toxic workplace; leaving

I haven't wanted to write this rant. I haven't even wanted to talk to anyone (save my gf, ofc). I've just been silently fuming.

I wrote a much longer rant going into far too much detail, but none of that is relevant, so I deleted it and wrote this shorter (believe it or not) version instead. And then added in more details because details.

------

On Tuesday, as every Tuesday, I had a conference call with the rest of the company. For various, mostly stupid reasons, the boss yelled at and insulted me for twenty minutes straight in front of everyone, telling me how i'm disorganized, forgetful, how can't manage my time, can't manage myself let alone others, how I don't have my priorities straight, etc. He told the sales team to get off the call, and then proceeded to yell and chew at me for another twenty minutes in front of the frontend contractor about basically the same things. The call was 53 minutes, and he spent 40 minutes of it telling me how terrible I've been. No exaggeration, no spin. The issues? I didn't respond to an email (it got lost in my ever-filling inbox), and I didn't push a very minor update last week (untested and straight to prod, ofc). (Side note: he's yelled at me for ~15 minutes before for being horribly disorganized and unable to keep up on Trello -- because I had a single card in the wrong column. One card, out of 60+ over two boards. Never mind that most have time estimates, project tags, details, linked to cards on his boards, columns for project/qa/released, labels for deferred, released to / rejected from qa, finished, in production, are ordered by priority, .... Yep. I'm totes disorganized.)

Anyway, I spent most of conference call writing "Go fuck yourself," "Choke on a cat and die asshole," "Shit code, low pay, and broken promises. what a prize position," etc. or flipping him off under the camera on our conference-turn-video-call (switched due to connection issues, because ofc video is more stable than audio-only in his mind).

I'm just.
so, so done.

I did nothing the rest of the day on Tuesday, and basically just played games on Wednesday. I did one small ticket -- a cert replacement since that was to expire the next day -- but the rest was just playing CrossCode. (fun game, fyi; totally recommend.)

Today? It's 3:30pm and I can't be bothered to do anything. I have an "urgent" project to finish by Monday, literally "to give [random third party sales guy] a small win". Total actual wording. I was to drop all other tasks (even the expiring cert lol) and give this guy his small win. fucking whatever. But the project deals with decent code -- it's a minor extension to the first project I did for the company (see my much earlier rants), back when I was actually applying myself and learning something (everything) new, enjoying myself, and architecting+writing my own code. So I might actually do the project, but It's been two days and I haven't even opened single file yet.

But yeah. This place is total and complete shit. Dealing with the asshole reminds me of dealing with my parents while growing up, and that's a subject I don't want to broach -- far too many toxic memories.

So, I'm quitting as soon as I find something new.
and with luck, this will be before assface hires my replacement-to-be, and who will hopefully quit as soon as s/he sees the abysmal codebase. With even more luck, the asshole king himself will get to watch his company die due to horrible mismanagement. (though ofc he'll never attribute it to himself. whatever.)

I just never want to see or think about him again.
(nor this fetid landfill of a codebase. bleh.)

With luck, this will be one of my last rants about this toxic waste dump and its king of the pile.
Fourty fucking minutes, what the fuck.

Looks like Apple is the new Microsoft and Microsoft is the new Apple...

I remember when every release of Windows was a catastrophic mess and you had to wait until at least SP2 to get the OS to work in a stable way. And Internet Exploder was *the* browser that broke everything, every time. And there was the whole embrace/extend thing, where they tried to impose their vision of web standards and compatibility, and *everything* you used *had* to come from Microsoft...

And now, it's Apple who fuck up every single OS release, on mobile and desktop, and whose browsers openly shit on web standards (ever try developing anything for Mobile Safari?). Apple's stuff that only works with Apple stuff (down to things like headphone jacks - OOPS, forgot, they dropped those now).

Microsoft is making interesting, beautiful hardware (Surface machines) while Apple is pushing un-innovative, overpriced garbage year in year out. And they're open-sourcing more and more, while Apple walls itself further and further behind its walled "garden". Bleh.

Be interesting to see in 10 years what will have shifted, because it'll change again by then.

What should you do when you find dfox ++ your rant?

Wrong - To take screenshot and post about it and say you are feeling like a celebrity.

Correct - Stay calm. Chill.

:)

Professor in college: We have our fest coming up. We need some volunteers for technical team to build website and android app.

*She says that and looks towards guys. Some guys raise hands saying they were interested.*

She didn't look towards girls even though some girls were raising their hands too.

Then she looked at girls finally....and she said "Oh you girls are interested too? We have cultural and decoration team. You can join that. "

I was triggered to next level.

I stood up and asked "Can't girls be part of technical team?"

She said "oh...yeah sure...." With not much hope that I would get into technical team.

But I ended up passing the screening round and got into technical team. She realised at that time that I knew my shit.....

There was even a time when I was in HODs office and she pointed at me and went "She is my student." trying to take credit for me being so Awesome ;)

LOL!

She was my guide for final year project too. We ended up writing a research paper and won best project award as well.

This was a year back. I have graduated and now I am working....
Just remembered....

How to never finish a project:

*Le me staring at my own code after a few weeks*
"Bleh! Icould do better. Lets change it all before things get worse."

And the cycle continues...

Senior Engineer -
Hey. I have a code that hits API to get details and multithreading is implemented. Can you just change the URL formed to hit Api?

Me
Yeah sure why not.

Me
After some time I discover that the initial code itself wasn't working 😐
I realise i need to fix code, fix multithreading and then make the URL changes.

Just finished......Realised had to rant....

… I need a drink.

The app I worked on is going for production into 36 sites starting from tomorrow.
Wish me luck.

So, I set up my computer after moving and settling in.

Turns out all the jostling killed the pump on my water cooler 🙁 It now sounds like an unmaintained soviet train at full speed, and starts burning up. Poor thing.

Guess it’s time to build a new one. Though parts aren’t exactly available right now...

Bleh.

1. Aim is to complete work as soon as possible and not worrying about good coding practices.

2. Senior Engineers take credits for everything that Junior Engineers work on. And that Junior Engineers are just shadows

3. Credits? Team lead and senior engineers take. Complains/issues/delay in product delivery? Junior Engineers are blamed

4. Testing? Test cases? What are they? Why do we need them? That's what my team lead asked.

5. Take work without even knowing what it is or what is to be done and then just keep carry forwarding it.

6. Junior engineer dares to point out any mistake, he/she is very rude and is taunted forever

And many more.....

My manager who promised me team change soon.....resigned.
I thought the worst had happened.

Then my team lead with whom I had issues was promoted as manager for our team.
I realised worst was yet to come.

And then today, in one day....I reached out to HR and then my Director and got my team changed

Now feels peaceful.

This is just temporary solution as I was mentally getting affected. I don't plan on staying in this company for longer....

How weird is this?
I was working on a project. I wasn't able to find solution for a particular sub problem. It was late so I thought of sleeping.

I dreamt about the problem. I solved it in my dream. When I woke up in the morning, I remembered the solution and I solved it.

Opened Devrant to say...
"Office is so hopeless that I am not even in mood to rant about all those stuff"

But saw a post that I had typed last time but never posted it....

Things happen!

So we have Oncall system. Every month I get one working weekend.

Now senior engineers and lead are assholes. They think they can bully us. They are putting their Oncall work on our heads.

I refused to do it. But my partner in Oncall agreed to take up their weekend Oncall and in return they would do our weekday. I don't see how that is fair enough.

I refused to do it still. My partner apparently ended up doing it alone this weekend.

I don't FUCKING need to lick anyone's ass here! I don't FUCKING need to do these things to be in their good books! Waiting for the time when I saw GOODBYE TO THESE FUCKING ASSHOLEZZZZ

Everything is falling apart

Some idiots ripped off our work and code that was open sourced and wrote a paper on it and got it published from some cheap publisher. Even for me to some benefit of doubt or consider that probably they worked on advancing our research….they didn’t even give us any credits!

Heights of shamelessness!

FYI, we already had an IEEE paper published!

I don’t mind if you guys have any suggestions on how I can get back at them. I don’t think a rant is going to calm me down for what they have done.

My old job was great. I was writing automation software for one of the world's biggest storage deployments, and there was always a new challenge. But over time, I was asked to lend a hand with the tedious task of corresponding with procurement vendors and on-site technicians. At first it was one site, then it was two, and then it was an entire region of the US, spread across two time zones I'm not in.

I hated that work, and I found that I didn't have time anymore for software development, because of the time commitment the logistics work was. I was never hired to do logistics work, I was never trained, never qualified, and as I said, I hated it. I agreed to it to temporarily help out a weakness due to a shortage in staffing. But it never got taken off my plate, except for a short stint toward the end, just before I was placed on a PIP, because surprise surprise-- I'm bad at logistics.

About halfway through the PIP, I told my boss I wasn't doing it anymore. I said he could either put me back on software development or let me go, if ticket-monkeying and phone calls is the direction the wind is blowing for our team. I told him I had no intention of resigning, as you are not eligible for unemployment or severance if you resign, so their choice was to let me go. I'm told by people who are still there that everybody on the team is a ticket-jockey button-pusher now. Bleh.

My wife and I sold our old condo in Kansas City earlier in the summer, so we had about a year's worth of cushion, which was why I was willing to be let go. I was profoundly unhappy in my work, and it was bleeding through to my relationship with my wife and kids. So I took advantage of the time between jobs by spending more time with my family and just generally becoming a happier person again.

Meanwhile, I was in no desperate hurry to find a new job, so I got on linkedin, and had no more than two irons in the fire at a time. After just over two months I got an offer for a better job than before, which I accepted. There wasn't anything remarkable about that process though-- it's just something I've gone through recently.

random question/minirant:

I need something to do on my phone besides devRant and chess and repeatedly checking my email. Suggestions? I'm getting really sick of chess, and there's only so much content on devRant. And email? Nothing interesting for days (and weeks prior) despite waiting on so. many. people. to get back to me.

Bleh.

Random research is a given. And no, mobile games and social media are pointless.

SuperDucky! SuperBored!

Literally every single day.

I remember when I was dying to get in the field. Now that I am in I realized there are a lot of bleh moments.

Love my job tho, but shit ain't nearly as exciting as I thought it would be lol

App fails, Check logs...No error logged. Check source code and debug....
And then you see following piece of code....

try{
//Code to hit an API
}catch(Exception ex){
/*DO NOTHING. Not even log stack trace*/
}

I made some changes in existing repo on my own branch. Created PR for it to be reviewed and merged into master.....

That was more than a week back. But senior engineer never merged it.

Today I see that he closed my PR, deleted my branch. He created his own new branch, added my changes and some of his changes and created PR.

What shit is this?

IBM is taking a shit in our mouths. I suppose we should have seen this coming, but almost our entire environment runs on CentOS. Not only will we have to find a new distro (which will probably be CoreOS with kube, bleh) but we'll have to get everyday trained up on it.

I'm taking a vacation in two weeks to hopefully recover from this burnout. I don't know if I can make it that long.

I've been trying to work on a ticket for the past two days. I don't even know what the ticket says. Just something about optimizing the Google pay object api. idk. I just can't. I need to have it done today though. Bleh.

Each sprint lasts for 2 weeks. But I get the basic info to start working on my stories only when 3/4th of the sprint is completed....

So yeah....no one gives shit about estimation at least in my case.

For those who have seen me ranting about ending up in a bad team.....

Few days back I was emotionally and mentally affected to a level I couldn't handle anymore. I spoke to my manager (our team got a new manager who is sensible and serious) and asked for team change and he said it was possible but he would need some time. 🙂

Apparently shutting down Windows doesn't mean shutting down Windows. Good to know that the apparently superior OS can't shut down properly

Odd numbers bother me

He strikes again ... I am glad that Friday is my last day ...

When you get into good company but end up in bad team. Worst thing to happen. I want to quit. But as of now I don't have any option.

I am way too triggered. Any one tries messing with me anymore at work, I won't be able to stop myself. I am gonna shout....take out all my anger. To hell with you assholez! I don't care if you get me kicked out of team or job! I can't take it anymore. FUCKING IDIOTS!!!!!!

I feel a person qualifies as a developer only if he/she has ranted.....

Such is our lives

Santa if you are reading this.....
I want a gift for Christmas :/ Come on I ain't getting holidays for Christmas.....a small gift isn't big thing to ask for....🙄🙄

Our team had a brilliant engineer, he made a tool that would convert IBM Assembler code to C, comments included. the comments are the assembler code. bleh

GIT LOG VERSION 110
---------------
a9c2934 I don't believe it
fb8d2e6 I am Root. We are Root.
6be9078 FINALLY FIXED THE FUCKING BUG IN THE CODE, DO NOT EVER EVER FUCK ME AGAIN YOU MARON
3d08a88 THIS IS THE FUCKING WORKING VERSION
013faed THIS IS NOT WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR, GO TO A PREVIOUS COMMIT
af5d013 We'll figure it out on Monday
49e238b de-misunderestimating
a40351b happy monday _ bleh _
a5f345d Fixed unnecessary bug.
485a26a pay no attention to the man behind the curtain
c4fcbde s/import/include/

When you are told the app you worked on is scheduled to go into production on Friday.....

My reaction was "Aise kaise?"
(Translation -How even?)

On a shitty day where your brain doesn't work, have you ever looked at some code you wrote, and actually get intimidated by whatever version of you wrote that? After stumbling around most of the day, read some beautiful code, I admired it, then realized, holy shit, I wrote this?

"Yeah, I don't know who that was, it looks great, how the fuck did I do that, and will I ever be able to do it again"

Like, I don't think I can, definitely not today, write anything even close to that.

bleh.

Microsoft for the win.

All hail Microsoft

Bleh

I did some investigation on Jira board. There was a story in Oct to design solution for a problem and a senior engineer has commented saying it was done.

The same story opened again in December and another senior engineer has commented saying "canonical and solution is designed"

But FUCKING IDIOTS didn't do anything! Last sprint I got the development story for same and I have been fucking waiting for them to give me solution. But idiots are way too lazy to do any work!

Ain't getting hacktoberfest tee delivered for the second time. I hate this shit 🙄

I'm still using .then().catch() instead of the async await.
So, first of all, Fuck you for calling it a STANDARD now. its nowhere near to be called standard. You wanna get some data from an API? Wanna call it using axios or fetch? What if the server is down? what if there's an error that you don't even know existed? Where do I get that kinda error in async await? try-catch? no thanks :| I'm good -_-

Hey folks, I want to start actually completing personal projects (that I'm proud of so I don't resort to showcasing homework bleh). I find that I get too ambitious and perfectionist in my ways that I wind up never completing projects.

Anyone have any advice or tips on how to overcome that? This might be a vague ask, but I want to do enough that it demonstrates an understanding of a framework/language but also is doable in a reasonable timeframe. Any personal anecdotes?

You know it's time to search for new job when you constantly feel like taking out wallet and mobile from bag and leave office and never return back

"Hey, just scheduling in some time for a catch-up today, looks like you've just got focus time so I've scheduled it then"

"Wait, why did you decline my invite?!"

Because I actually need time to focus and do my job, and spending an hour talking to your sorry arse about something irrelevant doesn't trump time I need to focus? Bleh. People.

Bleh, the game awards winners are a bunch of console hand-me-downs, or console exclusives. Fuck AAA games.

Really vague because of NDA bleh
For the first time since I started this job back in September 2021 none of the daily low-priority automation scripts for my department are broken. : D I was logged on an extra half hour yesterday to fix the last one, but I feel accomplished since I fixed many of them without assistance in the past few months. As apposed to how I asked questions regarding everything in my first few.

Let's see how long until something breaks due to changes outside of our control.
But until then I got harder tasks to focus

Just had to type a 12x12 matrix by hand.. Bleh

I didn't choose the engineering lyfe, the engineering lyfe chose me

New Year's vows:

- not waste time
- maximum productivity
- maximum speed
- cloak engaged (ok, just kidding)
- finally finish learning Java
- learn enterprise programming
- not be a jerk to people (bleh)

I feel sad about being in a standstill position in my life right now. everything feels like stopped, and i am not growing.

My only source of income is my job, which does pays well, but not much. I have been in this job for 6 months (3rd job in 3 years) and although it is satisfying in terms of the work i do, everything else is just bleh. quantity of work is a lot, there is chaos everywhere, bosses are incompetent and demanding and worst of all , its hybrid, so am wasting 2-3 days every week.

apart from work, i struggle to make myself useful. outside work hours, i want to earn more money, health, popularity and power.

- for health, i goto gym , which hopefully is the onlh thing going correct in my life. although am not getting any major transformation, the feeling of pain among my muscles feels good and people seems to know me somewhat in there.

- for money, popularity and power , am again at a still.
--- power comes from popularity and money.
--- money comes from ability to influence(and optionally with knowledge) .
--- popularity also comes with knowledge and/or ability to influence.
--- knowledge can be bought/learned.

- above all are my guesses. i haven't yet cracked the exact dependency graph in here. but the simplest thing to get is knowledge and i have been trying to get a hold of it, but in vain

- i have tried a lot of stuff in last 3 years :

--- get better in android ( which i did by working professionally) ,
--- learn web frontend (html/css/js/react, etc ., for which i took courses and i know them now somewhat ) ,
--- learn web backend ( spring, node, flask, aws, etc .,for which i took courses/videos)
--- learn no code stuff (markdown generators, wordpress etc , for which i tried as hobby)
--- learn ios/hybrid stuff(flutter, react native etc, for ehich i watched videos, did courses etc)

- the problem is, am just good at one thing (android) and have a limited knowledge (5-30%) of all the others. companies won't pay me more to be a mediocre full stack dev than what they are paying me now to be a decent junior android dev

- the areas where i lack as of now is DS,Algo, Competitive programming and System designing. these are skills expected for someone trying to crack a good fortune 5xx company

- i am not so sure if i want to do these since there isn't a guarantee whether i will be happy to be in google or amazon. i could guess the amount they would pay me for being a mediocre full stack dev.

- i am not even sure if its good for me to change jobs every few months. i contribute heavily wherever i go, nd i leave at the moment am about to receive a probable reward(probable promotion/increment) for a more concrete reward ( the definite increment from a job switch)

- my existing knowledge is being wasted like the various uselss courses i did in college as i am unable to find a usecase for them. i am tired of making useless jira clones , caclulators and portfolio pages for myself which no one will be using or appreciating.

- keeping the whole tech life aside, my family runs the blood of businessmen and i am not able to progress in that as well. my father was an average grocery shop owner whose shop is now on rent and who is now doing a sales job too. however, their family shop with grandfather and brothers was once a very popular and money minting business 40 years ago.

- i sometimes feel i could do good in business area, but i am a complete blank slate in that department with no one to support (my father is old now)

- alongside non career problems ( midlife crisis, money shortage, no friends ), life feels pretty stagnant right now :/

What are you currently working on? You can be as vague as possible and let others try to figure it out.

I’m currently working on something to make pelican based blogs look a bit decent.

New year resolution.......
Focus on career and improve technical skills.

Working from home.. no airconditioning.. no fan ('cause Covid particles danger).. f************ck.

Currently debugging a project that was written over 4 years ago...

At first all was well in the world, besides the ever present issue off our goddamn legacy framework. This framework was written 7 years ago on top of an existing open source one, because the existing one was 'lacking some features' & 'did not feel right'.

Now those might be perfectly fine reasons to write a layer on top of a framework, but please, for all future devs sanities, write fucking documentation and maintain it if you're going to use said framework in all major projects!!

Anyhow back to the situation at hand, I'm getting familiar with the project, sighing at the use of our stupid legacy framework, attempting to recreate the reported bugs...

Turns out I can't, well I get other bugs & errors, but not the reported ones. I go to the production server, where I suddenly do can reproduce them...

Already thinking, fuck my life, and scared for the results... I try a 'git status' on the production server....

And yep, there it is, lo and behold, fucking changes on production, that are not in git, fuck you previous dev who worked on this and your stupid lazy ass modifcations on production!

Bleh, already feeling royally pissed, there's only 1 thing I can do, push changes back to git in a seperate branch, and pray I can merge them back in master on my dev environment without to much issues...

Only I first have to get our sysadmi. to allow pushing from a production server back to our git server...

Sigh, going to put on my headphones, retreat to my me space and try to sort out this shitpile now...

now i know this is devrant and not su-rant or sysadminrant or anything alike,

but it cringes me everytime i see rants like "linux this" or "linux that".
now those who does it, do understand that the term "linux" refer to the kernel and not the os in it's entirety, right?

When you've got a night of fun planned with the wife (😉) and a major client emergency happens that needs your attention. Bleh/Sigh

Bleh, I fucking hate Arduino. I thought this Chad would teach me assembly for PCs, not Arduino. The boards don't fucking work half the time, I don't give a shit about blinking lights or motors, I don't want to do things with robotics, I just want to fucking code. Ffs, I'd rather write code that just makes a number increment and then quits, because then I wouldn't have to use that useless fucking Arduino "IDE".

Fuck you Arduino, fuck you so much.

If there was a button to shut down everything around you so that you can stay in peace....

when you know the shortcut to get a to z but decided to include all the steps from b to y anyway...

Why is the “touch” command to create files called “touch”? Why isn’t it called mkfile or something? Like mkdir, chdir bleh?

I mean, was the dev too attached to the touch? Or was it that he was just too much into King Midas?