The first time I realized I wasn't as good as I thought I was when I met the smartest dev I've ever known (to this day).

I was hired to manage his team but was just immediately floored by the sheer knowledge and skills this guy displayed.

I started to wonder why they hired outside of the team instead of promoting him when I found that he just didn't mesh well with others.

He was very blunt about everything he says. Especially when it comes to code reviews. Man, he did /not/ mince words. And, of course, everyone took this as him just being an asshole.

But being an expert asshole myself, I could tell he wasn't really trying to be one and he was just quirky. He was really good and I really liked hanging out with him. I learned A LOT of things.

Can you imagine coming into a lead position, with years of experience in the role backing your confidence and then be told that your code is bad and then, systematically, very precisely, and very clearly be told why? That shit is humbling.

But it was the good kind of humbling, you know? I really liked that I had someone who could actually teach me new things.

So we hung out a lot and later on I got to meet his daughter and wife who told me that he had slight autism which is why he talked the way he did. He simply doesn't know how to talk any other way.

I explained it to the rest of the team (after getting permission) and once they understood that they started to take his criticism more seriously. He also started to learn to be less harsh with his words.

We developed some really nice friendships and our team was becoming a little family.

Year and a half later I had to leave the company for personal reasons. But before I did I convinced our boss to get him to replace me. The team was behind him now and he easily handled it like a pro.

That was 5 years ago. I moved out of the city, moved back, and got a job at another company.

Four months ago, he called me up and said he had three reasons for us to meet up.

1. He was making me god father of his new baby boy
2. That they created a new position for him at the company; VP of Engineering
and
3. He wanted to hang out

So we did and turns out he had a 4th reason; He had a nice job offer for me.

I'm telling this story now because I wanted to remind everyone of the lesson that every mainstream anime tells us:

Never underestimate the power of friendship.

Was lead developer at a small startup, I was hiring and had a budget to add 3 new people to my team to develop a new product for the company.

Some context first and then the rant!

Candidate 1 - Amazing, a dev I worked with before who was under utilized at the previous company. Still a junior, but, she was a quick learner and eager to expand her knowledge, never an issue.

Candidate 2 - Kickass dev with back end skills and extras, he was always eager to work a bit more than what was expected. I use to send him home early to annoy him. haha!

Candidate 3 - Lets call him P.

In the interview he answers every question perfectly, he asks all the right questions and suggests some things I havent even thought of. CTO goes ahead and says we should skip the technical test and just hire the guy, his smart and knows what his talking about, I agree and we hire him. (We where a bit desperate at this stage as well.)

He comes in a week early to pick up his work laptop to get setup before he starts the next week, awesome! This guy is going to be an asset to the company, cant wait to have him join the team - The CTO at this stage is getting ready to leave the company and I will be taking over the division and need someone to take over lead position, he seems like the guys to do it.

The guys starts the next week, he comes in and the laptop we gave him is now a local server for testing and he will be working off his own laptop, no issue, we are small so needed a testing stack, but wasnt really needed since we had procedures in place for this already.

Here is where everything goes wrong!!! First day goes great... Next day he gets in early 6:30am (Nice! NO!), he absolutely smells, no stinks, of weed, not a light smell, the entire fucking office smells of weed! (I have no problem with weed, just dont make it my problem to deal with). I get called by boss and told to sort this out people are complaining! I drive to office and have a meeting with him, he says its all good he understands. (This was Friday).

Monday comes around - Get a call from Boss at 7:30am. Whole office smells like weed, please talk to P again, this cannot happen again. I drive to office again, and he again says it wont happen again, he has some issues with back pain and the weed helps.

Tuesday - Same fucking thing! And now he doesnt want to sign for the laptop("server") that was given to him, and has moved to code in the boardroom, WHERE OUR FUCKING CLIENTS WILL BE VIEWING A DEMO THAT DAY OF THE PRODUCT!! Now that whole room smells like weed, FML!

Wednesday - We send P a formal letter that he is under probation, P calls me to have a meeting. In the meeting he blames me for not understanding "new age" medicine, I ask for his doctors prescription and ask why he didnt tell me this in the interview so I could make arrangements, we dont care if you are stoned, just do good work and be considerate to your co-workers. P cant provide these and keeps ranting, I suggest he takes pain killers, he has none of it only "new age" medicine for him.

Thursday - I ask him to rather "work" from home till we can get this sorted, he comes in for code reviews for 2 weeks. I can clearly see he has no idea how the system works but is trying, I thought I will dive deeper and look at all of his code. Its a mess, nothing makes sense and 50% of it is hard coded (We are building a decentralized API for huge data sets so this makes no sense).

Friday - In code review I confront him about this, he has excuses for everything, I start asking him harder questions about the project and to explain what we are building - he goes quiet and quits on the spot with a shitty apology.

From what I could make out he was really smart when it came to theory but interpreting the theory to actual practice wasnt possible for him, probably would have been easier if he wasnt high all the time.

I hate interview code tests, but learned a valuable lesson that day! Always test for some code knowledge as well even if you hate doing it, ask the right questions and be careful who you hire! You can only bullshit for so long in coding before someone figures out that you are a fraud.

Me - "Has anyone changed the password on the print computer"
Him - "It's the same one."
Me - "Carrots99?"
Him - "Yeah, what's the message that comes up?
Me - "Password is incorrect."

The dumbest conversation I've ever had in my fucking life. You little shit, I know you changed the password just to fuck with people. You've been reading too many books on elevating yourself, tried to be important for something. It means fuck all if you can't remember what you changed it to. So you held up two hours of my work, not to mention everyone else, because you can't help but stick your beak in shit. You dont think people can't see what youre doing? Watching you scurry over to the computer with a big smile, only a to fuck off silent as a mouse not to be seen mumbling some shit about a system administrator. Yeah you forgot it you prick.

Stop sucking up to the boss, and commanding people on what to do, when you're as junior as junior gets. Don't change our fucking passwords, just so you can have the whole team approach you the next day asking for you, then not remember them. You cunt.

I made a Trello board and listed some tasks for me and my team.

My boss comes in, I show him the trello board to show how I organized our tasks.

He liked it, so I asked him if we can use it more frequently.

He replied: this is your code, do whatever you want.

I asked: my code?

He replied: yah didn't just build this webpage? This interactive task manager.

Me in shock: hold on you think I built trello?

Boss: oh ... You didn't ? It looks like something you'd do for your "front end masterbaution".

Me: oh wow, well... If that was the case I would've made $425 million on top of my salary.

Boss: looked at me like meh ~ and walked away...

When the boss comes in the office.

I think I've shown in my past rants and comments that I'm pretty experienced. Looking back though, I was really fucking stupid. Since I haven't posted a rant yet on the weekly topics, I figure I would share this humbling little gem.

Way back in the ancient era known as 2009, I was working my first desk job as a "web designer". Apparently the owner of this company didn't know the difference between "designer", which I'm not, and "developer", which I am, nor the responsibilities of each role.

It was a shitty job paying $12/hour. It was such a nightmare to work at. I guess the silver lining is that this company now no longer exists as it was because of my mistake, but it was definitely a learning experience I hold in high regard even today. Okay, enough filler...

I was told to wipe the Dev server in order to start fresh and set up an entirely new distro of Linux. I was to swap out the drives with whatever was available from the non-production machines, set up the RAID 5 array and route it through the router and firewall, as we needed to bring this Dev server online to allow clients to monitor the work. I had no idea what any of this meant, but I was expected to learn it that day because the next day I would be commencing with the task.

Astonishingly, I managed to set up the server and everything worked great! I got a pat on the back and the boss offered me a 4 day weekend with pay to get some R&R. I decided to take the time to go camping. I let him know I would be out of town and possibly unreachable because of cell service, to which he said no problem.

Tuesday afternoon I walked into work and noticed two of the field techs messing with the Dev server I built. One was holding a drive while the other was holding a clipboard. I was immediately called into the boss's office.

He told me the drives on the production server failed during the weekend, resulting in the loss of the data. He then asked me where I got the drives from for the Dev server upgrade. I told him that they came from one of the inactive systems on the shelf. What he told me next through the deafening screams rendered me speechless.

I had gutted the drives from our backup server that was just set up the week prior. Every Friday at midnight, it would turn on through a remote power switch on a schedule, then the system would boot and proceed to copy over the production server's files into an archive for that night and shutdown when it completed. Well, that last Friday night/Saturday morning, the machine kicked on, but guess what didn't happen? The files weren't copied. Not only were they not copied, but the existing files that got backed up previously we're gone. Why? Because I wiped those drives when I put them into the Dev server.

I would up quitting because the conversation was very hostile and I couldn't deal with it. The next week, I was served with a suit for damages to this company. Long story short, the employer was found in the wrong from emails I saved of him giving me the task and not once stating that machine was excluded in the inactive machines I could salvage drives from. The company sued me because they were being sued by a client, whose entire company presence was hosted by us and we lost the data. In total just shy of 1TB of data was lost, all because of my mistake. The company filed for bankruptcy as a result of the lawsuit against them and someone bought the company name and location, putting my boss and its employees out of a job.

If there's one lesson I have learned that I take with the utmost respect to even this day, it's this: Know your infrastructure front to back before you change it, especially when it comes to data.

Worst meeting I’ve been in?

Transitioning from an old system, the CEO said “We will transition on June 30th of next year or … heads … will … roll.”

Everyone knew what ‘heads will roll’ meant.

I wasn’t particularly worried because 90% of my work would be completed by December, the rest would be completed by the users (data transfers, etc.). Realistically, no reason we couldn’t transition by April or May.

June 15th comes around – CEO calls a meeting (managers, VPs, kind of a big deal) because we’re nowhere close to turning on the new system. Needless to say, I was a bit nervous, but my part had been done since November. I worked late nights, weekends, early mornings…I killed myself making sure the system was 100% ready.
CEO starts asking the different managers about what is taking so long…
Mgr-1: ”Well, we aren’t easily able to map our old customer records into the new system. The new system is too hard to use and taking a long time.”
Mgr-2: “We can’t reconcile until the customer records are in the database.”
Mgr-3: “We can’t proof the purchase orders until the customer accounts are reconciled.”
The ‘waiting on him/her’ excuse went around the room.
At this point, couple of the VPs look over at me …I felt like I just turned white …oh crap…I’m going to get fired because all these –bleep-holes just threw me under the bus.
CEO listens…nods…looks at my boss..
CEO: “OK, move the due date out 6 more months. Have your team help out in any way they can. I want this new system working correctly no matter how long it takes. If we need to move the date again, we just do.”

Part of me was relieved, other part was looking for a flame thrower. I worked myself to the bone, risked my marriage (in hindsight, I was not a nice person to her during that time), probably had an ulcer, and these sorry excuse for human beings dragged their asses for months and there was zero accountability.

That meeting was over 15 years ago and it bothered me so much I still remember the CEO was wearing a green button up shirt, khaki pants, and drinking coffee from a Break Time coffee cup.

Upside? Over the next couple of years, every one of those managers either quit or got fired.

!!good news
!!great news
!!linux dev lappy recommendations?

So, @Root might finally have a job! Woo!
(Pending a background check, drug test, cavity search, ...)

I'm excited, and kind of giddy. It's an open-office setup, but the devs are chill, the boss is chill (reminds me a bit of myself thus far, just... nice), pay is decent too. Drive is hell, but everything else feels kinda cushy. The parent company is super-stuffy corporate and has an HR and red tape fetish, but supposedly I won't have to interact with them at all. I start as soon as all of the background check nonsense comes through. (Don't get me started on that, please.)

One of the questions that came up, however, is what type of system I wanted to use. I requested a Linux lappy, and that's sadly a bit beyond the parent company's nontechnical IT department. They asked me for links to a few specific machines on amazon for options. (MacBook Pro or equivalent)

That's where this question comes in: Which lappys make great dev machines and also have decent linux (Debian/Mint/Ubuntu) support? The role is backend Rails development + some devops, so I don't need super-fancy graphics, though I will be attaching a 4k (hopefully IPS) display because space and pretty colors.

Recommendations welcome, as I should get back to them today!

While I'm in pause time with my colleagues and reading on wiki how, the boss comes to me and asks:
Boss: what are you reading?
Me: how to Quit Your Job Graciously 😊
Boss: 😐

The next day the boss offered me a +€0,50 p/hour.

How i got to devRant.

Boss comes in, sees me super chill.
Other people enter, boss sees me not chill.

Sends me an email and says "Enjoy".

I love this guy :')

Ps. Hope he doesn't expect work today

We've got a team of around 20 developers and the most junior of them all is a interesting specimen.

The kind of person who thinks they a 'expert' in anything and everything and is constantly trying to school our senior developers who have 20+ years experience behind them.

The sort of person that spends 15 seconds googling something he has never heard of before, but now that he has skimmed 1 page on Google would classify himself as a 'expert' in said topic.

He comes into my office yesterday and proclaims that it has been decided by himself that he no longer wants to be a developer anymore and wants to do Ops/Infrastructure, then starts rambling on about how he is a Kubernetes expert.

I asked what experience he had with Kubernetes and his response was "I watched a webinar they did last night" to which I asked if he had ever actually used anything to do with Kubernetes in his life.

"No, but I'll watch a few YouTube videos and will then be more than qualified" he says

Followed by him telling me that we'll be moving all of our current Docker Swarm clusters into Kubernetes.

This was news to me (I'm head of infrastructure and operations)

I needed a good giggle, so I asked why we would get rid of our exisiting Docker infrastructure that's got a 100% uptime over the past 2 years and has worked without failure. It's truely been a dream.

He says "Because it's shiny and cool and better"

The nest afternoon he comes to me and says "When I move everything into Kubernetes I am going to convert everything into micro services"

He says that he watched a YouTube video the night before on microservices and has decided that it's what we need to use for a particular project.

(It's a simple php website that gets 100 hits per day)

Hopefully his boss will notice that he is producing no output soon. Don't want to tell the manager that the guy he hired delivers no work and lives in a fantasy land.

"your not touching the infrastructure. Ever"

Boss comes in and gives me some js code for syncing data (he hacked it together the other day, really messy with like 5 callback lamdas stacked into each other)

Boss: Make it faster and more reliable and add some progress indicator

So i look at the code and he literally pulls all the data as one json (20+ MiB). Server needs multiple minutes to generate the response (lots of querys), sometimes even causing timeouts....

So i do what everyone would do and clean up the code, split the request into multiple ones, only fetching the necessary data and send the code back to my boss.

He comes in and asks me what all this complexity is about. And why i need 5 functions to do what he did in one. (He didn't -.-). He says he only told me to "make it faster and show progress" not "to split everything up".
So I ask him how he wants to do this over HTTP with just one request...
His response: "I don't care make it work!".

Sometimes i hate my job -.-

It goes like this.
I have one final task to solve before starting in a new job at a different company. This guy, which is also a board member in the company in which I'm currently hired, is also an IT consultant and project manager in a fairly large company. This said person is also a key person for me being able to solve this last issue. I send him a complete guide on what he has to do before I can move on and wrap it all up.
First conflict arises because he doesn't follow the guide and tells me something is not working. I kindly inform him why and the response I get is very personal and not kind in any way, telling me and my boss that I am bad at my job and that he will bill us for 1000 USD for the 5 hours he used "debugging" and testing. This should have taken him 30 minutes and I have no idea what he spent those 5 hours doing.
It comes down to that my boss sides with this asshole and tells me that I have to do the task all over and test the system for the 4th time (yes I tested it 3 times beforehand to make sure nothing could go wrong) What my boss and the asshole doesn't know is that my uncle is vice president in the firm the asshole is working for. After kindly reminding this asshat that he has to follow the guide and that I can confirm everything is working, he keeps on attacking me. It's very rare that I fuck up and I have consulted 2 colleagues and got them to test it as well. They found no issues at all. The asshole ignored my request of documentation that something was not working.
I'm so full of being treated as an idiot so I send my uncle the email correspondence with the asshole to confirm that this is not how any of their employees should behave independant of my ability to do my job.
He will speak with this fucker tomorrow at work as first thing in the morning. I'm not proud of the way I went about this, but that was like the last drop, if you know what I mean.
Sorry for the long rant.

Boss comes to me with an idea, we use a spreadsheet to store certain sets of links for clients, sometimes with dozens of links, he wants us to be able to push a button and open all the links in the sheet. I'll admit I'm not exactly proficient in excel but said I'd look into it.

I came up with a macro which seemed to work for a while but there were a few links now and then that didn't want to open due to the way excel apparently checks the links prior to actually opening them. I told my boss that I'd look into a better solution but was slammed in office with scheduled projects.

I ended up taking time at home over the next week learning how to make this happen in Python. After a week I've got a CLI Python app which takes in an excel workbook and asks the user to select a sheet. Well employees don't like CLI so they asked for a GUI. I had never made anything with a GUI before since I'm not a software developer, anything I had previously written was written for me so it didn't need a GUI to be useful.

Spent another two weeks at home developing this thing and finally got a working solution. Now several employees are using my app as part of their daily job, saving them well over an hour of just clicking links in a spreadsheet.

Boss goes on a long rant about how he appreciates me and is thankful I was able to figure this out in my own time and save him money. So I say "If you really wanna show you appreciate me, you could approve that raise I've been asking for."

He replies, "Haha, yeah, but that's not gonna happen."

(I and THE back end developer, and I make less than the copywriting interns, time to start looking)

My boss likes to measure the spacing between DOM elements using a ruler to make sure everything is proportional.

I forgot to remove some padding on an element so it wasn't exactly centered, so he comes in and says...

"the padding on the site is off, I think you need to use this" *drops ruler on desk*

Now I have to keep this stupid ruler on my desk because whenever I forget to align something he says... "that's why I gave you the ruler"

Too difficult to explain to these subhumans that I don't need a ruler to write proper css

Hello again, everyone. As Sunday comes to a close, and Monday is fast approaching, I'll share with you the likely cause of my death by stroke and/or heart attack:
MONDAY MORNING COFFEE OF HORROR
Disclaimer: Do NOT try this. I am a professional addict. I am not responsible for anything this brew from hell causes to you and/or those around you.
So, I wake up, feeling like I haven't slept for days, or just notice the fucking alarm clock shrieking because I pulled an all-nighter.
Step 1: Silence alarm clock via mild violence.
Step 2: Get the coffee machine to brew some filter coffee (espresso works too)
Step 3: Get milk and ice cubes from the fridge (both are needed, I don't care if you don't like milk, trust me)
Step 4: Get 2 spoonfuls (not tea spoon, and actually FULL spoonfuls) into the biggest glass you have
Step 5: Pour just a little of the warm filter coffee into the glass, just to get the instant coffee wet enough, and start mixing, until the result looks like the horror you unleashed in your toilet a few minutes ago (and will do so again in a few)
Step 6: Mix in 25-50 ml milk, just for the aesthetic change of colour of the devil-brew, and to add the necessary amount of lactic acid to react with the coffee to produce chemical X
Step 7: Add ice cubes to taste (if you are new to this, add a lot)
Step 8. Slowly add the filter coffee while mixing furiously, so that the light brown paste at the bottom get dissolved (it's harder than it sounds)
Now, take a deep breath. Before you is a disgusting brew undergoing a chemical reaction, and your moves need to be precise otherwise it will explode. Note that sugar or any other form of sweetener is FORBIDDEN, as it will block the reaction chain and the result won't be as potent.
Take a straw (a big one, not those needle-like ones that some cafeterias give to fool you into believing that the coffee is more than 150ml). Put it inside the mix, and check that the route to the bathroom is free of obstacles.
Now, clench your abs, close your nose if you are new to this, grab the straw and DRINK!
DRINK LIKE THERE IS NO TOMORROW!
THAT BROWN DEVIL'S BILE WILL HAVE YOUR INTESTINES SPASM AND DANCE THE MACARENA WHILE TWIRLING A HULA HOOP!
YOUR HEART WILL GO OVERDRIVE HARDER THAN YOUR PC'S CPU WHEN COMPILING ON ECLIPSE AND BROWSING WITH IE AT THE SAME TIME.
The combination of caffeine and lactic acid will bring out the perfectly disgusting combination of sour and bitter usually expected in rotting lemons. After you manage to chug it down (DON'T SPILL OR SPIT ANY!) you have 30 - 60 seconds max to run to the porcelain throne, where you will spend the next 30-60 minutes.
After that, nothing can stop you! You will fix bugs, write entire codebases from scratch, punch that annoying coworker, punch that boss! You will be a demigod among mortals for the next 6-8 hours!
Your recipes for Monday morning coffee?

Been reading devrant posts for a month or so, this is my first actual post. I'm hoping it will be therapeutic. ☺️ I need something to keep me from killing my boss when I see him again tomorrow..

Some backstory: Currently working in HR for the last 7 or so years with complete shit for brains boss, even worse when it comes to anything related to technology. For almost two years I've been working to get another bachelor's degree. This time in computer sciences, to make a career switch to systems and software engineer. Last week I roughly had the following wonderful conversation:

Boss: we've needed new Recruitment software for a while now. Can't you make us one as a school project?

Me: 'Make us one?' It's not really that simple.. I'm barely halfway through my education, maybe I could do it, but it would take me quite a long time even if I could work on it fulltime.. Combining a halftime job with a fulltime education is taking up enough of my time as it is and I have more than enough school projects btw..

Boss: it would be a win-win. Work a little harder in your spare time and when you graduate you have a real-life project on your resume.

Me: I'm sorry, i'm failing to see the 'win' for me here.. I work 10 hours a day, 7 days a week on average, trying to combine work and studies. I'm pretty much maxed out..

Boss: Your coworker(also extreme dumbass) told me you wrote some quick code the other day that helped him out. Don't underestimate yourself, I'm sure you can do this.

Me(in complete disbelief by now): I wrote him an Excel-macro! They don't even teach me that at school. It's a very very very long way from actual software development! I'm sorry, it just can't be done.

Boss: Thats too bad. I expected you to welcome an opportunity like this and be more motivated towards this company..

Me: ***more disbelief and silence, just staring at him***
I'm sorry you feel that way.
***walked away***

WTF, I work my ass off for 7 years for this fucking shithead.. Even before I started this bachelors degree I had at least some understanding of the work developers put in their software. It blows my mind, no, it fucking angers me how people think making software is so simple.. Why do you think it's a 3-year education you fucking cunt?

Please, someone tell me how I can keep myself from ramming his fucking head through a wall tomorrow...

I'm a shit programmer

I'm 29 and I assumed that by this point I'd be successful some way or another, either by being financially abundant or technically complex.

I am not, just mildly accomplished instead.

Here'a list of thing I consider challenges that I have:
* I tend to tunnel vision ideas that are terrible or execute them poorly because of said tunnel vision.
* I don't hone my skills, I usually consider my potentials the same as my actuals, as if I achieved everything already, probably product of ny huge ego.
* I communicate poorly with my boss, I sidetrack into thing he didn't ask
* I'm a mess when it comes to reading documentation online, I have the attention span of a fucking fish.
* I work alone, I have 0 networking status or skills.
* I take huge amounts of time to finish my side projects
* Of all the side projects I started I only finished one, the ones that I couldn't finish usually bevame insabely stressful things, so much and so many that I questioned myself many times if I should be a programmer or not.
* I have little discipline or organization, if I work in more than one thing at a time, i get really anxious and stressed.

I am not saying I'm not competent, I think I am (I'm looking at you imaginary scary recruiter googling this online), I'm just not really proud of myself

Root has a deadline

I've been working on this CCPA ticket for awhile. Admittedly too long, but I'm new to the codebase and it's fucking sprawling. There has also been a lot of back-and-forth on the ticket.

Anyway, I've had a few blockers, such as how mailers work, the legal copy, where to put a admin-facing link to the dashboard, how to build the jira integration (and its creds), etc.

Quite awhile ago I asked Mr. Product, "Where should I put the ccpa dashboard link?" To which he responds: "I'll get you the answer today!" Awesome. Except he didn't. That day came and went without a peep. So, the next day I ask again: "Where should I put the ccpa dashboard link?" To which he responds: "I'll get you the answer today!" And that day comes and goes, too. I ask again, and you guessed it: "I'll get you the answer today." Repeat ad nauseam.

I also asked about the Jira integration and credentials. I got about the same treatment as above, but with a tiwst: they tell me to talk to / continue to bug Mr. H instead. Except Mr. H had been on PTO for weeks. Every time I ask, they keep referring me to him. A little over two weeks later (yesterday), I finally got a response from him. Yay! I was preoccupied with finishing the dashboard (which wasn't in the original ticket for some reason) so I didn't get a chance to look into it yet. After asking his boss three times, Mr. Product also finally (!!!) gave me a response on the link placement today, too! Though not directly: he discussed it with said boss in a group chat that I'm a part of, but never tagged me or told me directly. So, now I know where to put it (I think), but I have no idea how that area of the site is built (it's dynamic based on domain, login, and roles), so adding it will still be difficult.

The best part:

Today during standup, some lady I've only rarely seen before attends the meeting, doesn't say anything until the very end, and then announces that everything must be code-complete by tomorrow for release, and then promptly signs off.

For fuck's sake. I've had blockers on this for weeks, and now I need to finish it by fucking tonight?

I still don't know how to build the mailers (because translations and formats), nor how to actually send emails using them. I don't know how to modify the footer (dynamic, complex), how to add the admin-facing link (dynamic, complex), nor how build a Jira integration (haven't even looked yet). I just got unblocked on two of these fucking today. and it needs to be done and code reviewed by tomorrow?

No bloody way.
Maybe I should go back to my previous job. 😡

"no micro managing here!"

*Boss comes in at 5*
- how much work have you done?
- why isn't this finished yet?
- you're working too slow
- show me git status
- show me git log
- why is this taking you so long?

Week 26 advice - you all probably know this but good to refresh!

Eat healthily

Sleep well

Document clearly

Annotate your code

Use version control properly

Keep yourself in check with project management tools

Your peers are your friends... And competition.

As much as your boss is an idiot respect them and your life will be easier.

With great power comes great responsibility; don't touch that keyboard until you think through what you are doing chances are your first idea is not the best.

Don't write quick fixes and say you will go back to clean it up later on when you have time. That time will never come.

Told the new hire that for the first week they can just familiarise themselves with the JS framework, do the tutorials, and read through the code / docs.

Boss comes by Tuesday morning "you should be finished with all the tutorials by the end of the day"

Looks like we're throwing him in the deep end!

Context: new dev has Java and 3d games background. Our app is full stack JS

I'm 4 days old to this company. I spent 40 minutes debugging why the internet is not working. I asked the IT Guys for the support and they said everything is good.

So why the fuck is the internet not working? I rant at them. The IT Guy told me to calm down and then he will help me. So I calm down and again went to ask for help. He said that he will check it out after breakfast.

It's been more then an hour and he hasn't returned yet. I'm going to complain to the Boss when he comes in. This is not cool man.

I swear I work with mentally deranged lunatics.
Dev is/was using TFS's web api to read some config stuff..

Ralph: "Ugh..this is driving me crazy. I've spent all day trying to read this string from TFS and it is not working"
Me: "Um, reading a string from an web api is pretty easy, what's the problem?"
Ralph: "I'm executing the call in a 'using' statement and cannot return the stream."
Me: "Why do you need to return a stream? Return the object you are looking for."
Ralph: "Its not that easy. You can return anything from TFS. All you get back is a stream. Could be XML, JSON, text file, image, anything."
Me: "What are you trying to return?"
Ralph: "XML config. If I use XDoc, the stream works fine, but when I step into each byte from the stream, I the first three bytes have weird characters. I shouldn't have to skip the first three bytes to get the data. I spent maybe 5 hours yesterday digging around the .Net stream readers used in XDoc trying to figure out how it skips the first few bytes."
Me: "Wow...I would have used XDoc and been done and not worried about that other junk."
Ralph: "But I don't know the stream is XML. That's what I need to figure out."
Me: "What is there to figure out? You do know. Its your request. You are requesting a XML config."
Ralph: "No, the request can be anything. What if Sam requests an image? XDoc isn't going to work."
Me: "Is that a use-case? Sam requesting an image?"
Ralph: "Uh..I don't know...he could"
Me: "Sounds like your spending a lot of time doing premature optimization. You know what your accessing TFS for, if it's XML, return XML. If it's an image, return an image. Something new comes along, modify the code to handle it. Eazy peezy."
<boss walks in from a meeting>
Boss: "Whats up guys?"
Ralph: "You know the problem with TFS and not being able to stream the data I had all day yesterday? I finally figured it out. I need to keep this TFS reader simple. I'll start with the XML configs and if we more readers later, we can add them."
Boss: "Oh yea, always start simple and add complexity only when you need it."

Frack...Frack..Frack...you played some victim complaining to anyone who would listen yesterday (which I mostly ignored) about reading data from TFS was this monumental problem no one could solve, then you start complaining to me, I don't fall for the BS, then tell the boss the solution was your idea?

Lunatic or genius? Wally would be proud.

Conversation with Boss about a new project.

[Me]: We have to program an API and preferably our own backend, so that all the wishes of the customer are covered. In addition, there will also be an app later, as the customer has requested

[Boss]: Why should we program everything from scratch?

[Me]: We do not have to program everything from scratch, we can already use some existing stuff, or even use frameworks etc. But the project is so complex that such a path must be taken.

[Boss]: Hmm, ok.

... some time later ...
boss comes to me.

[Boss]: (shines and is very happy) I have the perfect solution! We simply use Shopware and finish the project as soon as possible.

Are you fucking kidding me? I’ve never worked with Shopware, and the Backend looks like fucking Windows 98. He’s not even a Dev! So how can he judge it that way?
he does that every fucking time!!

I finished two projects. Both of them need to connect to each other. However, the tool to do that is not currently licensed to achieve my desired outcome. I email my boss to check the status of the license key I need, that they promised, and the only thing I get back is "Correct." Seriously? 😠 The person who has the company credit card and authority to buy, also the same one that gives me a deadline to turn this shit in, can't give me the time of day to respond to an email? Their response wasn't even relevant. I've been trying to move beyond this roadblock for a week now! I'm a pretty independent guy, but I'm not going to buy the license myself for a tool that I didn't even want to use. So when someone comes to my cube and I'm raging on Steam, ✋ I don't want to hear anything about company time, because mine isn't being respected either. 👊👊

*me as a boss*

*employee comes in late*
me *smiling and laughing":
*tells nearby person* there they are!!
*tells employee* congratulations!!
*laughs and hugs*

confused employee: what for?

me: you're late

Hi,
I'm not a ranty person so I never actually thought I'd post anything here but here it goes.

From the beginning.
We use ancient technologies. PHP 5.2, Symfony 1.2 and a non RFC complient SOAP with NO documentation.
A year ago We've been thrown a new temporary project. An VOIP app for every OS.
That being iOS, Android, MAC, PC, Linux, Windows mobile. With a 3 month deadline. All that thrown at 4 PHP developers. The idea being that They'll take it, sign the delivery protocol, everyone happy. No more updates for the app needed. They get their funds they needed the app for and we get paid.

Fast forward to today...

Our dev team started the year with great news that We'll most likely have to create a new project. Since the amount of new features would be far greater than current feature set, we managed to finally force our boss to use newer technologies (ie. seperate backend symfony4 PHP7+/frontend react, rest api and so on). So we were ecstatic to say the least. With preestimates aimed at a minimum 3 month development period. Since we're comfortable with everything that needs to be done.
Two days later our boss came to me that one of our most annoying clients needs a new feature. Said client uses ancient version written on a napkin because They changed half of the specification 2 weaks before deadline in a software made not by a developer but some sysadmin who didn't know anything. His MVC model was practically VVV model since he even had sql queries in some views. Feature will take 3 days - fixing everything that will break in the meantime - 1-2 months.
F*** it, fine. A little overtime won't kill me.
Yesterday boss comes again... Apparently someone lost a delivery protocol for a project we ended that half a year ago. Whats even better at the time when we asked for hardware to test we never got any. When we asked about any testing enviornment - nothing. The app being SEMI-stable on everything is an overstatement but it was working on the os'es available at the time. Since the client started testing now again, it turns out that both Android app does not work on 8.1/9 and the iOS app does not work on ios12. The client obviously does not want to pay and we can do little with it without the protocol, other than rewriting the apps.
It will take months at least since all of those apps were written by people that didn't know neither the OS'es nor the languages. For example I started writing the iOS one in swift. Only to learn after half of the development time, that swift doesn't like working by C Library rules and I had to use ObjC also. With some C thrown in due to the library. 3 unknown languages, on an unknown platform in 3 months. I never had any apple device in my hand at that time nor do I intend to now. I'm astonished it worked out then. It was a clusterf**k of bad design and sticking everything together with deprecated apis and a gum. So I'll have to basically fully rewrite it.

If boss decides we'll take all those at the same time I'll f***ing jump of a bridge.

Old boss story. This guy was nice but a terrible boss. Also relevant, he has a background in IT so should know better.

Him: So when you wanna check a password is correct you just unhash it in the database?
Me: *facepalm*

Me: Hey we should be doing unit and integration testing at a minimum to lower bugs.
Him: We don't need those, we're not a bank. If a problem comes up we just fix it and push to production.
(A while later)
Him(in email): Why do we keep getting bugs reported. Don't you devs test your code.

I was mildly annoyed at that one.

Him: We're always over budget on projects, how can we fix this.
Me: What if we increase our quotes.(technically there are other ways as well but not really possible at that time)
Him: We can't do that, clients won't want to pay.

Me: *finishing off my handover as I'm leaving for a new job*
Him: Wow you do a lot of work

Screw the German Telekom!
I recently got a new home without internet so naturally, I went to an isp, Telekom. I went there a few weeks ago and was pleasantly surprised by the personal and the general competence. He told me they would send a technician to check my cable. So I thought great and went home. 1 A week passes, nobody shows up. I then went back to the shop and asked(someone different). He basically told me that such a service must be specifically asked for and a contract has to be signed. I then told
him his colleague told me no such thing, and that the technician should have checked up on my connection last week. He excuses him self and I signed the thingy.

Now you would imagine that this would have worked.
but.
NOOOoooo.

A week came and went and I got pissed. So I went back to the shop the guy from the first try was there. I Asked what happened, he types in his Computer. and. and. and. nothing. Apparently, the previous guy forgot, fucking forgot, to enter my request to their bloody System.
Now I asked if I can Just become a customer.
Guy: Sure, what speed is available in your region?
Me: I don't know...
Guy: Let me check
/Type/ /Type/
Guy: I can't see your speed the technician should have checked.
Me: Um, so, can he check?
Guy: Clearly you don't know what you want
Me:???
Guy:*leaves table*

(shorten but you get the Idea)

At this point, I really wanted to change isp so I went to Vodafone.

Lady comes up to me asks me a bunch of stuff and I explain I would want to change my phone, internet, tv, mobile and my friends mobile(I lost a bet once ^~^) to Vodafone.

What happened next I can't really explain, but she talked to her boss and "cheated" (how she calls it) on Vodafone and got me an AMAZING deal it is cheaper than Telekoms has waay more mobile data, faster Internet and I got a new phone :D.

And guess what she could fucking check, fucking check from here Computer my max internet speed.

I can only hope that the lady got a big fat commission for what she has done.

Internship Rant #2

I can't believe I'm hating my job right now. It sucks because I have never coded in javascript and they expect me to code in javascript. I don't even know what I am doing, but I'm trying my best. I kinda have something already, but the worst part of it is that my boss comes in once in a while and sits beside me looking at my screen and of course, he expects me to tell him what I have been doing and what progress I have done. It's stressful cause I specifically told him that I have never coded in JavaScript and he still thinks I can get things done in a few days.

Perks of new job:
- I can take a bath there whenever I want
- gr8 bathroom 11/10
- gr8 heater, no need to have my hands shaking all the time
- workspace is nice and everyone has an extension so my phone and laptop are always on full charge
- flexible work schedule
- easy access to company files hehehe including credentials

Anyways, so I have to deal with this for three months.

One day at a meeting I proposed a solution and explained it to everyone and everyone agreed to it. And then comes in this motherfucking Mr. shithole who starts talking about a piece of shit approach which had apparent drawbacks and everyone could see it but no one mentions. Why, becuase that bigger asshole is the boss of these smaller assholes. When I mention the drawbacks, all I get in return is, you are right but we think you should go this way. No fucking explanation why should I or any son of bitch should go that way. And every single one of those fuckers in the meeting suddenly became ok with his approach without any question or doubt. I mean WTF! What kind of developer you are if cant fucking express your views.

So I'm back from vacation! It's my first day back, and I'm feeling refreshed and chipper, and motivated to get a bunch of things done quickly so I can slack off a bit later. It's a great plan.

First up: I need to finish up tiny thing from my previous ticket -- I had overlooked it in the description before. (I couldn't test this feature [push notifications] locally so I left it to QA to test while I was gone.)

It amounted to changing how we pull a due date out of the DB; some merchants use X, a couple use Y. Instead of hardcoding them, it would use a setting that admins can update on the fly.

Several methods deep, the current due date gets pulled indirectly from another class, so it's non-trivial to update; I start working through it.

But wait, if we're displaying a due date that differs from the date we're actually using internally, that's legit bad. So I investigate if I need to update the internals, too.

After awhile, I start to make lunch. I ask my boss if it's display-only (best case) and... no response. More investigating.

I start to make a late lunch. A wild sickness appears! Rush to bathroom; lose two turns.

I come back and get distracted by more investigating. I start to make an early dinner... and end up making dinner for my monster instead.

Boss responds, tells me it's just for display (yay!) and that we should use <macro resource feature> instead.

I talk to Mr. Product about which macros I should add; he doesn't respond.

I go back to making lunch-turn-dinner for myself; monster comes back and he's still hungry (as he never asks for more), so I make him dinner.

I check Slack again; Mr. Product still hasn't responded. I go back to making dinner.

Most of the way through cooking, I get a notification! Product says he's talking it through with my boss, who will update me on it. Okay fine. I finish making dinner and go eat.

No response from boss; I start looking through my next ticket.

No response from boss. I ping him and ask for an update, and he says "What are you talking about?" Apparently product never talked to bossmang =/ I ask him about the resources, and he says there's no need to create any more as the one I need already exists! Yay!

So my feature went from a large, complex refactor all the way down to a -1+2 diff. That's freaking amazing, and it only took the entire day!

I run the related specs, which take forever, then commit and push.

Push rejected; pull first! Fair, I have been gone for two weeks. I pull, and git complains about my .gitignore and some local changes. fine, whatever. Except I forgot I had my .gitignore ignored (skipped worktree). Finally figure that out, clean up my tree, and merge.

Time to run the specs again! Gems are out of date. Okay, I go run `bundle install` and ... Ruby is no longer installed? Turns out one of the changes was an upgrade to Ruby 2.5.8.

Alright, I run `rvm use ruby-2.5.8` and.... rvm: command not found. What. I inspect the errors from before and... ah! Someone's brain fell out and they installed rbenv instead of the expected rvm on my mac. Fine, time to figure it out. `rbenv which ruby`; error. `rbenv install --list`; skyscraper-long list that contains bloody everything EXCEPT 2.5.8! Literally 2.5 through 2.5.7 and then 2.6.0-dev. asjdfklasdjf

Then I remember before I left people on Slack made a big deal about upgrading Ruby, so I go looking. Dummy me forgot about the search feature for a painful ten minutes. :( Search found the upgrade instructions right away, ofc. I follow them, and... each step takes freaking forever. Meanwhile my children are having a yelling duet in the immediate background, punctuated with screams and banging toys on furniture.

Eventually (seriously like twenty-five minutes later) I make it through the list. I cd into my project directory and... I get an error message and I'm not in the project directory? what. Oh, it's a zsh thing. k, I work around that, and try to run my specs. Fail.

I need to update my gems; k. `bundle install` and... twenty minutes later... all done.

I go to run my specs and... RubyMine reports I'm using 2.5.4 instead of 2.5.8? That can't be right. `ruby --version` reports 2.5.8; `rbenv version` reports 2.5.8? Fuck it, I've fought with this long enough. Restarting fixes everything, right? So I restart. when my mac comes back to life, I try again; same issue. After fighting for another ten minutes, I find a version toggle in RubyMine's settings, and update it to 2.5.8. It indexes for five minutes. ugh.

Also! After the restart, this company-installed surveillance "security" runs and lags my computer to hell. Highest spec MacBook Pro and it takes 2-5 seconds just to switch between desktops!

I run specs again. Hey look! Missing dependency: no execjs. I can't run the specs.

Fuck. This. I'll just push and let the CI run specs for me.

I just don't care anymore. It's now 8pm and I've spent the past 11 hours on a -1+2 diff!

What a great first day back! Everything is just the way I left it.

So this happened when i was developing the iOS app for the company I work in. I was given half boiled code written by the previous employee to work on. The app was laid around a webview. Now in iOS, there are 2 kind of webviews, the UIWebView that works on all iOS versions, and the WKWebview that works only on iOS 8+.
The app was coded using UIWebview, I brouht that up with my boss, and he asked me to continue using it, even after I repeatedly informed him that the javascript engine of this webview is subpar and we could be better off with WKWebview. Fast forward to 12 weeks later. The application is ready and is given to the boss for testing. He runs the app and plays around for a day. The next day, he comes up to me and says "The javascripts aren't working that well, can we switch to WKWebview instead?" In the inside of my mind, I have already murdered him three times, on his face, however I say, "We can look into it."
So, basically I rewrote the whole app with WKWebView, retargetting the app to iOS 8+.
The app is tested and launched. Everythings fine. AND NOW, he comes up to me and says, "Can we switch it back to UIWebView? We really need the app to be universally available on the app store and 6% of our customers, still use iOS7."
You know how I felt and what I had to do. Goes without saying, that the application is available on the AppStore, targetting iOS 7+.

TLDR, iOS Dev, given half boiled code with UIWebview, tells boss about WKWebview (iOS8+) and advantages. He asks me to continue UIWebView. App developed, 12 weeks. He comes up and points to problems and asks me to retarget with WKWebview. Developed and App launched.
He comes up and says, we need iOS7+, retarget the app to UIWebview. FML.

"WTF? These records should have been inserted into the table!"
...Hours of checking code, trying to figure out how this is possible, can't find a way to have this scenario happen...
...Add additional debug and troubleshooting code, add more verbose logging, redeploy to all the containers, reset all the tables, many apologies to the boss for the delay....
...Co-worker comes in: "oh, hey, sorry, accidently deleted some stuff from the database last night before i left."

Somewhere in a lonely break room
There's a guy starting to realize that eternal hell has been unleashed unto him.
It's two a.m.

It's two a.m.
The boss has gone
I'm sitting here waitin'
This desktop's slow
I am getting tired of fixin' all my coworkers' problems
Yeah there's a bug on the loose
Errors in the code
This is unreadable
Rubber ducky can't help
I cannot debug, my whole life spins into a frenzy

Help I'm slippin' into the programming zone
Git push to the prod
Set up a repo
My hard drive just crashed
All my code is gone
Where am I to go
Now that I've broke my distro
Soon you will come to know
When you need Stack Overflow
Soon you will come to know
When you need Stack Overflow

I'm falling down a spiral
Solution unkown
Disgusting legacy, ugly code
Can't get no connection
Can't get through to commit

Well the night weights heavy
On my confused mind
Where's the error on this line
When the CEO comes
He knows damn well
To keep his distance
And he says

Help I'm slippin' into the programming zone
Git push to the prod
Set up a repo
My hard drive just crashed
All my code is gone
Where am I to go
Now that I've broke my distro
Soon you will come to know
When you need Stack Overflow
Soon you will come to know
When you need Stack Overflow
When you need Stack Overflow

When you need Stack Overflow, a ha
When you need Stack Overflow
When you need Stack Overflow, a ha
When you need Stack Overflow

When you need Stack Overflow, a ha
When you need Stack Overflow
When you need Stack Overflow, a ha
When you need Stack Overflow

!dev

TLDR; younger brother is an unreliable fuck. Learning to be a pathetic trickster. Penny teller cheap ass jester.

Hello folks. Time for a little family story.

This started around mid June.
I was a little tight on money the past few months. I had a broken laptop, that my brother wanted to buy. So I told him that he can have it for 100 bucks. It was a 1k gaming laptop 2 years ago, (i7, gtx 960m, 16gb ddr4). But I didn't know how much it would cost to repair. So I was happy with the price and so was him.

He told me he would pay by the end of June.

Hi didn't pay. He repaired the laptop for free by asking his boss, that used to be my friend (I'll probably tell you guys about that in another rant, best friend, got in a fight, stopped talking, next day my brother asked him for a job).

A month later, mid July, I told him I needed the money.

He literally said:

"I don't care for what you need. I'll pay you when I think it is a relevant expense, now I have money only for buying tools and investing in my career".

He was buying 15 usd pens (not only 1), because he wants to have expensive crap.

That was a bit disgusting, but not shocking. (I'm used to his little brat attitude, he's 26 btw).

I thought to myself. Ok, you want to be a bitch?. Then pay more.

I told him that he appreciated a good that wasn't his and that he should either pay now or agree to a new price. He didn't like that idea, but eventually we agreed to make it 300usd.

And one of the clauses was.

"I shouldn't ask him to pay." 🙄

He would pay when he could. (entitled brat attitude again). Ok. Fine.

It's been a month from that. He teased that he would pay 3 weeks ago. And he didn't. I asked him how was the "not asking for payment clause", because he did the teasing and I wanted to know if that kind of shitty mind games was part of the deal.

So that's the background story for the laptop.

Now time for a dinner story.

We share dinner once or twice a week. And when any one is short in money we keep a tally on who's been paying.

When I have money I just let the tally go in my favor, an buy him dinner whenever he says his short on money.

Note: Here, fries and soda are not part of the price, so the one that is short on money pays the fries and soda.

Today it was not one of those days. (Dinner here is about 15 USD for 2, with fries, and soda, nothing fancy, nor healthy, but an exuse to hang out with my only brother that would not eat a salad even if it was free).

I owed him 10 bucks, and he owed me 1 dinner. I asked him if he's buying dinner today. He said that the tally is even because last meal I didn't pay the chips. 🧐. (That was settled because I didn't pay once, but made up for it later)

Again with his entitled ass shitty attitude.

I just said. I don't want to hear your excuses. Here's your money. I want my laptop tomorrow, I'll sell first thing Monday. And tell me how much did you spend on repairs and parts and I'll pay you.

And now I'm sad. 🙃

Mainly, because is just so fucking boring to deal with a person that counts every penny. I fed him for 10 year while he was having problems, (alcohol and depression), And now he comes with this shitty ass counting pennies attitude, wtf?

I literally felt poorer just by counting the cents that made part of this story. (Really, who the fucks keeps track of chips and soda??? What are we 15yo??)))

It's one thing to be trapped in a 3rd world country where everyone is trying to fuck you. You learn to deal with that shit. And it's ok.

But seeing that your little brother is learning the same cheap trickery is just sad. The same cheap approach to life. The same easy and pathetic mind games is just fucking sad.

I don't even mind the money anymore. I was short on cash 2 months ago, I'm gladly better now. But finding out that he's becoming a little scammer is a bummer.

I just needed to vent. I think I should stop enabling him. And maybe keep some distance, it is fucking depressing to be counting cents to settle an argument. By dealing with that fucktard I end up counting cents just to figure out who's right.

*be me
* Design a website
* Boss comes in*
* Mmm smth off *
* Me discretely changes nothing, ctrl+S it
* Page reloads
* Boss : looks perfect

I am a people people pleaser.

Especially when it comes to deadlines. I struggle heavily with them. For example:

My boss: 'Will the app be done by Friday?'

Me: 'well some features won't be ready but overall yes.'

The truth: "No even if I work on it 24/7 there are just so many things in the background that are too technical to explain to my boss that it will be impossible for me to hit that deadline. It will most likely take over a month to be ready for beta testing...."

I just don't know how to deal with those kinds of questions. I don't want to say 'most likely over a month' because it makes me look like a bad dev but at the same time I know that that is way more realistic than 'it will be done by Friday'

The truth is: even if it just looks like 3 buttons to you, in reality I need to change thousands of lines of code to accomplish the expected goals...

P.S:

I wanted to write this rant for a long time. Now I am drunk. There will be a sober more ordered version of this rant.

Me: I need more programmers for the project.
Boss: You have 4 people, that's enough.
Me: I have 3 juniors taking 50% of time of a senior (me) contributing less than a medior and rest of my time goes to managing project. I know that in 6 months time invested in them will start paying off, but right now I need more people. Also I don't have me, by that logic, cleaning lady comes to the office every day and we couldn't work witout her, so there's 5 people, at least.
Boss: You'll manage.
Inner me: I would if I was working 8 hours as programmer without tutoring and managing.
Me: Sigh.

Has anyone been in a situation where a sr dev, with 12 yrs of experience and paid more than you, can't fix something after trying for a week and now the boss comes to you and expects you (a lowly paid dev with only 5) to fix it in a day, now that it's super urgent?

That describes my day... FML... I have to do overtime tonight...

Feels nice to have some place to rant now though....

Our project schedule is quite full at the moment, we are basically at the limit for the next three months.

In comes one of our sales people: "Hey, can we squeeze in a little project, nothing fancy just a very basic static web page." (No question mark there, it was not a question...)

I say no, we are full, the deadline is to tight (3 weeks), can't do it.

In comes boss: "Sure you can, just push everything else back." (We won't change deadlines, what he actually means is for us to do unpaid overtime for two months so he can barocke make a few thousand extra bucks...)

So I cave and allow it. It were just 4 hours of work, we can squeeze it in, maybe do a little less R&D this month.

Next day, the project scope changed, suddenly we are not taking about 4 hours but 80. Sure, we can squeeze two extra weeks into the month.

That is when I realized, I don't hate my work, just my work environment.

First day on my first job ever, the boss asks me what I want to do. I indicated that I had some experience with php and the yii framework (which was at some point very cool xD), so I wanted to start with something like that. And so it goes: after two days of watching laracasts (which is an awesome platform by the way! :O) I got assigned to a project.

Now the company I work at uses some kind of self built system that tracks how many hours are spent on which project, and compares that to how many hours was estimated implementing a feature would take. That's cool, but then I saw that for the project I was working on the time estimated was 5 work days. This was the estimate for both designing the interfaces and implementing both front and backend. I knew in advance that this was probably way to little time for me, but didn't want to come over as the new kid who can't do shit x)

Anyway, I started on the project and was having fun, but the biggest time consuming aspect of the project was not necessarily that I didn't have enough experience: it was that the developer who started this project and made most of the design choices had written some very messy code, without tests or apparently any refactoring. Also, everything was extremly inconsistent and not according to all the best practices I just watched in my laracasts spree.

So fastforward a little: we're way over the estimated hours. Yay. Now suddenly the boss comes by with an almost angry face that the client is becoming angry and we need to finish soon. He makes it entirely our (me and the front end guy) problem and I just decide to say nothing and try to work faster.

Now I'm stuck writing fugly code on top of more fugly code and when I mentioned to my front end guy that I was almost finished with feature but I only needed to finish up the tests, he said something like "oh just don't write tests, that'll take too long"... Is that really the mindset of this company?! No wonder the project I work on was in a very bad state.

Thanks to devrant I see now that I just need to say something if I know that I won't be able to complete something in a certain amount of time and that other people are just like me (thank god). :) I think I'll need to post more rants to vent my frustrations x)

Disclaimer: Long tale of a tech support job. Also the wk29 story is at the bottom.

One time I was working tech support for a website and email hosting firm that was in town. I was hired and worked as the only tech support person there, so all calls came in through me. This also meant that if I was on a call, and another one came through, they would go straight to voice mail. But I couldn't hang up calls either, so, sometimes someone would take up tons of time and I'd have to help them. I was also the "SEO" and "Social Media Marketing" person, as well; managed peoples' social media campaigns. I have tons of stories from this place but a few in particular stick out to me. No particular order to these, I'm just reminiscing as I write this.

I once had to help a man who couldn't find the start button on his computer. When I eventually guided him to allowing me to remote into his computer via Team Viewer, I found he was using Windows XP. I'm not kidding.

I once had to sit on the phone with a man selling Plexus Easy Weight Loss (snake oil, pyramid scheme, but he was a client) and have him yell at me about not getting him more business, simply because we'd built his website. No, I'D not built his website, but his website was fine and it wasn't our job to get him more business. Oh yeah, this is the same guy who said that he didn't want the social media marketing package because he "had people to hide from." Christ.

We had another client who was a conspiracy theorist and wanted the social media marketing package for his blog, all about United States conspiracies. Real nut case. But the best client I've ever had because sometimes he'd come into the office and take up my time talking at me about how Fukushima was the next 911 and that soon it'll spill into the US water supply and everybody was going to die. Hell, better than being on the phone! Doing his social media was great because he wanted me to post clearly fake news stories to his twitter and facebook for him, and I got to look at and manage all the comments calling him out on his bullshit. It was kinda fun. After all, it wasn't _me_ that believed all this. It felt like I was trolling.

[wk29] I was the social media and support techie, not a salesperson. But sometimes I was put in charge _alone_ in front of clients for status meetings about their social media. This one time we had a client who was a custom fashion-type person. I don't really remember. But I was told directly to make them a _new_ facebook page and post to it every day with their hot new deals and stuff. MONTHS pass since I do that and they come in for a face-to-face meeting. Boss is out doing... boss things and that means I have to sit in with her, and for some fucking reason she brought her boyfriend AND HER DAD. Who were both clearly very very angry with me, the company, and probably life. They didn't ever say anything at first, they didn't greet me, they were both just there like British royal guards. It was weird as fuck. I start showing them the page, the progress on their likes goals, etc etc. Marketing shit. They say, "huh, we didn't see any of these posts at home." Turns out they already had a Facebook page, I was working on a completely seperate one, and then the boyfriend finally chimes in with the biggest fucking scowl, "what are you going to do about this?" He was sort of justified, considering this was a payed and semi-expensive service we offered, but holy shit the amount of fire in all three of them. Anyway, it came down to me figuring out how to merge facebook pages, but they eventually left as clients. Is this my fuck up? Is it my company's? Is it theirs? I don't know but that was probably the most awkward meeting ever. Don't know if it comes across through text but the anxiety was pretty real. Fuck.

tl;dr Tech support jobs are a really fun and exciting entry level position I recommend everybody apply for if they're starting out in the tech world! You'll meet tons of cool people and every day is like a new adventure.

I seear man fucking shit php devs make it hard for people to appreciate the language.
To start, i don't think there is anything wrong with php. As a language I know damn near all of its pitfalls and have successfully deployed huge applications with minimal fuss.

The thing is...this shit seems to happen only when I AM THE MOTHERFUCKER THAT DOES IT

In any other scenario i am constantly cursing the original author under my fucking breath hoping that they choke on their own dicks. Fucking cunts.

Really man, some of the fucking code i have seen. This shit is dangerous as fuck and i can't believe that in 2019 motherfuckers would not have the decency to google for best fucking practices or learn it from a fucking book and shit.

Writing proper php code is not that fucking hard people, every fucking update to the language, every fucking tool that comes out is for the betterment of it.
Guess proper oop or functional paradigms are too complex for some dickheads. Hell, not even top to bottom procedural code.

Fuck me. Good thing is, boss is happy, the entire faculty is happy, the board is happy. Everyone is motherfucking happy.

Dez negroids better remember this shit cuz I just asked for a $20k raise.

I got a raise literally every time i ask for one so this one better make the cut.

Fuck shit php developers man. Y'all don't deserve the language, y'all make the language look bad, y'all make the community look bad.

Fuck you, die and eat a dick. Do all that shit in whatever order you prefer.

Last year at the the Xmas party CEO slips in that he wants the app done by end of February, I freak because I thought he meant both iOS and Android (only dev working on both :/), anyways he wanted specifics for locking out specific people that haven't paid for some in-house training (like in app persons just not in the app lol) it required web development which I'm horrible at, I spend a whole week and managed to scrape together the right functions to do a user lock out, pretty all things considering.

A couple weeks before deadline I'm done :D, I've done a lot of testing, some in-house user testing, changes made all bugs visually possible are fixed.

Now I've been sitting here waiting, it's an iOS app that is currently completed aside from some legal work, which I kept going to boss "hey, we need that disclaimer and privacy policy", he becomes busy for the next few weeks, pester him more, pester another co-worker, only a week ago did they contact a lawyer...

I'm here stuck waiting at a roadblock, developing the Android app sure but for their iOS app that they want released first, I'm stuck on hold, so annoyed, it's not like I can just put on a lawyer hat and just right some shit that says don't use x unless you agree and such.

So annoying, for about 2 weeks I just played games on my phone, I was not expecting to waste that much time lol, I was really expecting the legal stuff to be ready.

Just a side note co-worker and boss that needed to get this legal stuff knew I needed to get this done, since I mentioned it leading up to my completion.

I don't think it'd take too long with Apple when it comes to the review, it's just an update but I wouldn't put my faith in that as an answer. Just hate that I'm on hold, was wanting to finish this app and apply for a new job (nothing against the company more so because I want to go a company where I could get a but of mentoring). But I sit here waiting, working on the Android app, it'd be sad if finish the Android app before their lawyers get back to me with the legal stuff, though Android is a lot easier for me (I did iOS after completing majority of the features they wanted on Android because I was more comfortable working on it).

:/ What a drag

"four million dollars"

TL;DR. Seriously, It's way too long.

That's all the management really cares about, apparently.

It all started when there were heated, war faced discussions with a major client this weekend (coonts, I tell ye) and it was decided that a stupid, out of context customisation POC had that was hacked together by the "customisation and delivery " (they know to do neither) team needed to be merged with the product (a hot, lumpy cluster fuck, made in a technology so old that even the great creators (namely Goo-fucking-gle) decided that it was their worst mistake ever and stopped supporting it (or even considering its existence at this point)).

Today morning, I my manager calls me and announces that I'm the lucky fuck who gets to do this shit.

Now being the defacto got admin to our team (after the last lead left, I was the only one with adequate experience), I suggested to my manager "boss, here's a light bulb. Why don't we just create a new branch for the fuckers and ask them to merge their shite with our shite and then all we'll have to do it build the mixed up shite to create an even smellier pile of shite and feed it to the customer".

"I agree with you mahaDev (when haven't you said that, coont), but the thing is <insert random manger talk here> so we're the ones who'll have to do it (again, when haven't you said that, coont)"

I said fine. Send me the details. He forwarded me a mail, which contained context not amounting to half a syllable of the word "context". I pinged the guy who developed the hack. He gave me nothing but a link to his code repo. I said give me details. He simply said "I've sent the repo details, what else do you require?"

1st motherfucker.

Dafuq? Dude, gimme some spice. Dafuq you done? Dafuq libraries you used? Dafuq APIs you used? Where Dafuq did you get this old ass checkout on which you've made these changes? AND DAFUQ IS THIS TOOL SUPPOSED TO DO AND HOW DOES IT AFFECT MY PRODUCT?

Anyway, since I didn't get a lot of info, I set about trying to just merge the code blindly and fix all conflicts, assuming that no new libraries/APIs have been used and the code is compatible with our master code base.

Enter delivery head. 2nd motherfucker.

This coont neither has technical knowledge nor the common sense to ask someone who knows his shit to help out with the technical stuff.

I find out that this was the half assed moron who agreed to a 3 day timeline (and our build takes around 13 hours to complete, end to end). Because fuck testing. They validated the their tool, we've tested our product. There's no way it can fail when we make a hybrid cocktail that will make the elephants foot look like a frikkin mojito!

Anywho, he comes by every half-mother fucking-hour and asks whether the build has been triggered.

Bitch. I have no clue what is going on and your people apparently don't have the time to give a fuck. How in the world do you expect me to finish this in 5 minutes?

Anyway, after I compile for the first time after merging, I see enough compilations to last a frikkin life time. I kid you not, I scrolled for a complete minute before reaching the last one.

Again, my assumption was that there are no library or dependency changes, neither did I know the fact that the dude implemented using completely different libraries altogether in some places.

Now I know it's my fault for not checking myself, but I was already having a bad day.

I then proceeded to have a little tantrum. In the middle of the floor, because I DIDN'T HAVE A CLUE WHAT CHANGES WERE MADE AND NOBODY CARED ENOUGH TO GIVE A FUCKING FUCK ABOUT THE DAMN FUCK.

Lo and behold, everyone's at my service now. I get all things clarified, takes around an hour and a half of my time (could have been done in 20 minutes had someone given me the complete info) to find out all I need to know and proceed to remove all compilation problems.

Hurrah. In my frustration, I forgot to push some changes, and because of some weird shit in our build framework, the build failed in Jenkins. Multiple times. Even though the exact same code was working on my local setup (cliche, I know).

In any case, it was sometime during sorting out this mess did I come to know that the reason why the 2nd motherfucker accepted the 3 day deadline was because the total bill being slapped to the customer is four fucking million USD.

Greed. Wow. The fucker just sacrificed everyone's day and night (his team and the next) for 4mil. And my manager and director agreed. Four fucking million dollars. I don't get to see a penny of it, I work for peanut shells, for 15 hours, you'll get bonuses and commissions, the fucking junior Dev earns more than me, but my manager says I'm the MVP of the team, all I get is a thanks and a bad rating for this hike cycle.

4mil usd, I learnt today, is enough to make you lick the smelly, hairy balls of a Neanderthal even though the money isn't truly yours.

I finally fucking made it!

Or well, I had a thorough kick in my behind and things kinda fell into place in the end :-D

I dropped out of my non-tech education way too late and almost a decade ago. While I was busy nagging myself about shit, a friend of mine got me an interview for a tech support position and I nailed it, I've been messing with computers since '95 so it comes easy.

For a while I just went with it, started feeling better about myself, moved up from part time to semi to full time, started getting responsibilities. During my time I have had responsibility for every piece of hardware or software we had to deal with. I brushed up documentation, streamlined processes, handled big projects and then passed it on to 'juniors' - people pass through support departments fast I guess.

Anyway, I picked up rexx, PowerShell and brushed up on bash and windows shell scripting so when it felt like there wasn't much left I wanted to optimize that I could easily do with scripting I asked my boss for a programming course and free hands to use it to optimize workflows.

So after talking to programmer friends, you guys and doing some research I settled on C# for it's broad application spectrum and ease of entry.

Some years have passed since. A colleague and I built an application to act as portal for optimizations and went on to automate AD management, varius ssh/ftp jobs and backend jobs with high manual failure rate, hell, towards the end I turned in a hobby project that earned myself in 10 times in saved hours across the organization. I felt pretty good about my skills and decided I'd start looking for something with some more challenge.

A year passed with not much action, in part because I got comfy and didn't send out many applications. Then budget cuts happened half a year ago and our Branch's IT got cut bad - myself included.

I got an outplacement thing with some consultant firm as part of the goodbye package and that was just hold - got control of my CV, hit LinkedIn and got absolutely swarmed by recruiters and companies looking for developers!

So here I am today, working on an AspX webapp with C# backend, living the hell of a codebase left behind by someone with no wish to document or follow any kind of coding standards and you know what? I absolutely fucking love it!

So if you're out there and in doubt, do some competence mapping, find a nice CV template, update your LinkedIn - lots of sources for that available and go search, the truth is out there!

It’s a pretty good feeling when you’ve been sweating deadlines, stay in late, worrying about users, testing, maintaining a list of projects as long as your arm but your boss comes to you and low key asks you to be CTO of the company. It’s a small company so we don’t officially have that title but that’s the role I’ll be filling!

My NDA prevents me of revealing a lot but here we go...

Hi,
during a 2 year hiatus after High School I decided to study CS. Coming from a third world country with no prospect of getting a nice job without breaking my back or getting spit on by overconfident CS geeks who now actually make a living wage there, I decided to study abroad.

I immediately realized what I have been missing... the culture, the people, the happenings,... I have been starved of LIFE

Anyways, I got the language pretty much down, uni is pretty hard but doable and I got the unthinkable... A JOB. I am currently a working student for a year at a multimillion dollar global conglomerate, doing what some may think of as scripting/data tinkering. I get payed more than both my parents combined, which is why they don't know anything... 😂 (yet, gotta ease em into it).

Now I have gotten my contract extended, which shows that I am doing a decent job there, the boss is firm but chill, coworkers are helpful and resourceful.

But what really grinds my gears is that I am mashing code together whilst googling my brain out, but I am not gaining any skill...

Now comes my grievance, the bane of my existence, the evil Morty to my Morty,... GitHub.

In this professional surrounding, where I got handed a $2,5k notebook and a overly huge paycheck, I never use Git (because we have a proprietary, internal, and very transparent alternative (transparent for the higher ups 😬 ))

I always wanted to contribute on GitHub, but I get very intimidated by the projects there and their scopes, people are waaay too knowledgeable in comparison to me and I will most certainly screw something up and embarrass myself. Since I am very self-conscious and awkward I would most probably just delete my profile there and lurk in the shadows again.

I need help, not only for my mental health, but also to expand my skillset and improve myself, since skill is the only thing I can still acquire.

Does anyone know where I should start as a overglorified python script-kiddy who still thinks 1337 is cool and mr Robot is a decent show?

Thanks,
@rn

My boss and one of my coworkers “touch me”...

I’m usually one of the first ones in the office. When my coworker comes in and walks by, he touches my shoulder from the back in a “hello friend” kinda way.

Especially when I’m trying to ignore him he pokes my shoulder. He could you’d waved his hand in front of my head.

My boss is trying to be the “buddy” I guess. When having lunch and someone says something funny, he literally rests his hand on my shoulder or kinda rams my shoulder with his shoulder..

They think that’s nice and “bonding” but I hate it and it makes me very very uncomfortable. The ONLY ones who are allowed to touch me are my GF (I don’t have one) and other girls i know in a night out after a few drinks.

Not even my best friends touch me cause they know I don’t like that.

Im giving obvious signs that they should stop but they don’t get it..

On the other hand I probably have some serious problems that It makes me that uncomfortable in the first place, but not sure how to fix that.. i don’t even go to the barber shop because they have to touch me to cut my hair. So I cut them myself or my dad does it once in a year.

So, i live in Venezuela, a country with a lot of economical and political issues. Back in December I talked to my boss an ask for a pay raise, he talked me a lot of shit about economical issues his has been having with the Enterprise and give my a raise plan til July (starting in December).

Now he comes to me and tell me he can't afford to pay me the rest of the raise, because he's now in difficult times. The funny thing is I've talked to him many times to point it out some things that are bad and will cause him money loss.

I really don't want to go because I love the people I'm working with (they have the same problem that I) but is fucking frustrating when all is going wrong and you have some ideas to solve it, ideas you have searched a lot and came with a plan after a bunch of investigation, you come up with the plan everybody seems to love it but after that nobody applies it.

I think there is no much more I can do

So this i quite a big project, hundreds of files everywhere, pages are rendered using multiple files.

This is one of the latest created page, it was made by my boss, and it just give me the creeps.

I REALLY don't know how he always comes up with shit like these.

I just hate having more than 5 closing tags in sequence...

TL;DR Dear boss, firstly, you always get someone to review anything important done by a fucking intern.
Secondly, you do not give access to your fucking client's production server to an intern.
Thirdly, you don't ask your fucking intern to test the intern's work that has not been reviewed by anyone directly on your client's fucking production server.

Last week, the boss and one of the lead devs (the only guy with some serious knowledge about systems and networking) decided to give me (an intern who barely has any work experience) the task of fixing or finding an alternate solution to allowing their support team access to their client machines. Currently they used a reverse SSH tunnel and an intermediary VH but for some reason, that was very unreliable in terms of availability. I suggested using OpenVPN and explained how it would work. Seemed to be a far better idea and they accepted. After several days of working through documentations and guides and everything, I figured out how OpenVPN works and managed to deploy a TEST server and successfully test remote access using two VMs. On seeing my tests, the boss told me that he wanted to test it on the client network. I agreed. Today he comes to me and he tells me to prepare testing for tomorrow and that the client technician is going to give me access to one of their boxes. And then he adds, "It's a working prod server. We'll see if we can make it work on that" and left. I gaped at him for a while and asked another dev guy in the room if what I heard was right. He confirmed. Turns out, the lead dev and the boss's son (who also works here) had had a huge argument since morning on the same issue and finally the dev guy had washed it off his hands and declared that if anything goes wrong from testing it on production, it's entirely the boss's own fault. That's when the boss stepped in and approached me. I ran back to his office and began to explain why prod servers don't top the list of things you can fuck around with. But he simply silenced me saying, "What can go wrong?" and added, "You shouldn't stay still. You should keep moving". Okay, like firstly what the fuck and secondly, what the fuck?.
Even though OpenVPN client is not the scariest thing to install, tomorrow's going to be fun.

This is a guide for technology noobies who wants to buy a laptop but have no idea what the SPECS are meaning.

1. Brand
If you like Apple, and love their !sleek design, go to the nearest Apple store and tell them "I want to buy one. Recommendations?"
If you don't like Apple, well, buy anything that fits you. Read more below.

2. Size
There are 11~15 inches, weight is 850g ~ 2+kg. Very many options. Buy whatever you like.

//Fun part coming

3. CPU
This is the power of the brain.
For example,
Pentium is Elementary Schoolers
i3 is Middle Schoolers
i5 is High Schoolers
i7 is University People

Dual-core is 2 people
Quad-core is 4 people

Quiz! What is i5 Dual-core?
A) 2 High Schoolers.

Easy peasy, right?

Now if you have a smartphone and ONLY use Messaging, Phone, and Whatsapp (lol), you can buy Pentium laptops.
If not, I recommend at least i3

Also, there are numbers behind those CPU, like i3-6100
6 means 6th generaton.
If the numbers are bigger, it is the most recent generation.

Think of 6xxx as Stone age people
7xxx as Bronze age people
8xxx as Iron age people
and so one.

4. RAM
This is the size of the desk.
There are 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, and so one.
Think of 4GB as small desk to only put one book on it.
8GB as a desk to put a laptop with a keyboard and a mouse.
16GB as a normal sized desk to put some books, laptop, and food.
32GB as a boss sized desk.
And so one.

When you do multitasking, and the desk is too small...
You don't feel comfortable right?
It is good when there are spacious space.
Same with RAM.

But when the desk becomes larger, it gets expensive, so buy the one with the affordable price.

If you watch some YouTube videos in Chrome and do some document words with Office, buy at least 8GB. 16GB is recommended.

5. HDD/SSD
You take out the stuffs such as books and laptop from the basket (HDD/SSD), and put in your desk (RAM).

There are two kinds of baskets.
The super big ones, but because it is so big, it is bulky and hard to get stuffs out of the basket. But it is cheap. (HDD)
There are a bit smaller ones but expensive compared to the HDD, it is called SSD. This basket is right next to you, and it is super easy to get stuffs out of this basket. The opening time is faster as well.

SSDs were expensive, but as times go, it gets bigger as well, and cheaper. So most laptops are SSD these days.
There are 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1024GB(=1TB), and so one. You can buy what you want. Recommend 256GB for normal use.
Game guy? At least 512GB.

6. Graphics
It is the eyesight.
Most computers doesn't have dedicated graphics card, it comes with the CPU. Intel CPUs has CPU + graphics, but the graphics powered by Intel isn't that good.
But NVIDIA graphics cards are great. Recommended for gamers. But it is a bit more expensive.

So TL;DR

Buying a laptop is
- Pick the person and the person's clothes (brand and design)
- Pick the space for the person to stay (RAM, SSD/HDD)
- Pick how smart they are (CPU)
- Pick how many (Core)
- Pick the generation (6xxx, 7xxx ....)
- Pick their eyesight (graphics)

And that's pretty much it.
Super easy to buy a laptop right?

If you have suggestions or questions, make sure to leave a comment, upvote this rant, and share to your friends!

disadvantage of using noise canceling headphones.

boss comes in from other room. more amused than annoyed
👺:Is there a reason you are letting out a loud burp and a fart every couple minutes that i can hear through the walls?
🙊:Oh!? now I understand why my deaf friends are so oblivious to why the rest of us start laughing for 'no reason' when we go out to dinner with them.

I would like to rant one more time about my internship.

I began in July, the first. That's my sister who helped me to find this internship and I was a little scared about how bad it could be.
I came at the office, my boss told me that I would work in an "Innovation lab", an apartment where people works on projects that are less corporate than the enterprise's ones.

To me, it was amazing. So I came in this apartment, it was like a dream. I didn't know that I would have such luck to be in this environment : kitchen, sofas, beds, many decorations for all political ideologies, ideas. There was some decorations that were about weed and many cool things for the young guy I am.

The lab's leader told me that it was a very free environment and all the awesome stuff I could use.
Then they showed me where I would work.

We were two interns employed as web developers. We had a complete room for us.
Then we began to work there, and I was presented to my internship tutor.
He gave me some instructions but told me that I had a week before the project begin.

Here began the troubles.

We waited a complete week without having any instructions. Then we began to build something in PHP with our knowledge and the informations someone from the lab gave us.
When finally we had news from the project, two weeks later, we learned that the project would be built with ASP. NET.
Here we go, I learn ASP. NET alone. I have many problems and nobody helps (even if the problem comes from enterprise's API/Framework). I finally make something usable with no help, after I discovered that my mate wasn't developer at all and just took an option for her classes which forced her to get an internship.

She had 3 month left, I had 6.
Then when the project really began, nobody came to verify what I was doing and on a meeting, they said that I was doing nothing.

The boss even became mad on us because he couldn't see what we were doing (we're back end developers).
I asked for help to the developers of the enterprise and someone came, sad to have to help an internship, and learned some tricks but nothing else.

To have a concrete explanation of what DDD was, I had to ask 4 times for help.

Finally I had something that could receive data from the connected hives we are working on and store them into a database in the architecture of the enterprise.

Then, they wanted me to try an API for them. I tried, and it wasn't working at all. So they make me still wait to change my whole architecture when the API will be released.

Recently, I was told that I would never do the front-end of the project (which was an horror because of the fantasm of the lab leader). Then they realized that my late wasn't a programmer. So they asked me to make a prototype for the front-end. I did for a presentation.

Then they didn't tell me the device they would use for the presentation and it was an iPhone 7. Idk why, safari couldn't display what IE can.

They blamed me for having done a bad work. It wasn't my job. I did it to help because they can't find a fucking front-end developer with a little more experience than me.

Actually, I am an alone developer since my mate is gone and the lab leader don't want me to show up because she considers me as a shame.
I asked to be moved back in the office of the enterprise, they agreed and said it was a 2-weeks delay. It's the Thursday of the second week and I have no news. I send mails to my tutor, even SMS, he doesn't answer me. They didn't call me to give me my pay with a week late. And the person who is responsible doesn't answer me neither. I came to see her, but she wasn't available. I'm now alone in a desk, waiting the time to pass.

Fucking this shit.

I'm in France.

EDIT : I forgot to say that I can't use the sofas or bed because I'm allergic to cats and there were 3 cats. Now there is still one and this beast vomits and poos everywhere in the house...

!myrant

I'm a junior developer in a small company alongside with a fellow programmer. Since I have an interest in Security and our Sys Admin left, my boss offered me to do some sys admin stuff.

I feel bad for my fellow programmer just because there is an old man in the company that doesn't come to me with his tech problems and goes to him.

Something like this goes down today:
OM: Hey, I can't watch my Fox Live News. Can you help me?
FP: The problem isn't on our side

*OM keeps pestering him*

FP: Let me check it out

*Goes and fix the issue and comes back laughing *

My coworker is to kind 😬😂😅

In a meeting yesterday working through our WebAPI coding standards, starting from File -> New project..etc..etc.. and ironing out some of the left-or-right decisions so we can have a consistent coding style, working in a meeting room with an overhead projector and sharing keyboard around with one another.

Then we hit the routing 'rules' in the WebApiConfig, "api/{controller}/{id}"…

DevMgr: "Do we need the 'api' prefix? It seems redundant."
Ralph: "Yes it's needed. Prefixing the controllers with 'api' is industry best practice. Otherwise, how is anyone to know it's a web api"
Prancer: "Yea, it's part of the REST standard."
Me: "I don't think so. That is only part of the Asp.Net routing rule. We can put anything we want or take anything out."
DevMgr: "Yea, it looks silly. All the new services are going to be business process specific."
Ralph: "That's how everyone does it. It's kind of the point of why REST services are called WebApi"
Prancer: "What's the point of doing any of this work if we're not going to follow industry standards."
Me: "I understand if the service is part of larger web site, but we're developing standalone services. Prefixing routes with 'api' is redundant. I mean who are these 'everyone' you're talking about?"
<ralph rolls his eyes>
Ralph: "Lets see …uhhh… Netflix?. They're kinda a big deal."
Me: "Like I said, it's an integral part of their site and the services they provide. That's fine. I'm talking about the 12 other 3rd party services we integrate with. None of them have 'api' on any of their routes."
Prancer: "We're talking about serious web services."
Me: "Last time I checked, UPS is a big and serious service."
Ralph: "Their services are a fracking joke" – he didn't say fracking.
Me: "Our payroll system, our billing system, billion dollar companies, didn't have '/api' prefix anywhere. Heck, even that free faxing service we used for a while was a dead-simple routing path."
<I take the keyboard away from Ralph, remove the 'api' from the route.>
Me: "There. Done. Now, lets talk about error handling.."

Rest of the meeting Ralph and Prancer don't say much of anything, arms crossed…I swear Ralph looked like he was going to cry.
This morning I catch my boss…
Me: "What did you think of the meeting? I thought Ralph was going to take a swing at me when I took the keyboard away from him."
DevMgr: "Oh yes…I almost laughed out loud….blows my freaking mind how worked up people get about crap that doesn't matter. Api..or not…who the frack cares. Just make it consistent"
Me: "Exactly…I didn't care either way, but I enjoyed calling out that nonsense."
DevMgr: "Yes..waaay too much."

If I didn't call them on their BS and the 'standard' allowed to continue, I can bet my paycheck when the subject comes up in a few months (another mgr asks 'isn't this api prefix redundant?') Ralph and Prancer will be the first to say "Yea, its stupid. We fought really hard to remove it from the standard...its not our fault...its <insert scapegoat> fault."

*Not a rant, but a very long vent*
I'm 20 and facing the worst dilemma I ever experienced.
Been working at a company for more than half a year, got the job thru a friend and started as an intern to take care of customer problems, crap they do to PC's, printers that wouldn't work, answer emails and phone calls about our point-of-sale software.
Soon everything started to change, on one day my boss asked my what I knew about coding, all I could answer was about some really basic stuff that I learnt on a previous semester at college, just some very basic coding stuff we got for C, how for loops works, conditions, that kind of thing. Soon I was being asked to code a client management software for our company, I was starting to grasp a little of this wonderful world, soon I could write some more complex code in C#, even did a program that in 30 seconds did a 3 day's worth of work, and then I got assigned to develop a mobile POS application, earned a raise, and man, is this wonderful.
I feel that I really found my place in life, found something that makes me jump out of bed every morning.
But here comes the dilemma part: I'm enrolled in a mechanical engineering school for two years now, and it's my second place already (been enrolled at a agronomy school before that) and I'm starting to feel out of place, in all the classes I'm taking, I cant help but feel that this isn't for me, I don't see myself doing that for a future, but I don't know if jumping to another boat would make it any better or just worse, I don't know how good are my odds at a tech oriented course are, I don't really know what to do with the rest of my life.
Guess I'm just afraid of doing something stupid and regret it later, don't know if I should listen to the voice that shouts to me to do whatever I want to with my life or the one that assures me of a stable path... Don't know if anyone will read this much, but if so, thanks a lot, just wanted to put it out of my shoulders and maybe get to know anyone that has been here. I'm new here, but I feel already at home. ☺

TLDR boss is an idiot.

Boss has an issue. Sends screenshot, and a one sentence explanation, boss-style (not really clear, but the screenshot helps).
I set to solve it, not a minute passes, the boss os calling.
Explains the issue, i tell him I'm working on it, will msg when done. He explains the problem again, and tells me to hurry. I tell him, sure, let's hang up, give me five minutes, so he starts explaining again, that it's IMPORTANT.

Finally hangs up, it didn't take more than 3 minutes to solve it, msg him, it's done. test it, screenshots for the two parts i solved (of the one he wanted corrected and one where a similar case is still as it's supposed to be, not altered).

He calls me, I start telling him this us what I did, the screenshot.... *Interrups*
This is not what he needed, it's important, IMPORTANT i say, and tells the problem again.
I'm pretty annoyed by now, and just calm fuckoff mood comes over. I practically told him to click the link and see for himself....

if you want to take 10 minutes for something i would explain in 2 sentences, is it really that important....

A long long time ago ( 2007 I think ) I worked for a company that made landing sites, so basically an email campaign would go out, users would be sent to a 1 page website with a form to capture their data, ready to be spammed even more. You know how it was back then.

So I worked with a guy who we had just hired, I didn't do the hiring but his CV checked out, so I gave him one of my tasks. Now most pages were made with js and html, with a PHP backend ( called with Ajax). Now this guy didn't know PHP so I was like all good, ASP works too at the end of the day we don't judge, we do like 2 or 3 of these a day and never look at them again. So he goes of and does is thing.

3 weeks later, the customer calls up to me they still haven't received their landing page. Ok so he probably forgot to email the customer np, I tell him to double check he has emailed the customer. Another week goes by end the customer calls back, same problem. At this point I'm getting worried, because we're days away from the deadline and it was originally my task.

So I go back to the guy and I tell him I want that landing page so I can send it myself, half thinking to myself that we had a freeloader, that guy that comes in to companies for 3 weeks, doesn't work, but still cashes his pay. But no, this was much worse.

So he tells me he has finished yet. I ask him why, what's the blocker ? You had 4 weeks to tell me you were blocked and couldn't progress. And his answer was simply, because I wasn't blocked I have been working on it this whole time. So I tell him to zip his project up and email it to me. We didn't do SVN or git back then, simply wasn't worth it. So he comes back to me and says the email server is telling him attachments can't be bigger then 50mb. At this point I'm thinking he didn't properly sized the art or something, so I give him a flash drive to put it on.

When I then open the flash drive, the archive is 300mb, thinking to myself, the images weren't even that big to begin with.
So I open it up, and I don't even find any images, just a single asp page. About 500mb. When I opened that up and it finally loaded, I saw the most horrendous things ever.

The first 500 lines was just initializing empty vars. Then there was some code that created an empty form with an onChange event that submits the form. After that.. it was just non stop nested if's. No loops, no while, for, foreach, NO elseif's, just nested if's, for every possible combination of the state the form could be in. Abou 5000 of them, in a single file. To make matters worse, all the form ( and page ) layout was hardcoded in the if's. Includes inline css, base64 encoded images, nothing but as dynamic, based on the length of the form he changes the layout, added more background etc. He cut the images up for every possible size of the page and included them in the code.

I showed it to my boss, he fired the guy on the spot. I redid the work from scratch, in under 4 hours. Send it to the client. they had no ammends to make, happy as Larry. Whish I kept the code somewhere.

Morale of the story, allways do a coding test on interviews, even if small things just to sanity check.

We have to use a 20 year old API that is half assed and doesn't even work right every time.
Every three months the same discussion comes up why something doesn't work that relies on that API. I have to explain the situation over and over again... And then my boss starts to give 'solutions' which we already use or are utterly stupid... >.<

In case someone is wondering: SOAP API on a Windows Server 2003 with timeouts every few minutes and XML output in a language that is not English (even the tags!).

So I spent over 200 hours recovering a raid array because the the business that hired the company I work for tried to do all the work in house. Now I'm to the point of trying to quote a new server setup to the company because the last one got hit by lightning. My quote $8000-$20000 in just hardware alone. If im going to do this I want to do it right. Twin servers running xenserver holding virtual machines with a high-quality Nas to hold the virtual machine. Then have the vm's being imaged to two off site backup devices in two different locations and a cloud backup. My boss comes in after me talks to the guy in charge and tells him all that is needed is one server holding all storage on it just like the last server that died and one off-site backup for $4500. How stupid can someone be who has been doing this for over 20 years? Oh btw the software running on this server will be 911 dispatch, jail records and the database for fine payments. The sheriff making the final call me and my boss are meeting with him tomorrow if my boss tries to undercut me I'm going to tell them both that if the same shit happens next time they can spend the time themselves trying to recover stuff because I done the over 200 hours in just short of two weeks.

Oh, boy, prepare for the shit to fly at your face at light speed. Here it comes!

Been working for 6 weeks at this new company now. But at a department that has nothing to do with the job in my contract. Went to the boss and asked how long I have to do this the first week and he said "It will be 4-8 weeks. After this (department A) you'll be placed in department B". I was like "Ok".

6 weeks pass by and there's no sound from him. Went to his office and complained that something slowly needs to happen (changewise). He agreed and I went back to work.

Few hours pass by and my coworker gets a call from him that I will be working at department C from now on with no more information (such as end date) given. My coworker told me that and I asked if he didn't tell my coworker about the end date or any change of plans regarding department B. My coworker didn't know anything.

After the work ended I went to the boss again to ask him why there was this sudden change that he could have told me before in today's meeting or if this sudden change will interfere with our old plan. Instead he passive aggressively told me that he already told me that I will be placed at department B in 2 weeks.

No shit, Sherlock. I already fucking knew that you told me that. I just wanted to know if this sudden change changed our old agreement.

This company is so fucking unorganized. Jesus!

Sometimes life takes unexpected turns:

I studied mechanical engineering and did some "computer stuff" in my free time, you know, "programming" with Java, toyed around with HTML/CSS/PHP a few years ago, some local server stuff with a raspberry pi, nothing fancy.

Half a year ago i got hired as engineer first but they said they needed an "IT Guy" also.

What i did since then
*Researching, Testing and Planning the introduction of an ERP software
*Planning, coordinating and (partially) setting up a new server for the company (actually two cause redundancy (heavy lifting got done by our IT partner, its not like i suddenly know how to do the entire windows server administration)
*Writing 3 minor tools for some guys in the company in java
*Creating numereous excel vba scripts that make work a lot easier
*doing all the day to day business that comes up when absolutly noone know how to use a pc in the company
*consulting the boss about webshops and websites in general and finding a decent partner
*and some engineering

Did i mentioned that i studied mechanical engineering? I know nothing about all this, or rather, i know enough to know that i know not enough.

My current side project is creating a small intranet, so creating a new VM in Hyper V, setting up some OS (probably slim CentOS), getting a Webserver running and making it somewhat secure. Then i need to create some content, i am very close to just install a mediawiki and call it a day. If i write anything in PHP i fear that i make way to many erros or just reinvent the wheel, on the other hand, i couldnt find anything resembling what i need. I also had to create the front end side, i knew CSS around 2010, there is probably tons of stuff i dont know and i will make so many errors.

This is frustrating, everything i touch feels like i am venturing the beaten path but noone ever showed me the ropes so everything i do feels like childs play. I need an adult. Also the biggest Question remains: What i am?

Asked to do reporting on all of our workstations and servers patching compliance. Invited to team meeting with head administrator which should know where this data is stored and how to get to it. After five minutes can already tell this guy is all talk and has no clue about anything. To make matters worse he has a list of certifications and qualifications in his email signature. I figure out on my own where the data is, how to get access to it, and build reports which show just how terrible the head administrator is at patching and in general just useless. Roll forward two months, his boss comes and tells me useless admin has been let go and that I'll have a new admin to work with that actually knows stuff. HOW DO THESE PEOPLE GET HIRED!?

My job environment is either fucked up or am too young to understand what a job life is.
I was hired to intern for a startup having 2 main bosses/founders . one of them is mostly administrative and comes to office daily. He sets some tasks and i have to complete them, as soon as possible or sometimes till a deadline. He has little knowledge about the complexity of wotk so usually he says "just complete it as soon as possible so we could release it" but we haven't pushed any updates since i joined (of course i have completed some tasks, but they are just not pushed to the release version)

The other one , as i ranted previously is a completely different story.I think he is an elder bro or senior of the other boss,but he is just a superman: dealing with the distributers, commanding the hardware ppl, discussing with the othr boss, handling the server and most importantly the guy who wrote all the code i am working on. So he comes extremely rarely(1 or 2 days / week) , tries to communicate with me , but is immediately diverted by some other call/person and goes away.

The problem is : am feeling a little helpless. They give me tasks and i start working on them with excitement .( I don't believe myself to be a terrible beginner: i have been learning/working on android development for past 1 year, i know my things. And even if i don't, i know how to search/debug and produce results) . So as usual, i start and try to apply my skills / search for things i don't / try to understand his large,overwhelming and confusing codebase and at the end am stuck at some point where i don't understand what to do next. Sometimes its a bug which doesn't seems to fix, sometimes its a thing thats in the codebase but i couldn't find or sometimes it's just something i couldn't seem to understand why isn't it working. At that time, I only wish that boss to be here and look at what and how i have done, if its a correct approch and how can we together take it to completion (or simply wtf am i doing wrong, see my shit and tell me) .

But again, the tech boss is busy or wouldn't have time to understand my problem in our short , incomplete meetings. But he or the nontech boss will definitely have the time to ask the sttus of project and pressurise for the "deadline" .

Like today, i was so stuck at this fucking one line error that i couldn't detect that i just messaged him that am leaving for home 3 hours early. He came running and for the first time in history gave me a complete undisturbed time. It was such a small mistake, but i wasn't able to catch on my own. But when i told him, he immediately caught , changed a single line and the code started to work.

I am feeling irritated. Is this all a correct environment?

Working on an Android app for a client who has a dev team that is developing a web app in with ember js / rails. These folks are "in charge" of the endpoints our app needs to function. Now as a native developer, I'm not a hater of a web apps way of doing things but with this particular app their dev teams seems to think that all programming languages can parse json as dynamically as javascript...

Exhibit A:

- Sample Endpoint Documentation
* GetImportantInfo
* Params: $id // id of info to get details of
* Endpoint: get-info/$id
* Method: GET
* Entity Return {SampleInfoModel}

- Example API calls in desktop REST client
* get-info/1
- response
{
"a" : 0,
"b" : false,
"c" : null
}
* get-info/2
- response
{
"a" : [null, "random date stamp"],
"b" : 3.14,
"c" : {
"z" : false,
"y" : 0.5
}
}
* get-info/3
- response
{
"a" : "false" // yes as a string
"b" : "yellow"
"c" : 1.75
}

Look, I get that js and ruby have dynamic types and a string can become a float can become a Boolean can become a cat can become an anvil. But that mess is very difficult to parse and make sense of in a stack that relies on static types.

After writing a million switch statements with cases like "is Float" or "is String" from kotlin's Any type // alias for java.Object, I throw my hands in the air and tell my boss we need to get on the phone with these folks. He agrees and we schedules a day that their main developer can come to our shop to "show us the ropes".

So the day comes and this guy shows up with his mac book pro and skinny jeans. We begin showing him the different data types coming back and explain how its bad for performance and can lead to bugs in the future if the model structure changes between different call params. He matter of factually has an epiphany and exclaims "OHHHHHH! I got you covered dawg!" and begins click clacking on his laptop to make sense of it all. We decide not to disturb him any more so he can keep working.

3 hours goes by...

He burst out of our conference room shouting "I am the greatest coder in the world! There's no problem I can't solve! Test it now!"

Weary, we begin testing the endpoints in our REST clients....

His magic fix, every single response is a quoted string of json:

example:
- old response
{
"foo" : "bar"
}
- new "improved" response
"{ \"foo\" : \"bar\" }"

smh....

Why do bosses have to be such absolute bellends?

I have depression and ptsd after my time in the Army, which I was open with my boss about when I started.

It is more or less under control, but over the last month or so I’ve been going through a bit of a bad patch, and had a telling off at work about being late and using my phone too much. I’ve been doing everything that has been asked of me, but I hold my hands up and admit that I shouldn’t be using my phone (I have trouble concentrating at the moment so have a tendency to switch between things a lot like Work, emails, phone, emails, work etc. While at home I’ll have the tv on my computer and my phone switching. Between the 3)

So after my telling off and I’d calmed down a bit I sent my boss an email apology, saying I was going through a rough patch but that it isn’t an excuse and I will try harder to stop it from affecting my work etc.

She comes back with an email about she’s done this for me and that for me but she needs to see some output and wants to own some issues and see them to completion.

Now, I admit my output has been down a bit but I’ve spent the last two weeks working on some custom software that’s full of spaghetti code so it also requires time for me to get my head around it to understand what’s going on, and the guy who wrote it and is the one who knows exactly what it is that needs to be done only works 3 days a week and is only in the office for two of those, so makes it a bit difficult.

Anyway, I assume that she for got I am the person running the project (I use running in its loosest possible terms) to migrate us from SourceSafe to GitLab and if she’d bothered to look she would have seen every single piece of work that I’d committed over the last 2/3 weeks.

Luckily for me I know have to re-write all of the work I did in the last 2/3 weeks in one night.

Also because I, quite correctly, got told off I know feel like an absolute cunt, I’m getting marri d in 3 weeks and now I seriously feel like saying fuck it all and leaving everything and moving away

I really really hope that no one post this,a friend texted it to me and I wanted to share it because made my day.

Idk where it comes, so feel free if know where this came from to post it:

//FUN PART HERE
# Do not refactor, it is a bad practice. YOLO

# Not understanding why or how something works is always good. YOLO

# Do not ever test your code yourself, just ask. YOLO

# No one is going to read your code, at any point don’t comment. YOLO

# Why do it the easy way when you can reinvent the wheel? Future-proofing is for pussies. YOLO

# Do not read the documentation. YOLO

# Do not waste time with gists. YOLO

# Do not write specs. YOLO also matches to YDD (YOLO DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT)

# Do not use naming conventions. YOLO

# Paying for online tutorials is always better than just searching and reading. YOLO

# You always use production as an environment. YOLO

# Don’t describe what you’re trying to do, just ask random questions on how to do it. YOLO

# Don’t indent. YOLO

# Version control systems are for wussies. YOLO

# Developing on a system similar to the deployment system is for wussies! YOLO

# I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I do it in production. YOLO

# Real men deploy with ftp. YOLO

So YOLO Driven Development isn’t your style? Okay, here are a few more hilarious IT methodologies to get on board with.

*The Pigeon Methodology*
Boss flies in, shits all over everything, then flies away.

*ADD (Asshole Driven Development)*
An old favourite, which outlines any team where the biggest jerk makes all the big decisions. Wisdom, process and logic are not the factory default.

*NDAD (No Developers Allowed in Decisions)*
Methodology Developers of all kinds are strictly forbidden when it comes to decisions regarding entire projects, from back end design to deadlines, because middle and top management know exactly what they want, how it should be done, and how long it will take.

*FDD (Fear Driven Development)*
The analysis paralysis that can slow an entire project down, with developments afraid to make mistakes, break the build, or cause bugs. The source of a developer’s anxiety could be attributed to a failure in sharing information, or by implicating that team members are replaceable.

*CYAE (Cover Your Ass Engineering)*
As Scott Berkun so eloquently put it, the driving force behind most individual efforts is making sure that when the shit hits the fan, you are not to blame.

Thank God it's Friday and my brain is toasted from this specific email to IT department which I had to call to get more details. Here are the parties involved.
1) Original sender (OS), 2) Sender to IT (SIT), 3) IT (Me)

SIT: Can someone from IT print this for OS? She's having issue printing.

Me: It's just an image file in the email. What issues is she having when trying to print?

SIT: Idk. She said she's having issues printing.

Me: Yeah, but what issue? She can't connect to printer, the file won't open or what? Can you ask her what the issue is?

SIT: *hold on...comes back... She just said that again..issue printing..

Me: Well, we need to know what issues it is so we can fix it. In that case she can print and not keep sending documents or files to someone else to print. Btw, did you try printing the image file?

SIT:Since she said she's having issue printing I figured to send to IT to fix the issue and print. I didn't print it.

Me: 😕😂🤔🤨😒..what? First of I still don't know whatever issue she is having. Second, you should try printing it and if you also have issues, let me know.

SIT: Ok how?

Me: *shows her how to get

SIT: Thanks it printed. Now I'm also wondering what issue she was having because this was easy to print..

Me: Can you transfer me to her phone?

Now pay attention here. She is SIT's boss.

Me: Hi OS, what issue are you having when trying to print the image file in your email? I'd like to fix it so you don't encounter that issue from now on..

OS: No issues. I was too busy to do it so I asked my secretary to do it.

Me: So you can print image files with no issues, correct?

OS: Yes.. actually I just printed my a picture my daughter sent me.

Me: Ok, have a nice..

*I call SIT back

Me: She's all set

SIT: Thank you so much fo fixing her issue.

Me: She didn't have any issue. She can print fine..

SIT: WTF!?!

Me: Have a good day, SIT..

😂😂😂😂 I was WOWED!!!

Debating on whether to quit my job.

Part of the reason it's hard for me to make a decision is there are a lot of good things about my job:

- almost all the projects we work on are blue sky; no technical debt anywhere
- great teammates; people help each other out and generally there's a good vibe
- reasonable boss; he's totally fine with me managing my own schedule, and since I get my work done, he basically never questions when and where I work
- about 1 hour of corporate meetings each week
- best healthcare I've ever had; basically everything is paid for
- 3 weeks PTO & all major US holidays
- free food; generally healthy office snacks and such

So why would I want to quit this environment?

- I hardly get to code anymore. About 2 years ago, I got asked if I would mind helping spec out projects. Since then, I've moved from writing code related to projects to helping my teammates understand the business situation so they can build the right thing.
- I'm in lots of meetings. So we have very few meetings for the company itself. We have a bunch of customer meetings, though. And progressively, I've getting pulled into meetings where there's really no reason for me to be there, aside from "we should have a technical person present."
- The sales people are getting tired of turning down clients that our product isn't targeted for. So they're progressively pushing to make products in those areas. Unfortunately, I'm the only one on the engineering team has any experience in that other tech stack. Also, the team really, really don't want to learn it because it's old tech that's on its way out.
- The PM group is continuously in shambles. Turnover there has averaged 100% annually for about 5 years. Honestly, IMO, it's because they're understaffed. However, there has been 0 real motion to fix this other than talk. This constant turnover has made it so that the engineering team has had to become the knowledge base for all clients.
- My manager has put me on the management track, but has been very slow to hand off anything. I'm the team supervisor, and I have been since the beginning of the year formally. When the supervisor quit last year, it basically became obvious to me that I was considered the informal supervisor after that. However, I can't hire or fire; I can't give a review; I don't have any budget; I can't authorize time off. So what do I do now? Oh, I'm the person that my boss comes to ask about my co-workers performance for the purpose of informing promotion/termination/pay increases. That's it. I'm a spy.

Been made redundant today.

Get some tissues cause imma spill my tea across your keyboards.

It was my first job. I was a UX designer.(I guess I have to use past tense?) I was there for 6 months. It was enjoyable and rewarding,slightly stressful because I worked for two companies under an umbrella company and was split 50-50.
I was told to come to work and I went and I saw one of my bosses in the room aswell ( I have two bosses btw - 2 companies)
The head of IT comes in and tells us we both have been made redundant as our company is not doing well ( its a travel company)...
I was shocked and I cried. I felt sorry for my boss he was there for ten yrs. And he has kids. I was told I could go home but I went to bathroom and cried. I came out and I didn't know if I was supposed to finish the day ( I had 3 meetings) or go home.... So I went to the meeting like a dumb dumb.
Most awk meeting because the other company didn't even know I was made redundant. The meeting was about how even though its a difficult time for us we r United and we aren't firing u guys just take unpaid holidays etc. Btw IT head was in that meeting was shocked to see me there ... I don't even know why I went. Anyways I found out they got rid of 174 employees across the umbrella company. I had to awkwardly tell my other boss I've been made redundant. He was shocked... I don't even know what to do. How to do. Sigh. I asked him if we wanted me to finish work off he's like do whatever u want to do.... I mean whattt.

Also does anyone know what a redudancy consultantion meeting is? It's my first job I have no idea what happens. Anyone here made redundant? How did u cope with it? Do u think I'm gonna get another job in this pandemic? Sorry I'm just a bit lost

Another anectode from my apprenticeship:
Boss comes into the office, looks at my screen: „So Mr Possum, writing scripts again? Process some customer orders instead.“
My Screen: html in notepad++ (as I was also responsible for the company website)
Me: */ wtf man? */ Alright sir.

Yet another ticket comes in about a feature not working after we push another update. So in my meeting I bring up adding testing would reduce this. Yeah boss just wants me to fix this issue and just do manual tests....fml

This rant is about myself and anyone whos like me: using logs over a debugger

So, sometimes when I wanna quick check something or make sure, if and when something get's executed or I've ran into a Problem, I add a few log/print statements to check in console.

But I don't think about proper and helpful messages, since they aren't supposed to stay in code. So I often type what comes in my mind, like memes or song lyrics.

The last time this became a huge act, was Code review/ Prototype demonstration with Clients (which I didn't knew about, otherwise I would have removed them, I swear) and Boss and my Code printed "show bob and va...", "send nudes" and stuff... in loop... to stdout

First job and first days, boss comes to me with an urgent matter she nor other people were able to solve per her own words, it was something I hadn't even used before, a bug on a migration from versions between SSDTS projects, so she asks if I knew the technology, I answer no, but I'll try, so I started watching some tutorials and got hands on the project to know what it tried to accomplish, then in a couple of hours I found the bug in a connector it had with some other tech through a driver. Team went semi crazy like woah how you found that so quick, Bla blah... It felt good

About two weeks ago i posted a rant containing an email from the big boss. Today they held a "virtual town hall" where people could ask questions, get answers, and generally just be online. Went fairly well, good info was handed out, and i think people mostly enjoyed themselves (even if it was at the expense of the higher-ups).

Then comes the email. The same person as last time had this quote:

"I’m good at giving advice, so I need to take some of my own.  I intend to take it easy this weekend, watch Netflix, do some household chores, play the piano and maybe even read a book! "

Jesus christ. Remember those memes about zuck being a robot because everything he does it looks and feels like it's an alien trying to blend in? That's what this feels like. On a normal workyear i would hear from this person 10 times TOTAL. I have heard from them this amount in the past 2 WEEKS.

Maybe it's the virus, but this is driving me INSANE. If there's any lesson you can learn from this, it would be:

Dont pretend like you care by not knowing or learning anything about the people you work with.

Jesus they even sent out surveys to see what the telework experience is like... THE RESPONSES ARE RECORDED AND PUBLICLY DISPLAYED!!!

Ugh.

Hmm I have created marketing application. and when it goes live the client comes with approxx.. 10M mails to be sent at once :( Everything worked smoother But client does not have patience to wait.. So he went to the boss.. boss told us heyy you process email one by one .. instead create batch of emails and then sent.. my whole application flow has been changed.,.....
Its like am on 0 to start again

crying in corner ... :(

When a new employee comes in and is trying to get their boss to do a whole project refactor

That time when I requested someone from a different department to include the ID row in their database excerpt. Me, having the lowest possible status in the company, did not know the who I wrote to was the boss over at the other department. So I ask straight forward: "Could you please include the ID row?"

Then a damn long email comes back stating that there was absolutely no time for stupid shit as mine. There existed no ID row and I would only waste his time. All further requests should be route via my boss.

So, fuck, he's pissed. So what he deserve? A shit load of honey right into his mouth, like he wants to.
That company had a huge ass hierarchy in job positions and I was at the bottom. So I write my oh-im-so-sorry-mail.

~I never knew what position he had and that I would of course fuck off with my stupid request.~

What was his response?

Oh, yeah, thanks. Have a look into the attachment, is that the ID row you requested?

Yeah, as one can guess, it was.
Stupid honeyfucker. Of course an ID row exists, duh.

Boss comes, asks that I make a function in the site. Tell him it's impossible / forbidden, he says okay and goes back. Comes back a week later, asks for the exact same function he asked earlier.

longer rant, with curious question at the end;

my sister asked me lately how she can change the way her phone creates the name of pictures she takes (the naming scheme), as she didn't want the name to be composed of date and time (and so on) the picture was taken, cause she had to send it to her boss
after i replied that i don't know how this could be changed and that the naming scheme would have a purpose, she got angry at me because i wouldn't help her and that i should fuckin tell where it can be changed!😡
after i repeated my answer she said "what are you studying cs for?? YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS!!!😡😤"
i got furious, you guys can probably imagine as IT guy/dev 😠😠😠, given stereotypes/prejudices etc., unfortunately i'm not the guy who is good at freaking out and yelling at people, but GODDAMN IF I COULD TELL HER WHAT STUDYING THE DEGREE IS REALLY ABOUT! I'M SO FED UP WITH THIS!😤😤😤
i'm not supposed to know how her FUCKIN HONOR PHONE WORKS
WHICH I DON'T EVEN USE and never even thought about changing the naming scheme.
JUST RENAME IT AFTERWARDS!
of course her phone is so complicated that she doesn't even know how to rename the file, as she only knows how to use the google photos app (which doesn't support that?🤔) and never even considered to use the file manager ... well can't blame her for that, android isn't as simple as windows when it comes to this🤷
... in the end she just sent it, as is😪.

oh and by the way, is it actually possible?🤔

Our project manager is a past-retirement-age consultant who prefers to communicate the old-fashioned way, which is to physically pop in to my office asking questions about stuff that isn't even urgent and could easily be dealt with in jira or by e-mail FFS. Way to go disrupting a dev, break my flow and deprive me of my joy of working! He even says it himself: "May I disturb?" My answer is "No, but now that you already did, spit it out!" He's a nice and funny guy, I give him that. But I don't like this particular behaviour of his. I've complained to him directly and also to my boss, but to no avail. This is where devRant comes in, to let the steam out. Anyway, if I have it my way, we will definitely *not* be hiring the same consultant for our next project.

People just can’t show up on time. I respect people’s time and I do not waste a minute of anyone s time. I do not like it. Time is a precious resource and we should all treat it as such. I expect the same from other people too.

There was a meeting supposed to happen a month or so back. Me and another guy. This meeting was basically giving him the resource utilization and some cost related details for the budget our team used up. They wanted a more granular report than the generic ones we submitted.

He scheduled it once and about ten minutes before he cancelled it. Fair enough.

A week later he sent an invite and the next day he cancelled it a few hours before the meeting. Fair enough I’m still not pissed.

A month or so since the first scheduled meeting, he scheduled a meeting and I turn up and he s not there and I wait for about half hour before I leave. Next day I get an email saying he s sorry. Now I’m pissed.

A couple weeks back he schedules a meeting and I turn up and I could see through the glass door and he s talking to someone in the room he s in. He signals to me to wait for five minutes. It takes about 20. Finally I go in and he s relieved so he can finally get the data from me. I tell him I waited for twenty minutes and I have to somewhere and asked him to reschedule the meeting. He asks when and I tell him a time where I know he won’t turn up. About 8 30 in the morning. He says yes.

Next day I show up he s not there and I wait for ten minutes and just he s walking in to the floor I exit the room and run to my place. He comes over and asks and I tell him I waited for sometime and I’m busy now and he mumbles and goes away.

By this time it is already a week or so after the deadline. The bigger boss from finance turns up and asks me why I haven’t given them the data I asked for. I tell him they schedule meetings and don’t turn up on time and my other work is getting affected productivity blah blah and he says okay make the report and give it to me. I tell him no I’m not wasting anymore time on this.

He goes to my boss creates a little ruckus my boss comes over and he goes wtf. I tell him what happened. He says it’s okay give them the report. I’m like I don’t know where I kept it must be somewhere I can’t waste anymore time on this. Guy from finance joins us at this point and angrily says he’ll find it himself and don’t need our help anymore.

The file is in my laptop I use for travel. Just a local copy. Zero fucking backups. And I just deleted it.

Fuck. You.

- have/share an agenda as soon as possible
- each talking point should identify a problem. Make a list of strategic questions answers to which would make it perfectly clear what and by whom has to be done to resolve them.
- plan meeting duration according to the list of questions. Make sure you meeting room reservation gives you enough time
- take notes
- be prepared for a need for another meeting(s), if during that meeting it comes clear that:
> more/other people need to be engaged
> some things are not clear and need more investigation before going further
> you have run out of time
> there are other problems tgat need to be worked out and it might cobsume too much time to do this in a current meeting
- do not turn the meeting into a chat. It's counter-productive, tiring to the listeners and a waste of time
- do not try to cover many topics. The less, the better. Unless they are very tightly coupled.
- do not invite people you do not need or there is a very slim chance you will need.
- only schedule meetings when the situation needs to be DISCUSSED among multiple parties
- that being said, do not schedule meetings when it's more convenient to communicate otherwise, like email, chat, etc.
- after the meeting make a summary and send it our to all the participants. They might reply and clarify if you have misunderstood smth or missed some important point.
- during the meeting assign tasks to each other. Verbally. Make notes. After the meeting reflect them in jira, rally, wtv.
- while assigning tasks nake sure the assignees have no blockers to work on them and make sure they understand what, when and how should be done. Some tasks might be dependedt on each other, work the sequence out.
- while assigning tasks ask "for ETAs. They might be as silly as 1-hour-to-2-weeks, but they still let you know what to expect.
- offer your assistance to the task assignees if they need any while working on their tasks

- work on your language, grammar, syntax, etc. Reading texts with typos/mistakes is repelling

- be a leader, an authority everyone is looking up to. Not a boss.
- avoid saying NOs. Be more of a "do we really need this; can we do this some other way/time; I can't promise anythibg but I'll see what I can do about it" kind of person.

This happen last year during a one day workshop over zoom. We where around 16-18 strangers plus the tutor. We started with everyone introducing themselves (most showing their faces on camera), then it was just the tutor with his shared screen. Two hours in, one of the participants accidentally turned her camera on. I know it was accidental because I still cringe from what happened next: she started picking her nose. At this point, I have to clarify that I'm not familiar with zoom, because I'm on Microsoft teams almost exclusively thanks to my organization. While I looked frantically on how to DM this person (something along the lines of "hey, your cam is on :)" or whatever), I watched in horror as the second act of this play unfolded as she put her finger in her mouth and started to eat it. At this point I was actively dying from second hand embarrassment. Like girl, our orgs payed good money to be on this workshop, gave us a day off (so to speak) and know all I can focus on is you going gold hunting and bringing home some cured cave meat. My boss basically paid so I can get traumatized! And all this while being being in the comfort of my own home. Thanks, zoom! Anyway, she went in for seconds. That is when I died. I am dead at this point. My eyes glued to the screen. Ears ringing. Brain fried. It is done. Now, that the cringe has peaked, does it even matter If I figured out how to dm her? It is too late at this point. We all saw it. The tutor must have seen it. We all witnessed it. We are all witnesses, your honor. She has been witnessed! What else can I do at this point? Me, one bystander amongst bystanders. Idle and powerless.This is exactly how the holocaust started! At this point, I'm no better than your average Joe, who doesn't really like the new regime but doesn't fight it either. At this point, I ask myself what would Jesus do? Or Hollywood? What would happen in the movies in this situation? If I cant fight them, join them? Starting my cam, knuckles deep and double fisting my air holes to save what? It is done. Nothing left. She made her statement. She basically played us for fools. By god, what a freaking boss move that was! Like, can you imagine? Here we were, during the end of a world wide pandemic, bound to our homes, advised to regularly clean our hands, protected ourself and our loved ones and, yes, not eat buggers. And here comes miss fuck-it-all showing us degenerates how its done. You go girl! You showed us the light while we dwelled in darkness. You are our queen! Long may be her reign and just her punishments! I have seen true power and wept with the angles! I was born again. My mind at peace. I was Gandalf the Grey, now I am Gandalf the White. This is the day I will tell my children about. Songs have been written for less. I will never forget this!

Anyhow, I could go on, but that this is basically what happened over the span of a couple of moments in late 2022. I will never forget her. And now you won't either ❤️

Headsup: if you're making a game, or want to, a good starting point is to ask a single question.
How do I want this game to feel?

A lot of people who make games get into it because they play and they say I wish this or that feature were different. Or they imagine new mechanics, or new story, or new aesthetics. These are all interesting approaches to explore.

If you're familiar with a lot of games, and why and how their designs work, starting with game
feel is great. It gives you a palette of ideas to riff on, without knowing exactly why it works, using your gut as you go. In fact a lot of designers who made great games used this approach, creating the basic form, and basically flew-blind, using the testing process to 'find the fun'.

But what if, instead of focusing on what emotions a game or mechanic evokes, we ask:
How does this system or mechanic alter the
*players behaviors*? What behaviors
*invoke* a given emotion?

And from there you can start to see the thread that connects emotion, and behavior.

In *Alien: Isolation*, the alien 'hunts' for the player, and is invulnerable. Besides its menacing look, and the dense atmosphere, its invincibility
has a powerful effect on the player. The player is prone to fear and running.

By looking at behavior first, w/ just this one game, and listing the emotions and behaviors
in pairs "Fear: Running", for example, you can start to work backwards to the systems and *conditions* that created that emotion.

In fact, by breaking designs down in this manner, it becomes easy to find parallels, and create
these emotions in games that are typically outside the given genre.

For example, if you wanted to make a game about vietnam (hold the overuse of 'fortunate son') how might we approach this?

One description might be: Play as a soldier or an insurgent during the harsh jungle warfare of vietnam. Set ambushes, scout through dense and snake infested underbrush. Identify enemy armaments to outfit your raids, and take the fight to them.

Mechanics might include

1. crawl through underbrush paths, with events to stab poisonous snacks, brush away spiders or centipedes, like the spiders in metro, hold your breathe as armed enemy units march by, etc.

2. learn to use enfilade and time your attacks.

3. run and gun chases. An ambush happens catching you off guard, you are immediately tossed behind cover, and an NPC says "we can stay and fight but we're out numbered, we should run." and the system plots out how the NPCs hem you in to direct you toward a series of
retreats and nearest cover (because its not supposed to be a battle, but a chase, so we want the player to run). Maybe it uses these NPC ambushes to occasionally push the player to interesting map objectives/locations, who knows.

4. The scouting system from State of Decay. you get a certain amount of time before you risk being 'spotted', and have to climb to the top of say, a building, or a tower, and prioritize which objects in the enemy camp to identity: trucks, anti-air, heavy guns, rockets, troop formations, carriers, comms stations, etc. And that determines what is available to 'call in' as support on the mission.

And all of this, b/c you're focusing on the player behaviors that you want, leads to the *emotions* or feelings you want the player to experience.

Point is, when you focus on the activities you want the player to *do* its a more reliable way of determining what the player will *feel*, the 'role' they'll take on, which is exactly what any good designer should want.

If we return back to Alien: Isolation, even though its a survival horror game, can we find parallels outside that genre? Well The Last of Us for one.

How so? Well TLOU is a survival third-person shooter, not a horror game, and it shows. Theres
not the omnipresent feeling of being overpowered. The player does use stealth, but mostly it's because it serves the player's main role: a hardened survivor whos a capable killer, struggling through a crapsack world. The similarity though comes in with the boss battles against the infected.

The enemy in these fights is almost unstoppable, they're a tank, and the devs have the player running from them just to survive. Many players cant help but feel a little panic as they run for their lives, especially with the superbly designed custom death scenes for joel. The point is, mechanics are more of a means to an end, and if games are paintings, and mechanics are the brushes, player behavior is the individual strokes and player emotion is the color. And by examining TLOU in this way, it becomes obvious that while its a third person survival shooter, the boss fights are *overtones* of Alien: Isolation.

And we can draw that comparison because like bach, who was deaf, and focused on the keys and not the sound, we're focused on player behavior and not strictly emotions.

Some humans are calm and thoughtful, some annoyingly complicated, while others with behaviours too difficult to comprehend.
I got a call from the office (former from 6 months ago) and it's from the G.M herself.

** Phone rings **
Hmm see who's calling...

Me: * Picks up phone and set it on loud speaker, so my partner can also listen *

Me: Hello Ma

G.M: Hey (calls me by my full name)

Me: It's really nice to he...

G.M: Why would you move the YETI server hosted on AWS to Azure! We have been faced with lots of challenges ever since and that has cost the company a lot.

Me: Pardon me Ma, but that...

G.M: That is a very bad and unacceptable behaviour from you and I can have the company sue you for this.

Me: Excuse me Ma, but...

G.M: I have spoken with the director of C.M.D quaters (A sister company) and explained the situation on ground about what you did before leaving without having any prior permission. What nonsense!

** At this point my partner let's call her "CC"... was more confused than me**

CC : **Panicking** Who's that? What did you do? I thought you said you no longer work at that firm, what's going on?

Now I'm confused cus I don't even know who to reply.

Me: **Signals CC to calm the fuck down**

G.M: ** Still talking and spitting out millions of threats to the guy who left the company with evil deeds in mind...**

CC who literally hates suspense and also a half cool and half crackhead kind of person... Tries stealing the phone from me so she could pour out whatever is on her mind to the caller because of how disgusted she felt, mostly for reasons I quite understood but nevertheless i kept the phone far from her reach while we both enjoyed the suiting voice of *a threat giver*

Honestly at this point my closest guess was "Joe, who must have fucked up big time" because Joe is the company's SysAdmin and has a lot of fucked up records (One time Joe tried to convert all system OSes to Linux even with our hydra servers with pre-installed windows running smoothly, his action caused a noticeable server down-time all for the reason of Joe being a Linux freak). He and only he has the power to transfer/switch/off/on servers at will. I really don't know what Joe must have done but sure thing is there is a fuck up somewhere.
Talking about me, I was only a developer enthroned only within his desk and secondly I no longer worked there. Who fucking calls a retired soldier about a lost battle after six freaking months later! Just fucking sink with your ship captain!

But how can I explain all of this to G.M without implicating Joe and also not look like snitch, I thought to myself.

While I was pondering within myself and the call which has long been disconnected, CC broke the silence.

CC: Giddy, Can you honestly explain me why your old company is calling talking about lawyers and suing you? Have you been lying to me about your work?

Me: *Explained the situation to CC*

CC: But why was she that saucy and acting a bitch? You should have spare me a minute with her.

Me: She wouldn't let me speak but we good CC. We good.
The woman that just called is the G.M. of the firm I had formerly worked with and she's also the wife to the M.D of the same firm which was my former direct Boss whom I respect a lot. Having a disjunct with the wife can also affect the relationship with the husband, which I don't want to lose. So we cool!

Maybe I should text her or maybe not... But before then
** Another call comes in **
It's her again.

GM: Hello Giddy (Sounding calm)

Me: (WTF. She called me by my first name and also sounds cool... More confused than a stray dog) ...Yeah Hello

GM: I just called to let you know that my accusation was wrong because I was misinformed. Joe Nosa was in charge on Systems but why didn't you correct me on that during our last conversation?

Me: ... 😲

CC: (Drags the phone) Hello and Good morning whosoever...

G.M: Sorry who am I speaking with?

CC: (Introduced herself) I overheard your last conversation with Giddy, and I demand you appogise to him both in written and in verbal because not only did you accused him falsely, you also almost bridge the trust between us which may have cost the relationship.

Me: ...
** Long awkward silence **

G.M: Hey Giddy, I'm sorry. Just angry about what went down recently.

Me: All good ma'am

CC: ** Hangs up **

I am scared :< every day our boss comes in and blames someone that he did some shit.... He Never came to me... maybe he think I'm not working... Should do some issues too or I get fired :O

After a week of working days of testing and development, the new feature finally finished. But my boss wasn't satisfied with the flow so he sent a revision.

After finished with revision, he still not satisfied with it and then sent another revision. This happened 3 times in a week after completing task before any revision and this week comes the fourth with some vague businesses flow. I feel like I don't have value anymore in this company.

TFW you are finally making progress on a project... and a ticket comes in. Ok, just knock that out... intern needs help. Ok, real quick, I'll help my man out... boss wants to discuss a new project. Ok... what was I working on?

This is why you shouldn’t try to redefine words and deviate from accepted word definitions.

Dev team/product decides to put the word [content] in a JIRA ticket’s title. To dev, this means “it’s a CMS change and no code push required.”

A new marketing team comes on board along with a few “website manager” type folks. They start putting [content] in JIRA ticket titles, but they think [content] means content change and their requests do require a code push instead of a CMS update.

First time it happens, I comment on the ticket and tag the reporter. I explain what [content] actually means for us. Most importantly, I explain that it tells us how to prioritize the request and how to deploy the changes.

Happens again. And sometimes they’re requesting changes for the next day when we only do weekly releases. I suspect they didn’t believe me because I’m lower in the chain. It’s also easy to forget because we are using “content” to mean something different here. I ask my boss does [content] still mean what I think it does? It does. 😕

I just decide to comment on the ticket and let them know the request requires a deploy and that’s why I’m changing the title of the ticket. They might also have to wait until the weekly release.

Overall, a bunch of lunacy all around.

Don‘t we adore it when month in advance requested vacation does not get confirmed and 3 days before the due boss comes in: „you need to finish your tasks, fulfill yet 5 hereby new assigned tasks but all 1 day in advance because if client comes back with questions. If all is done you can have your vacation!“ the new assigned tasks are ofcourse a whole weeks known project with tons of undone work and no one did any preparation for that in advance 💉needle wanted 😂

Gradle,Android Studio

Boss: Great job can we change the UI by using a custom view..
Me:Hesitating a bit sure we can.Head back to my station and consult Stack overflow and start implementing.
Boss:Five minutes later you done and how is it so far.
Me:Am done am just rebuilding and cleaning my project yet in reality ain't done.Gradle built time to my rescue.
Boss:How comes it taking long yet you got a high end machine okay then let it built.
Me: Breathing a sigh of relief thanks gradle

I was supposed to relieve work last Friday and then as per request of HR on last moment, i had to postpone it to tomorrow.

Guess what, today evening boss comes and asks if really want to relieve tomorrow and then tells to change it to 31st. I tried to say no.

Then HR talked to me and his excuse was he got the dates messed up. He thought tomorrow was Friday. Fucking lie. I remember him saying it was a Wednesday when he told.

I'm seriously annoyed and tired of sitting there and being absolutely doing nothing productive other than fixing bugs assigned to team mates. I don't want to write any new code or participate in coding decision on the project, because i think that's just asking for more trouble. Team mates gotta learn to work on their own instead of relying me for every stupid little thing. I can't concentrate to work on my thing there, i just want to get out of that environment asap.

3 more boring days to pass, assuming i dont have to come on sat and sun.

😑

!dev

Sorry about another non-dev rant, but I can't help it :p

I have seen a post here on devRant a few minutes ago talking about being a millionaire, so I thought I'd write a lil something for people thinking of chasing that.

As I said in a comment on that rant: as Jordan Peterson (aka Lord of the Lobsters) said, in order to be successful you need to be an industrious person, i.e. you gotta work hard, very hard. Most success stories are from people that worked very very hard (Elon Musk is one I can remember off the top of my head) and had to put their life, friends, family in second place. To this day I remember watching a video on a 30 year old millionaire, he said he didn't have friends for about 6-10 years, he just worked, worked and worked. If that's what you wanna do with your life do your thing, I'm just saying that's not it for me.

A few years back I wanted huge success (being famous, being rich), but I've come to realize that's not what I want. Being famous must suck, people recognizing you everywhere you go and shit, and being rich comes with a price (pun intended?), which is working every minute of your time for 10 years. That's not gonna make me happy, I have realized that I want to get married in my early 30's at max, have kids, buy a comfortable house somewhere in europe, have enough money to be able to give my family a good life and be able to buy and tune a few cars (that's a dream of mine btw), and maybe even try to start a company of my own (I don't like the idea of having a boss). And I think that to achieve these goals, all I need to do is be a bit smart right now: invest in fixed income, don't buy expensive shit, live with my parents at least until I get out of college and get a relatively decent job.

Anyway I might've steered off-course for a bit there, the point is: before you decide you want to be a millionaire, think what you actually want in life. If you want to be rich and are sure you have the willpower to work a 100 hours per week, do your thing, whatever makes you happy. But if you are going to work 60 hours a week and you're looking to be rich you're just going to be disappointed. You'll be chasing money all your life, sacrifice the (IMO) important things in life (friends, family, health, fun) and you won't get anywhere.

It's all or nothing, make up your mind before you waste your time.

So we have this local competition and i was tasked to pitch in some help. 2 weeks before, we get a problem with the database so we pull someone from another team to fix it since our hands our full. But his PRICK OF A TEAM LEAD is forcing him not to do it because "It's not priority". So day of the competition - EVERYTHING WAS A MESS. The competition was forfit. We tarnished our company name. BuT his PRICK OF A TEAM LEAD suddenly comes in POINTING FINGERS AT US SAYING "they dont communicate and dont seem competent enough" OHHHH SNAP YOU UNCULTURED GOOSE PRICK FOR TWO WEEKS YOU IGNORED US BUT WHEN WE WENT DOWN YOU SHOWED YOURSELF TO THE BOSS LIKE "it's because they didnt rely on me" WELL KISS MY ASS PRINCE NOT-CHARMING. I really like my company but some people are just TOXIC.

How do you know you're about to spend a wole lot of shitty months ?
When the boss comes in with a big smile on his face shouting out "Good news everyone !"
I almost fainted.

So, I'm about to be up shit's Creek. I need a new source of income, ideally either a new job or becoming a freelancer. I have been making intranet sites with ASP.NET for a while now, and I can tell two things:
1. It's too corporate minded, so I'll need a fucking degree
2. It's too corporate minded, so I'll be stuck with people like my boss, who still use tables to align content despite the project having bootstrap.

I need to do something more fulfilling, but I probably will have to leave my job by December anyway due to some major fuck ups in my life, do I need to get something lined up. I have been brushing up on my HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills, but when it comes down to it, I suck at design so my "portfolio" is blatant clones to learn CSS and shitty Spartan things.

Basically, I'm anxious, terrified, and unable to figure out what comes next. Do I keep sending job applications and praying to whatever deity will listen, it do I start figuring out this freelance thing? If freelance, then how do I get into it? I'm terrified and desperate.

15 mins in our weekly dev meeting, boss comes in sits down and starts talking about a project. After that he stands up and brings one of the designer in and begins to make some stuff up we could add. Are you kidding me? That is a dev meeting, he is not even supposed to be there. How rude disturbing a meeting so he can discuss stuff we could discuss later-.-

Usually an idea comes up in the back of my head... Then i wait. After some time, the idea comes again. Now ill think about it, when i lay in bed, when im in a train, everywhere. Ill think about the technical implementation. How ill present it to someone else. To my boss. To my little brother. I think about the counterarguments, ill simulate discussions in my head, how ill defend it.

And then, one day, while thinking about it, ill start writing it.

Edit: Its like my brain needs enough entropy to do something. Then it works, then it generates entropy again, eg youtube, gaming, working on something else, dreaming etc

I was once working at very successful startup as lead android engineer, when another startup contacted me and offered me a better paid and "stable" position. 9 months later I woke up on the 1st of the month (1st June 2018), checking my bank account: No payment. I go to office, boss comes in : hey guys, we're bankrupt and we can't pay your salary.

Today still no salary, we're waiting now for court to officially declare the startup bankrupt and then Government will pay me my last 3 salaries, while my working contract is still valid for 3 months after company gets declared officially as bankrupt. We're being expected to work as nothing would be, with no money on our bank accounts (we've been even told to take a temporary loan) and that sooner or later somebody will buy us off. Oh, it would be also really nice from us if we would not be looking for a new "challenge". What'd you do?

PM: I can't see the Facebook page, can you check what's wrong with it?
Me: *click click tab tab* There's not much I can do... I don't have the admin access
PM: Who is the admin?
Me: ABC (who is on holiday)

PM then decided to bombard ABC with emails & phone calls (& to ABC's family)

PM: When ABC comes back, ask for the login details
Me: But that's linked to the personal account.....
PM: It doesn't matter

Where the f is privacy?

p.s PM is an arrogant bastard who logged in to ex-colleague computer, read her personal emails, found out she went to a job interview, told the boss and asked her to come back then fired her on the spot

I've been programming for 15 years now or more if I count my years I programmed as a hobby. I'm mostly self learned. I'm working in an environment of a few developers and at least the same amount of other people (managers, sales, etc). We are creating Magento stores for middle sized businesses. The dev team is pretty good, I think.

But I'm struggling with management a lot. They are deciding on issues without asking us or even if I was asked about something and the answer was not what they expect, they ask the next developer below me. They do this all the way to Junior. A small example would be "lets create a testing site outside of deployment process on the server". Now if I do this, that site will never be updated and pose a security risk on the server for eternity because they would forget about it in a week. Adding it to our deployment process would take the same time and the testing site would benefit from security patches, quick deployment without logging in to the server, etc. Then the manager just disappears after hearing this from me. On slack, I get a question in 30 minutes from a remote developer about how to create an SSH user for a new site outside of deployment. I tell him the same. Then the junior gets called upstairs and ending up doing the job: no deployment, just plain SSH (SFTP) and manually creating the database. I end up doing it but He is "learning" how to do it.

An other example would be a day I was asked what is my opinion about Wordpress. We don't have any experience with Wordpress, I worked with Drupal before and when I look at a Wordpress codebase, I'm getting brain damage. They said Ok. The next day, comes the announcement that the boss decided to use Wordpress for our new agency website. For his own health and safety, I took the day off. At the end, the manager ended up hiring an indian developer who did a moderately fair job. No HiDPI sprites, no fancy SASS, just plain old CSS and a simple template. Lightyears worse than the site it was about to replace. But it did replace the old site, so now I have to look at it and identify myself part of the team. Best thing? We are now offering Wordpress development.

An other example is "lets do a quick order grid". This meant to be a table where the customer can enter SKU and quantity and they can theoretically order faster if they know the SKU already. It's a B2B solution. No one uses it. We have it for 2 sites now and in analytics, we have 5 page hits within 3 years on a site that's receiving 1000 users daily... Mostly our testing and the client looked at it. And no orders. I mean none, 0. I presented a well formatted study with screenshots from Analytics when I saw a proposal to a client to do this again. Guess what happened? Someone else from the team got the job to implement it. Happy client? No. They are questioning why no one is using it.

What would you do as a senior developer?

- Just serve notice and quit
- Try to talk to the boss (I don't see how it would work)
- Just don't give a shit

When it comes to judgemental conclusion of people's acts, I've always been careful and maintain a total calmness because I never can really tell what influences such acts. The so called boss I'm working for, obviously has anger issues and I find it very difficult to tell what triggers such irritating habit. Unfortunately, it is uncontrollable by him. He releases it whenever it comes. I've tried as much as possible to avoid falling into the pit of false consensus bias - i.e, the tendency of assuming other people should think like me. I work my ass 50 - 60+ hours a week + weekends for his startup company without expecting much in return but he still feel people are not important to him. Nothing actually interests me anymore in the company and I feel quitting is a necessity for me right now - please, I need people's opinions regarding this.

Everyone has project builds. Boss comes in and says we need to build 12 landing pages on 12 new domains by end of day. Repurposes PR for content, my designer, and 3 devs.

Happy goddamn Friday.

Story of my life in the office

I work my ass off and get the job done, almost 4 to 5 hours before my shift ends. And then I casually sit with other colleagues and chat a bit.
And my boss comes in and says you have no work ethics and are lazy.

And i'm like you fucker I got my job done, why can't you see that. I doesn't mean that my job is easy if I get it done before time. I just means that i'm more fucking efficient then the other employees.While the other employees were gossiping, I was on my desk working. Why can't that fucker see that.

Not to mention as I get my job done before time, I get burdened with other people's work, coz apparently they are overloaded with work.
Fucking idiocracy.

When you boss makes a product decision in a meeting and never tells the team or me the lead dev. Then when it comes to an overview day he gets angry that I didn't know about these changes cause he never told us or put it in the sprint. So I have to spend my weekend refactoring the whole website so make it work the way he wants.....

Part of my remote work is to have a daily call reporting in on what I have done yesterday and what I am about to today. My colleague calls me for it. She's hired as a tech support and is suddenly assigned to take note and report on my work activities to our boss. Several times, I caught her pretending to know what I'm talking about like with Puppet configurations, Firewall diagnosis packets, ActiveMQ, Regex, etc. Most of the time, I just let it go as its not my job to validate her knowledge on these different but many services. Just do the call, get the report in, carry on. How difficult was that?

Yesterday, our call was left sour because I somehow blew up. I think I've reached my patience with this woman's assumptions to how these services work. Now I feel guilty for yelling at a lady but goddamn she stoopid for fibbing through my ear. Somebody help! What do I do?

If I report to our boss about her technical incompetence (politely), she might get sacked. She's a good tech support as long as she still has her trusty manuals by her, she can fix specific problems. But when it comes to unknown tech to her, she assumed she knew.

If I tell her about her weaknesses, however constructive I can get and as politely as I can get, all the while complimenting something about her, showing her how to improve herself, maybe she'll do better not to ask silly questions like buying a Puppet certificate? At least getting rid of ignorance would definitely help but not sure how she would take it. The worst thing I would imagine is her backfiring and yelling at me and then we ended up fighting.

If I kept quiet and tuck it all into a can, it will eventually implode as we go on.

This is not about her gender. I don't see her as a woman. I see her as a tech support engineer who should know her stuff.

Don't you just hate politics being spoken about in work. Many deva go to uni and get brainwashed into a left wing LOONEYS. Fed up of keeping quiet while they slagging the right wing party off!!!

Keep politics and religion out of work. You ask and preach to me ill say the truth about left wing nutters and false prophets.

But fed up being asked why I'm discriminating against people by my boss/owners.

My programming always comes into questions after politics or religion brought up. I'm sure my work was amazing before this happen

Apparently golliwog might offend the person across from me. Sorry but did he say it's offended him. NO. would he tell me like when I have before. YES. NOW WHO THE RACISTS.

I'm in middle of fucking moronic, most incomprehensible situation.
So primarily I work for a project which requires Node 6.11.5 precisely and now I've been assigned another developer's half asses'd work without any documentation about how to set up gulp, long story it took me a week to figure out it's an ant build with node dependencies oh and I nearly forgot this developer is using node 0.12.1, Can you fucking believe that?

Now when I'll need to compile/build for primary project i'll need to reinstall 6.11.5 and god knows what will happen when and if that half asses'd project comes back

This idiot has style.css / style.ie.css / style.min.css in .gitignore so every time I pull I'll need to re-build oh and the worst part I spend my weekend fixing this shit then sass compiled and shit is still crazy, CSS is written from SASS but not reflecting on server ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

While I'm writing this I'm waiting on my boss who is also trying to fix this.

Start to work. 15 minutes in boss comes in "do you have a second to guide me through this random part of our online company made software I sell to clients daily because I can't be bothered to use my brain or read any documentation" 2 hours later get back to work...15 minutes in boss comes in again.

FML why can't anybody understand that people need time to get their work done.

End of release cycle: why isn't feature xy finished, you said it should be finished this cycle of no one distracted you to much

I had to do a modular deduplication project that could read, parse and clean up the data.
The data? Personal information: Name, Surname, phone, address and more.
Imagine the zip code in any of the following formats: ####AA, #### AA. Names with and without dashes. Address with(out) spaces, dashes, underscores etc. as well as typos! Now clean it up, and dedup.

But what files have priority over another? What data is newer? How to process address changes?

Deadline: 2 moths, impossible deadline for a (at the time - 4 years ago - rookie developer)
Anyway, night before the deadline, code was running somewhat (Java) and was able to get a Regexed address cleanup of about 70 - 80%.

My boss comes in to check the progress, sits me down next to him and says: Not good enough, let's do it together tonight, it was 4pm, day normally ends at 5pm.

No thank you, I can't do that. if you don't want this code, then I can't meet your deadline.
bye

I hate it when I'm knee deep in projects that need to be done before the new CI strategy starts two avoid a three week long full test every two weeks and then my dear boss comes up with having me do the planning for the next testphase while my coworker is scrolling through 9gag. I mean, sorry old man but either I automate this monstrosity of thirty million layers of 'naturally grown', ill documented, identifier lackimg piece of shit or I can do the fucking schedule. My mother isn't an octopus, i've got only two arms...

Tl;dr: Why do non programmers always heavily underestimate the time shit needs to get done?