.
My beef is with a wider perception, beyond economical analysis, profit, investment and so on.
Examples:
Organization A uses a 15 year old system that is crappy beyond description, but any recent attempt to replace it have failed. Josh thinks that this is a crappy organization, any problem lies within the replacement of that system, and all resources should be devoted to that. Josh lives in a perfect world - where shit can be replaced, where people don't have to live with crappy systems. Josh is stupid, unless he can replace that old system with something better. Don't be Josh. Adapt to the fucking reality, unless you have the power to change it.
Peter is a moron who downloads pirated software with cracks, at the office. He introduced a ransomware that encrypted the entire company NAS. Peter was fired obviously, but Sylvia, the systems administrator, got off easily because Peter the moron was the scapegoat. Sylvia truly believes that it's not her fault, that Peter happened to be a cosmic overgrown lobotomized amoeba. Sylvia is a fucking idiot, because she didn't do backups, restrict access, etc. Because she relied on all people being rational and smart, as people in her imaginary world would be.
Amit finished a project for his company, which is a nice modern website frontend. Tom, the manager says that the website doesn't work with Internet Explorer 8, and Amit is outraged that Tom would even ask this, quoting that IE8 is a dinosaur that should've been euthanized before even hatching. Amit doesn't give a shit about the fact that 20% of the revenue comes from customers that use IE8, what's more important to him is that in his perfect imaginary world everybody uses new hardware and software, and if someone doesn't - it's their fault and that's final. Amit is a fucking asshole. Don't be like Amit.
React to the REAL world, not what you WANT the world to be. Otherwise you're one of them.
The real world can be determined by looking at all the fuck ups and bad situations, admit that they happen, that they're real, that they will keep happening unless you do something that will make them impossible to happen or exist.
Acting as if these bad things don't exist, or that they won't exist because someone would or should change it, is retarded.10 -
There are three things in my workflow that I don't like:
1. Feature requests appearing out of thin air.
It's common to be handled work at 2pm that needs to be deployed by the end of day. Usually it's bug fixes, and that's ok I guess, but sometimes it's brand new features. How the fuck am I supposed to do a good job in such a short time? I don't even have time to wrap my head around the details and I'm expected to implement it, test it, make sure it doesn't break anything and make it pass through code review? With still time to deploy and make sure it's ok? In a few hours? I'm not fucking superman!
2. Not being asked about estimates.
Everything is handed to me with a fixed deadline, usually pulled off my PM's ass, who has no frontend experience. "You have two weeks to make this website." "You must have this done this by tomorrow morning." The result, of course, is rushed code that was barely tested (by hand, no time for unit or integration tests).
3. Being the last part of the product development process.
Being the last part means that our deadlines are the most strict. If we don't meet the deadline, the client will be pissed. The thing is, the design part is usually the one that exceeds its time (because clients keep asking for changes). So when the project lands on our desks it's already delayed and we have to rush it.
This all sounds too much like bad planning to me. I guess it's the result of not doing scrum. There are no sprints, no planning meetings, only weekly status update meetings. Are your jobs similar? Is it just usual "agency work"?
I'm so tired of the constant pressure and having to rush my work. Oh, and the worst part is we don't have time for anything else. We're still stuck with webpack 2 because we never have time to update it ffs.6 -
Frustrated, tired and a bit lost.
I'm a "Senior PHP Backend Dev", which includes not the greatest tech stack nor the best job title, but it pays fine, and the company is awesome to work for.
I suck at writing features, but I'm great at bitching, and I easily put complex abstract concepts into usable models. So I'm also QA, tester, tech lead, database architect, whatever.
That makes writing PHP less annoying, because I create the rules, and whip devs around when they forget a return type definition or forget to handle an edge case. But I don't write a lot of code anymore, I mostly read (bad) code.
Lately I REALLY feel like doing something else... problem is that I know JS/ES6, but really dislike React/Vue and the whole crappy modern frontend toolchainchootrain of babelifyingwebpackingyarnballs. I know Python/Tensorflow/etc, but don't feel like I want to go into data science or AI. And then I'm awesome at the shit no one uses, like Haskell, Go and Rust (and worse).
I got a job offer which combines a very interesting PHP codebase with a Java infrastructure, where I could learn a lot... and I'm kind of tempted.
Problem is, everyone always shits on Java. I always made a bit of fun of Java myself. Don't even know exactly why, probably some really cruel instinct which causes kids to bully the least popular kid.
I know the basics, I've written the hello world, and a small backend app for a personal project. I know how strict and verbose it can be. I love the strictness in Haskell and Rust.... but those are both also quite terse.
Should I become a Java dev? I'm not talking about Android SDK, but an insane enterprise codebase at a life sciences corporation.
To the pro Java devs: What are the best and worst things about your job, about the weekly processes, about the toolchains? Have you ever considered other languages? Do you unconditionally love and believe in Java, or do you believe Swift, Kotlin, Scala or whatever will eventually make it completely obsolete?
Will Java hasten my decline into the cynical neckbeard I was always destined to be?
There are a lot more fun langauges, but looking at realistic demand and career value...20 -
LONG RANT ALERT, no TL;DR
* Writes an email to colleague about why I can't create a page on our CMS without at least a H1 title. She wants to me to put up an image with text on it (like a flyer), for multiple reasons, I say I need a textless image. *
30 minutes later:
* Casually plans a frontend optimization project, by looking at files on the CMS, in order to make further development easier and less time-taking*
*** EMAIL NOTIFICATION ***
* clicks *
"Hello, this is [Graphic designer] from the company who created the image with text on it. I do not understand why you can't put display:none on your <h1> tag. Also, being a web company, we are used to making themes and my solution of display:none will work. It's pityful to work on a design only to have it stripped out from most of its concept. If you can't do that, do tell me what resolution you need."
My first reaction:
"Dear [Graphic designer], I am managing our corporate identity, our backend and frontend codebase, I am a graphic designer myself, and am also SEO-aware. For at least 8 reasons (redacted, 'cuse too long), I will need an image without text. As told to my colleagues, I need a 72/96 DPI 16:9 ratio image, 1920x1080 is a good start but may be bigger. Also, looking at the image, it'll have to be in JPG, at 100% quality, exported for the web. Our database software will optimize the image by itself."
Reasons are about SEO issues, responsiveness issues, CMS tools issues, backend and frontend issues.
Instead, I sent following email "We can't. Image please."
I mean seriously. A bit of clarity for you:
In my company, nobody has the slightest idea what I do. They don't understand how a computer works (we all know it works by magic, right?). So of course, when one thinks what we don't know, we know it better than the one who knows, my colleague thought our CMS was like a word document, and began telling me how I should display her bible-length text-infected image, by using some inline css styling display:none.
I tell her "nope, because of my 8 reasons". She transmits that to the agency who's done the visual, now I have this [Graphic designer] not understanding that there are other CMSs than Wordpress on the web, and she tells me, me being one of the most aware on this CMS we have, how I should optimize my site?
Fucking shit, she connects on our CMS for 1 second and she'll get cancer since it's so bad. I'm in the process of planning a whole new rewrite so the website is well designed (currently I am modifying a base theme made by an incompetent designer). I know the system by heart and I know what you can, or can't do.
Now I just received an answer: "so it's only a pure technical problem". NO, OUR WEBSITE WAS CODED BY A CHIMPANZEE WHO THOUGHT WEB DEV WAS AS EASY AS WRITING "HELLO WORLD" ON A SHITTY CMS THAT FORCES DEV USERS TO USE A FUCKING CUM-WHITE-THEMED EDITOR TO EDIT THE WHOLE SITE!!!
I can't just sneeze and "oh look, it's working!"1 -
This rant is inspired by another rant about automated HR emails like "we appreciate your interest [bla bla] you got rejected [bla bla]". (Please bare with me).
I live in an underdeveloped country, I graduated in September, did Machine Learning for my thesis and I will soon publish a paper about it, loved it wanted to work as ML/data science engineer. On all the job postings I found there was only one job related, I sent resume, they didn't answer, couple months later that company posted that they want a full stack web dev with knowledge of mobile dev and ML, basically an all in one person, for the salary of a junior dev.
- another company posted about python/web scraping developer, I had the experience and I got in touch, they sent me a test, took me 3 days, one of the questions took me 2 days, I found an unanswered SO question with the exact wording dating to 6 months ago, I solved it, sent answers, never heard back from them again.
- one company weren't really hiring, I got in touch asking if the have a position, they sent a test, I did it, they liked it, scheduled an interview, the interviewer was arrogant, not giving any attention to what I am saying, kept asking in depth questions that even an expert might struggle answering. In the end they said they're not really hiring but they interview and see what they can find. Basically looking for experts, I mentioned that im freshly graduated from the very beginning.
- over 1000 applications on different positions on LinkedIn across the whole world, same automated rejection email, but at least they didn't keep me waiting.
- I lost hope. Found a job posting near me, python/django dev, in the interview they asked about frontend (react/vueJS) and Flutter, said I don't have experience and not interested in that, they asked about databases, C and java and other stuff that I have experience in, they hired me with an insulting salary (really insulting) cuz they knew im hopeless, filling 2 positions, python dev and tech support for an app built in the 90s with C/java and sorcery... A week into the job while I'm still learning about the app I'm supposed to support, the guy called me into the office: "here's the thing" he said, "someone else is already working on python, i want you to learn either react or vueJS or flutter" I was in shock, I didn't know what to say, I said I'll think about it, next week I said I'll learn react, so I spent the week acting like im learning react while I scroll on FB and LinkedIn (I'm bad, I know).
- in the weekend a foreign company that I applied to few weeks ago got in touch, we had some interviews and I got hired as DevOps/MLOps. It's been a month and I'm loving it, the salary is decent and I love what I do.
Conclusion: don't lose hope.8 -
I kinda hate my life right now.
I hate my job: I've been working as a flutter developer for a month and a half (even though I was hired to do backend) and I discovered I don't like frontend, it doesn't give me enough challenges. Every once in a while I have to do something complicated and have fun working, but most of the time it's just boring layout shit.
I can't do any side-projects, everything bores me. I want to get into really low level programming so bad but the steep learning curve makes me lazy.
I don't feel like I'm doing enough. I'm learning quite a bit about flutter, but I don't want to work with that, I hate it, so I feel like I'm just wasting my time. I'd like to work on something complicated and meaningful, like developing flight systems for rockets or whatever, but there's sooo much road ahead of me I just feel like I'm never gonna make it, plus I have to be very smart to do that and I'm starting to think I'm not as smart as I thought I was. I've been programming for almost 10 years now, but I can already see my college friends getting practically on my level in 2-3 years. I can't let that happen and this thought is making me stressed and burning me out. Programming is literally the only thing I'm good at (or at least I think I am), if I don't have that I don't have anything, because I suck at everything else (I'm not exaggerating, I wish I was though).
I can't see friends because of the corona. I've met with friends about 7 times in a year and I havent been with a girl god knows since when. Meanwhile, practically everyone I know is partying, having fun, going to the beach and I'm here, at home, typing this fucking rant and feeling sorry for myself.
I also wanto to get fit but every time I try to do so something happens and I have to wait 2 months in order to start again.
There isn't anyone I can trust enough to share some feelings and thoughts I have and this is eating me up.
I am unhappy and have been like this for a while now. Every once in a while I smile, yes, but most of my day is endless boredom either because of work or the lack of it. I just want to go back to normal, I don't want to think about my future, I want someone to talk to, I want to be able to cry.
I hate this.19 -
Just happened to stumble across an indian job offer. They want a fulltime php dev for 20k indian moneys a month. Thats not even $300. Are they... Are they serious or is this just a bad company? Because thats less then what i made with a part time frontend job when i was just a beginner. Is this a trend in india to underpay people by this much?11
-
A discussion about writing tests for frontend applications.
Context: my frontend coworkers don't write tests, at all. Yeah, really. Our testing process is very manual. We test manually when developing. We test manually when reviewing code. After merging, the application is deployed to a staging server and the design team does a QA Sprint. Lots of manual testing and some bugs still crawl by.
So I decided to start pushing my coworkers to start writing tests. One of the reasons I constantly hear them say to not write tests in the frontend is: "It's not worth the time, because design keeps changing, which means we have to take time to fix the tests. Time that we usually don't have."
I've been thinking about this a lot and it seems to me that this is more related to bad tests than to tests in general.
Tests should not break with design changes (small changes at least). They should test funcionality, not how things look. A form should not break if the submit button's style changes, so why should its tests fail? I also think that tests help save time, as they prevent some back and forth because of bugs.
Writing good tests is the hard part. Tests that cover what's really important and aren't frail and break with things that shouldn't break them. What (and how) should we test? And what shouldn't be tested?
Writing them fast is another hard thing. Are you doing it right if they take more time to write than the actual code?
What do you think about this? Do you write tests for your frontend applications? What do you test? How much time do you spend writing tests? What are your testing tools/frameworks?6 -
AAARGH ELECTRON IS SO FUCKING...decently pleasant to use?
So I've been working on a FPGA based synthesizer on a Xilinx Arty A7 board (that little Artix 35T chip is surprisingly capable), and since I hate typing commands into a serial stream for anything even decently complex just like any sane person should, I needed something to build a UI for controlling it and other synth projects while I make the Eurorack compatible enclosure and knobs and stuff. I chose Electron because they said it was simple and easy to make cool looking stuff, fast.
And they were right. In like two hours, with Electron and p5.js, starting from zero since I don't know jack about frontend, I had a pretty nice UI driving the hardware synth and effects modules. Not bad. I should use this more often.11 -
Rant. (I love and respect all people! Especially developers.)
You frontend imbecils! I just can’t deal with you any more. I’ve had it.
Stop-inventing-new-components-where-there-are-fully-developed-and-working-concepts!
I mean. Just fucking stop! If I see another worthless datetime picker with an ”innovative” design I am going to hunt you down and freaking scream in your face.
And make fucking buttons look like tappable/clickable. It’s not fucking hard! Imbecils.
Oh, ooo, look at me, I am a frontend developer and I am in UX la-la land and what I am doing is sooo hard. Fuck off with your fucking moving gradients and n:th-child childish playground.
”Yeah, I exchanged the spinner…”
Fuck you. Your not contributing. Nobody cares! We’re not doing anything for the business by having a web which can be seen on a fucking telephone. EVERYBODY IS SITTING WITH SEVERAL GIANT MONITORS AND A FUCKING WORKSTATION FOR THIS. NOBODY ASKED FOR IT. AND YOU SPEND COUNTLESS HOURS ON IT.
”Yeah, I made the site work on ipad”
Please. Why? It’s not worth anything. Zero value.
”Yeah, the toggle component is now changed since we started to use the biddle-flipflup lib and it works almost the same”
No! NO! It does not work ”almost” the same. The psychology of the toggle is now wastly different. What was On before now looks like Off and it is fucking worse!!!
Imbecils. I hate you.
And no, I can’t do your fucking work! And I know that you do other non-ui stuff as well sometimes… but anyway… I have no interest to be in that clusterfuck that modern frontend is today. It was really fucking bad twenty years ago and it is just as bad today and you are not helping.
”I’ve improved the button so now it aaaaalmost does not look like a button. But I am getting there!”
Fuck you.14 -
How Bad I'm at frontend Development: about 3 year ago i accidentally wrote </from> instead of </form> while working on the frontend of a website, everything just went bonkers. Took me 10+ hours to realize my mistake.
In my opinion frontend devs are real hero they have to learn multiple frameworks, and make website respinsive and work on IE at the same time. Idk Why the fuck clients still want their website to work on IE (fuck you Carl, your users are of age group 15-22 they don't even know wtf IE is)
P. S. At that time i didn't knew HTML validators are a thing.6 -
Since this post was too long for devrant's 5k sign limit, I split it in several parts. I will try to make each part comprehensible as a standalone post. This is part one of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU? saga. A tale of empathy, competence and me being a dick, even though I didn't really want to be one. The part one is titled: "Bad times, good times". It may or may not have any value. It probably won't be funny.
I dedicate this to every single junior or entry level dev out there, struggling to find a job in their field.
=====
What do you think, how long does it take for junior with 6 months of commercial experience to find a dev job? If your answer was "idk", you're right. If your answer was "3 montths maybe", you're also right. At least this is how long it took for me. I am writing this at 2am, couple of hours after I managed to get employed. I am happy. My employer probably is happy too. My recruiters certainly are. The guy whose offer I had to reject after we were almost ready to sign the contract, on the other hand, isn't. He probably hates me. We'll get to that one post at a time.
Let's move back in time a little bit. It's December 12th, 2019. It is third month after I left my family home. I don't ha0ve a job, I was living first in my older brother's apartment for a month, then I started to rent my own. I have literally no money, I'm in debts. I moved out because reasons that would make up for another couple of posts, and for said reasons I refused to get 'any job just to pay the bills'. You can imagine that I was in pretty bad situation, and my psyche didn't really take that shit too well either. My daily meal was a bowl of rice with a little bit of self-hatred on top. Gourmet.
At that time, my daily routine would consist of practicing music, practicing programming, trying to get a job and surviving. Some of my friends just turned their backs against me. I did a small rework of my contact list as well. It was a *hard* time. I had sent my CV to around a hundred different companies with very little to no response. Some of them required at least bachelor's in IT for their frontend dev. Some of them required experience I didn't have. Some of them just didn't care to answer me. And then that one day happened. Three different people wanted to meet me and talk about internships/job offers. I will share what happened next in next posts, but here's a quick spoiler. I got a job. Yes, I am hyped.
Dear fellow Dev. This is a small reminder. If you're having bad times, just remember that if you focus on what you need to do, you will be just fine. Sometimes it may take days of struggling, sometimes it will take months of eating mostly rice. We all... Most of us have been through this.
Next posts will be less inspirationalstufftelling and more storytelling. Let this post be a setup, a small context to keep in mind upon reading my next stories. Because it is quite important. For me and for the story.3 -
Welcome to Part III of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU?, a saga of competence, empathy and me being dick, even tho I didn't want to be one.
This is a follow-up to: https://devrant.com/rants/2363551. It's title is: "Mt 13:12".
We left off the story in the very moment I had received feedback from 3 companies that decided to interview me. A, B and C. We won't talk about A from now on, since I refused their offer to offer me unpaid internship.
It's December 20, 18:00. I am returning home. Earlier that day I emailed guys at C that I need some time with my decision, because I have another offer that suits me better. It was awaiting response from B, obviously. That day they called me and offered me... full-time job. As a fullstack. On a project for a big company, that they described by something like: "They may not be one of the famous X of the market, but they're probably X+1, yeah". Needless to say, that was some bad marketing. I googled them up later tho. Anyway, my response didn't change, altho thing seemed a little big better for me. Except that I was a little suspicious of them too. Were they *that* desperate for a worker?[1]
It is December 24th. 10 am. My phone rings. It's guy from B. He tells me "saito, the recruiter guy is still sick. Since I don't know if we can hire you for sure, it may be better for you to accept another offer, if you got any. I'll keep you updated." That was pretty cool of him. Remember the quote from part II? That's the empathy part. He called me, even tho he didn't really have to. If you read this, monsieur, you're the best. Back to the story now. I emailed guys at C that I am willing to start the job anytime. They told me that CEO is back January 7th, 2020.
It is January 4th 2020, 10 am. Unkonwn number calls. It's actually a guy from B, but the other one. The one that was sick previously. He tells me that he wants to talk about my employment. He talked with the senior dev and he just wants a talk and a small code test in typescript. He told me that it's no prob that I don't know typescript, since it will be entry level and I have time to learn the basics. And so I do. We decide to meet at January 7th. Later on that day guys from C email me that they want to sign the contract n January 7th.
And here we get to the culmination and the lesson of those posts. What should I do? On one side I have a job that isn't 100% comfirmed, but I'm pretty positive about it. The people at B are great, I love them. During my interview I learned some stuff about the project I would participate in, so I didn't go in blindly. It was my field of interest. I was hyped for the possibility itself to work with that senior dev. On the other hand guys at C had their contract ready. They finally were ready to start. I still didn't know for shit what would I do. I knew that I would need to learn basics of data science and stuff. Their interview and CEO left me with a quite bad impression. I didn't really like them. But it was a job.
What I did I consider the best thing I could do for myself. I told guys from C to meet someday later. I visited B yesterday, January 7th. I've done the test. It had some code refactoring and implementing some React elements. Basic shit indeed. I am almost positive I would do it even if I didn't visit typescript docs during the weekend. We then talked about it. The dev told me what he would change in the solution, but didn't consider it bad. Then they told me I'm hired. And I emailed C that I can't accept their offer. The guy was pretty pissed. I can understand it, they seemed to be ready to start with me and I pulled out last day, in the evening. I am truly sorry for that. But also I feel no regrets. I have chosen those whom I trusted more. I've chosen guys who took notes of my CV and talked about it in my interview over people who didn't even get that I applied for a frontend positin. That's competence for you. I've chosen guys who actually wanted to talk wih me about me making music over people who sat me down at a computer and told me: "code". That's empathy for you.
Dear recruiters. If you want to attract best candidates, show your competence and empathy.
Dear recruitees. If you're looking for a good job, it may take some time. Also, knowing people helps a lot.
1 – Actually, I wouldn't be surprised, if they really needed someone to help them out on their projects and they didn't get a lot of attention. Why? Well, their webpage was unfinished and kinda sucked, their interview sucked also. I still don't know whether they're a startup or what. I just can't help but feel bad seeing HR and Marketing that bad. Because the guys actually might do a lot of good stuff, and their potential employees didn't get to know that.5 -
At work, my closest relation is with the DBA. Dude is a genius when it comes to proper database management as well as having a very high level of understanding concerning server administration, how he got that good at that I have no clue, he just says that he likes to fuck around with servers, Linux in particular although he also knows a lot about Windows servers.
Thing is, the dude used to work as a dev way back when VB pre VB.NET was all the rage and has been generating different small tools for his team of analysts(I used to be a part of his team) to use with only him maintaining them. He mentioned how he did not like how Microsoft just said fk u to VB6 developers, but that he was happy as long as he could use VB. He relearned how to do most of the GUI stuff he was used to do with VB6 into VB.NEt and all was good with the world. I have seen his code, proper OOP practices and architectural decisions, etc etc. Nothing to complain about his code, seems easy enough to extend, properly documented as well.
Then he got with me in order to figure out how to breach the gap between building GUI applications into web form, so that we could just host those apps in one of our servers and his users go from there, boy was he not prepared to see the amount of fuckery that we do in the web development world. Last time my dude touched web development there was still Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript(we actually had the same employer at one point in the past in which I had to deal with said technology, not bad, but definitely not something I recommend for the current state of web development) and decided that the closest thing to what he was used was either PHP(which he did not enjoy, no problem with that really, he just didn't click with the language) and WebForms using VB.NET, which he also did not like on account of them basically being on support mode since Microsoft is really pushing for people to adopt dotnet core.
After came ASP.NET with MVC, now, he did like it, but still had that lil bug in his head that told him that sticking to core was probably a better idea since he was just starting, why not start with the newest and greatest? Then in hit(both of us actually) that to this day Microsoft still not has command line templates for building web applications in .net core using VB.NET. I thought it was weird, so I decided to look into. Turns out, that without using Razor, you can actually build Web APIs with VB.NET just fine if you just convert a C# template into VB.NET, the process was...err....tricky, and not something we would want to do for other projects, with that in we decided to look into Microsoft's reasons to not have VB.NET. We discovered how Microsoft is not keeping the same language features between both languages, having crown C# as the language of choice for everything Microsoft, to this point, it seems that Microsoft was much more focused in developing features for the excellent F# way more than it ever had for VB.NET at this point and that it was not a major strategy for them to adapt most of the .net core functionality inside of VB, we found articles when the very same Microsoft team stated of how they will be slowly adding the required support for VB and that on version 5 we would definitely have proper support for VB.NET ALTHOUGH they will not be adding any new development into the language.
Past experience with Microsoft seems to point at them getting more and more ready to completely drop the language, it does not matter how many people use it, they would still kill it :P I personally would rather keep it, or open source the language's features so that people can keep adding support to it(if they can of course) because of its historical significance rather than them just completely dropping the language. I prefer using C#, and most of my .net core applications use C#, its very similar to Java on a lot of things(although very much different in others) and I am fine with it being the main language. I just think that it sucks to leave such a large developer pool in the shadows with their preferred tool of choice and force them to use something else just like that.
My boy is currently looking at how I developed a sample api with validation, user management, mediatR and a custom project structure as well as a client side application using React and typescript swappable with another one built using Angular(i wanted to test the differences to see which one I prefer, React with Typescript is beautiful, would not want to use it without it) and he is hating every minute of it on account of how complex frontend development has become :V
Just wanted to vent a little about a non bothersome situation.6 -
(As a freelancer I was asked to do a couple of tasks on legacy code)
Let’s check this code, how bad can it be?
- all of the following: unreadable mess, no auto linting
- tests: some are there cause there’s not enough automation, others are poorly named
- frontend: somehow a genius made a react component for every variable in the store which only passes the variable to the child (wtf)
- backend: death by best practices
- ci/cd: “we have it but it’s broken”
Let’s fucking goooo 😎
Diagnosis: my therapist is getting rich
Chances to not cry tonight: close to zero
At least they pay well 🤷♂️5 -
Hello everyone!
This is a kinda follow up to my previous rant:
https://devrant.com/rants/1442655/...
So, it’s been a week since I started the internship. I am kinda lost to be honest.
The first day was awesome, but I have been going downhill since then. I make so stupid mistakes and it seems like I always think different than my mentor/employer (me making mistakes). Then he corrects me and I have to rewrite the code which I had to spend hours to think and get working. 😕😕
As @RantSomeWhere said, the guy is actually nice and still appreciates me and helps me all the time. I am really thankful for that. 🙂
As @plant99 said, I do have to be working a lot to try and meet the tasks that I am given. The employer does tell me to not over work but I still do if I have to, to get the thing done. I don’t feel nice if I don’t finish the work. So I do spend up to 12 hours (not continuously) on it at times. 😅
The code base… oh my god!! It is so bad (to me). Don’t get me wrong, we use the linting and auto formatting tools, but I can’t get over the 2 space tabs in C++ code. It makes me feel like I am not looking at code but at paragraphs of mumbo jumbo stuff. 😭😭
Oh and yes, it is confirmed. I HATE FRONTEND WORK! Especially when languages like JS and C++ are used in combination and interact with each other. 😨😨😱😱
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate JS or frontend, but I hate doing it myself. So not my cup of tea. Kudos to those who actually do it! 😎👏🏻🎊
Overall, I guess, it is going decently. I feel so scared at times, consumed by the fear, that my code will be wrong and he’ll be disappointed in me. Yea I know that I shouldn’t be upset with how others feel. But it does make me sad when I disappoint my mentor (who is still rooting for me). 🙁
I am hoping to get better over time. This is definitely a great experience for me because my code has never been judged before. I have always been the “king of code” in my college/social circle. 🤭🤭
Honestly, this is actually humbling. I guess I definitely needed this 😅😅. And as they say, you don’t improve by being the top. You improve by leaping forward, ending up at the bottom of the heap of the next level, and growing up from there. 😅
Oh and I also realized - remunerative benefits are DEFINITELY motivating 😂😂😂😂
And the 5 days work also definitely makes me MUCH more excited for the weekends 😆😆😂😂
Thanks everyone for cheering, motivating, and giving me advise.
@oudalally I definitely found your advise quite helpful 😁😁😊😊
PS: ooh this my biggest rant/story yet! Yiiipppeeeeeee 😁😁😊😊7 -
I really hate it when I try to be careful with disclosing information of my employer in a rant on Reddit but the CTO who fires me go there and replies in full detail in an attempt to shame you. http://archive.is/sfP00
Because I have bigger balls (or a small brain, depending how you see it) I'll leave the post on but with my response to his comment on my thread as anybody may dig my Reddit account before hiring me for a job.
And yes, he is the same guy I refer in this past rant https://devrant.com/rants/1089376/...
It fucking sucks that the CTO will sleep safe and sound and I can't do much than looking for another job and contribute to FLOSS projects while I build new stuff to improve my skills all this while money is running out. I'm glad I'm living with my parents after this shit hit the fan, less stuff to worry about, but this is not life.13 -
I used to work with a teacher in my last uni year.
The job consisted on doing a kinda-like management system for a business. It all began kinda "right", we agreed upon a price for 6 months of my work (a very lowball price, but it was just right because I was learning stuff that we were going to be using).
Fast-forward first six months, all I do is code frontend, mockup screens and whatsoever because this "business" hadn't give us proper requirements (Yeah, I told him to ask for them, but nothing came through).
So I was like well, I'll keep working in this project because I really want to finish it. Sidenote: I was doing all the "hard work", he didn't know how to code, and he calls himself a teacher... wtf).
Months go by, and a year goes round, in between these months, he spoke to me, that he wanted me that we kept working together, that we could renegotiate the payment (I asked him to give me my payment once the job was done). I agreed, but my uni residence period was coming along and I got an oportunity to go abroad to another country.
So there I was, in the need of money to buy my passport, plane tickets and other stuff, so I asked him for the payment.
Needs to be noted, that the last 6 months work was me doing tutorials on how to fucking use Linux, how to use PostgreSQL, how to fucking use CSS! He told me he would pay me extra for it.
The day came, and I received my payment... the exact amount we talked a year ago, I was like "Seriously dude?", but well, I needed the money and I didn't have time to argue, so we talked a little bit about me helping him and I told him "As long as I have time, I'll help, but remember that I'm going abroad to work for a small startup, so maybe I'll be up to my head with work" he agreed, we nod and then I left.
First week abroad came in and I was doing a shit-ton of stuff, then his first message comes around "Hey, I need more tutorials! ASAP! Before 6PM"
What.The.Fuck. I told you, son of a bitch, that I wouldn't be able to do them until weekend.. and it was monday!
So I ignored it, weeks went throught and my "angry mood" was fading away so I said to myself "Well, it's time to pick up that stuff again", I open Slack and I find a week old message with a document attached, it was a "letter", I just skimmed by it and read some keywords "deceptioned... failed me.."
Sure dude? Was I the failure? Becase, as far as I remember, you were the fucktard that didn't know how to fucking install a VM!
A week went by, and then randomly a friend of mine talks to me through Facebook:
E: Hey, how are you?
M: I'm fine, what's up?
E: What did you do to TEACHER?
M: Nothing, <explains all situation>
E: Well, It seems weird, that's why I wanted to talk with you, I believe in you, because I know you well, but TEACHER it's thrashing shit about you with all his students on all of his classes
M: Seriously?
E: Yeah, he's saying that you are a failure, irresponsible, that you scammed him
That moment, I for sure, lost all moral responsibility with him and thought to myself "He can go fuck himself with my master branch on his ass"
So when I got back to my country, I had to go around in school, avoiding him, not because I was ashamed nor anything by the way, just because I knew that If i ever had the disgrace to meet him face to face, my fists would be deep into his nose before he could say "Hey".
Moral of the story:
If you overheard that a teacher has a bad rep, not by one, nor two, but more than +100 people, maybe it's true.
Good thing my friends and others know me well and I didn't have repercutions on my social status, I'm just the guy that "fucked up TEACHER because I had the right and way to do it"4 -
I did my portfolio website as part of a college project. I had it posted when i finished it to a local fb page where around 200 people commented on it to say how they like it. A lot of them liked the website while most of them had CONSTRUCTIVE CRITISISM to share (this is important). After i fixed what people didint like i posted the website to css awards and since then i had two site of the day awwards on different websites and some other features or smaller awwards. I was happy as I thought this was the best project i did so far (in frontend). I got the highest grade for it too.
Now for the rant part. Yesterday i ran into the proffessor that is in charge of the degree orientation I am on. He started to call me out and shit on that project basicly saying it was shit. No reason why or any constructive critisism. I felt such fuking anger. Im all for critisism as long people state their opinions in a way that they prove why something is bad. But this was just disgusting. Well fuck me2 -
Apparently I'm surrounded by morons...
For the past 7 days since I was ordered to learn react wich originated this rant https://devrant.io/rants/805055/...
I somehow know more of it then my team that is on it for the past month or more.
Looks like the "standard" is to pass refs everywhere instead of proper props/state utilization.
At first I was confused by the usefulness and credibility of it but after a literal 1 fucking minute google search I found it to be a bad practice discouraged even by official docs.
Wtf? No one read the docs?2 -
Shit guys, I cannot even begin to tell you about how tired I am at seeing gifs at every single.fucking frontend article. I cannot enter a single Medium/Dev.to without it being plastered in the most random fucking gifs you have ever seen.
Its bad enough that your average Medium/Dev.to is as shallow as the little puddle you spill on the floor after watering your cactus. With the added gifs, it just sucks so bad. I mean, who's fucking idea was it to plaster reading material with distracting content anyway? I wanna hunt them down and shove something right up their arses.
Back in uni when I started dabbing into frontend, my feeble brain thought it was quite refreshing after peering over java docs every day. Nowadays though, I cannot even manage to read these mostly shitty arse articles without wishing I was dead.
Also, I wonder if this is also the case for the java, .net, python, rust community?15 -
Colleagues cannot seem to grasp that allowing a user to manually update a field via an Api, that only business process should update is a bad idea.
The entire team of around 10 'software developers' cannot grasp that just because the frontend website won't set it doesn't mean its secure. I have tried many times now...
Just an example honestly... Our project follows a concrete repository pattern using no interfaces or inheritance, returning anaemic domain models (they are just poco) that then get mapped into 'view models' (its an api). The domain models exist to map to 'view models' and have no methods on them. This is in response to my comments over the last 2 years about returning database models as domain transfer objects and blindly trusting all Posts of those models being a bad idea due to virtual fields in Ef.
Every comment on a pull request triggers hours of conversation about why we should make a change vs its already done so just leave it. Even if its a 5 minute change.
After 2 years the entire team still can't grasp restful design, or what the point is.
Just a tiny selection of constant incompetence that over the years has slowly warn me down to not really caring.
I can't really understand anymore if this is normal.3 -
This might be a long post. I need some serious advice.
For the past 6-7 months, My friend and I have been working with these two guys "Managers" on their startup idea. He managed the backend and I was managing the 2 frontend systems for them. The Managers are non-technical.
For the longest time, the Managers were very stubborn on how they wanted things to be implemented in my code or how they wanted something to look. Initially, this was not a bother as we thought that their experience bought some insight that we lacked, but after changing dozens of things back to how we originally made them, we started feeling unhappy. I specifically was more affected by this as most of their changes were related to the front end.
This caused a lot of rifts between us and sometimes led to heated conversations. I won't say that it's all on them. I do have an attitude issue. But then, it's the same with them.
Other than that, one of the Managers is very condescending. He used to talk badly, discredit my work and even say things like "Ohh, so you can't do it" for things that I said will take too much time to implement. This was seriously affecting my mental health.
Nevertheless, we completed the system, which was originally supposed to be just an MVP, over the course of these months and now have our sites up and running with almost 100-200 daily hits. But because it's an e-commerce site, that too with a very different model, the revenue has not started yet.
Yesterday, one of the Managers called me and in so many words told me that I should exit, because of my attitude, with my current equity which is just 3% which amounts to nothing as the company has no value right now. On top of that, I, an idiot, had not taken any remuneration for the first 4 months.
Although I too want to leave, now that I have seen their real face and also because of my mental health. I feel that the system I have made is worth more than 3% equity, way more than that. One of them is a multi-featured seller dashboard to manage products, finances, orders, and a ton of complex features like bulk uploads using excel, image cropping for products, and region selection. The other is a highly optimized dynamic site using Nuxt which is used as the store, with SEO good enough to often list it as one of the top results of various google searches. I'll drop the dev links in the comments if you are interested.
But I don't know how to go about it. I do have complete control over my code and have not signed any formal contract with them, but I feel bad about jeopardizing the company at this stage. Not to mention all that work will just go to waste as well.20 -
Android studio is a PATHETIC excuse of an IDE!! And managing a constraint layout inside a scroll view is worse than having my nails pulled out while a bamboo is growing into my spine at record time! Screw this piece of shit IDE!! I suck at front end bad enough to have to deal with its buggy frontend IDE!! Aaaah!!!! - pulls lumps of hair out-16
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Damn frontend crap.
The fact that you have to mask all of the disease with processable versions of css, html & js is bad enough, but there are like 6 dialects of each bandaid, and every project has traces of each.
The the design kid tells me to run this grunt script, frontender number two screams "no, dont use grunt, we use gulp! or was it bower? I guess just run it through yeoman, it's easy!", after which the third fucking shitty hipster yells "No that's outdated, just edit the webpack file, and then run yarn install... oh but run npm upgrade --global yarn first"
Did you just fucking tell me to upgrade a fucking package manager with another package manager?
Composer, gem or cargo are not always without problems. But at least us backenders have our fucking shit together. The worst we have to deal with is choosing Python 2 vs 3, or porting some old code so the server can migrate to PHP7.
The next person to tell me they found this awesome tool to manage his other tools... I'll fucking throw your latte all over your wacom tablet.2 -
# Retrospective as Backend engineer
Once upon a time, I was rejected by a startup who tries to snag me from another company that I was working with.
They are looking for Senior / Supervisor level backend engineer and my profile looks like a fit for them.
So they contacted me, arranged a technical test, system design test, and interview with their lead backend engineer who also happens to be co-founder of the startup.
## The Interview
As usual, they asked me what are my contribution to previous workplace.
I answered them with achievements that I think are the best for each company that I worked with, and how to technologically achieve them.
One of it includes designing and implementing a `CQRS+ES` system in the backend.
With complete capability of what I `brag` as `Time Machine` through replaying event.
## The Rejection
And of course I was rejected by the startup, maybe specifically by the co-founder. As I asked around on the reason of rejection from an insider.
They insisted I am a guy who overengineer thing that are not needed, by doing `CQRS+ES`, and only suitable for RND, non-production stuffs.
Nobody needs that kind of `Time Machine`.
## Ironically
After switching jobs (to another company), becoming fullstack developer, learning about react and redux.
I can reflect back on this past experience and say this:
The same company that says `CQRS+ES` is an over engineering, also uses `React+Redux`.
Never did they realize the concept behind `React+Redux` is very similar to `CQRS+ES`.
- Separation of concern
- CQRS: `Command` is separated from `Query`
- Redux: Side effect / `Action` in `Thunk` separated from the presentation
- Managing State of Application
- ES: Through sequence of `Event` produced by `Command`
- Redux: Through action data produced / dispatched by `Action`
- Replayability
- ES: Through replaying `Event` into the `Applier`
- Redux: Through replay `Action` which trigger dispatch to `Reducer`
---
The same company that says `CQRS` is an over engineering also uses `ElasticSearch+MySQL`.
Never did they realize they are separating `WRITE` database into `MySQL` as their `Single Source Of Truth`, and `READ` database into `ElasticSearch` is also inline with `CQRS` principle.
## Value as Backend Engineer
It's a sad days as Backend Engineer these days. At least in the country I live in.
Seems like being a backend engineer is often under-appreciated.
Company (or people) seems to think of backend engineer is the guy who ONLY makes `CRUD` API endpoint to database.
- I've heard from Fullstack engineer who comes from React background complains about Backend engineers have it easy by only doing CRUD without having to worry about application.
- The same guy fails when given task in Backend to make a simple round-robin ticketing system.
- I've seen company who only hires Fullstack engineer with strong Frontend experience, fails to have basic understanding of how SQL Transaction and Connection Pool works.
- I've seen company Fullstack engineer relies on ORM to do super complex query instead of writing proper SQL, and prefer to translate SQL into ORM query language.
- I've seen company Fullstack engineer with strong React background brags about Uncle Bob clean code but fail to know on how to do basic dependency injection.
- I've heard company who made webapp criticize my way of handling `session` through http secure cookie. Saying it's a bad practice and better to use local storage. Despite my argument of `secure` in the cookie and ability to control cookie via backend.18 -
Interviewed for a Mid/Senior developer role and finally got feedback. The company feels I'm not experience enough for the senior role but think I'm a good fit for the company. Bad thing is they don't have any entry level positions available. I honestly feel like I am ready for a mid level role and maybe even a senior role. They say to keep considering them while they try to get approval for entry level position, but this is a massive company and who knows how long that will take. Recruiter said it's not a no, just not a right now. /:
Oh and going off my last rant, I found out that the senior dev was wrong about set interception being '|' in python, I found out that it's actually a method called interception(set). So even the senior dev didn't know off the top of his head. /:
Have some projects in GitHub but my biggest one is a private repo I'm doing the entire backend and even frontend. Can't share that repo or share details because it's a project a friend (his idea) and I are planning on releasing. (:
Overall feeling pretty bummed because I was looking forward to steady work that'll improve my skills even further... I'm self taught so it's a bit tougher to land interviews because of the automated process most companies have with resume filtering. ):
Going to keep doing small contracted projects until I land another interview. In the meantime trying to keep my spirit up. (:1 -
Anyone else have people that seem to constantly try to "prove" themselves to you in this weird, competitive way that only makes them seem... very annoying? I'll call him Bob here, but it's always something like:
Bob: Hi Almond, how's it going?
Almond: Ah not bad thanks, PSU blew up in the PC over the weekend though so that was a bit of a faff!
Bob: Ah no! How old's your PC?
Almond: Oh, like 7-8 years old now. I don't replace it often.
Bob: Really?! I replace mine completely every year.
Almond: Ah, cool.
Bob: Yeah, I'm a dev so I feel I need to. It's like my tool, you know.
Almond: Sure thing!
Bob: I actually spend quite a lot on it. I make sure it's got the fastest memory I can afford. Like, DDR5 stuff. That's really important, you know.
...etc., while I try to get out of said conversation for the next eternity.
Or:
(while in a conversation about a frontend bug I was looking at in Chrome devtools)
Bob: Hey Almond, you know Firefox actually had a plugin that did all this stuff before everything else?
Almond: Err, yeah, I think so. Used it back in the day.
Bob: It was called firebug. It was really good. Revolutionary.
Almond: Certainly was.
Bob: It was launched in January 2006 you know.
Almond: Right...
Bob: I used it back then.
...I mean damn, I'm all for being civil, but no-one cares you replace your PC every year, or that you know the year firebug was released, or that you once set up 5 identical PCs with different versions of Linux to run some benchmarks...14 -
The more I'm on here the more I remember all the shit I have had to deal with in the past.
Anyway, lets rant! I just moved cities after college to be closer to my family, I didnt have any work lined up at that stage but started job hunting the moment I was settled in, I did some freelance for smaller companies to stay afloat.
Eventually I got a job at this agency startup where "SEO" was there main focus, still very inexperienced they put me on frontend and data capturing but will teach me how to code using their systems in due time. At this stage I was getting paid minimum wage, but I was doing minimum work and it wasnt that bad.
A new investor bought 49% of the company and immediately moved into the office space to focus more on marketing (He was one of those scaly marketing guys that will sell you babies if he could get his hands on enough to make a profit).
This is where everything starts going to shit. He hires a bunch of "SEO Gurus", fills up the small office with people like sardines squished together. Development was still our main money maker at this stage, so there where 3 new more senior developers at this stage and I started learning a lot really fast.
Here are some of the issues we had to deal with:
1. Incentives - Great more money, haha! No, No, you where 5 minutes late so you only get half of the promised amount.
2. For every minute you are late we will deduct it from you paycheck (Did I mention I was getting paid minimum wage).
3. If you take a smoke break we will dock it from your pay.
4. Free gym membership to the gym downstairs, but you can only go once a week during your lunch.
5. No pay raises if you cant prove your worth on paper.
He on purposely made up shitty rules and regulations to keep us down and make as much profit as he could.
Here are some shitty stuff he has done:
1. We arent getting a 13th check this year because the company didnt make a big profit - while standing next to his brand new BMW.
2. Made changes over FTP on clients work because we where too slow to get to it, than blames me for it because its broken the next day and wants to give me a written warning for not resolving the issue Immediately. They went as far as wanting to fire me for this, gave me 1 day notice for meeting and that I can bring a lawyer to represent me (1 day notice is illegal, you need 5 days where I am from), so I brought a lawyer since my mom was a lawyer. They freaked the fuck out and started harassing me about this a week later.
3. Would have meetings all the time about how much money the company is making, but wont be raising our pay since no one has proven they are worth it yet.
4. Would full on yell at employees infront of the entire office if they accidentally made an mistake on a clients project.
One one occasion I took a week off for holiday, my coworker contacted me to ask a question and I answered that I will handle it when I am back the following week. Withing 2 hours my other boss phones me in a rage, "he is coming to fetch the company laptop from my house in 5 minutes, he will let me know when he arrives. Gives me no time to talk at all and hangs up - I have figured out what has happened by now so when he showed up he has this long speech about abandonment, and trust and loyalty to the company. So I pass him my laptop once he shut up and said: "You do know I am on holiday leave which you approved, right?", he goes even more silent and passes me back my laptop without saying anything, and drives off.
While the above was happening Douche manager back at the office has a rage as well and calls the whole office (25 people) to a meeting talking about how I abandoned the company and how disgraceful that is.
Those are the shitty experiences I can remember, there where many more like this. All of the above eventually led to me going into a deep depression and having panic attacks weekly, from being overworked or scared to step out of line. Its also the reason I almost stopped coding forever at that stage. I worked there for 2.5 years with the abuse.
I left 2 weeks after the last shit show, I am ok now and have my anxiety and depression well under control if not almost gone completely.
Ran into Douche Manager a few months ago after 9 years, the company got bought out and the first person they fired was him. LOL! He now has his own agency and is looking for Developers (They are hard to find he says), little does he know I spread his name far and wide to all and every Dev I knew and didnt know to avoid working for him at all costs. Seems like word of mouth still works in this digital age.
Thanks for reading this far!5 -
Please delete your browser cache.
Wtf is up with this shit?
Maybe I'm just having a streak of bad luck, but in recent days, I ran into this particular issue time and time again.
First with one of our own products - the user appearently not always was shown the newest version due to stuff being cached in the browser.
Fair enough, we had our web-dev find a solution to that, which he did. Until this is rolled out, the only resolution is to clear the browser cache.
I also ran into this same issue on multiple other fronts. For example, there's a remote connection to one of our clients I had to establish via browser. The backend was a bit unresponsive, and somehow I ended up in a situation where my login was rejected. The only solution? Clear your browser cache.
Then we have confluence and jira in the company. Same issue. All of a sudden, I could no longer log in. Worked fine in another browser.
Delete your browser cache.
Is it just that most frontend developers out there are incompetent at what they do or is this stuff broken by design? I don't recall having to clear my browser cache very frequently - in fact, I'm pretty sure I haven't done it for years on one of my PCs at home. What changed?
Ah well, maybe it was just a streak of bad luck. But still ...
/Rant7 -
Our agile scrum team has finally shattered into two parts.
On the one hand we have front-end guys.
On the other hand we have backend- /dev-ops guys.
The FE guys don't care about the BE guys business.
They don't join pairworking and only noticing things that went bad, when a Backend guy has caused it.
Goodbye fullstack dev-ops team...
I really dislike that arrogant basterds.
Frontend Hobo-Bitches...! -
Netlify.
The only one of them which will build your frontend for you and can handle a custom HTTPS domain in one click.
Perfect for spontaneous side projects, especially when they added form handlers.
Too bad it’s blocked here in Russia.4 -
So this person is looking for a way to learn how to create websites, but apparently doesn't know what backend or frontend is.
Not sure if he is using the wrong process, or someone teaching him messed things up pretty bad. Or probably my question wasn't properly phrased?
Not sure what to say next. How to help him without investing hours? Should I share a good link for him to read? How do I do that without scaring him away?8 -
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)! -
As a new freelancer I didn't have much clients , so I paired with a web designer +10 years exp. who work with me as a pm and that was a bad decision.
Although I am a back-end dev , half of the projects were frontend/WordPress theme (less price than back-end projecrs) - so 30% of the projects were cancelled .
sometimes I receive project's which have requirement, like magento, I don't know anything about ,
I tried to push myself but I burned out after six month.
he deals with clients, partner with other companies ,and I don't know anything about the terms.
at the end I was like an employee without any benefits from his company .
moreover I get my money after 45 day!!!
and not all my money .
this is a project I work for another company through him
A requirement for mobile back-end server was integrating with parse and that was my first time working with Facebook parse so ....
after two weeks ..
we received email from parse that they'll shutdown their service after a year .
so we moved to Amazon sns again my first time working with aws .
at the end I can't charge for extra money but my pm became a gold partner for that company .
the only thing that made me hold is that I need some high quality projects for my c.v.
-----------
he didn't show on hangout because I need my money .
this will be my last project with him.
wow I write too much ... I feel better now .😥1 -
Current mood: Preparing a communication plan for how to explain why we have decided to throw out the entire 3-years-worth-of-work code base for the frontend project we have inherited and rewrite it from zero because it's just. THAT. BAD.3
-
I’ve been self-employed for the past three years. Though I did spend my first year out of college working for a three person, now-defunct startup, I’ve never had a typical 9-5 (or more like 10-8 nowadays) and to be honest, never really wanted one. Lara Schenck, LLC is a profitable business, and every day I do work that is enjoyable and challenging. I make my own hours, take vacations when I want to, and run everything on my terms.
While that’s all awesome, what you don’t get from working independently is the team experience. I base my work on teaching technical literacy to non-technical designers and content producers so that they can better communicate with developers. The theory is that if a designer understands why it’s a bad idea to request 18 fonts, and if content producers know why it’s not trivial to edit the titles of a set of related posts, life will be easier for everyone. At least that’s my theory, and the assumption on which I’ve developed my business.
Lately though, in a bout of the good ‘ol impostor syndrome, I’ve been feeling like, wait, how can I be telling people how to work on teams if I’ve never really worked on one? I’ve always been the ‘Lead UI/UX/Visual/Web/Front-end Designer-person-thing’, and have never worked for a larger company with separate teams for product, UX, marketing, content, frontend, backend, etc.
So I felt the urge to look for a job, and a seemingly perfect one fell into my lap. It was for an awesome company, and it sounded right up my alley skill-wise. The title was ‘UX Engineer/Interaction Designer’. I usually balk at the the term “engineer” (perhaps for good reason) but considering the presence of “designer” and the nature of the job post, I wasn’t too bothered.9 -
How many sh*t days does it need to make me down?
3 ...
I hate my company, for making everything overcomplicated and annoying.... I have to discuss with 3 peoples for 3 days to getting some gitlab premium licenses (20$ per month for 10 licenses)... Why do you need it? Why we can't use the free version? Why Why Why... It's not enough to tell them it will save us much times and improves the quality of development.....
Also I wanted to ask if we can to Jaxb or another Dev Conference this year... Then I got the information that we have about 2000 Euro for 10 people for training.......... What should we do if everyone buys a book this budget is out .... f*ck company....
Second day, half of the day was taken for fixing the live db on the fly cause of a bad structure of tables... at least fixed some other inconsistence too... later the day fixed a freaking shitty bug with Spring Devtools and 2 Classloader to make the product that I'm presenting in 2 days running.
Today next shitty day with discussion that everything I did last half year (introducing Microservices, Kubernetes, Kafka and other DevOps things) could be maybe useless when the external company will say that they use another ecosystem -..- for their microservices...
Someone looking for a disappointed java developer? I just want to develop the best product ever... I'm happy with every area... Frontend, Backend, DevOps, Fullstack, Architect in some kinds depends on the wishes and technologies.1 -
Considering that I'm the designer on most projects and work mostly frontend... Well yeah I'm a bad experience for myself from times to times 🤔 but at least I know my tools and web limitations (haven read others rants about ignorant designers).. so.. that's something 🎉
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I'm a backend developer who for the last year has been helping the iOS-, Android and Frontend team with rewriting their shit.
Now I got yelled at for not making any new features on the backend, and we need to ship fast. So my manager dropped all further work on our backend, since it clearly needed a rewrite, since there have been no new features which to him indicates bad code that is hard to change.
Now all the developers are rewriting their applications to fit the new backend created by some new guy, which for some reason is stuck in creating a log-aggregator from scratch instead of the actual product. -
In previous company I was a backend developer. All the frontend ones were on vacation so it was up me to redo the whole frontend because of design chance. So i thought it couldn't be that bad. Little did i know was that designs were just jpg files with no info about margins or font sizes or anything really and everything was supposed to be pixel perfect. Fuck. That. Place.
-
(Part 1/2?)
Ohhh my god am I furious and this one's a gem.
Also I'm gonna namespoil all of the entities in my post. If this is against rant rules I'll reframe it.
So the story starts over an year ago. Me, being in a bad place, where I couldn't do a job due to external issues, wanted to try out an internship. Thought I could pull off a 5 hour shift and then attend to my problems.
THE INTERNSHALA ARC:
I apply to a bunch of applications on Angel, Internshala and Indeed.
I was contacted by a few handful of these places. One of them was called "ARCHITECTA SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS". These guys had arranged an online aptitude test for me which I promptly took.
I looked up this company and they seemed like a pretty okay big firm from the outset but didn't have many reviews on Glassdoor and likes of such. (first red flag). Post aptitude test, I was quite sure I fucked up and wouldn't get further contact. Surprisingly, a person from the company sends me his Whatsapp number over chat and asks me to save it. The message is worded like a bulk email (Starting with Hello everyone!!) which I thought was quite odd since the interaction from these platforms has always been a person-to-person contact for me. Since Internshala showed that only around 40 people applied for the position I was quite intrigued but attributed this to my lack of exp in internship operations.
THE WHATSAPP ARC:
I was contacted by the number on WhatsApp saying that they'd be interested in moving forward and I gave them my work experience details.
The person sends me over a development assignment to complete within a few days. The assignment consists of massive scope of details. I'm talking production level concept and implementation. Asks to me implement a custom emotion detection CV model (worded as "emotion camera" lmao), generate a 3d model (specified nowhere and expects to implement a mono-ocular system for the curious) and deploy it over AWS with a website to go along with it and also host that. The website should contain a VR ("360 rotatable") view that can explore the depth-map ("not worded as depth-map") of the face. My first assumption was that they had picked this work up for outsourcing and didn't bother to chip off parts so as to create an assignment out of it (I know very optimistic).
So I shoot it at him on WhatsApp asking which parts of the assignment should I do?
Him: So, which parts CAN you do?
I thought of it as an HR thing.
Me: I could do most of it but given the time-frame of the assignment and my applied position as a web developer it is perhaps out of scope for my application.
Him: Don't worry about the assignment. You can submit when you complete the whole assignment.
I was visibly angry over the stupidity of this man.
Me: This task is a Full-Stack + CV + VR task. It will take over two months to get working. Am I supposed to work on it for that long for an assignment?
Him: Okay just do the basic functionalities like add to cart. But also try to do the camera thing before next week.
At this point I'm sure that they are having trouble handling an eager client and they're offloading work to interns. So I do only the backend and minimal frontend and submit the assignment (a 2 day job done over a weekend).
Nothing. Empty. No messages since then. I tried sending in a Whatsapp message on the application and how to proceed. Then, if I could get to know if I have been rejected. Nothing.
And all this time I can clearly see the account is active as it pushes pretentious motivational quotes over it's Whatsapp status.3 -
Have a question about my career:
So far my career out of uni has been like this:
8 months in first place working as C# .NET dev, creating native desktop apps for windows. job was shitty, was not getting any best practices skills so I left.
12 months in 2nd place working as android dev in a startup. was working all alone and had to rebuilt my app up to 5-6 times to learn best practices. startup didnt care about android app at all so I left and now doing just some small freelance work for them.
3 months in new startup as android dev.Today I was told that its decided to focus on iOS and do all marketing (also uplift of new design) only on iOS. basically for next 3-4 months they don't plan to do much on android side. they saw that I showed some interest in backend and now they are asking me to talk with two other senior guys about starting with some small tasks for me on backend.
Our backend is mainly using python. Also backend guys will be pretty busy for next few months because they will have to deliver many new features in next few upcoming months. I've talked with one of them and he said that this is a bad idea to force frontend to start working on backend. However I feel that he's sort of gateekeping and probably just doesn't want to help me with getting up to speed.
In my defense, my knowledge doesn't end with C# .NET desktop apps and native mobile apps for android.
I have hobbie projects (gameservers) where I worked on websites (php,html,css,javascript,mysql) and also was taking care of a java based gameserver which is hosted in a linux vps.
Also I've had a small hosting "company" where with available tools I've managed to automate VPS(virtual private server) ordering, web hosting ordering and domain ordering. Basically I owned a dedicated server and did everything using whmcs, cpanel and proxmox virtualization.
I trust myself in learning this backend stuff and doing whats required, however I learned everything by myself and I won't follow all of these best practices.
Should I accept more responsibility on backend or should I continue focusing on android?7 -
Head hunting interview:
Q: Are your front end dev?
A: Yup, I'm website's frontend developer.
Q: Are you good at AngularJS?
A: No, I'm not. I only know Reactjs, and Ember.
Q: How about backend, you said you know Rail?
A: Yes, maybe for 3 month experience.
Q: So we need Angular guy, but it seem that you are BAD at Angular. Can you JOIN our next interview?
A: Sorry. I already told you that I don't care about Angular. Isn't it totally different with BAD at Angular? Thank for your consideration. I'm out.
Is there any double standard such as without AngularJS you will be considered that you are terrible at AngularJS?5 -
I have my first developer interview next week. I'm really nervous. Its an interview for both a front end role and a php backend role, and they are hiring 9 developers.
I'm a full stack developer, dot net core backend and learning React.js frontend. My html and CSS knowledge is fine but I don't quite have a grasp of js yet. As for php, I know nothing, but the recruiter said they are looking to train someone and I explained that I enjoy learning, not to mention php is very popular so it's a good tool to have knowledge with.
I've been told to look at their site, so I've written a list of about ten aspects of the site that I like and that I would change. From the lack of interactivity to images being larger than necessary, something that could be optimised.
The interview will be an hour and a half long and I'm shitting myself. Im not a confident person as is, plus I suffer from anxiety. I'm mostly worried about being put on the spot with questions like "tell me your best achievement". I will rehearse the obvious questions this weekend.
Doss anyone have any advice? Good experiences, bad experiences etc.7 -
Wow..so i can’t believe this but i just got told by my “senior” in company that he “knows his shit” when i tried to give him constructive feedback on why doing calculations for users on backend is a bad idea and is not going to scale very well.
I mean we could do those calculations on frontend using web workers ( if they are so complex ) and that would have been clearly a better idea.
I also tried to give him feedback on why its a bad idea to couple backend apis with frontend. Honestly, i don’t feel like giving any sort of feedback anymore. I don’t even feel like trying my best to “improve” the codebase because if its going to be maintained by shitheads like him that get their pride easily hurt, then no matter how hard i try to improve it, its going to end up shit either way.14 -
Four steps of professional development:
1. Simple and bad
2. Complicated and bad
3. Complicated and good
4. Simple and good
At CSS and frontend in general, I'm easy four, straight up. At architecture, I'm perhaps two in devops/docker/kubernetes/other crap and three at DB design. At electrical engineering and embedded stuff, I'm 1, no questions asked.
What are your rankings?1 -
Welcome to post 2 of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU?, a saga of competence, empathy and me being dick, even tho I didn't want to be one.
This is a follow-up to: https://devrant.com/rants/2363374 It's title is: "Oh, you can post only every 2h. Didn't know that". I also didn't know that the rest of my rant would be put into a comment. For consistency tho, this time I am still splitting the story.
A wise person once wrote in their book: "People judge other people by two things: Empathy and competence." This may not be an accurate quote, but it carries the same message. Also, I don't really remember who was the author. I only know they were probably quite wise. Anyway, I just wanted to share that sentence. Have a moment and think about it. Or don't. Here's my story:
A was a software house that looked pretty promising. They were elegant, their page and offer looked nice. Well, unless you consider the fact that they offered me internship. Unpaid. But I decided to meet with them anyway, since I had hope that I could negotiate some sort of paid internship or a job contract even. I did my homework after all, and I was confident I am able to keep up with their requirements. I arrived a little bit... no, way to early. One damn hour. Whatever, I waited. I was greeted by a woman. We had a cultural conversation, she had a list of 12 questions I needed to answer, as a form of a test. We begun. First question: How do you change a value in Oracle Database? "Wait a minute", I thought, "What kind of question is that?". Why in seven hells would you want your frontend developer to know how to handle oracle db? Well, I gave my answer, I did lick some of that SQL in my life. Next question: Java stuff. The bloody gal didn't even care to check what position I am applying to before the interview! At this point I didn't really have very high hopes. A shame on them forever.
The story of B and C is connected and a little bit more complicated. More on that in part 2. B stands for Bank. A big corporation then, by definition. A person I know decided called me that day and told me they're hiring, that he referred me and that they would like to arrange a meeting. And so we did. It was couple of days before Christmas. C was a software house again. Or a startup. Idk really. Their website wasn't finished so I couldn't read anything useful up on them. They didn't tell me much about themselves either. They also started with "unpaid internship".
In C, they would greet me and instantly sit me down next to a mac laptop and told me, "hey, do this stuff in python". What the fuck, not again... I told them that I am frontend dev, they guy said "it's no problem, you said you know python, it's a simple task". And yeah, I did host some apps in Flask and I did use psycopg2. It was in my CV. But never, ever, have I mentioned knowing heuristics nor statistics. I'm no data scientist, monsieur. Whatever, I tried, I failed a little bit, I told them that maybe if I did want to spend half of my day there I would finish this task, but back then I was way too nervous to focus and code. I told them what should be done in code and that I just was unable to code this at the very moment. They nodded, we said goodbye and I was sure not to hear from them ever again.
In B, I was greeted by a senior frontend dev. He told me the recruiter is sick and he couldn't come, so we're talking alone. I can buy it. We sat down in said meeting room, and he asked me if I wanted a drink. No thx, I had digested so much caffeine during last 24h, next dose could be an overdose. And then, he took out my resume printed in paper. With notes on it. With some stuff encircled. That bloody bastard did his homework. We spent over an hour, just talking in friendly atmosphere. It was an interview, but it was a conversation also. We shared our experiences, opinions and it went just perfect.
On December 20, I was heading home for Christmas. My situation looked like this: A called me they could offer me only unpaid internship. I was getting kinda bored of rice and debts, tbh. I gracefully rejected their generous offer. B didn't give me feedback yet(it was a most recent interview, so I didn't expect any message until after Christmas anyway). C told me that they could give me internship, but I managed to convince them to make it paid internship. After three months of very bad times, things were starting to get better.
On part III we will explore further events of my very recent past. That post will be same amount of storytelling and possibly a lesson for those who seek an employer and for those who seek an employee.6 -
Can somebody explain to me why developers (especially web) have to micromanage every single thing into it's own f*ing component.
Story time: I have an input form with some tabs. I discovered that the UI Library (Devextreme) has a nice little component that handles forms, (including tabs, groups, etc.). So I make a page, configure tabs, inputs and whatnot.
Now, I already knew that my coworkers can't handle html that is bigger than a page. So instead of putting the configs in the frontend, I made nice files where I store those, to keep them nicely clean and seperated.
Me feeling very good, went off to have a nice lunch break.
I come back read the message from my coworker, asking me to make every tab it's own component and form and load them into a separate Tab-Component, instead of using the built in configuration
......
WHAT?
Like seriously. I have a f*ing library that handles that, why the f*ck do I need to reinvent the wheel here!?
Supposedly it's to make it more maintainable, easier to find bugs, flatten the hierarchy.
Here's a little wake up call you morons: Nesting hundreds of components into each other does *not* help you with that.
It just creates a rabbit-hole of confusing containers that you have to navigate and dissect every time you try to find something.
"Can I fix the bug in the detail Page? Sure I'll tell you tomorrow when I find out which fucking component the bug results from".
Components are there to be *reused*. It's using inheritance for reusing code all over again, but worse.
But maybe I'm just old fashioned, and conservative. Maybe I'm just a really bad software engineer, because nowadays everything seems to result in architectures spreading hundreds of folders, thousands of files with nothing but arbitrary cut-offs with no real benefit, that I don't see the value in.6 -
Wow, I feel like idiot.
I struggled making documentation becouse I didn't know proper tools.
I sometimes used markdown but it was for internal git pages when I did, other times I just was doing crap within html (and I hate frontend and Dubba cannot frontend and its generally bad idea to give me html)
Than I had random talk with someone on the internet and he was suprised I never used (and known) markdown to html and I was more like "thats genius, why the fuck I didnt know its a thing".
goddamint...3 -
After 1.5y in this company with literally 0 growth, I'm most likely about to change job and earn a bit more.
I'm switching from frontend development to XR development.
I already worked with it and I know it's gonna be bad, but I really need that extra money (about +250€/month14 -
Started porting one application written in php to:
Golang(and some libraries to make certain sht simpler like GORM and Gorilla amongst a couple of others, most shit is STD shit already built in)
Java Spring(I know it well, but wanted to try this particular app in it, lots of boilerplate although the coded is solid AF)
.NET Core API, which I separated in a series of modules for the domain interface, the persistence logic, the actual api etc, I really dig it. It has a basic React frontend in Typescript whereas the other 2 versions are using the standard Go html/template package and the Twig interface for Spring.
My favorite thus far is Golang. I find it extremely easy to extend, the language reads good enough for a retard like myself to make sense of it fairly easy, really easy to test and experiment with it, any idea I get for something to add(say users and stuff) took me less than 30 mins to figure out while reading the actual documentation, as in the base documentation or just the source code.
I know the language is retard proof, and I am highly enjoying this. Not to say that the other two are bad, not at all, been using C# and Java for years now, but I highly appreciate being able to concentrate on functionality rather than all the fucking architectural boilerplate needed to run basic shit in the other two frameworks. Thus far Golang has been a breath of fresh air the likes Clojure gives me, while not even being a profound or mind blowing language in terms of features(since other than the interface{} and goroutines i can't think of shit) and have not reached a scenario in which I am stuck or dying to have generics one bit for the overall business logic.
The app is growing like crazy in terms of code since the original php application was huge to begin with, but dear me this shit is as simple as it can get without being too technical. Might move it to production once all usability tests pass and force the rest of the staff to learn it. I have one lead dev that damn near refuses to touch anything other than php, and a very eager to try shit out content administrator that comes from a Java and C# background.
all I want to say is how much I love go haha4 -
I hate this feeling.
Changing stuff with a greamripers scythe around my neck called doubt because the available data isn't too convincing.
Then having to go big or nothing as it is an ecosystem change (e.g. changing the cipher suites of TLS, changing protocol - e.g. HTTP 1.1 to 2) so it needs to be consistent as otherwise fun stuff could happen (fun as in the grim reaper cuts off my neck except a few centimeters and plays "now your head is off, now your head is on" ).
To top it off - just few seconds after the change has happened people coming up in the support channel.
My hands are - mysteriously - not sweaty then. Rather cold.
Lil prayer to the heavens and getting the whiskey bottle...
Opening an ongoing discussion in support channel....
And they're discussing whether the page needs to have an additional arrow for going back to the last page or if the default page navigation is enough.
Constantly using @all so everyone gets pissed off due to being pinged every few seconds in a channel that was meant for emergency support.
Now my hands go from a dark red to a bright red, my nostrils flare out, my adrenaline goes through the roof and I literally wanna murder people....
Those days.
I hate those days.
And I hate the timing of some people...
Like they're deliberately fucking with me without knowing it, like the universe told them explicitly to do so just to fuck with me.
*gooozfraba*
And of course, everything else is fine and running smooth like butter, except that said discussion now goes on in a total flamewar so I get even more pings.
Sucks to be in management.
You have way to many rooms where people can annoy you.
To top it off - after being grumpy and pissed and angry for people just annoying the fuck out of me, I have to mediate.
Yeah. Cause the usual person is on vacancy.
*slowly strangling the whiskey bottle like homer does with bart*
Turns out after 15 mins listening to enraged UX designer vs Frontend Team Lead that UX designer meant a completely different thing - uploaded wrong screenshot, whole discussion was unnecessary.
*Nah. Fuck it. Drinking whiskey*
Reminding everyone what the fucking frigging support channel is meant for and that penis fights aka who got the longest schlong don't belong there....
"Yeah it was a mistake, but it wasn't so bad"
...
You pinged fucking 32 people like it was the end of the world, you ignorant fucktwads.
For over 5 mins.
For fucking frigging nothing except your tiny dicks and shitty egos.
*Second round of whiskey*
Back to work after a wasted half hour.
What says monitoring?
Ah. Everything's working.
At least luck hasn't failed me.
Good server. Brave server.
Then I hear this lil voice in my head: no.
The servers know your personality.
They're afraid. Terrified.
Somehow that thought makes me giggle always...
Childish? Maybe. But it helps on those days.... Funnily enough, remaining 3 hours noone said anything in any chat channel.
"I wonder why, I wonder how...."... *hum* -
I'm a self-taught frontend developer with 1,5 - 2 years of experience in JavaScript / Vue.js development. Pretty cliche in 2023 and I can actually feel this now when it comes to the job market. It's brutal at the moment.I moved to Germany for a specific job but got laid off a few weeks ago due to a lack of projects and actual things to do. And here I am right now: tons of job applications, 4-5 interviews a week, zero success.
I'm thinking about getting some warehouse job or anything for the time being, and start freelancing in my spare time. Instead of this oversaturated JavaScript landscape, I would get into PHP (not as "hip" so less competition, backend, no new tools every 6 months), SQL, or hyper-specialize in CSS - something I like quite a bit but have seemingly zero value to employers.
I actually made a simple website for a small business when I was getting started with frontend, and he was super happy with the end result. I also did some language tutoring, that was quite rewarding as well. So freelancing is definitely fun, I enjoyed it much more than fearing layoffs or trying to force a fake-ambitious attitude on my 30th interview that most probably won't lead me anywhere. :D
Is the frontend job market really this oversaturated? (I know, I know... It's not difficult for competent, skilled, and experienced devs with CS degrees) Is being a CSS specialist, PHP-developer, or SQL-magician on fiverr/upwork/etc. a viable freelancing path? I've heard good and bad about these platforms, the competition there, etc. If not, where should I start?
What do you think? Any input is much appreciated. :)4 -
Hi bad-practice, thank you for your application but unfortunately we had to conclude there is no opportunity for the role you are looking for.
They had a vacancy for frontend developer. I am frontend developer. What you mean no role?
Smells like the 33th BULLSHIT EXCUSE!2 -
I'm just fed up with the industry. There are so much stupidity and so much arrogance.
My professional experience comes mainly from the frontend and I feel like it's not as bad on the backend but I'm still convinced it's not really different:
I'm now about to start my 3rd job. It's always the same. The frontend codebase is complete shit. It's not because some juniors messed up not at all. It's always some highly paid self-proclaimed full-stack developer that didn't really care somehow hacked together most of the codebase.
That person got a rediculous salary considering the actual skill and effort that went into the code, at some point things became difficult, issues started to occur and that person left. If I search for that person I find next to the worst code via gitlens on Linkedin it's somebody that has changed companies at least two times after leaving and works now for a lot of money as tech-lead at some company.
There's never any tests. At the same time the company takes pride in having decent test coverage on the backend. In the end this only results in pushing a lot of business logic to the frontend because it would just take way to long to implement it on the backend.
Most of the time I'm getting told on my first day that the code quality is really high or some bullshit.
It's always a redux app written by people, that just connect everything to the store and never tried to reflect about their use of redux.
Usually it's people, that never even considered or tried not using redux, even if it's just to learn and experiment.
At the same time you could have the most awesome projects on github but people look at your CV, sum up the years and if you invested a lot of time, worked way harder to be better than other developers with the same amount of experience, it's totally irrelevant.
At the same time all companies are just the worst crybabies about not being able to find enough developers.
HR and recruiters are generally happy to invite somebody for an interview, even if that person does not have any code available to the public, as long as that person somehow was in some way employed in the industry for a couple of years. At the same time they wouldn't even notice if you're core contributor for some major open-source product if you do not have the necessary number of years in the industry.
I'm just fed up.
By the way, I got my first real job about two years ago. Now I'm about to start my third position because my last job died because of the corona crisis. I didn't complain for some time because I didn't want to look like I'm just complaining about my own situation. With every new job I made more money, now I'm starting for the first time at a position that is labeled "lead" in the contract.
So I did okay. But I know that lots of talented people that worked hard gave up at some point and even those that made it had to deal with way too much rejection.
At the same time there are so many "senior" people in the industry, that don't care, don't even try to get better, that get a lot of money for nothing.
It's ridiculously hard to get a food in the door if you don't have any experience.
But that's not because juniors are actually useless. It's because the code written by many seniors is so low quality, that you need multiple years of experience just to deal with all the traps.
Furthermore those seniors are so busy trying to put out the fires they are responsible for to actually put time into mentoring juniors.
It's just so fucked up.3 -
I got contacted by an other company and I am so unsure whether to accept their offer or stay at my current job.
For now I spend 2 years at my current company. The culture is great and everyone gets treated very well.
The bad part is, that it is located in a part of Germany I really can't stand and to this day fully remote is not an option.
Additionally lots of stuff is really frustrating in my daily work, e.g. colleagues that experiment with critical parts if our infrastructure, resulting in every developer who made the mistake to update the local development stack being unable to work for half a day or so.
This and the fact, that our techstack sucks hard. (mostly bad php for backend and server-rendered HTML and a weird mix of Typescript, Javascript, Vue and some old bits of deprecated angular for frontend). This company has it's own product (a web platform) and no real deadlines in the sense of "something bad happens, when your team won't achieve the project in the originally proposed time"
Company number two seems to work with a wide variety of technologies for very different projects (it's a consulting compan), would pay me ~28% more than my currently raised pay and allows for full remote.
When I try to look objectively on the facts everything points to accepting their offer, but on the other hand there is this weird feeling of this being a joice that would come to soon...
How do you make such decisions? I already talked to a great colleague of mine, who thinks it might not be a bad idea to stay at the company for an additional year or 2, because I haven't yet reached the point where there is not enough to learn here anymore, which I agree on, but this company seems to offer everything I want.
I feel overwhelmed with this situation :D that's why I would like to know how you people try to tackle such a situation8 -
Today I saw how the frontend devs on my team write Vue components + TypeScript. It's bad and it further proves that Vue=bad. Not even TypeScript can save it from being bad. Function defineComponent is ugly5
-
Soooo I am an apprentice who just started his third year. Everybody in my team (3 ppl) left for better jobs.
I am now basically front and backend lead, teaching four new employees our restapi, web and javafx frontend.
At the same time I fix errors happening in production and develop new features.
I guess there are many great rants to come, so stay tuned :D
Going to write about things like tests that got disabled months ago after migrating to gradle, no documentation, finding out how to set up new development workstations with an outdated script missing important steps, management, print debugging in production and much more :)
Oh and it is not that bad, I learned more in the last month than in the two years before. (not saying my team was bad)1 -
Hey guys. I am in a situation where I need to decide wether to take on a new project or not. And if not, how to turn down that client so that I would not burn any bridges. So I need your opinions on this matter in order to make the final decision.
To make things clear heres some background info. 10 months ago I quitted my fulltime position in another EU country and went back to my own home country. 10 months forward till today and I have my own ltd company which currently has 5 projects. Its doing pretty well money wise. All projects combined, I already earn more then I ever did and I need to work max 10 hours a week since all projects are remote projects so I dont waste time on useless meetings and etc. However I dont feel fulfilled or challenged anymore because surprise surprise doing well paid projects doesnt guarante your sense of fulfillment.
So I noticed that I have lots of spare time which I spend diving into rabbitholes with hobby projects. I decided that its time to scale my company and take on more projects and maybe even hire more people.
So I started searching for other projects I could work on (prefferibly remote projects or flexible ones where I could come in 2-3 days a week in office and work remotely rest of the week). Reason being that I am already out of sync with fulltime position lifestyle and I am totally result oriented, not punch in my hours and go home oriented.
For exampleIf i get my weekly tasks I prefer to do them in 1-2 days (even if it requires doing double shifts which rarely but happens) but then I want to have rest of the week off. Thats how my brain works and thats how Im wired. I cant stand fulltime positions especially in enterprise bigger companies where I come in and do maybe 2 hours of actual work everyday because of all useless meetings and blockers from backend/etc. Its soul crushing to me.
So I posted linkedin ads and started searching for new clients/projects. One month ago I went to an interview for an android project in a startup.
The project looked interesting enough. Main task was to rewrite their android app from java to kotlin. Apparently their current current app was built by a backend developer who wants to focus solely on backend.
So during the interview they showed me their app which was quite simple frontend wise but not so simple backend wise from what I was able to figure out.
Their project lead (also a backed guy) asked me my estimation of price and completion of task. I told them maybe 2-3 months to do everything properly.
Project lead was basically shocked because all other candidates told him they can rewrite the app from java to kotlin in 2-3 weeks. I told him that everything is possible but his app quality will suffer and for a better estimation he would we would need to sign an NDA so I could evaluate the costs. So we ended the interview.
After that we kept in touch for one month (it took them one month to google a generic NDA and sign it digitally with me).
So heres the redflags I noticed:
1. They dont respect my time. Wasted 1 month of my time and after signing NDA gave me 2days to estimate their project and go to a meeting and give them detailed info about what I can offer. I thats not a brain rape then I dont know what it is
2. They are changing initial conditions we talked about. We agreed on rewriting the codebase and be done with it. Now they prefer a fulltime worker who would be responsible for android app as his own product. So basically project lead was not able to find a fulltime dev so now hes trying to convert me (a company owner) to his fulltime worker.
3. Lack of respect. During the interview he started speaking in his own native language to me with some expression (he seemed pissed off at that moment when he switched languages).
4. Bad culture fit. As I said Im used to relaxed clients and projects where I dont need to be chained to a desk a monitored and be micromanaged. I mean lets sign a contract give me access to your codebase and tell me what to do, I will produce results and lets be done with it.
5. Project lead is a backend guy who doesnt understand how complicated android apps can be. No architecture and no unit tests are in his frontend app. He doesnt care about writing proper app since he ships it in his own device so he doesnt need to worry about supporting custom devices or different api levels of android and etc. But not having any architecture? Cmon.
So basically I am confused. Project lead needs a fulltime dev but hes in contact with me in hopes that I would sign a fulltime contract. But how I can work fulltime if all what I can see are redflags?
Basicaly I thinkthis was a misundersanding. Im searching for fulltime remote projects and hes offering fulltime inhouse projects. Project lead never outsourced so hes confused as well.
As you can see decision is already basically made to turn him down, I just need to know how to tell him to fck off in the most polite manner and thats it.6 -
Started new internship last week, hired as dev but working qa till their next release goes up. See last 3 posts for some horror lmao. They... don't know how to use git but insist they do. 275MB single repo for entire angular frontend (no dependencies are pushed, few images) and "angular backend" (according to PM). Commits to master, bad commit messages, no testing except me on qa..... death
-
Which of the two jobs is better for a frontend Dev:
1. React project, stressful, bad communication, depending on bad internal libraries
2. WordPress theme building, higher paid, promising startup with stock options8 -
>start new job, not very professionally experienced dev
>spend couple of months working on a feature that is supposed to be an MVP kind of thing, be rushed to finish and told to cut corners because it's "just an MVP", still lose sleep and have relationship suffer (and ultimately ruined) as I try to not lose deadlines created by the boss with questions like "you can have this done by <very soon>, right?"
>frontend created by fellow developer is a garbled mess of repeated code and questionably implemented subpages, frontend dev apparently copies CSS from Figma and pastes it into new non-reusable React components as envisioned by designer, I am tasked with making sense of the mess and adding in API consumption, when questioning boss what to do with the mess I am often told to discard stuff that the frontend dev has made and just reuse his styling; all of this on top of implementing the backend feature that a previous developer wasn't able to do
>specs change along the way, I had been using a library as a helper in some part of the original feature, now the boss sees that and (without further testing the library) promises CEO that we'll add that as a separate subfeature, but the performance of the library is garbage for larger inputs and causes problems, is basically shit that might not have been shit if we had implemented it ourselves, however at this point CEO has promised new feature to some customers, all the actual sense of responsibility falls upon my hands
>marketing folk see halfway done application and ask for more changes
>everything is rushed to launch, plenty of things aren't implemented or are done halfway
>while I'm waiting for boss to deploy, I'm called up to company office by CEO, and get new task that is pretty cool and will actually involve assessing various algorithms and experiment with them, rather than just stitching API calls and endpoints together, it involves delving into a whole new field of CS that I never had the opportunity to delve into before
>start working on cool task, doing research, making good progress
>boss finally deploys feature I had been originally implementing
>cut corners of original boring insane feature start showing up, now I have to start fixing them instead of working on cool task, however the cool task also has a deadline which is likely expected to be met
I'm not sure if I'm having it bad or not, is this what a whole career in software development will look like?6 -
Football/futbol/soccer analogy:
Frontend engineers are like strikers - you see their work, good and bad, and you don’t notice how many contribute to their success. Backend engineers are like goalies - you only really notice when they do a _bad_ job and don’t see how many things contribute to their failure.5 -
I’ve been doing web development and mostly focusing on the frontend side of things professionally for almost 10 years. Still, I have to put up with some backend developer who did a couple of years of frontend development who now thinks he knows it all. Everytime someone reports a UX problem or asks for a feature that has some complexity and needs more thought to have a good enough solution, he steps out of his lane with “suggestions” on how to get it done with solutions that are half baked and don’t consider things like accessibility, responsiveness, or even semantics. Still, he is the hero and we’re the bad guys when we call him out for only providing crappy solutions and presenting them as complete solutions.
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Let's say you're pretty good frontend dev, a bet geeky about strong typing. And you're paired with an API backend, and it's PHP. You would think it's pain when it's bad PHP. No, real pain is when it's good PHP, and backend dev embraces and uses dynamic nature of the language to an extreme.3
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Tags are really bad implemented on this website (frontend)rant or is it a comma or is it a space tags don't break no quick feedback; is it a semicolon why commas4
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Horror story and rant time I guess...
I haven't seen the main developer of this MVC project that I've been working on but I can totally assure that his seniority isn't in frontend development 😠 and I doubt the backend too... Fucking DataTables converted to IDictionaries<string,object>
Guess who need to build on top of the pile of shit!
Anyway, I wasn't really careful about what kind of template I was given to work on a new SPA page, so I'm doing the job given the time, but it's fucking gory:
- matrioska style layers (n.3) without documentation
- partials everywhere
- too much inline styling
- too many <style> sections (n per layer or partial)
- too many <script> sections (n per layer or partial)
- poor CSS styling or no styling at all! (classes without any style nor js association)😠
He's just been lucky that the browser is capable of handling his shit
Now that at the end of this year I'll leave this project (solo fullstack) and need to provide documentation for the next poor souls I was thinking to leave behind something at par of my skills and capabilities but analysing the current mess ticks my brain in a bad way, fuck you Marco!
Fuck you
and your seniority
and the Italian way of perceiving seniority that gives you a higher living in the wrong side of the field 🤬🤬🤬2 -
It seems they mistaken me for italian giving me spaghetti all over the product. Go to frontend to check the app, react with weird jQuery, no routes, pages summoned by the templates that have concatenated values and html in vanilla js, changing screens/pages with jQuery, no router... ok lets see the other app, react, redux, offline capabilities and tought myself niicee hut nothing work as intended with clusterfuck of hacky workarounds that makes app look like it is working but with hardcoded data. Offline means automatic sync when you get the network back, right? Oh backend never developed any sync, so you guys can do it, we have to fix and patch some important stuff! I don't like php but whatever, let's see what is going on there... So much spaghetti bolognese there that Bologna actually called to ask if they can buy some, they are out of stock because of us!
This is just like that song mess.css from stdout, but in any file you open!
Living on deserted island eating grass and coconut for the rest of the life doesn't seem so bad atm!4 -
It was for a school project, I was in the bad books of the teachers and some seriously horrible shit was going on with me, so the teacher set up a special 24-hr deadline only for me, rest other students were given a 30 days deadline. The assignment was a java front end paired with a mysql backend application for keeping a record of a students details like name, phone, roll no, and some other details manageable and changeable through the java frontend only. I was seriously panicked and worked the whole night with my friend.2
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Liferay is a fucking malediction inflicted on the human race, bubonic plague has nothing on Liferay. A staunch advocate of legacy tech, bad documentation, bad APIs and poor UX, Liferay has it all. Scriptlets all day every day. Fuck your hot reloads, a deployment cycle is the shit. Why be productive when you can wait for a deployment? Scientists are still deciphering the enigma of Liferay APIs. Over fifteen arguments per method, some optional, some not, littered with value specific functionality. Happy debugging motherfucker. API design is for hacks and pussies, real developers want to know implementation details. JSP the flagship of frontend tech, scriptlets, the pinnacle of evolution. Liferay has PLENTY of that. Did I mention scriptlets? How about obscure Liferay grown frameworks? MetalJS? A bigger mistake than smoking a pound of meth. Liferay UX, heh, heh, design, user experience hehe, hoho. Best joke I've heard. Liferay and UX, choose one.
I'm out, fuck my life.2 -
So, I told the interviewer that my frontend skills are bad. He said that I should not worry as the tests where backend centered, good. Later, I got the job, now the interviewer, which happens to be the head of tech in the company I work for, has assigned me two tasks involving 99% of work on the frontend.
FFS, I've been searching on Internet and reading Kendo UI documentation for 4 hours to figure how to trigger the KendoGrid editable popup with populated data to enable the user to update such data. AAAAARGH!!!1 -
People are whining about frontend bloat, overengineering, too many packages on npm and whatnot.
And I'm just like: "Hey! You still can write your own leftpads y'know..."
I just don't get why having lots of options has to be so bad... -
I find it unfair how many talented frontend developers get assigned to backend-only/focused positions. This is a sign of bad management that sees developers as code monkeys rather than talent.8
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Apparently the fact I like to study things outside what I do for a living is bad for recruiters.
"We selected a candidate which focuses only on the frontend."
Why is everyone so afraid about the fact people can do more than one thing? Is it the fact they'd realize they are mediocre af if they would have to admit specialization doesn't mean they should stop to be passionate about the rest of the world?
I didn't say stuff like: "I am a pro in every it field", I said: "While I am definitely stronger on the frontend, I have interest in both backend and frontend, because it allows me to better understand how systems work and it helps me understanding that sometimes what may seem easy to do for the other role may also come at a too big to handle performance cost."5 -
Okay so i did an internship in Laravel for 6 months. I started there and i had zero experience with it. Later, i started to learn more about it and i realized their Laravel version was at 5.8 and their bootstrap was at 3.4. It annoyed me so much but i wasn't allowed to update it to a better version.
What happened is, i installed Linux on my laptop and had to install some things. I accidentally did composer update and updated the whole thing. I updated it to Laravel 7.4 and i thought, well, that's good right, it will not effect the whole project right? No it wasn't right. I got Teams messages from my colleagues. They normally don't really respond to me, ignoring me but this time, they responded quickly. It was wrong what i've done because the code on the server wasn't working anymore and it was pretty bad they said. So i had to get the last version in Gitlab and i should not do composer update again.
Also, i was annoyed because i couldn't use so many font awesome icons. They all didn't work! I had to make this dropdown menu with an arrow down but even that didn't work, so i used a transparent image to do it because that was my only option to have a good arrow. I wanted to update that as well but nope, not allowed.
Oh yes, i'm not done yet.
They have put so much CSS on the project, that i couldn't even use bootstrap columns. I struggled with that and seriously, no help. The pages were styled really weird and it was dramatic.
When i asked for help, for some PHP code for example, no one responded for days and i was angry about that. Later at the end of my internship, they told me I wasn't the one who was responding and that i should have asked for help and i had to start the conversation. They really just said that? Yes, they did and i'm not happy about that. It costed me some points on my end essay, because they haven't been doing their best.
I wanted to learn more about PHP, but ended up doing all the frontend. I like it, but it's not what i originally wanted to do. So basically, i learned stuff in frontend but almost nothing in backend. It saddens me and hope to get a better internship next schoolyear.
I really had to rant about this, oops.1 -
!rant
Preface: As it was unpaid labor I won't count my school-internship in a games resell shop in which I was ordered to "program" a BDSM-Shop with MS Frontpage.
My first paid gig was back in 2006. I got booked to write the website of a new company by friends of the family. The problem was that the gig had to happen ~600km away from my home town. Back in 2006 it was far from common to own a laptop for young folks, which is why I packed my Pentium 4 HT "powerhouse" tower, my 15" TFT monitor, keyboard and mouse into a suitcase and took a bus. I not only had to write the website, but had to do all the Frontend and Design as well and was paid 400€. Hahaha what a deal. They are still using my logo btw.
Anyhow... I was like 17yo and the work experience was more valuable then the money anyways. Plus at the time 400€ weren't a bad payment either. After that it took 2 more years and half a dozen of boring jobs until I started earning money with programming again. I can't understand why I haven't started programming earlier. Especially considering the wage gap between the jobs I did and potential programming jobs. Guess you're always smarter afterwards. -
Was moved from frontend to backend. I am an absolute noob in java, code has no documentation, no formal training, code has cross repository dependencies and I have been assigned with a case and was asked to debug, felt like a pathetic piece of shit. One of those depressing days, but the good thing is we were moved here as an entire team and apparently everyone feels the same way 😂 which makes me feel better.
These are one of those short phase of "0 productivity" days, I wish Java god help me and let me write code with my usual speed, untill then I am going to feel miserable and bad about myself. -
Can't operate in normal conditions, hmmm... These airplane media systems really need someone to come in and change the game. Linux stack, nice, but most obviously some Linux frontend? 🤔 Although, this is satellite, my rant remains the same! Need to change the game!
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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 🥲
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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 -
How do I deal with a lead who was hired to lead a predominantly backend team when he's just an average frontend dev. He's so afraid to try new tech and so reluctant to learn. Plus most of the junior developers are better than him. He even tries to shift the blame on other devs. It's so hard to deal with the guy. Our old lead was so much better the guy was a really bad hire zzzzz.1
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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