Senior manager calls me at 3pm today. I’ve known about this issue since last Friday, one of her pions told me to hold off until Thursday when he’s back in the office and that I could prioritise other tasks.

I have another task with a deadline of the 21st with the potential for fines if it’s not done.

Snr manager: “I’m calling to see how this is going”
Me: “cool, it’s not, bigger problems in the world”
Snr manager: “waah, this has to be done Monday or we face the potential of a court case, fines, this is the biggest problem in the world”
Me: “I’ve known about this issue for a week, have been told not to worry too much and nobody has mentioned the impact or timeline you’ve just given me.”
Snr manager: “so can it be done for monday”
Me: “no chance”
Snr manager: “why not?”
Me: “because it’s 3pm Friday and I have 1 hour of Work left, good luck”

My manager was in the room, he got an arsey call soon after. I don’t really care how that one went but he’s a good guy so I’m sure it was fine.

I also had the joy of asking: so give me an idea of the potential fine... to which they wouldn’t give me an answer.

I need this to weigh up which of the potentially finable tasks takes priority.

The other team that had trouble told me all the dates, gave me over a months notice and the scale of the problem.

If you want someone to help: be polite, give them as much warning as you have and be absolutely honest.

The job’s done cause I’m a fucking legend. But they’re not gonna find out until 5pm Monday. That’s the dickhead tax, they get the dickhead tax for being dickheads.

I’m gonna spend Monday working from home, incommunicado. Fuck incompetent arseholes.

Enjoy your weekend everyone, I know I will mine.

Been reviewing ALOT of client code and supplier’s lately. I just want to sit in the corner and cry.

Somewhere along the line the education system has failed a generation of software engineers.

I am an embedded c programmer, so I’m pretty low level but I have worked up and down and across the abstractions in the industry. The high level guys I think don’t make these same mistakes due to the stuff they learn in CS courses regarding OOD.. in reference how to properly architect software in a modular way.

I think it may be that too often the embedded software is written by EEs and not CEs, and due to their curriculum they lack good software architecture design.

Too often I will see huge functions with large blocks of copy pasted code with only difference being a variable name. All stuff that can be turned into tables and iterated thru so the function can be less than 20 lines long in the end which is like a 200% improvement when the function started out as 2000 lines because they decided to hard code everything and not let the code and processor do what it’s good at.

Arguments of performance are moot at this point, I’m well aware of constraints and this is not one of them that is affected.

The problem I have is the trying to take their code in and understand what’s its trying todo, and todo that you must scan up and down HUGE sections of the code, even 10k+ of line in one file because their design was not to even use multiple files!

Does their code function yes .. does it work? Yes.. the problem is readability, maintainability. Completely non existent.

I see it soo often I almost begin to second guess my self and think .. am I the crazy one here? No. And it’s not their fault, it’s the education system. They weren’t taught it so they think this is just what programmers do.. hugely mundane copy paste of words and change a little things here and there and done. NO actual software engineers architecture systems and write code in a way so they do it in the most laziest, way possible. Not how these folks do it.. it’s like all they know are if statements and switch statements and everything else is unneeded.. fuck structures and shit just hard code it all... explicitly write everything let’s not be smart about anything.

I know I’ve said it before but with covid and winning so much more buisness did to competition going under I never got around to doing my YouTube channel and web series of how I believe software should be taught across the board.. it’s more than just syntax it’s a way of thinking.. a specific way of architecting any software embedded or high level.

Anyway rant off had to get that off my chest, literally want to sit in the corner and cry this weekend at the horrible code I’m reviewing and it just constantly keeps happening. Over and over and over. The more people I bring on or acquire projects it’s like fuck me wtf is this shit!!! Take some pride in the code you write!

Just need to get this off my chest. Started a new job 3 weeks ago at a company that has been around ~18 years, it is only recently that they have started to grow more rapidly. I was brought in under the guise that they wanted to embrace change and better practices and so said I was up for the challenge.

In my 2nd week I was asked to produce a document on tackling the technical debt and an approach to software development in the future for 3 consultants who were coming in to review the development practices of the company on behalf of the private equity firm who has taken a major stake in the company. I wrote the document trying to be factual about the current state and where I wanted to go, key points being:

Currently a tightly coupled monolith with little separation of concerns (73 projects in one solution but you have to build two other solutions to get it to build because there are direct references.).

Little to no adherence to SOLID principles.

No automated testing whatsoever.

Libraries all directly referenced using the file system rather than Nuget.

I set out a plan which said we needed to introduce TDD, breaking dependencies, splitting libraries into separate projects with nuget packages. Start adhering to SOLID principles, looking at breaking the project down into smaller services using the strangler pattern etc. After submitting what I had written to be part of a larger document I was told that it had been tweaked as they felt it was too negative. I asked to see the master document and it turns out they had completely excluded it.

I’ve had open and frank discussions with the dev team who to me have espoused that previously they have tried to do better, tackle technical debt etc but have struggled to get management to allow them. All in all a fairly poor culture. They seem almost resigned to their fate.

In my first 2 weeks I was told to get myself acquainted and to settle myself in. I started looking at the code and was quite shocked at how poorly written a lot of it was and in discussions with my manager have been critical of the code base and quite passionate and opinionated about the changes I want to see.

Then on Friday, the end of my third week, I was invited to a meeting for a catch up. The first thing I was told was that they felt I was being too openly critical in the office and whether I was a good fit for the company, essentially a stay or go ultimatum. I’ve asked for the weekend to think about it.

I’ve been a little rocked by it being so quickly asked if I was a good fit for the company and it got my back up. I told them that I was a good fit but for me to stay I want to see a commitment to changes, they told me that they had commitments to deliver new features and that we might be able to do it at some point in the future but for now I just needed to crack on.

Ordinarily I would just walk but I’ve recently started the process to adopt kids and changing jobs right now would blow that out the water. At the same time I’m passionate about what I do and having a high standards, I’m not going to be silenced for being critical but maybe I will try and tackle it in a different way. I think my biggest issue is that my boss who was previously a Senior Developer (my current position) has worked at the company for 12 years and it is his only job, so when I’m being critical it’s most likely criticising code he wrote. I find it hard to have the respect of a boss who I had to teach what a unit test was and how to write one. It makes it hard to preach good standards when by all accounts they don’t see the problems.

Just wondering if anyone has suggestions or experience that might help me tackle this situation?

Did I ever tell you kids about the time I worked for a company that got a contract to develop an iOS application around some object detection software that had been developed by another team?

Company I was working for was a tiny software consultancy, and this was my first ever dev job (I’m at my second now 😅). Nobody at the company has experience building mobile applications but CEO decides that the app should be written in React Native because _he_ knows React Native.

During a meeting with the client, CEO jokes about how easy the ask is and says he could finish it in a weekend. Please note that Head of Engineering had already budgeted a quarter for the work. CEO says we can do it in a week! And moves up the deadline. And only assigns two engineers to project. I am not one of those engineers.

The two engineers that are put on it struggle. A lot. They can’t seem to get the object detection to work at all, and the code that’s already written is in Objective-C. I realize one of the issues is that the engineers on the project can’t read Objective-C because they have no experience with Objective-C or even C. I have experience with C, so I volunteer to take a look at it to try to see what’s going on.

Turns out the problem is that the models are trained on one type of image format and the iPhone camera takes images in a different format.

The end of the week comes, they do not succeed in figuring out the image conversion in React Native. There’s an in-person demo with the customers scheduled for the next Monday. CEO spends the weekend trying to build the app. Only succeeds in locking literally every other engineer out of the project.

They manage to negotiate a second chance where we deliver what we were supposed to deliver at the original schedule.

I spent the weekend looking up how to convert images and figure it would be a lot easier to interface with the Objective-C if we used Swift. Taught myself enough Swift over the weekend to feel dangerous. Spoke to Head of Engineering on Monday and proposed solution — start over in Swift. Volunteer to lead effort. Eventually convince them it’s a good idea (and really, what’s the worst that can happen? If this solves our main problem at the moment, that’s still more progress than the original team made)

Spend the next week working 16 hour days building out application. Meet requirements for next deadline. Save contract.

And that’s ONE of the stories of my first dev job that got me hired as a senior engineer despite only having 10 months of work experience in the industry.

Trying to buy a house in another state. First time moving out of state, first time trying to buy a house. Making first offer this weekend. Which is terrifying, and exciting. But it’s also lonely because my other half is in the other state looking at houses and I’m stuck here working and taking care of the cats.

Had a poor mental health day yesterday. Got a call today that my mama (gran on my mum’s side) took a tumble and has been in hospital and they don’t think she’ll pull through. I don’t have many memories of her, but the memories I do have are happy ones. She was always full of life and love and kindness.

💔

SUNDAYS ARE THE WORST!!

Normally it’s the weekend but recently it’s just so stressful!

It’s like you can’t even relax because you’re supposed to be preparing for the week ahead!

It doesn’t feel like the weekend anymore!

Why is planning and prioritizing
So MF Hard for me!?!!!!

Why did my brain cope with stress and trauma by simply checking out & spacing out!?

I got so good at it that I find it hard to bring my focus back—it takes soooo much effort to do what i need to do

I’m So Freaking TIRED.

Fml... you keep getting the weekly discussions right on point.

I started with the last guys right out of university... just out of Hospital.

With a brand new degree and a Crohn’s diagnosis I stepped into the first place I found hiring. They were good guys, after a junior dev... to get stuck in their muck.

I did! I nailed project after project, tricky development after tricky development. I spent 5 years with them and over those years things changed.

They had a mass cull... the original idea was to get rid of the useless middle managers, the ones managing other managers being managed by another manager for no real reason.... the ones that do fuck all with their day.

But the fucking idiots upstairs put the job of working out the cull in the shitty middle managers hands.

So, instead, they cut the titles senior, junior and everything in between. Everyone was just a thing, no senior things, no junior things. Just things.

Once they’d done that they said “we’ll we have this many things, they’re all the same, let’s get rid of the things with the highest pay checks because the other things can do it just as well for less money”...

And that’s how they cut 50% of their senior techs.

I was one of the ones left behind but the damage became obvious quick. The middle managers barked out orders at people who couldn’t complete them, and everything went to shit.

My team was rebranded twice in as many years... an obvious ploy for funding, but the cost of the team fluctuated like hell because contractors had to fill the senior positions at 3 times the cost.

Then the managers started barking out Self contradictory orders. Do this, but this way...

This would work, but not that way... try explaining that to a group of non-technical, useless as fuck middle managers. It took months, and shit flows downstream so we got the bulk of the hassle for it.

Then my boy Morpheus, got a warning... they threatened his contract for saying “this will work, but not that way”.

He kept the contract, and the manager giving him the warning said he didn’t think he should... but he, and all the middle fuckwits don’t have the balls to stand up against nonsense.

That was the breaking point for me, I handed in my notice and told them a month was what they could have.

I didn’t have a position or an idea of where to go, a few long-standing offers as back up in a pinch but not the perfect job.

On the Thursday I decided I was done, I let my manager know. Then I boshed the fuck out of my CV and updated my profiles.

My phone started ringing off the hook, a senior NG2/MEAN/Ionic dev on the market is like candy to recruiters. They’re lovely too.

I went to a few interviews that were okay but not great. Then a company got in touch... one that I immediately recognised as an IT book publisher. They said they were looking for NG/NG2 devs, senior. winner! Set up the interview.

So I’d spent the weekend with the missus, about an hour away from mine and 2 from the interview. I hadn’t planned on staying there but at 6ish she looked over at me and said “do you have to go” <- imagine that with puppy dog eyes from a gorgeous Slovenian lass.

I folded quicker than a shitty pancake toss.

We spent the night together but that meant I had to be up at 6, to go back to mine, iron my interview clothes and make it to the train to manage the interview. Fuck. I did it, but I was at the interview wired on caffeine and struggling to be awake and coherent. I still managed, that’s what I do, I make do and try to do well regardless of the situation.

That comes from being ill btw, when you’re dealt a shitty hand you learn to play it well.

They were good guys, the heads all knew what they were on about, not the middle management bs I was used to.

They demoed me live with an ng1 test, which was awesome as hell to play with.

We chatted, friendly and cool guys! I loved the place.

The end of the week they got me in for second round. Ng2 and competence test, again I went for it!

Positive feedback and a “we’ll get back to you ASAP, should be by Tuesday”...

Tuesday was the Tuesday before the Friday I was due to leave the old company... I was cutting it close.

On the Monday the offers started rolling in, a few C# ASP MVC positions, cool but I was holding out for the guys I’d interviewed with.

Then Tuesday comes around, I’m nervous as fuck but it’s okay because I knew regardless I can pay the rent in December with one of the offers.

Then said yes!

The thing that seemed most important in the process was my ability to talk to any fucker. If you’re coming up to interview, talk to everyone, the grocer, your barista, the binmen, anyone. Practice that skill above all others.

I start tomorrow morning! I can’t wait.

Final thought: middle managers are taints.

Probably the MOST complete software book on a very broad subject.

This is book to read for those of you are near college grad, first job in the industry. But to the level of detail and broad coverage this book has I think it’s actually a great book for everyone in the industry almost as a “baseline”

From requirements, project planning, workflow paradigms. Software Architecture design, variable naming, refactoring, testing, releasing the book covers everything, not only high level but also in reference to C.

Why C ...because in the consumer electronics, automotive industry, medical electronics and other industries creating physical products c is the language of choice, no changing that. BUT it’s not a C book... it contains C and goes into dept into C but it’s not a C book, C is more like a vehicle for the book, because there are long established, successful industry’s built around it. Plenty of examples.

When I say it’s the most complete on a broad subject seriously like example the chapter about the C language is not a brief over like many other books, for example 10 pages alone are dedicated to just pointer! Many C books have only a few paragraphs on the subject. This goes on depth.

Other topics, recursion, how to write documentation for your code.

Lots of detail and philosophy of the construction of software.

Even if you are a veteran software engineer you could probably learn a thing or two from the book.

It’s not book that you can finish in weekend, unless you can read and comprehend over 1000 pages.

Very few books cover such a broad topic ALL while still going into great detail on those subtopics. the second part is what lacks in most “broad topic books” ..

Code Complete.. is definitely “Complete”

So the image doesn’t match the rest of my book images because I tried to make an amage to cover of the book, inception style kinda haha 😂

I think I want to quit.

I know it’s a bit of an inconvenient time with there being corona around but everything was okay up till January. I’m a junior even though I shouldn’t be. Since my manager told me and my team leader senior in my review “maybe you two should switch jobs” things have been going downhill. I think the team lead had it out for me and didn’t put me on a new project, I’ve been left with doing stupid basic shit like updating text on websites in a cms and doing fuck all and then there’s also another guy that was basically harassing me trying to put me in my place any time I was doing better than him and literally both of them been like that ... and now that I’m working from home it’s even worse. I don’t have any kind of assurance that everything okay and actually I think I’m being framed as welll since I found keyloggers on my work laptop and deleted cleaned shit up the past two weeks and changed my WiFi security as there were like 5 unknown devices on our network so yeah .. I’ve been framed and they made it out like I put a powershell script on one of the servers and it crashed a Porsche website for 8 h and all kinds of bullshit - this was yday. On Tuesday they logged me out of everything like changed the password for work vpn and kicked me out of slack and Microsoft teams for over 2 hours till the end of shift and two managers weren’t answering their phone and then next day my manager called and apologised that saying that he “accidentally” did that to me along with 15 people they let go from the company....

I’m seriously thinking of quitting being removed from team group for a moment , not being on a project and people literally trying to put me down after I know I’m genuinely smarter than them and if I had over 10 years experience like those on my team (I have 1) I’d be far higher up and better

They can genuinely just go fuck themseves !!!! And here I was going to work over weekend on something! No fucking way I just wanna quit or give in my notice but because of corona I’m divided

So, I am currently seeking opportunities at other companies. I randomly got a call on Thursday around 12pm from an unknown number and I was not able to take that call as I was in a meeting. Later on, after looking up that number on Truecaller, I found out that it’s a recruiter from a US-based firm that I had applied to earlier. I immediately tried to call that person again but she was not able to talk as she was in another meeting. I tried texting the recruiter asking for her availability but she didn’t respond. I called again and this time she got annoyed at me, saying that she will call me back if needed. Now, on the weekend I again tried to message her, asking when she is free for a conversation, she is acting high and mighty, saying that she will call me when we (the company) have interviews again (hinting that I have missed the opportunity and it’s my fault). Her passive-aggressive attitude seems to be coming because I didn’t take her earlier call— I did not deliberately avoid her call, I was in another meeting. I was not given any intimation that she is going to call me— let alone on a weekday at 12pm. My current company expects a high-level of professionalism and I intend to show the same level of professionalism in any future companies that I work with. This kind of dehumanization (mainly due to a power imbalance in top-down heirarchical structure) is why big companies have hard time retaining workers these days. And this company was not Google/Apple or anything remotely in the same league. So I seemed to have dodged a bullet there.

You guys work from home because of coronavirus?
Me on the other hand, have to work on weekend on my desk to finish an urgent project, it’s for the ministry of education (who closed all schools and launched an online courses) to monitor the effectiveness of the new platform and fix some bugs on it.

My lead always steal my work and showcase it has his work to the manager. I always look for a chance to trap him in front of Manager.

One fine day, He gave me an work which has to completed on Monday, I sit over the weekend and finished it’s but partially committed it.

He is a blind thief, As always he says that he himself completed over the weekend.

While running in front of the manager they face huge issues because it’s a half cooked product. Manager purposely sent an email to our team without mentioning the name of my lead.

After few days my lead silently put paper and left the team.

Blizzard coming this weekend. I get to spend the night at work because our disaster recovery plan isn’t in full swing (Yes it’s paid, but I am going to lose my mind). Awesome. Suck my ass, winter.

I really hate sales people. My stakeholder wants to buy an address verification service but is hesitant to purchase now because the dev time needed would be substantial. Now the sales rep has planted seeds of doubt in my SH and SH thinks I grossly overestimated the labor I quoted.

Sales rep is all “major corporations have installed this in a weekend.” 🤬🤬🤬 Major corporations also have more than one developer and probably aren’t dealing with a website that has a dozen address forms that all work differently. Oh, and I DON’T WORK WEEKENDS MOFO.

My SH originally requested a labor estimate for installing the AVS on all address forms and that’s what I delivered. My audit revealed a dozen different forms. I’m working with a legacy code base that’s been bandaged together and maintained by an outside dev agency. The only thing the forms have in common is reusable address fields. They all work differently when it comes to validating and submitting data to the server and they all submit to different api endpoints. At least a quarter of those forms are broken and would need to be fixed (these are mostly admin-facing). I also had to provide an estimate on frontend implementation when I have no idea what they want the FE to look like.

My estimate was 5-8 weeks for implementation AND testing. I wrote up my findings and clearly explained the labor required, why it was needed, and the time needed. All was fine until the sales rep tried to get into SH’s head.

My SH is now asking for a new estimate and hoping for 1-2 weeks of labor, which is what will SH to buy the AVS. Then go to the outside dev agency you used to work with and ask for a second opinion. I’m sure they’d also tell you at least month if not more for testing, implementation, and deployment because you have a DOZEN FORMS you want to add this to. 1-2 weeks is only possible for a single form.

My manager doesn’t work in the same coding language I do, but he read my documentation and supports my original estimate.

I honestly want to ask my SH if this sales rep is giving a very good price for the AVS. If not, are there other companies in the mix? Because right now you have a sales rep that’s taking you for a ride and trying to pressure you all so he can get another notch in his belt for getting another “major corporation” as his account. I don’t think it’s a good idea to be locked in with a grimy sales rep.

Any people here who experienced derealization?

Just sharing it here because I think that devs (or other stressful desk jobs) are especially susceptible to it.

I’ve had the feeling that my perception of the world has been kinda „weird“ and unsharp for months but I always thought „I’m sure it’s because I drink too much. I’m sure it’s because I don’t eat healthy. I’m sure it’s because I don’t do sports. I’m sure it’s because I don’t sleep enough“ etc.

I knew about derealization but I always had the opinion that it’s one of those psycho diseases that are all made up.

When I started doing some research on it i learned what it actually is..
A „defense“ mechanism of the brain to protect the brain from shocks and stuff or just a mental disturbance and that it’s kind of a vicious circle once you actually notice it.
It’s only getting worse because you focus on it and check in on it if it’s still there..

Just a few days ago I started to ignore it and told myself „it’s fine, it’s a natural experience, just ignore it“. It changed things a lot..
I feel much better just because of the fact that I’m no longer afraid of it.

Enjoy your weekend, cheers!

I think I just came up with my next app idea while writing a blog post:

--Sometimes Ignorance Can Really Be Bliss?--
I like to be in know so I read a lot. My reading list will never end as there’s always more I can know.

Part of the problem is lack of clear priorities but all these articles and books are just so interesting….

I probably spend 4-5 hours every weekend reading… mostly from my Inbox. Yes I try to clear some daily but again, I keep a lot just because they look interesting.

I also use Boxbe and recently setup some Automatic Cleanup… but sort of hurts when I see an email I want to read but then it’s gone tomorrow…

**An App Idea!**
What if I never see these actual emails. But my computer does?
What if I can use it to generate a list of articles from all my emails and just show a few in a Weekly Digest?

Thoughts? anyone else have this problem?

But the key is still, never actually knowing what you missed!

It’s always fun when you are asked to push to production on a friday afternoon...Because the project managers and owners won’t have be the ones who have to fix something on a friday night or weekend 🤷‍♂️

That feeling when - one year after quitting Twitter - it’s the weekend and you finally don’t feel the pressure of having to have a side project, cool library, you name it anymore. I just enjoy my weekends and if I want to, I fucking watch Netflix 48 hours straight.
I genuinely feel that I am good enough at development that it won’t make a difference and my weekends are mine to spend. I have zero cool stuff on my GitHub and have never had any disadvantage because of that in the past 11 years of my career, so why even worry?
I officially achieved anti-imposter-Syndrome 😎

My previous employer was an e-commerce company. Most of our customers had use it or lose it funds that had to be spent by December 31 each year. So every year, the devs had to stay online until midnight on New Year’s Eve just in case there was a website issue. I didn’t witness any issue during my time there, or at least I was never contacted for support when I was on NYE duty.

They compensated by giving an extra PTO day for future use. Pre 2020, they’d allow us to leave work two hours early on NYE since the office was in NYC and getting home would be a nightmare. But you’d have to work from home to work the NYE support.

It was “optional”, but we know as a dev it’s not really optional unless you have a life and death reason not to. My first few weeks working there, my grandma had passed away. The funeral was NYE weekend so I was excused from doing the NYE support my first year because I was on bereavement leave.

The last two weeks of December were considered blackout dates for PTO, so everyone (including non devs) was not allowed to take any vacation time during those two weeks. Some people might have a problem with that if they’re into holiday celebrations and family and friend get togethers. They did observe Christmas, so that was the only day off most folks got during those two weeks. Though, the period from Thanksgiving through the end of December was stressful.

!dev

Zero carbs for a full week, went pretty good. Didn’t feel tired or anything..
UNTIL.. I got out my whiskey today..
It’s pumping me up so hard..
my hard rate must be around 120 or so..

Too much energy..