Back in my teenage , a friend of mine asked me «Can you make me a software that guesses the result of a football match ?» I said «Sure, but you have to tell me how to calculate the chances of a team»
«Yeah, use the previous performances in the league»
«Ok, but you have to tell me how to calculate the expected result using previous performances» He laughed at me and said «If i knew how to calculate chances of winning/losing, i would not need a software!»
I tried to explain it simply «Computers can execute basic operations like sums or subtractions, and they know how to follow a list of basic instructions to give you a result»
He looked me like «If computers are so stupid like you are telling me now, are we all crazy idiots trying to learn how to use stupid machines??» and stated that i obviously misunderstood the real power of a computer. I walked back home thinking how funny was my friend believing in some kind of magic inside box called pc.

Few years later, i start studying IT at university. In the free time i look for small jobs like website development, small office network setup, pcs repair.
I continue noticing people believing that pcs knows what to do and how to do it.
«You sure I lost my data ? No i didn't do a backup. You sure my pc didn't do a backup ? No i hadn't a backup software»
«Why antivirus asks me what to do with the viruses it found. It should delete them obviously! Change my antivirus, it's too stupid for my pc»
«I want more people finding my business thanks to my website. How I imagine my website ? Yeah it has to be cool and full of cool stuff»

All that boring stories leads to my final question :

is our job dealing with persons who think we are some kind of wizard, well learned about dominating the pc magic ?

Please answer no.Please.

I remember my first "Software Engineering 2" class at University. The teacher, a pompous son of a bitch that later on gave proof of his vast ignorance, greeted us with
"so ... You call yourselves programmers, right? What's the biggest program you have ever wrote? Something along the 100, maybe 200 lines of code? ..... If you've never written at least a MILLION lines of code software, you're not a software developer"
Even at that time, with my lack of experience in software development, I had that feeling in my guts telling me "writing myself a 1M lines of code software .... Brrrr that's something I hope I'll neve have to do in my life"
Turned of he was one of those dinosaurs stuck with the love for gargantuan monoliths of software like they used to do.
Just to dive you the whole picture, the course had ZERO software development and focused only on how to manage wonderful waterfall projects, how to write all types of software documentations and the final project was ... Writing a ton of documentation so boring and useless that even he didn't care to read through.
we still laugh at the episode when another group asked us to borrow one of our documents and after one day they asked "hemm ... Have you really sent this to the teacher?" "yes, why not?" ".... at page 23 someone left a comment saying 'what the fuck is this shit?'"

Best: Finally left the video game industry for a "real" software engineering role!

Worse: Left work at an exciting studio and fun projects for shorter hours and more pay, and it's incredibly boring and I actually *miss* the crunch and chaos.

Software engineering project discussion:
Boy: Sir, my project is a client to manage files stored on different cloud file storage systems at one place
Faculty: Boring idea. Very easy to implement, No scope of scalability, etc
Girl: My project is an app to display the weather information
Faculty: Omg! What an innovative idea! I'm surprised how no one though of this before!

Software development lessons are so boring and the teacher is so stupid. He can't swap two variables without a temporary var. He said that he never saw this kind of swaping before. I pay attention sometimes, but I'm just drawing in my exercise book.

Recently met this girl and she told me that she had gone on a date with another Software Engineer recently.
I asked her why it didn't work out..
She told that he started every single sentence with "I am going to assume that you know nothing about this" and went on to explain the most boring shit while assuming that she was a dumbass.
To the poor Software Engineer, you missed out on a great gal.

Why are people complaining about debugging?
Oooh it’s so hard.
It’s so boring.
Can someone do this for me?

I honestly enjoy debugging and you should too..
if it’s not your code, you’ll get to understand the code better than the actual author. You’ll notice design improvements and that some of the code is not even needed. YOU LEARN!

If it’s your own code (I especially enjoy debugging my own code): it forces you to look at the problem from a different perspective. It makes you aware of potential other bugs your current solution might cause. Again, it makes you aware of flaws in the design. YOU LEARN!

And in either case, if it’s a tricky case, you’ll most likely stop debugging at some point, refactor the shit out of some 50-100 line methods and modulize it because the original code was undebuggable (<- made up a new word there) and continue debugging after that.

So many things I know, I know only because I spend days, sometimes even weeks debugging a piece code to find the fucking problem.

My main language is java and i wouldn’t have believed anyone who told me there’s a memory leak in my code. I mean, it’s java, right? We refactored the code and everything worked fine again. But I debugged the old version anyway and found bugs in Java (java 6.xx I believe?) which made me aware of the fact that languages have flaws as well.. GC has its flaws as well. So does docker and any other software..

Stop complaining, get on your ass and debug the shit out of your bugs instead of just writing it in a different way and being glad that it fixed the issue..

My opinion.

When you realize that there's no "magic" and no "only really smart specialists can understand this" in computers, software and hardware.

Everything is clearly defined in protocols/RFCs. The "magic" part is nothing more than extremely tedious, annoying and boring work combining those protocols together, making them talk to each other, and layering them inside each other.

Understand the little parts and you'll understand how the big ones work.

Le me: writes some handy dandy software for my company

Le my colleague: goes to customer site to do some set up, wants to show customers how do some commands on my tool

Le my colleague: proceeds to open the massive manual I also wrote detailing how to use the tool, closes it immediately saying it's boring

Le my colleague: proceeds to use a very basic command incorrectly, declares it a non-working feature

Le me: ??? *head desk*

MOTHERFUCKER THERE IS EVEN A 'HELP' COMMAND THAT EXPLAINS TO YOU THE SYNTAX IN THE TOOL ITSELF.

that one legendary guy who cranks out code and builds insane features. PMs (product management) love him because he builds features in several months which 10 devs together couldn't have built in the same time (so they say), features that are loved by customers as well, become their new standard and that have saved our company's asses in the past.
features are really awesome, performant and have very few bugs (compared to the rest of the software シ).
but this guy seems to live for this job. he also works at weekends, at unholy times of day and night and even in his holidays (he doesn't care that this is actually illegal, in terms of employee's rights, and he wouldn't listen to his superiors, no matter what they tell him)
so far, so good - except that he will probably die of some stroke or something very soon due to this lifestyle.
but it must be an absolute pain in the ass to work with him, as long as you're a developer (or his superior).
he lives in his own world and within the software, his features are also his own world. since the different modules interact with each other, sometimes you would be assigned a bug that might have its cause in some interaction of your and his module. talk with him about it? forget it. he wouldn't answer most devs who contacted him for some reason. ever. fix it in his module yourself? might happen that he just reverts your changes to his module without comments. so some bugs would lie on your desk forever because theoretically you know what would need to be done but if you cannot reach out into HIS world, there's no way to fix it. also - his code might be good in terms of performance and low bug numbers. but it seems to be hard to work on that code for everybody else but him.
furthermore, he is said to be really rude. he is no team player, but works on a software that is worked on by a huge team.
PMs think he's a genius, just a great dev, but they don't understand that other devs need to clean up the mess behind or around him.
everyone who's been his superior so far recommends to get him fired, but the company wouldn't fire him because they don't want to lose his talent. he can just do what he wants. he can even refuse to work on certain things because he thinks they are boring and he is not interested in them. devs seem to hate him, but my boss said, they are probably also a bit jealous because of his talent. i think, he's not wrong. :)
i haven't actually met him so far or was actually "forced" to deal with him, but i've never heard so many contrastive things about one person, the reputation of his, let's say vibrant personality really hurries ahead. he must be a real genius, after all i've heard so far, like he lives in the code. i must say i'm a bit curious but also somewhat afraid of meeting him one day.
do you also have such a guy at your company?

Alright lads here is the thing, have not been posting anything other than replies to things cuz I have been busy being miserable at school and dealing with work stuff.

Our manager left us back in February. Because she was leaving I decided that I wanted to try a different path and went on to become a programmer analyst for my institution, if anything I knew that it was going to be pretty boring work, but it came with nice monetary compensation and a foot in the door for other data science related jobs in the future. Thing is, the department head asked me to stay in the web technologies department because we had a lack of people there and hiring is hard as shit, we do not do remote jobs since our work usually requires a level of discretion and security. Thus I have been working in the web tech department since she left albeit with a different title since I aced the interview for the analyst position and the team there were more than happy to have me. I have done very few things for them, some reports here and there and mostly working directly with the DBA in some projects. One migration project would have costed my institution a total of 58k and we managed to save the cost by building the migration software ourselves.....honestly it was a fucking cake walk, if you had any doubts about the shaddyness of enterprise level applications regarding selling overpriced shit with different levels of complexity, keep them, enterprise is shaddy af indeed. But I digress.

I wrote the specification for the manager position along the previous manager, we had decided that the next candidate needed to be strong with development knowledge as well as other things as to properly understand and manage a software team, we made the academic requirement(fuck you, yes we did ask for academic requirements) to be either in the Computer Science/software engineering area or at least on the Business Administration side. We were willing to consider BA holders in exchange for having knowledge of the development process of different products and a complete understanding of what developers go through. NOT ONE SINGLE motherfucker was able to satisfy this, some of them were idiots that I knew from before that had ABSOLUTELY no business even considering applying to the position, the courage it took for some of these assholes to apply would have hurt their mothers, their God if they had one, and their country, they were just that fucking bad in their jobs as well as being overall shit people.

Then we had 1 candidate actually fall through the cracks enough to get an interview. My dude here was lying out of his ass through the interview process. According to him he had "lots of Laravel experience and experience managing Laravel projects" and mentioned repeatedly how it would be a technology that we should consider for our products. I was to interview him alongside the vice president of our institution due to the head of my department and the rest of the managers for I.T being on vacation leave all at the same bloody time.

Backstory before the interview:
Whilst I was going over the interview questions with the vice president literally offered me the job instead. I replied with honesty, reflecting how I did not originally wanted him but feeling that our institution was ready to settle on any candidate due to the lack of potentials. He was happy to do it since apparently both him and the HOD were expecting me to step up sooner or later. I was floored.

Regardless, out of kindness he wanted to go through the interview.
So, going back to the interview. As soon as the person in question referenced the framework I started to ask him about it, just simple questions, the first was "what are your thoughts on the Eloquent ORM? I am not too fond of it and want to know what you as a full time laravel dev think of it"
his reply: "I am sorry I am not too familiar with it, I don't know what that is" <--- I appreciated his honesty in this but thought it funny that someone would say that he was a Laravel developer whilst not knowing what an ORM was since you can't really get away from using it on the initial stages of learning about Laravel, maybe if one wanted to go through the hurdle of switching to something like doctrine...but even then, it was....odd.

So I met with the hod when he came back, he was stoked at the prospect of having me become the manager and I happily accepted the position. It will be hell, but I don't even need to hit the ground running since I have been the face of the department since ages. My team were ecstatic about it since we are all close friends and they have been following my directions without complaints(but the ocational eat a dick puto) for some time, we work well together and we are happy to finally have someone to stop the constant barrage that comes from people taking advantage of a missing manager.

Its gonna get good, its gonna get fun, and i am getting to see how shit goes.

My uncle who thought me Computers and Networking ( I once worked with him on a project ) came by to my house today. He said that he created a software that automates his work on the boring stuff so when he has free time he works on his own company. My man!

Ok Im done. I‘ll quit my job in the upcoming 6 weeks.
I have posted about it in the past. I cant imagine doing a job I hate for longer than absolutely necessary if you don’t have people depend on you.
My job is boring, my position redundant, my colleagues are pretentious and pricks, my boss doesn’t care about my work and I am miserable doing something completely meaningless for company I am sure will not survive the next 12 months.

I have floated out my resume to some companies yesterday evening. Do you guys have any recommendations where to look except the typical job platforms? I would like to either have a interesting position as a Fullstack developer gaining more experience with BE or it must be a job about something meaningful. I have already scanned the jobs on all NGOs but of course they don’t seem to need any software developers.

I am fucking done doing stuff that goes directly to the trash can just because some useless PM had a brain fart. My life is too short to do this shit anymore.

I am currently doing my first ever internship. It is a medium-ish sized IT company and I basically do stuff in networking and software development. I sit on my chair, wheel it back and forth the small space behind my desk for like and hour. Then I go to the cafeteria, eat whatever is there (it’s absolutely free? Hopefully). There is a pool table which is always occupied. Then I sit in the lab and configure routers till 8 in the night. Boring.
I am developing a management system side by side so I break my head over server side routes (seriously, they are confusing) over the night.
So coffee is my mantra and boring is my life.

dev, ~boring

This is either a shower thought or a sober weed thought, not really sure which, but I've given some serious consideration to "team composition" and "working condition" as a facet of employment, particularly in regard to how they translate into hiring decisions and team composition.

I've put together a number of teams over the years, and in almost every case I've had to abide by an assemblage of pre-defined contexts that dictated the terms of the team working arrangement:

1. a team structure dictated to me
2. a working temporality scheme dictated to me
3. a geographic region in which I was allowed to hire
4. a headcount, position tuple I was required to abide by

I've come to regard these structures as weaknesses. It's a bit like the project management triangle in which you choose 1-2 from a list of inadequate options. Sometimes this is grounded in business reality, but more often than not it's because the people surrounding the decisions thrive on risk mitigation frameworks that become trickle down failure as they impose themselves on all aspects of the business regardless of compatibility.

At the moment, I'm in another startup that I have significantly more control over and again have found my partners discussing the imposition of structure and framework around how, where, why, who and what work people do before contact with any action. My mind is screaming at me to pull the cord, as much as I hate the expression. This stems from a single thought:

"Hierarchy and structure should arise from an understanding of a problem domain"

As engineers we develop processes based on logic; it's our job, it's what we do. Logic operates on data derived from from experiments, so in the absence of the real we perform thought experiments that attempt to reveal some fundamental fact we can use to make a determination.

In this instance we can ask ourselves the question, "what works?" The question can have a number contexts: people, effort required, time, pay, need, skills, regulation, schedule. These things in isolation all have a relative importance ( a weight ), and they can relatively expose limits of mutual exclusivity (pay > budget, skills < need, schedule < (people * time/effort)). The pre-imposed frameworks in that light are just generic attempts to abstract away those concerns based on pre-existing knowledge. There's a chance they're fine, and just generally misunderstood or misapplied; there's also a chance they're insufficient in the face of change.

Fictional entities like the "A Team," comprise a group of humans whose skills are mutually compatible, and achieve synergy by random chance. Since real life doesn't work on movie/comic book logic, it's easy to dismiss the seed of possibility there, that an organic structure can naturally evolve to function beyond its basic parts due to a natural compatibility that wasn't necessarily statistically quantifiable (par-entropic).

I'm definitely not proposing that, nor do I subscribe to the 10x ninja founders are ideal theory. Moreso, this line of reasoning leads me to the thought that team composition can be grown organically based on an acceptance of a few observed truths about shipping products:

1. demand is constant
2. skills can either be bought or developed
3. the requirement for skills grows linearly
4. hierarchy limits the potential for flexibility
5. a team's technically proficiency over time should lead to a non-linear relationship relationship between headcount and growth

Given that, I can devise a heuristic, organic framework for growing a team:

- Don't impose reporting structure before it has value (you don't have to flatten a hierarchy that doesn't exist)
- crush silos before they arise
- Identify needed skills based on objectives
- base salary projections on need, not available capital
- Hire to fill skills gap, be open to training since you have to pay for it either way
- Timelines should always account for skills gap and training efforts
- Assume churn will happen based on team dynamics
- Where someone is doesn't matter so long as it's legal. Time zones are only a problem if you make them one.
- Understand that the needs of a team are relative to a given project, so cookie cutter team composition and project management won't work in software
- Accept that failure is always a risk
- operate with the assumption that teams that are skilled, empowered and motivated are more likely to succeed.
- Culture fit is a per team thing, if the team hates each other they won't work well no matter how much time and money you throw at it

Last thing isn't derived from the train of thought, just things I feel are true:

- Training and headcount is an investment that grows linearly over time, but can have exponential value. Retain people, not services.
- "you build it, you run it" will result in happier customers, faster pivoting. Don't adopt an application maintenance strategy

/rant

ughh, studying about various software project management methodologies and lifecycles is so boring.

every different model looks similar, saying :
you got an idea?
- check weather its needed and if its practically / financially possible
- get investment and resources,
- design,develop, test, release
- repeat .
why name them waterfall or spiral or rad or agile or shit?

and we know how project go in reality: "fuck its 2 days to release and 5 features left? push to prod, make breaking features, leave the tests and release"

I want a boring software developer job. I’ve been working for software consulting companies since the beginning. And is just so stressful. Clients always ranting, the need to always be in the cutting edge, or even the complete opposite. There’s always pressure to get certified in X o Y. I don’t want that anymore. I don’t want to be constantly catching up with the latest stack or framework. I want a boring job. A slow-paced job maybe maintain some old hunk of software that does not give too much trouble. I’m tired of putting down fires all the time. Of running against the clock to deliver a meaningless app. Because all this apps don’t contribute to anything in the world. Just more clutter, more bloat. I just want to work 8 to 5 and be done with it. Just throw myself in the couch after it and play some games. Maybe do some gardening. Or bread. I love bread. Don’t you love bread?

I think I need some "programming detox", a couple weeks away from any kind of software development. It's just not fun anymore, I have lost my drive, I'm lazy to learn new stuff, I never finish my projects, I don't even know if I enjoy web development anymore.

Actually, I'm kind of lost on what to do with my life.

I don't want to become a full time web developer because it's boring, it's always the same shit: write frontend with some sort of framework, design database, write backend, rinse and repeat. There's nothing new, all projects seem to have the same requirements.

I don't want to get into machine learning and whatnot because it's a lot of math and theory, I like math but idk if I would like doing that all day. Same goes for basically anything related to research.

Low level stuff: on paper I like it, it's interesting, but I'm too lazy to learn and whenever I come up with a robotics project I end up making a shopping list and forgetting about it because either 1) stuff is too expensive or 2) I can't make the parts I want without spending a lot of money on tools. Also from what I can see in school, VHDL is boring af.

I just don't know what I like anymore, nothing gets me excited, not even video games. I used to like csgo but I just suck at it and I only play it because there's nothing else to play and deep down I still have a little bit of hope of becoming a decent player, even though I know I never will.

I just don't know what I want out of life. Sometimes I just like having tons of school assignments (especially calculus ones) just to keep me busy.

Fucking german computer science classes

You get a few UML structograms and have to finish a half finished project. It's the most boring way to learn programming ever. Instead of giving us a task or a project to work on, it's literally translating UML to C#.

Is this what one is gonna do later as a software dev?

I finally finished my Bachelors Degree that I was studying for while working 40-60h a week with 2 children.
During this whole time (3.5 years) I was totally into learning everything. Not just for my studies but I read many books about programming and architecture read thousands of blog posts and loved it to be a software developer.

And now suddenly I lost every interest in reading even one tiny post.
Software Development got boring and I just don't care about it anymore.

Probably just a down period, but who knows.

At least I finally can build my unfinished guitars that had to wait for so long. working on them makes me really feel happy 😊

Since my contract is going to be terminated on 1st July and brilliant devrant community injected me idea to make same project and start selling it as incorporated I made some steps.

I made simple POC that is command line application in different language and unrelated to what I’m doing and showed to my friend and ask if he want to buy it for his company and he was like wtf this shit even exist on the market or it’s new thing ?
I admit company I work for is not present in my country and this product is like not existing on the market. ( at least I can’t find it )

From this point I have a feeling I need to do it. I have life savings that will provide me to at least 2021 or even for a whole year if I’ll be smart and I think it’s going to be good thing to take a summer brake and make own project based on professional experience I have.

Despite the situation around I will be mostly coding 24/7, drinking and playing playstation.

I probably will convince my friend to work on it and my other friend to sell it once it’s done. He already wanted to sell my command line tool but I told him to keep his mouth shut cause they might steal the idea.

I already decided to use different tech stack and api so all software will be different, some business parts are unavoidable but I have many fresh ideas. At the end I will just connect some online payment, make youtube commercial and start selling it by integrating with some api and buying internet ads, also I will start looking for a new job from October if nothing will work out and just keep investing less time in it.

What you think ?
Should I take the risk or not finding job and do something that my heart is telling me to do( I write software for 12 years for money so I don’t think it’s even possible ) or should I live safe boring life and just go to another job ?

Thanks
Have a nice day.

What happens when you get bored of working as a software engineer?

3 years after starting my career as a dev, I'm already in the middle of a crisis, struggling to find motivations to stay in tech aside of the good salaries.

Don't get me wrong, I like solving problems trough code, designing complex solutions, I love software architecture. My problem goes around the jobs themselves, doing engineering for a living is just so boring, makes me feel so empty inside.

It is not the same doing something for someone else company than doing it for yours, I usually feel like I could be happier raising my own startup, immediately after that, I remember that I must stick around working for someone else if I want to put food on my table.

I have been thinking about quit and get a normal job, but money is a huge deal, i'm used to a lifestyle that is hard to backup without a salary like the ones of software engineers.

In short, I feel empty and hopeless. What are your toughs, are you going trough something similar?

I’m a software architect, and my lil brother (he is 19yrs) works fixing computers.

I forgot to pay the internet bill this month and they suspended my signal yesterday, then when try to access any website, we got a ISP page saying that the signal was suspended.

I paid the bill yesterday then they reactivated the signal this morning.

He woke me up saying that the WiFi was working but his computer still stuck on the ISP page.

I said that was cache of the browser and he still boring me saying that was not for the next 2 hours.

I took that computer from him and cleared the cache, and now is working.

My lil brother is a lil dumb.

I am in an apprenticeship as a software developer so you might think I would have lots of stories to tell in wk73 but you could not be more wrong! Our school teachers don't care about us or the thing they teach!

BUT in the first year, our company payed to send all of their IT trainees to a special training facility and the coaches there where amazing!!!👍🏼

For every IT related subject there was a coach! And they were fucking experts!

Let me tell you how this "training" worked:
1. Basic introduction to a certain subject
2. Some basic tasks
2.1 Extended tasks for those who want to dig into it
3. Search some other students to team up
4. Define project
5. Discuss the project plan with a coach.
6. Realize project
6.1 - Question rises -
6.2 Discuss question with coach
6.3 Coach prepares prepares presentation on the questions subject
6.4 Coach sends out invitation to everyone
6.5 LEARN AND PROFIT
7. Awesome product is finished
8. Present project to other students

The awesome part about this is that the coaches pushed us to our limits (so we would keep improving) but they would assist with every problem you faced.
They where relatively young and the spirit within the teams were amazing!

Because not all IT trainees have this kind of training the professional school is pretty boring ever since...

But I silently thank them for that training after every exam at school.

If software developers / engineers and various other technical people stop serving banks and governments and become free minded we’re be having our own clothes and food served to us whenever we want and where we want by now.

Fucking capitalism and stupid dickheads.

I think being able to be served by robots in your own house to provide you everything you need is first step for long spaceship trips that can take over galaxies.

Living on this planet is boring as fuck.

[Fairly existential career question] How fulfilling would you say your career in development has been?

[Long rant] for years I had been planning on becoming a rabbi, majored in religious studies etc, until I realized there would be no way out of my rapidly growing debt if I chose to continue on that path. i had to drop out 3 years into my undergrad due to financial issues, and as it is now working full time im barely holding my head above water. I spent a lot of time being sad about it until i decided to change things and started getting into accounting before I discovered coding. I am SO GLAD I discovered coding cause accounting was so boring...Now I'm excited to be going back to school for software development and I'm in a bit of a pink cloud having discovered something thats both exciting/fun/challenging AND lucrative... But i do worry about 5, 10 years in the future, will i still be as stoked about it? Religious leadership was and is something I know i would feel ~fulfilled~ over a lifetime, and while my newly discovered passion for coding literally keeps me up at night getting fired up on solving problems and writing my little newb programs, i think I'm afraid of burnout?

[Tl;dr] I'm making an education+career switch to software development and i wanna know how folks feel about their career years into it, do you still love it just as much? Feel jaded? Regretful? Happy?

This is sort of a boring story. I always have been interested in making games but actual coding always made me very uncomfortable and never tried it until I got to college. I met some really cool guys there and got into an association that was based on pop culture and videogames. Me and the president of that association started on our spare time to code for a videogame. He made his and I made mine. The software I used was gamemaker studio and I made like 7 games. I wanted to make a website for the games so I learned HTML, CSS and JavaScript. At that first year I was studying criminal justice and was slowly being taken away by programming. I changed my concentration to computer information system thinking that I wanted to do a more general approach but programming kept gaining ground. I had depresion on middle School all through highschool and early college. I'm safe to say that after I decided to code seriously my depression has seize to exist and life feels very good. Coding for me is very rewarding and challenging. I'm soon going to pursue a bachelor degree in computer science and hope I don't change concentration again.

I need help.
I love software and hardware development but over a period of 4 years now i have lost motivation. I hardly finish anything i have started and if i finish, it's never rewarding.

I also feel like i live a very boring life. Staring at the screen all day and doing very little.

What do you guys do for fun? What activities or books do you read to keep yourselves busy or entertained?

I have been having this desire for someone to love but something makes me think that it's just a reaction to a soul that has lost purpose and only feels like loving someone will be a source of happiness. Luckily, nobody has been available for the mess i have been.

I really admire busy people. People who are passionately working on something they have chosen to do and still have fun.

I think talking to someone about how bad i feel about myself will help a little but what i really need is help on how to restore the motivation i had 4 years ago.

Can someone give me a fun project i can work on? Not for making money but something i will do, learn and feel happy about it.

I will also appreciate if someone can recommend a good book that will help me learn. Get me motivated and also hide me from this reality.

Thank you.

My college years was actually quite helpful.

I'm from a college that value academic proficiency over industrial skills. There are only 2-3 courses top that are focusing more on coding or software development. The others are theoretical and focus more on the math behinds everything (with fun projects tho, so they are not boring at all).

The importance is that, you could easily learn coding and software dev practice from good examples in your workplace, probably way better what you can get in college. But chances are that our daily job rarely touches hardcore algorithm and mathematical principal behind. Where when you actually need it (bi-weekly scenario), your knowledge and research experience in college comes to play.

And of course, by all means, that was an enjoyable college life!

If I was to talk about software, the act of coding is probably the most boring part. But birthing a program can pull from magic, animation, circus, gardening, parenting, woodwork, and a host of arts, trades, and crafts. It is a wonderful creative task that is being sold short by brilliant jerks, one trick fools, and con men.

was just setting up a tinder profile. couldn't think of a non-boring version of "software engineer" to use as the job title.

Hey just brainstorming a business/ startup idea I may try out sometime down the line. I wanted to put it in writing available to my peers for review. If that sounds boring, sorry.

So I've had an idea and I know it's a million dollar idea because it's absolutely boring as fuck.

Recently I have been learning about NoSQL and it has gotten me pretty excited about unstructured data.

Now the first thing you should know about me is I like to make business software. I don't like games or social networks or blah blah blah, I like business stuff. One dream I have always had is to make THE business solution. I've noticed so many specific business solutions for very specific areas of work. Specific software for car washes, which is separate from the software for car maintenance, which is separate from the point-of-sales software, which is separate from the [...]

One of the problems with this is the inconsistency. Modular is good, but only if the modules are compatible. They aren't. Training needs to be provided for each individual system since they are all vastly different. And worst of all, since all of these different applications reach their own niche market, they charge out the butt for things that are usually very simple "POST a form over http(s)" machines.

I mean let's not get too dreamy here. My solution is an over-complicated form-builder. But it would be a game-changer for small and medium-sized businesses. Allowing users to build their own front-end and back-end disguised as a drag-and-drop form builder would be THE alternative, because they could bring all of their solutions into a single solution (one bill!) and since THEY are the ones that build what they need, they can have custom business software for the price of a spreadsheet program.

The price difference we could offer would be IMMENSE. Not only would we be able to offer "cookie-cutter" pricing as opposed to "custom" pricing, but since this generic solution could be used for essentially all of their systems, we aren't just decreasing one bill. We're decreasing one bill, and eliminating the rest entirely. We could devastate competition.

"BUT ALGO", you scream in despair, "USERS AREN'T SMART ENOUGH TO DRAG AND DROP FORM PARTS TO MAKE A FORM"

I mean ya true. But you say that like it's a bad thing. For one, we can just offer a huge library of templates. And for another, which is part of the business plan, we can charge people support dollars to help them drag and drop their stupid fucking forms!! Think of the MONEEYYYY YOU COULD MAKEE BY EXPLAINING HOW TO COLLECT FIRST AND LAST NAMEEE. Fuck.

The controls library would be extensible of course. You would be able to download different, more specialized controls if you need them. But the goal would be to satsify those needs with the standard collection of controls (Including interesting ones line barcode scanner and signature input and all that). But if all else fails, maybe someone made an open source control for you to implement and ignore that stupid donation button. We all do.

This could PURGE the world of overpriced and junky specialized business software, and best of all, it's aimed at smaller businesses. With smaller businesses making more profit, they will stay afloat better and may start to compete with their larger foes. Greater for the entire economy.

Anyways, I'm sure it's full of holes. Everything always is. But I still think it's something I'll try before I die.

I'm founding a company on machine learning with two others where one of them is an economics guy who decided his work was boring so he did his PhD in Engineering.

He started about three months ago to also invest some time in computer and dev stuff.

As a free software and Linux guy I wanted to get clear about stuff like open sour...

Economics guy: "We should definitely make all of that stuff open source to give back to the community."

Me: I love you. I truely do.

The same thing happened with security, svn etc.

I mean... Well... So unexpected! o.O

Most developers are morons, pt 2

In my last post on this topic, I discussed zombie developers, i.e. lower tier developers who enter the industry from a non-tech background usually through a bootcamp or get hired at a small (and usually desperate) company after doing a few github projects.

In this post I'll be talking about the middle 67% of developers. The average joes. The ones who know enough software to build apps, maybe even publish it and sometimes (not always) actually get users using their products, even for a brief moment of time.

For these people, software is genuinely interesting to them, but they don't really put in enough effort to get good at it. They don't put in enough late nights. They don't cancel enough leisure or social events. For most, they're only good enough to not get fired (job security) and that's as far as they want to take their careers.

And I suppose there's nothing wrong with that. Most people don't have a yearning to go above and beyond, so I'd expect most developers to follow this pattern as well.

So to you, I say thank you. Thank you for doing all the boring menial work no one cares to do. You might even get a pat on the back if you put in the extra effort.

About 95% of developer jobs in my country are unevenly split between the administrative and commercial capitals, with an overwhelming majority favouring the commercial capital. I live in the administrative one. Any dev jobs outside both states pay a fraction of what is tenable

Not having much luck with my search, I reluctantly applied for this php role advertised in one of the other states. I wasn't even expecting them to write back cuz the pay is piss poor. it's on site, about 400km away. For some context the salary is 120k but the tfare to and from there is in the neighbourhood of 70 grand

Anyway, the employer wrote back to me on WhatsApp, sending a full stack sample project for me to complete in 36 hours, which frankly, I found pitiful and absurd. Call me entitled, Arrogant, etc. But I didn't anticipate a cv and github like mine, from a company requiring relocation from the capital for a paltry retainer, would demand I complete a sample project. For 120k ffs. I was already making more than that years ago when our inflation hadn't ballooned 30x over

I haven't been able to bring myself to start the project. Not like I know much else to do with my life, I just slipped into a catatonic state shortly after reading it. EVERYBODY I started software with a decade ago, is either outside the country now or earning too much fx to bother with departure. I'm not envious of them, just asking for something decent to get by or not live in penury. Comfortable enough to afford basics without breaking the bank

Shortly after leaving my last workplace, I made a dark joke that: the best ones who leave, get better jobs. The average ones are either retained or land similarly mediocre positions. But the truly incompetent employees wind up in the village, farming

One detail I left out is that this sample project guy is located in the same state as my hometown. In a sense, I made a self fulfilling prophecy

He's going to request I turn in my solution tomorrow but I might just come clean about his sample project catching me off guard. I did an assessment this morning for a coy advertising a senior developer role. 4 segments, not one single one technical /code. Just boring shits about OCEAN, time management, communication. I checked my results when I was done and saw I'd done a previous test with these same guys 5 months ago. I shockingly aced the topics back then but didn't get hired anyway

This time around, almost none of the scores ramped above 50

I hate the US education system, its just designed to fuel capitalism. It keeps getting less funding so that actually passionate, intelligent people get kicked out and replaced with people who only want to be a teacher so they can have power over others.
Why do they block news websites? Why do they block github, so their own robotics team can't even access the essential building blocks for the robot? They make everything more complicated and for the reason that it might distract you. Maybe just make topics engaging and not boring asf, just cramming for the exams so the school gets more funding. Maybe prepare students for jobs, allow them to do projects, pursue classes that interest them, and have any sense of individualism.
Anyways, yeah, the school blocked github so I can't do my FBLA project, I can't access the code for programming our robot for competitions, I can't even download software required for half of these classes. I have a Linksys router, is there any way I could set it up to bypass the firewall?

Should I change my Job?

# Pro current job
- extremly convinient in terms of family compatibility
- low stress
- awesome boss
- I worked on this software for years and can see it gaining maturity
- can not complain about salary

# Contra current job
- always the same boring tech stack, little development as programmer and none beyond that
- I can't see any greater good or social added value in what I do!
- small team and very little opportunities to meat new poeple from other departements or what
- colleagues are okay but conservative and boring, also they do a lot of wfh (take in consideration i am rather extrovert so this is an issue)
- no work trips (see above)

Okay this is going to become an issue

With the speed at which we are developing software, there will be a time when there is no more coding left to be done and we will all be there doing tech support for everyone and will be so boring
Or, someone will develop an artificial conscience capable of developing software and all of us will be there sitting like we just got fired

How resource calculations for software services like code analysis, monitoring, etc are done:

Opening fridge, putting all the beer one can find in it.

Opening the necessary tools, e.g Excel, Accounting software, ....

Drinking the first beer.

Starting to aggregate the monthly costs - cause you can never trust the reports written by someone else...

First beer poof.

Looking at the monthly cost, adding columns "Intended use", "Actual usage pattern", "Usage factor"...

Opening next beer...

Usage factor is btw a factor of 0.1 ... 1.0 - to give an estimate how much the products feature are actually used, for further analysis if the invest is justified or not...

Oh. Another half bottle gone...

Filling in the columns...

Oh. Bottle empty and the next one toooooooooooooooo...

*burping*
*cracking finger joints*

Now let's get to the sad part...

Next worksheet, adding infrastructure costs...

Cost and description as columns.

Hehe. Column sounds like gollum.

Another beer...

Ugh. Need the paper reports, manually typing off things for stuff that was e.g. tax deductible.

Many beers die during this task. Poor little beers, dying for such an boring and mundane task...

SUM is a real useful function. I don't think I can add numbers anymore.

Now we can add another sheet.

Hehe. Sheet sounds like shit. And yes, everything in this file is shit.

Summing up costs from both sheets and including the cost factor from 1
... Beeeeeeeer Beeeeer beer we need more beer here... Beer beer beer...

Where was I. Oh yeah. Cost factorization total vs effective.

Why do I want to get even more drunk.

Oh yeah. Most software is completely underused and the costs aren't justified.

Let's add some colored highlighting ...

Uuuuh. ,Too much red. Better change the highlights.

Too much red.

More beer.

Don't give a fuck.

Hm.

Time for some whiskey.

What else is there to do....

Oh yeah.

Diagrams.

The bloody wankers from accounting need diagrams as numbers are too boring.

Not that everything in accounting is boring, no matter how much you paint colors on it... *sigh*

Hm. More whiskey...

Hehe. Whiskey rhymes with frisky.

Uff. Now just need to write mail. Mail mail mail....

"Copy paste the last mail from last month"

Hm.

Ah.

*sipping whiskey*

Spell check extension - to the rescue.

Thesaurus *burps*.

Let's change a few words here and there... Maybe another paragraph there.

Uh....

Trying to attach file...

*fucking mouse is pretty constantly crashing into empty beer bottles*

Done.

Damn.

Need to press send button.

*Creating mess on the desk by just randomly crashing the beer bottles*

Done.

*Pressing computers power button*

Mwahahahaha. No mouse needed.

*regretting to stand up too quickly, nearly barfing on the floor*

Couch ... Where Couch...

After hitting several doors, frames and other stuff, the glorious mission ended successfully with a most graciously executed gut buster on the couch.

(Regretting next morning to have emptied two 6 packs and a few glasses of whiskey)

!rant
My boss has influenced me the most at work. He was the first person to introduce me to software development. Though I'm self-taught since, I still owe him my career. Now I teach support techs and junior devs how to code, as well as oversee the architecture of major systems. It's crazy to think now that my computer building hobby would turn into something like this, and it's all because someone convinced me to try what I thought would be terribly boring.

Note: In this rant I will ask for advices, and confess some sins. I will tell my personal story- it will be long.

So basically it has been almost 2 years since I first entered the world of software development. It has been the biggest and most important quest of my life so far, but yet I feel like I missed a lot of my objectives, and lots of stuff did not go the way I wanted them to be, and it makes feel frustrated and it lowered my self esteem greatly. I feel confused and a bit depressed, and don't know what to do.

I'll start: I'm 23 years old. 2 years ago I was still a soldier(where I live there is a forced conscription law) in a sysadmin/security role. I grew tired of the ops world and got drawn more and more into programming. A tremendous passion became to burn in me, as I began to write small programs in Python and shell scripts. I wanted to level up more seriously so I started reading programming books and got myself into a 10 month Java course.

In the meanwhile I got released from army duty and got a job as a security sysadmin at a large local telco company. Job was boring and unchallenging but it payed well. I had worked there for 1 year and at the same time learned more and more stuff from 2 best friends who have been freelance developers for years. I have learned how to build full-stack mobile apps and some webdev, mainly Android and Node.js. However because I was very inexperienced and lacked discipline, all of my side projects failed horribly, and all attempts to work with my experienced friends have failed too- I feel they lost a lot of trust for me(they don't say it, but I feel it, maybe I'm wrong).

I began to realise I had to leave this job and seek a developer job in order to get better, and my wish came true 6 months ago when I finally got accepted into a startup as a fullstack webdev, for a bit lower wage but I felt it was worth it. I was overjoyed.

But now my old problems did not end, they just changed. My new job is a thousand times harder and more intensive than the old one. I feel like it sucks all the energy and motivation that was still left in me, and I have learned almost nothing in my free time, returning home exhausted. My bosses are not impressed from my work despite me being pretty junior level, and I feel like I'm in a vicious cycle that keeps me from advancing my abilities. My developer friends I mentioned earlier have jobs like I do and still manage to develop very impressive side projects and even make a nice sum of money from them, while I can't even concetrate on stupid toy projects and learning.

I don't know why It is like this. I feel pathetic and ashamed of my developer sins and lack of discipline. During that time I also gained some weight that I'm trying t lose now... I know not all of it is my fault but it makes me feel like crap.

Sorry for the long story. I just feel I need to spill it out and hope to get some advices from you guys who may or may not have similar experiences. Thanks in advance for reading this.

- Have rebuild my blogging software
- released an API for HttpHeaderSurvey
- automated all the boring everyday tasks

Hello everyone,
My name is Andi and I would appreciate some advices how I can get started in the IT sector.
Im very interested in the development of software.
I was always interested in software and all around computers.
Right know I'm working in a boring steel trade company and I want finally start to develop some skills for my (hopefully) future job.
Do I need to study to get a good job as developer or do I have to learn to code all by my self ?
(Sorry for my bad English)

>start new job, not very professionally experienced dev
>spend couple of months working on a feature that is supposed to be an MVP kind of thing, be rushed to finish and told to cut corners because it's "just an MVP", still lose sleep and have relationship suffer (and ultimately ruined) as I try to not lose deadlines created by the boss with questions like "you can have this done by <very soon>, right?"
>frontend created by fellow developer is a garbled mess of repeated code and questionably implemented subpages, frontend dev apparently copies CSS from Figma and pastes it into new non-reusable React components as envisioned by designer, I am tasked with making sense of the mess and adding in API consumption, when questioning boss what to do with the mess I am often told to discard stuff that the frontend dev has made and just reuse his styling; all of this on top of implementing the backend feature that a previous developer wasn't able to do
>specs change along the way, I had been using a library as a helper in some part of the original feature, now the boss sees that and (without further testing the library) promises CEO that we'll add that as a separate subfeature, but the performance of the library is garbage for larger inputs and causes problems, is basically shit that might not have been shit if we had implemented it ourselves, however at this point CEO has promised new feature to some customers, all the actual sense of responsibility falls upon my hands
>marketing folk see halfway done application and ask for more changes
>everything is rushed to launch, plenty of things aren't implemented or are done halfway
>while I'm waiting for boss to deploy, I'm called up to company office by CEO, and get new task that is pretty cool and will actually involve assessing various algorithms and experiment with them, rather than just stitching API calls and endpoints together, it involves delving into a whole new field of CS that I never had the opportunity to delve into before
>start working on cool task, doing research, making good progress
>boss finally deploys feature I had been originally implementing
>cut corners of original boring insane feature start showing up, now I have to start fixing them instead of working on cool task, however the cool task also has a deadline which is likely expected to be met

I'm not sure if I'm having it bad or not, is this what a whole career in software development will look like?

Gave me a career when I wasn't looking for one. Graduated with a mathematics and Management Science double major. Started as a data analyst and a Java architect saw something in me and gave me a shot. He was a dick at first and we had a minor squabble in which I defended myself and I thought I was done there. I later apologized and said I didn't have to because I was sticking up for myself.

I hated programming in college. Found it boring and thought I could teach myself if I wanted to. So in the real world, the problem solving and the variety of languages and software to work on opened up my eyes and allowed me to follow though my career.

For that I get a sweet paycheck, tons of opportunities and my children get to have and do things I never had the opportunity to do as a child.

which software/research/project you created in your free time as a hobby recently?

I personally created a small widget app that would allow users to create widgets of PDF files on their mobiles.

i have noticed a personal trend : i tend to spend my free time on language/tools/framework that are somewhat different than my daily job. I am a software engineer building sdks in my job that provide a very commercial set of features for android apps, but ended up creating an hobby app that would utilise android's other cool APIs ( storage, file, permission etc) .

before this project too i was exploring backend and web development, creating small react websites in my past time.

do you also spend time exploring outside yhe frameworks/tools used in your work life? or if not, how do you keep yourself motivated? the lateral part os important for me as i am soon going to a job where i might be exploring android APIs in daily work life and therby making android apps will become boring for me .

i remember before joining an SDK making company, i was trying to come up with an SDK myself lol, which at that time was opposite yo rhe work i was doing in the day

Time is relative. It's been 10 minutes now from when I inserted my smartcard credentials on my workstation (NO SSD) with Windows 7, McAfee Antivirus, Crypted HD and other company policies and useless software. So boring...

And they ask me why I need an SSD right now!

Hey, I need a little help here and I don't have a lot of time to figure this out.

I have this piece of code which I wrote in flask when I had just ventured into programming. The idea is that we have two excel sheets a search file and a demand file, all we need to do is search for the names from the demand file in the search file and then produce the result in an appropriate format. The problem, the names don't match up, quite often. Sometimes the spellings are wrong sometimes the way they named one things in the files is different, so, for that I have a keyword based search and I make another sheet called guesses where this data is then written.

I made it for my mom who's a doctor and does procurement (buying stuff) for the hospital. It was just a small project to help her and her team with a very inconvenient and boring task and I never could host it cause I really didn't know how to (in py) and I had used socketIO in flask along with threading and stuff. But now, shit has hit the fan as the software is suddenly in demand for obvious reasons.

Just help me host this thing somewhere. Thanks, link in comments.

I'm kind of lost guys 🤔(from the point of view of the career path).

Currently I'm unemployed and looking around for a new job inside and outside Italy, but most of them are quiet mediocre, from the point of view of salary(is hard to reach 40K pre-tax in Italy) or actual interesting work to do.

Leaving that aside, up to now I was always able to deal with any job that I had at hand, despite the industry, and this leaves me with an empty goal in the software development career because I feel capable to adapt to any technical environment.
The business side was always a second thought because it's quite boring most of the times(but I might change mind I think, given the chance).

And if you ask me what I like, I would say anything technically interesting/challenging, so no real preference here 😕

Have you ever had such period in your career?
Did you get the chance to find a way to move on?

(0. First off, being a job I'd like — native software development that is — and not having to default to some boring backend job because "mUh WeB's EvRyThInG TodAy")
1. If the commute isn't too long I have no much problem working in office I think, but I want this to be clear: you let me work with the tools I want. Things like CI are understandably imposed, but let me choose whatever IDE/editor, Git client, etc.
Otherwise off to work from home where no one can check
2. Not having assholes colleagues (obnoxious, stupid, interrupting…)
3. A decent pay. Not high or minimum, just what I'm worth
4. Not drowning in meetings. I want to take part to them to clarify some things and understand what's going on, but I don't think I need more than 2 a day. Ah, and let me tell what's wrong if there's anything
5. Be basically respected. I don't want to be overvalued, that can be embarrassing, but I don't want my work to be completely ignored

I am proceeding towards a DevOps job but I am not clear what are the responsibilities if this role and how it will affect my long term career.
I don't want to alienate myself from development technologies and I do not want to end up doing some boring documentation of software.
Any guidance will be appreciated :)

I have actually two, but I'll write the other one in the week.

So we had classes about software engineering. The class was interesting but the teacher wasn't. Too soft, too slow, too low, too monochord (usual french), it was boring. So we ended up not listening to him. Kinda regret this.

We got a first exam, where we were in group to develop a Test Manager for Unit Test (yep.)
We had instructions, like the note would be multiplied by the percentage of coverage of code, etc.

The thing is, we really didn't get the point of the project. Now that I think of it, it seems obvious, but it wasn't back then as it was too new. In the four people of our group, one worked real hard on it, I tried to do my best, the others too.

But like I said, I didn't get back then the point of the topic, which is to apply design pattern, unit testing, etc. It was furstating af and we ended up with a 9/20.

I got the point of the topic only for the second exam, the most classic one, on a paper sheet with questions to answer. (We were allowed only one cheatsheet, I understood the topic while doing it. Sad, huh ?)

I got my first developer job three years ago. I’ve always had a great eye for detail, and getting things done while following best practices. I learned that a few years ago from typography, which I think is a fascinating subject, which has a lot of shared ideas with software development.

In my first job, I immediately took a lot more responsibility than what I was assigned to. This job was as a React Developer, but I quickly got into backend development and set up kubernetes clusters, CI/CD.

Looking back, this was to me quite an achievement, considering I had never done anything even remotely close to it.

I did however, work my ass off. 18 hours work days without telling my boss, so only getting paid for 8. Plus I worked weekends.

I did love it. After a while, I got promotes to Senior Developer, and got responsibility for everything technical. I tried asking for help, but everybody else was either a student, or working purely front-end or app-development. Meanwhile, I was Devops, API-design, backend, Ci/CD, handling remote installations (all our customers are Airgapped), customer support, front-end and occasionally app-development when the app-developers could not handle their shit. Basically, I was the goto-guy for every problem, every feature, every fix. I don’t say this to brag.

I recently quit my job, started working as a consultant, because I almost doubled my pay. However the new job is boring as shit. I’m now an overpaid React Developer. And I really hate React. Not because it is shit, but simply because it is boring.

I’m thinking of going back to my old job. It was a lot of work, but it was really interesting. However, after I quit, they have changed their whole stack. No more Golang, Containers, Kubernetes, webRTC and other fun new technologies. Now, it is just plain, PHP without any dependecies. It is both boring, and idiotic. So I’m thinking of just quitting. Either doing some personal projects like game-development. I dont know.