Burned it 🔥

Its Friday, you all know what that means! ... Its results day for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

*audience: wwwwwwooooooooo!!!!*

We've had a bewildering array of candidates, lets remind ourselves:

- a psychopath that genuinely scared me a little
- a CEO I would take pleasure seeing in pain
- a pothead who mistook me for his drug dealer
- an unbelievable idiot
- an arrogant idiot obsessed with strings

Tough competition, but there can be only one ... *drum roll* ... the winner is ... none of them!

*audience: GASP!*
*audience member: what?*
*audience member: no way!*
*audience member: your fucking kidding me!*

Sir calm down! this is a day time show, no need for that ... let me explain, there is a winner ... but we've kept him till last and for a good reason

*audience: ooooohhhhh*

You see our final contestant and ultimate winner of this series is our good old friend "C", taking the letters of each of our previous contestants, that spells TRAGIC which is the only word to explain C.

*audience: laughs*

Oh I assure you its no laughing matter. C was with us for 6 whole months ... 6 excruciatingly painful months.

Backstory:

We needed someone with frontend, backend and experience with IoT devices, or raspberry PI's. We didn't think we'd get it all, but in walked an interviewee with web development experience, a tiny bit of Angular and his masters project was building a robot device that would change LED's depending on your facial expressions. PERFECT!!!

... oh to have a time machine

Working with C:

- He never actually did the tutorials I first set him on for Node.js and Angular 2+ because they were "too boring". I didn't find this out until some time later.

- The first project I had him work on was a small dashboard and backend, but he decided to use Angular 1 and a different database than what we were using because "for me, these are easier".

- He called that project done without testing / deploying it in the cloud, despite that being part of the ticket, because he didn't know how. Rather than tell or ask anyone ... he just didn't do it and moved on.

- As part of his first tech review I had to explain to him why he should be using if / else, rather than just if's.

- Despite his past experience building server applications and dashboards (4 years!), he never heard of a websocket, and it took a considerable amount of time to explain.

- When he used a node module to open a server socket, he sat staring at me like a deer caught in headlights completely unaware of how to use / test it was working. I again had to explain it and ultimately test it for him with a command line client.

- He didn't understand the need to leave logging inside an application to report errors. Because he used to ... I shit you not ... drive to his customers, plug into their server and debug their application using a debugger.

... props for using a debugger, but fuck me.

- Once, after an entire 2 days of tapping me on the shoulder every 15 mins for questions / issues, I had to stop and ask:

Me: "Have you googled it?"
C: "... eh, no"
Me: "can I ask why?"
C: "well, for me, I only google for something I don't know"
Me: "... well do you know what this error message means?"
C: "ah good point, i'll try this time"

... maybe he was A's stoner buddy?

- He burned through our free cloud usage allowance for a month, after 1 day, meaning he couldn't test anything else under his account. He left an application running, broadcasting a lot of data. Turns out the on / off button on the dashboard only worked for "on". He had been killing his terminal locally and didn't know how to "ctrl + c a cloud app" ... so left it running. His intention was to restart the app every time you are done using it ... but forgot.

- His issue with the previous one ... not any of his countless mistakes, not the lack of even trying to make the button work, no, no, not for C. C's issue is the cloud is "shit" for giving us such little allowances. (for the record in a month I had never used more than 5%).

- I had to explain environment variables and why they are necessary for passwords and tokens etc. He didn't know it wasn't ok to commit these into GitHub.

- At his project meetups with partners I had to repeatedly ask him to stop googling gifs and pay attention to the talks.

- He complained that we don't have 3 hour lunch breaks like his last place.

- He once copied and pasted the same function 450 times into a file as a load test ... are loops too mainstream nowadays?

You see C is our winner, because after 6 painful months (companies internal process / requirements) he actually achieved nothing. I really mean that, nothing. Every thing was so broken, so insecure / wide open, built without any kind of common sense or standards I had to delete it all and start again ... it took me 2 weeks.

I hope you've all enjoyed this series and will join me in praying for the return of my sanity ... I do miss it a lot.

Yours truly,
practiseSafeHex

I'm a self-taught 19-year-old programmer. Coding since 10, dropped out of high-school and got fist job at 15.

In the the early days I was extremely passionate, learning SICP, Algorithms, doing Haskell, C/C++, Rust, Assembly, writing toy compilers/interpreters, tweaking Gentoo/Arch. Even got a lambda tattoo on my arm after learning lambda-calculus and church numerals.

My first job - a company which raised $100,000 on kickstarter. The CEO was a dumb millionaire hippie, who was bored with his money, so he wanted to run a company even though he had no idea what he was doing. He used to talk about how he build our product, even tho he had 0 technical knowledge whatsoever. He was on news a few times which was pretty cringeworthy. The company had only 1 programmer (other than me) who was pretty decent.

We shipped the project, but soon we burned through kickstart money and the sales dried off. Instead of trying to aquire customers (or abandoning the project), boss kept looking for investors, which kept us afloat for an extra year.

Eventually the money dried up, and instead of closing gates, boss decreased our paychecks without our knowledge. He also converted us from full-time employees to "contractors" (also without our knowledge) so he wouldn't have to pay taxes for us. My paycheck decreased by 40% by I still stayed.

One day, I was trying to burn a USB drive, and I did "dd of=/dev/sda" instead of sdb, therefore wiping out our development server. They asked me to stay at company, but I turned in my resignation letter the next day (my highest ever post on reddit was in /r/TIFU).

Next, I found a job at a "finance" company. $50k/year as a 18-year-old. CEO was a good-looking smooth-talker who made few million bucks talking old people into giving him their retirement money.

He claimed he changed his ways, and was now trying to help average folks save money. So far I've been here 8 month and I do not see that happening. He forces me to do sketchy shit, that clearly doesn't have clients best interests in mind.

I am the only developer, and I quickly became a back-end and front-end ninja. 

I switched the company infrastructure from shitty drag+drop website builder, WordPress and shitty Excel macros into a beautiful custom-written python back-end.

Little did I know, this company doesn't need a real programmer. I don't have clear requirements, I get unrealistic deadlines, and boss is too busy to even communicate what he wants from me.

Eventually I sold my soul. I switched parts of it to WordPress, because I was not given enough time to write custom code properly.

For latest project, I switched from using custom React/Material/Sass to using drag+drop TypeForms for surveys.

I used to be an extremist FLOSS Richard Stallman fanboy, but eventually I traded my morals, dreams and ideals for a paycheck. Hey, $50k is not bad, so maybe I shouldn't be complaining? :(

I got addicted to pot for 2 years. Recently I've gotten arrested, and it is honestly one of the best things that ever happened to me. Before I got arrested, I did some freelancing for a mugshot website. In un-related news, my mugshot dissapeared.

I have been sober for 2 month now, and my brain is finally coming back. 

I know average developer hits a wall at around $80k, and then you have to either move into management or have your own business.

After getting sober, I realized that money isn't going to make me happy, and I don't want to manage people. I'm an old-school neck-beard hacker. My true passion is mathematics and physics. I don't want to glue bullshit libraries together. 

I want to write real code, trace kernel bugs, optimize compilers. Albeit, I was boring in the wrong generation.

I've started studying real analysis, brushing up differential equations, and now trying to tackle machine learning and Neural Networks, and understanding the juicy math behind gradient descent.

I don't know what my plan is for the future, but I'll figure it out as long as I have my brain. Maybe I will continue making shitty forms and collect paycheck, while studying mathematics. Maybe I will figure out something else.

But I can't just let my brain rot while chasing money and impressing dumb bosses. If I wait until I get rich to do things I love, my brain will be too far gone at that point. I can't just sell myself out. I'm coming back to my roots.

I still feel like after experiencing industry and pot, I'm a shittier developer than I was at age 15. But my passion is slowly coming back.

Any suggestions from wise ol' neckbeards on how to proceed?

I was working in a small startup with very cool people as a GameDev. One day I turned towards my colleague to tell him about a joke I just read and I saw flames coming out of his CPU. He was so focused on his work that he didn't notice.

I yelled "OH, SHIT' and quickly reached to the main switch and turned it off. Everyone turned towards me to yell at me, but then they saw the flames and everyone ran outside.
After few minutes the flames died. My colleague was in shock to lose his work as the HDD was completely burned.

Four months ago changed a laptop failing hdd and give it back to customer. Today I got a 30 minutes call because the computer "is not like before the repair, it doesn't work well".

*Thinks* Well, s#*@, before the repair the hdd had more than 2000 damaged clusters, which prevented even the os to start

*Says* "Could you describe me the issue?"
....
...
[ basically he was saying that since he started using IE as a browser, he didn't have Google.com set as the first page and that he had to bing it]
...
"When did the 'issue' start, If I may ask?"

>"Two weeks ago. "

Two weeks ago.
Two f*""#ng weeks ago.
Set aside for the nature of the issue, you blame my four months ago repair for a two weeks ago issue?
"The computer was better before"?
THAT F###ING MACHINE WAS LIKE A BURNING HOUSE - I RESCUED DATA FOR 2 DAYS JUST BEFORE THE HDD STARTED TO CRANK AT EVERY SPIN - I REBUILT IT TO GIVE IT YOU BACK FULLY WORKING AFTER YOU USED AS A FOOTBALL, AND NOW YOU BLAME ME BECAUSE THE
BROWSER ISN'T SETTED AS YOU LIKE

No,seriously, is like I rebuilt a burned house from scrap and now the owner blames me because in the kitchen sink the hot water tap is on the right side instead of the left side.
Seriusly, wtf.

1. I join a company.

2. I get deeply involved in "how to run the company", and get nice compliments from both coworkers & management about my skills in conveying startup/scaleup advice & necessities to upper management.

3. With my ego inflated through all the sweet talk, I think "ah, what the hell, let's do this again", and I accept a Lead/CTO promotion. I have to join board meetings, write reports on quarterly plans and progress.

4. I get unhappy/stressed/burned-out because I really just want to be a developer, not a manager/executive.

5. Upper management understands, I give up my lead position, lock myself back into my coding cave.

6. I get annoyed because the requirements I receive become more and more disconnected from reality, half of the teams seem to have decided to stop using agile/scrum, the testing pipeline breaks all the time, I get an updated labor contract from HR by mail which smells like charred flesh, etc

7. The annoyances become too much to do ANY work. I yell at the other devs outside of the entrance of my cave. There is no answer, only a few painful moans and sighs.

8. I emerge from my cave. The city has turned into a desolate wasteland. The office is a burning ruin, the air sharp and heavy with black soot. Disemboweled corpses of developers litter the poisoned soil.

Product Managers dressed in stained ripped suits scream at each other while they try to reinforce concrete barricades with scotch tape and post-its. *THUMP* Something enormous is trying to break through. "Thank God, bittersweet, you're still alive! The stakeholders! They have mutated! We couldn't meet the promised deadlines! We've lost the whole mobile app department, and that kid there is the last of the backenders and he's only an intern! You're here to save us, right? RIGHT?".

In the corner, between the overflowing coffee machine and a withered cactus, a young boy has collapsed onto the floor. His face is covered in moldy coffee grounds, clasping on to his closed macbook for dear life, wide-open eyes staring into the void, mumbling: "didn't backup the database, and It's all gone" over and over.

A severely dented black Tesla with a dragging loose bumper breaks through the dried up vertical herb garden and the smoothiebar, and comes to a halt against the beanbags in a big cloud of styrofoam balls.

The CEO limps out, leaking blood all over the upholstery. He yells to the COO: "The datacenter is completely flooded with sewage! I saved the backup tapes though", holding a large nest of tangled black magnetic tape mixed with clumps of mud above his head.

9. I collect my outstanding salary and sell any rewarded options/shares for a low dumping price, take a 5 month holiday, and ask a recruiter about opportunities in a different city.

Dad calls:
D: Hai, so, um, my pc's not booting up.
Me: So?
D: What do I do now?
M: You tried fixin' it?
D: That's why I'm calling you.
M: I'm 400km away from you. Does it do anything by pressing a power-on button?
D: No. But I touched it, it's really hot.
M: When was the last time you cleaned that shit up?
D: I have to clean it?
*PC is located at dusty environment at work. 5 years old and is being turned on 6 days a week*

Clean. Your. Pc.
Oh, and yeah, it overheated, burned the mbo, power suply, and cpu cooler stopped spinning.
It's like Satan threw a curse on a pc, and took a piss on it.
The best part? He's mad because I "never help him nor have time when he needs something to be fixed".
He can fix the PC in a pc shop that is across the street.

So, you doin' any better this week?

So, I grew up on the US/Mexican border, in a city where saying there's no opportunity is like saying the Titanic suffered a small leak on its maiden voyage. There were two kinds of people in said town: Mexicans trying to find something less shit than juarez and white trash reveling in their own failure. I came from the latter, for whatever that's worth.

I graduated high school when I was almost 16 years old. Parents couldn't really afford to support three kids and pay the rent on the latest in a long line of shit holes we migrated in and out of. If being a serial eviction artist is a thing, my family were savants.

I applied to college and got accepted only to be told by my father that he didn't see the need. Turns out the only reason he'd helped me graduate early was so I could start working and help pay his bills. I said okay, turned around and tossed a bag and my shitty af spare parts computer into the back of the junkyard Vega I generously referred to as a car and moved cross country. Car died on arrival, so I was basically committed.

Pulled shifts at two part times and what kids today call a side hustle to pay for school, couch surfed most of the time. Sleep deprivation was the only constant.

Over the first 4 months I'd tried leveraging some certs and previous experience I'd obtained in high school to get employment, but wasn't having much luck in the bay area. And then I lost my job. The book store having burned down on the same weekend the owner was conveniently looking to buy property in Vegas.

Depression sets in, that wonderful soul crushing variety that comes with what little safety net you had evaporating.

At a certain point, I was basically living out of the campus computer lab, TA friend of mine nice enough to accidentally lock me in on the reg. Got really into online gaming as a means of dealing with my depression. One night, I dropped some code on a UO shard I'd been playing around on. Host was local, saw the code and offered me a job at his firm that paid chump change, but was three times what all my other work did combined and left time for school. Ground there for a few years until I got a position with work study at LBL that conflicted too much for it to remain mutually beneficial. Amicable parting of the ways.

Fucking poverty is what convinced me to code for a living. It's a solid guarantee of never going back to it. And to anyone who preaches the virtues of it and skipping opportunity on grounds of the moral high ground, well, you know.

List of things that my fucking corporate proxy blocks

* Maven
* The NPM registry
* Github

List of things that aren't blocked

* Google drive
* Twitter
* Porn

Half my mobile data is burned away by NPM sinkholes. Fuck this place.

*Me and my workmates laughing and having fun before going home*

Me: Hey, do you want to hear a joke?
Workmate 1: What is it?
Me: Look at your code.

...
...
...

Other workmates: BURRRRRNNNN!!!!

I'm beginning to get burned out on coding in general due to work-related stresses.

Is anyone hiring remotely?
Please?

Will code in Ruby/Node/React for food ☹

Sorry, I burned out! 😂

Navy story continued.
And continuing from the arp poisoning and boredom, I started scanning the network...
So I found plenty of WinXP computers, even some Win2k servers (I shit you not, the year was 201X) I decided to play around with merasploit a bit. I mean, this had to be a secure net, right?
Like hell it was.
Among the select douchebags I arp poisoned was a senior officer that had a VERY high idea for himself, and also believed he was tech-savvy. Now that, is a combination that is the red cloth for assholes like me. But I had to be more careful, as news of the network outage leaked, and rumours of "that guy" went amok, but because the whole sysadmin thing was on the shoulders of one guy, none could track it to me in explicit way. Not that i cared, actually, when I am pissed I act with all the subtleness of an atom bomb on steroids.
So, after some scanning and arp poisoning (changing the source MAC address this time) I said...
"Let's try this common exploit, it supposedly shouldn't work, there have been notifications about it, I've read them." Oh boy, was I in for a treat. 12 meterpreter sessions. FUCKING 12. The academy's online printer had no authentication, so I took the liberty of printing a few pages of ASCII jolly rogers (cute stuff, I know, but I was still in ITSec puberty) and decided to fuck around with the other PCs. One thing I found out is that some professors' PCs had the extreme password of 1234. Serious security, that was. Had I known earlier, I could have skipped a TON of pointless memorising...
Anyway, I was running amok the entire network, the sysad never had a chance on that, and he seemed preoccupied with EVERYTHING ELSE besides monitoring the net, like fixing (replacing) the keyboard for the commander's secretary, so...
BTW, most PCs had antivirus, but SO out of date that I didn't even need to encode the payload or do any other trick. An LDAP server was open, and the hashed admin password was the name of his wife. Go figure.
I looked at a WinXP laptop with a weird name, and fired my trusty ms08_067 on it. Passowrd: "aaw". I seriously thought that Ophcrack was broken, but I confirmed it. WTF? I started looking into the files... nothing too suspicious... wait a min, this guy is supposed to work, why his browser is showing porn?
Looking at the ""Deleted"" files (hah!) I fount a TON of documents with "SECRET" in them. Curious...
Decided to download everything, like the asshole I am, and restart his PC, AND to leave him with another desktop wallpaper and a text message. Thinking that he took the hint, I told the sysadmin about the vulnerable PCs and went to class...
In the middle of the class (I think it was anti-air warfare or anti-submarine warfare) the sysad burst through the door shouting "Stop it, that's the second-in-command's PC!".
Stunned silence. Even the professor (who was an officer). God, that was awkward. So, to make things MORE awkward (like the asshole I am) I burned every document to a DVD and the next day I took the sysad and went to the second-in-command of the academy.
Surprisingly he took the whole thing in quite the easygoing fashion. I half-expected court martial or at least a good yelling, but no. Anyway, after our conversation I cornered the sysad and barraged him with some tons of security holes, needed upgrades and settings etc. I still don't know if he managed to patch everything (I left him a detailed report) because, as I've written before, budget constraints in the military are the stuff of nightmares. Still, after that, oddly, most people wouldn't even talk to me.
God, that was a nice period of my life, not having to pretend to be interested about sports and TV shows. It would be almost like a story from highschool (if our highschool had such things as a network back then - yes, I am old).
Your stories?

rant? rant!

I work for a company that develops a variety of software solutions for companies of varying sizes. The company has three people in charge, and small teams that each worked on a certain project. 9 months ago I joined the company as a junior developer, and coincidentally, we also started working on our biggest project so far - an online platform for buying groceries from a variety of vendors/merchants and having them be delivered to your doorstep on the same day (hadn't been done to this scale in Estonia yet). One of the people from management joined the team working on that. The company that ordered this is coincidentally being run by one of the richest men in Estonia. The platform included both the actual website for customers to use, a logistics system for routing between the merchants, the warehouse, and the customers, as well as a bunch of mobile apps for the couriers, warehouse personnel, etc. It was built on Node.js with Hapi (for the backend stuff), Angular 2 (for all the UIs, including the apps which are run through a WebView wrapper), and PostgreSQL (for the database). The deadline for the MVP we (read: the management) gave them, but we finished it in about 7 months in a team of five.

The hours were insane, from 10 AM to 10 PM if lucky. When we weren't lucky (which was half of the time, if not more), we had to work until anywhere from 12 PM to 3 AM, sometimes even the whole night. The weekends weren't any better, for the majority of the time we had to put in even more extra hours on the weekends. Luckily, we were paid extra for them, but the salary was no way near fair (the majority of the team earned about 1000€/mo after taxes in a country where junior developers usually earn 1500€/month). Also because of the short deadline given to us, we skipped all the important parts like writing tests, doing CI, code reviews, feature branching/PR's, etc. I tried pushing the team and the management to at least write tests and make feature branches/PRs, but the management always told me that there wasn't enough time to coordinate and work on all that, that we'll do that after launching the MVP, etc. We basically just wrote features, tested them by hand, and pushed into the "test" branch which would later get tested and merged into master.

During development, one of the other juniors managed to write the worst kind of Angular code you could imagine - enormous amounts of duplication, no reusable components (every view contained the everything used in the view, so popups and other parts that should logically be reusable were in every view separately), fuck - even the HTML was broken (the most memorable for me were the "table > tr > div > td" ones, but that's barely scratching the surface). He left a few months into the project, and we had to build upon his shit, ever so slightly trying to fix the shit he produced. This could have definitely been avoided if we did code reviews.

A month after launching the MVP for internal testing, the guy working on the logistics system had burned out and left the company (he's earning more than twice the salary he got here, happy for him, he is a great coder and an even better team player). This could have been avoided if this project had been planned better, but I can't really blame them, since it was the first project they had at this scale (even though they had given longer deadlines for projects way smaller than this).

After we finished and launched the MVP, the second guy from management joined, because he saw we needed extra help. Again I tried to push us into investing the time to write tests for the system (because at this point we had created an unstable cluster fuck of a codebase), but again to no avail. The same "no time, just test it manually for now, we'll do that later when we have time" bullshit from management.

Now, a few weeks ago, the third guy from management joined. He saw what a disaster our whole project was. Him joining was simply a blessing from the skies. He started off by writing migrations using sequelize. I talked to him about writing tests and everything, and he actually listened. He told me that I'm gonna be the one writing them, and also talked to the rest of management about it. I was overjoyed. I could actually hear the bitterness in the voices of the rest of management when they told me how to write the tests, what to test, etc. But I didn't give a flying rat's ass, I was hapi.

I was told to start off by writing a smoke test for the whole client flow using Puppeteer. I got even happier, since I was finally able to again learn new things (this stopped at about 4 or 5 months into the project).

I'm using jest as the framework and started writing the tests in TypeScript. Later I found a library called jest-extended, but it didn't have type defs, so I decided to write them and, for the first time in my life, contribute to the open source community.

"Hey, Root, someone screwed up and now all of our prod servers are running this useless query constantly. I know I already changed your priorities six times in the past three weeks, but: Go fix it! This is higher priority! We already took some guesses at how and supplied the necessary code changes in the ticket, so this shouldn't take you long. Remember, HIGH PRIORITY!"

1. I have no idea how to reproduce it.
2. They have no idea how to reproduce it.
3. The server log doesn't include queries.
4. The application log doesn't include queries.
5. The tooling intercepts and strips out some log entries the legendary devs considered useless. (Tangent: It also now requires a tool to read the logs because log entries are now long json blobs instead of plain text.)
6. The codebase uses different loggers like everywhere, uses a custom logger by default, and often overwrites that custom logger with the default logger some levels in. gg
7. The fixes shown in the ticket are pretty lame. (I've fixed these already, and added one they missed.)
8. I'm sick and tired and burned out and just can't bring myself to care. I'm only doing this so i don't get fired.
9. Why not have the person who screwed this up fix it? Did they quit? I mean, I wouldn't blame them.

Why must everything this company does be so infuriatingly complicated?

I really hate this company.

The code is a disaster. Every single other employee is a salesperson. Nobody has any bloody clue what I do or how difficult it is. They don't care about stability (unless things are crashing), maintenance (until crashing), code quality (until it delays features), or anything apart from shiny new features they can sell. The boss (the king salesman, if ever there was one) doesn't know how to manage, but tries to by acting like his "nice asshole" self -- he's an asshole that gives you passes, makes sure it's bloody obvious that he's doing it begrudgingly, yet everything is still absolutely your fault. If he arbitrarily decides it's too much your fault, he stops being "nice" and flips out on you in front of everyone. That's a "nice asshole": an asshole who can barely even pretend to be nice.

Fuck him.

And you know what? I really hate having to work next to these fucking birds, too.

Today was our weekly conference call, and I was both late and unprepared. I was too focused on my work, and got a ping 4 minutes into the meeting, so I obv didn't have time to prepare. Boss was also pissy today, and I didn't have much to show for my week, thanks to lots of little "OMG NEED ASAP" shit projects that all took too long, pushing back what I was actually supposed to work on. Which didn't get finished, of course, and today that project was "the most important" -- I suspect simply because it wasn't finished. AGADJFSKL. Cue the birds fucking screaming and never fucking shutting up no matter what I did. Blanket? No effect. Spray bottle? SCREAM MORE! Boss was yelling at me, the birds were screaming, and I couldn't think. Goddamn fucking disaster.

and yes, we have a macaw. A macaw and over 20 cockatiels. Said macaw decided today was a lovely day to just fucking SCREAM non-stop, and the tiels were doing their best to keep up. Thinking clearly during this cacophony? Not gonna happen.

Wait, "go elsewhere," you say? Somewhere quieter? Where is this "elsewhere?" We live in a fucking tiny house, and during the call it was (and still is) filled with sleeping people, and surrounded by a fucking desert. Who the fuck thought living in the desert was a good idea, anyway? Like, seriously. What brainless moron thought "You know what? This is a great place! Let's settle down right here," while trudging through the scorching sand and dust, looking at the basically lifeless horizon filled with large, hot, dry, dusty, barren rocks (aka "mountains"), and fucking dying from thirst? Probably someone so delirious from heatstroke they never actually recovered, and continued raving that it's a goddamn paradise to their heat-addled imbecile followers. I really hope they hallucinated a la-z-boy in place of a hedge of teddybear cholla and died an excruciating and prickly death. Fuck that guy/girl, too.

But I digress.

I seriously need an office that isn't a 30 min drive into gang-central. I'd work outside, but I live in the middle of the bloody fucking desert, and get heat exhaustion within about half an hour. Everywhere else in the house people bother me almost incessantly.

just. FUCKING FJASKLDFJGAG.
I HATE THIS PLACE SO SO SO MUCH.

'I've had such Zen lately,' Alex said. Maybe then, but lately? I've just been too exhausted and burned out from putting up with all this shit to get angry. Days like today? I could pour kerosene over everything and laugh as it all just burned to ash.

!!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.

It’s one-on-one time yet again this week!

I have a 1:1 with my boss every Thursday from 11:30am to 12:00 noon. They often run 45 minutes instead of the planned 30.

Why do I have these? I complained that I have too many meetings, and that it’s hard to get my work done around them (especially while burned out). So as a remedy he scheduled a weekly meeting, every Thursday, so he can make sure I’m getting enough work done. Totally makes sense, right?

And every Thursday he’s 15-25 minutes late. And because they always run long, I lose a full hour or more of time I could have used to get my work done. See the problem?

Today he was 36 minutes late.
Seriously, how disrespectful can he be?

Sometimes it just feels really good to see recruiters getting burned. A stupid one recently posted:

"When you find the candidate that has 15 years of experience in AWS, has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence, speaks 6 languages and is under budget... "

The comments immediately mentioned that AWS was formed 12 years ago.

Haha, what a stupid fuck!

Apparently, because I know how computer works and how to program

I also had to know how to:
- become rich
- hack into banks
- solve all world problems
- make a better windows/facebook/apple/google
- repair a burned down PC

Sometimes I think they are scared that I'm able to zap them with a lightning strike as if would be a motherfucking wizard.

Still love my family though ;)

Portugal is burning
500+ fires active
31 confirmed deads in 1 day...
A large one almost reached my house, saved by two man with construction machines. Still houses burned, gás bottles exploding like shotguns at a distance...
It's the end off the summer...
And now im at work, a new fire started close by...

I need a vacation.
I’m horribly depressed and burned out, every day for months has been a little harder than the last, and really doing anything at all is a monumental challenge, work or otherwise. Let alone working on the fucking screwdriver.

I told my boss last night and requested time off.

His response?
> Oh no, but the new screwdriver! We were all really really hoping to get it out by the end of the month!

I’m a crumpled wreck and all you care about is the fucking screwdriver that PRACTICALLY NOBODY WILL FUCKING USE? Seriously dude, go to hell.

Hey @Root! I know you won't have time to finish Ticket A before holiday vacation, so work on Ticket B instead.

I finished Ticket A in time. except for converting/fixing some horrible spaghetti monstrosity. More or less: "we overwrote this gem's middleware and now it calls back into our codebase under specific circumstances, and then calls the gem again, which calls the middleware again." Wtf? It's an atrocity against rationality.

The second day after vacation:

Hey @Root, drop Ticket B and work on Ticket C instead. Can you knock this out quick, like before friday? ... Uh, sure. It looks easy.

Ticket C was not easy. Ticket C was a frontend CSS job to add a print button, and for unknown reasons, none of the styles apply during printing. The only code involved is adding a button with a single line of javascript: `window.print()`, so why give it to the chick who hasn't been given a frontend ticket in over a year? Why not give it to the frontend guy who does this all day every day? Because "do it anyway," that's why.

And in somewhere between 13 (now 5) minutes and two hours from now, I'm going to have a 1:1 with my boss to discuss the week. Having finished almost all of Ticket A won't matter because it's not a "recent priority" -- despite it being a priority before, and a lot of work. I've made no progress on Ticket B due to interruptions (and a total and complete lack of caring because I'm burned out and quite literally can no longer care), and no progress on ticket C because... it's all horribly broken and therefore not quick. I assigned it to Mr. Frontend, which I'll probably get chewed out for.

So, my 1:1 with bossmang today is going to be awful. And the worst part of all: I'm out of rum! Which means sobriety in the face of adversity! :<

but like, wtf. Just give me a ticket and let me work on it until it's done. Stop changing the damn priorities every other freaking day!

Had an interesting time these past few days. Had a customer who, when I left for vacay, was complaining that he couldn't get access to our private package registry. Get back, this issue is still active.

We'd granted access to his github enterprise, and for some reason he wasn't getting the activation email. We spent about 22 hours of customer support time on his failing to help himself before he finally escalated to the standard 40 person IT enterprise tantrum/come to jesus meeting.

Long story short, he had somehow ignored repeated attempts (35 email replies to the ticket chain, 4 phone calls) to get him to check his spam folder. In which, as it was revealed to all the hollywood squares in attendance, there were no less than 35 activation emails from github granting him access. Of course, none of this was his fault. And while screensharing his big brain to god and everyone he decides the problem is now actually Microsoft because their office 365 spam email filtered his emails incorrectly. We of course agreed with his big brain, smoothed over his bruised ego and went about our day.

I mean, fair enough, it's kind of dumb that Microsoft ever spam lists github, but still. I was just a fly on the wall, and he burned all his paid support tickets on the issue, so hopefully we won't be dealing with him again this year.

Also, this is an edge case with our new product line, most of our customers are painless.

Every step of this project has added another six hurdles. I thought it would be easy, and estimated it at two days to give myself a day off. But instead it's ridiculous. I'm also feeling burned out, depressed (work stress, etc.), and exhausted since I'm taking care of a 3 week old. It has not been fun. :<

I've been trying to get the Google Sheets API working (in Ruby). It's for a shared sales/tracking spreadsheet between two companies.

The documentation for it is almost entirely for Python and Java. The Ruby "quickstart" sample code works, but it's only for 3-legged auth (meaning user auth), but I need it for 2-legged auth (server auth with non-expiring credentials). Took awhile to figure out that variant even existed.

After a bit of digging, I discovered I needed to create a service account. This isn't the most straightforward thing, and setting it up honestly reminds me of setting up AWS, just with less risk of suddenly and surprisingly becoming a broke hobo by selecting confusing option #27 instead of #88.

I set up a new google project, tied it to my company's account (I think?), and then set up a service account for it, with probably the right permissions.

After downloading its creds, figuring out how to actually use them took another few hours. Did I mention there's no Ruby documentation for this? There's plenty of Python and Java example code, but since they use very different implementations, it's almost pointless to read them. At best they give me a vague idea of what my next step might be.

I ended up reading through the code of google's auth gem instead because I couldn't find anything useful online. Maybe it's actually there and the past several days have been one of those weeks where nothing ever works? idk :/

But anyway. I read through their code, and while it's actually not awful, it has some odd organization and a few very peculiar param names. Figuring out what data to pass, and how said data gets used requires some file-hopping. e.g. `json_data_io` wants a file handle, not the data itself. This is going to cause me headaches later since the data will be in the database, not the filesystem. I guess I can write a monkeypatch? or fork their gem? :/

But I digress. I finally manged to set everything up, fix the bugs with my code, and I'm ready to see what `service.create_spreadsheet()` returns. (now that it has positively valid and correctly-implemented authentication! Finally! Woo!)

I open the console... set up the auth... and give it a try.

... six seconds pass ...

... another two seconds pass ...

... annnd I get a lovely "unauthorized" response.

asjdlkagjdsk.

> Pic related.

So this chick has been super nice to me for the past few months, and has been trying to push me towards a role in security. She said nothing but wonderful things about it. It’s easy, it’s not much work, it’s relaxing, etc.

I eventually decided I’m burned out enough that something, anything different would be good, and went for it. I’m now officially doing both dev and security. The day I started, she announced that she was leaving the security team and wouldn’t join any other calls. Just flat-out left.

She trained me on doing a security review of this release, which basically amounted to a zoom call where I did all of the work and she directed me on what to do next, ignored everything I said, and treated me like an idiot. It’s apparently an easy release. The work itself? Not difficult, but it’s very involved, very time consuming, and requires a lot of paper trail — copying the same crap to three different places, tagging lots of people, copying their responses and pasting them elsewhere, filing tickets, linking tickets, copying info back and forth to slack, signing off on things, tagging tickets in a specific way, writing up security notes in a very specific format etc. etc. etc. It’s apparently usually very hectic with lots of last-minute changes, devs who simply ignore security requests, etc.

I asked her at the end for a quick writeup because I’m not going to remember everything and we didn’t cover everything that might happen.

Her response: Just remember what you did here, and do it again!

I asked again for her to write up some notes. She said “I would recommend.. you watch the new release’s channel starting Thursday, and then review what we did here, and just do all that again. Oh, and if you have any questions, talk to <security boss> so you get in the habit of asking him instead of me. Okay, bye!”

Fucking what.
No handoff doc?
Not willing to answer questions after a day and a half of training?

A recap
• She was friendly.
• She pushed me towards security.
• She said the security role was easy and laid-back.
• I eventually accepted.
• She quit the same day.
• The “easy release” took a day and a half of work with her watching, and it has a two-day deadline.
• She treated (and still treats) me like a burden and ignores everything I said or asked.
• The work is anything but laid-back.
• She refuses to spend any extra time on this or write up any notes.
• She refuses to answer any further questions because (quote) “I should get in the habit of asking <security boss> instead of her”

So she smiled, lied, and stabbed me in the back. Now she’s treating me like an annoyance she just wants to go away.

I get that she’s burned out from this, but still, what a fucking bitch. I almost can’t believe she’s acting this way, but I’ve grown to expect it from everyone.

But hey, at least I’m doing something different now, which is what I wanted. The speed at which she showed her true colors, though, holy shit.

“I’m more of a personal motivator than anything,” she says, “and I’m first and foremost a supporter of women developers!” Exactly wrong, every single word of it.

God I hate people like this.

!!rant
!!ANGER

Micromanager: "Hey, Root!

Since you're back, and still not feeling well, we have an easy ticket for you: Rewrite the slack integration gem! Oh, you don't have to re-implement all of it, just make sure it all works the same way it does now. That bitch you worked with once over a year ago who kept throwing you under the bus to management and stealing credit for your work? Yeah, she wrote the original code like four years ago. It's perfect, so don't touch it. but she can fill you in on all the details you need and get you up to speed on how to test it.

But yep! It should be simple. and I just knew you would love this ticket, so I saved it just for you. Nice and quick, too, to get you an easy win.

You know, since you have to repair your reputation with product. and management. and the execs. and the rest of the team. and me. Yeah, product doesn't trust you so they don't want to give you any tickets. They just can't trust you to get them out and have them work. So you have a lot of hard work to do."

Spoiler: The bus-thrower wasn't much help. (Surprise.)
Spoiler: The ticket was already in my backlog -- one of a grand total of two tickets.
Spoiler: I don't find the ticket fun. Maybe if I was to write the entire implementation with a nice DSL? but no, "don't touch the perfect code." Fuck you.
Spoiler: It isn't going to be nice or quick. But, she (micromanager) is looking to lose me, so that really is an easy win. for her.

And. just. argh. fuck you. i've been exhausted and dying for well over a year, but you've kept ignoring that (and still are, despite me providing goddamn legal forms from fucking doctors stating it in plain fucking english, which you also fucking ignore), and you just keep piling on the work and demanding the ridiculous of me despite it. Yeah I can pull it off sometimes. No, I really shouldn't, and I'm surprised I can. (also, "Time off? What, and lower your productivity even more? ____ doesn't even take vacations. And how are you doing on that ticket?") And no, none of my tickets have ever had any fucking problems. Not even when there are upstream service outages. Not. a. single. fucking. one. Ever. And the only things I've ever missed were things that bloody product never put in the fucking ticket, so fuck you with your "repair your reputation" bullshit.

god, i fuckiNG HATE THESESTUPOID ANWETLJAF SAJEWTKW BITCHFACEDUCKFUCKERS

Why the FUCK am I still fucking working here?
Right, because I've been burned out and dying so much I can't pass a fucking interview so I can fucking leave.

jasdkl;fk

ugh. Anyway. If you ever find yourself starting work at a Cali fintech company whose internal mascot is a very fine duck? Just run. I absolutely guarantee you will be miserable.

The dutch referendum against the new mass surveillance is going to happen and one politician said that he'll continue with it no matter what the outcome is.

We've got a dutch version of john oliver over here (Arjen Lubach).

Man, how he burned that politician into the ground, it was nearly painful to watch! (The video is in dutch though)

I've been on dark devrant since it was released and today I was wondering what the light mode looked like again..

*switches to light*

After my eyes burned away I remembered why I use dark mode in the first place and switched back 😂

Oh dear, another Tuesday!
That means I'll probably get chewed out for something in front of the entire company. What for, you ask? The boss is inventive, so it could be anything.

Instead, I'm calling in sick and taking the day off. 😊

So we had a dev on our team who was on a performance improvement plan, wasn't going to pass it, but decided to quit before it was over saving us 2 weeks.

I was ecstatic when he left (caused us hell). I knew updating his code wouldn't be great, but he was only here 6 months

"how bad could it be" - practiseSafeHex - moron, idiot, suicidal.

A little run down would be:

- Despite the fact that we use Angular 2+, one of his apps is Angular 1 ... Nobody on the team has ever used Angular 1.

- According to his package.json he seems to require both mongoDb and Cloudant (couchDb).

- Opened up a config file (in plaintext) to find all the API keys and tokens.

- Had to rename all the projects (micro services) because they are all following a different style of camelcase and it was upsetting my soul.

- All the projects have a "src" folder for ... you know ... the source code, except sometimes we've decided to not use it for you know, reasons.

- Indentation is a mess.

- He has ... its like ... ok I don't even know wtf that is suppose to be.

- Curly braces follow a different pattern depending on the file you open. Sometimes even what function you look at.

- The only comments, are ones that are not needed. For example 30+ lines of business logic and model manipulation ... no comment. But thank god we have a comment over `Fs.readFile(...)` saying /* Read the config file */. Praise Jesus for that one, would have taken me all week to figure that out.

Managers have been asking me how long the "clean up" will take. They've been pushing me towards doing as little as possible and just starting the new features on top of this ... this "code".

The answer will be ... no ... its getting deleted, any machine its ever been on is getting burned, and any mention of it will be grounds for death.

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

!!depression

I used to measure my performance in features per day (or week, depending on their scope), or tasks/day or loc/day for huge projects. My usual was two to three small features a day, and some progress on a larger one.

Now I’m so burned out and depressed that i measure my progress in the amount of days per week that aren’t “zeros” — as in days where i get literally nothing done. Now any day where i get _anything_ done, no matter how little, is a “good day.” I partially refactored about fifty lines of json builder spaghetti on Tuesday. That was a great day.

This week I’ve had two zeros, and it’s Thursday morning. I think it’s going to be a three zero week.

Worse: performance reviews were due weeks ago. I still haven’t written mine, and have no idea what i would even write. How can i make myself sound good when i can barely even force myself to eat or take a shower?

When pandemic hit in 2020 I found myself out of work. Until then I used to have a java based pirate gameserver of a MMORPG as a hobby.

When pandemic hit I noticed that online players count increased from like 70 to 200 without much advertising because purely of people being stuck in home. So i decided to scale and spent 2 years with that. What a wild ride it was.

So i invested a bit in ads, managed to reach around 500 online players, opened my own company and launched a couple other successful spinoffs of that gameserver.

First year it was a goldmine but I was doing 10-14 hour days because I had to take care of everything (web, advertising, payment integrations, player support and also developing the server itself, ddos protections and etc.). I made quite a bit of money, saved for a downpayment for mortgage and got an apartment.

Second year I noticed that there was a lot of competition and online players count dropped, but I double downed on this and invested a lot into the product itself and spent most of the time developing a perfect gameserver that would be the big bang while also maintaining existing ones. Clasic overengineering mistake. As you can guess, I crashed and burned on all levels, never even managed to launch my final project because simply the scope was too big and I had trouble finding decent devs to outsource it to, since it was a very niche gameserver.

In the end I learned a lot especially about my own limits and ownership, now Im back to being a dev but working as a contractor.

I believe having actual business owner experience allows me to have different perspective and I can bring more to the table rather than focusing on crunching tasks.

My time as a Dev have given me deep mistrust of the following words;
Only
Just
simple
Quick
Easy

Any requirements, specs or feature files presented with the above words should immediately be deleted and/or burned if in hard copy.

I have a problem.

My phone has "Rant" and [Comment] burned into the screen, along with the Facebook and share buttons. It's faint, but it's absolutely there.

Recipe: "baked developer"

you will need:

- 1 day = 1 story point
- 10SP per sprint
- every team member must deliver all the SPs.

Now for every sprint slap on 20+ hours of mandatory meetings, mix with 2-5 days of ad-hoc tasks, which must be addressed, because they are blocking the release/other teams/prod, and make sure all the devs try not to spill no matter what, and you get a perfectly burned out team.

Brittle/crispy on the outside, mashed/soft on the inside

enjoy!

Fuck, SoundCloud got burned in into my display...

TFW your client's git policies are so draconian that the dev teams use "develop" as trunk, and completely ignore the release process.

I wrote up 50 pages of git standards, documentation and procedure for a client. Bad indian director 9000 decides the admin (also Indian) who specializes in Clearcase and has no git or development experience is more qualified to decide and let's him set the policy.

FF to today:

- documentation, mostly contradictory, is copy pasted from the atlassian wiki
- source tree is the standard
- no force pushing of any branches, including work branches
- no ff-merge
- no rebasing allowed
- no ssh, because he couldn't figure it out...errr it's "insecure"
- all repos have random abbreviated names that are unintelligible
- gitflow, but with pull requests and no trust
- only project managers can delete a branch
- long lived feature branches
- only projects managers can conduct code reviews
- hotfixes must be based off develop
- hotfixes must go in the normal release cycle
- releases involve creating a ticket to have an admin create a release branch from your branch, creating a second ticket to stage the PR, a third ticket to review the PR (because only admins can approve release PRs), and a fourth ticket to merge it in
- rollbacks require director signoff
- at the end of each project the repo must be handed to the admin on a burned CD for "archiving"

And so no one actually uses the official release process, and just does releases out of dev. If you're wondering if IBM sucks, the answer is more than you can possibly imagine.

I am fucked.... 😫😫😫My new custom build pc is not starting up after lighting strike 😭😭 ... I had unplugged all the plugs from the socket but i forgot to unplug the wifi from the broadband cable.... So when lighting hit my building the current came through broadband cable and burned my wifi then through there it got to my pc... My motherboard, gtx1070 graphic card, ram everything is gone.... Except my hard drive and psu...

Arduino, all the way...
I have a burn out for 3 years and a few months ago I found arduino.
Burned lots of money in components in the first months because I got so addicted.
No regrets, helped me a lot, been learning a lot and keeps me focused.

8th day on the job:
1st Project: 90% done.
2nd Project: 5% done.
3rd Project: 5% done.
4th Project: not started.

I think I will be burned faster than I expected

I know a guy who writes everything in Haskell.

He started learning it because his parents got him into a math school (and math schools in Russia use either Python or Haskell), he liked it, but later he dropped out. Today, apart from Haskell, he only really knows HTML and CSS, and maybe some JavaScript.

He writes backend AND frontend in Haskell and uses some kind of JRPC stuff to manage all that. He told me that his life is a pure heaven. He IS RELEVANT (!!!!!!), his apps always run without bugs (because in Haskell you can mathematically prove that there are no bugs), they are performant, faster than C (because you can't write a complex enough app in C that will be as efficient as compiled Haskell, because it's you vs compiler). He doesn't have any problems in life whatsoever. He never got burned out, he never got anxiety or depression. He doesn't act pretentiously and stuff, he's just a normal person who rarely even mentions that he can program.

Science says it can't be done! You can't only know Haskell and be a relevant software engineer! You know what, he didn't _know_ it was impossible. He's like that grandpa from a meme, he got Alzheimers, but because of it he forgot that he had Alzheimers, and now remembers everything.

The fun thing is that he looks like a typical gopnik, with adidas suits and stuff.

What a gem of a person.

It just hit me why they called their software "nero"... cause he burned Rom(e).... Am I dumb or something? I'm using it for 5 years now

!code

I literally cannot get this computer to boot from ANYTHING other than its hard drive.

I want to boot from a usb flash drive, but the bios doesn't support that. it supports standard and 120mb floppies, ZIP drives, usb floppies, usb cd drives, etc. but not a generic USB drive. You'd think the bios developers would have heard of them back in 2012, but they also refer to Windows as "window os", so who knows.

I changed the boot order multiple times to include everything that might possibly include a usb flash drive, and then just tried all of the other options as well. No luck. Everything just booted straight to Windows.

Okay, that's not exactly unexpected, so I found a boot manager that allows booting to usb drives, and burned that to a cd. I made sure the boot order included "CDDRIVE" first (and "USB-CD" second just to be sure), and tried again. The bios refused to boot from the cd because it's in a cd/dvd drive, and cd drives are VASTLY different beasts than dvd drives, apparently. Like, it didn't even ask the drive to spin up! It just booted straight into Windows.

After a few more reboots (and quite a few middle fingers), my dvd drive magically appeared in the list of allowed boot devices. Why did it just show up now? No clue :/ I'm just happy it's there.

So, I pick that, save and exit, and wait for my shiny new boot manager to pop up. The cursor flashes a bit, moves around, and flashes some more. Then Windows starts loading.

what the crap? why?

So this time I disable booting from the hard drive altogether. In fact, I disable everything except the dvd drive, because screw this, and save/restart for the twelfth time.

Windows greets me.
Again.

What the hell?

At this point I'm tempted to unplug the friggin' drive. If Windows still greets me after that, I'm just going to check myself into an asylum and call it a life.

But seriously.
Either the boot manager in question is triple-faulting and the bios is transparently failing-over to the previous boot config (Windows), or said boot manager is just like "yolo!" and picks Windows anyway.

If a different boot manager doesn't work, I'm totally out of ideas.

Edit: disabling HD boot entirely and removing the boot manager cd also results in Windows loading. It's like the bios is completely ignoring my settings. :/

Long long ago there was a man who discovered if he scratched certain patterns onto a rock he could use them to remind him about things he would otherwise forgot.

Over time the scratching were refined and this great secret of eternal memory were taught to his children, and they taught it to their children.

Soon mankind had discovered a way to preserve through the ages his thoughts and memories and further discovered that if he wrote down these symbols he could transfer information over distances by simply recording these symbols in a portable medium.

Writing exploded it allowed a genius in one place to communicate the information he had recorded across time and space.

Thousands of years passed, writing continued to be refined and more and more vital. Eventually a humble man by the name of Johannes Gutenberg seeking to make the divine word of God accessible to the people created the printing press allowing the written word to be copied and circulated with great ease expanding vastly the works available to mankind and the number of people who could understand this arcane art of writing.

But mankind never satiated in his desire to know all there is to know demanded more information, demanded it faster, demanded it better. So the greatest minds of 200 years, Marconi, Maxwell, Bohr, Von Nueman, Turing and a host of others working with each other, standing on the shoulders of their brobdinangian predecessors, brought forth a way to send these signals, transfer this writing upon beams of light, by manipulating the very fabric of the cosmos, mankind had reach the ultimate limits of transmission of information. Man has conquered time, and space itself in preserving and transmitting information, we are as the gods!

My point is this, that your insistence upon having a meeting to ask a question, with 10 people that could've been answered with a 2 sentence email, is not only an affront to me for wasting my time, but also serves as an affront to the greatest minds of the 19th and 20th centuries, it is an insult to your ancestors who first sacrificed and labored to master the art of writing, it is in fact offensive to all of humanity up to this point.

In short by requiring a meeting to be held, not only are you ensuring the information is delayed because we all now need to find a time that all of us are available, not only are you now eliminating the ability to have a first hand permanent record of what need to be communicated, you are actively working against progress, you are dragging humanity collectively backwards. You join the esteemed ranks of organizations such as the oppressive Catholic church that sought to silence Galialio and Copernicus, you are among the august crowd that burned witches at Salem, the Soviet secret police that silenced "bourgeoisie" science, you join the side of thousands of years of daft ignorance.

If it were not for you people we would have flying cars, we would have nanobots capable of building things on a whim, we would all be programming in lisp. But because of you and people like you we are trapped in this world, where the greatest minds are trapped in meetings that never end, where mistruth and ignorance run rampant, a world where JavaScript is the de facto language of choice every where because it runs everywhere, and ruins everywhere.

So please remember, next time you want to have a meeting ask yourself first. "Could this be an email?" "Do I enjoy burning witches?" if you do this you might make the world a little bit of a less terrible place to be.

I was recuited to do devops work for a client. The project started in late '14. Until mid '15 I was forced to just sit there and do nothing. And I mean nothing. The ops team needed my help but the project lead didn't allow that (endless discussions). Somewhere around the end of '15 I could start to work and quickly learned that I had to report to two leads that couldn't disagree more on what to do and how to do it. I also learned that the companies mentality is "Clean me but don't get me wet". So the ops team demands a lot but is really uncooperative with everything. So I am currently sitting between three grindstones and everything I do is worthless. Because nobody agrees with anybody and I cannot fulfill my job for which I have been hired: Make ops more efficient because they are drowning in manual work. My job is further complicated by the following facts: This company uses no standard whatsoever but their own. Thru this they have created a Rube-Goldberg-Machine. But they think their system is the greatest in the world and the only one that makes sense. Which makes automation pointless because it is not maintainable. They call it diversity and they say that it is the clear reason why automation is not for them even though they schedule meeting after meeting in which they discuss about how to automate things. But in general they do just block everything useful and sabotage my work. And behind my back they make me the reason for the fail. Every real decision is blocked anyway. Also the ops guys think they are the leetest in the world. And everything they invent is above and beyond. If you ask them why they have over 400 VLANs for example (in a company of unter a thousand employees) they stutter and stumble because they cannot explain their complicated shit. They also change their decisions like underwear. Another really "kewl" thing they just did: They hired a devops engineer and everybody loves him. During the interview he said that he has no prior experience with devops whatsoever and it will take him around six month to get started on the basics of devops. I could go on for hours here about the insanity of this company that in my opinion will cease to exist within the next 5 years, if you ask me.
Long story short I am getting out of there by the end of march and will be on sabbatical shortly after because I am burned out. And I mean burned out. Not like "Oh I am burned out". I mean really burned out, with health problems and everything. Another external guy got out here last month because of the same health conditions.

This happend to me around 2 weeks ago. For some reason, I decied to post this now.

I won the lottery, yey! I mean, bot really, but I am <19yo student, "less than junior dev" in my office, but sonce I am the only one who is capable of working with hardware, I was working month back as a sysadmin for a few days. Our last sysadmin was really good working but really, really toxic guy, so he got fired on a spot after argument with some manager or whatever, no big deal, we could have another guy hired in a week. But, our backup server literally was on fire, all data probably dead because bad capacitor or whatever. This was our only backup of everything at the time. Everyone in full fucking panic mode, we had literally no other working HW we could use for backup, but then comes me, intern employed on his first dev job for 3 months. That day I bought some HW for my own personal server at home (Intel NUC with some Celeron, 4GB DDR4 RAM and two 240GB SSDs for RAID 1. My manager asked everyone in the office for sollution how to survive next 4 days before new server arrives. People there had no idea what tk do and no knowedgle about HW, I just came from a break and offered my components for a week, since there was noone else who can work with HW, servers and stuff like this, manager offered me $500+HW cost if I, random intern, can make it work. I installed Debian on that little PC, created RAID1 from both SSDs, installed MySQL server and mirrored GIT server from our last standing server (we had two before one of them went lit 🔥), made simple Python script to copy all data on that RAID, with some help of our database guy copied whole DB from production to this little computer and edited some PHP so every SQL request made on our server will run on that NUC too. Everything after ±2 hours worked perfectly. Untill a fucking PSU burned in our server and took RAID controller with him in sillicon heaven next night, so we could not access any data unltill we got a new one. Thanks to every god out there, I was able to create software RAID from survived HDDs on our production server and copy all data from that NUC on the servers software RAID and make it working at 3 AM in the night before an exam 😂. Without this, we would be next ±40 hours without aerver running and we might loose soke of our data and customers. So my little skill with Linux, Python, MySQL and most importantly my NUC hardware I got that day running as a backup server saved maybe whole company 😂.
Btw, guess who is now employee of the year with $2500 bonus? 😀
Sorry for bragging and log post, but I was so lucky an so happy when everything worked out, good luck to all sysadmins out there! 👍

TL:DR: Random intern saved company and made some money 😂

I was working on an Arduino counter (an inside joke) and I somehow sent 12V to an IC I was using.

🔥🎆🌬💨
it burned out.

I'll leave now

Its so weird working in this company. No onboarding, no micromanaging, noone to track your progress or performance. U can basically do what u want and ask what u want and requests will be fulfilled.

Initially was assigned to a random team and started fixing stuff. I hated the scope so after 2 months in requested to switch teams, request approved.

3 months in realized I lowballed myself during the interview and actually am doing better than half of the team, so I asked for a 43% bump, request approved.

4 months in I realized that I did atleast 100hrs overtime in a month during crunchtime, burned out. Asked for a paid week off to recover, request approved.

5 months in realized that we have many MR's piling up in the team and I could help with approving some of them, but they grant MR approval rights only when u work here for a year or are a decent dev from the get go. Requested for MR approval rights, request approved.

Again it feels so weird working on a big product with 6-7 scrum teams. Its like there is no bullshit, just ask what you need you will get what you asked so you can continue working.

On the other hand its kinda weird to keep asking everything, in other companies a good teamlead/manager shows more initiative takes care of stuff like this without even asking.

I want a case/skin/idk for my lappy after I finally leave this company. I have this awful habit of associating things with memories. If the memory is bad, seeing the object reminds me of it, and e.g. makes me feel burned out again. So, I want to add a really pretty case to my lappy so it feels like my laptop instead of the company's.

I've found a few really beautiful ones on Etsy and Pinterest, but they're so ridiculously expensive! I really don't want to pay $90 🙁

Does anyone know where I can find alternatives?

Today I learned the hard way that losing your app's key store means no more updating , bug fixing , performance boosting , features adding ...
The app had like 5k downloads on the play store ..
Lost the key when one of my hard drives burned ..
Lesson of the day : keep your keys safe .
*trying to stay strong*

WHAT THE FUCK? WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT? ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS.. I WAKE UP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING NIGHT BECAUSE MY FUCKING PHONE VIBRATED UNDER MY FUCKING PILLOW WHICH I KNOW ISN'T VERY HEALTHY BUT WHATEVER, I CHECK MY PHONE AND IT'S A GODDAMN GOOGLE PLAY AD... IN THE FUCKING NOTIFICATIONS. THEY FUCKING SENT ME AN APP SUGGESTION IN MY NOTIFICATIONS EVEN THOUGH THAT OPTION IS SPECIFICALLY TURNED OFF IN THE FUCKING SETTINGS.
FUCK YOU GOOGLE YOU BOTNET GREEDY BLOATED "muh AI" PIECE OF SHIT. I HOPE YOUR SERVERS IN ALL CONTINENTS GET BURNED DOWN BY SOME SADIST NIHILIST HACKER WITH A 0DAY AND YOU SEIZE TO EXIST.

Goodnight.

- be the most productive member in the team and everyone dumps their tasks on you.

- be the laziest person in the team and everyone sees you as a bottleneck.

- be the senior + the laziest person in the team and you can complain about others being a bottleneck and dump your tasks on the most productive member.

fml ( ︶︿︶)_╭∩╮

Why is it that when someone mentions they really like windows or that someone should/might want to install windows, hardly anything happens (maybe some funny comments from linuxers but no hate or anything) (same goes for OSX) but when someone makes the same comment about linux, they get burned into the ground as a 'Linux nazi'? I am not only talking about devRant (it happens here sometimes as well) but also about my study and real life.

If someone would mention that it might be useful to install windows or OSX over Linux, it was all good but the FUCKING SECOND I mention it might be useful (or other linuxers) to use/install Linux, we are immediately put away as Linux nazi's.

On devRant I've tried to keep this shit to myself because I don't want to start wars but I think I am going to quit doing that and actually show my fucking opinion. Yes, that might also result in some people seeing me as a fucking linux nazi but fuck being burned into the ground every time I give my opinion regarding this.

Fucking hell. (nothing personal to any devRanters by the way but I am starting to get really tired of this shit).

Windows is probably good now...

And Real Player probably isn't buffering anymore either.

Still don't want to try either.

I cannot wait to leave my job. I love my bosses, but the customer service people are the fucking worst!

Since I'm the only developer day in and day out I hear the same problems of people forgetting how to do so something over and over and over. Then they yell at me because they say I don't train them enough.

I WASTE 8 HOURS A WEEK RETRAINING YOU SHIT HEADS BUT NONE OF YOU TAKE NOTES IN THE MEETINGS!!!! ITS NOT MY FAULT IF YOU THINK YOU PEA SIZED BRIAN WILL REMEMBER ANYTHING!

AND ITS NOT LIKE THE SYSTEM IS HARD! THERE ARE TOOLTIPS AND CUSTOM ERROR MESSAGES THAT YOU JUST CHOOSE NOT TO READ!

I am just so burned out of answer the same damn questions day in and day out

Is there a lot of people in the same boat as me?

I'm a self taught guy. Never in my life had I a senior developer i could bug for answers. Every little bug and inconveniece i have ever experienced - left alone to cope and find solutions. I just feel like sooo burned out. I have some large complex system questions building up and googling doesnt give me the answers anymore. This is frustrating. I'm supposed to be a mid level developer, but I'm acting as a senior to one of my colleagues even though I have so many questions and doubts in my mind. I think I developed a lot of plot holes in my knowledge and I have no real way to know which are which. I feel I dont know so much. Fuck. Where do I go from here?

Meet my new toy, Centos7 as of this afternoon (once I get the usb burned and installation done)

She's not much to look at, but she's mine.

Do y'all ever consider switching to woodworking?

Oh man... I fucked up. I spent almost 36-40 hours in 3 days trying to fix a bug, that was quite literally a single, two word fix.

Change `Key` to `Value.State`

I burned that time into the weekend. I'm both satisfied and dissatisfied with this decision.

Most burned out experience?

My superpower:
The ability to work on huge, complex projects/features without ever getting burned out.

In lieu of that, foregoing the need to sleep!

I'm probably burned out.

I am mentally burned out from web development.

Physically I'm fine, but it's getting more difficult each day to open my laptop and write code, documentation or do code reviews.

Web development just seems so meaningless, where my day to day job has me trudging through one web form after another. I'm sick of implementing business logic on the backend and tired of listening to the product owner bitch about users who are demanding.

My productivity has fallen to the level where I'm feeling guilty for spending my time on nothing!

Don't give me advice, I know I need a change of scenery.

I just need to find the motivation to work on another hiring test which has nothing to do with the actual job.

i genuinely like programming. it's like solving logical puzzles for me, challenges on a smaller or bigger scale, and this is fun.
i always feel this when working on something on my own, i.e. a full stack project where i take care of everything.

but i'm so sick and tired of corporate software development.
i'm tired of scrum, all these scrum meetings, it feels like they are sucking my life energy away. if at least i had the feeling that i work in a team where everybody contributes, the team work is nice and also project management is aligned.
i'm tired of having too many different tasks in too many different areas or projects and never having the feeling to be able to really concentrate on one thing, to be able to do a job well enough so that i'm content with it.
i'm tired of this feeling that what i'm working on is not meaningful. the feeling that my team is not part of a bigger story where everyone contributes their part and where there is a sense of productive collaboration between teams. the feeling that mismanagement will result in a lot of money being burned, because of work being thrown away or becoming irrelevant, or because of miscommunication, making promises that can impossibly be delivered on.
this feeling that i cannot really improve or fix the ship we are sailing with, but rather being handed a bucket and being told to constantly remove the leaking water and put it back in the ocean, but always at multiple sites of the ship all at once.
i'm tired of being the only female dev and altogether feeling so different from the rest of the team, feeling that i do not belong there.

even though i need to make a living, i just can't imagine anymore to spend so much of my lifetime for something that makes me feel so bad...

Rant. Always start debugging with the start point :p

We have a lamp with a dimmer.
A day, the dimmer make some noisy noise. Just down it and the lamp never bright again.

I open the dimmer, check all connection, bullshit what is wrong?
I decide to bypass the dimmer with a standard interrupter. But doesn’t work.
Finally.... I check the bulb 💡 and... burned...

Morality: if the bulb doesn’t work, check the bulb!
:p

I have a project at work that involves learning a bunch of AWS stuff and rewriting a couple credential-generating scripts. I don't even know what the ask is, apart from some high-level "make this SSO" so ... idfk.

I am so incredibly bored of it (and burned out in general) that I can't even look at it.

I would rather see how many times it takes to beat my head against the wall to make a hole than think about this ticket again.

"Oh, I thought you would find that fun" No. No I do not. I can't even bring myself to look at it anymore. "Well, try to push through it and get it outta here!" Ughhhhh

I hope Russia nukes the bloody company.

Devrant burned in the screen of my phone. Well at least not porn :)

Finished our Christmas tree at work today. Featuring Zip ties, faulty burned blu rays, an old keyboard, a led stripe, cut IDE Cables and a 10m cat 5e cable and the holy Debian as topping
Sadly I cant capture all of its beauty in a single picture
I call him the GeekTree

Hey. I am recruiter X from irrelevant startup Y. We automatically sent you a message with our LinkedIn bot because we think you may like working in an irrelevant language and an overhyped useless technology. I hope you love working overtime and getting burned out. :)

Free beers, silicon valley blabla. Insert irrelevant information about millions of dollars of funding blabla.

Have you encountered projects that were beyond saving?

Been freelancing for a client via agency for the past year. In the beginning the deal was to maintain identity verification sdk for android maybe 10-15 hours a month or so. Their flow consisted of around 25-30 screens, so I took it thinking it was easy. Boy I was wrong.

Codebase was and still is a complete spaghetti, backend weird and overcomplicated and impossible to talk with someone in backend. Had to reverse engineer their complicated flows many times just to make a small change on the app. There also are lots of issues with capturing/sending camera recordings especially on older devices. The fact that Im the only dev maintaining this doesnt help either.

First few months it was just maintenance, later some small features and soon it become a 40 hour a month gig. I was able to deal with it but then management changed, they started micromanaging me heavily and now they want me to do 60-70 hours a month. Also they asked to implement some unnecessarily complicated features and to be honest without refactoring most of the codebase I cant even begin to think of how to implement them.

Also workload in my main job increased. Started sacrificing my evenings, weekends and basically my wellbeing to work on their product. Tried to relax but then I realized Im just spending my freetime thinking about their project all of the time. Best part is that last few updates fucked up the whole flow and I dont even understand where the problem is anymore: backend, 3rd party integration issues or something else that I did.

Last friday told them that my availability changed and Im quitting. Told them that Im gonna provide support till the end of the month but no big features. Just spent a full shift in my main job and another full shift working on their product, trying to untagle their spaghetti.. Im totally lost and burned out. Meanwhile stupid manager is asking why "simple" stuff according to him is taking too long.

I should receive my last payment from agency this week, also asked them to send it to me earlier but no answer so far. At this point Im so burned out that I dont care anymore about the last payment, even if client complains that everything is broken and doesnt want to pay me. Project is beyond fucked and that SDK as well as their backend is a ticking time bomb. Im done.

On the twelfth day of Christmas
programming gave to me:
Twelve bugs in public branch
Eleven errors to fix
Ten freaking warnings
Nine Windows Updates
Eight blue screens of deaths
Seven minutes of compiling
Six servers down
Five Android Studio crashes
Four angry stackoverflow devs
Three kernel panics
Two burned graphics cards
and a one broken-dick piece of shit JavaScript framework

How do you deal with burnout?

I've been working 50-80 hour weeks for the last 10 years, without any real holiday.
I kinda feel I may be irredeemably burned out now.
I know it's not a healthy situation but i'm still looking out for a healthy solution, or at least a way to survive it.

I'm starting to think we might need a global union for developers. I have been reading the comments today and it looks like a lot us getting way underpaid.

New features should be a moment of joy if they are released. So far so good. People really liked the idea of working together on opensource project. The app is updated. But then we encountered a major problem. It looks like some of us are getting so underpaid that they can't pay for the 14 dollar it cost to start the opensource project they want. We must rebel against this.

14 dollar, how much is 14 dollar. How many hobbies cost 14 dollar to start up. From running to collecting stamps. Its going to cost you more And how many hobbies are you as passionate about as your own open source project.

The next great thing is that it is show in the place where developers are eagerly looking to join a opensource project. And will probably join you're product because I'm sure between all of us there are tons of wonderfull ideas just waiting to be build.

And for me personal I do not mind supporting an app that I use almost every day. And just keeps growing without annoying ads.

So you should be more then willing to pay 14 dollars. And are ready to start recruiting your team.

And if you really can't pay. Your house burned down, you needed it for food. Your only pc is beyond saving. You can be a positive force in this community and do pay with upvotes.

But if you are to much a cheapskate to pay 14 dollars well, I think I was clear enough.

Having some thoughts as I sit here, trapped in the house by equal parts coronavirus and a layer of smoke drowning out the sun. The smoke is a bit of an annual thing; every year, some irresponsible jerk will go out and put their convenience and enjoyment over everyone else's quality of life.

It's a bit different this year since coronavirus has given people cabin fever. Those same people who lose their minds after weeks of isolation and suffering the indignity of wearing a mask headed out into the wilderness for recreation in record numbers.

The result is record wildfires.

Where I'm at, it's mostly coming from the eastern part of our state. The area is typified by being on the mountain range's dry side, more rural, less densely populated. Towns have burned, people lost their homes, millions of acres of land will likely burn before it's over. It happens every year; people pack up, head out into the wilderness, and cause devastation due to a simple lack of common sense or regard for the consequences of their actions.

On the west side, we see the fallout in the form of days without sunlight and abysmal air quality. We also see it in cost; we will unquestionably and without hesitation contribute to eastern recovery efforts. The western half of the state will cover almost all of the damage in both taxes and recovery aid. Our local ethos demands it.

The mountains form a kind of natural barrier, both cultural and environmental. The fact that few people cross the mountains by choice is symbolic of that divide. Those who enjoy greenery and lakes and thriving vibrant nature prefer the west, as we have them in abundance. People who have a strong appreciation for distance between themselves and other humans prefer the east, as it affords them cheaper land and few urban environments.

Here's to hoping people learn from this in 2021.

i worked at this startup that had these very low wages, hustle culture, bad work environment (bad or no computers for staff, no ergonomics, cramped), and they delayed payments a lot. my boss was mad at me cause i said i didn't see myself there in the future lol. i didn't last 4 months, and i saw colleagues leave within a month. i was so burned out i thought i didn't want to be a dev anymore

At this day, July 18 in Eastern timezones, one of the globally recognized animation studios in Japan, Kyoto Animation - more known as KyoAni, has been deliberately burned by an arsonist, and has claimed 20 lives and counting.

Please give a moment of silence for the fallen in KyoAni. All they wanted was to make people smile despite the low wage situation and Japan and this happens.

On the gitlab incident livestream description on youtube I noticed this:

"No, nobody was fired"

Yeah right. They probably beat him, raped him, burned him, crucified him, raped him again. But no there were no firing involved.

Some of the best mentoring has actually been from the devRant community on how not to get burned out as a developer.

Take it section by section. Don’t spend a lot of time on one part. Work on it for a bit then move on to a new part and so on.

Thanks devRant Community

A Vue application I'm tasked with fixing consists of one single huge component, wouldn't survive even the most liberal use of linting, and has a reloadPage() function.

How fucked am I?

Do you guys still work on your personal project after work or just to tired/burned-out when you get home?

Working on Unicode support for Linux Terminal apps, and I output an Emoji smiley face. The emulator I'm running (Termius SSH client) rendered it fine, but once the application exited, half the smiley face was left there as graphical garbage for some reason XD

Resetting my terminal did nothing, scrolling up and down did nothing... it was burned into my terminal for the rest of the session.

This is what I get for performing the unholy act of adding Unicode to terminals.

Oh look. The monitoring channel is in flames, smartphone is vibrating so hard it's having a seizure.

Hm. Nah it's fine. Not my...

Damn it. Incoming call. -.-

I'm actually on vacation (more like you need to trim down overtime before management get's angry).

They decided to test the new hardware / os stack I set up in the last weeks. I'd actually be happy about it If I wasn't on vacation and would be part in something that I invested a lot of time...

Well now I am. Guess what. It's running too good.

And that's not a joke. It's partly due to an upgrade in infrastructure (got rid of some last remaining 1 Gbps networks)… but also because I changed quite a lot on the OS / VM side plus we changed from XEN to Proxmox... With major tweaks, too.

The whole stack can now handle peak traffic where it would choke before, and even go beyond the old peak traffic.

Enough of introduction, the simple reason why shit burned down was because they tried out the current development branch and let it ran.

The development branch had an currently unfinished ratelimiter framework, since I didn't had time for an full burn in and didn't knew what the maxima / limits were. And since I hadn't finished that, I didn't finish the traffic shaping either.

Hm. Guess it's not good when you let a bunch of heavy parallelized data generators / analyzers run for free....

In the end, we simply shotgunned the docker development machines, because thanks to network congestion / retransmissions and feedback, they were not really cooperative via network / REST.

But hey: To infinity and beyond. XD

So, this is probably somewhat esoteric but...

While studying at university I had a "programming paradigms" module, dunno why they called it that, it was more like "introduction to functional programming".

So, it's kinda mind bending, we'd only really started to get our heads around classical object oriented programming and they throw functional programming at us.

It's worse than that though, for do they use an established language, like lisp/scheme, functional Python, or even given Haskell?

No, of course they didn't. They taught us Oz.

You probably won't have heard of it, but this language is burned into the back of my brain, along with a vague understanding of the n-queens problem we had to solve graphically (using qTk, which I dunno if someone took qt and tk and blended them, I stopped asking questions after a while).

To top it off did this language (at the time) have a stand alone interpreter? Did it buggery! It was coupled to the Mozart programming system, which is just Emacs (which has a bloody lisp built into it,so close, yet so far 😭).

It gets worse, though, oh does it get worse, for pause dear reader and consider, have you ever heard of Mozart/oz before, I'd put money on most of you had not heard of it until today.

For, you see, I believe at the time of writing, one, yes, ONE text book exists on this language. When I was doing my assignment there was merely some published conference notes and language design documents.

That's not all, I was not the only one experiencing difficulties with this language, someone in the class ended up pouring through the mailing lists and found the very tutor teaching the class struggling at first to understand the language.

I had to repeat that year. The functional programming class was one semester.

When I retook that year, it was a whole year long. However, halfway through the year, original tutor was fired and a new tutor was hired to teach the language.

He was, understandably, just as confused as we were.

There was a Starbucks and a pub equidistant from the lecture hall, though in opposite directions. From lecture to lecture we had no idea which one we'd end up in.

I have reason to believe Mozart/Oz it some sort of otherworldly abomination designed to give students the occasional nightmare flashback, long after they've left.

My room had post it notes, sheets of paper, print outs, diagrams, doodles and pens, just stuck to the wall, I looked like a raving lunatic three hours away from being institutionalised. There was string connecting one diagram to the next and images of a chess queen all over. As I attempted to solve the n-queens problem.

Madmans knowledge, I call it. I can never unlearn all that, in fact it seeps into much of the code I write. Such information was not meant for the minds of a simple country bumpkin such as myself...

Mozart/Oz... I wouldn't be the programmer I am today without it, and that's frankly terrifying...

It was an intern job for 2.5$ /h. I removed a bunch of technical debt, made their modx site localized (with a weird approach though but hey, I was an intern) and wrote a few new pages. I loved every minute of working there until the end, but had it lasted a bit longer than a month I'd have probably burned the place to the ground when I realized that my friends had earned twice as much at McDonalds and I could've earned about the same amount writing one excel macro a day.

So we are completely burned out with this project that had a fucking generic contract and my boss never had the balls (and never will) to say no to the client's endless requests and changes...

We are about to deliver it once and for all and they complain about one thing that I have already agreed to my boss that we would not do...
We tell the client that it is the case...

They email everyone involved in the project with a high level of drama on it...

I ask my boss, who is on vacation, on directions as to "how" I should tell them the fuck off...

My boss answer: I'm making a script to solve this issue and to avoid further trouble with it...

Ooo you stupid motherfucker! Can't you see you only bring more trouble with that attitude?

One coworker in my projects now.

I work with her on two projects. One project I'm doing a review on their test scripts and saw a lot of revision is needed on hers. It's fine, she may just need some help. Offered help and did sessions and gave explanations and samples. But she is still not finished. 2nd project I was acting like the project manager until the official PM gets assigned. Her tasks is just to create test data.

Little did I know she has escalated the 1st project to her team lead and manager and requesting for a project change. This is not the first time she did this project shopping bit. But what irks me the most is doing an emergency leave so you don't have to attend the meeting on one project you are failing and then not telling me as the acting PM on the 2nd project that you have an emergency leave. She may likely never thought there is need to tell because she did attend the meeting for the 2nd project later in the day. But for the 1st project I have to pickup her slack and do the test scripts because the PM in that project already was informed about her leave.

This would have gone to daily rant but she is the first one I've encountered who fails and somehow gets away with it and even gets promoted doing the same tactics. But she did that to our junior resources in other projects who may likely got burned out and resigned.

Crappy performance should not be rewarded. I hope this time our management won't look the other way.

I think this a perfect anecdote of where tech is going nowadays:

I moved my bowels on one of those high-tech Japanese toilets: it allowed you to control the seat temperature, cleaned your butt with spray (with an additional "ladies" mode), had several modes of flushing (1, 2, and "eco"), automatically lifted and closed the lid, played some music for you, had a remote controller for you to flush your shit at a distance.

But, guess what, IT DIDN'T FLUSH SHIT. It pathetically trying to flush my shit with 1000 different kinds of puny jets and draining modes but my heap of shit always bounced back because its flush was so weak that it couldn't push it.

I don't care if the seat warmer went out of control and burned my ass or if the butt cleaning jet didn't reach my anus,
JUST DO WHAT YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO DO AND FLUSH MY SHIT.

Watching a piece (a Belgian TV series) about hackers

- Police IT dpt takes a burned down computer (literally burned down -- black from the smoke), plug it into the mains and remove a graphics card. To collect evidence from.

- A policeman from IT dpt is browsing some company's website (while at the police station), looking at their clients. Address bar says: 127.0.0.1.

- The police hacker is browsing some forum. She got the post author's IP and MAC addresses from that forum post metainfo.

<img src="awkward.jpeg" alt="Awkward...">
<img src="confused_jackie.jpeg" alt="Awkward...">

switched from windows 10 to kubuntu 18.10 (yes it's not arch or gentoo) last week, after the previous system crashed and burned

I had no idea, my laptop can be so fast and work almost entirely without a fan. Live is beautiful again!

According to my doctor and chiropracter I'm burned out right now.

But I'm not ready to throw in the towel just yet. But my concentration and productivty have been gone for a few weeks now.

I mainly work alone and I'm currently trying to complete 4 projects. But I just can't seem to get it done anymore.

I know that when I'm in my peak I would only need 2 weeks for it. But I have been trying for 2.5 months know and getting nowhere.

Not really where the problem originated but probably with the ever changing specs and my main client that hasn't paid in 5 months. But he accounts for 80% of my profits, but the internal politics of the coperate stuff is making stuff hard.

Not really sure how to go from here yet, need to finish this but can't focus. Can't hire someone since my reseveres are gone and I can't take a holiday and relax because of the money and the voice in my head that says you have to get this done.

But the feeling of wanting to work but not getting anything done, like walking into a mental wall. Makes me wanne run into a real wall head first. Stupid body listen to reason so we can go on a holiday and relax!

Story from when game disks were in fashion
I asked my best buddy to burn a disk of GTA vice city so that I can install it on my desktop.
The next day when I receive the disk and insert it into my PC I almost fell of my chair laughing cause that douche bag had copied the icon from his desktop to the disk and burned it .
I almost fell laughing not because what he did , but because he did so when he was in his final year of his IT degree 🤣🤣🤣

I'm halfway in on a six-month disaster contract where I'm converting a massive site written over 7~8 years to a new system. Manager has had us restart about 4 times and there are other departments who want to take over. The deadline is so tight that I've stuck with the original plan and kept my code flexible to be changed if the manager wants to go with the other teams' ideas. ("Okay, manager: here's a clone, tell the other team to prove that works") The lead dev, to my horror, didn't write any code and was let go in November.

Manager hired a new dev part-time whose commitment is on something entirely separate that is required in order for the deadline to be pushed to Summer. (new thing for old thing)

New dev has an attitude, basically wants to start over, and is already acting like I'm his subordinate, very patronizing, very dodgy when asked to explain a strong opinion (THIS IS A SECURITY PROBLEM!!!1). I really have no idea what my manager promised to him. Also found out that manager hired an agency to create a roadmap of the project (WHY?!!! WHY NOW?!). I've been burned once already with the previous lead, and I'm not wild about working with yet another person who wants to burn the whole thing to the ground and start completely over, especially not someone who wants to engage in a dick-measuring contest.

Do you guys have any advice? I mean, other than quitting? I'm going to see this through, but I'm burned out.

Is it just my random madness...

Or do you sometimes picture yourself in a fictional comic / movie / whateva...

Had this feeling today.

Burned a database down, grilled 2 terabyte of data, deleted ~ 500 elasticsearch indices.

Then I chopped an haproxy loadbalancer into 6 seperate machines, because noone likes to read ~ 2.5 to 3 k of lines.

And I guess now I'm doing some backups of elasticsearch before the second round of flamethrower madness starts.

It's somehow very satisfying to just destroy everything.

So I thought “wow, alcohol aerosol should probably catch fire and burn really quick. I bet I can burn my hands if I do this”.

So I poured pure alcohol into a spray bottle and sprayed it right onto a lit up lighter in my hand.

It burned really quick.

I burned my hands.

I was right.

Affective disorder be like

I'm pretty sure every company is filled with parasites who suck the life out of the 3 top people who keep everything working.

Maybe when we see a tech company enshitify, it's because those 3 people burned out and moved on.

I started a project with a friend 2 years ago, we were excited and shit until we burned out and ended up not talking for half a year

My college wants me to submit my final project.... On a compact disk!
Yes, I'm sitting here facepalming myself to a pulp.
Like what the actual fuck, those things died six years ago! The last time I burned a cd was probably when I was in 9th grade and had a potato for a computer.

have you ever felt that you enjoyed and loved your job and coding, then after a while all of the joy, contentment and vigor just left together with the wind?

Well I have, and let me tell you the story of my peope and the feature whirlpool drain of death, slowly `agile`ing you to the death of creativity.

First everything was seemingly good, Its your product, a baby that every one is contributing to make, a great idea in the making.

Fastforward after the baby was fully materialize, and you are watching his first step, usually you are happy seeing his slow growth. But ITS A BIG FUCKING NO. He wants the baby to go faster, bigger and stronger, more than what he can chew. Then you watch as the baby grew into an abomination. A monster of undistinguishable and parts. It grew inhumanly large. BUT it never grew and it never matured. The baby sits there, and were just here injecting all sorts of stuff just to make his father happy. But the end of the day he will ask more and more and more, until the cycle goes on. The baby grows but does not mature, and were here trying to make his father accept the baby. But NO he like more. Sadly we have no power over this. we are mere slaves of the fathers bidding. his bitches, tools and nothing more...:(

Probably gonna leave devrant until we get a working block feature. Or like. Any new feature at all. The last was pixelated fucking icons in april. Feel like david and tim kinda burned out or gave up or something which would be fine if the opensourced devrant but no i guess. See ya later fuckers.

Biggest hurdle I have overcome is <b>myself</b>.

All my expectations, worries, fears, and doubts definitely caused major hurdles I had to crash through, trip and fall into, or they downright exploded into balls of fire as I would stand dumbfounded and burned by flames of regret.

Learning I was the blocker to greater achievement, success and ultimately happiness was a very hard lesson for me to learn, and a lesson and discipline that I still battle with today.

It is difficult to climb the seven story mountain of madness with heavy burdens, plodding with little progress.

Free the weight, and the natural warm air currents will lift high the spirit, and the body will follow.

"Angels fly because they take themselves lightly" ~GKC

>laptop can't handle 3 terminals because cpu is single-core 1.2GHz
>fuck it
stress -c 128 -i 128 -m 16
>second terminal
top
>load average: 272.15, 247.60, 149.80
>CPU is cool after 30 minutes
>how
>picks up laptop from right side
>burned myself
>cpu is on the left under power button, right side has nothing that would get hot???
>takes apart laptop
>second large CPU-like die
wtf.386
>looks up laptop
>floating point/algebraic coprocessor
WHAT

and that was the story all about how my life got flipped turned upside down

what fucking system has a coprocessor after 2002? (My laptop is a 2008 HP something or other)

I quit this startup side job coz I was over worked and under paid for 3 years and I decided it wasn't worth the mental fatigue and anxiety. Plus I didn't feel like it added any value to my life other than stress. Gave them at least 2 months notice (since February effective April 30th) coz as the only server side engineer+team lead, I did ALOT. Now they brought this hot shot new CTO who wants me to basically rewrite the entire app before I go while maintaining the existing system and making sure everything functions smoothly (there is a ton I chose to optimise to make things easier for the new dev who they have not hired and I have 4 weeks to go) . The app was built in mongo db now he wants it in mysql. Can't believe ask me this after breaking my neck and falling in and out if depression for this job?!! I want to laugh and scream at the same time.

I have an interview with a CEO and product owner next week for the position of principal developer. The job ad which got me here stated 'Any additional skills you have will be viewed favorably'.

I've had my ass burned by that crap at least once before. When they ask about private projects, I'm just going to say "I love my job so much, I do it in my free time too!"

Startup-ing 101, from Fitbit:
- spy on users
- sell data
- cut production costs
- mutilate people's bodies, leaving burn scars that will never heal
- announce the recall, get PR, and make the refund process impossibly convoluted
- never give actual refunds
- claim that yes, fitbit catches fire, but only the old discontinued device, just to mess with search results and make the actual info (that all devices catch fire) hard to find
- try hard to obtain the devices in question, so people who suffered have no evidence
- give bogus word salad replies to the press

This is what one of the people burned has to say:
"I do not have feeling in parts of my wrist due to nerve damage and I will have a large scar that will be with me the rest of my life. This was a traumatic experience and I hope no one else has to go through it. So, if you own a Fitbit, please reconsider using it."

Ladies and gentlemen, cringefest starts. One of fitbit replies:
"Fitbit products are designed and produced in accordance with strict standards and undergo extensive internal and external testing to ensure the safety of our users. Based on our internal and independent third party testing and analysis, we do not believe this type of injury could occur from normal use. We are committed to conducting a full investigation. With Google's resources and global platform, Fitbit will be able to accelerate innovation in the wearables category, scale faster, and make health even more accessible to everyone. I could not be more excited for what lies ahead".

In the future, corporate speech will be autogenerated.

(if you wear fitbit, just be aware of this.)

Next week I'm starting a new job and I kinda wanted to give you guys an insight into my dev career over the last four years. Hopefully it can give some people some insight into how a career can grow unexpectedly.

While I was finishing up my studies (AI) I decided to talk to one of these recruiters and see what kind of jobs I could get as soon as I would be done. The recruiter immediately found this job with a Java consultancy company that also had a training aspect on the side (four hours of training a week).

In this job I learned a lot about many things. I learned about Spring framework, clean code, cloud deployment, build pipelines, Microservices, message brokers and lots more.

As this was a consultancy company, I was placed at different companies. During my time here I worked on two different projects.
The first was a Microservices project about road traffic data. The company was a mess, and I learned a lot about company politics. I think I never saw anything I built really released in my 16 months there.

I also had to drive 200km every day for this job, which just killed me. And after far too long I was finally moved to the second company, which was much closer.

The second company was a fintech startup funded by a bank. Everything was so much better than the traffic company. There was a very structured release schedule, with a pretty okay scrum implementation. Every team had their own development environment on aws which worked amazingly. I had a lot of fun at this job, with many cool colleagues. And all the smart people around me taught me even more about everything related to working in software engineering.

I quit my job at the consultancy company, and with that at the fintech place, because I got an opportunity I couldn't refuse. My brother was working for Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wallstreet, and he said they needed a developer to build a learning platform. So I packed my bags and flew to LA.

The office was just a villa on the beach, next to Jordan's house. The company was quite small and there were actually no real developers. There was a guy who claimed to be the cto of the company, but he actually only knew how to do WordPress and no one had named him cto, which was very interesting.
So I sat down with Jordan and we talked about the platform he wanted to build. I explained how the things he wanted would eventually not be able with WordPress and we needed to really start building software and become a software development company. He agreed and I was set to designing a first iteration of the platform.
Before I knew it I was building the platform part by part, adding features everywhere, setting up analytics, setting up payment flows, monitoring, connecting to Salesforce, setting up build pipelines and setting up the whole aws environment. I had to do everything from frontend to the backest of backends. Luckily I could grow my team a tiny bit after a while, until we were with four. But the other three were still very junior, so I also got the task of training them next to developing.
Still I learned a lot and there's so much more to tell about my time at this company, but let's move forward a bit.

Eventually I had to go back to the Netherlands because of reasons. I still worked a bit for them from over here, but the fun of it was gone without my colleagues around me, so I quit last September.

I noticed I was all burned out, had worked far too much, so I decided to take a few months off and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I even wondered whether I wanted to stay in programming.

Fast forward to last few weeks. I figured out I actually did want to work in software still, but now I would focus on getting the right working circumstances. No more driving 3 hours every day, no more working 12 hours every day. Just work close to home and find a company with the right values.
So I started sending out resumes and I gave one recruiter the chance to arrange some interviews too. I spoke to 7 companies in the span of one week. And they were all very interested. Eventually I narrowed it down to 2 companies and asked them for offers. And the company that actually had my preference offered me significantly more than I asked for, which settled the deal.

So tomorrow I'm officially signing with them, and starting next week I'll be developing in Kotlin, diving into functional programming and running our code in serverless environments. I'm very excited!

!dev

I will never understand the need for weeding bs. I am ok with marriage, and doing whatever religious festivity you want to whatever deity you follow. I respect that stuff enough to not go all anti-religious or what not. But I just cannot fathom making a party that benefits the attendee (food whatnot) more than the people starting a life together. Gifts? a popularity contest? I don't get it. My weeding was simple, did not invite a bunch of people, shit burned bridges, but our families were there and that to me was more than enough. Anyone else that got offended, well, they can get offended whenever they pay one of my fucking bills.

But I just cannot get the need to have such a ceremony, AND then to have the audacity to get upset or call out people that cannot make it. Make it for fucking what? the bridge and groom are going to be so fucking distracted with everyone that at most your presence gets an "ah glad you came!"

AND some people even do it in different cities, fucking why? it is a burden as an adult to make time for such minute events, even more to take the time, and the fucking money to go to your fucking party on another city. Bonus points if I need to buy a fucking airplane ticket, no fucking thanks.

I am currently doing something big in my life that only my wife can help me with, because of my situation, my family can't help me, so i am all by myself and wife, and some people told me to put it on hold.....to go to a fucking party. WHY? Why in the sweet holy Mexican baby Ritchie would I go ahead and fucking do that? you are not going to help me afterwards when I get back, shit, you will be out on fucking vacation after the party, for 2 fucking weeks (talk about privilege) and you still want me to put my shit on hold to go...to a fucking party?

Fuck, sometimes I feel that I am toooo fucking egotistical to put my time before others, but man, you really get shit out of this. 2 weedings happening this month, one requires a ticket, the other is a drive away (4 fucking hours) but still, I really don't feel that I should waste my VL that I would much rather spend with my wife and child on some fucking obnoxious ego-inflated party.

If you're recording a tutorial then please switch to dark theme. Just because you like getting your eyes burned it doesn't mean the rest of us also do

!rant

I have been at my current company for seven years. I am in a senior position and I am a senior person in the department with a lot of systems that I am responsible for. Anyway I am getting really tired of my management and getting burned out working basically 24x7 on call. My last two vacations I have been called and worked 6 hours each time.

So, tomorrow I have a second interview at another company, I am worried what will happen if / when I leave. I have a feeling I will probably land a side contract with my current employer.

I think I am sure I am ready to leave, just a little anxious about the change.

I did not foresee myself learning ColdFusion in Internet Explorer in 2020, that’s for damn sure.

1. Plan your work
2. Plan new skills to learn every year
3. Stackoverflow is your best friend
4. Don't be afraid to ask stupid questions...
5. ... but make sure not to ask too many of them
6. Don't get burned on one single topic, find other projects to work in parallel or even better work on side projects in your spare time

Random af project idea that will see me burned alive by the internet (because if I do it I intend to put it in dev.to which is full of "that offends me" people):

Generate a classifier that will scan text from different websites and categorize where the person might be from.

Example: "plz send bob and vagene" <--- we all know

"mami que ricas nalgas" <--- Mexican for the most part.

"there, their, they're and similar text" <--- my fellow Americans for the most part....

"cyka blyat" <--- 0.o we know

"pompous statement about the way Americans do shit" <--- European, meaning, from Yurop.

"angry as fuck rant/banter" <-- German

"lol whatever Trump is the best president ever" <--- some moron from the south of the U.S (south much like myself but I am not a Trump supporter nor a republican)

etc etc.

What makes this complex is that I would have to put together my own dataset in the highly likely chance of something like that not existing already for me to use.

Can you imagine the chaos?

I've been writing my first game for the last week...

When do the suicidal thoughts stop? 🙃

Dunno, almost got burned out, took a month to recover 🙃

Have you heard of the bread factory that burned down while sending out messages? ... They're toast.

MSbuild makes me want to blow my brains out.

I know it's no longer used in .NET Core and all the lucky people that don't have to deal with .NET Framework can happily move on.

But here I am, a complete idiot. Expecting MSBuild to build the exact same way from the CLI as it does if I run a build in Visual Studio. Expecting the build server to consistently produce the same result as if I built my solution locally.

Demanding meaningful earnings and error messages that don't leave me completely perplexed as to what's actually going on in the compiler.

Fuck me and fuck .NET Framework. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

The most scary stuff when changing jobs is not the fear if the code is spaghetti or not. It’s onboarding and how the company expect new devs to learn the domain.

When I joined the company I am working on, they did not have at all documentation in regards to domain knowledge. I had to ping devs who have been with the company for years so they can explain to me. Product Managers are useless. They can explain the ticket but cannot point me in the codebase and DB fields that that ticket needs to touch.

They would say to me “Ask what you don’t know “. MF, I don’t know what I don’t know. How am I supposed to come up with questions?

Cherry on top are JIRA “Stories”. It’s title and 1 sentence and it was expected of me to do the discovery.

Fast forward, there are still things that I am learning. I work in an industry that is very complicated and has a lot of information to take. I don’t get burned out of code and tasks. I get burned out of trying to understand my tickets and connect them with the code and DB.

Just tell me if the API is ready or not. I can understand if it's not. I just don't like being left out and when the boss asks for an update, I'll get burned for not starting anything yet, all because you guys aren't ready

OMG you fucking little cunt!

Previous issue with this co-worker we hate eat other but can maintain minimal contact due to covid. Last interaction was actually nice, we joked a bit.

He teaches me how to do the build and ‘updated’ the confluence page. By update he striked through one paragraph.

Been doing these for week and now others what builds done all the time and since I am not an asshole they can approach me to do this but now I spend all
day long doing builds.

Work on a classified app so it has to
be burned on a disk, taken to a ‘secret machine’ and deployed. Takes about an hour and people are like. Can you rebuild it? I forgot to commit something?

So I updated the page to flush out the directions. Did not remove one thing only added things simple things like do a ls -lah in the dist folder to make sure the are built correctly. Things like check to make the symlink works, bolded words.

He was not at standup so I figured he was out of the office today and was going to ask him to review tomorrow.

Fucker goes in to make changes while I am making changes and doesn’t think to msg me telling me?

He is removing things and moving things which is fine just let me know! What a dick!!!!!

Screenshot of all the activity today, I am
in blue. I will spend all day watching the page to make sure I get the last fucking edit!

Hey guys
I think I just burned 2 Nanos.
I'm using a 30W soldering Iron and had to resolder the pins of one and solder the pins of a new one.
Now they don't work. One allows for code upload but won't turn on, other seams to have a short circuit.
Could have I burned the circuits due to a 30W soldering iron?
Also used a little of flux on the pins, can flux pass energy and make bridges?
Thanks

So at the beginning of the year I took a new job at a large, stable company. Leaving a failing startup, toxic leadership, and an absolutely stellar development team in the process. Given what's happened in the world since then, I'm overall pretty happy with the decision to have some more stability for me and my family.

That being said, I'm super bummed out (and weirdly burned out) now because I feel like I'm becoming a worse engineer.

I've worked for large organizations before (single digit thousands of employees), but never have I experienced a personification of enterprise memes like this. Leadership too out of touch, lots of bullshit work just to make worthless reports look good, horrific legacy codebases and infrastructure, you name it.

My biggest problem are the expectations are shockingly low. I went from a hyper demanding work environment where the fate of the entire company seemed to hang in the balance each and every week, to an environment where we literally invent arbitrary, bullshit deadlines and requirements so we have something to feel some stress about. And even still, most of the deadlines are laughably far away. The pace of work that's not only accepted, but praised is so slow that I find myself procrastinating more and more. I spend so little time doing any work, and even less time doing things that would pass as "interesting", that I feel like the engineering and problem solving part of my brain is starting to rot.

To make matters worse, the culture is weirdly confrontational despite the pace being so slow. The people here are _incredibly_ pedantic and will launch into 15 minute arguments over the tiniest incorrect details in a story title. Interrupting someone just so you can say what they were going to say is a daily trial. And most ridiculous of all, _repeating_ word for word what someone _just_ finished saying like it was your thought and you didn't even hear them. I don't even know what the motivation for this could be because it makes them look like total clowns.

I've tried to bring up some of the things I find ridiculous, but most everyone has just accepted them at this point and there's virtually no effort to try and make things better. I only get stupid non-answers like "obviously you've never worked at a large enterprise before". Yes I have. Twice. We didn't partake in half the bullshit that happens here.

Honestly this was all just a passing frustration for the first month or two, but 7 months in I'm starting to see myself become complacent. My current output would be absolutely _shameful_ to myself from a year ago, and even my personality has started to shift to the point that I just go with the flow and don't challenge anything.

I've stopped keeping up with tech trends. I've stopped experimenting with new things. I've tried to do more work on personal projects, but the burnout is starting to affect my life outside of work. In general I've just completely stopped trying, and I absolutely fucking hate it.

I also feel like a total tool for complaining about having a cushy, stable job where I barely have to do anything given the current world climate. But I'm more miserable now than I think I've every been in my career. Has anyone else experienced this and found ways to combat it? How do you get your motivation back once it's lost and there isn't even any pressure to regain it?

I totally blame myself for becoming part of this joke. That's totally on me for not continuing to push myself, but I never realized how much of my "drive" from the last job was coming from the high stakes we were operating under. I really just want to get back to being proud of my work and pushing to be better.

Anyway, sorry for the lengthy post. This turned out to be a weirder rant/self-roast than I intended. But I'm hoping this will be the first step to kicking my own ass back into shape.

How surprising is it when a person designs code in a very clear and impressive structure and just when you think about asking them for guidance, they reveal themselves to be complete turds?

I've been working with this person's "infra" code, at work. I've rewritten some classes to use their infra. I had a vague idea of how the classes work. I had no idea of how their code works. Expectedly, there were some issues but now only minor ones remain.
I asked them for a description of what I'm supposed to do for the few bugs I'm facing. They replied in such a condescending tone, it made me want to punch them through the screen.
Almost a month later, we're still going back and forth with emails. I've been swallowing it and responding calmly. I never got direct answers. Always deflections to irrelevant things or veiled insults. I took it because they did correct one silly error of mine that actually my code reviewer should've caught. (What's worse is that it got introduced by me just before my review and commit.)
But does that give them the right to insult me in front of the whole team including my project manager? I got a reply today from them with everyone of note in cc implying very clearly that I have not done any work. They highlighted a line from my code with some todo tag (that was not meant for them) to make their invalid point. A line that's unrelated to the bug I asked them about. This is after I proved them wrong when they insisted that I had done something wrong about a feature related to the bug.

If you don't understand what I asked for fucking ask me to ask again. But do not fucking try establish yourself on higher ground by pointing out irrelevant things in my code.
I was shocked and enraged that they'd do such a thing. I double checked everything like a mad man. Despite knowing that the fix has to come from them, I was instantly transported to the noob stage, grasping at straws. I wanted to send a really scathing reply right away but my manager asked me to wait.

My mind is now a see saw shifting between a panicked noob questioning every fucking thing I ever did in my nada life and a hungry enraged monster looking to maul that fucking shithead for burning me like that.

So can someone explain to me what's all the drama around our recent burned out sourceforge-dude? Y'all know you can just, ignore his/her rants/comments right? Unless I'm missing something here, I don't see the big deal. Not the first quirkling we've seen here, not the last. And It's not like he's spamming posts either, seems like a post a day, perfectly ignorable if you don't want to read their walls of text.
Like yeah, the levels of aggression are a "bit" too much but still. Ignorable.

This new job has more work than I can possibly complete in a day, week, or month. Deadlines pile up and I’m thoroughly exhausted all weekend. My mind feels lethargic and dull. People around me seem to be getting stuff done and I feel like I’m making too many mistakes and holding everyone back. Not sure I can stick with this job for the long haul to retirement. But freelancing absolutely sucks because nobody wants to pay you enough to feed yourself and it doesn’t scale to a full time salary for me. I simply don’t have the mental capacity to do the equivalent of four peoples’ jobs to design, code, QA, launch, and do all the digital marketing, advertising, writing, and maintenance for enough sites to make up my salary.

Small company, sole engineer. Non-tech management. Increasingly fancy job titles despite working alone most of the time, with the promise of hiring someone (again) I can actually manage soon.

Backlog of projects/tasks is truly a mindfuck, with new things being added each week. This backlog will never ever get done, and nothing matters anyway because the next idea is "the future", all the time.

While I have influence on some aspects of decision making, it usually ends up being what the boss wants. Actively opposed a project because it's just too big of an undertaking, it was forced through anyway. I'm trying to keep the scope manageable as I'm building it now, and it's hard.

"It's the future, we absolutely have to do this. It will be the biggest thing we've ever done."

Boss's excitement then quickly faded since it's actually in development, now nobody really seems to want to know where it's at, or how it will all work. I need to scope it out, with the knowledge that many decisions boss signed off will be questioned when he actually looks at it. We now have even more "exciting" ideas of utter grandeur. Stuff that I can't even begin to comprehend the complexity of, while struggling to keep a self imposed deadline on the current one.

Every single morning we sit on Zoom for a "valuable" "catch-up". This is absolutely perfect for one thing: Completely destroying whatever drive and focus I have going into the day. Unrelated topics, marketing conversations, even more ideas, ideas for ideas sake, small problems blown out of proportion, the list goes on. I recently argued in detail why it should be scrapped or at least be optional to attend. No luck, it's "valuable".

Today a new idea was announced, and we absolutely have to do it ASAP because it can only be better than the current solution. I raise my concerns, saying it's not as easy as you make it out to be, we should properly think about it. Nope! We'll botch something to prove that it works... So you'll base your decision whether it's good on some half ass botch job that nobody really has the mental capacity to actually pay attention to. What a reliable way to measure!

"Our analytics data isn't useful enough to tell us the impact of things we do. We (you) have to fix this." Over the last 2 or so years, I've been pushing for an overhaul and expansion of our data analysis capabilities for exactly this reason. Integrating different data sources into a unified solution so we can easily see what we're doing, etc. Nope, never happened.

The new project idea which is based on wild assumptions is ALWAYS more important than the groundwork.

Now when I mentioned that this is what I wanted to do all along, it got brushed aside. "We don't need to do anything complicated, just fix this, add that, and it's done. It should be an easy thing to do. This is very important for our decision making." Fine, have it your way.

I'm officially burned out. It's so fucking hard to get myself to focus on my work for more than an hour or two. I started a side project, and even that effort is falling victim to my day-job-induced apathy.

I'm tempted to hand in my resignation without another offer on the table. I just need time to rediscover my passion, and go job hunting from that position, instead of the utter desperation of right now.

If you've read through all this rambling, kudos to you!

This is going to sound like a ridiculous question, but how do you all find both the time and the interest to work on side projects for your portfolio / GitHub? I always seem to start strong, get burned out, and can never find the inspiration to break away from the 9-5 of my day role to work on coding something else... Where do you find ideas? Designs? Concepts? Interesting solutions? I'm in desperate need of building some GitHub repos for my portfolio... 😅😰

Any IDE that doesn't go to the end of line when you press the down arrow key on the last line of the file, should be burned with hell fire.

Exercise bike + devRant. Burned 110 calories so far.

Can anyone tell me how to become less resentful and less bitter? I am becoming a miserable fuck. Its true that I burned out in this job after doing 100hrs overtime during previous month, its also true that I am pissed off about having to wait 8-9 weeks for my raise to happen. I cared so much that I burned out and now Im trying to set some boundaries but damage was done and Im struggling dealing with it.

I took 6 days off to disconnect from work (still was responding to some major blockers and monitoring stuff). Today I got back at work and interacting with two incompetent devs immediately sets me off. Imagine taking 2-3 days and extra meetings to do a simple fix which shouldnt take longer than 30min. My mind was blown and still gets constantly blown about how ineffective some members of team are.

I am becaming a ranting fuck. I even noticed one person escaping my rants once he sees that they are taking longer than 5min.

Right now I started setting boundaries - I clock my 8 hours, disable slack/email notifications and get the fuck out from the office. I dont care if I will have to sit in traffic extra 30min during summer heat, Im done with putting in overtime and caring so much about being efficient. I will just start working on my side project and put my love/learnings in that. Hoping that by the end of year I will have couple projects to show in my portfolio so I could find a better paying job...

In the past I was the sole dev responsible for apps and I was communicating with ceos/ctos/product owners/designers directly. This is my first position where I work in a dev team and boy oh boy out of 8 devs barely 3 are competent enough but their output is how to say... Not the biggest. Anyways...

Transition to boundaries and 'normal life' is so hard. Nobody told me that I will have to learn to work with and tolerate such retarded and incompetent people. Im talking about illiterate monkeys who cant even read or write. Im amazed how they manage to code.

Fuck these SJWs, what kind of society respects and validates the opinion of irrational, psychologically mutilated humanoids. how long will people let them.

And I don't care if try to mute my freedom of speach, I will say what I wish, whether is sexist, racist, or offensive in general

But what happens when progress decays because of it?! Yesterday, this master/puppet situation, today Linus leaves Linux, what if tomorrow I am not allowed to eat chocolate because it's offensive for the people of Ivory coast who slave for it, what if tomorow I can't say that the sun is blue, because it'd be offensive to colorblind people? Until when is this society going to regress?

I hope live in a modern Babylon world which is to be teared down and burned to ashes, buried deep underground, down by fascist nationalist with no sense of moral freedom of speach and justice, because I feel like it would happen anyways.

AMD DRM Linux drivers, so much wow much usable

I have an interview with Google in less than 3 hours. It really sucks because I'm totally not motivated to do it. I didn't study much for the interview, because I recently switched companies and had a lengthy job search. And I finally landed at a decent job that I'm having a great time working for. And to be totally honest, I just have interview fatigue. It started in late May and ended in August. Countless interviews asking the same damn questions just gets exhausting. Too "homework assignments" in addition to my "day job". I'm just burned out on interview hence I just haven't had it in me to really study for a Google interview.

The project is nowhere near complete, the customers are waiting for demo/proof of concept. the code is spaghetti and I'm burned out.

Oh, and I'm a solo dev.

Pic without code as my light bulb has burned and I will not be able to fix that this week.

But I can update the picture later.

Darkest client description.

With a gift since birth, if you answer this riddle: Who I be?
The fetus of a demon,
Semen from the tip.
Of the penis I'm the only thing
That you see when you're dreaming,
Armageddon and aftermath
This may blog in paragraphs.
Sit on a throne, full of X's and bones
Blowing smoke and I laugh.
Turning sinners like you,
Into my personal acid tabs.
Let me put you up on game,
I've been shot, burned, and stabbed, and still ain't deceased,
I carry the mark of the beast
Now can you tell me
Who the fuck I be?
Client, as the guyreplies
Wine, red wine was the color of his eyes
Coughing a lot of blood like Piru, but he slowly dies
As his eyes close shut, in prison was his eternal life

Realisation of the client being devil.

Just integrated urban dictionary in my app.

Boubas: adjusting their sleep schedule by forcing themselves to go to bed early. Result: bouba turns all over the bed for three hours straight trying to find a comfortable position, sweats, stands up to adjust windows and AC, now it’s too cold... ends up actually falling asleep later than usual, wakes up fucked, as always.

Boubas who think they’re kikis: take melatonin pills. Result: bouba can’t sleep without their bouba pills.

Me (the kiki): wear blue light blocking glasses from five o’clock on. No blue light = no melatonin burned, go to bed at 11pm, sleep like a teen girl after a rough teen sex with her teen boyfriend.

Yes I sometimes wake up at 3am but that’s because my brain is too kiki to sleep. I feel refreshed, TOO refreshed in fact.

Presents: Udemy Unity & Blender courses

Holiday Reading: A Book Of Lenses

Status: Reenergised, pumped to program once again

I was developing an Android app during college training. I made the app in three days, actually, three nights.

Three consecutive nights of only coding had its toll on me. I got burned out.

I couldn't even look at my laptop. Every code I looked made me want to throw up. That's how much burned out I was.

Well, after three more days, the feelings of throwing up receded, and I was back on track.

This was my second worst burned out experience.

TL;DR; do your best all you like, strive to be the #1 if you want to, but do not expect to be appreciated for walking an extra mile of excellence. You can get burned for that.

They say verbalising it makes it less painful. So I guess I'll try to do just that. Because it still hurts, even though it happened many years ago.

I was about to finish college. As usual, the last year we have to prepare a project and demonstrate it at the end of the year. I worked. I worked hard. Many sleepless nights, many nerves burned. I was making an android app - StudentBuddy. It was supposed to alleviate students' organizational problems: finding the right building (city plans, maps, bus schedules and options/suggestions), the right auditorium (I used pictures of building evac plans with classes indexed on them; drawing the red line as the path to go to find the right room), having the schedule in-app, notifications, push-notifications (e.g. teacher posts "will be 15 minutes late" or "15:30 moved to aud. 326"), homework, etc. Looots of info, loooots of features. Definitely lots of time spent and heaps of new info learned along the way.

The architecture was simple. It was a server-side REST webapp and an Android app as a client. Plenty of entities, as the system had to cover a broad spectrum of features. Consequently, I had to spin up a large number of webmethods, implement them, write clients for them and keep them in-sync. Eventually, I decided to build an annotation processor that generates webmethods and clients automatically - I just had to write a template and define what I want generated. That worked PERFECTLY.

In the end, I spun up and implemented hundreds of webmethods. Most of them were used in the Android app (client) - to access and upsert entities, transition states, etc. Some of them I left as TBD for the future - for when the app gets the ADMIN module created. I still used those webmethods to populate the DB.

The day came when I had to demonstrate my creation. As always, there was a commission: some high-level folks from the college, some guests from businesses.

My turn to speak. Everything went great, as reversed. I present the problem, demonstrate the app, demonstrate the notifications, plans, etc. Then I describe at high level what the implementation is like and future development plans. They ask me questions - I answer them all.

I was sure I was going to get a 10 - the highest score. This was by far the most advanced project of all presented that day!

Other people do their demos. I wait to the end patiently to hear the results. Commission leaves the room. 10 minutes later someone comes in and calls my name. She walks me to the room where the judgement is made. Uh-oh, what could've possibly gone wrong...?

The leader is reading through my project's docs and I don't like the look on his face. He opens the last 7 pages where all the webmethods are listed, points them to me and asks:
LEAD: What is this??? Are all of these implemented? Are they all being used in the app?
ME: Yes, I have implemented all of them. Most of them are used in the app, others are there for future development - for when the ADMIN module is created
LEAD: But why are there so many of them? You can't possibly need them all!
ME: The scope of the application is huge. There are lots of entities, and more than half of the methods are but extended CRUD calls
LEAD: But there are so many of them! And you say you are not using them in your app
ME: Yes, I was using them manually to perform admin tasks, like creating all the entities with all the relations in order to populate the DB (FTR: it was perfectly OK to not have the app completed 100%. We were encouraged to build an MVP and have plans for future development)
LEAD: <shakes his head in disapproval>
LEAD: Okay, That will be all. you can return to the auditorium

In the end, I was not given the highest score, while some other, less advanced projects, were. I was so upset and confused I could not force myself to ask WHY.

I still carry this sore with me and it still hurts to remember. Also, I have learned a painful life lesson: do your best all you like, strive to be the #1 if you want to, but do not expect to be appreciated for walking an extra mile of excellence. You can get burned for that.

The time at university I was kind of burned out all the time.
I was far away from being a hard-working student, I needed more than double time to finish, but I constantly had a feeling of being stressed.
My free time never felt like free time because I thought I should learn/do something for the university.
Now at work, I can spend my free time without feeling guilty. Sure, I also have to think about problems at work sometime and I still should learn something to get better, but now I can focus on stuff I'm really interested in.

I wrote a parody of Sound of Silence based on the struggles of cleaning up people's shit in the shop

============

Hello problems, my old friends
I've come to talk with you again
Because a driver softly creeping
Left its seeds while RAM was leaking
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of crashing

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow bands of networking
'Neath the halo of a burned-out fan
I turned my collar to the hot and spinning
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of an LED light
That split the night
And touched the sound of crashing

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand tasks, maybe more
Programs malloc with no swap
Programs writing with no space
Programs writing bits that voices never play
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of crashing

"Fools, " said I, "You do not know
Malware, like a plague, it grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my tools that I might help you"
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells, of crashing

And the programs bowed and prayed
To the malware god they made
And Windows flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And Windows said, "The words of the prophets are written in the event log
And dumped over COM"
And whispered in the sounds of crashing

I started fully exploring different aspects of tech in a middle school technology class where the teacher gave me a good grade as long as I did something that could be useful or interesting. I learned how to design webpages by playing with inspect element, and then decided to make my own with Notepad. One of my friends showed me how to use Sublime Text, and I found that I loved programming. Other things I did in there included using two desktops with NIC's wired directly to each other with an old version of Synergy and a VNC server, and at one point, I built a server node out of old dell Optiplex desktops the school had piled in a storage room.

Last year in high school, I took a class on VB.net and made some money afterwards by freelance refreshing legacy spaghetti, and got burned pretty badly by a person offering $25,000 for a major POS to backend CMS integration rewrite. The person told me that I had finished second, and that another dev had gotten the reward, but that he liked my code. A few days later, I was notified through a *cough*very convoluted*cough* system of mine by a trigger that ran once during startup in a production environment and reported the version number as well as a few other bits, and I was able to see that *cough*someone*cough* had been using my code. I stopped programming for at least six months straight because I didn't want to go back.

This year in high school, I'm taking the engineering class I didn't get into last year, and I realized that Autodesk Inventor supports VBA. I got back into programming with a lot of copy-paste and click-once "installers" to get my modelling assignments done faster than my classmates. Last week, one of my friends asked me to help him fix his VB program, which I did, and now I'm hooked again.

I've always been an engineer at heart, but now I'm conflicted with going into I.T., mechanical or robotical engineering, or being a software developer.

A little long, but that's how I got to where I am now. (I still detest those who take advantage of defenseless programmers. There's a special place for them.)

As a new freelancer I didn't have much clients , so I paired with a web designer +10 years exp. who work with me as a pm and that was a bad decision.
Although I am a back-end dev , half of the projects were frontend/WordPress theme (less price than back-end projecrs) - so 30% of the projects were cancelled .
sometimes I receive project's which have requirement, like magento, I don't know anything about ,
I tried to push myself but I burned out after six month.
he deals with clients, partner with other companies ,and I don't know anything about the terms.
at the end I was like an employee without any benefits from his company .
moreover I get my money after 45 day!!!
and not all my money .
this is a project I work for another company through him
A requirement for mobile back-end server was integrating with parse and that was my first time working with Facebook parse so ....
after two weeks ..
we received email from parse that they'll shutdown their service after a year .

so we moved to Amazon sns again my first time working with aws .
at the end I can't charge for extra money but my pm became a gold partner for that company .
the only thing that made me hold is that I need some high quality projects for my c.v.
-----------
he didn't show on hangout because I need my money .
this will be my last project with him.
wow I write too much ... I feel better now .😥

Joined a new startup as a remote dev, feeling a bit micromanaged. So this week I joined an established startup as a senior mobile dev where I work remotely.

Previous two devs got fired and two new guys got hired (me as a senior dev and another senior dev as a teamlead, also third senior dev will join next week).

Situation is that codebase is really crappy (they invested 4 years developing the android app which hasn't even been released yet). It seems that previous devs were piggybacking on old architecture and didn't bother to update anything, looking at their GIT output I could tell that they were working at 20-30% capacity and just accepting each other MR's usually with no comments meaning no actual code reviews. So codebase already is outdated and has lots of technical debt. Anyways, I like the challenges so a crappy codebase is not really a problem.

Problem is that management seems to be shitting bricks now and because they got burned by devs who treated this as a freelance gig (Im talking taking 8-10 weeks pto in a given year, lots of questionable sick leaves and skipping half of the meetings) now after management fired them it seems that they are changing their strategy into micro managament and want to roll this app out into production in the next 3 months or so lol. I started seeing redflags, for example:

1. Saw VP's slack announcement where he is urging devs to push code everyday. I'm a senior dev and I push code only when I'm ready and I have at least a proof of concept that's working. Not a big fan of pushing draft work daily that is in in progress and have to deal with nitpicky comments on stuff that is not ready yet. This was never a problem in 4-5 other jobs I worked in over the years.

2. Senior dev who's assigned as the teamlead on my team has been working for 1 month and I can already see that he hates the codebase, doesn't plan on coding too much himself and seems like he plans on just sitting in meetings and micromanaging me and other dev who will join soon. For example everyday he is asking me on how I am doing and I have to report this to him + in a separate daily meeting with him and product. Feels weird.

3. Same senior dev/teamlead had a child born yesterday. While his wife was in hospital the guy rushed home to join all work meetings and to work on the project. Even today he seems to be working. That screams to me like a major redflag, how will he be able to balance his teamlead position and his family life? Why management didn't tell him to just take a few days off? He told me himself he is a senior dev who helped other devs out, but never was in an actual lead position. I'm starting to doubt if he will be able to handle this properly and set proper boundaries so that management wouldn't impact mental health.

Right now this is only my 1st week. They didn't even have a proper backend documentation. Not a problem. I installed their iOS app which is released and intercepted the traffic so I know how backend works so I can implement it in android app now.

My point is that I'm not a child who needs hand holding. I already took on 2 tickets and gonna push an MR with fixes. This is my first week guys. In more corporate companies people sit 2 months just reading documentation and are not expected to be useful for first few months. All I want is for management to fuckoff and let me do my thing. I already join daily standup, respond to my teamlead daily and I ping people if I need something. I take on responsibility and I deliver.

How to handle this situation? I think maybe I came off as too humble in the interview or something, but basically I feel like I'm being treated like a junior or something. I think I need to deliver a few times and establish some firm boundaries here.

In all workplaces where I worked I was trusted and given freedom. I feel like if they continue treating me like a junior/mid workhorse who needs to be micromanaged I will just start interviewing for other places soon.

Is it highly likely that, those at high position of management are more greedy of money and posses less ethics and values, than those who actually build the company ie engineers ?

I had seen, it's always the top management who get away from mistakes/ issues but generally it's those who develop the company at core i.e. engineers again, are sidelined or considered responsible for the mistake, when management don't know a shit about anything, or sometimes engineers just follow what management says and management fucks their asses wide even if the management did something wrong.

Who do you think actually build companies/product. Engineers or management or marketers/sales people, who eats fat cheques ??

I remember from silicon valley, when hooli reverse engineered Richards idea and developed their own prototype named Nucleus. Pushed their engineers to beat pipe Piper and when their product turns out to be awfully terrible and extremely fucked like a burned dick with broken balls, they just fired their entire nucleus division

So I've been hired as a senior software developer with all the tags included (mentoring, innovating, pushing forward changes) for a company that is trying to move away from waterfall development (yup, it's 2019 and this exists) to a more iterative workflow.
I was initially hired and sent out to do some "field work" abroad for 3 months and then worked "remotely" from the local office with our field partners.
During all this time it seemed that my ideas go through smoothly, there was a lot of chatter about how things are moving forward, how new projects, innovations and new methodologies are implemented.
And yet, after my "remote" work has finished and I have to do things locally more, all of the skeletons fell out. It's just talk, nothing seems to be changing at all and yet any attempts to talk with the brass is like hitting a brick wall.
Not only that, I've been handed a 12 year old project with no possibility to refactor, no technical documentation, very few comments and in a terrible style.
The atmosphere in the company is odd as hell. People are either not very initiative, nor they seem to really care about all of the "changes" that "should be happening".
It almost feels that I've arrived in a company that still lives in 2007 more or less.
Should I quit, or perhaps it's a little "too soon" (have spent 7 months in the place already)? What I don't want is to get in the same train again (work for a company for 8 - 12 months, feel burned out because of the divergence between actual things done and "plans" and then change the job).

I'm seriously burned out "CTO" (small company 20 people, 4 developers).
Should I tell my CEO/CFO exactly that?
Should I tell them, I can't take it anymore, please help me.

Next month we'll have a fund raising opportunity.
I'm afraid it will sound like a blackmail.
I'm afraid they will think, ok, he's burned out, let find somebody else.

On the other side, if I take the risk myself, without telling anyone, I could explode and I'll be on my own.

What do you think it's the best approach?

Second job

Was the lead dev on an ios/android project. I knew that i was not gonna spend much time there and was using them to add shit to the portfolio. my app is in the playstore and seems to be working fine, can't get credit for it and can't bitch about it either since i burned all bridges with that company. the app is a trucking logger logistics ba type of deal for a local company.

i was paid $400 dllrs a week. Yeah I know, ain't shit in the U.S much less Texas. But the thing gave me perspective:
Android development sucks big balls and ios is way easier and nicer on devs.

I am all burned out on everything having to do with websites. I need a new career path. I’ve never been a stellar programmer. I have no idea what to switch to that I could be good at and that comes with a paycheck and benefits to provide for a family of six. Feeling painted into a corner with no way out.

My parents didn't mind. Since childhood, they used to tell me that I can choose my profession freely. I tried with medicine. Burned lots of €s and lots of time. And then switched to IT. Parents did not get in my way - on the contrary, helped me wherever they could. And allowed me to shoot my own foot whenever I was so stupidly determined to.

I believe it's the best kind of parenting -- allowing your children to make their choices, their own mistakes and learn from them while suggesting a piece of advice along the way.

Trying to learn 10 finger system as a gamer, fucking WASD was burned in my mind for a long time already...

Yeah, I never bothered since I'm pretty fast at typing anyways, but I'm hoping I could get a little faster like this, for the long run
Ah yeah also to stop looking at the keyboard

Now I'm curious, what do you guys type like?
If that makes sense

I had a nightmare this morning in which I had been working on a project for months without pushing my commits to the remote server. Then the office suddenly burned down and I had to tell my boss that months of work was lost because I was too lazy to push. He was sooo mad. 😬

Today I almost burned my hand from touching my (metal) laptop

(Context: I left Rome: Total war running on it while it sat on a bed which meant the fans couldn't cool it and it was heating up because Rome: Total War

Burned out! Taking a fucking long ass weekend break next week. Let’s gooooo

Burned out but still got work to do.
Haven't slept in 2 days now I just want to sleep but can't get sleep.
Damn it fuck,I feel like just beating the crap out of something anything for that matter.

I remember when my sister borrowed the original Sims from one of her classmates. She would play and i would watch. One time she recreated our entire family as well as our home. Everything was fine and dandy until she tried cooking something. The kitchen burst into flames and burned the whole family alive so me, being 5 or so, literally cried for the rest of the day and never dared to play the game again. The end.

Month passed so I looked at job offers and I am tired again.

All of them look the same and all of them look like crap. Some require stupid online tests preparation ( cause everyone likes to traverse tree 10000 times a day ).

Seriously I think I will go to supermarket and work there.
It’s more pleasant then getting input and pushing it in some stupid places all over again.
Finding some shit in shit pile, then moving this shit pile back and forth between different shit holes.

AI should start writing this stupid code, robots should provide food and build shelter.
The sooner the better for all of us.