Yesterday: Senior dev messages out a screenshot of someone using an extension method I wrote (he didn’t know I wrote it)..

SeniorDev: “OMG…that has to be the stupidest thing I ever saw.”
Me: “Stupid? Why?”
SeniorDev: “Why are they having to check the value from the database to see if it’s DBNull and if it is, return null. The database value is already null. So stupid.”
Me: “DBNull is not null, it has a value. When you call the .ToString, it returns an empty string.”
SeniorDev: ”No it doesn’t, it returns null.”
<oh no he didn’t….the smack down begins>
Me: “Really? Are you sure?”
SeniorDev: “Yes! And if the developer bothered to write any unit tests, he would have known.”
Me: “Unit tests? Why do you assume there aren’t any unit tests? Did you look?”
<at this moment, couple other devs take off their head phones and turn around>
SeniorDev:”Well…uh…I just assumed there aren’t because this is an obvious use case. If there was a test, it would have failed.”
Me: “Well, let’s take a look..”
<open up the test project…navigate to the specific use case>
Me: “Yep, there it is. DBNull.Value.ToString does not return a Null value.”
SeniorDev: “Huh? Must be a new feature of C#. Anyway, if the developers wrote their code correctly, they wouldn’t have to use those extension methods. It’s a mess.”
<trying really hard not drop the F-Bomb or two>
Me: “Couple of years ago the DBAs changed the data access standard so any nullable values would always default to null. So no empty strings, zeros, negative values to indicate a non-value. Downside was now the developers couldn’t assume the value returned the expected data type. What they ended up writing was a lot of code to check the value if it was DBNull. Lots of variations of ‘if …’ , ternary operators, some creative lamda expressions, which led to unexpected behavior in the user interface. Developers blamed the DBAs, DBAs blamed the developers. Remember, Tom and DBA-Sam almost got into a fist fight over it.”
SeniorDev: “Oh…yea…but that’s a management problem, not a programming problem.”
Me: “Probably, but since the developers starting using the extension methods, bug tickets related to mis-matched data has nearly disappeared. When was the last time you saw DBA-Sam complain about the developers?”
SeniorDev: “I guess not for a while, but it’s still no excuse.”
Me: “Excuse? Excuse for what?”
<couple of awkward seconds of silence>
SeniorDev: “Hey, did you guys see the video of the guy punching the kangaroo? It’s hilarious…here, check this out.. ”

Pin shoulders the mat…1 2 3….I win.

I accidentally created a bug that became an amazing feature at my last job.

It was for a program to read barcode tickets (we created software and web solutions for events), and to register the barcode sacnners to the computer I had to do some magic with USB-detection since it was not specified which brand the scanners would be (so no SDK would be available).

When the scanner was plugged in it would create its own thread so it wouldn't interfere with the UI of the program when it was reading/sending data.

Somehow I messed up with the thread termination for new scanners so it would accept to connect more than one scanner and it would work flawless since it was its own thread in the program.

When I tried to think out a solution for multiple scanners when planning it I got a headache and thought that's something for later. Turned out alright in the end apparently.

Just found out the backend developer I’m always complaining about. The one who:

- Can’t implement OAuth, and we have to have app users login every 24 hours because we have no way to generate new refresh tokens.

- Who used the phrase “your time zone is not my concern” to avoid building something that would let us inject test data.

- Who’s been debugging a critical bug affecting many users since December.

- Who can’t conduct API tests from external internet (you know, like the way the app will be in the wild) because it takes too much time.

- Who replies to Jira tickets only on a blue moon.

- Who has been 90% of the reason for my blood pressure situation

... is a fucking principal engineer in this company. In pecking order, his opinion should be considered more valuable than mine and everyone on my team.

I’ve just lost the will to live. How are big organizations THIS bad. Seriously, what promotion discussion did he go into

“So, you are a complete and utter bastard, nobody can stand to speak to you and you’ve yet to deliver anything of worth that actually works, over the course of several years ... ... ... interested in having your pay doubled??”

At my previous job, the person in charge of the Phabricator server didn't have a backup system in place. I yelled at him until he implemented one.

He had the server perform backups to the same drive. I yelled at him again, to no avail.

Well, after awhile the hard drive started failing, and it would only boot intermittently. After a lot of effort, he was able to salvage part of the backup data, but no more, meaning we lost a lot of bug reports and feedback, and developer tickets. We were able recover all of the older lost tickets from a previous server, so overall the loss was pretty small.

But I think he learned his lesson.
He definitely learned to listen.

!!fml

"Root, go fix this bug. It'll take you two days."

The "bug" is a feature that was never implemented for one particular payment type.

The code in question is two years old, full of typos, smells, junior-isms, and is convoluted AF. The feature's commit touched 190 files and implemented many other features as well. Thus far, I have been unable to narrow down where this particular feature's code lives for the other payment types, nor which code or payment paths lead to it. Burned out, I can barely focus on the screen, let alone follow its many twisting and dynamically-inferred paths. I hint as to the ticket's scavenger hunt nature during standup.

"But I wrote comments on the ticket telling you exactly where to look to fix it," Thundercunt admonishes in front of the team.

"Sure, you did," Root replies. "You reworded what the original dev had said in the comments 20 minutes prior, and agreed with him. His comments were helpful, but it doesn't tell me how any of it works," she continues.

TC scoffs and closes the meeting.

Root stares blankly, seeing neither code nor screen, questions her life decisions, and recalls the previous tickets she has worked on: nearly every one of them busywork, fixing other people's bugs. Bugs she never could have gotten away with if she tried.

"Why do I put up with this?" She asks. "They don't care, and it's killing me."

But the bills remain, and so must she.

"Fuck my life" she finally decides.

Going through the latest bug tickets like...

Ok story of my most most recent job search (not sure devRant could handle the load if I was to go through them all)

First a little backstory on why I needed to search for a new job:

Joined a small startup in the blockchain space. They were funded through grants from a non-profit setup by the folks who invented the blockchain and raised funds (they gave those funds out to companies willing to build the various pieces of the network and tools).

We were one of a handful of companies working on the early stages of the network. We built numerous "first"s on the network and spent the majority of our time finding bugs and issues and asking others to fix them so it would become possible, for us to do what we signed up for. We ended up having to build multiple server side applications as middleware to plug massive gaps. All going great, had a lot of success, were told face to face by the foundation not to worry about securing more funds at least for the near term as we were "critical to the success of the network".

1 month later a bug was discovered in our major product, was nasty and we had to take it offline. Nobody lost any funds.

1-2 months later again, the inventor of the blockchain (His majesty, Lord dickhead of cuntinstein) decided to join the foundation as he wasn't happy with the orgs progress and where the network now stood. Immediately says "see that small startup over there ... yeah I hate them. Blackball them from getting anymore money. Use them as an example to others that we are not afraid to cut funds if you fuck up"

Our CEO was informed. He asked for meetings with numerous people, including His royal highness, lord cockbag of never-wrong. The others told our CEO that they didn't agree with the decision, but their hands were tied and they were deeply sorry. Our CEO's pleas with The ghost of Christmas cuntyness, just fell on deaf ears.

CEO broke the news to us, he had 3 weeks of funds left to pay salaries. He'd pay us to keep things going and do whatever we could to reduce server costs, so we could leave everything up long enough for our users to migrate elsewhere. We reduced costs a lot by turning off non essential features, he gave us our last pay check and some great referrals. That was that and we very emotionally closed up shop.

When news got out, we then had to defend ourselves publicly, because the loch ness moron, decided to twist things in his favour. So yeah, AMAZING experience!

So an unemployed and broken man, I did the unthinkable ... I set my linkedin to "open to work". Fuck me every moronic recruiter in a 10,000 mile radius came after me. Didn't matter if I was qualified, didn't matter if I had no experience in that language or type of system, didn't matter if my bio explicitly said "I don't work with X, Y or Z" ... that only made them want me more.

I think I got somewhere around 20 - 30 messages per week, 1 - 2 being actually relevant to what I do. Applied to dozens of jobs myself, only contacted back by 1, who badly fucked up the job description and I wasn't a fit at all.

Got an email from company ABC, who worked on the same blockchain we got kicked off of. They were looking for people with my skills and the skills of one other dev in the preious company. They heard what happened and our CEO gave us a glowing recommendation. They largely offered us the job, but both of us said that we weren't interested in working anywhere near, that kick needing prick, again. We wanted to go elsewhere.

Went back to searching, finding nothing. The other dev got a contract job elsewhere. The guy from ABC message me again to say look, we understand your issues, you got fucked around. We can do out best to promise you'll never have to speak to, the abominable jizz stain, again. We'll also offer you a much bigger role, and a decent salary bump on top of that.

Told them i'd think about it. We ended up having a few more calls where they showed me designs of all the things they wanted to do, and plans on how they would raise money if the same thing was to ever happen to them. Eventually I gave in and signed up.

So far it was absolutely the right call. Haven't had to speak to the scrotum at all. The company is run entirely by engineers. Theres no 14 meetings per week to discuss "where we are" which just involves reading our planning tool tickets, out loud. I'm currently being left alone 99% of the week to get work done. and i'm largely in-charge of everything mobile. It was a fucking hellhole of a trip, but I came out the other side better off

I'm sure there is a thought provoking, meaningful quote I could be writing now about how "things always work out" or that crap. But remembering it all just leaves me with the desire to find him and shove a cactus where the sun don't shine

.... happy job hunting everyone!

Walked into the office in the afternoon, everyone was kinda panicking
Asked what was going on, well, the ticket system is not working anymore, can't put in any new tickets.
So I started to look for the issue as well, checked the system and... The last tickets' IDs were at ~32k. Ha. Looked into the source code and, sure enough, they used a data type with an upper limit of... 32k. So when trying to get a new ticket ID it just crashed and burned.
Quickly changed the data type and stopped the office panic in around half an hour.
Memorable not because of how tough the bug was, but because of the impact and the simplicity of the fix

Some days I feel like I work in a different universe.

Last night our alerting system sent out a dept. wide email regarding a high number of errors coming from the web site.

Email shows the number of errors and a summary of the error messages.

Ex. 60 errors
59 Object reference not set to an instance of an object
1 The remote server returned an unexpected response: (413) Request Entity Too Large

Web team responds to the email..

"Order processing team's service is returning a 413 error. I'll fill out a corrective action ticket in the morning to address that error in their service. "

Those tickets are taken pretty seriously by upper mgmt, so I thought someone on the order processing team would point out the 1 error vs. 59 (coming from the web team's code).

Two hours go by, nobody responds, so I decide to jump into something that was none of my business.

"Am I missing something? Can everyone see the 59 null reference exceptions? The 413 exception only occurred once. It was the null reference exceptions that triggered the alert. Looking back at the logs, the site has been bleeding null reference exceptions for hours. Not enough for an alert, but there appears to be a bug that needs to be looked into."

After a dept. managers meeting this morning:

MyBoss: "Whoa..you kicked the hornets nest with your response last night."
Me: "Good. What happened?"
<Dan dept VP, Jake web dept mgr>
MyBoss: "Dan asked Jake if they were going to fix the null reference exceptions and Jake got pissed. Said the null reference errors were caused by the 413 error."
Me: "How does he know that? They don't log any stack traces. I don't think those two systems don't even talk to one another."
<boss laughs>
MyBoss:"That's what Dan asked!..oh..then Jake started in on the alert thresholds were too low, and we need to look into fixing your alerting code."
Me: "What!? Good Lord, tell me you chimed in."
MyBoss: "Didn't have to. Dan starting laughing and said there better be a ticket submitted on their service within the next hour. Then Jake walked out of the meeting. Oh boy, he was pissed."
Me: "I don't understand how they operate over there. It's a different universe.
MyBoss: "Since the alert was for their system, nobody looked at the details. I know I didn't. If you didn't respond pointing out the real problem, they would have passed the buck to the other team and wasted hours chasing a non-existent problem. Now they have to take resources away from their main project and answer to the VP for the delay. I'm sure they are prefixing your name right now with 'that asshole'"
Me: "Not the first, won't be the last."

While writing up this quarter's performance review, I re-read last quarter's goals, and found one my boss edited and added a minimum to: "Release more features that customers want and enjoy using, prioritized by product; minimum 4 product feature/bug tickets this quarter."

... they then proceeded to give me, not four+ product tickets, but: three security tickets (two of which are big projects), a frontend ticket that should have been assigned to the designer, and a slow query performance ticket -- on top of my existing security tickets from Q3.

How the fuck was I supposed to meet this requirement if I wasn't given any product tickets? What, finish the monster tickets in a week instead of a month or more each and beg for new product tickets from the product manager who refuses to even talk to me?

Fuck these people, seriously.

"I'm getting an error. It's just not working right."

Stupidest. Bug. Report. Ever.

Please stop wasting our time with tickets like this people, it only requires is to then spend more time just figuring out what the issue is.

🙄🔫

My tech lead keeps assigning me incident tickets in the company's worst legacy app because I solved some bug in it a while ago. I'm the only one who gets assigned these.

If this keeps going, I know for sure that I will be regarded as the designated developer for this application. Then I will be truly fucked.

Here I am trying to get some tickets for a theater, and I noticed an interesting thing. It seems that the website holds no session persistence. In other words it doesn't check to see if the user has stopped trying to order tickets, instead it holds the seats for about 30 minutes. This is kind of stupid because when you back out, your treated as a completely new session, you have no way of trying to get back the seats you had chosen.

Sooo, what does this mean? It means that I can start selecting a bunch of seats and continue selecting a bunch of seats. There appears to be no server-side checks to prevent someone from just booking the entire theater.

Soooooo, what does this mean? I could potentially spam the entire country's theaters (any that use this website as a booking system) and make it impossible for people to book seats through this website.

What do you guys think? Is this a bug or feature?

Two of them, both are not very extrem.
Positive one first:

Meetings were usually not dead serious (unless there was a problem), everyone just joked around a little, made their actual points and got back to work.

Now the other one:
A client's QA staff commented "this bug is still occuring" on 5 tickets, without checking if they ever deployed the new release candidate.
They didn't deploy the new RC, so of course, the bugs couldn't have been fixed on their side.

I'm going on vacation next week, and all I need to do before then is finish up my three tickets. Two of them are done save a code review comment that amounts to combining two migrations -- 30 seconds of work. The other amounts to some research, then including some new images and passing it off to QA.

I finish the migrations, and run the fast migration script -- should take 10 minutes. I come back half an hour later, and it's sitting there, frozen. Whatever; I'll kill it and start it again. Failure: database doesn't exist. whatever, `mysql` `create database misery;` rerun. Frozen. FINE. I'll do the proper, longer script. Recreate the db, run the script.... STILL GODDAMN FREEZING.

WHATEVER.

Research time.
I switch branches, follow the code, and look for any reference to the images, asset directory, anything. There are none. I analyze the data we're sending to the third party (Apple); no references there either, yet they appear on-device. I scour the code for references for hours; none except for one ref in google-specific code. I grep every file in the entire codebase for any reference (another half hour) and find only that one ref. I give up. It works, somehow, and the how doesn't matter. I can just replace the images and all should be well. If it isn't, it will be super obvious during QA.

So... I'll just bug product for the new images, add them, and push. No need to run specs if all that's changed is some assets. I ask the lead product goon, and .... Slack shits the bed. The outage lasts for two hours and change.

Meanwhile, I'm still trying to run db migrations. shit keeps hanging.

Slack eventually comes back, and ... Mr. Product is long gone. fine, it's late, and I can't blame him for leaving for the night. I'll just do it tomorrow.

I make a drink. and another.
hard horchata is amazing. Sheelin white chocolate is amazing. Rum and Kahlua and milk is kind of amazing too. I'm on an alcoholic milk kick; sue me.

I randomly decide to switch branches and start the migration script again, because why not? I'm not doing anything else anyway. and while I'm at it, I randomly Slack again.

Hey, Product dude messaged me. He's totally confused as to what i want, and says "All I created was {exact thing i fucking asked for}". sfjaskfj. He asks for the current images so he can "noodle" on it and ofc realize that they're the same fucking things, and that all he needs to provide is the new "hero" banner. Just like I asked him for. whatever. I comply and send him the archive. he's offline for the night, and won't have the images "compiled" until tomorrow anyway. Back to drinking.

But before then, what about that migration I started? I check on it. it's fucking frozen. Because of course it fucking is.

I HAD FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FUCKING WORK TODAY, AND I WOULD BE DONE FOR NEARLY THREE FUCKING WEEKS.

UGH!

Start raising tickets/bugs like you were going to the doctors and things would get fixed a lot faster.

X page doesn't work.

Great information there what about the page isn't working?

Doesn't answer the question and gets pissy when you have to ask them again.

If this was a doctor's appointment all you would've done is walked into my office and yelled it hurts over and over.

Then proceeded to shit on my floor as you're leaving because I didn't diagnose the problem fast enough.

What were you trying to do when the system took a crap?
What did the red text say?
Can you take a screenshot? because the old saying a picture paints a thousand words holds some truth.

If you can go to the doctor and give them a full run down of when you got sick and what symptoms you got in the same order they happened why do you struggle to do the same when reporting a bug.

I am just sick of the things that's been going on.

Joined a mid level startup as full Stack developer working on angular and node js . Code base is too shit and application is full of bugs(100+ tickets are being raised for bugs)

Since the product owner(PO) wants to demo the application he is pushing for bug fixes.

UI code:
1. Application is not handled for responsiveness all these years, it is now being trying to address. Code base is very huge to address though .
2. The common reusable components of UI has business logic inside. Any small change in business logic we are forced to handle in common components which might break up on another components.
3. Styling in 40+ components are made global. Small css change in component A is breaking up in component B due to this
4. No time to refactor.
5. Application not at all tested properly all these years. PO wants a stable build.
6. More importantly most of developers have already left the company and we are left with 2 developers including me.

I am not in a position to switch due to other commitments adds up a lot to frustration

Best:Working for people with money and crazy projects in mind. Working for dreamers. Working for people that believe in you, as a decision maker, stack choices. Choose not to be a pawn.

Worst: not leaving a company when they indiscriminately lie in the job offer. HR will never say bug fixing (that's like going to a date saying you have a micropenis from the beggining), they will say integrations, product improvement... If then all the tickets are bug fixing i should have said something in the first month.

Getting "bug" tickets from customers complaining about EXACTLY WHAT I DESCRIBED WOULD HAPPEN. THATS NOT A F&)$*(%$(*# BUG, THATS LITERALLY WORD FOR WORD WHAT I WROTE IN THE TICKET LAST WEEK YOU F&#*(@#$() NEANDERTHAL PIECE OF SH$%*(#(*)!!! WE AGREED ON THIS EXACT BUSINESS PROCESS WEEKS AGO. DO YOU EVEN READ THE WORDS THAT I WRITE AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Our QA team love writing really awkward bug tickets

No reproductions steps

and every time i see one appear all i can think of is this

I have been working on this software for 3 years now. The code base was a working prototype made by my boss before I came, not more, not less. Php + Angular. Have been refactoring a lot, backend is backed with hundreds of tests now, frontend still lacks a lot. Still a lot of programm structures are still the same weird ones my boss once created in a rush between two meetings while learning Angular to get the prototype finished. Now it's used in production which makes hard to refactor, because we have to maintain backwards compatibility. Neither the parts I added or refactored completely are satisfying, because they are built on this structures, because i never got any feedback for anything I decided and because I changed my own paradigms over time.

So I am all alone on this project. All genuinly new projects are assigned to the new team members (i was the first one, no we are five plus my boss) because I wont have time, have to maintain the old one. So I never can do something new which is quite frustrating.

I did a little side tool, the only thing I invented and did completely by myself in our repertoire - and now some stakeholder shows big interest onto this. Instead of giving me the task to make a real project from this my boss wants to give it to them to develop it. Why? Because I need more time for the main application.

Also the more the software is used the more bug tickets and feature requests come. I was crying for help for months but the others had appareantly more important stuff to do.

This might be true to some extend. Yesterday we had some kind of crisis meeting and my boss wanted again to assing pur junior to help me, who has a shit load of other things to do and is a student. I insisted that this would not be enough, and one of the fulltime devs has to get involved because the thing is our core application and I am only part time btw. So my boss said we wont decide today but one of them should do it. They should have some time to figure out who which is understandable but it's not that I didn't keep saying this for months. Now they are all like whimp whimp when I have to do php i will quit. The new projects are all typescript, with node backend if any. But alas, one of them even said yesterday he doesn't want to do js anymore. Okay... but... this is our tech stack then get another job allready?

And I should do the same probably. But then again I feel very sorry for my boss who helped me in very dark times of corona and more. If both of us leave, the project he worked on for decade (including convincing poeole, collect money..) might be suddenly at it's end while he is so exited about it's access today...

I also get insecure if it's really that they hate php so much or that they don't want to work with me personally because maybe I am a bad team Player or what?

I experienced the same at my old workplace, got left alone with big parts of the project because they didn't want to do php and js in this case and it ended up five devs doing the python backend and me doing the frontend and the php cms part all alone. Then I quit and now everything seems to happen again.

And then again I think I am only fucked up so hard by this stuff because I do not really like being a developer at all. I only do it for the money and because I am good at it (at least i think so. Nobody ever bothers to ever to read my code and give me feedback, because you know, php and js). So I guess I would hate any other job in the field maybe likewise?

This job *is* convinient, salary, office
position, flexibility could not be better. At the end of the day it's not that stressfull. And i don't have any second of freetime (due to family) or energy i could offer a new and more demanding employer, can't work over time or even take a fulltime position, can't home office, can't earn less, can't travel very long to the office and especially can't go back to school to learn something completely new. Some of these constraints are softwe then other naturally but still my posibilities at the Moment are very limited. That might change in about five years if the family situation changed. So it would most likely be reasonable to stay until then at my current job? And bear being alone with this app, don't getting involved on any new project, don't learn anything new, don't invent anything.

There was one potential way out, they considered offering me PHD position to the upcoming ml part of the project... But I learned that I would attend to a bunch of classes at university first, which i would like to, but I don't think i have the time.

I feel trapped somehow. I also feel very lonely in the Office because those fucktards keep saying in home office.

Man, I don't want to go to work today.

Can someone please write a plugin that automatically translates bug tickets into startup-ese? It would make it very easy to present the most common offenders to higher management on quarterly reviews.

Example:
-
$< "screen A is all messed up"
$> "We are disrupting the establishment in screen A"
-
$< "API B is not responding, giving timeout errors"
$> "We are facing logistical challenges in API B"

That moment when agile means "I will sneak in new feature requirements in with your bug tickets even though our sprint is supposed to be only stabilization". Thanks PM Lord.

So what's up with some devs, QAs and managers that create bug tickets with little to no information on what is the actual bug? I can semi-understand in the case where you document it only for you to read later.

Fuck you if you think that a ticket with only a title saying "fix all the bugs for this release" or "this feature is not working" is an appropriate way of documenting a bug.

Fuck you even more if when you are being asked to provide more info to reproduce the issue so someone else can actually be sure it is fixed or not (environment, steps, expected result, actual result, etc.), you simply say that you don't have the time for it and documenting tickets is a waste of time.

Hiring YOU was a waste of time!

I'm considering quitting a job I started a few weeks ago. I'll probably try to find other work first I suppose.

I'm UK based and this is the 6th programming/DevOps role I've had and I've never seen a team that is so utterly opposed to change. This is the largest company I've worked for in a full time capacity so someone please tell me if I'm going to see the same things at other companies of similar sizes (1000 employees). Or even tell me if I'm just being too opinionated and that I simply have different priorities than others I'm working with. The only upside so far is that at least 90% of the people I've been speaking to are very friendly and aren't outwardly toxic.

My first week, I explained during the daily stand up how I had been updating the readmes of a couple of code bases as I set them up locally, updated docker files to fix a few issues, made missing env files, and I didn't mention that I had also started a soon to be very long list of major problems in the code bases. 30 minutes later I get a call from the team lead saying he'd had complaints from another dev about the changes I'd spoke about making to their work. I was told to stash my changes for a few weeks at least and not to bother committing them.

Since then I've found out that even if I had wanted to, I wouldn't have been allowed to merge in my changes. Sprints are 2 weeks long, and are planned several sprints ahead. Trying to get any tickets planned in so far has been a brick wall, and it's clear management only cares about features.

Weirdly enough but not unsurprisingly I've heard loads of complaints about the slow turn around of the dev team to get out anything, be it bug fixes or features. It's weird because when I pointed out that there's currently no centralised logging or an error management platform like bugsnag, there was zero interest. I wrote a 4 page report on the benefits and how it would help the dev team to get away from fire fighting and these hidden issues they keep running into. But I was told that it would have to be planned for next year's work, as this year everything is already planned and there's no space in the budget for the roughly $20 a month a standard bugsnag plan would take.

The reason I even had time to write up such a report is because I get given work that takes 30 minutes and I'm seemingly expected to take several days to do it. I tried asking for more work at the start but I could tell the lead was busy and was frankly just annoyed that he was having to find me work within the narrow confines of what's planned for the sprint.

So I tried to keep busy with a load of code reviews and writing reports on road mapping out how we could improve various things. It's still not much to do though. And hey when I brought up actually implementing psr12 coding standards, there currently aren't any standards and the code bases even use a mix of spaces and tab indentation in the same file, I seemingly got a positive impression at the only senior developer meeting I've been to so far. However when I wrote up a confluence doc on setting up psr12 code sniffing in the various IDEs everyone uses, and mentioned it in a daily stand up, I once again got kickback and a talking to.

It's pretty clear that they'd like me to sit down, do my assigned work, and otherwise try to look busy. While continuing with their terrible practices.

After today I think I'll have to stop trying to do code reviews too as it's clear they don't actually want code to be reviewed. A junior dev who only started writing code last year had written probably the single worst pull request I've ever seen. However it's still a perfectly reasonable thing, they're junior and that's what code reviews are for. So I went through file by file and gently suggested a cleaner or safer way to achieve things, or in a couple of the worst cases I suggested that they bring up a refactor ticket to be made as the code base was trapping them in shocking practices. I'm talking html in strings being concatenated in a class. Database migrations that use hard coded IDs from production data. Database queries that again quote arbitrary production IDs. A mix of tabs and spaces in the same file. Indentation being way off. Etc, the list goes on.
Well of course I get massive kickback from that too, not just from the team lead who they complained to but the junior was incredibly rude and basically told me to shut up because this was how it was done in this code base. For the last 2 days it's been a bit of a back and forth of me at least trying to get the guy to fix the formatting issues, and my lead has messaged me multiple times asking if it can go through code review to QA yet. I don't know why they even bother with code reviews at this point.

Another fun thing. This morning one of the first mails i read was a issue about a bug in our software.

This was a bug i mentioned months ago but there was nog evidence where i searched like mails chats or tickets.

If people would just listen to me this bug was solved months ago but back then i got a reaction like: "works over here" while i tested it on two different instances with buggy results each time.

One month ago, two tickets were opened by two different people for the same bug.

I picked the one with the most informations and rejected the other by giving the ID of the other ticket, and then assigned it to the person who opened the ticket.

Today, I see that ticket coming back to me, with the status back to Open, and the comments "The ID given is this ticket's ID!"
I mean, yes, I did a typo and typed a 5 instead of a 6.
They could, like, test to see if it was patched (been one month), or contact me by mail or Skype to ask me if I didn't make a typo in the comments, but no, they decided to reopen the ticket for this.

Thanks.

How is it that 4 years after the start of this project we still have to tell people that their dedicated cloud storage is for their projects and not their 8TB server backups or 600000+ vacation pictures…
We literally have processes sending you mails that keep telling you should sort your crap and you still manage not to listen. And then we get support tickets like “cloud storage abnormally slow” “bug in performances” etc… The last gem being a small company CEO that contacted our CEO about this “problem”, he had syncd his entire workstation and told his employees to do the same…

I’m not sure how to convey the stack of feelings I have regarding all of this. I want not to care but I can’t. I want to get angry but what’s the point.

So, it's been a while since I've been working on my current project and I've never had the "luck" to touch the legacy project wrote in PHP, until this week when I got my first issue.

And damn, this goddamn issue. It was a bug, a very strange bug, that only happens in production and that nobody has any idea what was happening, so yeah, I didn't have anyone to ask and I got less time than usual ( because Thanksgiving ).

And thus, I have no starting point, no previous knowledge on PHP and less time! I expected a very fun week 😀 and it was beyond my expectations.

First I tried to understand what might be causing the issue, but there wasn't any real clue to star with, so no choice, time to read the flow on the code and see what are they're doing and using ( 1k line files, yay, legacy ). Luckily I got some clues, we're using a cookie and a php session variable for the session, ok, let's star with the session variable. Where it's that been initialize ? Well, spoiler alert, I shouldn't start with that, because my search end up in the login method of the API that set a that variable and for some reason in the front end app it was always false and that lead me to think that some of the new backend functions were failing, but after checking the logs I got no luck.

Ok, maybe the cookie it's the issue, I should try open the previous website on the brow...redirect to new project login, What? Why ? I ask around and it's a new feature push on Monday, ok I got Chrome Dev tools I can see which value of the cookie it's been set and THERE IT WAS it has a wrong domain! After 2 days ( I resume a lot of my pain ) I got what I've been looking for, so now I should be able to fix the bug. Then where is the cookie initialized ? In the first file the server hits whenever you tried to enter any page of the app, ok, I found the method, but it's using a function that process the domain and sets it correctly? wtf ? Then how in heaven do I get the incorrect domain ? Hello? Ok, relax, you still have one more day to fix this, let's take it easy.

Then, at the end of the Wednesday, nope I still have no clue how this is happening. I talked with the Devops guy and he explain me how this redirection happens and with what it depends on, I followed the PHP code through and nothing, everything should works fine, sigh. Ok I still have 2 days, because I'm not from US and I'm not in US, so I still have time, but the Sprint is messed up already, so whatever I'm gonna had done this bug anyhow.

Thursday ! I got sick, yay, what else could happen this week. Somehow I managed to work a little and star thinking in what external issue could affect the processing, maybe the redirection was bringing a wrong direction, let's talk with the Devops guy again, and he answer me that the redirection it was being made by PHP code, IN A FILE THAT DOESN'T EXIST IN THE REPOSITORY, amazing, it's just amazing. Then he explained me why this file might be missing and how it's the deployment of this app ( btw the Devops guy it's really cool and I will invite him a beer ) . After that I checked the file and I see a random session_star in the first line of the code, without any configuration, eureka ! There was the cause and I only need to ask someone If that line it's necessary anymore, but oh they're on holiday, damn, well I'll wait till Monday to ask them. But once and for all that bug was done for ! 🎉

What do I learn ? PHP and that I don't want any more tickets of PHP 😆.

"Write the failing test first."

Oh, I know. This is probably simple, but when you're stuck on support tickets - there's no faster way than to write a test for whatever the issue is and run it.

You wind up having a quick way to verify your bug fix and you now have a test going forward to ensure the bug never happens again.

I'm in a team of 3 in a small to medium sized company (over 50 engineers). We all work as full stack engineers.. but I think the definition of full stack here is getting super bloated. Let me give u an example. My team hold a few production apps, and we just launched a new one. The whole team (the 3 of us) are fully responsible on it from planning, design, database model, api, frontend (a react page spa), an extra client. Ok, so all this seems normal to a full stack dev.

Now, we also handle provisioning infra in aws using terraform, doing deployments, building a CI/CD pipeline using jenkins, monitoring, writing tests, building an analytics dashboard.

Recently our tech writer also left, so now we are also handling writing feature releases.

Few days ago, we also had a meeting where they sort of discussed that the maintenance of the engineering shared services, e.g. jenkins servers, (and about 2-3 other services) will now be split between teams in a shared board, previously this was handled only be team leads, but now they want to delegate it down.

And ofcourse not to mention supporting the app itself and updating bug tickets with findings.

I feel like my daily responsiblities are becoming the job responsibilities of at least 3 jobs.

Is this what full stack engineering looks like in your company? Do u handle everything from app design, building, cloud, ops, analytics etc..

Universal rule of opening tickets

Me: *opens ticket on basically ANY ticketing system EVER* (could be internal, from the customer, some random bug online, anything...).

Me: writes detailed explanation of issue, because I know working on tickets is hard. Of course I include that I tried steps A, B, C, and that I haven't been able to do D because of reasons.

Ticket derp: Comments...
"Hey, have you already tried A, B, C? Also you should totally do D first."

WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? I TAKE TIME OUT OF MY FUCKING DAY TO WRITE THIS SHIT DOWN AND EVEN FORMAT IT NICELY, JUST TO MAKE YOUR MISERABLE LIFE EASIER, AND YOU DON'T EVEN READ IT YOU WORTHLESS LITTLE BALLSACK!? FUCK OFF!

How 2018 brings an aww bug.

At my company, we've a reporting application. Which kind of provides analysis of client's weekly business. When you open the application it shows their business trend starting from Sunday to day of week.

As usual their is an endpoint to get the data basis on start date. As soon as date changed to 1st Jan, it stopped showing data. Given that it was a long weekend, no one was available from the tech. Support team got tremendous amount of tickets for this. Later on Tuesday while debugging we got to know while forming the date in the application the logic was like this

- get current year
- get the date and month on start of week

Combine these 2 and request the data. All the time it was fetching data starting from 31 Dec 2018.

😒😒😒

FUCK APPLICATION LEVEL FIREWALLS!

So i cam online today, thought already lets open the shitty outlook webmail client. Holy crap .... thats way to much mails. Many of them are missed teams messages. So i open up teams and holy crap. Like every third dev in my company send me a message screaming "gitab is not working!!!".

Yesterday i updated it so imediately get in panic mode - what the shitty hack have i done?!

So yeah gitlab seems to be working just fine, everything is speedy and responsive, so i call one of my fellow devs and ask him whats wrong? And he is like oh yeah there comes a ldap error saying timeout or something.

I try to login with active directory. Works like a charm. Try another account, same problem?!

Google the problem, search gitlab tickets. Nope there is no open bug or sth. like this.

So alright lets call the network guy. "Yo, can you check if there is something ldap-like getting blocked to the gitlab server?" - He is like oh yeah damn like almost every damn request is getting blocked. Ah wait, there was an firewall update yesterday too. Yeah ldap is no longer ldap. BLOCK THAT SHIT!

After 10 minutes of figuring out what shitty type is detected by the firewall and what needs to be whitelisted to make it fucking work again it seems to work.

But ha no, there is another update rolling on, so same shit like 15 minutes later.

Now it seems to work and i have to inform every damn fcking developer that it works again. And yeah alright you sent a mail, but fuck it, i will call you though! So yeah just answering calls, mails and chat messages. Like why the fuck cant you read your mails like a damn normal person?!

So ok, today was a crazy day.
New sprint, new ticket.
Work on the bug tickets first he said ….

Sure can. Oh had I just known that this very first innocent looking ticket is the way to coder‘s hell ….

‚Access of undefined‘ it said. Easy to fix, I thought.
Until I found the very same code twenty-fucking-two times over about 50 files!

Who would guess that exportSingleOperatorBooking, exportSeveralOperatorBookings, exportAllOperatorBookings (… and more) could in practically be the same? Nah, they all use different interfaces.
Oh wait, the alias type of the extended sub-interface of file misc.ts is the same logical content as a differently named interface below another different interface with the same content as in another ts file?
Wait that can‘t be. Riiiiight?? 😳

8h later I have barely scratched the surface of refactoring this shitshow of a project.
But no, I refuse to put the same error handling multiple times in different places.
I could have been done already. I could have saved my soul, my sanity. But I will be brave and strong to save the innocent developer that will cometh after me. For I shall be rewardeth for my sacrifice.
Amen.

for my job I need to know,

Programming, C#, Optimization, Multithreading and Async code, Working certain tools, Reading difficult written code, Understanding, Physics, Networking, Rendering, Codeloops, Memory management, Profiling tools, Being able to make Jira tickets and read Jira tickets. Understanding source control branching, merging, push and pull. bug fixing.

And I write almost 1 line of code a week on average..

I'm a programmer.

My JIRA fanatic manager: log whatever you do during the day, even the smallest things are important. and you have all the material needed for next day's standup meet.

me, on a particular tuesday:
had lunch
peed thrice
bitched about an unreasonable bug raised by the testing team
listened to Rihanna's song Diamonds
had four mugs of coffee
, among various other things.

next day.
manager: so, ssup?
me: eh, didn't do much yesterday. was one of those down days I guess.

Guess who was asked to write "didn't do much yesterday" on all the JIRA tickets assigned to him?

Is exclusively being assigned bug tickets only for a whole sprint (they're not my bugs) while another dev does feature work a bad sign? I'm a Senior SDE but my domain Knowledge is far weaker than the other SDE 2, so he can get feature work done faster. Bug fixes are general project ones that are either suddenly very critical or lower priority and leads me to keep debugging some other aspect of the system (not much documentation sadly so have to check whole flow slowly to understand it, very financial based).

My manager also just yesterday said as a senior my expectation is to lead a project and we'll discuss the requirements of my role. This is my direct manager, the one who assigned me all the bugs is the project manager, who also acts a bit like an SDE sometimes. The problem is I want to deliver work my main manager suggests but I simply don't get the time due to suddenly high priority bugs occurring (last night 1 hour before I log off, other manager says to find root cause analysis of a high priority bug), this isn't an oncall rota or task either, just normal bugs all the time.

Is this a bad sign? Am I about to be PiPed?

How I feel after a major bug fix, responding to all those support tickets

Bug tickets with no steps-to-reproduce.

So we now do continuous deployment to a development environment. Once a PR gets merged it gets deployed there. We then have to manually deploy to staging every so often.

We did this because QA wined that the Dev was constantly breaking Staging, when we contentiously deployed to that.

So now we have a staging instance that is always behind. Which isn't big deal, because its supposed to be stable right?

Well now the stupid fucking QA team is always making mountains of tickets and noise for stuff that is already fixed on the development instance.

Fucking shit that they message me about, or have to call me about. "Hey let me tell me about this thing I found." And then I'm like I already fixed that thing last week.

So it seems to be wasting everyone time to not just CDCI into staging. I have to wait weeks to retest my bugs on staging. To make sure that some other stupid fuckeshir on my team didn't undo or break my fucking fix. Shit keeps getting kicked out of QA Review. Fuck. lol.

Then there like I can update the thing on the database through the front end tool. Well tough shit buddy, your going to have to wait a week unti next staging deployment to see if that tool is fixed. This is your fault for fucking up our pure CDCI with your ideas. Now everything takes longer for everyody.

To sum things up. Some dumb bug makes it into the manual staging deployment and gets fixed an hour later. Doesn't get deployed until next fucking week. QA makes a bunch of noise about it. A thing that is fixed and in the pipe-line.

Also a dumb fucking bug will make it into staging, lets say a critical front-end back office tool that needs to send numbers to the backend, they send a fucking string instead of a number and break it. Now we have to redeploy the tool and backend to staging because there related. Then if we deploy backend we have to deploy the client facing site too. since it also depends on backend.
Its a fucking hassle.

Now if the fucking DevOps guy could do his job, and make a god-damn deploy button for all the staging servers that would be great.

Don't you love the neverending sprint?

You know the one that just inherits all the tickets from the last one? Each sprint packs on new cool features but along the way bug tickets come in for code you haven't even touched or wrote and you deal with them because they are blockers.

before you know it, sprint is over and ok to the next one. I'm pretty sure that is how this is supposed to work right?

Asking for a friend....

New job, fairly new to web development, very new to JS. I am failing miserable at my job can’t complete tickets which are mostly bug fixers created by testers. So I am debugging code that I didn’t write on a tech stack I do not know (ampersand, q, radio, lodash, react, etc)

Do I try to learn the language better?
or
Focus on learning debugging with dev tools and getting better at using the webstorm IDE.

It seems that my barometer for whether I would stay long in a company is roughly 1.5 years. Because apparently that's how long it takes to gauge if:

(a) The work I'm doing is fulfilling or self-satisfying
(b) My colleagues make work a fun and challenging experience
(c) My bosses are people I can be proud to work for.

Right now, the tally thus far:

(a) The work is half crap, supporting old code (fuck Swig and Architect, by the way) or fixing bugs on old projects. New projects are always mismanaged, and I mean ALWAYS (let's do Agile and create tickets but hey the requirements are still in progress so do start anyway and we'll file everything as bug tickets until they're done)

(b) I'm sure it's an effect of going remote working for the last few months, but I'm feeling detached from my team. It's fine I guess.

(c) My manager is okay, he's a good guy who listens and is also technical so we get along. But his boss (who oversees several teams. including ours) is a total prick who loves to insult people at their expense as a joke. He knows nobody's gonna talk smack back so he just does it without repercussions.

I'll probably see if I can move around internally to a different division since the pandemic makes it difficult to find work externally. I'm grateful I have a job, but I shouldn't have to feel like I owe the company for that at the cost of my personal happiness.

Just gotta #survive2020 I suppose.

GitHub status is like my Jira tickets: Found a bug, fixing a bug, squashed a bug. The end.

What's your team's best practice when using JIRA (on premises or cloud) and VSTS or GitHub?

Who manages issues/tickets and are they duplicated in both locations? Is one for PM only and other for Devs??

We have both tools and I'm trying to figure out a workflow that doesn't kill devs and PMs.

We have Office 365 so I heavily use MS Flow to help (Jira bug turns into vsts work item) etc, but any insight from anyone who has a similar setup would be appreciated!

How do you deal when you are overpromising and underdelivering due to really shitty unpredictable codebase? Im having 2-3 bad sprints in a row now.

For context: Im working on this point of sale app for the past 4 months and for the last 3 sprints I am strugglig with surprises and edgecases. I swear to god each time I want to implement something more complex, I have to create another 4-5 tickets just to fix the constraints or old bugs that prevent my feature implementation just so I could squeeze my feature in. That offsets my original given deadlines and its so fucking draining to explain myself to my teamlead about why feature has to be reverted why it was delayed again and so on.

So last time basically it went like this: Got assigned a feature, estimated 2 weeks to do it. I did the feature in time, got reviewed and approved by devs, got approved by QA and feature got merged to develop.

Then, during regression testing 3 blockers came up so I had to revert the feature from develop. Because QA took a very long time to test the feature and discover the blockers, now its like 3 days left until the end of the sprint. My teamlead instantly started shitting bricks, asked me to fix the blockers asap.

Now to deal with 3 blockers I had to reimplement the whole feature and create like 3 extra tickets to fix existing bugs. Feature refactor got moved to yet another sprint and 3 tickets turned into like 8 tickets. Most of them are done, I created them just to for papertrail purposes so that they would be aware of how complex this is.

It taking me already extra 2 weeks or so and I am almost done with it but Im going into really deep rabbithole here. I would ask for help but out of other 7 devs in the team only one is actually competent and helpful so I tried to avoid going to him and instead chose to do 16 hour days for 2 weeks in a row.

Guess what I cant sustain it anymore. I get it that its my fault maybe I should have asked for help sooner.

But its so fucking frustrating trying to do mental gymnastics over here while majority of my team is picking low hanging fruit tasks and sitting for 2 weeks on them but they manage to look good infront of everyone.

Meanwhile Im tryharding here and its no enough, I guess I still look incompetent infront of everyone because my 2 weeks task turned into 6 weeks and I was too stubborn to ask for help. Whats even worse now is that teamlead wants me to lead a new initiative what stresses me even more because I havent finished the current one yet. So basically Im tryharding so much and I will get even extra work on top. Fucking perfect.

My frustration comes from the point that I kinda overpromised and underdelivered. But the thing is, at this point its nearly impossible to predict how much a complex feature implementation might take. I can estimate that for example 2 weeks should be enough to implement a popup, but I cant forsee the weird edgecases that can be discovered only during development.

My frustration comes from devs just reviewing the code and not launching the app on their emulator to test it. Also what frustrates me is that we dont have enough QA resources so sometimes feature stands for extra 1-2 weeks just to be tested. So we run into a situation where long delays for testing causes late bug discovery that causes late refactors which causes late deliveries and for some reason I am the one who takes all the pressure and I have to puloff 16 hour workdays to get something done on time.

I am so fucking tired from last 2 sprints. Basically each day fucking explaining that I am still refactoring/fixing the blocker. I am so tired of feeling behind.

Now I know what you will say: always underpromise and overdeliver. But how? Explain to me how? Ok example. A feature thats add a new popup? Shouldnt take usually more than 2 weeks to do my part. What I cant promise is that devs will do a proper review, that QA wont take 2 extra weeks just to test the feature and I wont need another extra 2 weeks just to fix the blockers.

I see other scrum team devs picking low hanging fruit tasks and sitting for 2 weeks on them. Meanwhile Im doing mental gymnastics here and trying to implement something complex (which initially seemed like an easy task). For the last 2 weeks Im working until 4am.

Im fucking done. I need a break and I will start asking other devs for help. I dont care about saving my face anymore. I will start just spamming people if anything takes longer than a day to implement. Fuck it.

I am setting boundaries. 8 hours a day and In out. New blockers and 2 days left till end of the sprint? Sorry teamlead we will move fixes to another sprint.

It doesnt help that my teamlead is pressuring me and asking the same shit over and over. I dont want them to think that I am incompetent. I dont know how to deal with this shit. Im tired of explaining myself again and again. Should I just fucking pick low hanging fruit tasks but deliver them in a steady pace? Fucking hell.

I know it made sense resource wise, but being on constant support/incident tickets, bug fixes, out of hours & weekend deployments for the past like four months really drains you.
Though, now I have the opportunity of completing half a sprint on my own, while dealing with the ongoing incident tickets.
Not exactly what I hoped for, but I guess it's a change.