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

A 20-something dev, 'A', back in the early days of twitter+facebook would post all his extracurricular activities (drinking, partying, normal young-buck stuff). The dev mgr, 'J', at the time took offense because he felt 'A' was making the company look bad, so 'A' had a target on his back. Nothing 'A' did was good enough and, for example, 'J' had the source control czars review 'A's code to 'review' (aka = find anything wrong). Not sorting the 'using' statements, and extra line after the closing }, petty things like that. For those curious, orders followed+carried out by+led by 'T' in my previous rant.

As time went on and 'T' finding more and more 'wrong' with A's code, 'J' put A on disciplinary probation. 'A' had 90 days to turn himself around, or else.

A bright spot was 'A' was working on a Delphi -> C# conversion, so a lot of the code would be green-field development and by simply following the "standards", 'A' would be fine...so he thought.

About 2 weeks into the probation, 'A' was called into the J's office and berated because the conversion project was behind schedule, and if he didn't get the project back on track, 'A' wouldn't make it 30 days. I sat behind 'A' and he unloaded on me.
<'A' slams his phone on his desk>
Me: "Whoa...whats up?"
A: "Dude, I fucking hate this place, did you hear what they did?"
<I said no, then I think we spent an hour talking about it>
Me: "That all sucks. Don't worry about the code. Nobody cares what T thinks. Its not even your fault the project is behind, the DBAs are tasked with upgrades and it's not like anyone is waiting on you. It'll get done when it's done. Sounds like a witch hunt, what did you do? Be honest."
A: "Well, um...I kinda called out J, T, and those other assholes on facebook. I was drunk, pissed, and ...well...here we are."
Me: "Geez, what a bunch of whiney snowflakes. Keep your head down and you'll get thru it, or don't. Its not like you couldn't find another job tomorrow."
A: "This is my first job out of college and I don't want to disappoint my dad by quitting. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing. All J told me was to get better. What the fuk does that even mean?"
Me: "He didn't give you any goals? Crap, for someone who is a stickler for the rules, that's low, even for J."

Fast forward 2 weeks, I was attending MS TechEd and I was with another dev mgr, R.

R: "Did you hear? We had to let 'A' go today."
Me: "What the hell? Why?"
R: "He couldn't cut it, so we had to let him go."
Me: "Cut what? What did he do, specifically?"
R: "I don't know, 'A' was on probation, I guess he didn't meet the goals."
Me: "You guess? We fire a developer working on a major upgrade and you guess? What were these so-called goals?"
R: "Whoa...you're getting a little fire up. I don't know, maybe not adhering to coding standards, not meeting deadlines?"
Me: "OMG...we fire people for not forming code? Are you serious!?"
R: "Oh...yea...that does sound odd when you put it that way. I wish I'd talk to you before we left on this trip"
Me: "What?! You knew they were firing him *before* we left? How long did you know this was happening?"
R: "Honestly, for a while. 'A' really wasn't a team player."
Me: "That's dirty, the whole thing is dirty. We've done some shitty things to people, but this is low, even for J. The probation process is meant to improve, not be used as a witch hunt. I don't like that you stood around and let it happen. You know better."
R: "Yea, you're right, but doesn't change anything. J wanted to do it while most of us were at the conference in case 'A' caused a scene."
Me: "THAT MAKES IT WORSE! 'A' was blindsided and you knew it. He had no one there that could defend him or anything."
R: "Crap, crap, crap...oh crap...jeez...J had this planned all along...crap....there is nothing I can do no...its too late."
Me: "Yes there is. If 'A' comes to you for a letter of recommendation, you write one. If someone calls for reference, you give him a good one."
R: "Yea..yea...crap...I feel like shit...I need to go back to the room and lie down."

As the sun sets, it rises again. Within a couple of weeks, 'A' had another job at a local university. Within a year, he was the department manager, and now he is a vice president (last time I checked) of a college in Kansas City, MO.

Uploaded an app to Appstore and it was rejected because the Gender dropdown at registration only has "Male" and "Female" as required selectable options. The reviewer thought it was right to force an inclusion of "Other" option inside a Medical Service app that is targeting a single country which also only recognizes only Male/Female as gender.

Annoyingly, I wrote back a dispute on the review:

Hello,
I have read your inclusion request and you really shouldn't be doing this. Our app is a Medical Service app and the Gender option can only be either Male or Female based on platform design, app functionality and data accuracy. We are also targeting *country_name* that recognizes only Male/Female gender. Please reconsider this review.

{{No reply after a week}}

-- Proceeds to include the option for "Other"
-- App got approved.
-- Behind the scene if you select the "other" option you are automatically tagged female.
Fuck yeah!

The worst boss and human being so far, still wondering how he keeps the company afloat. This was my first longterm developer job almost a decade ago and I was a student at that time. The application was an outlook plug in for a document management system.

Scene 1:
Boss: The processing is too slow. Make it faster.
Me: After analysis and profiling I can prove that the core (developed in VB6 by a physicist and autoconverted to VB.NET) is the bottleneck.
Boss: I don't care. Make it faster and don't touch the core.

Scene 2:
Boss: I want the app to behave in that way.
Me: This is not what we specified previously. Look here. Nonetheless, I would have to rewrite half of the plugin. Mind that it is an outlook plug in and we are restricted by outlook. If you want that, it would take XX days and we do not have enough time until release.
Boss: I don't care. Do it. And the deadline stays as it is.
Boss 2 weeks later: I don't like it.

Scene 3:
Me: To release in time I need more resources. I need at least one tester and another developer would be a huge plus. Also, I need a second PC for testing.
Boss: No.
2 weeks later:
Boss: why does it not work properly in outlook 2010? Didn't you test it?
Me: I could not. I have only outlook 2007. I asked for more resources and did not get them.
Boss: it's your fault. Bad work.

Scene 4:
*Me having failed multiple exams, stress at work, started to drink*
Boss: Don't you like working here?
Me: ...

Finale:
*Me getting written sick with severe depression*
Boss: fires me.
Me: Loses flat. Quits uni. Unemployed for 6 Months, one rejection after another (boss was phoned, that's sure). Moving back to parents. Sues boss. Gets money.

I still hate him and wish him the most painful experiences in life. Such people belong behind bars. But the justice isn't always served. One has to move forward and improve himself.

In my wallowing experience as a freelancer I've noticed that almost all C/C++ clients are perfectionist. You just can't please them by getting the job done quickly.

I got a libcurl job from one the other day to scrape data from a target website and within an hour it was ready. I notified the client and he was both amazed and confused assuming it would take the whole week.
C++Client: The code works but you need to take your time.
Me: Sorry?
C++Client: Yes, it works but you used "string" instead of "wstring"
Me: 😊 Oh okay... *converts strings to wstring*
C++Client: And also variable names should be more descriptive.
Me: 😏 *int foobar => int very_long_descriptive_foobar_01*
C++Client: And also use "shorts" for page nums it'll save some bytes
Me: 😕 *int => short...*
C++Client: And also use forloops instead of whileloops
Me: ☹️ *whileloops => forloops*
C++Client: And also use -- instead of ++ in loops
Me: 😤 *for(... i++) => for(... i--)*
C++Client: And also...
C++Client: And also...
C++Client: And also...
C++Client: And also...
C++Client: And also...
C++Client: And also...
C++Client: And also...
===> Seven "and also" days later <===
Me: *completed 10 Java projects behind the scene*
C++Client: And also use pthread instead of thread
Me: 😧 It's day 7 already!
C++Client: Oh I see, great job. You can compile and send me the archived source.
Me: 🤩
C++Client: And also...
Me: 🏃💨

Gotham...

why, oh God, why do you have a scene in SE01 E17 at 9:20 min into the episode, where

J.Gordon uses reading glasses to a screen of an old B/W TV and magically is able to read a logo brand of a jacket.

How did the glasses add hundreds of more pixels to the resolution behind them.

This has ruined it for me, not watching now. Even Mission Impossible where they say "use DDOS to take over their systems" is better than this.

I got a dayjob in a company. I got an error. I cannot solve it and I am so desperate. So I go to stackoverflow, nobody answers. I post on git issue, but nobody solves the problem. So, I pay someone to solve it, like Hackhands.com to find a mentor. There is no mentor that can help. So I pay more, hired a peer, and finally a development team just to help me. They get paid only if they solved it.

But each of my folks repeat my same steps, asking on stackoverflows or github, and none of these help. So, they end up hiring their own friends and mentors. Their friends also end up paying (pay before problem solved) someone to help them.

their friends pay for friends of friends, then friends of friends of friends

And all of a sudden it becomes a giant MLM scheme.

And those people they paid for actually work for a company behind the scene which I am a founder of 😁

Multi billions startup idea, is it?

Learning C/C++ started to become fun, mainly because I've managed to do seemingly cursed stuff lately.
For example, today, I learned you could totally call a class member function using a type-matching nullptr variable. The 'this' variable is so null that it will crash as soon as the program hits 'this', though, but the control flow does go into the function.
It's not *that* cursed once you learn the behind-the-scene stuff, but that kind of weird s#!+ is funny, even amusing for me, who've mained languages other than C/C++.

I feel like writing or telling people about the time I jumped from Windows 7 Ultimate and jumping to Windows 10. (I'm not against 10, but I'm never updating after what had happened to me)
It all starts when none of my games will play due to a possible issue with my graphics card. I look up "3D source game bug" and not many results pop up. I go on Microsoft's Qna areas and ask this question but to my surprise nothing they say would make sense. "Clean the pins of your graphics card, make sure you verify the games on Steam". I verified the games and they checked out as perfectly fine. I don't have access to my graphics card because this is a laptop, sadly not a tower.
Two months pass and my computer is already showing signs of stress, like it didn't want to live in a sense. It was three times slower than when I was on Windows 7 and it was unallocating areas of my main hard drive where I could make virtual hard drives.
Instantly I start looking up Linux distros and find Linux Mint. 17.3 was the current version at the time. I downloaded it and burned it onto a DVD-rom and rebooted my computer. I loaded into the disc and to my surprise it seemed almost like Windows 7 apart from the Linux part. I grab my external hard drive and partition it to hold the Linux distro and leave it plugged in incase Windows 10 does actually fail.
On December 19, a few months after Windows 10 had released. I start my laptop to try and continue my studies in video game development. But to my surprise, Windows 10 had finally crashed permanently. The screen flickered blue and black, and an error box saying Loginui.exe failed to start. I look at it for a solid minute as my computer had just committed suicide in a sense.
I reboot thinking it would fix the error but it didn't. I couldn't log in anymore.
I force shutdown the laptop and turn it back on putting it into safe mode.
To my surprise loginui.exe works and I sign in. I look at my desktop, the space wallpaper I always admired, the sound files, screen shots I had saved.
I go into file explorer and grab everything out of my default hard drive Windows was installed on. Nothing but 400gb got left behind and that was mainly garbage prototypes I had made and Windows itself. I formatted my external hard drive and placed everything on it. Escaping Windows 10 with around 100GB of useful data I looked at the final shutdown button I would look at.
I click it and try to boot into normal Windows 10. But it doesn't work. It flickers and the error pops up once more.
I force it to shutdown and insert the previous Linux Mint disc I made and format the default hard drive through Linux. I was done. 10 gave me a lot of shit. Java wouldn't work, my games has a functional UI but no screen popped up except a black abyss and it wouldn't even let me try to update my graphics card, apparently my AMD Radeon 5450 was up to date at the AMD Radeon 5000's.
I installed Linux Mint and thinking the games would actually play I open steam and Launch Half-Life 2 to check if Linux would be nicer to me than Windows 10 had been.
To my surprise the game ran. The scene from Highway 17 popped on screen and the UI was fully functional. But it was playing at 10-15fps rather than the usual 60-70fps. Keep look at my drivers and see my graphics card isn't in use. I do some research and it turns out I have a Hybrid Laptop.
Intel HD Graphics and an AMD Radeon 5450 and it was using the Intel and not the AMD. Months of testing and attempts of getting the games to work at high frame rates pass and the Damn thing still functions at a low terrible fps. Finally I give up. I ask my mom for a Windows 7 disc and she says we can't afford it. A few months pass and I finally get a Windows 7 installation disc through money I've saved up. Proudly I put it into my optical disc drive and install it to my main hard drive deleting Linux completely. I announced to all my friends my computer was back in working order and I install everything I needed, Steam, Skype, Blender, and Unity as well as all my games. I test Half-Life 2 and it's running exceptionally smoothly, I test Minecraft at max settings and it's working beautifully. The computer was functioning properly once again and my life as a developer started as I modeled things and blender, learned beginners C# and learned a lot of Batch. Today the computer still runs at a great speed and I warn others of what happened to me after I installed Windows 10 to my machine if they are thinking of switching from 7 or 8 on an older machine.
Truly the damage to my data cannot be undone. But the memory of the maintenance, work, tests, all are a memory of how Windows 10 ruined me and every night before the one year anniversary of Windows 10's release, I took out the battery of my laptop and unplugged it from the a.c. power, just so Windows 10 doesn't show it's DLLs, batch scripts, vbs scripts, anything on my computer. But now, after this has happened and I have recovered, I now only have a story to tell

With the help of GameMaker.
It was my first look behind the scene of video games. At first I was using Drag&Drop.
Then slowly I got my hands dirty by coding and I started to enjoy it. I then later (after reaching the highest level possible in GML (jk)) decided to learn more famous languages.

Code freeze...

Sitting in a lecture where the lecture is pro-android and completely clueless on what goes on behind the scene.

#FirstRant

I have one question to everyone:

I am basically a full stack developer who works with cloud technologies for platform development. For past 5-6 months I am working on product which uses machine learning algorithms to generate metadata from video.

One of the algorithm uses tensorflow to predict locale from an image. It takes an image of size ~500 kb and takes around 15 sec to predict the 5 possible locale from a pre-trained model. Now when I send more than 100 r ki requests to the code concurrently, it stops working and tensor flow throws some error. I am using a 32 core vcpu with 120 GB ram. When I ask the decision scientists from my team they say that the processing is high. A lot of calculation is happening behind the scene. It requires GPU.

As far as I understand, GPU make sense while training but while prediction or testing I do not think we will need such heavy infra. Please help me understand if I am wrong.

PS : all the decision scientists in the team basically dumb fucks, and they always have one answer use GPU.