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So one year ago I was working at this company from the US, me being in Europe, which automatically implies there is several hours of timezone difference.
The eng. manager decided we would have a release tomorrow (decision was made one month earlier), and stuff was being prepped up to make that happen.
In the US the workday was about lunch time and in EU it was one hour before finishing. The manager gets us in a meeting and asks me and another dude to do some testing that would take several hours to do. This testing could have been done several days or weeks earlier.
40 minutes after that meeting I get a private message from the PM asking for the status of the test...
Me: aaa.. well I started it and will continue tomorrow
Manager: wait what? we have launch tomorrow, this testing has to be done by tomorrow
Me: it's the end of the workday here, I got personal errands that I have to attend to
Manager: uhm ok ... I see...
I was just messaging something in the public chat right before calling it a day and the manager writes "thanks for the input, your day is over now", completely out of context to the conversation I was having with whomever.
There was no question of "can you stay extra hours and do this?", there was no "hey, I know your day is over we will pay you premium hours with this amount as according to our contract, could you do this now as we have release tomorrow?" ..no ..just .. "do it!". I automatically assumed that ..hey, maybe he wants to do this during and after the live launch (and yes I do admit my mistake of not asking just to be clear, but I assumed the manager knows that there is a timezone difference ..like it's a no brainer).
I can not tell you the heat sensation I had after that last reply from the manager ... it was completely uncalled for, and unreasonable.
I mean why not make a pre-launch phase where you put stuff on the staging server, and perform all the necessary tests and then when you get all the green lights from testing you then proceed with the actual deploy? ...no ... mention this like right at the end of the day before the launch....
And another thing that scratched my neuronal cortex is, how does he know exactly how long the tests would take?12 -
What an absolute fucking disaster of a day. Strap in, folks; it's time for a bumpy ride!
I got a whole hour of work done today. The first hour of my morning because I went to work a bit early. Then people started complaining about Jenkins jobs failing on that one Jenkins server our team has been wanting to decom for two years but management won't let us force people to move to new servers. It's a single server with over four thousand projects, some of which run massive data processing jobs that last DAYS. The server was originally set up by people who have since quit, of course, and left it behind for my team to adopt with zero documentation.
Anyway, the 500GB disk is 100% full. The memory (all 64GB of it) is fully consumed by stuck jobs. We can't track down large old files to delete because du chokes on the workspace folder with thousands of subfolders with no Ram to spare. We decide to basically take a hacksaw to it, deleting the workspace for every job not currently in progress. This of course fucked up some really poorly-designed pipelines that relied on workspaces persisting between jobs, so we had to deal with complaints about that as well.
So we get the Jenkins server up and running again just in time for AWS to have a major incident affecting EC2 instance provisioning in our primary region. People keep bugging me to fix it, I keep telling them that it's Amazon's problem to solve, they wait a few minutes and ask me to fix it again. Emails flying back and forth until that was done.
Lunch time already. But the fun isn't over yet!
I get back to my desk to find out that new hires or people who got new Mac laptops recently can't even install our toolchain, because management has started handing out M1 Macs without telling us and all our tools are compiled solely for x86_64. That took some troubleshooting to even figure out what the problem was because the only error people got from homebrew was that the formula was empty when it clearly wasn't.
After figuring out that problem (but not fully solving it yet), one team starts complaining to us about a Github problem because we manage the github org. Except it's not a github problem and I already knew this because they are a Problem Team that uses some technical authoring software with Git integration but they only have even the barest understanding of what Git actually does. Turns out it's a Git problem. An update for Git was pushed out recently that patches a big bad vulnerability and the way it was patched causes problems because they're using Git wrong (multiple users accessing the same local repo on a samba share). It's a huge vulnerability so my entire conversation with them went sort of like:
"Please don't."
"We have to."
"Fine, here's a workaround, this will allow arbitrary code execution by anyone with physical or virtual access to this computer that you have sitting in an unlocked office somewhere."
"How do I run a Git command I don't use Git."
So that dealt with, I start taking a look at our toolchain, trying to figure out if I can easily just cross-compile it to arm64 for the M1 macbooks or if it will be a more involved fix. And I find all kinds of horrendous shit left behind by the people who wrote the tools that, naturally, they left for us to adopt when they quit over a year ago. I'm talking entire functions in a tool used by hundreds of people that were put in as a joke, poorly documented functions I am still trying to puzzle out, and exactly zero comments in the code and abbreviated function names like "gars", "snh", and "jgajawwawstai".
While I'm looking into that, the person from our team who is responsible for incident communication finally gets the AWS EC2 provisioning issue reported to IT Operations, who sent out an alert to affected users that should have gone out hours earlier.
Meanwhile, according to the health dashboard in AWS, the issue had already been resolved three hours before the communication went out and the ticket remains open at this moment, as far as I know.5 -
This happened today...
Manager: how long this is going to take?
Dev: 3 months
M: cool! 3 weeks then
D: no.. This is quite complicated and most of us are unfamiliar with the topics. It'll take us 2 weeks just to get started
M: drop the unit tests then. Just get the features done in 3 weeks. We have customers waiting
D: that's a bad idea. We'll end up with unstable co..
M: oh we also need to complete documentation, release guide, and this [shitty feature no one care about]
D: but that is even more complex. We don't have enough ti..
M: just copy it from stackoverflow. It'll only take 5 minutes guys
Worst part? This guy is technically sound and understands our pain really well. He is just acting dumb and trying to put the blame on us when the higher management asks
Second worst part? The whole team keeps silent when I try to convince him somehow and starts ranting after he leaves the call2 -
I'm managed by idiots who don't fully realize the nightmare they're creating.
They're making small operational changes, but hundreds of them with zero evidence to back their claims up.
When I bring up how it actually works, and how operations actually work I'm told I don't use the tools as much as management does and that my feedback is limited to how I use the tool.
So now I'm just gambling that they won't fuck up too bad before I get that sweet sweet sellout money and just letting them fuck everything up they want without any warnings from me.
I'm quickly learning that the phrase of the year is, "Fuck em". -
My 5 cents about refactoring.
People often postpone it, making it harder down the line.
From my experience, it's better to just do it as you go. 5 min can otherwise become 30 min thing after a while, and combined with some other 5 min thing, this can become 2 hour thing after some time, for example.
Also good luck convincing management (especially bad one), that you need 2 weeks of refactoring. Doing tiny 5 min refactoring, no one will notice.7 -
I applied as a full-stack dev at a private company, they offered me the Project Manager role instead, I took the offer and after 1yr they gave me a choice to choose between staying as a Project Manager or switching to being a Software Engineer/System Analyst. I took the SoftEng position because project management isn’t my career choice for now.
Now people saying I not knowingly chose to be demoted. Is it a bad choice?10 -
I have been keeping this inside for long time and I need to rant it somewhere and hear your opinion.
So I'm working as a Team Lead Developer at a small company remotely based in Netherlands, I've been working there for about 8 years now and I am the only developer left, so the company basically consists of me and the owner of the company which is also the project manager.
As my role title says I am responsible for many things, I maintain multiple environments:
- Maintain Web Version of the App
- Maintain A Cordova app for Android, iOS and Windows
- Working with pure JavaScript (ES5..) and CSS
- Development and maintenance of Cordova Plugins for the project in Java/Swift
- Trying to keep things stable while trying very hard to transit ancient code to new standards
- Testing, Testing, Testing
- Keeping App Stable without a single Testing Unit (sadly yes..)
- Just pure JavaScript no framework apart from JQuery and Bootstrap for which I strongly insist to be removed and its being slowly done.
On the backend side I maintain:
- A Symfony project
- MySQL
- RabbitMQ
- AWS
- FCM
- Stripe/In-App Purchases
- Other things I can't disclose
I can't disclose the nature of the app but the app is quite rich in features and complex its limited to certain regions only but so far we have around 100K monthly users on all platforms, it involves too much work especially because I am the only developer there so when I am implementing some feature on one side I also have to think about the other side so I need to constantly switch between different languages and environments when working, not to mention I have to maintain a very old code and the Project Owner doesn't want to transit to some more modern technologies as that would be expensive.
The last raise I had was 3 years ago, and so far he hasn't invested in anything to improve my development process, as an example we have an iOS version of the app in Cordova which of course involves building , testing, working on both frontend and native side and etc., and I am working in a somewhat slow virtual machine of Monterey with just 16 GB of RAM which consumed days of my free time just to get it working and when I'm running it I need to close other apps, keep in mind I am working there for about 8 years.
The last time I needed to reconfigure my work computer and setup the virtual machine it costed me 4 days of small unpaid holiday I had taken for Christmas, just because he doesn't have the enough money to provide me with a decent MacBook laptop. I do get that its not a large company, but still I am the only developer there its not like he needs to keep paying 10 Developers.
Also:
- I don't get paid vacation
- I don't have paid holiday
- I don't have paid sick days
- My Monthly salary is 2000 euro GROSS (before taxes) which hourly translates to 12 Euro per hour
- I have to pay taxes by myself
- Working remotely has its own expenses: food, heating, electricity, internet and etc.
- There are few other technical stuff I am responsible of which I can't disclose in this post.
I don't know if I'm overacting and asking a lot, but summarizing everything the only expense he has regarding me is the 2000 euro he sends me on which of course he doesn't need to pay taxes as I'm doing that in my country.
Apart from that just in case I spend my free time in keeping myself updated with other tech which I would say I fairly experienced with like: Flutter/Dart, ES6, NodeJS, Express, GraphQL, MongoDB, WebSockets, ReactJS, React Native just to name few, some I know better than the other and still I feel like I don't get what I deserve.
What do you think, do I ask a lot or should I start searching for other job?24 -
That feeling when you’ve got a reputation of preciseness etc, and the code you just submitted for review has so many silly little mistakes you just want to do that ostrich thing. Gosh, how can I suddenly suck at my job this bad?
Okay, the changes affect EVERYTHING in our codebase (a major change in core business logic), and there is no way I could’ve tested every possible case by myself without a decent coverage of automated tests - which we obviously don’t have. So yet another argument for it (damn management, won’t you listen?!)… but still, some of the mistakes found during code review make me seem like a complete idiot.9 -
It's funny how you start feeling bad for the next dev taking over your project because it turned into a total spaghetti code shit show that will be impossible to maintain in the future with new features coming in.
Honestly... if a projects starts out with a certain scope which then gets extended EVERY FUCKING WEEK with requirements that can't even be met in the initial timeframe it's no wonder the code quality will decrease over time.
This just reminds me daily how important good project management (and I'm not talking about suit wearing pain-in-the-ass-managers) and the inclusion of devs in the planning process really is.
It's so fucking crazy that companies run like that with people up front that have NO FUCKING CLUE what they are doing, nor do they understand the mechanics, tech and effort that go into certain features. They're like "beep, boop, it's done by Friday you fuck!".
The funniest part of this stupid charade is that the closer we get to a new "deadline" (we will not meet the deadline anyways) the more nervous the "managers" get. WHY didn't you properly plan this shit in the first place? WHY didn't you care for the last six months where all this fucking bullshit could still have been prevented?
Meanwhile I'm just so sick and tired of this shitty project and this sucky company that I just don't have any motivation left to keep on working. It's so fucking hard and painful to work on projects that suck ass, are poorly designed. I just got to the point where coding is no fun any more. Thank god I'm out of here soon... fml5 -
How is the shopify developer experience actually so bad.
Shopify Buy JS docs suck
Product ID's are inconsistent
Token management is not built into GUI2 -
Ahhhh I'm in the mood to make a few complains against the company I work for.
Reason: management is done by children, expensive machines are breaking down due to lack of maintainance, having to deal with problems everyday due to machine problems.
Although that's not illegal, just stupid, there's also bad company policies (like if you get hurt can't call an ambulance, must go to the local private clinic, even if you lose a hand ), problems like pools of oil everywhere, electric boxes open (and we do have to put our hands inside to reset the machines)... Stuff like that.
But fuck it, I'm just a temp gaining minimum wage.8 -
I’ve become so indecisive in terms of knowing what I want from my career.
All I know is what I don’t want (to end up a in management)
I’m definitely getting a new job and right now it looks like I’ve got 3 offers on the table
Option 1, a previous company I worked for. Still the same problems with the company there as before but the work was interesting and unusual. and my line manager was a good guy.
They have practically no legacy code.
Not much in the way of company benefits but they’re local and it would be nice to see friends again.
So feels like the pull to this is strong.
Option 2, a fully remote company that I’ve been referred to by an ex-workmate.
They’ve not even tech tested me because they’ve read my blogs and GitHub repos instead and said they’re impress. So just had a conversation with them. I feel honoured that they took the time to look at what I’ve done in my own time and use that in their decision.
Benefits are slightly better than option 1 (more hols)
But they’re using .net 6 and get a lot of heavy use on their system and have some big customers. I think the work is integrations to start with and moving services into docker and azure.
Option 3, even though I’ve got an offer from this one but they can’t actually explain the work until We can arrange a call next week (they recruit and then work out what team your in, but Christmas got in the way of me having a call with them straight away)
It’s working on government systems and .net is their least used stack so probably end up switching to Java. Maybe other tech stacks too.
This place has much better benefits than option 1 and 2 (more hols and more pension), but 2 days a week in office.
All of the above pay the same salary.
Having choice feels almost as bad as having no choice.
It’s doing my head in thinking about it , (even tho I might as well not think about it at all until the call with option 3 happens).
On the one hand with option 3, using a tech stack that’s new to me might be refreshing, as I’ve done .net for 10 years.
On the other hand I really like c# and I’m very good at it. So it feels a bit like I should be capitalising on that and using my experience to shape how the dev is done. Not sure I and I can do that with option 3, at least for a while.
C# feels like it’s moving forward nicely and I’m not sure I can say the same for Java or other languages.
I love programming and learning new stuff but so unable to let things go. It’s like I have a fear that c# will move on without me and I’ll end up turning into one of those devs whose skills are a decade out of date.
Maybe the early years of my career formed me in this way.
Early on I worked at a company where there was a high number of Cobol devs who thought they had a job for life.
But then redundancies came and many left. Of those who stayed they had to cross train to Java and they just couldn’t do it.
I don’t think the tech was hard for them, I think they were just so used to not learning that they could no longer adapt.
Think most of them ended up retiring after trying to learn Java for a few years.10 -
Am I right? Is this micro management?
So, in my new team, I have another coworker is my buddy, we are same level and I doubt here coding techniques as I have seen very bad code written by her.
The thing is, whenever I need to pick up a new jira, she starts telling me what code I need to change, without me understanding the ticket or the code.
She forced a code change which was obviously a bad one.
She asked me what did I do yesterday and said that I could have worked on this jira.
Although this is a start but I don't want yo waste my time working with someone who is trying to micromanage when I clearly have the potential to be working without her micro-managemnt.
The problem I see is that her priority is not learning but I don't know what is that but she worked on the tasks which are clearly not our teams work, in the initial informal chat she was too concerned with people being young in the company like who is married who is not etc.
I don't see her as a good developer.
Should I move to other project? or am I overreacting?7 -
the october of 2020 was the year when i started my first job. 9 months before that, i was under a severe depression and burnout (i guess?) and had made up a decision to quit android dev, an area for which i was passionate and had proven excellence before.
(just having a few good thoughts and going into a little nostalgia in this rant)
DR has been my goto place for every good/bad/shitty thought, so the rants on those days reflected my mental pain ( am gonna go check those after this rant) and confusions.i was so so much confused:
- "College is about to get over, i have to go earn bread for my family, what am gonna do"?
- "My jan Android internship had so shitty people, it was so much fast paced, they exploied me, mistreated me so much. am never gonna do android dev. should i take this shitty TCS offer of INR 300,000? i bet those guys will be nice atleast, they are a freaking mnc"
- "I don't seem to like anything these tcs people have offered me in their video classes. how am gonna survive my daily job life if i don't like these stuff?"
"FUCKING COVID IS THERE!! MY DAD's SHOP HAS CLOSED DOWN, WE ARE ON OUR LAST SAVINGS !! I SHOULD FUCKING DO SOMETHING, BUT A JUST A 22 YEAR OLD NOBODY!!"
this above, was my fight. to me these were the end of the world thoughts.
however the last day of college came, then the next day came, then another , then a week came and went, then months came and went , then years came and went and today after 2 years, i am just amazed at how things handled themselves. all the above points are now totally invalid in my eyes
i was shit scared to even open android studio after that jan internship. however, every thing i learned in between feb to sept ( and that includes my college stuff, some web dev, php, etc) i would find myself comparing it with java and android. and after spending some off screen time with friends nd family getting some relax, i started applying for jobs at startups. I only ever had confidence in java and kotlin , so 50% of the jobs i applied for were that of android dev.
and it was to no one's surprise that one android startup offered to interview me. i remember being terrible at ds algo, programming, java and even android at that time, yet somehow they saw some potential in me and offered me a role. the role they offered me was for an android dev with a salary of almost double the TCS's offer. this was even more terrifying for me because i was already burnt with a startup offerring money and exploiting me.
But my god how things changed .
This small startup company was everything opposite of that exploitive startup.
- From day 1 to my last day in that company, I had seniors who would give me time to understand stuff, ask questions that they would clarify, understand my knowledge and level and give me tasks accordingly, trust me of my time and my words and appreciate me. no one ever called after 6 pm or on weekends and no one ever counted my leaves or asked question about it.
- I was myself very scared at first, that someday they are gonna blame me, find me as some fraud , some masquerader unfit for the role, but these fears slowly went away. i just found myself diving deeper and deeper into code with full passion love and quest for writing bug free stuff.
- slowly and slowly they even stayed putting me as sole devs in management meetings, making me the front spokesperson for android tech in those meetings, the position that gave me so much confidence since, the people taking the top decisions will change their decisions based on my calls. I also felt a pull for exploring stuff outside my domain, sitting in calls of backend devs , react guys and designers, asking them questions and learning their stuff too.
today i laugh at the problems that life had put in front of me at that time. today my opinion on choosing mnc vs startup is not about who pays how much or where the job is most secure, but its about where i find myself motivated and excited to work.
money is not even a factor anymore. everyone (mncs included) is willing to give tons of money to the worthy candidate, so i won't be ever settling for a low paying job. the topmost priority is which company has the culture to let me grow and keep me on heals at the same time.
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(continued)4
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