Me talking to a recruiter (even though I am not looking for a job)

Me: If I walk into an interview, and they ask me to reverse a binary tree for a frontend Reac or Vue position or something along those lines, I will end the call and/or walk away from it.

Him: I get similar feelings from other programmers, I don't quite understand why the notion is as common

Me: Because it is fucking useless, it servers no purpose to a dev to know about that when building frontends with react, I link my github profile, for which they can find advanced backend-frontend related projects, compiler and interpreter projects, plus the title I currently have at my workplace and a bunch of other shit, I am not interviewing for a teaching position at an institute, but an actual place of work, for which if they want to know about DS and A they can review my profile which has a repo of DS and A in about 5 different languages including plain C++. I do not need to be offended by such notions since they server no purpose on the frontend, and neither do other devs. If anything it should be a casual conversation during the interview, not a basis for employment.

Recruiter: .........thank you for explaining this to me, I am sure I can bring it up to the agencies doing the reviews and interviews. Are you still interested?

Me: Are they going to give me a coding assignment for a project or a bs question like what I mentioned?

Him: I don't know

Me: then I am not interested

Best co-worker quitting story?

"T" I've refereed to in previous rants knew he was close to being fired, so he jumped ship. 'T' sent the usual "I'll miss you guys" email to the department, except me (and a few others that didn't fall for his BS and not scared of him). His mistake was he sent the email out a day early (buddy forwarded me the email) and left the stuff (box of pics, books, etc) he planned on taking with him. One item in particular was a new company provided laptop bag, which technically wasn't his to keep (supposed to leave/turn-in any company provided equipment), so I grabbed the bag and hid it.

The next day I heard him slamming drawers (looking for the bag) and a loud cursing. Other devs peeking over the walls asking what's wrong.

Dev1: "Dude, what's up? Whatcha' looking for?"
T: "Nothing...fuck!...damn it...nothing...assholes...fucking assholes!"
Dev2: "Who's the ass? What's wrong?"
Dev3: "Need help looking for something?"
T: "No..no...nothing...I'm fine...making sure I don't forget anything."

'T' never found out who took the bag and I've had that laptop bag underneath my desk ever since.

“Management wants to know your performance”. And what is managements performance?

I was pressued to shift the blame.

We received an angry email from a customer that some of their data had disappeared. The boss assigns me to this task. This feature is relatively new and we've found some bugs in the past in here. I go through request logs, search the database, run some diagnostics, etc. for about 5 hours and I cannot find the problem. I focus on the bugs that we've had before but they don't seem to be the problem.

I tell the boss "sorry but I checked XYZ and I can't find the problem. I'm out of ideas." But the boss wanted answers by the end of the day. They did not want to admit to the client that we couldn't figure out what's wrong.

By now I was more pressured to find an answer, find something or someone to blame it on, not exactly to find the real solution. So I made up some BS:

"Sometimes, in HTML forms, the number inputs allow you to change the number by scrolling. We have some long forms where the user has to scroll. Perhaps the focus remained on the number input, so when they scrolled down they accidentally changed the number they meant to input."

The boss was happy with that. We explained this to the customer, and there's now a ticket to change type="number" to type="text" in our HTML forms and to validate it in th backend.

A week later another customer shows us a different error. This one is more clear because it had a stack trace, but I realise that this error is what caused our last error. It was pretty obscure, mind you, the unit tests didn't detect it.

I didn't tell the boss that they were connected tho.

With two angry clients in two weeks, I finally convinced the boss to give us more time to write more unit tests with full coverage.

- Get invited to apply to job
- Technical interview, guy shows up late starts small talk wasting time and gives me the exercise
- Start implementing the first algorithm, finish it passing min test cases then realize there's a solution that would make both algorithms a breeze
- I pitch my solution realizing there's no much time left, cuz we lost almost 20 min of my test hour talking about BS plus the almost 10 min he arrived late, and reassure the interviewer it can be developed faster
- Interviewer says it doesn't matter, we should finish edge cases
- Kay no problem, finish the first algorithm successfully and explain pitfalls on the second part with the current implementation
- I tell him there's a better solution but he doesn't seem to care, he says time's up

Now here's the funny part.

I get called by the recruiter today (2 weeks later) and she says "They are happy with your soft skills but feel there are some gaps with your coding, they would like to repeat the technical interview because they didn't feel there was much time to assess the 'gaps' ".
Interviewers, either I'm competent enough to work for you or not, your tests must be designed to assess that, if you see you can't fit the problem you want in the time you have left change the problem, reschedule or here's an idea...LEAVE THE BS CHITCHAT TILL THE END AND START THE INTERVIEW ON TIME. When I do interviews I always try to have one complete free hour and a one algorithm exercise because I expect the candidate to solve it, analyze it and offer alternatives or explain it, I've never had someone finishing more than 2 an hour.

You can keep your job I'll keep my time. I'll write a similar problem on the comments to pass on the knowledge for people who enjoy solving these kinds of problems, can't give you the exact same thing, also tip guys don't do NDA's for interviewing it makes no fucking sense trust me no one cares about your fizz buzz intellectual property.

Remember to regularly defragment your drives on linux. use this handy command.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1M

Terminology:
dd: Disk defragment
if: input file (the pattern to search for, and should always be /dev/zero)
of: output file (your disk, /dev/sda for instance)
bs: blocsize 1M is fine here

This is how U became a Data Scientist 😆

I AM TIRED

warning: this rant is going to be full of negativity , CAPS, and cursing.

People always think and they always write that programming is an analytical profession. IF YOU CANNOT THINK IN AN ANALYTICAL WAY THIS JOB IS NOT FOR YOU! But the reality could not be farther from the truth.

A LOT of people in this field whether they're technical people or otherwise, just lack any kind of reasoning or "ANALYTICAL" thinking skills. If anything, a lot of of them are delusional and/or they just care about looking COOL. "Because programming is like getting paid to solve puzzles" *insert stupid retarded laugh here*.

A lot of devs out there just read a book or two and read a Medium article by another wannabe, now think they're hot shit. They know what they're doing. They're the gods of "clean" and "modular" design and all companies should be in AWE of their skills paralleled only by those of deities!

Everyone out there and their Neanderthal ancestor from start-up founders to developers think they're the next Google/Amazon/Facebook/*insert fancy shitty tech company*.

Founder? THEY WANT TO MOVE FAST AND GET TO MARKET FAST WITH STUPID DEADLINES! even if it's not necessary. Why? BECAUSE YOU INFERIOR DEVELOPER HAVE NOT READ THE STUPID HOT PILE OF GARBAGE I READ ONLINE BY THE POEPLE I BLINDLY COPY! "IF YOU'RE NOT EMBARRASSED BY THE FIRST VERSION OF YOU APP, YOU DID SOMETHING WRONG" - someone at Amazon.

Well you delusional brainless piece of stupidity, YOU ARE NOT AMAZON. THE FIRST VERSION THAT THIS AMAZON FOUNDER IS EMBARRASSED ABOUT IS WHAT YOU JERK OFF TO AT NIGHT! IT IS WHAT YOU DREAM ABOUT HAVING!

And oh let's not forget the tech stacks that make absolutely no fucking sense and are just a pile of glue and abstraction levels on top of abstraction levels that are being used everywhere. Why? BECAUSE GOOGLE DOES IT THAT WAY DUH!! And when Google (or any other fancy shit company) changes it, the old shitty tech stack that by some miracle you got to work and everyone is writing in, is now all of a sudden OBSOLETE! IT IS OLD. NO ONE IS WRITING SHIT IN THAT ANYMORE!

And oh my god do I get a PTSD every time I hear a stupid fucker saying shit like "clean architecture" "clean shit" "best practice". Because I have yet to see someone whose sentences HAVE TO HAVE one of these words in them, that actually writes anything decent. They say this shit because of some garbage article they read online and in reality when you look at their code it is hot heap of horseshit after eating something rancid. NOTHING IS CLEAN ABOUT IT. NOTHING IS DONE RIGHT. AND OH GOD IF THAT PERSON WAS YOUR TECH MANAGER AND YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO THEM RUNNING THEIR SHITHOLE ABOUT HOW YOUR SIMPLE CODE IS "NOT CLEAN". And when you think that there might be a valid reason to why they're doing things that way, you get an answer of someone in an interview who's been asked about something they don't know, but they're trying to BS their way to sounding smart and knowledgable. 0 logic 0 reason 0 brain.

Let me give you a couple of examples from my unfortunate encounters in the land of the delusional.

I was working at this start up which is fairly successful and there was this guy responsible for developing the front-end of their website using ReactJS and they're using Redux (WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS TO ELIMINATE PASSING ATTRIBUTES FOR THE PURPOSE OF PASSING THEM DOWN THE COMPONENT HIERARCHY AGIAN). This guy kept ranting about their quality and their shit every single time we had a conversation about the code while I was getting to know everything. Also keep in mind he was the one who decided to use Redux. Low and behold there was this component which has THIRTY MOTHERFUCKING SEVEN PROPERTIES WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS BE PASSED DOWN AGAIN LIKE 3 TO 4 TIMES!.

This stupid shit kept telling me to write code in a "functional" style. AND ALL HE KNOWS ABOUT FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING IS USING MAP, FILTER, REDUCE! And says shit like "WE DONT NEED UNIT TESTS BECAUSE FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING HAS NO ERRORS!" Later on I found that he read a book about functional programming in JS and now he fucking thinks he knows what functional programming is! Oh I forgot to mention that the body of his "maps" is like 70 fucking lines of code!

Another fin-tech company I worked at had a quote from Machiavelli's The Prince on EACH FUCKING DESK:

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things."

MOTHERFUCKER! NEW ORDER OF THINGS? THERE 10 OTHER COMPANIES DOING THE SAME SHIT ALREADY!

And the one that got on my nerves as a space lover. Is a quote from Kennedy's speech about going to the moon in the 60s "We choose to go to the moon and do the hard things ..."

YOU FUCKING DELUSIONAL CUNT! YOU THINK BUILDING YOUR SHITTY COPY PASTED START UP IS COMPARABLE TO GOING TO THE MOON IN THE 60S?

I am just tired of all those fuckers.

My family sometimes send me tick tock videos. I usually open them on brave browser. Dude, why the fuck is brave blocking "motion sensor" through camera? what kind of spying is this? tick tock is spyware and cancer fr

Currently literally sitting in a meeting about meetings. Like for real, the topic the last 15 minutes has been what the difference between 3 of the daily team meetings is.

Then the dumbass who booked this for two hours says about one of the others "an hour is long"

ffs, can someone tell me why i know so many ppl (and me) that have interviews that drag on for MONTHS. 1 interview, 2 interview, 3, 4, oh we have to hold off for some bs/biz reason. 5, 6

clearly you dont need anybody that bad do you

I was working as a software dev contractor at this company providing specific e-learning services for a specific industry X.

One day the CEO posts on Linkedin about an interview discussing the potential of gaining $100k per year working in industry X after getting specialized training for 6 months (using our e-learning platform of course) .

My gross income at the time was $65k. My experience was about 7-8 years. Now the thing is you might say "gee that's pretty low for a dev, especially a contractor", and yes I agree, but you have to understand a few facts:

1. I am from eastern Europe (cheapish labor - which btw for all of you out there from the West, including Germany and whatnot, it is xenophobic to consider easterners cheap and it personally insults me and my ability - but that's another story)

2. I was happy to accept the offer since it was the best I had up to that point :))

Now, by the time the LinkedIn post I was heavily invested in the product development. I personally had written 30% of the code (frontend and backend) compared to the whole development team (about 15 devs)... and yes you might argue that performance is not measured by number of lines of code... but trust me when I am saying I did the most on that product, and I am not saying this to brag, I actually care about the stuff that I work on.

When I saw that post on Linkedin I thought to myself "what kind of BS is this? I am a dev and devs are supposedly the best paid workers out there, and a guy from industry X that just got trained for 6 months would get more than me?! WTF?!"

So I messaged the CEO ...

Me: I noticed the post from linkedin about $100k by working in industry X, I am curious how does one get to that revenue per year? What is your advice?

CEO: The best way to obtain value is by creating value which you maximize continuously.

Me: and how does one maximize value?

CEO: it does not matter how hard your work but how large of an impact you make!

Me: ... and how do you measure impact? (me thinking about performance reviews for contract negotiations - and because performance reviews should be SMART -> meaning it should be measurable somehow)

CEO: Simon Sinek says ... << insert motivational quote here because I don't remember and don't care >>

I just lost if after reading the name "Simon Sinek" ...

So you see my dear friends ? It is all fairy dust, smoke and mirrors, in the end it is about maximizing profits, lowering costs and maintaining the illusion of opportunity... when there is none.

Lord is my witness... I hate hypocrisy and quackery ...

You can imagine that my contribution on that product immediately lowered, doing the bare minimum to meet the contract demands AND I FEEL NO REGRET.

%&#$ YOU SIMON SINEK.

I really think 1 hr+ meetings are a fucking waste of time. By minute 40, people's attentions waver.

If I ever run my own shop I will fucking ban meetings that last more than 30 minutes, and have a hard cap of 7 people per meeting and require a fucking agenda. God damn it. Being stuck in meetings where 90% of crap not relevant to me is bs.

#TiltedMonday

just so you boys know, "sorry you feel this way" is not an apology, and if a guy comes with this bs to me they will be sorry for the way I'll feel then

PM: I’m not asking what you were doing, I’m asking what was done
me: losers are asking, champions go and do it. This is what I did. The only thing I hear from you is questions. Meanwhile leaders are always a part of the answer. With that loser mentality, you’re never gonna be an MVP.

I’m a neural network powered parrot with a supercar brain. No matter the business guru speak BS you throw my way, I’m gonna wipe the floor with you in your own game. You have no chance. You’re that mediocre type of person who buys a rolex, the same one Gary V has, with the hope it would fix your self-confidence. The only thing I see in your eyes is your shattered ego.

So this might be a very long post , but i am sure most of you can relate to it .

So , the year end . Time of joy and appraisals right?You have slogged your ass off the entire year and are expecting amazing ratings.Then boom , your piece of shit sadist manager starts of his review by saying 'there are worrysome things to discuss' after not saying shit for the entire year . I am pretty new to corporate , in fact 1 year old , still managed to handle devops for a team of 130+ , majority of whom have no work apart from playing a blame game and indulging in cheap politics. I mean , bro , I am literally your son's age , i dont see the point in playing this cheap shit with me.On top of that this sadist and borderline piece of shit manager has the audacity to say that I did not raise any blockers , while I have CCed him in every fucking mail possible.How big of an a****** can you be bro?
I counter his points for 40 45 mins straight ,leaving him stuck without words for solid 10 to 15 seconds many times during the 'review meet'. This guy is in the same place working on the same shit code , which 90% of this community can't even think of. Every thing is bloody manual and apparently ' I should have tried to streamline the entire f**** process' . Cool bro , why not open a startup while I am at it ?

Then this piece of poop gives me a rating which is just above the inconsistent performer bracket :) .

I just dont get the points what do these people get by giving shit ratings and not even having valid points to back up their fuck all arguments.This guy , throughout the duration of the call did not say 1 (bloody 1 ) good thing about my efforts. Past context is majority of the smart people who were literally running their pods single handedly , were under him and were fed up with not getting hikes and appraisals.Apart from me ,everyone resigned and left with hikes as high as 50% (LOL right).

But I have a year of experience and its really difficult to perform well in 4 rounds of bs compititive coding rounds, after which I get the generic ' oh you did well bro but we are moving on with other candidates' (FFS) .

I pray that even my worst enemies don't get such managers and I hope he rots in hell.

Amen and sorry for the cussing :)

Kinda wanna say my teammates are incompetent morons but the truth is I'm not much better

So saying that about them would be admitting it about myself

There's something super broken about the interview process in our industry. I spent 30 minutes chatting with a hr recruiter. 2 hours on a coding screen. 1 hour for a technical interview. 1 hour talking with the head of engineering. But then they decided to pass on me. Well if things went well then, then I spend an entire fucking day on an onsite.

Wow. Since when did the industry get so bloated until we have to do so much to get a job? Is signal really that unclear so candidates have to jump through hoop after hoop?

BS.

The "Gratitude" emoji pack recently introduced to Slack. They're basically "Thank you" in different languages.
Among others, there is a Russian "спасибо", but there is no Ukrainian "дякую".

What's up Slack? Didn't you paint your logo blue and yellow when the war started?

If you're gonna push your "please don't cancel us" marketing BS like all the other companies, at least be fucking consistent.

Betty: Opens slack chat with Bob, Tony and me to ask me to fix some data for a client who messed the setup. (Don’t worry just building a script that takes 3 hours to complete and that I must supervise)

Betty: Opens slack chat with Ron, Tim and me to ask me to force the system I made to ignore protocol because someone else’s fuck up made it so she didn’t get the output she expected.

Betty: proceeds to ask for status updates constantly on both chats. She also disguises them as her asking what she can do to “get it across faster” knowing there’s jack shit I or anyone can do to make it go “faster”.

Also Betty, vomits BS about my micro service being unstable in front of managers even though it is it’s correctness what brought to light a bug fucking up thousands of records silently.

Go fuck yourself Betty ☺️ and fuck the client

How about being laid off over a 5min video call one morning when you completely didn’t suspect it? 😅 At least that taught me a valuable lesson about all these fuckin companies early on in my tech career! Watch me never prioritize their bs over work/life balance haha

Not sure if forums like DevRant ever helped me but it certainly gave me an impression of how work in the industry is. It sort of prepared
me for the bs that I could face and I ended up expecting and managing those situations. This will be both a happy, raw and a grumpy thought. I’m a self taught dev, I failed my education due to a situation outside my control but I always loved programming, it’s mostly because I love solving problems and creating something I feel is my own. Today I’m a core member in a company and I’m also a contractor in my own company. I love the variety of working on my own and I love helping team members, I love organising projects and the experiences others bring help me grow and expand what is literally my life’s passion. I started out as a consultant because someone saw my passion and my experience, they took a chance and well, I can’t say I’ve disappointed them. I just recently got to know into my adult life that I got ADD and meanwhile it probably pushed me out of the normal, it helped me focus on the things I liked. I was 6 years when I wanted to learn programming and I was 10 when I first started learning, I felt like a failure when I was 18 after literally 6 hours a day of learning development each day, I didn’t have a job for several years and when I was 24 - prior to becoming a consultant, someone offered me a job, it was one of those “5 day” interview assignments, where I practically delivered a finished, fully tested project for them. They offered me lowest of pay (15 usd/hr). They took advantage of my situation, put me on a solo project and said it wasn’t good enough because it didn’t fit their preferences after 50 hours of dedicated work without any guidance, specs or meetings. I’d say thanks but I was never considered before I had “experience” by others, I hope I’ll get the chance to give someone that experience before they go through the same as me. I could go on for so long about what I feel is wrong about this industry but one description that continually come up “impostors syndrome”, shut the fuck up if you don’t know what you’re talking about and give even “newbies” a chance. Programming and development is more than experience.

You know what, I’m feeling generous.

Tell me some BS your manager told you in 💵😎business guru motivational style, and I’ll give you a comeback, in the same style.

I’m somehow very good at it, so now you’ll have something to deflect this shit with 😂

I spent the whole damn day trying to setup grpc-web, but this protocol is documented so damn poorly!

You manage to set grpc up for one language and it’s all cool, then you stupidly think that you are free to reuse the compiler you used for the nodejs version for your frontend part but nope! Our web module is now deprecated, please use this module instead!

“Ah yes just clone the repo and check out (…) and you can also check this link whic is in no way highlighted in the middle of a wall of text (…)”

*checking the other page*
Ah yes you need to install a package available only on your unix machine (great! Screw the devs in my team who use windows I guess, they’ll be happy to hear this!) and don’t forget to clone this repo to build your own plugin! And by that I ofc mean to compile it on your own!

- compiler error
After digging for an hour you find a requirement in an obscure issue opened and closed cause “ah yes we have a dependency not stated anywhere” *close issue and never add it to the project*

Fine, fine I can survive this bs

- another compiler error, no solution found after 2 hours

Honestly? Why the fuck do I need to compile this stuff? Just give me a damn npm package I can use? Goddamn it’s just transpiling, you don’t need access to my OS! (Aside for fs to save the files, and which btw is accessible via nodejs)

Now, I COULD download the latest realease as a precompiled, but… honestly?
I give up, I’ll do some shitty rest apis cause the customer’s not paying me enough for even THINKING to go trough this shit again when they’ll ask an iOS app. Or having colleagues asking me to help them understand how to do it.

Side note: also add typescript support to the web-code-generation ffs! Why does node have it and web don’t?

tutorial code doesnt have enough comments

not some bs header before a function and explanations. like, a snippet of bad code and why youre doing it how you are, or an example and then reduction, the evolution of what's what. redundancy.

recently been burnt out and exhausted juggling too much bs while trying to learn other stuff x-x

also 311, neat

So this supposed dev ops job has devolved into first support.

This shit honestly doesn't even make sense to me

Time to start looking

OK, so, I see PY files shared on GitHub. All I know is, it is code for certain apps or pages. I download SEVERAL DIFFERENT PROGRAMS trying to get PY to open. Some didn't work, others were in Console and not Form. I asked for help on the Forum, how to open it, they do the same BS; gave me a Console app that just stays black for less than a second, and closes. I ask for a Form version. They made the excuse that it wasn't a program like I was thinking. They rudely tell me to be polite, but something like this IS GOING TO HAPPEN if they can't get their crap working. Eventually, after I TOLD THEM I WAS FURIOUS, THEY HIDE MY QUESTION FOR 10 MINUTES. When I replied, I DID NOT CUSS, I REPLACED LETTERS WITH ASTERISKS AND SYMBOLS, AND STILL GOT SUSPENDED, FOR A MONTH, AFTER TELLING THEM I WAS FURIOUS.

On the other hand, I was using Audacity. I upgraded and a plugin stops working. I thought they messed something up, so I wait using the outdated version for the fix for a few months, and so a few months later I update again, at this point I was a little upset; 2nd update and it still doesn't work. After the 3rd time, I thought they just didn't want to take the time and fix it, as people probably would have reported it by then. So I rant on Audacity's Forum saying they didn't fix an error, showed them screenshots in all versions I got and the 3 newest ones show an error. THEY TOLD ME WHAT WAS WRONG! I was trying to run a 32-Bit plugin on a 64-Bit version! I downloaded a 32-Bit version of the newest Audacity, and the plugin worked fine.

Python could've done what Audacity did, but, "No-o-o, we enjoy banning Winston when he is peed off!" And just so, the Suspension ends a day after my Birthday.

I might just ask when I'm back on, "How to remove my user off this Forum", so they can say "I can't", and flag it as malware because I almost no longer want they're help, and CAN'T GET AWAY FROM IT.

Freak you in the butt, Python.

PS - If anyone knows how to use Python files in Windows 10 or know a free, non-demo program that will more-advancedly edit, save, open PY files in a Form, please, give me the name or link to the software, program or app in the comments.

Before anyone says anything, this page says "Rant", so don't ban this or I'm deleting my account. If this isn't a "Rant" site, please tell me, and/or rename this site.

That is the reason I came here, just to get my frustration out.