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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?
32 -
The worst career choice I ever made was walking away from a six figure salary software development job with benefits to focus on the small startup I co-founded just a few years earlier. My wife and I had two small children at the time and my wife was also nearly 8 months pregnant with our third. It resulted in an approximate 70% reduction in income, prematurely cashed out 401k and loss of existing health insurance.
To be fair, it was also simultaneously the best career choice I ever made. Three years later I make more now than I originally walked away from. The raw roads of stress, anger, fear and complete uncertainty have aged both me and my wife at an accelerated rate but we have grown closer to each other than we would otherwise be. We have relied on each other, and she has been unbelievably supportive with all the late nights and required traveling. We discovered what we are capable of. In one day it will be October. In one day it will be the month that we finally pay off our last batch of credit card debt that resulted from that career choice.
I cannot recommend following in our footsteps as from where I’m sitting there are much better, more calculated ways of going about it. Logically, what we did was beyond stupid. Luckily for us, we were still young enough to not grasp the full magnitude of stupidity and we also refused to fail. It’s also crucial to have stellar business partners who are just as crazy and just as determined. We have all labored tremendously and we have each played critical roles in our success. The hard times of fear and uncertainty aren’t over. I don’t think they will ever be, to be honest. But, it sure has been one hell of a ride. I wouldn’t change a thing.17 -
classmate: Hey, "friend" told me you do freelance website development. right? I need to create a new website and need your help.
Me: umm... OK... what's it about?
Classmate: It's for my dad's friend's business.
Me: OK. but I will charge the standard rate.
classmate: No... I will make it myself. I just want your help.
Me(Internally): ...not again...
Me: Do it yourself then.
Classmate: It will be quick. an hour or two max.
Me: *speechless*
Classmate: And one of my uncle who did IT told me that c++ is faster. can we use that instead of HTML?
Me: huh...?
classmate: you don't know shit.
... classmate walks away...
This guy somehow manages to get As in exams (mostly cheating. and our papers are shitty theory papers which you can mug up. so that helps) and in a year will have an IT degree.56 -
Its that time of the morning again where I get nothing done and moan about the past ... thats right its practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!
Today I'd like to tell you the story of "i". Interesting about "I" is that he was actually a colleague of yesterdays nominee "G" (and was present at the "java interface" video call, and agreed with G!): https://devrant.com/rants/1152317/...
"I" was the spearhead of a project to end all projects in that company. It was suppose to be a cross-platform thing but ended up only working for iOS. It was actually quite similar to this: https://jasonette.com/ (so similar i'm convinced G / I were part of this but I can't find their github ID's in it).
To briefly explain the above + what they built ... this is the worst piece of shit you can imagine ... and thats a pretty strong statement looking back at the rest of this series so far!
"I" thought this would solve all of our problems of having to build similar-ish apps for multiple customers by letting us re-use more code / UI across apps. His main solution, was every developers favourite part of writing code. I mean how often do you sit back and say:
"God damn I wish more of this development revolved around passing strings back and forth. Screw autocomplete, enums and typed classes / variables, I want more code / variables inside strings in this library!"
Yes thats right, the main part of this bullshittery was putting your entire app, into JSON, into a string and downloading it over http ... what could possibly go wrong!
Some of my issues were:
- Everything was a string, meaning we had no autocomplete. Every type and property had to be remembered and spelled perfectly.
- Everything was a string so we had no way to cmd + click / ctrl + click something to see somethings definition.
- Everything was a string so any business logic methods had to be remembered, all possible overloaded versions, no hints at param types no nothing.
- There was no specific tooling for any of this, it was literally open up xcode, create a json file and start writing strings.
- We couldn't use any of the native UI builders ... cause strings!
- We couldn't use any of the native UI layout constructs and we had to use these god awful custom layout managers, with a weird CSS feel to them.
What angered me a lot was their insistence that "You can download a new app over http and it will update instantly" ... except you can't because you can't download new business logic only UI. So its a new app, but must do 100% exactly the same thing as before.
His other achievements include:
- Deciding he didn't like apple's viewController and navigationBar classes and built his own, which was great when iOS 7 was released (changed the UI to allow drawing under the status bar) and we had no access to any of apples new code or methods, meaning everything had to be re-built from scratch.
- On my first week, my manager noticed he fucked up the login error handling on the app I was taking over. He noticed this as I was about to leave for the evening. I stayed so we could call him (he was in an earlier timezone). Rather than deal with his fucked up, he convinced the manager it would be a "great learning experience" for me to do it ... and stay in late ... while he goes home early.
- He once argued with me in front of the CEO, that his frankenstein cross-platform stuff was the right choice and that my way of using apples storyboards (and well thought out code) wasn't appropriate. So I challenged him to prove it, we got 2 clients who needed similar apps, we each did it our own way. He went 8 man weeks over, I came in 2 days under and his got slated in the app store for poor performance / issues. #result.
But rather than let it die he practically sucked off the CEO to let him improve the cross platform tooling instead.
... in that office you couldn't swing a cat without hitting a retard.
Having had to spend a lot more time working with him and more closely than most of the other nominees, at a minimum "I" is on the top of my list for needing a good punch in the face. Not for being an idiot (which he is), not for ruining so much (which he did), but for just being such an arrogant bastard about it all, despite constant failure.
Will "I" make it to most incompetent? Theres some pretty stiff competition so far
Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!7 -
When I was in the army I wasn't officially a dev. But one commander needed someone to develop a bunch of stuff and couldn't get a dev officially, so I ended up as his "assistant", which was an awesome job with about 60% time spent on software development.
Except I wasn't an official developer, so I wasn't afforded many of the privileges developers get, like a slightly more powerful machine, a copy of Visual Studio, or an internet connection. In this environment you couldn't even download files and transfer the to your computer without a long process, and I couldn't get development tools past that process anyway.
So I was stuck with whatever dev tools I had pre-installed with Windows. Thankfully, I had the brand new Windows XP, so I had the .Net framework installed, which comes with the command line compiler csc. I got to work with notepad and csc; my first order of business: write an editor that could open multiple files, and press F5 to compile and run my project.
Being a noob at the time, with almost no actual experience, and nobody supervising my work, I had a few brilliant ideas. For example, I one day realized I could map properties of an object to a field in a database table, and thus wrote a rudimentary OR/M. My database, I didn't mention, was Access, because that didn't need installation. I connected to it properly via ADO.NET, at least.
The most surprising thing though, in retrospect, is the stuff I wrote actually worked.15 -
A Java Development vacancy I came across today:
Requirements:
Must:
° Appropriate Education
° Work Experience with Java/Javascript knowledge, at least 2 years, good understanding of OOP, patterns
° Experience with Spring, NoSQL(MongoDB)
Preferably:
° Experience with Tomcat/Jboss/Glassfish
° JDBC, JSF, JSP, JSTL, Angular, ExtJS
° HTML5, CSS3, XML, Jquery, Bootstrap, Primefaces
° Hibernate
° Git/SVN
Objective:
° Implementation of specific requirements
° Cooperation with business analytics and clarification of reuirements
° Participation in the development of application architecture and technology selection
Who are they hiring?51 -
A contractor at my old job was doing a development role and was constantly annoyed and the idiotic design decisions going into the website backend we were developing 🙄😒
When he decided enough was enough he could have easily written a really snarky email but instead he wrote the most sincere and professional email to his boss and the director thanking them profusely for the opportunity and hopes he would be welcome for future work with the business....👍
He was a really good Dev and the email made the bosses super happy thanking him so much and how much of a shame it was he was going....😍
He bcc'd me on the mail and when he handed his computer in he told me to open the email and highlight in full....👌
At the end of every line in white text was 'Go Fuck yourself' or 'Zero fucks given'
The bosses never realised... And I know he's been back there about 4 months now..... But shhh 😭3 -
tl;dr
A former colleague of mine, who used to suck at web development is now a kick-ass who knows how to get things done.
We are of the same age. We got hired on this company at the same time. He was a front-end guy, and I am a full-stack. So, we were like a yin and yang in development roles.
Initially, we have this big gap of skillset. I was solely assigned on a project which I worked on from ground up, while he was barely able to make an HTML table look properly on a separate existing project. My impression of him that time is that he's kind of a simpleton. But, I was wrong.
Few months passed, our seniors left the company, and I was promoted to be a team lead. Eventually, I was teamed up with this guy. I had a hard time working with him, but I was able to share him some of my knowledge.
Every time I teach him something new, he's exploring more. From proper indentation, writing SASS, using streaming build system (GulpJS), etc., he's making sure that he applies it on every project he's assigned to — even practicing it on his personal projects during break time. I can see him improve each day.
After a year in the company, he became so much better. I even ended up teaching him more than just front-end stuff. I shared the gospel of Jesus of PHP community (Jeffrey Way), tought him how to set up his own server, how to configure DNS, etc.. Again, it's tough for him even to write a simple for..loop statements. But, after a lot of consistent practice, he became better and better. We've done quite a number of projects together. He's fun to work with because of his "hungry" spirit.
Unfortunately, he was laid-off from the company, and I worked on the company til the very end. We parted ways.
He went back to his hometown to launch his own e-commerce business — apparently, this was the "practice" project he was working on the whole time during breaktimes.
Another year has passed, that project worked out and got a funding. And now, he's launching his second project. The best thing is, when I lookup his projects on builtwith.com, every damn stack I tought him, he used it. It's like a project built by me.
To be honest, I am a little jealous of him, but at the same time, I am so proud of him. I thought him how to make things work, he thought me how to get things done. He's my inspiration now.5 -
I recently joined the dark side - an agile consulting company (why and how is a long story). The first client I was assigned to was an international bank. The client wanted a web portal, that was at its core, just a massive web form for their users to perform data entry.
My company pitched and won the project even though they didn't have a single developer on their bench. The entire project team (including myself) was fast tracked through interviews and hired very rapidly so that they could staff the project (a fact I found out months later).
Although I had ~8 years of systems programming experience, my entire web development experience amounted to 12 weeks (a part time web dev course) just before I got hired.
I introduce to you, my team ...
Scrum Master. 12 years experience on paper.
Rote memorised the agile manifesto and scrum textbooks. He constantly went “We should do X instead of (practical thing) Y, because X is the agile way.” Easily pressured by the client to include ridiculous (real time chat in a form filling webpage), and sometimes near impossible features (undo at the keystroke level). He would just nag at the devs until someone mumbled ‘yes' just so that he would stfu and go away.
UX Designer. 3 years experience on paper ... as business analyst.
Zero professional experience in UX. Can’t use design tools like AI / photoshop. All he has is 10 weeks of UX bootcamp and a massive chip on his shoulder. The client wanted a web form, he designed a monstrosity that included several custom components that just HAD to be put in, because UX. When we asked for clarification the reply was a usually condescending “you guys don’t understand UX, just do <insert unhandled edge case>, this is intended."
Developer - PHD in his first job.
Invents programming puzzles to solve where there are none. The user story asked for a upload file button. He implemented a queue system that made use of custom metadata to detect file extensions, file size, and other attributes, so that he could determine which file to synchronously upload first.
Developer - Bootlicker. 5 years experience on paper.
He tried to ingratiate himself with the management from day 1. He also writes code I would fire interns and fail students for. His very first PR corrupted the database. The most recent one didn’t even compile.
Developer - Millennial fratboy with a business degree. 8 years experience on paper.
His entire knowledge of programming amounted to a single data structures class he took on Coursera. Claims that’s all he needs. His PRs was a single 4000+ line files, of which 3500+ failed the linter, had numerous bugs / console warnings / compile warnings, and implemented 60% of functionality requested in the user story. Also forget about getting his attention whenever one of the pretty secretaries walked by. He would leap out of his seat and waltz off to flirt.
Developer - Brooding loner. 6 years experience on paper.
His code works. It runs, in exponential time. Simply ignores you when you attempt to ask.
Developer - Agile fullstack developer extraordinaire. 8 years experience on paper.
Insists on doing the absolute minimum required in the user story, because more would be a waste. Does not believe in thinking ahead for edge conditions because it isn’t in the story. Every single PR is a hack around existing code. Sometimes he hacks a hack that was initially hacked by him. No one understands the components he maintains.
Developer - Team lead. 10 years of programming experience on paper.
Writes spaghetti code with if/else blocks nested 6 levels deep. When asked "how does this work ?”, the answer “I don’t know the details, but hey it works!”. Assigned as the team lead as he had the most experience on paper. Tries organise technical discussions during which he speaks absolute gibberish that either make no sense, or are complete misunderstandings of how our system actually works.
The last 2 guys are actually highly regarded by my company and are several pay grades above me. The rest were hired because my company was desperate to staff the project.
There are a 3 more guys I didn’t mention. The 4 of us literally carried the project. The codebase is ugly as hell because the others merge in each others crap. We have no unit tests, and It’s near impossible to start because of the quality of the code. But this junk works, and was deployed to production. Today is it actually hailed as a success story.
All these 3 guys have quit. 2 of them quit without a job. 1 found a new and better gig.
I’m still here because I need the money. There’s a tsunami of trash code waiting to fail in production, and I’m the only one left holding the fort.
Why am I surrounded by morons?
Why are these retards paid more than me?
Why are they so proud when all they produce is trash?
How on earth are they still hired?
And yeah, FML.8 -
After our Head Of Software has terminated.
I started to take control over our development crew. And in this year I did more then the old head in the last 6 years.
- Swapped from plain old SVN to Gitlab.
- Build a complete autonomous deployment with Gitlab.
- Introduced code reviews.
- Started to refactor the legacy product with 500.000 lines of code...
- learned how to use confluent apache kafka and kubernetes to split the legacy project in many small and maintainable one.(not done yet)
- Last 3 weeks I learned how to use elasticstack with kibana and co. That we aren't blind anymore. Big dashboards are now shown in the middle of the room :) and maybe convinced my coworker that we use unity3d for our business application cause of support for all devices and same design on them. And offline capabilities. (Don't know if this was my best idea)
When I look back, I'm proud to did that much in one year alone. And my coworkers are happy too that they have less work with deployments and everything.
But I can't decide what's the title for this. System or Software Architect cause I litterallity did both :/7 -
I just quit my job!
The company I worked for is a small company founded in Jan of this year and I was there since the early days but wasn't a founder nor a partner.
It was me who decided on which tech stack we should use, which languages, what servers to use, best practices and almost anything related to development. I was the lead developer and project manager for the biggest project they had.
But they decided that I don't deserve to be a partner. I was making more than 50,000 SDG per month for the company but only paid 6,000. The worst thing is that the partners don't know shit about software development. They have no vision for where should the company be in the future.
I just had enough. I already had my own software dev business before joining them, and it was successful.
I am going back to building my own company with my own vision.
I know I made the right decision, but it still hurts leaving a company after u made it what it is today. It is like your own baby and you are abandoning it.
Hopefully, it is for the best.9 -
I've had my share of incompetent coworkers. In order of appearance:
1. A full stack dev. This one guy never, and I mean NEVER uses relationships in their tables. No indexing, no keys, nada. Couple of months later he was baffled why his page took ten seconds to load.
2. The same dev as (1). Requirement was to create some sort of "theme" feature for a web app. Hacked it by putting !important all over the place.
3. The same dev again. He creates several functions that if the data exists returns a view, and if it doesn't, "echo '0'". No, not return 0 or return false or anything, but fucking echo. This was PHP. If posted a rant about this a few months ago.
4. Same dev, has no idea what clean code is. No, not just reusable functions, he doesn't even get indenting right. Some functions have 4 spaces, some 2 tabs, some 6 tabs! And this is inside the same function. God wait until he tries Python...
5. Same dev now suggests that he become the PM. GM approves (very small company). Assigns me to travel to a client since they needed "technical assistance about the API". Was actually there to lead a UAT session.
Intermezzo, that guy went from fullstack dev to PM to sales (yes, one who calls clients to offer products) to business development, to product analyst in the span of two years.
After a year and a half there, I quit.
6. New company, a "QA engineer" who also assumes the role as the product owner. Does absolutely no tests other than "functional tests" in which he NEVER produces any form of documentation. Not even a set of test cases. He goes by "intuition".
7. Same guy as (6), hands me requirements for a feature. By "hands me" I mean he did that verbally. No spec documents, no slack chat, no Trello card. I ended up writing it as a card in Trello. Fast forward to the due date, he flips out because that wasn't what he wanted. Showed him the card. He walked away, without thinking of a solution how this mess should be handled.
Despite all this, I really don't want him (6&7) to leave the company. The devs get really stressed out at this job and he does make a really good person to laugh with/at. -
Back in my teenage , a friend of mine asked me «Can you make me a software that guesses the result of a football match ?» I said «Sure, but you have to tell me how to calculate the chances of a team»
«Yeah, use the previous performances in the league»
«Ok, but you have to tell me how to calculate the expected result using previous performances» He laughed at me and said «If i knew how to calculate chances of winning/losing, i would not need a software!»
I tried to explain it simply «Computers can execute basic operations like sums or subtractions, and they know how to follow a list of basic instructions to give you a result»
He looked me like «If computers are so stupid like you are telling me now, are we all crazy idiots trying to learn how to use stupid machines??» and stated that i obviously misunderstood the real power of a computer. I walked back home thinking how funny was my friend believing in some kind of magic inside box called pc.
Few years later, i start studying IT at university. In the free time i look for small jobs like website development, small office network setup, pcs repair.
I continue noticing people believing that pcs knows what to do and how to do it.
«You sure I lost my data ? No i didn't do a backup. You sure my pc didn't do a backup ? No i hadn't a backup software»
«Why antivirus asks me what to do with the viruses it found. It should delete them obviously! Change my antivirus, it's too stupid for my pc»
«I want more people finding my business thanks to my website. How I imagine my website ? Yeah it has to be cool and full of cool stuff»
All that boring stories leads to my final question :
is our job dealing with persons who think we are some kind of wizard, well learned about dominating the pc magic ?
Please answer no.Please.14 -
About a year ago, I did an e-commerce for a client who wanted to sell electronic goods. It was a custom design, so the team prepared a mock-up and we showed it to the client who absolutely loved it. The specs were that he was going to sell only a few products (like 50 or so) so the website had to showcase the categories and didn't need to put a lot of products on page. Also the design had to be unique as he wanted to be different from his competitors.
A few weeks later, during the dev phase the client checks again the design and starts doubting about it. We redesign it adjusting to his oppinion. A week later he schedules a meeting where he starts complaining that the deadline is late and that the design doesn't accomplish his specs. At that meeting he tells us that he wants to sell thousands of articles since he's doing dropshipping.
We start from scratch and make a third design, which he approves after quite a lot of changes. He also asks for a dropshipping plugin which we install in its free version, when he complains about having to update manually, we answer politely that he has to purchase the paid version.
Fast forward, we deploy the website and the design has a few issues related to responsive development. We fix it quickly and the site starts working.
He also has a physical shop, however, since he's competing with big corporates like Amazon or eBay and he can't offer any difference, neither his phisical address or his on-line shop manages to be profitable.
He decides to close the business but before, he calls my PM saying that the website has "never worked" (There were a couple of people who bought with 0 issues and we tested the site countless times). And that we shouldn't have recommended a custom design because the website never worked. He also implied that we should compensate him because of that.
I've never seen my PM to tell someone to "fuck off" as fast as he did.6 -
Hello there, just couple of words about PHP. I've been develop on PHP more than 10 years, I've seen it all 3,4,5,{6},7. Yes PHP was not good in terms of engineering and patterns, but it was simple, it was the most simple language for web to start those days. It was simple as you put code into file, upload it via FTP and it works. No java servlets, no unix consoles, no nothing, just shared hosting account was enough to host site, or even application with database. As database everybody used to have mysql, again because its simple to start and easy to maintain. So PHP+MySQL became industry standard on Web during 00-2012, and continues in some way.
You can write HTML and logic inside single file, within php code, even more single file may content few pages, or even kind of framework. That simplicity and agility sticks everybody who wants to develop sites with PHP.
This is pretty much about why it is so popular.
Each good or wannabe PHP developer in an early days write its own framework or library (like in javascript this days because of nodejs)
Imagine that PHP has hadn't have package manager, developers used to have host packages on their own sites, then various packages catalog sites created, and then finally composer. A gazillions of php code had spread over internet, without any kind of dependency control. To include libraries to your projects you have to just write include, or require. Some developers do it better than others.
So what we have ? A lots of code, no repositories, zip archives with libraries, no dependency control.
Project that uses that kind of code are still alive even today, they are solid hose of cards, and unmaintainable of course.
And main question that I'm trying to answer is Why PHP is not good ?
- First is amount of legacy code which people copy and pasted into their project, spread it even more like a virus.
- Lack of industry standards at the beginning lead to a lots of bad practices among developers. PHP code usually smells.
open source php projects in early days was developed in same conditions so even in phpbb, phpnuke, wordpress, drupal used to have a lot of bad practices in their codebase. So php developers usually not study by another library, instead they write their own frameworks/libraries.
- "It works", - there are no strong business demands, on web development, again because lack of standards, and concerns.
This three things are basically same, they linked to each other and summarize of answer of why PHP have strong smells and everybody yelling against it.
Whats is with PHP nowadays ? Of course PHP today is more influenced by good practice of webdev. Composer, Zend, Laravel, Yii, Symphony and language it self became more adult so to say, but developers...
People who never tried anything except PHP are usually weaker in programming and ecosystem knowledge than people who tried something else, python, perl, ruby, c for instance.
Summary
PHP as any other programming language is a tool. Each tool has its own task. Consider this and your task requirements and PHP can be just good enough solution.
"PHP is shit" - usually you heard that from people who never write strong applications on PHP and haven't used any good tools like Symphony or Laravel.
Cheap developers, - the bigger community, the more chance to hire cheap developers, and more chance to get bad code. That can be applied on any other language.
PHP has professionals developers, usually they have not only php on scope.
That's all folks, this is very brief, I am not covering php usage early days in details, but this is good enough to understand the point.
Enjoy.8 -
The reason why hiring a Recruiter in Software/Web Development industry is a waste of time and money.
- A real story from 2 years ago.
**few minutes of recruiter reading my resume, skills and whatnot**
Recruiter: Okay sir, we are looking for people skilled in C# for our app development and Java for our business software envirnoment. Which one are you interested in.
Me: C#.
Recruiter: I see, well.. I'm afraid we already have someone for the seat.. *checks resume again*.. maybe you would be interested in Java?
Me: Not really, why is that if I may ask?
Recruiter: Well, says here you have experience in Javascript
Me: *trying not to cringe* Yes, but I didn't see any Javascript related job available.
Recruiter: Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't "Java" just short for Javascript?
Me: No, just like C# isn't short for C and C++
Recruiter: *oops* then I think we do have a free spot for you.
TL;DR - the guy had guidelines but no field-specific knowledge.. I only feel sorry for the other guy who thought he got the job lol.3 -
Just joined a skype meeting:
Me (software engineer): Am I audible?
Product Manager: Am I audible to you?
Business Development Manager: Hey guys, Am I audible?
After 30 minutes:
Me: Hey guys, Am I audible?
Product Manager: Am I audible to you?
Business Development Manager: Am I audible, guys?6 -
That feeling when the company looses a 120k account and it is blamed on your expert opinion and poor handling off the situation when It's really the fuckwits in sales who in their greed for provisions make shitty pitches.
I got a call to attend a meeting with a customer. Present was also the "developer" from the customers side who was to oversee the projects. The pitch was made earlier, but no information was provided beforehand so I was going in blind, covering for a suddenly absent lead. The point was to roughly present how the project was to be executed and I was told to voice my opinion on development time estimate that the clients expert had given. They were outsourcing and had already fired their whole team.
I gave a number based on the provided information and all hell breaks loose. Suddenly it's a total circle jerk. Shit goes down. The "dev" tells that he can do it himself in half the time and starts showing some shitExcelsOfTotalAbsurdness that prove it. I calculate his claim and end up with a result that he has 60+ hours in his day, so I ask why doesn't he do it then? Why the outsourcing if they could just give him a raise and save a ton of cash.. sudden silence and you just can hear the rusty gears turn while they try to make a new excuse.
Well it went south. Today I found out that the client was our sales guys buddy. so TL;DR of it was that our sales guy was trying to make a quick buck and give a break to his buddy and hang the shitbucket on our team. I pointed out that this was a shitty business deal that would go into the red, but the sales guy turned it around and now "I cost company 120k/month account on a long project" and because I acted unprofessionally customer is unhappy.
I FUCKING HATE THIS SHIT
secretly hoping to get fired over this10 -
!rant
At my last job, my boss would constantly tear my work apart, belittle me and patronise me. He didn't really understand web development and just wanted to hire someone to do it for him. I ended up burning out and he persuaded me to quit because of it cause he didn't want to go through the whole disciplinary process (because he had no real reason).
A year later, and I've had my first review with my current boss, who's also a developer. He said he's learned a lot from me, I've helped the business and the junior devs grow; and that he struck gold in hiring me. I've got no feelings of burnout and I actually enjoy going to work now.
I'll be the first person to say that I'm not the best developer on my team and my new boss was probably exaggerating with me a little bit, but it goes to show that the people you work with are some of the most important people in your life.7 -
Among my fellow developers at work, there is one guy who stands out because he actually strives to write modular, reusable and readable code. He literally saved me weeks of development by making his code modular enough that I can simply use it almost like a mixin where I only need to provide an alternative template. Note that the feature I'm talking about is for a pretty much sophisticated business process related to handling credit card data. Others in my workplace would just couple their logic tightly with their feature/scope's views.
I really wanna hug him and be his BFF now. #nohomo tho.9 -
I have seen it. They say it doesn't exist; just a story we tell our children so that their innocence does not lead them down into a nightmarish adulthood from which there is no salvation. But the evil lives. So vile that were you to look inside its soul, all you would find is a terrible desperation for suffering. To cause it. To revel in it. To bathe in the tears of those it considers less than human and feed off the emotional detritus.
It was 2009. The financial crisis. I was one of the lucky, having found refuge in a large company right before the jobs dried up. General IT: system administration, documentation, project management, telephony, software training, second level help desk. No software development, but with a two-year-old at home and Ph.D.s lining up outside the local Olive Garden whenever a help wanted sign was posted, I grabbed the health insurance and entered into darkness.
The Thing did not need to hunt it's prey. A manager title with 21 reports brought it new opportunities for fresh meat by the hour. But I was special. I resisted. I needed to know my place.
My first mistake was incomprehension. I did not understand the Thing's lust to be right at all costs. I was reviewing some documentation it had brought forth from its bowels. I mentioned that two spaces were being used between sentences. That proportional type made that unnecessary. It insisted, I was wrong. It insisted that Microsoft itself, the purveyor of all good technical writing, required two spaces. I opened the Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications that it demanded its staff use and showed it that the spec was one space. It was livid. I was a problem.
From that point on my work life became exponentially more wretched. I was given three Outlook calendars to maintain: one with my schedule, one with the team's schedule and one with the Thing's schedule. Every time I had an appointment, I was to triple schedule it. If I was going to be away from my desk for more than 15 minutes triple schedule. Triple schedule my lunch, vacations, phone conferences.
Whenever it held a meeting, I and a colleague would be taken off mission critical IT projects to set tables with name tents and to serve as greeters as attendees arrived.
I was called into its crypt to be told never to say anything in a meeting unless I told the Thing beforehand what I was going to say. Naive, I mentioned that I often don't know what I will say as it is often in reply to someone else. Of course the response was that I should not say anything.
I would get emails 10-20 times a day asking about a single project. I would regularly complete work that was needed to be completed ASAP, only to have the Thing rake me over the coals for not completing it a week later. And upon resending the emails proving I notified it of the work being competed, disparaged at length a second time for not sending repeated notifications of the competed work.
I would have to sit in two-hour meetings to watch it type. Literally watch it try to create cogent thoughts. In silence.
I received horrendous annual reviews. At one, it created a development plan that stated a colleague would begin giving me lessons on the proper ways to socially interact with personnel. I pointed out to HR that this violated privacy concerns and would make the business liable in many areas, not least of which would be placing a help desk person in the role of defining proper business practice. HR made the Thing remove this from my review. She started planning to remove me.
I had given a short technical training to a group of personnel months earlier. Called into its tomb I was informed that feedback surveys on my talk were disturbing. One person stated that they did not think I was funny. Another wrote that I made an offensive statement. That person did not say what the offensive statement was. Just that I had said something he or she didn't like.
The Thing interviewed the training attendees. Gathered facts. Held three inquest-like meetings where multiple directors peppered me with questions trying to get me to confess to my offensiveness. In the end the request to fire me was brought to the man who ran the business at the time. The statement on high: "Humor is a subjective thing. Please tell This to be sensitive to that."
The Thing had failed, but would no doubt redouble its efforts. I had to find a new job. I sent hundreds of resumes. Talked to dozens of recruiters. But there were no jobs. And I had a family. And the wolf was at the door.
So I didn't say a word to the creature. For six months. Silence. At one group meeting it shrieked at me "what are you smirking at? If you've got something to say then say it!" I just shrugged. For my salvation was revealed. The Thing could not stand to be ignored. And at the end of my penance I was transferred to another group: Software Development.
I am one with the Force. The Force is with me. I am one with the Force. The Force is with me.4 -
"WTF IS THIS?"
Exclaimed the developer that had never bothered to learn proper architectural patterns such as MVC in his web development are, failing to grasp the folder structure that was open in front of him, gasping at those strange php files that contained not only namespace declarations....but requires, uses and GASP! CLASSES!!
"That is Laravel my dude, built that in Laravel some time ago. Been running without an issue ever since." I mentioned as I reminded him that i had provided documentation had he ever needed to update or work with the application(currently it just needed a static page, which is why he had the app open in his editor)
See children. This is why you don't just learn a tool and never bother to learn something else.
Y'all should have seen how confused this dude was.
Das what yo dumbass gets.
OAN I am getting placed into more hardcore Business Intelligence roles.
The ammount of statistics and overall math required is....
Damn near 0. Data Scientists are full of shit. Anyone in an analyst role is full of shit.
I would know.
I IS one.13 -
**Web Host Rant**
I can't believe how saturated the market is. I also can't believe how many Web hosts do not know a thing about development. You would think you'd want to read up on development practices before going into the business since developers are your customers.
Not to mention that a lot of hosting services are resellers of resellers of resellers. It's to the point where a 15 year old with their mom's credit card can start doing Web hosting. The problem is... they don't know how to answer actually development questions... they won't be in a conference call with you while you do deployments.
It infuriated me to the point where I've started my own hosting company. Completely managed and using the most advanced technologies aimed towards developers. Not only that but an advanced managment package that will teach proper deployment procedures and be there to hold your hand when you do deploy.
Oh and did I mention git will be available to even shared hosting? Oh and did I also mention that we are currently setting up put own git server?36 -
So I used to do some freelancing in web development last year, nothing too fancy just some simple PHP websites. Comes the worst meeting in my life. So I am from India and we have a lot of long lasting business here being passed on over generations. TL;DR the guy was the owner of a very old business which was actually very huge and the guy was educated too, so I assumed that he'll be sensible as compared to other people.
The meeting was in an expensive cafe and he paid for it, he even told me upfront that meeting is on him. Great, right? So we sit down, order some coffee and then start discussing what he needed.
The guy needed an ecommerce website built with backend and logistics system integrated. We discussed possible designs for the website and stuff too and so far the deal looked promising to both of us.
I explained him the cost estimate and told him that I would email him the final quote from myself once we discussed server cost and shit.
So now comes the bargaining part where he asked me to give him server and domain for free.
At this point, I suspected that he didn't know that servers and domains are not something that you make. You have to purchase and renew them periodically.
So I told that guy that he didn't understand the cost estimation and explained to him that X is the cost of making this fucking thing and Y is its monthly maintenance cost, if he wanted annually could be done too. And this Y did not include server and domain costing.
Now came the fucking tide, the guy straight up turned to his shit and told me I am lying and trying to con him. So I gently asked him if he had ever gotten any website made. To which, he said No, but he knows how the costing works.
I was like "Bitch?". So I calmly tried to explain that that's not how websites are done, delivered and maintained.
He didn't seemed to be understanding and kept on fucking repeating that he knows his shit and blah blah.
At this point, I was like "Okay. Fuck this dude then. I can find another project. " and then I told him that he'll need to find someone according to his needs.
Interestingly enough, the guy called someone and then walked out of the cafe while talking on phone. I waited for 5 minutes and he didn't come back so I decided I would pay for my coffee and leave. Turns out the guy had paid his bill before my arrival and ditched me with the excuse of the call.
But oh well, I think working with such an idiot would have been much worse than paying for that coffee.4 -
Best client ever:
Yesterday I meet my new client. He need portfolio website for his logistics business.
So I meet him and explain my previous experience in website development.
After 1hour he gave me advance 50% of total cost.1 -
The Steam Community forums for the Planet Zoo beta have really reinforced my decision to stay far away from game development.
A third of the posts are people who clearly have no idea what a beta is - "don't buy, too buggy". Sorry, were you expecting a finished game? You wasted your money, then.
Another third of the posts are people making decisions for the developers. A very common discussion is "Should they delay launch?" which makes my blood boil a bit. First of all, you have no fucking clue what kind of manpower this development team has. You don't manage them, and neither do I. So, neither you nor I should be making assumptions about how fast they can fix the issues, and definitely shouldn't make decisions about if the game should delay launch.
Second of all, neither you nor I know how the game is built. These fixes could mean a line of code, or they could mean a re-write of multiple core systems. We don't know, and I'm guessing you've probably never even written a line of code in your life so you REALLY shouldn't be telling these guys how to do their job.
The last third is benign discussion - people reporting bugs (even though there's an issue tracker, but that thing is fucking jam packed with 250 pages of reported issues), asking how to do xyz, posting feature requests, etc.
But if roughly 60% of the community is behaving poorly and actively working against development by pissing off the devs and drowning out constructive discussion, then yeah; I won't be going near game dev any time soon. Sure, developing business software means dealing with REALLY dumb people but at the very least they are in a business environment and not in a toxic forum of bullshit.
Oh, and as a closing remark, I love this game!14 -
Senior management has decided developers have to spent 25% of their time / month on business related self development and improvement.
😁😁😁😁😆😆😆😆5 -
So, for an assignment we have a task of developing an IT product for a business to solve one of their problems. One of the project development examples contains the following screenshot.
You can tell, from this screenshot that whoever made a screenshot of this example has no idea what they're doing.
14 -
This is something that happened 2 years ago.
1st year at uni, comp sci.
Already got project to make some app for the univ that runs in android, along with the server
I thought, omg, this is awesome! First year and already got something to offer for the university 😅
(it's a new university, at the time I was the 2nd batch)
Team of 12, we know our stuffs, from the programming POV, at least, but we know nothing about dealing with client.
We got a decent pay, we got our computers upgraded for free, and we even got phones of different screen sizes to test out our apps on.
No user requirement, just 2-3 meetings. We were very naive back then.
2 weeks into development, Project manager issues requirement changes
we have a meeting again, discussing the important detail regarding the business model. Apparently even the univ side hadn't figure it out.
1 month in the development, the project manager left to middle east to pursue doctoral degree
we were left with "just do what you want, as long as it works"
Our projects are due to be done in 3 months. We had issues with the payment, we don't get paid until after everything's done. Yet the worse thing is, we complied.
Month 3, turns out we need to present our app to some other guy in the management who apparently owns all the money. He's pleased, but yet, issued some more changes. We didn't even know that we needed to make dashboard at that time.
The project was extended by one month. We did all the things required, but only got the payment for 3 months.
Couldn't really ask for the payment of the fourth month since apparently now the univ is having some 'financial issues'.
And above all: Our program weren't even tested, let alone being used, since they haven't even 'upgraded' the university such that people would need to use our program as previously planned.
Well, there's nothing to be done right now, but at least I've learned some REALLY valuable lesson:
1. User Requirement is a MUST! Have them sign it afterwards, and never do any work until then. This way, change of requirements could be rejected, or at least postponed
2. Code convention is a MUST! We have our code, in the end, written in English and Indonesian, which causes confusion. Furthermore, some settle to underscore when naming things, while other chooses camel case.
3. Don't give everyone write access to repository. Have them pull their own, and make PR later on. At least this way, they are forced to fix their changes when it doesn't meet the code convention.
4. Yell at EVERYONE who use cryptic git commit message. Some of my team uses JUST EMOTICONS for the commit message. At this point, even "fixes stuffs" sound better.
Well, that's for my rant. Thanks for reading through it. I wish some of you could actually benefit from it, especially if you're about to take on your first project.3 -
Why is there so much hate against QA in general??
I read tons of rants about how bad testers are... and as a dev who does a lot of QA work, IT SUCKS!
We (devs) have to accept that are work needs to be tested! Otherwise we want be successful with our products.
BUT the testers need to know the development business! They should be trained at the same level as the devs are.
BECAUSE if the mug on my desk is smarter than the tester it is not going to work!
If the tester has full access to all the technologies, environments and tools (and are capable of using it) he has the ability to HELP!
I THINK that testing should be more than just follow predefined steps and let a random tool generate a bugreport.
I am sure that some of you are lucky enough to work with highly skilled testers so please let them help18 -
(Best read while listening to AEnima by Tool, loudly)
Dear Current Workplace,
Fuck you, for the reasons enumerated below.
Fuck your enterprise grey blue offices, the stifling warm air of a hundreds of bodies and sub par "development laptops".
Fuck your shitty carbonated water machines which were a cost saving measure over decent drinkable water.
Fuck your fake "flexi time", "you can do home office whenever you want" bullshit. You're still inviting me to mandatory meetings at 09:00 regularly.
Fuck your shitty, in house, third part IT provider sister company. They're the worst of all worlds. If it was in company, we'd get to give out to them, if it was an external company we'd fire them. And yes, when I quit I will quote the dumpster fire that is our corporate VPN as a major factor.
Fuck your cheery, bland, enterprise communication. Words coming under the corporate letterhead seem to lose all association with meaning. Agile, communication, open are things you write and profess to respect, but it seems your totally lack understanding of their meaning.
Fuck your client driven development. Sometime you actually have to fix the foundations before you can actually add new features. And fuck you management who keep on asking "why are there so many bugs and why is it always taking longer to deliver new releases". Because of you, you fucknuts, Because you can't say "NO" to the customer. Because you never listen to your own experienced developers.
Fuck your bullshit "code quality is important to us" line. If it's so important, then let us fix the heap of shit you're selling so that it works like a quasi functional program.
Fuck you development environment which has 250 projects in a single VS solution. Which takes 5mins plus to compile on a quad core i7 with 32 gb of ram.
Fuck this bullshit ball of mud "architecture". I spend most of my time trying to figure out where the logic should go and the rest of the time writing converters between different components. All because 7 years ago some idiot "architect" made a decision that they didn't have to live with.
Actually, fuck that guy in particular. Yeah, that guy who was the responsible architect for the project for 4 years and not once opened the solution to look a the code.
Fuck the manual testing of every business process. Manual setup of the entities takes 10mins plus and then when you run, boom either no message or some bullshit error code.
Fuck the antiquated technology choices which cause loads of bugs and slow down development. Fuck you for forcing me to do manual tests of another developers code at 20:00 on a Friday night because we can't get our act together to do this automatically.
Fuck you for making sure it's very clear I'm never going to be anything but a code monkey in this structure. Managers are brought in from outside.
Fuck you for being surprised that it's hard to hire competent developers in this second rate, overpriced town. It's hard to hire anywhere but this bland shithole would have anyone with half a clue running away at top speed.
Fuck you for valuing long hours and loyalty over actual performance. That one guy who everyone hated and was totally incompetent couldn't even get himself fired. He had to quit.
Fuck you for your mediocrity.
Fuck you for being the only employer for my skill-set in the region; paying just well enough that changing jobs locally doesn't make sense, but badly enough that it's difficult to move.
Fuck you for being the stable "safe" option so that any move is "risky".
Fuck your mediocrity.
Fuck you for being something I think about when I'm not at work. Not only is it shit from 9 to 5 you manage to suck the joy out of everything else in my life as well?
Fuck you for making me feel like a worse developer every day I work here. Fuck you for making every day feel like a personal and professional failure. Fuck you for making me seriously leave a career I love for something, anything else.
Fuck you for making the most I can hope for when I get up in the morning is to just make it until the night.6 -
Building a business can hamper one's development urges!
I have been building stuff since 2008. Took my first job in 2012, won a hackathon at Yahoo right after that. Got an amazing team to work with! Our team converted the hacked product into a proper product using Django and AngularJS. Those were the fun days. At that time AngularJS had just come out and I was under the dilemma to use Angular, Ember or backbone. But with all this came the responsibility to build a business out of our product. It didn't happen eventually though.
So I moved on to cure my entrepreneural itch and went on to start up an e-commerce startup along with my day job. It started getting good traction and I finally left my day job to focus completely on it. It's a sticker marketplace and I had to focus a lot on the actual physical product, improve the quality, tackle business development and stuff etc. In all this, my habit of creating stuff with code kind of got the back seat. Everyday, I see such exciting technologies come up and I want to try them out. I have been itching to create a native app using react native. Try to build a skill for Amazon Alexa.
On one side I am happy that I have been able to build a brand and become the largest sticker marketplace in India providing super awesome reusable stickers, but on the other hand, managing the business on a daily basis is killing the developer in me :(
Does anyone else building a business which involves a physical product also face a similar problem? I think I should just take up weekend hackathon type problems and try to solve them using the technologies I want to learn. Example, I have been meaning to build an app for our company. I think I will start with that!
I have been following devRant for quite sometime now and it has been awesome. Finally, signed up and ranted today! 😊😊5 -
I seriously do not understand the rants against Windows.
I love Windows 10 (got as free upgrade from MS), and have no issues with MacOS or Linux OS. I use them as well but do all serious work on Windows.
All my life, I have worked on business / commercial side and picked up Web development in last couple of years. I started using computers on DOS in 1992, and shifted to Windows 3.0 in 1995. There was no Mac or MacOS back then.
For serious work, I purchased a old Dell Precision M4700 workstation grade laptop with quad-core i7, at throwaway price, got 32GB RAM, 2.4TB (1x2 TB + 400gb) of SSD on super sale online, and installed it myself. It easily supports dual 4k monitors.
Git-bash on windows allows all the necessary linux command line on windows. Though not tried, Windows 10 allows embedded Ubunutu with linux terminal. Web development tools like - VSCode, git, github / bitbucket clients, NVM/Node, React / Redux / Webpack / Gatsby / Jest, REST clients, GraphQL client and server, Graph Server, Chrome PWA / Chrome Dev Tools, http/Websocket/WebRTC interception, Google Firebase SDKs, AWS sdks, cloud utilities, CI/CD tools work flawlessly. Windows even has its own package manager for applications.31 -
No, I do not wish to work on your Scrum-managed project.
I do not wish to contribute to the Taylorism of my profession.
I do not wish to be an interchangeable cog in your software sausage machine.
I do not wish to be tracked by some pointless metrics like a call-centre worker.
I do not wish to bust my tight, cute ass to sprint after some idiotic management request that could have been factored in earlier.
I do not wish to obtain some piss-ant qualification that "authorises" me to do my job.
I do not wish to be party to your lie that technical debt will be avoided by refactoring---whatever the cost.
I do not wish to contribute to the death of software engineering to have it replaced by software development.
Agile? Sure. I can pick up the phone and talk to the client, users and fellow devs. After all, that's what it FUCKING MEANS. Communi-fucking-cation.
See that burndown chart? See your anus? Know what's happening next?
Fuck Scrum and every fucking bottom-feeder that is scamming a living by promoting it. You're killing this business.
Hugs and kisses,
Platypus15 -
Job Interview for a CTO role for a premium employer, a big law firm.
All is going well, I am telling them about my years of experience doing complex software integrations in business environments. Talking CRM/ERP, project management and development with external service providers. I tell them I want a salary of 100k and they nod in silence.
Then out of the blue one of the three stakeholders/managers leans over for a final question:
"Soo, we have this really big IT problem and if you would happen to know a solution to it, you would really prove your worth: I have these 10k+ E-Mails in my Outlook folder which doubles as an archive and Outlook keeps getting slower all the time. What can we do?"6 -
How can business majors be so gullible?! Who the fuck poisoned their minds with the app hype ?!!
Seriously my tears are 90% from laughter and 10% shame for humanity.
Friend: "Dude I'd like to consult with you the idea of an app...etc"
Me: "Sounds nice, got a business plan?"
Friend: "Yes, but well...you see... development has already started"
Me: "oh cool, how's that going?"
Friend: "well I already made an upfront payment of 2K dollars"
Me: "sounds kind of excessive for the amount of work...wait did you said upfront payment?"
Friend: "yeah, we calculated 30k total"
😐
Me:"umm...that software must be...special...? Can I see it?"
Friend: "that's the thing, they haven't delivered"
Me: " did they give you mockups? A development plan? Demo? Anything?"
Friend: "umm no"
Me: "a god damn receipt?"
Friend shows me a piece of paper with the name of the guy and 2K written on it.
Friend: "he says he's been busy, I wanted your advice"
I blame Eduardo Saverin's fate and my friend's on college's failure to teach "real world assholes 101"
7 -
TLDR: There’s truth in the motto “fake it till you make it”
Once upon a time in January 2018 I began work as a part time sysadmin intern for a small financial firm in the rural US. This company is family owned, and the family doesn’t understand or invest in the technology their business is built on. I’m hired on because of my minor background in Cisco networking and Mac repair/administration.
I was the only staff member with vendor certifications and any background in networking / systems administration / computer hardware. There is an overtaxed web developer doing sysadmin/desktop support work and hating it.
I quickly take that part of his job and become the “if it has electricity it’s his job to fix it” guy. I troubleshoot Exchange server and Active Directory problems, configure cloudhosted web servers and DNS records, change lightbulbs and reboot printers in the office.
After realizing that I’m not an intern but actually just a cheap sysadmin I began looking for work that pays appropriately and is full time. I also change my email signature to say “Company Name: Network Administrator”
A few weeks later the “HR” department (we have 30 employees, it’s more like “The accountant who checks hiring paperwork”) sends out an email saying that certain ‘key’ departments have no coverage at inappropriate times. I don’t connect the dots.
Two days later I receive a testy email from one of the owners telling me that she is unhappy with my lack of time spent in the office. That as the Network Administrator I have responsibilities, and I need to be available for her and others 8-5 when problems need troubleshooting. Her son is my “boss” who is rarely in the office and has almost no technical acumen. He neglected to inform her that I’m a part time employee.
I arrange a meeting in which I propose that I be hired on full time as the Network Administrator to alleviate their problems. They agree but wildly underpay me. I continue searching for work but now my resume says Network Administrator.
Two weeks ago I accepted a job offer for double my current salary at a local software development firm as a junior automation engineer. They said they hired me on with so little experience specifically because of my networking background, which their ops dept is weak in. I highlighted my 6 months experience as Network Administrator during my interviews.
My take away: Perception matters more than reality. If you start acting like something, people will treat you like that.2 -
Hi guys!
That is my first...well, rant? No, not at all.
I found this community by accident. I was looking for something like this, but did not realize til now. I scrolled through some posts and it is awesome to read awesome stories and rants from awesome people.
I am a 21 year old SAP ABAP developer from Germany. I have finished my bachelor's degree (business informatics/business information management? German: Wirtschaftsinformatik) last August. I have always been interested in web development and teached myself some php basics when I was younger. I would love to do more things like that, but things have changed. There are lots of different frameworks, languages and stuff. It's complicated.
I am not sure if I have understood how this community works, but I am very excited to find out.
And, as I already mentioned, I am German. So please feel free to bash my shitty English. :D25 -
!rant && rant
I've been doing random HTML/CSS/JS crap since I was 11 (I'm 20 now). And worked with NodeJS/Swift/Java/Typescript for the past 4 years. For some reason, I've always been interested in public transit and the combination between public transit and Development seemed magical to me. I've tried making Departure time apps and trip planners for a few years now. And for that you need open data, for which we have a national data source and a Google Group for support with that.
I quit my study two years ago after a year doing nothing and I was on the edge of getting into depression because I didn't do anything useful for two years. Didn't see myself do anything useful in the next few years apart from some random dev crap (still public transit related).
About half a year ago I ranted on that Google Group about shit being not efficient (weird standards, weird documentation but mostly lack thereof).
For some reason a business saw that rant and sent me an email about two months ago and told me they 'potentially' had 'some' work for me. So I had some really informal conversations with that business but I still was very insecure about myself (had some shitty experience with tons of unfinished projects) and I was worried that they had higher expectations for me than what I could give them.
A week later I received an e-mail with a proposal for an actual, full-time job as a back-end developer and obviously took the opportunity.
I started a month ago with a month-long probation period and after three weeks told me I had passed the probation period.
I'm a super happy boy right now. I got a job, being super insecure, without any certifications, without finishing school (Everyone in the Netherlands tells you you NEED a diploma to get a job), more than double minimum wage (minimum wage is quite high in the Netherlands), and most important, at a business that does a lot of public transit stuff.
Apparently ranting about stuff, not finishing your school and being depressed gives you a well-paid job. :)5 -
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.7 -
Continuation from :
https://devrant.io/rants/835693/...
Hi everybody! I am sorry that as a first time poster I am building 2 long stories, but I really like the idea of connecting with other people here!
Well, as I was mentioning before, I got a job in Android development and had a blast with it. Me and the developer clicked and would spend our time discussing PHP, the move to other stacks (I was making him love the idea of Django or Spring Java) games, bands and cool stuff like that. This dude was my hero, his own stack was developed in a similar MVC fashion that he had implemented from scratch before for many projects. It was through him that I learned how to use my own code (rather than frameworks and other libraries) to build what I wanted. I seriously thought that I had it made with a position that respected me and placed me in the lead mobile development position of the company. Then it happened. He had taken 2 weeks of unauthorized leave, which was ok since he was best friends with the owner of the company, those 2 along another asshole started it so they could do whatever they wanted. And I could not make much progress without him being there since there were things that he needed to do, that I was not allowed, for me to continue. When he came back I was quickly rushed to the owner of the company's office to discuss my lack of progress. The lead developer was livid, as if he knew that he had fucked up. He blamed the whole thing on me (literally told the owner that it was my fault before I was summoned) and that we lost 2 weeks of business time because I did not had the initiative to make progress on my own. I felt absolutely horrible, someone that I had trusted and befriended doing something like that, I really felt like shit. I had mad respect and love for this guy. It got heated, I showed the owner the text messages in which I showed him my pleas to led me finish the parts that were needed while he was away. Funny enough, he acted betrayed. After that it was 3 months of barely talking to one another except for work related stuff. He got cold and would barely let me touch the internal code that he was developing. It was painful. The owner kept complaining about progress and demanded that I do a document scanner for the company, which was to be attached to their mobile application. Not only that but it had to be done with OpenCV. Now, CV is great, but it is its own area, it takes a while to be able to develop something nice with it that is efficient and not a shitstorm.
I had two weeks.
Finished in one. After burning my brain and ensuring that the c++ code was not giving issues and the project was steady I turned it in...to their dismay. And I say so because I felt that they gave me such a huge project with the intention of firing me if it was not done. After that it was constant shit from the owner and the lead developer. I was asked then to port the code to the IOS version. I had some knowledge of it already so I started working on it. Progress was fast since the initial idea was already there and I really love working on Apple devices. And when I was 70% done the owner decided to cut me loose. At first he cited things such as lack of funding and him being unable to pay my salary. I was fine with that even though I knew it was not true. So at the time I just nodded and thanked the company for my time there. Before I left, he decided to blame it on me, stating that if they were not producing money that it was perhaps my fault. I lost my shit, and started using my military voice to explain to him how a software company is normally ran. Then I stormed out.
It was known to me, that the lead developer had actually argued against me being laid off. And that he was upset about it, we made amends, but the fact remains that I was laid off because the owner did not think of me as an asset, regardless of how many times I worked alongside the lead developer or how valuable I was actually to the company, their infrastructure did get better while we worked together, so I just assumed that he never actually did any mention of my value.
I lasted 2 months without a job, feeling horribly shitty because my wife had to work harder to ensure our stability whilst I was without any sort of salary. At this time I had already my degree, so all I had to do was look better. In the meantime I decided to study more about other technologies. I learn React, and got way better at JS and Node that I thought I could and was finally able to get another job as a full stack developer for another company.
I have been here since 2 months. It has been weird, we do classic ASP, which is completely pointless at this time, but meh. At this time though, I just don't really have the same motivation. Its really hard for me to trust the people that I work with and would like to connect with more developers.21 -
Is it just me who sees this? JS development in a somewhat more complex setting (like vue-storefront) is just a horrible mess.
I have 10+ experience in java, c# and python, and I've never needed more than a a few hours to get into a new codebase, understanding the overall system, being able to guess where to fix a given problem.
But with JS (and also TS for that matter) I'm at my limits. Most of the files look like they don't do anything. There seems to be no structure, both from a file system point of view, nor from a code point of view.
It start with little things like 300 char long lines including various lambdas, closures and ifs with useless variables names, over overly generic and minified method/function names to inconsistent naming of files, classes and basically everything else.
I used to just set a breakpoint somewhere in my code (or in a compiled dependency) wait this it is being hit and go back and forth to learn how the system state changes.
This seems to be highly limited in JS. I didn't find the one way to just being able to debug, everything that is. There are weird things like transpilers, compiler, minifiers, bablers and what not else. There is an error? Go f... yourself ...
And what do I find as the number one tipp all across the internet? Console.log?? are you kidding me, sure just tell me, your kidding me right?
If I would have to describe the JS world in one word, I would use "inconsistency". It's all just a pain in the ass.
I remember when I switcher from VisualStudio/C# to Eclipse/Java I felt like traveling back in time for about 10 years. Everyting seemd so ... old-schoolish, buggy, weird.
When I now switch from java to JS it makes me feel the same way. It's all so highly unproductive, inconsistent, undeterministic, cobbled together.
For one inconveinience the JS communinity seems to like to build huge shitloads of stuff around it, instead of fixing the obvious. And noone seems to see that.
It's like they are all blinded somehow. Currently I'm also trying to implement a small react app based on react-admin. The simplest things to develop and debug are a nightmare. There is so much boilerplate that to write that most people in the internet just keep copying stuff, without even trying to understand what it actually does.
I've always been a guy that tries to understand what the fuck this code actuall does. And for most of the parts I just thing, that the stuff there is useless or could be done in a way more readable way. But instead, all the devs out there just seem to chose the "copy and fix somehow-ish" way.
I'm all in for component-izing stuff. I like encapsulation, I'm a OOP guy by heart. But what react and similar frameworks do is just insane. It's just not right (for some part).
Especially when you have to remember so much stuff that is just mechanics/boilerplate without having any actual "business logical function".
People always say java is so verbose. I don't think it is, there is so few syntax that it almost reads like a prose story. When I look at JS and TS instead, I'm overwhelmed by all the syntax, almost wondering every second line, what the actual fuck this could mean. The boilerplate/logic ration seems way to off ..
So it really makes me wonder, if all you JS devs out there are just so used to that stuff, that you cannot imagine how it could be done better? I still remember my C# days, but I admin that I just got used to java. So I can somehow understand that all. But JS is just another few levels less deeper.
But maybe I'm just lazy and too old ...4 -
The freaking furniture people didn't complete things on time and our business development department is still not finished. The freaking reception desk is not there yet.
Here I am going to my new office on Saturday morning. Not to code but to monitor those guys to get things done by today.2 -
devRant is awesome, but Disney also manages to light-up my day.
This is how Wall-E became a beloved member of our team, and helped me put a smile on my face throughout a very frustrating project.
It all started in a company, not so far far away from here, where management decided to open up development to a wider audience in the organization. Instead of continuing the good-old ping-pong between Business and IT...
'not meeting my expectations' - 'not stated in project requirements'
'stuff's not working - 'business is constantly misusing'
'why are they so difficult' - 'why don't they know what they really want'
'Ping, pong, plok... (business loses point) ping, pong'
... the company aimed to increase collaboration between the 2 worlds, and make development more agile.
The close collaboration on development projects is a journey of falling and getting back up again. Which can be energy draining, but to be honest there is also a lot of positive exposure to our team now.
The relevant part for this story is that de incentive of business teams throughout these projects was mainly to deliver 'something' that 'worked'. Where our team was also very keen on delivering functionality that is stable, scalable, properly documented etc. etc.
We managed to get the fundamentals in place, but because the whole idea was to be more agile or less strict throughout the process, we could not safeguard all best-practices were adhered to during each phase of a project. The ratio Business/IT was simply out of balance to control everything, and the whole idea was to go for a shorter development lifecycle.
One thing for sure, we went a lot faster from design through development to deployment, high-fives followed and everybody was happy (for some time).
Well almost everybody, because we knew our responsibility would not end after the collection of credits at deployment, but that an ongoing cycle of maintenance would follow. As expected, after the celebrations also complaints, new requirements and support requests on bug fixes were incoming.
Not too enthusiastic about constantly patching these projects, I proposed to halt new development and to initiate a proper cleaning of all these projects. With the image in mind of a small enthusiastic fellow, dedicated to clean a garbage-strewn wasteland for humanity, I deemed "Wall-E" a very suited project name. With Wall-E on board, focus for the next period was on completely restructuring these projects to make sure all could be properly maintained for the future.
I knew I was in for some support, so I fetched some cool wall papers to kick-start each day with a fresh set of Wall-E's on my monitors. Subsequently I created a Project Wall-E status report, included Wall-E in team-meetings and before I knew it Wall-E was the most frequently mentioned member of the team. I could not stop to chuckle when mails started to fly on whether "Wall-E completed project A" or if we could discuss "Wall-E's status next report-out". I am really happy we put in the effort with the whole team to properly deploy all functionality. Not only the project became a success, also the idea of associating frustrating activities with a beloved digital buddy landed well in our company. A colleagues already kickstarted 'project Doraemon', which is triggering a lot of fun content. Hope it may give you some inspiration, or at least motivate you to watch Wall-E!
PS: I have been enjoying the posts, valuable learnings and fun experiences for some time now. Decided to also share a bit from my side, here goes my first rant!
3 -
doNotMessWithITTeamInAFuckingProject();
Last night me with my team have a discussion with my project team. Currently we have a project for our insurance client building a Learning Management System. The project condition already messed up since the first day i join a meeting. Because since its a consortium project with multiple company involved, one of company had a bad experience with another company. It happened few years back when both of company were somehow break up badly because miss communication (i heard this from one of my team).
Skip..skip... And then day to day like another stereotype IT projects when client and business analyst doing requirements gathering, the specs seems unclear and keep changing day by day even when I type this rant I'm sure it will change again.
Then something happened last night when my team leader force our business analyst to re index the use case number (imho) this is no need to be done, and i know the field conditions its so tough for all team members.
So many problems occured, actually this is a boring problem like lack of dev resource, lack of project management and all other stereotype IT projects had. Its sucks why this things is happening again.
Finally my fellow business analyst type a quite long message in our group and said that he maybe quit because its too tired and he felt that the leader only know about push push pushhhhhy fcking pussy, he never go to the client site and look what we've done and what we struggle so far.
I just don't know why, i know this guy earlier was an IT geek also, but when he leading a team he act like he never done IT project before, just know about pushing people without knowing what the context and sound to me like just rage push!
Damnit, i maybe quit also, you know we IT guy never affraid to quit anytime from the messed up condition like this. Even though we were at the bottom level in a project, but we hold the most main key for development.
Hope he (my leader) read this rant. And can realize what happened and fix this broken situation. I don't know what to say again, im in steady mode to quit anytime if something chaos happen nearly in the future.
doNotMessWithITTeamInAFuckingProject();
1 -
Hi everyone, just discovered this wonderful community and I've got a new rant just for the occasion.
I work at a creative agency and we offer writing, design and web development.
This client wanted the whole package, so we've written a ton a copy, got it approved, sent it to translation, got it approved, designed both print and digital assets and developed a website.
Everything was looking good, files sent to the printer, website ready to be deployed...
Then we get a call and a PDF of text changes. The stuff is already printed.
The business owner's wife (not an employee) took it upon herself to make changes to the text, some of which have grammatical and spelling mistakes.
Everything has to be delayed, files have to be resent to the printer, project goes over budget, we're pissed, the printer is pissed and their director of communications is pissed.
What a shit show. I wonder who's going to get thrown under the bus for this one.3 -
Picking the web development field and becoming more of a business person than a dev.
I want to develop more interesting things (like games, AI, etc) rather than corporate websites and web apps. Now, I can't even write a mobile app ffs.
I can't even work on my hobby project lately.6 -
I walk into the kickoff meeting today. The first part of this project had 5 developers and a project manager. Former project manager handled communication and sheltered us from bullshit. We built an amazing piece of software in a very short time. Customers were so amazed that they decided to reboot the project, boost the funding by several million, and let us go again. They specifically requested the same team.
Now the team looks like this: the neediest tester guy, a UX lady that doesn't have any UX background, an agile "visionary", a project manager that doesn't understand how development works, a solutions architect, 3 COTS platform specialists, a devops specialist, and an account lead. They have booked all kinds of workshops and other shit to kick things off.
So development capacity is only 60% of what it was. Management ratio was 1:5 before. Now the management ratio is 9:3. The new project manager thinks developers should be on more customer calls and responding to all customer emails during sprints. We already built this system and devops pipelines end to end. The COTS people, solutions architect, or the UX person can't program. They want us to magically convert this custom application into one based on COTS. What we need to do is make the rest of the business processes that we omitted, integrate known feedback, rework the backend, build better automated testing, improve logging and reporting, add another actor to the system, add a different authentication method, and basically work through the massive backlog.
How do they think this is going to work? Do they think we can download a custom engineered enterprise grade software system from Microsoft and double click all the way to customer satisfaction? The licenses alone are too much for the customer on an ongoing cost basis. I guess we can discuss it during the agile team-building weekend at some remote lake that the team "visionary" has set up. For the sake of fuck.
Like development isn't hard enough. Hire two more developers and lose all of the dead weight. Get a project manager that won't let the trivial shit roll down on us. What the fuck.5 -
So the dev team got invited to a management team meeting. First order of business: Happy Birthday Betty!!! Yey!! Second on the agenda: How's you son Dylan doing at school? Yey!?!? After fucking around for 25 minutes: why are the development team here? OHH! We didn't mean to invite you, must be a mistake. WELL FUCK YOU, AND YOUR SON DYLAN AND YOUR BIRTHDAY BETTY, YOU THINK WASTING OUR FUCKING TIME IS FUN!?1
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!rant
TLDR; Lost passion after a few years, wasted a year, went on vacation without really any technology, found my passion and am excited as hell for 2019.
After programming for nearly 5 years, I’ve hit the point of not wanting to program anymore. I’ve burnt myself out, and haven’t had a vacation in 8+ years so we’ve finally decided to take one. I’m not going to say it’s a full blown vacation, but a semi-vacation since it’s with my parents also so I do have to do a few things I’d prefer not to such as meeting relatives.
I didn’t have the motivation to work on any new projects, finish any projects I actually enjoyed, I just did a few side projects for friends that took me anywhere from 5 minutes to 30 minutes every few weeks. In general this year has been garbage in development terms, I’ve lost passion. It felt like a chore, I didn’t find the entertainment I once did.
I’ve been away from technology for about 2 weeks now, and have less than a week left before I fly back and I’m excited as hell. During this break away from technology (with the exception of browsing devRant once in a while), has me excited to work on many projects and actually start learning and improving my skills. I’ve actually gained the motivation to work on 2 projects that have been planned for nearly 2 years now, I’ve noted down ideas for them, made diagrams, etc, just never had the passion to develop them. 2019 is going to be one hell of a year, since I get back almost at the end of November, and December I have a few business meetings and University exams that I have to prepare for. Excited to see these projects through, one is going to be for the hell of it, just been a passion project I’ve wanted to do for years now. The other project is actually a project for one of my sub-companies that hasn’t officially released since I didn’t have the passion to work on it. (Not going to go into full detail yet about the companies/projects, going to save that for the future)
Alongside that, I’m excited since my main company that is totally unrelated to technology, is set to do some massive moves during 2019 also. Looking forward to that, and being able to launch my dream company (the sub-company I mentioned before).
Time for sleep now, goodnight! (Wrote this after a few drinks and in the middle of the night, hopefully it’s not full blown garbage)2 -
Why would someone hire you to build a website, constantly say that you don’t know business, never give you anything you ask for, berate you for asking questions about what they want the website to be like, “that’s your job”, all while expecting under $500? Because they’re stupid, that’s why. Oh also, they now want an app instead of a website because their generic-ass domain name was taken already. Fffffffffff7
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I was in second year of University when I joined the internship, I knew the business idea sucks and he wouldn't be able to carry out the operations either. Little did I know that I will work with the dumbest team ever, literally, the dumbest.
So, the major chunk of the software was outsourced to a consultancy. I was a tech intern, and we were developing an Android App that will save your parking location, let you reserve locations and all etc.
I knew I have stepped on a wrong turf, but again, I had nothing better to do that summer. So, for a very meager stipend, I said yes to a very stupid project. Let the stupidity flow...
~ The boss, had quit his job for this dumb idea with no funding, no team, nothing.
~ He was pursuing a certification course in Android Development from somewhere, where their final project will be a calculator!
~ He had little to no tech skills, hardly knew Java but was leading an Android App Dev project in Java. He had little to no managerial, marketing or sales skills either.
~ For a brief period, I had to work along with the consultancy guys to ramp up their work. They would take backups in a USB drive every evening, and share each others code using the same. VCS died a painful death that day.
~ They hardly wrote functions, rather, wrote very long code in the main (onCreate) function. Code style died of cancer.
~ They couldn't compress an image before sending it to a server. I had to do it for them.
~ Had no concept of creating utility classes.
And best of all,
~ Wrote 20 cases (switch case) with the same code! Instead of using a loop...1 -
Just wanna to share my story:
I just quit my job 2 months ago to ramp up my own startup. I will be funded with 2k Euro per month for 1 year to prepare the founding of my startup. Basicly that means i got one year to build backend/frontend/app. I have a friend that is doing some nontech related stuff like business development and shit. Sounds good until now i guess.
But:
Developing all that stuff in a one man show as a junior-like developer is really hard. I did not find another dev who wanted to join me as a sideproject or something.
Do you guys think thats even possible to ramp up all this by myself or am i to optimistic? I mean, i learn a lot atm, but i am a bit scared to fail too.
That should not be whining or shit, just gathering some input of you guys.
(excuse typos and stuff as i am not a native speaker :) )17 -
!rant
Upper management finally caved in to the endless change requests from business and explicitly made the following statement:
"We won't overpromise and under-deliver. With that, we are reducing the committed scope of development work per sprint, but will continue to deliver the same final deliverables by the delivery dates"
So all our compressed project timetables just got uncompressed, and we finally have the breathing room we've been begging for since 2017. Any change requests from business will be (finally) backlogged.
On the other hand, the number of projects have increased to fill out the new extra dev time, but at least we're now less stressed at work. Priorities!1 -
I do believe, genuinely that “I don’t know” is sometimes an acceptable answer. If you don’t know, you don’t know. I appreciate the honesty.
But at the same time
I don’t know how much longer I can take “I don’t know” as an answer from my boss when I ask about critical business things HE tasked me with, or things relating to career development and maximizing my time with this company.
Do I need my boss to have all the answers on company revenue? No.
Do I need my boss to at least have an understanding on wtf is going with projects when my priorities get changed mid-project for the 4th time? Hell yes.4 -
MARKETING IS A MENACE FOR SOCIETY and a large waste of time and resources.
Imagine that for some very stupid reason people were allowed to steal cell phones from unsuspecting victims and sell it on open market legally, tax invoices and all.
One could create a business like this. Steal some lad's brand new $600 iPhone and sell it for $280, because why not?
That is marketing. A company goes and makes a phone for lets say $180. Add in taxes, shipping and development costs, and we get to $300. Put some real nice profits on top (let's say 40%) and we get to $420.
The last 180 are the cost of marketing for society.
Today some stupid marketing conmen goosesteps into my lab and says that we must use Tensorflow and in-memory databases and multicloud redundancy and, I kid you not, "profound learning".
WE HAVE A FREAKING LOGISTICS OPS APPLICATION.
"We are putting it on the brochure, those technologies are set to sell well in our core market, and improve employer-branding" says the conmen.
A request for a feature is one thing, a request for an whole other technology because some snake-oil salesmen read the term in some clickbait rag and thinks that some starry-eyed moneyhead will pay extra because the brochure says "NOW WITH 2X MORE TECH!" is just an assault on society.5 -
Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Here is another.
Early into our eCommerce venture, we experienced the normal growing pains.
Part of the learning process was realizing in web development, you should only access data resources on an as-needed basis.
One business object on it's creation would populate db lookups, initialize business rule engines (calling the db), etc.
Initially, this design was fine, no one noticed anything until business started to grow and started to cause problems in other systems (classic scaling problems)
VP wanted a review of the code and recommendations before throwing hardware at the problem (which they already started to do).
Over a month, I started making some aggressive changes by streamlining SQL, moving initialization, and refactoring like a mad man.
Over all page loads were not really affected, but the back-end resources were almost back to pre-eCommerce levels.
The main web developer at the time was not amused and fought my changes as much as she could.
Couple months later the CEO was speaking to everyone about his experience at a trade show when another CEO was complementing him on the changes to our web site.
The site was must faster, pages loaded without any glitches, checkout actually worked the first time, etc.
CEO wanted to thank everyone involved etc..and so on.
About a week later the VP handed out 'Thank You' certificates for the entire web team (only 4 at the time, I was on another team). I was noticeably excluded (not that I cared about a stupid piece of paper, but they also got a pizza lunch...I was much more pissed about that). My boss went to find out what was going on.
MyBoss: "Well, turned out 'Sally' did make all the web site performance improvements."
Me: "Where have you been the past 3 months? 'Sally' is the one who fought all my improvements. All my improvements are still in the production code."
MyBoss: "I'm just the messenger. What would you like me to do? I can buy you a pizza if you want. The team already reviewed the code and they are the ones who gave her the credit."
Me: "That's crap. My comments are all over that code base. I put my initials, date, what I did, why, and what was improved. I put the actual performance improvement numbers in the code!"
MyBoss: "Yea? Weird. That is what 'Tom' said why 'Sally' was put in for a promotion. For her due diligence for documenting the improvements."
Me:"What!? No. Look...lets look at the code"
Open up the file...there it was...*her* initials...the date, what changed, performance improvement numbers, etc.
WTF!
I opened version control and saw that she made one change, the day *after* the CEO thanked everyone and replaced my initials with hers.
She knew the other devs would only look at the current code to see who made the improvements (not bother to look at the code-differences)
MyBoss: "Wow...that's dirty. Best to move on and forget about it. Let them have their little party. Let us grown ups keeping doing the important things."8 -
I had spent the last year working on a online store power by woocommerce with over 100k products from various suppliers. This online store utilized a custom API that would take the various formats that suppliers offer their inventory in and made them consistent. Now everything was going swimmingly initially, but then I began adding more and more products using a plug-in called WP all import. I reached around 100k products and the site would take up to an entire minute to load sometimes timing out. I got desperate so I installed several caching plugins, but to no avail this did not help me. The site was originally only supposed to take three to four months but ended up taking an entire year. Then, just yesterday I found out what went wrong and why this woocommerce website with all of these optimizations was still taking anywhere from 60 to 90 seconds to load, or just timing out entirely. I had initially thought that I needed a beefier server so I moved it to a high CPU digitalocean VM. While this did help a little bit, the site was still very slow and now I had very high CPU usage RAM usage and high disk IO. I was seriously stumped the Apache process was using a high amount of CPU and IO along with MYSQL as well. It wasn't until I started digging deeper into the database that I actually found out what the issue was. As I was loading the site I would run 'show process list' in the SQL terminal, I began to notice a very significant load time for one of the tables, so I went to go and check it out. What I did was I ran a select all query on that particular table just to see how full it was and SQL returned a error saying that I had exceeded the maximum packet size. So I was like okay what the fuck...
So I exited my SQL and re-entered it this time with a higher packet size. I ran a query that would count how many rows were in this particular table and the number came out to being in the millions. I was surprised, and what's worse is that this table belong to a plugin that I had attempted to use early in the development process to cache the site. The plugin was deactivated but apparently it had left PHP files within the wp content directory outside of the actual plugin directory, so it's still executing scripts even though the plugin itself was disabled. Basically every time I would change anything on the site, it would recache the whole thing, and it didn't delete any old records. So 100k+ products caching on saves with no garbage collection... You do the math, it's gonna be a heavy ass database. Not only that but it was serialized data, so when it did pull this metric shit ton of spaghetti from the database, PHP then had to deserialize it. Hence the high ass CPU load. I had caching enabled on the MySQL end of things so that ate the ram. I was really desperate to get this thing running.
Honest to God the main reason why this website took so long was because the load times made it miserable to work on. I just thought that the hardware that I had the site on was inadequate. I had initially started the development on a small Linux VM which apparently wasn't enough, which is why I moved it to digitalocean which also seemed to not be enough, so from there I moved to a dedicated server which still didn't seem to be enough. I was probably a few more 60-second wait times or timeouts from recommending a server cluster to my client who I know would not be willing to purchase it. The client who I promised this site to have completed in 3 months and has waited a year. Seriously, I would tell people the struggles that I would go through with this particular site and they would just tell me to just drop the site; just take the money, just take the loss. I refused to, this was really the only thing that was kicking my ass. I present myself as this high-and-mighty developer like I'm just really good at what I do but then I have this WordPress site that's just beating the shit out of me for a year. It was a very big learning experience and it was also very humbling as well, it made me realize that I really don't know as much as I think I might. It was evidence that there is still so much more to learn out there, I did learn a lot from that experience especially about optimizing websites the different types of methods to do that particular lonely on the server side and I'll be able to utilize this knowledge in the future.
I guess the moral of the story is, never really give up. Ultimately things might get so bad that you're running on hopes and dreams. Those experiences are generally the most humbling. Now I can finally present the site that I am basically a year late on to the client who will be so happy that I did not give up on the project entirely. I'll have experienced this feeling of pure euphoria, and help the small business significantly grow their revenue. Helping others is very fulfilling for me, even at my own expense.
Anyways, gonna stop ranting. Running out of characters. If you're still here... Ty for reading :')7 -
The only thing more dangerous than an alcoholic short-term-memory-challenged non-technical throw-you-under-the-bus IT director with self-esteem issues that are sporadically punctuated by delusions of superiority is one who fears for his job. Submitted for your inspection: a besotted mass of near-human brain function who not only has a 50 person IT department to run, but has also been questioned by the business owners as to what he actually does. So he has decided to show them. He has purchased a vendor product to replace a core in-house developed application used to facilitate creating the product the business sells. The purchased software only covers about 40 percent of the in-house application's functionality, so he is contracting with the vendor to perform custom development on the purchased product (at a cost likely to be just shy of six-figures) so that about 90 percent of existing functionality will be covered. He has asked one of his developers (me) to scale down the existing software to cover the functionality gaps the purchased software creates. There is no deployment plan that will allow the business to transition from the current software to the new vendor-supplied one without significantly hurting the ability of the business to function. When anyone raises this issue he dismisses it with sage musings such as, "I know it will be painful, but we'll just have to give the users really good support." Because he has no idea what any of his staff actually does, he is expecting one of his developers (again, unfortunately, me) to work with the vendor so that the Frankensoftware will perform as effectively as the current software (essentially as a project manager since there will be no in-house coding involved). Lastly, he refuses to assign someone to be responsible for the software: taking care of maintenance, configuration, and issue resolutions after it has been rolled out. When I pointedly tell him I will not be doing that (because this is purchased software and I am not a system admin or desktop engineer) he tells me, "Let me think about this." The worst part is that this is only one of four software replacement initiatives he is injecting himself into so he can prove his worth to the business owners. And by doing so he is systematically making every software development initiative akin to living in Dante's Eighth Circle. I am at the point where I want to burn my eye out with a hot poker, pour salt into the wound, and howl to the heavens in unbearable agony for a month, so when these projects come to fruition, and I am suffering the wrath of the business owners, I can look back on that moment I lost my eye and think "good times."4
-
!rant
Had a meeting with the head of my department concerning the status of many of our current projects. Them projects are huge and it is 2 dedicated devs(me and the lead) working on them whilst training our CMS admin in development to help out(dude is talented af and really digs programming) and my manager was so worried about what he was gonna say.
The thing is, she doesn't know how to take a break, she never pushes us, but she does push herself and it pains the team to see her take so much heat. She really is a bomb manager, and we want her to be more at ease.
Well a couple of days ago the vips of the board decided to bombard her with shit since out dptmnt head was on sick leave. The stress they put on her was some military grade bs and even then she never...EVER took it out on anyone.
The head of our department walked in to talk to us about it. Dude is a tall older gentleman, suits up every day(Texas style meaning cowboy boots and everything) and is quite imposing. Has a stern look man, one of them 1000 mile stares and a huge mustache that more than surpasses mine(which mind you, my mustache is fucking outstanding)
Our boss walked into the meeting room, sat down and heard what she had to say, she was not excusing herself. As bomb as this gorgeous woman is she was all about telling him what we were going to show the board on next week's meeting.
He sat there quietly listening to her as well as the presentation that me and my boys had to do.
What happened next blew me the fuck out of this world.
He said that he was sorry that so much stress had come down to her and us whilst he was gone and that he was happy with the leadership showcased by her and the initiative that the team took to put forward a presentation for him and the board. He also said that he was going to make said presentation for us since the vips had no business stressing us out, he asked for our assistance for any of the technical stats since even though he was a programmer he is not aware of all the inner details of our apps. He said that it is commendable that such a small team can hold 2 campus(college level) and that he was aware of the technical proficiency of me and the lead and that he knows that our shit is not something that gets done overnight.
He then said that at any given time that we get antagonized by matters such as timeframes or shit like that that we can direct everyone to him, regardless of what.
.He was also really amazed at the progress we showed him on the current projects(most are on their respective testing phases).
He then reiterated on how proud he is of all of us before biding us a good weekend and leaving to his office
As i sat there watching how the world was lifted from my manager and happy that he enjoyed the progress of my work I could not help but feel a deep sense of admiration and respect for this mysterious man.
I would damn skippy take a bullet for him....just in case my draw gets sloppy that is, ain't no one taking aim at the boss.3 -
My developer career has ended before I even start. After failing to get a job, I have started a business men services company. Maybe in the future, I will include software development to the business. So no more rants from my side at least for one year.
Fuck you all fucking retarded companies who wants junior developers with the same experience of senior developers.6 -
Last week's Android development time breakdown:
21.9% Managing state
17.7% Referring to lifecycle diagrams
15.1% Waiting for Gradle
8.5% Reading the official docs on how to use component x
8.4% Reordering auto-generated ConstraintLayout XML
7.5% Swearing
4.2% Googling “Stack overflow component x is deprecated”
3.9% Googling “Stack overflow implement component x on API 24 or lower”
3.7% Googling “Stack overflow implement component x on API 21 or lower”
3.2% Googling “Stack overflow implement component x on API 19 or lower”
2.9% Googling “Stack overflow callback y called twice”, realising its a feature and not a bug, swearing a lot
2.0% Checking if Flutter is mature yet
1.0% Implementing business logic4 -
I am calling this a premonition rant, of more rants to come.
I have a feeling in my bones.
We have a newly acquired fat cat customer with bucks to blow who we have done some digital work for already and swag bag of marketing perkiness.
I will call the CEO of this whale "The Porcupine"
The Porcupine has a business degree and industry experience, nothing to do with websites or applications.
It claims to be a visual perfectionist yet never delivers an overall coherent review.
It likes to fixate on minor brand style differences in websites and apps we have built.
The Porcupine seems to be always busy with policy and legal and other things rather than participating in their own projects.
Procrastination on feedback or reviews until the day before release is common.
Many overtime hours worked, not a sliver of thanks. The haughty attitude indicative of somebody who thinks web development is like desktop publishing.
"It's just code" in response to a crash production server change they were warned was a risk that borked all of our responsive templates and took 3 hours to fix.
Their entire brand is shades of pea green, grey and lime. No serif fonts because they are suck. Arial and Helvetica are boss.
One of my devs missed a CSS style on privacy policy hyperlink text that went times new roman and I had various account directors and our CEO on phone telling me how embarrassing it was for us to let this happen.
Anyway. They pay on time and the cost estimates for all the upcoming work are juicy.
We have shitloads going on for an upcoming hard date conference and everything is already compressing.
Therefore I can already smell doom and feel those porcupine quill getting closer to my ass as I beg their AD today if we have any feedback on the 10 or so project reviews yet?
Nope.4 -
"CTO" here.
Two week ago the CEO informs me that the "investor" want to put me in contact urgently with an external software house to help me with my "bottlenecks".
The investor goes immediately on holiday, so it's not available for explanations. The CEO doesn't know much.
Today I meet the software house CTO and CEO.
They tell me that I should do a transfer of knowledge with them. That they will respect my requirements, my schedule and that they want to help me.
During the meeting the business consultant explains "his" vision. Some new development nobody understand. Not even the CEO. The other cofounder is probably in disagreement but stay silent.
I agree to cooperate with them in due time and with due scope and planning.
It appears they already signed a contract with the investor. The investor is offering to us 40 days of a senior developer, for "free".
The CEO doesn't even know the economical details of the contract and he is surprised that has been signed.He also didn't know that a person will come over for 40 (?) days and that we will have to pay the transfer expenses.
I try to be friendly. I explain to them the issues I need to solve. I say specifically that I need help on certain tasks and that my wish is that nothing "new" will start until we fix some obvious problems.
After leaving, in the evening I receive an email from the software house guy, telling me that next week I MUST allocate a slot for technical transfer and the 2 weeks after for on site training. Like that. He also mention we "agreed" on that which is false. We agreed on me deciding the timing.
We are only 2 developers, at the moment and the other one will be on holiday next week, so I'm trying to get from him a lot of things I don't know because I don't know everything.
I'm not even sure I'll be able to explain how to prepare all the environment.
Worst thing is that I don't know what will be the scope of the project.
I really don't know how to behave.
I wrote back setting my conditions. I have holiday too. I have to prepare "documentation", explanation, etc.
I don't want the "senior dev" coming when I'm not present.
Maybe I was too weak answering and I should have started a fight immediately. Because he actually AGREED to let me decide and after that he set conditions on me immediately.
I don't know.
My stomach is burning, I had a very bad digestion with fever and headache, feel like puking, plus I spent several evening hours fixing the fucking Linux kernel bug.
I want to survive. I don't want to let them oust me in this stupid way. I want to fight.
I know that if I will explode, scream or whatever I will be at fault and I'll accelerate my demise.
When I try to be "diplomatic" actually I end up being weak.
When I try to be assertive I'm in fact rude and hysterical.
I can't think anything else.
This is what burnout looks like.20 -
Alright lads here is the thing, have not been posting anything other than replies to things cuz I have been busy being miserable at school and dealing with work stuff.
Our manager left us back in February. Because she was leaving I decided that I wanted to try a different path and went on to become a programmer analyst for my institution, if anything I knew that it was going to be pretty boring work, but it came with nice monetary compensation and a foot in the door for other data science related jobs in the future. Thing is, the department head asked me to stay in the web technologies department because we had a lack of people there and hiring is hard as shit, we do not do remote jobs since our work usually requires a level of discretion and security. Thus I have been working in the web tech department since she left albeit with a different title since I aced the interview for the analyst position and the team there were more than happy to have me. I have done very few things for them, some reports here and there and mostly working directly with the DBA in some projects. One migration project would have costed my institution a total of 58k and we managed to save the cost by building the migration software ourselves.....honestly it was a fucking cake walk, if you had any doubts about the shaddyness of enterprise level applications regarding selling overpriced shit with different levels of complexity, keep them, enterprise is shaddy af indeed. But I digress.
I wrote the specification for the manager position along the previous manager, we had decided that the next candidate needed to be strong with development knowledge as well as other things as to properly understand and manage a software team, we made the academic requirement(fuck you, yes we did ask for academic requirements) to be either in the Computer Science/software engineering area or at least on the Business Administration side. We were willing to consider BA holders in exchange for having knowledge of the development process of different products and a complete understanding of what developers go through. NOT ONE SINGLE motherfucker was able to satisfy this, some of them were idiots that I knew from before that had ABSOLUTELY no business even considering applying to the position, the courage it took for some of these assholes to apply would have hurt their mothers, their God if they had one, and their country, they were just that fucking bad in their jobs as well as being overall shit people.
Then we had 1 candidate actually fall through the cracks enough to get an interview. My dude here was lying out of his ass through the interview process. According to him he had "lots of Laravel experience and experience managing Laravel projects" and mentioned repeatedly how it would be a technology that we should consider for our products. I was to interview him alongside the vice president of our institution due to the head of my department and the rest of the managers for I.T being on vacation leave all at the same bloody time.
Backstory before the interview:
Whilst I was going over the interview questions with the vice president literally offered me the job instead. I replied with honesty, reflecting how I did not originally wanted him but feeling that our institution was ready to settle on any candidate due to the lack of potentials. He was happy to do it since apparently both him and the HOD were expecting me to step up sooner or later. I was floored.
Regardless, out of kindness he wanted to go through the interview.
So, going back to the interview. As soon as the person in question referenced the framework I started to ask him about it, just simple questions, the first was "what are your thoughts on the Eloquent ORM? I am not too fond of it and want to know what you as a full time laravel dev think of it"
his reply: "I am sorry I am not too familiar with it, I don't know what that is" <--- I appreciated his honesty in this but thought it funny that someone would say that he was a Laravel developer whilst not knowing what an ORM was since you can't really get away from using it on the initial stages of learning about Laravel, maybe if one wanted to go through the hurdle of switching to something like doctrine...but even then, it was....odd.
So I met with the hod when he came back, he was stoked at the prospect of having me become the manager and I happily accepted the position. It will be hell, but I don't even need to hit the ground running since I have been the face of the department since ages. My team were ecstatic about it since we are all close friends and they have been following my directions without complaints(but the ocational eat a dick puto) for some time, we work well together and we are happy to finally have someone to stop the constant barrage that comes from people taking advantage of a missing manager.
Its gonna get good, its gonna get fun, and i am getting to see how shit goes.7 -
caution: just some dude sharing a random story.
started my own small business around half a year now. a month earlier from that my cousin also started his career as a self employed dev with his own small business and we work together.
next year we we will start a company together, where we merge our existing small businesses into one. we are developing software on our own and we design and implement software for our customers.
seems like we are doing something right because we are reaching our capacities almost all of the time.
we plan to hire apprentices (hope it's the right word) and to teach them all we know to be able to then increase our possible workload.
you know, I do not have a degree or some form of education in the field of IT. And here in germany it was almost impossible to land a job as a dev. needed my cousin who studied cs to get me my first position in that field - and even with his reputation it was not easy.
this shit will not happen on my watch. If I see someone with fire for development I will give them a chance, irrespective of their background. And I will be more than happy to let that person grow and to give every kind of support I can.
we also plan to have something like "if the employee has a good idea for software that sells, we will support it and share revenue". got to figure out the details on that one, but I want to give the employee the possibility to grow some passive income out of their normal job - because for me this was never an option. and I think that this will motivate in some way 😅
just wanted to get this out of my head 😣4 -
This business philosophy is relevant no matter which industry, culture or century you're in. In software development a user- or customer-centered design approach is particularly important👌
Via Instagram @alphaimplement 🚀
14 -
Rant r = new Rant(Rant.TEAM_PROBLEM);
Three months ago, a senior, one year older than me, decided to join me in doing startups. He said he's good at finance stuff (his parents are fund managers), and he is interested in startups just like I am. He treated me very nicely, so I gladly accepted him.
I'm currently working on many projects, and some of them won me quite a few awards, most notably on the national competition. I also got invited into startup incubator programs, met some awesome people and offered free scholarships at universities in my country.
He frankly said he joined because he wanted to learn about startups and have those "privileges" too, and I'm cool with that.
Anyway, the problem is that I'm the one doing all the work. He's really nice, doesn't claim anything whatsoever, but the thing is he doesn't have any skills whatsoever except soft skills like communicating. So, I'm horribly tired from working alone.
My tasks mostly involves full-stack development, such as planning the specs, designing and developing frontend for mobile apps and progressive webapps, developing microservices for the backend, up to deploying and maintaining the servers. It's a lot of work for a single person to handle in such a short timeframe.
Not only that, but I'm also the one handling the business/marketing part, albeit I'm still learning. From doing paperworks, pitches, business models, up to creating advertising materials for the product.
I'm obviously not the smart ones like the people out there, but I keep focusing on improving my skills.
So, he said he could help me, and I let him try. What did you think he did?
He made pitch decks using default fucking PowerPoint themes, shooted a demo video with his phone cam in 320p potato resolution and expect me to "add some effects", gives me loads of requirements when all we needed was a simple feature, copying and pasting prior documents in my paperworks which doesn't make any fucking sense at all, and quite a lot more.
Also, he said I should stay in the developer zone only while he maintains the business, whilist he obviously can't do much in the business part either. Seriously...?
I'm okay with his lack of experience, considering he's nice and all, unlike the other business guys I've met in the previous rants. However, I keep questioning myself why he is here in the first place when I'm the one doing everything anyway.
What should I do? Maybe just keep him and recruit more experienced people to join us, as he's not that much of a burden? What do you devRanters think?
Thanks for reading, fellow devRanters! 😀8 -
rant & question
Last year I had to collaborate to a project written by an old man; let's call him Bob. Bob started working in the punch cards era, he worked as a sysadmin for ages and now he is being "recycled" as a web developer. He will retire in 2 years.
The boss (that is not a programmer) loves Bob and trusts him on everything he says.
Here my problems with Bob and his code:
- he refuses learning git (or any other kind of version control system);
- he knows only procedural PHP (not OO);
- he mixes the presentation layer with business logic;
- he writes layout using tables;
- he uses deprecated HTML tags;
- he uses a random indentation;
- most of the code is vulnerable to SQL injection;
- and, of course, there are no tests.
- Ah, yes, he develops directly on the server, through a SSH connection, using vi without syntax highlighting.
In the beginning I tried to be nice, pointing out just the vulnerabilities and insisting on using git, but he ignored all my suggestions.
So, since I would have managed the production server, I decided to cheat: I completely rewrote the whole application, keeping the same UI, and I said the boss that I created a little fork in order to adapt the code to our infrastructure. He doesn't imagine that the 95% of the code is completely different from the original.
Now it's time to do some changes and another colleague is helping. She noticed what I did and said that I've been disrespectful in throwing away the old man clusterfuck, because in any case the code was working. Moreover he will retire in 2 years and I shouldn't force him to learn new things [tbh, he missed at least last 15 years of web development].
What would you have done in my place?10 -
My designer just had an user interview where the user is a developer and my designer showed him the mock-ups of a no code tool that we are building, asking the dev for his input.
She literally had a session with a guy announcing him that we are building a tool that will put him out of work and moreover asked him for inputs so that we miss no use case.
And in another story, one of my dev lead decided to decommission an entire feature and replace it will a hacky solution because the devs in her team were not comfortable using the current design in their development stage. Hence, without user research, any strong use case, or considering business implications, she went ahead and drafted the entire approach on how to fuck everyone.
I am out of my honeymoon phase at my new org and I am scared. Shit scared.16 -
A long time ago, I've started my journey into web development. Discovered HTML, CSS and was great, then it came WordPress.
As a self taught developer I thought this was an awesome way to develop sites quicker, didn't really knew any better and, for all I did at the time it was fine.
Then I discovered .NET and MVC, I was amazed (I kinda love the MVC pattern)
Then it came Laravel, really really liked working with it, felt free to develop isntead of focusing on mundane stuff
Last week a client came by, requesting a site for his business, he wanted all sorts of custom stuff, but he needed it in WordPress because that is what he knows how to use.
After three days of dealing with "the WordPress way" I'm seriously considering doing the whole thing in Laravel and style the admin to look like WordPress. I feel like wrestling a 500 pound gorilla, geez, why do every little feature has to be implemented in such an unnatural way.
I'm grabbing a hook but to hang myself on it5 -
So here's my problem. I've been employed at my current company for the last 12 months (next week is my 1 year anniversary) and I've never been as miserable in a development job as this.
I feel so upset and depressed about working in this company that getting out of bed and into the car to come here is soul draining. I used to spend hours in the evenings studying ways to improve my code, and was insanely passionate about the product, but all of this has been exterminated due to the following reasons.
Here's my problems with this place:
1 - Come May 2019 I'm relocating to Edinburgh, Scotland and my current workplace would not allow remote working despite working here for the past year in an office on my own with little interaction with anyone else in the company.
2 - There is zero professionalism in terms of work here, with there being no testing, no planning, no market research of ideas for revenue generation – nothing. This makes life incredibly stressful. This has led to countless situations where product A was expected, but product B was delivered (which then failed to generate revenue) as well as a huge amount of development time being wasted.
3 - I can’t work in a business that lives paycheck to paycheck. I’ve never been somewhere where the salary payment had to be delayed due to someone not paying us on time. My last paycheck was 4 days late.
4 - The management style is far too aggressive and emotion driven for me to be able to express my opinions without some sort of backlash.
5 - My opinions are usually completely smashed down and ignored, and no apology is offered when it turns out that they’re 100% correct in the coming months.
6 - I am due a substantial pay rise due to the increase of my skills, increase of experience, and the time of being in the company, and I think if the business cannot afford to pay £8 per month for email signatures, then I know it cannot afford to give me a pay rise.
7 - Despite having continuously delivered successful web development projects/tasks which have increased revenue, I never receive any form of thanks or recognition. It makes me feel like I am not cared about in this business in the slightest.
8 - The business fails to see potential and growth of its employees, and instead criticises based on past behaviour. 'Josh' (fake name) is a fine example of this. He was always slated by 'Tom' and 'Jerry' as being worthless, and lazy. I trained him in 2 weeks to perform some basic web development tasks using HTML, CSS, Git and SCSS, and he immediately saw his value outside of this company and left achieving a 5k pay rise during. He now works in an environment where he is constantly challenged and has reviews with his line manager monthly to praise him on his excellent work and diverse set of skills. This is not rocket science. This is how you keep employees motivated and happy.
9 - People in the business with the least or zero technical understanding or experience seem to be endlessly defining technical deadlines. This will always result in things going wrong. Before our mobile app development agency agreed on the user stories, they spent DAYS going through the specification with their developers to ensure they’re not going to over promise and under deliver.
10 - The fact that the concept of ‘stealing data’ from someone else’s website by scraping it daily for the information is not something this company is afraid to do, only further bolsters the fact that I do not want to work in such an unethical, pathetic organisation.
11 - I've been told that the MD of the company heard me on the phone to an agency (as a developer, I get calls almost every week), and that if I do it again, that the MD apparently said he would dock my pay for the time that I’m on the phone. Are you serious?! In what world is it okay for the MD of a company to threaten to punish their employees for thinking about leaving?! Why not make an attempt at nurturing them and trying to find out why they’re upset, and try to retain the talent.
Now... I REALLY want to leave immediately. Hand my notice in and fly off. I'll have 4 weeks notice to find a new role, and I'll be on garden leave effective immediately, but it's scary knowing that I may not find a role.
My situation is difficult as I can't start a new role unless it's remote or a local short term contract because my moving situation in May, and as a Junior to Mid Level developer, this isn't the easiest thing to do on the planet.
I've got a few interviews lined up (one of which was a final interview which I completed on Friday) but its still scary knowing that I may not find a new role within 4 weeks.
Advice? Thoughts? Criticisms?
Love you DevRant <33 -
Nope, definitely not going to work for that customer anymore. Fuck this shit. At least for this week.
My background: mid-30 years old, some kind of business & IT consultant / lead dev working for a mid sized CRM consulting company, with approx 15 years of experience in development and software architecture, most of the time "thinking" in C#, still learning new languages, being a cloud evangelist and team lead. We usually have customers with customers (B2B/B2C).
Personality type "campaigner" (ENFP-A).
Today the project lead of my client (a big corporation in the energy industry) told me that he still didn't order all the necessary resources for the cloud project. Just to be clear: He's on the client side. We (the architects, one internal and me) told him one month ago what we need for the beginning. Just a few things - an Azure subscription, a license for the CRM platform, and our dev tools.
And now let's guess when the project is planned to begin? Yeah, right: 1st of April. NO APRIL'S FOOL. And guess what? Next Tuesday we'll do the onboarding for the new (external) devs, and NOTHING will be ready. Yeah, just let us build stuff in our minds, and on the whiteboards, because it's an AGILE project, right? We don't need any systems and tools...
And now he sent me the questionnaires which need to be answered before any cloud service can be ordered by the corporate IT. And yes, he didn't answer a single thing, and just meant "Those are architecture questions" (they are not) and (of course) "please provide the answers until Monday morning, so we can FINALLY order the services."
Yeah, you fucktard. Of course it's MY FAULT now. Maybe I should write an email to your boss asking how we can speed things up a little bit...3 -
Fuck me sideways. I work for a small business doing most of their IT work, a lot of which is in-house software development. Today I was working on a feature of our employee schedule system that I wrote and for the last couple of hours, my laptop (which is my dev machine) kept freezing up on me every ten minutes or so... 😬
Well, I finally found the cause, but only after running apt-get update/upgrade to see if updating fixed the issue. I haven't updated in a LONG time... Productivity is not on the agenda for today I suppose.
5 -
ever had the experience that people want you to do UI development or think you can only do / you love UI development, just because they like your UI?
my former boss (dev) thought i had spent most of my development time for my in-house web app (student project) for the UI and didn't see the work i had put in the business logic behind (which was more). also, he wanted me to completely switch to 100% UI development after my studies. when he asked me what kind of work i could imagine in the future, i said different things, but also that i somehow hate UI development. XD if i have to do it sometimes, fine, no problem, but doing only UI sounds fucking boring to me.
however, then i got another boss and worked on new topics which i like and which are rather far away from UI development.
one day my former boss asked me how i was doing with the new topics, and i told him about the cool stuff i did. he was somewhat surprised and told me, he didn't know that i was also enthusiastic about those topics, and he had always thought that i was most interested in UI development.
...did you actually hear anything i said? xD
also, just because i can, doesn't mean i want to. 🤷♀️2 -
Why am I sad, depressed, demotivated, you ask?
Because I was asked to create-react-app with nodemailer, it worked well on heroku, YAYYY MEE, "
"NOTHING GOES WRONG IN DEPLOYMENT FUCK YEAH"
Little did I know that was a "demo" for the business people, My superior / manager/boss wants me to deploy on 1and1 service provider,
> Okay 1 and 1 service provider does provide Nodej, so it shouldn't be hard.
> Turns out it is a Windows hosting server IIS 10 without URL Rewrite.
> *INTERNAL SCREAMING*
I went up to him to talk about this issue and requested to let me talk to 1 and 1, and get this sorted
> But bro, if we cannot fix it, I think they also cannot fix, probably.
*INTERNAL SCREAMING AT PEAK*
I just want URL Rewrite installed on IIS10 so that I can move on to the next project.
A little background for this project
> No support from him during development.
> I personally used HD Images, because why not?
> Website seems slow because of HD Images, and now he complains about it.
You fucking (managers) want a website to be scalable and fast and yet you choose to focus on B U S I N E S S instead of support the real guy.
I'm fucking sick and tired, it took me 24 hours figure out the issue because there is nothing on 1 and 1 support/ forum/help center.
Another 24 hours to try and fix, yet no luck.
I'm gonna finally point the domain name to heroku. Fuck, I'm so fucking done6 -
A few months a couple of my colleagues, a business consultant and a developer, worked on a big project. The project capsized because the client is an A-hole and the developer was way over his head.
To save the project I was brought on board. The entire code base was a fucking mess of duplicated code. Shortly after, the developer called in sick with stress, simply because the whole thing was too much.
Fast forward to now; we just launched. The client is expressing concerns about the quality of the work because of the bumpy road (rightly so). I try to explain why my way of doing things is better, but to "paint the picture" I had to compare my approach to my predecessor. This results in the business consultant shooting me down, right in front of the client.
I fucking saved your job, your project, and about $1M in profits. I'm allowed to tell the story of why my incompetent coworker messed everything up.
I'm so done walking on egg shells because some just don't realize they are not cut out for software development.2 -
Guys I need your help. I'm a student working at a very small development business as a developer ( who would have thought) and I really love working there ( nice colleagues, I learn something every day) but recently I don't get enough work. it really feels like half of my day is spend running after the seniors asking for work and it starts to get really annoying not only for my but for them too. and most recently I'm just going home early because I don't want to just sit there unproductivly :/ but this is not really a solution either because at the moment I'm trying to work 40 hours ( I get paid 20) to get some overtime to not have to work as much as soon as my university starts. but now I don't get my hours and have to chase for work... does anyone have any advice for me?6
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Spend the last year helping to rescue a company from the brink of collapse. Literally live and breathe the company for no extra pay or reward, supporting and improving all aspects from IT and development, HR, Legal, Procurement, business day to day running and Accounts.
Create a business plan and forecast for 2019 with the General Manager over the weekend (unpaid) to grow the business and start to make lots of profit, hand it over to the director and he makes me redundant the next day.
Furious doesn't even cover what I'm feeling at the moment.3 -
My first experience with any kind of development was in a web mastering class in high school. I got super into it and started going really far ahead in the course materials.
During the second semester most students in the class were not interested at all so I decided to start a business of selling custom tailored assignments to about half the class. It didn't make me rich of course, but it felt good being the HTML / CSS god in the class.
The best part honestly was getting caught. The principal was so impressed at the amount of extra work I'd been doing that he just gave me a detention. Thanks Mr. Murray, for being so cool and not putting me down for doing what I love. -
How do you guys handle a client who is two months behind in payments?
I am building a website for a local business and the owner is very far behind in paying. I am a bit behind in the development schedule, but he is in the know about the status and progress of the website and I’ve reminded him multiple times.14 -
Listened for about a half-hour yesterday to DevA ‘beat down’ DevB writing a console app for trying out a proof-of-concept idea he had.
DevB: “What’s the URL of the development server?”
DevA: “Why? What are you doing?”
DevB: “I’m needing to throw some messages to it so I can capture data for something I’m working on.”
DevA: “How are you calling the service?”
DevB: “I wrote a console app”
- you could almost hear the eye roll -
DevA: “A console app? Why in the world would you write a console app?”
DevB: “Oh..um..no reason. I just need log some test data for something I’m playing around with. How should I do it?”
DevA: “If it’s test data, you should have wrote a unit test. You see, unit tests …”
- yammer on and on for about 5 minutes about the virtues of unit tests…never really explaining anything -
DevB: “Yea, I’m not needing to test the result or anything. I just need to log some data.”
DevA: “Then you should use a unit test for that, not a console app. With a unit test, you’ll be able to validate the data. That’s what unit tests are for. Microsoft should have never put in console apps in Visual Studio. It just leads to bad coding practices.”
DevB: “Um…I don’t care. It’s a console app because I just need data…thanks anyway”
Today, DevC was talking to DevA
DevC: “Charlie is testing the order module, but there isn’t any test data. Do you still have the data generating script?”
DevA: “Oh yea, I’ll send him my console app that populates the database.”
It was all I could do from screaming “You stupid –bleep-er!! What the f–bleep-ck was all that yesterday?!”, but none of my business. Better to devrant about it than start a fight. -
I agree with many people on here that Front-End web development/design isn't what it used to be.
Things used to be simple: a static page. Then we decoupled design from description and we introduced CSS; nice, clean separation, more manageable - everything looks nice up to this point.
Introduce dynamic pages, introduce JavaScript. We can now change the DOM and we can make interactive, neat little webpages; cool, the web is still fun.
Years later, we start throwing backend concepts into the web and bloating it with logic because we want so much for the web to be portable and emulate the backend. This is where it starts to get ugly: come ASP, come single pages, partial pages, templates,.. The front-end now talks to a backend, okay. We start decoupling things and we let the logic be handled by the backend - fair enough.
Even later, we start decoupling the edge processes (website setup, file management, etc.) and then we introduce ugly JavaScript tools to do it. Then we introduce convoluted frameworks (Angular,..). Sometimes we find ourselves debugging the tools themselves (grunt, gulp, mapping tools,..) rather than focusing on the development itself (as per ITIL guidelines; focus on value), no matter how promising today's frameworks claim to be ("You get to focus on your business code"; yeah right, in practice it has turned out differently for me. More like "I get to focus on wasting copious amounts of time trying to figure out your tangled web").
Everything has now turned into an unfriendly, tangled web (no pun intended).
I miss the old days when creating things for the Web used to be fun, exciting and simple and it would invigorate passion, not hate.
<my cents="2"></my>3 -
Of course the shouting episodes all happened during the era I was doing WordPress dev.
So we were a team of consultants working on this elephant-traffic website. There were a couple of systems for managing content on a more modular level, the "best" being one dubbed MF, a spaghettified monstrosity that the 2 people who joined before me had developed.
We were about to launch that shit into production, so I was watching their AWS account, being the only dev who had operational experience (and not afraid to wipe out that macos piece of shit and dev on a real os).
Anyhow, we enable the thing, and the average number of queries per page load instantly jumps from ~30 (even vanilla WP is horrible) to 1000+. Instances are overloaded and the ASG group goes up from 4 to 22. That just moves the problem elsewhere as now the database server is overwhelmed.
Me: we have to enable database caching for this thing *NOW*
Shitty authors of the monstrosity (SAM): no, our code cannot be responsible for that, it's the platform that can't handle the transition.
Me: we literally flipped a single switch here and look at the jump in all these graphs.
SAM: nono, it's fine, just add more instances
Me: ARE YOU FUCKIN SERIOUS?
Me: - goes and enables database caching without any approvals to do so, explaining to mgmt. that failure to do so would impair business revenue due to huge loading times, so they have to live with some data staleness -
SAM: Noooo, we'll show you it's not our code.
SAM: - pushes a new release of the monstrosity that makes DB queries go above 2k / page load -
...
Tho on the bright side, from that point on I focused exclusively on performance, was building a nice fragment caching framework which made the site fly regardless of what shitty code was powering it, tuned the stack to no end and learned a ton of stuff in the process which allowed me to graduate from the tar pit of WP development.5 -
4 years ago I made a personal goal/plan to be a full stack developer. Meaning a good understanding of any development between os level code and web/front end user experience.
Over the years this term 'full stack' has been abused greatly and now basically means 'a javascript developer that generally knows what they are talking about'.
So now, devRant collective I ask you. What do you call a developer with good skills in:
- os level code (c, c++ and os apis)
- database level tech (advanced querying and db aglo/modeling)
- software architecture
- application level (workflow and business logic)
- transport level (protocol design and usage)
- front end tech (graphics programming and event driven paradigm)
- user experience14 -
My first project, ever, was a very unproud thing that was developed...
A little detail - I was 12 back then.
So, a distant family member had a business of selling things that they brought to the country. They, of course, needed a website and my parents knew that I had some skills in development so suggested them my services.
Discussion started and well, what came out was this:
1. They need a site with items list.
2. It had no actual design plans, no actual requirements, just a list.
3. Oh. It had to work perfectly on IE4 or IE5 (can't remember).
So what was actually done, was a site full of divs, clearfixes and so buggy that opening in any other browser than IE - resulted in a total failure.
We have sat down and I, with all the respect told them that my skills are not sufficient to make all of the browsers work equally (I've been on HTML/CSS for more than 6 months back then. And all of it was after school). They calmed me down and said that it's ok, they can give me as much time as I need to figure things out. Yet, my English wasn't good back then so I couldn't... (I was 12, with 3 years of basic English as a non-native speaker).
We sat around the table, discussed what could be done and if I could investigate that and re-do when I'm fully ready. I agreed. The site was launched for IE only as it worked fine and others were just throwing an error to visit it with IE.
They were happy, people were using it and they didn't say that anything was bad. Of course, management was thru FTP and editing LIVE files because, well, no php, no control panels, nothing... I felt ashamed that the site wasn't what they wanted but they were ultra happy with it - first customers rolled in from there. They paid me around 60EUR at that time (it was ~12 years ago) and I've spent a month there. (minimum monthly wage here was around 90-120EUR at that time...
So, all in all, this project that I still think I failed - pushed me to the world of devs and... I've never regretted it. Of course, when I actually met with them after years - they have dropped the site as it was not needed anymore but they said that it was exactly what they needed and there was nothing wrong, even if it didn't work perfectly.2 -
Started about 4 years ago after losing my job in social work. Realized I liked computers more than talking to people. Picked up a beginning Java text book, and worked through it in a month. I moved over to web development to help a buddy of mine and kill time while unemployed.
Since then, I've run a small web dev business and am currently director of technology for a company with an international presence. I still code on the side an recently launched a new mobile app with a buddy of mine from grade school.
I do not miss social work even a little bit.2 -
My parents (mom and grandma) helped me buy my first PC. I had some money saved from mowing lawns and they supplemented the rest. Mom, a library director, got a bunch of DOS and Assembler and BASIC books and encouraged me to teach myself.
That turned into computer camps and helping with tech at the library and school. That turned into a computer science and aerospace scholarship to college where I learned C and Unix.
That turned into a degree in business information systems and a career in web development.
19 more years to go and I can retire.3 -
Backend devs (and yes, even full-stack folks) who naively dismiss the nuance of a frontend dev role have clearly never tried to do a really good job at it. Or, don't realize the fullness of the responsibilities, more like.
Frontend devs have to reconcile all the requirements (and sometimes whims) of the following people:
- End Users, obviously
- Desires of Business stakeholders
- Visual Designers
- UX (Yes, it's a different discipline from vis design)
- Fellow frontend devs
- Performance budgets
- Accessibility specialists
- Content Authors (if using a CMS)
And rarely are they ever ALL aligned. Some days, it feels less like development and more like brokering deals and compromises.5 -
Many years ago, when I moved from a semi-experienced developer to an absolute beginner project manager at another company, my very first project was an absolute clusterfuck.
The customer basically wanted to scrape signups to their EventBrite events into their CRM system. The fuckery began before the project even started, when I was told my management that we HAD to use BizTalk. It didn't matter that we had zero experience with BizTalk, or that using BizTalk for this particular project was like using a stealth bomber to go down to the shops for a bottle of tequila (that's one for fans of Last Man on Earth). It's designed to be used by an experienced team of developers, not a small inexperienced 1-person dev team I had. The reason was for bullshit political reasons which I wasn't really made clear on (I suspect that our sales team sold it to them for a bazillion pounds, and they weren't using it for anything, so we had to justify us selling it to them by doing SOMETHING with it). And because this was literally my first project, I was young and not confident at all, and I wanted to be the guy who just got shit done, I didn't argue.
Inevitably, the project was a turd. It went waaay over budget and time, and didn't work very well. I remember one morning on my way to work seriously considering ploughing my car into a ditch, so that I had a good excuse not to go into work and face that bullshit project.
The good thing is that I learned a lot from that. I decided that kind of fuckery was never going to happen again.
A few months later I had an initial meeting with a potential customer (who I was told would be a great customer to have for bullshit political reasons) - I forget the details but they essentially wanted to build a platform for academic researchers to store data, process it using data processing plugins which they could buy, and commersialise it somehow. There were so many reasons why this was a terrible idea, but when they said that they were dead set on using SharePoint (SharePoint!!!) as the base of the platform, I remembered my first project and what happened.
I politely explained my technical and business concerns over the idea, and reasons why SharePoint was not a good fit (with diagrams and everything), suggested a completely different technology stack, and scheduled another meeting so they could absorb what I had said and revisit. I went to my sales and head of development and basically told them to run. Run fast, and run far, because it won't work, these guys are having some kind of fever dream, it's a clusterfuck in the making, and for some reason they won't consider not using SP.
I never heard from them again, so I assume we dropped them as a potential client. It felt amazing. I think that was the single best thing I did for that company.
Moral of the story: when technology decisions are made which you know are wrong, don't be afraid to stand up and explain why.
3 -
So one of my co-partner in a website development business we started, took up back end responsibilities from me, didn't complete a simple form handling in 3 months and then complained the 3rd partner that it was my work and I didn't do it and now I am the bad guy.
FUCK YOU BRO!6 -
I work in a large organization that previously didn't have it's own development team. Therefore various business areas have built their own solutions to solve problems which mostly involve Access and Excel.
Many of these applications still exist and we are expected to resolve any issues with them and update them when necessary performing this support role while still expected to meet our (very tight) development timelines.
I can't tell you how much of a pain in the tits it is to be trying to power through a priority development only to be interrupted with an urgent instruction to fix a 17 year old Access database that's running slow.
Of course it's pissing running slow, it's 17 years old, has nearly a million records and you have multiple users accessing it across the country!! I think it's time to peacefully let it die.6 -
Not really a rant (?)
I started my first programming job in January this year. I went there staight after Highschool, so i had no real experience, knew only the basics of software development and my written code was quite a mess. So one of my first real tasks (after 2 months) was to write a business logic for batch handling (for a warehouse management system). I invested quite some time to develop a suitable architecture, talked with some other developers and wanted to cover the whole thing with unit tests (which really nobody at the company uses). So I spent about 3 weeks to write the whole thing, test it and improve it many times. It worked perfectly and I got pretty good feedback from the code-review.
1 month ago - the code worked perfectly and was multiple times testet (also by the client) - the client came with some totally new requirements for the batch handling. I tried to impelemt them, but soon found out, that the architecture doesn't supported them, it was not build for the required handling and would soon become a totally mess, if i tried to make it work.
So I was pretty mad, because I had to change the whole fucking thing, but I also wanted to make it better. I hab gained some experience and decided (with some help of a senior dev) to make a completely new try with a different architecture, that can be easily expanded, if needed. I build my concept, wrote and tested the whole new code in 3 days. Fucking 3 days compared to the initial 3 weeks, and it worked, better and even faster.
I was quite pissed to delete the old code, and especially that i had wasted 3 weeks for it and had to struggle with many different things. But I lerarned so much from it and also in the months between, that I was also really glad that I had the opportiunity to write it again.
This whole thing made me now realize that this is, what I really like to do and what I'm good in. I really enjoy learning new things and for me, programming is the best and easiest way to do it. Despite alle the cons and annoying side effects of it, I really found my dream job here.1 -
So IBM finally jettisoned the cancer that was Virginia Rometty a few weeks back. They had an opportunity to move fresh blood and solid managerial background into the top slot with Jim Whitehurst (Redhat) and try and recover their flagging market share and do some sane business strategy. They passed on that opportunity and instead appointed the old guard bootlicker who overpaid for Redhat to the tune of 20x what it was worth, and signalled their intent to continue staying the course of the Titanic and it's slow inevitable trek towards the bottom of the ocean. The board wants a yes man, and they got one.
This is basically what I assumed would happen, but I have some other predications as well:
- Whitehurst will leave to a better company
- the redhatters that haven't already left will be replaced with commodity labor
- Redhat will be the least stable Linux offering 2 years after the last hatter leaves
- they will sell off most of their existing software assets to HCL/ similar consulting partners like they did with domino and websphere to stem the bleed
- the displaced in that move will either quit or be replaced
- their cloud initiative will collapse under the weight of its own stagnation and glacial pace of development
- they will attempt to salve these wounds by moving focus to global services, reducing profit loss by cutting salary costs, further diluting their eroding ability to innovate
- they'll buy at least one other trendy software company at ridiculous valuation, and sell it off within 2 years at a massive loss
- the CEO slot will start to resemble the late Roman empire with a new CEO every other week
- Redhat assets will be sold to Google inside of 5 years
Last prediction: I will be overjoyed being able to witness the death of IBM in my lifetime. Fuck them 🍻7 -
Today we were told that management decided that apart from software development we are also responsible for internal IT support, such as helping business with installing programs on their laptops. Yay!2
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!rant
I had a talk with my manager about my future role in the company. I had talked with him before about my interest to dive deeper in the technical side - rather than the business side, for which we have a higher dev demand.
The outcome is that I will work more closely with the senior devs on technical improvements and also tech strategy (e.g. implementation of code reviews). I will also advise the upcoming manager of the development team (who is coming from a PM position) on technical decisions. Lastly the roadmap for the company is to work more with cloud technology (azure), which is also going to be in my new duties.
I'm looking forward to these new challenges where I can improve myself on the technical side (yay!) rather than on the business side (which bored me).1 -
So, I departed for a month long Erasmus in Portugal and got to work for an education related business. From day 1, all my tasks consisted in transcribing data from paper to excel sheets, and then using that data for various different tasks. It became obvious that I wouldn't have had much programming to do by default, so I started creating a series of Python scripts to automate part of my work or aid me in some bothersome areas of it, and what at first seemed a grueling series of boring and repetitive work soon actually became fun. From this point on I challenged myself to make the scripts better and better under as many aspects as possible. I eventually ended up concluding all my daily tasks in a matter of 15 to 30 minutes everyday, as that's the time it took to adapt the scripts to the new document formats of the day :P Jokes aside, this truly proves a point though: small businesses like this one, that very much depend on manual labor for tasks that can easily be automated by 50 lines of code, truly would benefit from a prepared IT and development team, and it shocked me to see how little these guys know, and are even afraid at times, about innovative techniques to speed up work substantially. Truly a great and humbling experience for very young devs like me :)2
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For two projects, I have been in a solo work pattern, been a time bottleneck, and been irreplaceable on the projects. Four months ago I told management, "If anything happens to me these projects will be in trouble. I want to train a backup. I can't sustain this momentum. It isn't good for me, or for the success of these projects."
Four months later I still have no backup. They decided to diversity hire some new developers in the wrong area and now there is no money for a backup for me. I can't do all the work on both projects as a solo developer. I could have if I wasn't pushed into doing trial and error development on a poorly defined MS Dynamics API. Since the projects were behind schedule the customers lost confidence in the company to deliver. So the executives railroaded both project managers to save face.
Instead of addressing the development issues they did a bunch of other silly things. I got a job offer lined up and issued my resignation. That news absolutely exploded. After resigning my executive decided to say how awful I am in front of the customer in an attempt to save face for the company. The customer contacted the recently railroaded project manager and asks why. Former project manager tells customer, "You noticed how much faster the development of that part of the application went when he joined. You noticed how much better the quality of the project was. What do you think is happening? Do you think that a very good developer and an experienced project manager are to blame for the failures here?" So the executive is 13/10 pissed off because I may have accidentally struck a death blow for millions of dollars of business. I committed to taking care of the handover to the customer, and the company can't afford to get rid of me without completely losing confidence of the customer. The developers that I work with don't blame me at all and they are disgruntled that executive tried to character assassinate me and realize that it could have been them. I sense that I also may have initiated a developer mass-exodus. So the last few days have been the most stressful of my career but none of it is sticking to me because I followed all of the correct process.
You play stupid games you win stupid prizes.4 -
Oh my, never was i triggered more. Of course i can only speak for my experience. I study software development as focus.
First off, the starting languages and or concepts you learn.
Why the fuck do they start with java and don't even really explain how instances actually work? Of course they don't. Because it would be way too fucken much for a semester to go over garbage collection, Instanciation of stuff, allocation in such an advanced system, etc..
How about starting with something not 50% managed by a vm?
Good ol' C. And now don't tell me thats a rough start. We all know about these subjects or exams where it's all about sorting people out. Who will be able to manage a whole bunch of shit or who should consider something else.
Yo dawg sick idea: how about sorting it via the will to achieve the skill of coding?
Nah but we make the exams around coding (by the fucking way done on paper, what the hell) such a fucking breeze, asking you how to convert hex do dec.
Meanwhile maths will make you cut yourself in a dark corner, after you nearly shot yourself because of some lame-ass business-subject.1 -
Three days ago my focus was shifted from a development role to a support role. I was shifted to replace another support guy who had used fraud to get the position. I have no experience with this role but there was decent KT and I'm catching on fine. During onboarding and KT I'm serving as the first contact for new tickets and whatnot...
Today I got a ticket with an error on our production instance that no one had ever seen before. It prevented the guy from using our service entirely. I tried to reproduce it and... I couldn't use the service either. No one could. Everything was down. I could see the sweat building on my manager's forehead.
Thankfully another member on my team has done a bit of support before, so we collaborated with each other and other teams throughout the day to figure out what's wrong and how to fix it. I'm listening to them chat remotely as we speak - so far I've been working on it 9 hours straight.
This service is used by everyone - it's a business critical service with due dates on actions and escalations to managers... Imagine if the support ticketing service for your company crashed. That means a lot of people are asking what's wrong, requiring extensions, etc. I've been answering to managers and seniors in the business throughout the day.
The best part? We figured out why the server went down, and the reason is fantastic: someone updated the server's code without telling anyone, and all they had done was remove critical parsing code. Just took it right out, pushed, redeployed. We don't know who did it or who even has access to do that. I guess I have some detective work cut out for me after we've fixed everything that was broken by that.
I miss coding already.1 -
So I started working at a large, multi billion dollar healthcare company here in the US, time for round 2,(previously I wasn't a dev or in IT at all). We have the shittiest codebase I have ever laid eyes on, and its all recent! It's like all these contractors only know the basics of programming(i'm talking intro to programming college level). You would think that they would start using test driven development by now, since every deployment they fix 1 thing and break 30 more. Then we have to wait 3 months for a new fix, and repeat the cycle, when the code is being used to process and pay healthcare claims.
Then some of my coworkers seem to have decided to treat me like I'm stupid, just because I can't understand a single fucking word what they're saying. I have hearing loss, and your mumbling and quiet tone on top of your think accent while you stop annunciated your words is quite fucking hard to understand. Now I know english isn't your first language and its difficult, I know, mine is Spanish. But for the love of god learn to speak the fuck up, and also learn to write actual SQL scripts and not be a fucking script kiddie you fucking amateur. The business is telling you your data is wrong because you're trying to find data that exists is complex and your simple select * from table where you='amateur with "10years" experience in SQL' ain't going to fucking cut it. Learn to solve problems and think analytically instead of copy fucking pasta. -
!rant
I know this may not be the typical post on Devrant and it may be a little off topic, but I could really use some advice from fellow colleagues here.
The thing is, I just finished engineering school and I got my first job as a software engineer. So far so good. I've never been a natural talent in this field, and I suck at writing code. I find things like architecture, system design, innovation, requirementsspecification, management and business development much more interesting.
These past weeks as a software engineer has been really challenging for me. I seem to be totally "in over my head", and fuck everything up. I can't understand how the code I'm supposed to write works, and can't solve even the simplest of tasks that are assigned to me if they involve any implementation of code, or fiddling with Github or build servers.
Is it normal to feel like this as an engineer with zero experience? Will things get better, or should I just resign or wait to be fired?
What would a natural next step for a software engineer who'd like to move more into business and management be? A MBA? Project management courses?
I hope to get some advice from you guys. Maybe you've felt like this when you started out as well? Anyway, any constructive feedback would be really much appreciated.7 -
Rant against a new religion: the Agile Religion, started by the Agile Manifesto: https://agilemanifesto.org
This manifesto is as ambiguous and open to interpretation as any religious text. You might as well get advice from a psychic. If you succeed, you'll start believing in them more. If you don't, then they'll say you misinterpreted them. The whole manifesto just re-states the obvious with grandiloquent words.
For example: "Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale." What does this say REALLY? To me, it just says "deliver software, try to be fast." Great, thanks for re-writing my job description. Of course, some features take "a couple of weeks", while others "a couple of months". Again, thanks for re-stating the obvious.
"Value *working software* over _comprehensive documentation_"
Result => PHP
"Welcome changing requirements, even late in development."
I'm okay with this one as long as the managers also `welcome the devs changing deadlines, even the night before the release date`. We're not slaves; we're more like architects. If you change the plans for the building, we're gonna have to demolish part of what we've already built and re-construct. I'm not gonna spring just because you change your mind like a girl changes clothes.
"Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project."
Daily? Fine. ONCE a day, sure. But this doesn't give you the right to breathe down my neck or break my concentration by calling me every couple of mintues.
"The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation."
- Not if you could've summed up that meeting in an email.
- Whereas that might be true for clarity, write that down.
"Working software is the primary measure of progress."
... is how you get a tech debt the size of the US's.
"The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely."
Have you heard of vacations?
"Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility."
So you're telling us "do good". Again, thank you for re-writing my job description.
It's just a bunch of fancy babble, more suitable in poetry than in the dev world. It doesn't provide any scientific evidence for any of its supposed suggestions, so I just won't use it3 -
Met one of my friends after almost three months. (He was out on vacation)
We randomly start talking about life and what we aspire to be.
He's doing Business Management Studies, so naturally, he wants to be some sort of manager.
He then asks about me. I tell him how I'm learning and aspiring to be a Web dev and do a little bit of ML on the side.
And following conversation ensues:
Him- Dude, what's the use of learning web development? Anyone can make a website today. Haven't you seen those ads?
Me- *Knowing he's talking about WIX* Yeah I've seen em. But it mostly generates dumb templates. If you need something custom, you gotta take help from a professional.
Him - Nah dude, you can get custom made stuff from them too. Web developers will soon lose their jobs. Learn something else.
Me - *Trying to control the urge to punch, I tried to explain that a website is more than HTML and CSS*
He - *Doesn't want to understand what I'm saying and says I should do something else, since automation will take away developer jobs *
WHAT THE FLYING SPAGHETTI FUCK!?
Why don't these people FUCKING UNDERSTAND (even after telling again and again) that there's more to a website THAN JUST FUCKING STATIC TEMPLATES
EAT SHIT AND DIE YOU FUCKING BASTARDS
And what's with claiming to know more about someone's profession than the person himself who's spending his days and nights dealing with problems your fucking zombie brains can't even fathom.
This was literally the third guy I met this month who said something similar. Are these people so common now?2 -
Does anyone have experience in turning a website idea into a working business? I had a website idea so me and friend decided to make it happen. So far the development is going well, but we don't really know what's next after we're done. Does anyone know any resources regarding what's next? However to reach audience, investors and staff like that?11
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So good to see flash finally be put to pastor. Am I sad no flash sucked from a developer standpoint but even more from a business standpoint! Why? Here’s why!
....Yes it was fast in the sense of quickly getting content out and functioning BUT this ment you are at the mercy of Adobe / Macromedia (depending on the timeframe) for support AND mercy of the company whom create the browsers for support.
Meaning your product is fully reliant on others for existence and can easily not exist if one of two other beings choose.
For developers shame on you for accepting this you should never have supported this.. if you did it was just for a job you are suppose to be experts in your field and when management came to you for guidence you allowed this technology to be used rather than saying no this isn’t good! It’s too risky...
Fuck... how many people choose a career path that made them flash only developers.. well guess what becuase you niched yourself now your out of a job... rethinking now?
CAN ANY OF YOU TELL ME WHAT OTHER WIDLY USED TECHNOLOGY IS RELIANT ON A SEPARATE ENTITY?!
geee it would be a shame if one day that technology was phased out or no longer supported and then a date was picked and boom shutdown... geee that would suck...
I remember for years before it was announced it would be ending ... I said development around flash should be avoided at all costs because of it’s reliance on someone else for your product to function and exist...
Let this be a foreshadowing/ warning... learning experience/ AMAGE.. to those who use similarly situated technologies...
Developers you were warned.
Businesses you were warned.15 -
That’s it! I have had enough of business development, design and other non-technical departments of the business! STOP making us technical types sit through your demo meetings and circle-jerking each other on how great everything looks and “how exited you are for the future…”!
Look, I’m all for enthusiasm but taking it in turns to make over optimistic comments feels false and nauseating!!!!3 -
Has anyone ever had the joy of dragging their employer kicking and screaming into the 20th century?
I've been here a little over a year, and slowly but surely I'm moving us forward.
We implemented git via GitLab (our it department already had an on premise installation), I've got us up and running with basic pipelines, I'm pushing TDD, im leading the move towards APIs for new development, and I'm implementing new projects to streamline our work, mainly by automating tasks which currently can take hours with hundreds of manual changes.
It's slow going, and there's lots of legacy business critical apps which we won't be able to change, but we're getting there.
If things keep going smoothly then I might even ask for a ride to reflect my benefit to the business, and extra responsibilities I've taken on which are far beyond my official job as an SQL Developer5 -
With work from home being way more productive why the fuck would any software development company go back to the office? Rent, workstations, and electricity are expensive! Why spend that money when it’s not essential to your business.6
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TL:DR Company partner screws up and doesnt do job. I start new company and now able to make ends meet.
My friend and me started this company together. Our roles were defined. I would manage the development of stuff and he would manage getting the clients. I did my job. About a year into the company. He goes ahead and partners in another company. Normally I wouldnt bother, but this is when he stops getting clients for us. Our business drops 50% in the second year. He doesn't work but expects to be paid the same salary as me. I'm doing all the work for the clients while he wastes his time with the other company. He manages to make money doing stuff and buys a BMW, while I'm struggling to make rent.
Finally in Dec last year, I plan to start my own company. And i suddenly have lots of work which pays decently well. I'm looking to hire and am not as stressed with work any more.
Moral of the story: if you must partner, make sure your partner is fully invented in growing your company.3 -
We have built an entire app that is very critical to our business on google sheets. My boss did this all by convincing people he is doing that to save time on admin panel development. But the business suffers with slowness and so many problems. And he loves google sheets for some crazy reason I don't know.6
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Easy. I was in just 1, but i heard what they were all about. They happened weekly.
This boss mainly ran his hardware renting business. The software for that hardware was often optional, but they developed and sold that as a seperate company with almost the same name.
The guy had no idea what development meant. What it means to test. Everything he knew was hardware, and it just never really clicked. This means that bugs and non linear development cost for a feature were confusing to him to a point that when brought up or conflicting, he would look confused, and walk out the office without another word.
This guy would bust in, usually monday morning and call a "meeting"
They gather in the lunchroom as thats the only place everyone fit, and the guy would go on a 3 hour monologue on god knows what.
It was never positive and always full off complaints and idiotic ideas that the senior developer had to break down until as if talking to a big toddler, on why they do not work.
As a result everyones day started mizzerable, nothing got done. The software package was full of logic flaws. And everyone wanted to quit but didn't have the energy to invest in that.
During that internship 1 guy was fired. In the 2 months he was there he litterally did jack shit. And if he did anything it was the bare minimum, committed broken but compilable, and then wait for revision requests.
Yeah that place was a shitshow. I loved it, but never again. -
Early on in my freelancing career I learned something important. Even with seemingly tame nerdy stuff, sh*t can get real, real quick. This story describes the very start of my career in web development and hopefully will serve as a warning to newbies out there.
A young teen, I had just learned some basics of wordpress, I was confident I could hack together something that worked and looked okay with minimal effort and knowledge. One day I was approached by a guy who wanted a job board board site. Knowing there were already clones out there I figured this would be an easy gig, man was I wrong.
In addition to the fact I didn't know about contracts or the scope creep from hell, I had somehow gotten myself involved with a criminal business front.
These guys operated a scam business to rip off investors. Me and my designer buddy were used to make the business look legit. What they would do is hold job fairs where people are supposed to pay to rent a booth, but instead they would give everyone a booth for free and then lie about what all businesses were coming. They would then show this info, along with the website and marketing materials to investors. They would take the money from the investors and launder it for drugs.
The real story starts the day of one of the worst hangovers I had ever had. I was at a random friends house sleeping for most of the day.
Apparently one of the guys who was operating the scam business was about to strike a deal with one of the investors when something on the website didn't work (it was working as designed). This guy, Manny we'll call him, had been blowing up my phone all morning. I check my voicemails and there are threats on my life; saying I will be sleeping with the fishes, or if they ever find me, they'll fuck me up. Needless to say this really freaked me out, either way I decided to head back to my dorm.
When I come back home, my designer buddy tells me that some guys were in the house looking for stuff. Apparently this guy hired two nerds to "break into my computer and steal the website", fortunately they didn't know what they were doing.
After a while I got another call, Manny wanted to sit down and "talk things out". Being naive I accepted and we met up. The two nerds were there with one of his body guards. He said he wanted to have those two nerds take over the project. While this was going on, his bodyguard flashed his gun at me several times making eye contact. I agreed to, but I still wanted to get paid. I asked about getting paid and he said we never signed a contract and that he owned the host and domain. I was pretty much screwed.
This is where the story should end, but I wasn't a very smart guy back then. I gave up the site but I created a back door into it. Every week or so, they would get "hacked". Because the two nerds didn't know what to do, they ended up coming back to me for help. This is when I finally got paid. Totally not worth it. -
What just happened?
I had my annual review meeting with my bosses and everything was going well and I was doing a great job and I was working so independently and they were happy I used my training budget efficiently, great attendance and I have good standing at the customer, although I'm the only representative there. BUT... BUT... BUT... there will be no chance of a raise this year, because the company is not doing quite well currently (OK, I can understand that part) and also because I didn't do anything for business development, didn't bring new projects or anything.
I'm a developer, your typical slightly introverted geek. I'm not doing sales. That's not my job. That's not me. That's a part of why I'm not a contractor. I had this before in another job, and those expectations which seem to always only come out during those evaluations, were part of the reason why I left.
Fuck this for putting me in this situation again.
I'm really wanting to start looking for an in-house job at some production company again. Do these jobs still exist? Those consulting companies seem to expect things from me I can't and won't deliver.1 -
I can create and deploy a web app (LAMP stack) but I don't know how to create mobile apps. Should I hire mobile devs in the future or self study and create the mobile apps? Um or find some mobile developer to partner with? 🤨4
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happy new year! what do yall have planned for this year? I'm thinking about writing me up a miniature jarvis to automate my Web Development business, nothing really special just automated invoices, website installs, calendar, contract signing, etc. where all I have to do is type up a requirement list and code2
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So in grade 11 (2 years ago),i had to do something called "job shadowing".basically you choose a profession and you go to a workplace. My cousin (who's in the same SAP industry)got me into this SAP development place.there were like quite a few "developers" but mostly business analysts.they made me learn this (in my oppinion) absolute shit language called ABAP which I found to be mostly glorified SQL . First I had to just create a small program which I did in like a few minutes after my mentor taught me the basic commands but you have to learn alot of module numbers and other shit.and guess what ,I remember I had to end one liners with a damn full stop,seriously fucking irritating.
So,worst dev technology I've worked with ever is SAP.Bad thing is my cousin and my uncle are really trying to take me into that bullshit SAP shit of theirs but I always refuse.will never step my foot into a SAP development job ever.3 -
In my current role, most of the time i am supporting classic asp legacy apps which i absolutely dislike.
When i started the role i told them we have to rewrite the apps in .Net and they said sure sure.. Its been almost 2 years now yet it doesn't seem we are rewriting any time soon. Even if we did some people in the business want us to use Microsoft CRM dynamics.
Hence i am changing jobs. I am no fan of classic asp or Microsoft dynamics CRM for web application development2 -
So with the current project that I am working on, I'm in charge with creating various base classes, libraries, and helpers. The problem is that the other developers on the team just want to dive straight into developing the API endpoints without designing what the request and response formats should be, let alone decide what the URL structure should be!
So in the middle of their development work, they keep telling me how this and that don't work, or they can't figure out why Laravel is throwing this particular error. It's starting to piss me off that I'm having to do an architect's job whilst also teaching these guys how to use Laravel because they don't bother reading the documentation.
The worst part is that once they've completed their implementation, I'll have to end up fixing it because it's either missing a bunch of business rules, or it doesn't account for any error handling. -
Ugh there's little to no labor laws for developers.
Sometimes they don't even list software development as an industry.
We don't really analyze business finances, but we create tools that help real analysts to gather data and visualize economic trends. We don't really teach kids, but we create tools for schools. We're not in retail, but our cusomters are.
"Oh I know! You're an **electrician**. I'll put you next to the people who install air conditioning."
"How about... storage services?" I say "we storage our customer's data. At least that is accurate."
"Oh yeah like wholesale!"
"I recommend you write down telecomuncations." I mean, we do use HTTP if that's what you mean, but would you call a restaurant to be in the telecommunications industry just because they have social media accounts?3 -
The sheer amount of information to be gained in this field, and in my case specifically at my job, is mind boggling. Maybe it's just the week of fatigue talking here but I feel I'm way in over my head. Learning business, teamwork, development strategies, progress tracking, the code base itself, how different teams work together, how different sectors work together, overarching goals, individual goals, and then going home and having a social life, good nights rest, and somehow exercise in there?
It's certainly overwhelming. I know being new makes it seem worse than it likely is but I don't see how people even manage to amass so much knowledge in such a short amount of time. It's honestly so exhausting to keep track of everything and try not to make mistakes that it's nauseating. I'm still gonna try but good lord does it feel impossible. -
Isn't it fun when you are given a library or framework and that in order to debug it you have to use some hacky way of hooking the code to a special instance of the project?
Even more fun: the developers by default don't debug the project with tools, but rather with logic. Ok, that's a good way to debug but it shouldn't be the only way to debug. I don't want to go back to the age of coding on paper. At least give me a stacktrace that's halfway clear on what's happening there. Even worse is when the framework doesn't document its own problems! stacktrace.someMagicalMethodNoOneKnowsWhatItDoes(). Having to read the even more mystic and overly verbose documentation! You're just left there trying and guessing shit, even for the senior devs!
And do you know what's more fucked up?! Fucking using println() to debug!! And they take this shit seriously! I don't understand how these people call themselves programmers. No breakpoints? What the fuck, man!
Just give me Visual Studio for fuck's sake. I don't want to code in a broken IDE with a broken framework. Development on its own is already hard enough, so don't make it harder by giving me crappy frameworks and crappy IDE's that only work half the time.
Debugging without a debugger, with broken IDE's, with broken frameworks, I'm sorry but that's just not for me. And then the framework dares advertise that it 'lets the developer focus on business code!' (how many times have you heard this crap before?). Right, the only thing I focus on constantly is trying to figure out why their broken framework doesn't work.
Arghhh. -
I just came home from opening of the fiscal year of a small drivers' club and it was quite an amazing life experience.
I got about a 5-times "rise" for a first, small, post-due-time project.
All of the members were so relaxed in one of the most serious moments of an association. We ate, drank beer and had as much fun as possible without break the law and other rules.
The story goes like this:
I was an intern in a website development company as students tend to do. In middle of the internship my teacher asked me if I'd be willing to develop a website to the before mentioned organization.
School will help with the money by being as a middle-man. It wasn't going to pay much, about 120€ or so, it's nothing really for the job, but I said yes for the experience. We organized a meeting, school provided the space, and went straight to the business.
The development went quite well: I got the final design requirements late (there weren't too much), research a lot about CMS:s, ended up with a beta version CMS (a risk), learned it, developed some plugins (not published yet), kept copyrights for most of the work and so on.
I was done _relatively_ quickly with the project and was quite happy with it. Only things still pressing my mind was bugs of the beta CMS, support for the plugins and my somewhat inexperienced graphical design.
Then it hit me, the world. Hosting, domain transfer, certificates, registry agreements. Arrgh. Most of things were fine, I know them. I had luck that I had a technical contact for the club. It would have been a nightmare of it's own otherwise.
We had problems transferring the domain, again, as you do. The other hosting company was to blame. They were the n00bs here. I went trough the law, technical guidance, etc. I was having heavy messaging with my technical contact about it, who was a middle-man for me and the hosting firms.
After a long while loop of waiting, reconfiguring, researching and messaging, until he transfer was finally over.
We had a long while of radio silence after some bug fixes. Until the Christmas came and I was invited to a Christmas party in a cottage, third Christmas party that year. It was great fun. We ate, drank, talked, went to sauna and had a playful adult stiga or sledging competition, etc.
I updated the site yet again, a stable version of the CMS were published. Yess!
Another radio silence came and year changed. It was broken off by a call to the opening of the fiscal year, the same day. This is today, or yesterday by now. This was just after my current company's board game night. I was really busy that day. A whole afternoon of second-hand shopping around the city with a bike. I counted 35 kilometers. Yes I go by bike, don't own a car or have an driving license... Yet.
I wasn't horribly late, around 30 minutes. I started eating and drinking. Free food and beer! They was also late, they should've got trough the business before I got there, before eating. So I ate and listened. Learned more about having business or an association in general. Until my matter came to be heard. They thanked me of the co-operation and made public the change of my reward sum, I WAS GRANTED 500€ REWARD for the work. It's still not an amazing sum in a larger point of view, but I can imagine that it's big deal for a small non-profit organization, which was loosing money. Everybody applauded, every 25 members of the club. I was greatly pleased. I will have to update their site a bit still, but they are going to pay the reward ASAP.
Did I mention that the school works around the taxes, legally. Taxes for the reward, if it were assumed as a wage would be 15%, for me, at the worst case scenario, only for getting the money to my hands.
I was offered another gig at the event, but didn't promise anything yet. I left before sauna, so we didn't get to change contact details. He will find a way to reach me if he really wants so. I'm a busy free man.3 -
Working in an Agile software development department (12 dev teams, >100 developers) inside a very old school traditional business (15000 staff, several billion annual turnover) is an uphill struggle that I don’t know if I have the energy to persevere with.
New year is making me think I push the launch button on a product that I spent all of last year building.
For context I should add that I am a senior person / leader in the department so I have to deal with a lot of shit from the suits. -
Uni nowadays be like:
Lecturer says everyone should come up with an idea, find out how much it costs, figure out the competition, write a business plan, find out the development costs and indicate your value proposition. Best idea gets an A.
This is more like trading an A for a potential billion dollar idea.2 -
It never ceases to amaze me how the business end can get in the way of sensible, efficient development. I get why, to an extent, but it's really mind-blowing at times.
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Hello Devrant. I really need a second opinion on this one. I work in this promising start-up and our current evaluation is about 10 mill $. I have a vesting opportunity in the company where I earn 2.5% of none dilutable shares in the company over three years. I also get salary of about 500$ a month just to survive. Though it is the plan that I get a decent salary once we have more funding secured.
I'm the CTO of the company where we are 10 employees in total and 5 are in the development team.
I've been programming for about one year now so I'm not that experienced and some of the guys I lead are much more experienced than me. Which is good because I grow my skills quickly, but it is a challenge sometimes.
I'm really in doubt if I have got a good deal in the company. I started working in February and back then the company was valued at around 1.5 mill $. I have always been loose about not demanding money right away and said to the CEO that we will figure that out about the money eventually and I trusted him blindly. When he gave the offer of 2.5% vesting I just accepted it right away, because I was a beginner in coding and I just wanted to learn. Also I was traveling around the world for a few months at the time and it was a great way to get a little money quickly.
I also study together with two colleges who are some of my best friends. We study business development at university and have round 1.5 year left. It's a lot of work
but we've managed to only study about 1 week in advance of the exams and still pass. So we all still working full time on the company.
I've never known how many shares the other guys had, but yesterday me and the other partners had a meeting about some contract and the CEO pointed out how many shares everybody had. I was stunned to hear that the my two other colleges that I study with have 10% each. And the reason for that is that they helped start the company from the beginning and I've only joined when it was around 6 months old. Still I find it difficult to that that it's fair that they should have 4 times as much as me. I would say the amount of value we provide to the company is about the same. One of the guys is only the son of the CEO, which should not change anything.
For me it's not all about the money but I don't want to be taken advantage of. I can't determine if I'm being overdramatic about this and whether it is a good deal or if it sucks and I should find another place to work. Also my studies at the University are pretty much intertwined with the company by now. All our school projects are something that creates value to the company and if I leave I would have to dramatically change the direction of my education.
I know that there is a lot of information here and that I'm not the best at writing, but what would you have done in my situation?7 -
Recently started reading about how businesses startup and grow. As much as I hate to admit it, their problems seem more daunting than technical challenges developers face. The nature of problems is so much more dynamic, unstructured and nuanced. After all, leading strangers to work towards your personal vision is kinda neat!1
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[Background]
Back in September I joined a startup after my first job in MNC for about 1.8 yrs as a fresher. I always wanted to learn, but the experience in that MNC was not at all fruitful. So ai decided to join a small/mid size company or a startup. To my luck, I got in this small startup in a week after my resignation as a front-end dev (always wanted to be).
It's an automation company, so you can find software, electronics, even mechanical engineer.
The team was almost a year younger than me. It was a team of around 12 people, in which 5 of them were from Business development.
The tech team was too driven and knowledgeable. Always trying new stuffs and motivating to do the same. I was highly motivated by them in my initial days, watching them working on new stuffs.
So I started with revamping their website completely in Angular 4, and did it in around a month or so, being new to Angular. Outcome was pretty satisfactory. I wanted to work on new projects, but just to get the cashflow in they started getting in WordPress projects. It was frustrating, I wanted to work more on new technologies like Angular, React, etc...but just for the survival of the company I had to work on WordPress, so to respect their urge to get going I kept working on 3-4 projects in parallel, and mind you the clients were from hell !!
Fast-forward 4 months, I am still working on few WordPress websites, and one internal GPS based project in React. And I haven't received my salary for past 3.5 months, since the company is still struggling with the issue of funding and getting money from clients. I kinda liked working there because there was lot to learn even though they are so young, but I had bills to pay too.
And I am in dilemma to leave the company or not, because I already stretched 3 months out of good will and guilt of leaving the company in high time. So i finally let the CEO know that I cannot stick for any longer. And i was done with the false promises of getting the salary "next month" everytime. All the money getting inside of company was invested heavily on the product we were building and no one was getting the salaries. Others were fine since they were founding members too.
Long story short : I finally left immediately and now working in a good company as a React dev. I hope they do well and I would love to see them grow, but please *STOP* making false promises and hold on to employees on a lie.1 -
what the fuck are "covariant" return types...
I've been using java since java exists through all different versions. Mostly for web development.
Today I discovered "covariant" return type. What a shitty name.
I think I used the concept even without being aware of it...maybe just -oh- because Eclipse is allowing or even suggesting it.
I honestly cannot develop without Eclipse suggestions.
But here I am, survived 30 here in the business, developing end-to-end web applications for thousand of customers and deploying them.
And failing stupid questions in moronic interviews. Fuck.
PS also I don't use Streams. sorry.4 -
Since early 2016 a LinuxDev at my work, pushed me (windows admin) right in the CentOS world. With some practise I had to build a infrastructure to deploy Ubuntu to development clients (laptops with stuff without windows) In perspective I had to migrate this infrastructure to my team (windows admins) and run it there as were this all the time our business. I loved powershell but for some reason I have had to learn Ruby, bash etc.. Now I am the first Admin with some pretty skills in Linux, my workplace comes without any version of Windows. I am flying with Debian, Ubuntu, redhat and CentOS. The finished work from past enabled my team and me to drop fully automated Linux Clients for our developers.
Well last weekend Windows 10 fuc*** up with the creators update and destroyed even my USB3 ports... I didn't even spend lot of my time playing with this machine... So my desk is now running arch.
That day my colleague thought, windows isn't my passion is thanked every week once for directing me in this pretty good world.
Today I am still the first Linux DevOps in my team, but still happy.1 -
RAD (Rapid Application Development, such as Oracle's colossal frameworks) frameworks aren't rad at all. They promise to let you focus on your business code, but instead what they do is bring you additional problems to have gray hairs over.
Thoughts?9 -
Our clients came from abroad to have 4 days of business meetings and planing about next stage of product development. Of course they wanted to go shopping and to restaurants etc. Obviously they can not call a cab because they cannot say the name even close to its correct pronunciation. Who do you think needed to babysit them? You guessed right - me. FUCK MY LIFE2
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I posted a few weeks ago about how I started my own mobile app development business. Today, I released its first app. It's a turn by turn navigation app for amusement parks, right now it's only featuring Walt Disney World. If you have an Android the app is called AmuseGO. I'm waiting for apple to approve it.
2 -
It feels like half of what I do is just tell people that their code sucks and it needs to be replaced, then I drag them through the 5 stages of grieving the loss of an application that has them trapped in an abusive relationship.
1. Denial:
The unique and complicated needs of our business lead to this unique and complicated architecture. This is all here for a reason, and it's all needed.
2. Anger:
What do you mean it's going to take 6 months to rebuild this? We made MVP in 3 months!
3. Bargaining:
Surely we don't need to throw it all away! There must be something worth salvaging!
4. Depression:
Stake holders and going to think we're not getting anything done! This is a nightmare 😭
Six months later...
6. Acceptance:
Holy shit thank god we got away from that glass tower before it shattered and cut us all to pieces! Side note: development velocity is on fleek. #profit3 -
I'm looking for collaborators for a site I'm making in laravel for my dad's apple/produce orchard business. I've pretty much have finished front end design but could use help in the back end development. I can't really pay anyone right now because I'm broke but it's more resume material and you would be helping a brother out so anyone interested let me know:)18
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Have you ever found a infinite task? Well, I did.
So, the software that I'm working now was under responsibility of another company for development and maintenance (I'll call them X) from 2014 to last month , and the company I work for was handling only with the business part. Now we took all the development for us as well.
This software has a lot of reports , so it has a lot of templates for this reports.
When X was handling the software, they asked the client and the old project manager if they wanted the templates to have the client's products dynamic (no need to change the template when adding a new product) or hardcoded for some products they already had, they choose hardcoded because it would be faster. Butterfly effect.
Fast forward to this week, the team leader designated a task for me, It looked easy at first, just fix 2 templates, easy.
Oh boy, I was so wrong.
I fixed the first template, discovering in the process the hardcoded things, had to add the product reference in a lot of places.
So i went to the second item, a super template that they use to put together some smaller templates.
It was really weird, I couldn't find all the templates that it was supposed to use, and I didn't really know the exact problem, the only thing I knew was that it was not being generated, the reason could be the super template itself or one of the 15 smaller templates, that could happen to have sub templates.
So I called the team leader and explained to him wtf was happening, he called the senior business analyst, that called the PM, we agreed that it would be infinite because of those fucking hardcoded things, they prepared a excel sheet with this and a lot of other problems and will send this to the client, explaining that we'll need a lot of time to put this new product up and running.
Now I'm in the middle of this shit storm seeing a time of darkness in the future.
Ps: This new product was supposed to be inserted in the software since last November, when it was under X responsability, and they analyzed it and said that it would take 190 hours to be completely done, the client refused. It was the first rain drop of what would become a shit storm. -
My dad used to write DbaseII programs for the Marines in the 80s (logistics officer, was moving the batallion’s local copy of maintenance records to digital in parallel with the mandatory file card system), then went on to manage enterprise-level software development programs as a government contractor when he got out, so he has a pretty good sense of what goes on in my small, 1-man web shop, and has even advised on best practices at times. Mom knows the basics from years of observation.
Recently my dad also became a business partner in a venture we’re working on launching, so for that particular project he has a *very*clear idea of what goes on and where things are at.2 -
Sometimes I think to keep development as a hobby for my side projects and not as a full time job.
Hate how development/programming has to compromised for businesses.
Hoping some of you will get what I'm trying to say. -
Ever since I started out in a programming job, I have always been a sole developer. I have worked in teams before but it was usually me being the mentor, despite my own knowledge being very limited.
However years ago I worked for a successful ecommerce business and it was the first time that I felt like a junior. At the time I was the type that never cared much about front-end and design. But the senior developers there had taught me how design of the website, and how we treat the customers is important. By making sure that we give them the best customer experience, they will come and shop again.
Although I still primarily focus on backend development, I still hold onto what they taught me. Even now at times I give my input to designers and project managers about design, UI/UX, and the customer experience. But more importantly bestow that mindset to my fellow developer co-workers. -
TL;DR: Computers and I go way back, but I don't know how I ended up as a dev - and am still not certain that's what I want to do for the rest of my life.
Rewind to the early 80's. My friends at the time got the Comodore 64 one after the other. I never got one. Heck, we didn't even have a color TV back then. Only a 12/14" small B&W TV. It's easy to conclude that I spent a lot of time at my friends'.
Back then it mostly was about the games. And, living in the rural countryside, the only way to aquire games was to pirate them. Pirating was big. Cassette tape swapping and floppy disk swapping was a big deal, and gamers contacted eachother via classifieds sections in newspapers and magazines. It was crazy.
Anyways. The thing about pirated games back then is that they often got a cracktro, trainer, intro or whatever you want to call them - made by the people who pirated the game. And I found them awesome. Sinus scrollers, 3D text, cool SID-tunes and whatnot. I was hooked.
My best friend and I eventually got tired of just gaming. We found Shoot'Em-Up Construction Kit, which was an easy point-and-click way to create our first little game. We looked into BASIC a bit. And we found a book at the library about C64 programming. It contained source code to create your own assembler, so we started on that. I never completed it, but my friend did.
Fast forward through some epic failure using an Amstrad CPC, an old 486 and hello mid 90's. My first Pentium, my first modem and hello Internet! I instantly fell in love with the Internet and the web. I was still in school, and had planned to enter the creative advertising business. Little did I know about the impact the web would have on the world.
I coded web pages for fun for some years. My first job was as a multimedia designer, and I eventually had to learn Lingo (Macromedia Director, anyone?) And Actionscript.
Now I haven't touched Flash for about 7 years. My experience has evolved back to pure web development. I'm not sure if that's where I will be in the future. I've learned that I certainly don't know how to do everything I want to do - but I have aquired the mindset to identify the tasks and find solutions to the problem.
I never had any affiliation with the pirate scene or the demo scene. But I still get a little tingling whenever I see one of those sinus scrollers. -
I would start with the development of the idea me and my friends made a business plan about a while back. It was about a medicine cabinet which offers you only the medication you need and the right amount of it. It furthermore informs you about side effects and alerts when you run out of stock. It was meant to fit elderly as well as also large scale hospitals were one case would be used for each room of patients.5
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What the actual freaking fuck?!?! First this company postponed my jobinterview with a week. Ok shit is busy that can happen. No problem.
I was just about to leave my home when i got a call from them.
“I didn’t know if the interview was remote or not so blabla. Last week we talked to a company and are gonna outsource our development. Therefor we won’t hire any developer right now. But maybe in six months”
WTF?! Are you fucking kidding me? Goddamn asshole, this is ridiculous.
I should’ve just hang up right there. If you run your business like this and threat people this way, i don’t even want to work at your company. Motherfucker1 -
I am starting my web development business and i intend to focus on building mainly custom ecommerce solutions to small and medium businesses or large ones too. I am just about to launch my first project and my client has been great.
Any advice from the pros in the house who have been there done that will be worth more than diamond right now to me.
I like advice mainly on how to find new clients.2 -
Sydochen has posted a rant where he is nt really sure why people hate Java, and I decided to publicly post my explanation of this phenomenon, please, from my point of view.
So there is this quite large domain, on which one or two academical studies are built, such as business informatics and applied system engineering which I find extremely interesting and fun, that is called, ironically, SAD. And then there are videos on youtube, by programmers who just can't settle the fuck down. Those videos I am talking about are rants about OOP in general, which, as we all know, is a huge part of studies in the aforementioned domain. What these people are even talking about?
Absolutely obvious, there is no sense in making a software in a linear pattern. Since Bikelsoft has conveniently patched consumers up with GUI based software, the core concept of which is EDP (event driven programming or alternatively, at least OS events queue-ing), the completely functional, linear approach in such environment does not make much sense in terms of the maintainability of the software. Uhm, raise your hand if you ever tried to linearly build a complex GUI system in a single function call on GTK, which does allow you to disregard any responsibility separation pattern of SAD, such as long loved MVC...
Additionally, OOP is mandatory in business because it does allow us to mount abstraction levels and encapsulate actual dataflow behind them, which, of course, lowers the costs of the development.
What happy programmers are talking about usually is the complexity of the task of doing the OOP right in the sense of an overflow of straight composition classes (that do nothing but forward data from lower to upper abstraction levels and vice versa) and the situation of responsibility chain break (this is when a class from lower level directly!! notifies a class of a higher level about something ignoring the fact that there is a chain of other classes between them). And that's it. These guys also do vouch for functional programming, and it's a completely different argument, and there is no reason not to do it in algorithmical, implementational part of the project, of course, but yeah...
So where does Java kick in you think?
Well, guess what language popularized programming in general and OOP in particular. Java is doing a lot of things in a modern way. Of course, if it's 1995 outside *lenny face*. Yeah, fuck AOT, fuck memory management responsibility, all to the maximum towards solving the real applicative tasks.
Have you ever tried to learn to apply Text Watchers in Android with Java? Then you know about inline overloading and inline abstract class implementation. This is not right. This reduces readability and reusability.
Have you ever used Volley on Android? Newbies to Android programming surely should have. Quite verbose boilerplate in google docs, huh?
Have you seen intents? The Android API is, little said, messy with all the support libs and Context class ancestors. Remember how many times the language has helped you to properly orient in all of this hierarchy, when overloading method declaration requires you to use 2 lines instead of 1. Too verbose, too hesitant, distracting - that's what the lang and the api is. Fucking toString() is hilarious. Reference comparison is unintuitive. Obviously poor practices are not banned. Ancient tools. Import hell. Slow evolution.
C# has ripped Java off like an utter cunt, yet it's a piece of cake to maintain a solid patternization and structure, and keep your code clean and readable. Yet, Cs6 already was okay featuring optionally nullable fields and safe optional dereferencing, while we get finally get lambda expressions in J8, in 20-fucking-14.
Java did good back then, but when we joke about dumb indian developers, they are coding it in Java. So yeah.
To sum up, it's easy to make code unreadable with Java, and Java is a tool with which developers usually disregard the patterns of SAD. -
I am so fucking tired being the handy man that solves every problem that arises from a disgraceful project management.
I was minding my own business when a project was handed to me two weeks before the production rollout. In this project they needed a ton of integrations with the destination system and nothing was done.
So naturally I started to ask where were the integration specifications and what infrastructure was supporting the project so I could start development right away.
There were no DEV nor QA infrastructure, only production, and no one could give me a straight answer about what exactly they needed to do. That alone was a huge red flag but the kicker was that I could only start when the software provider development team finished the configurations of the system that they wanted to integrate with. After reviewing the due dates I only had 4 days to implement the integrations before the rollout.
During those 4 days I was constantly on the phone trying to get enough information to implement everything in time. After an immeasurable effort I managed to implement every critical component for the rollout.
So fucking tired of this shit.......1 -
Say what you will but React JS development is utterly exhausting. Every React project is a totally new stack and there is no consensus in the ecosystem.That is how I feel after having worked on 5 big SPA React JS projects over the course of 5 years.
The structure of these projects was all but similar: most used HOC's, some render props, functions-as-a-child, hooks or rather component lifecycles, some used container-components, some Redux, others sprinkled business logic & state all over, and yet others use a mix of server-side rendering and "hydration"...
I dangerouslySetInnerHTML on LazyExoticComponents, and dared not useEffect on the DO_NOT_TOUCH_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED root property. Hooks embrace functions, but without sacrificing the practical spirit of React, you see.
I didn't make this up. It's verbatim from the code and the docs.
This is not web development, this is at best a tedious fantasy multiplayer game or at worst, a costly joke.5 -
I'm fucking Paralyzed and I need some advice.
I want to be an entrepreneur.
Not just an entrepreneur but a DAMN good one.
I self-studied business, economics, physics, self-taught multivariable calculus, teaching myself chemistry too.
But I haven't even started my career and I just graduated from University.
Right now I'm starting simple and just doing a few web development things.
But, I want to go deeper into a subject that hasn't really had its problem solved yet.
A.I. can sell you neat things, but it can't kill misinformation (yet).
Graphics are an integral part to gaming, but GPUs are the second greatest threat to our environment behind commercial jets.
Do I HAVE to choose between A.I. and graphics?!14 -
Have you ever worked for an organization that is not specialized in software development because that is not their main line of business, however, their products are software applications?
If you are, then hi you and me are in the same boat. Currently I have a nice manager and I'm acting as dev lead the strange thing I have a peer that is supposed to be lead as well but I cannot define his position....
In theory he should be scrum master / resource manager which fails at both terribly.
I ended up implementing Agile in the team and deciding what goes and not into the sprint based on quality while this guy just try to squeeze stuff into the sprint, the more the better even with all kinds or problems...
Honestly I'm not sure why he is still in the team since it seems like he only drains the budget, doesn't understand a thing about the products he is working on and every single idea he has is horrible.
Every meeting I have with him I always ended up asking myself "How can somebody be that stupid?" The lack of technical knowledge and even common sense is over 9000 in this one...
It might sound bitter from my end but after two years of dealing with this stupidness of getting people in software development that have no idea what software development is and understand the intricacies of it just because they did an access database or are good at excel is nonsense.
I'm at the verge of quitting and the only thing that is keeping me here is my manager and the fact that the products I am working with are pretty interesting.
Sorry for the long rant but I had to get it out of my chest before it explodes and I directly call out this person.
Not looking for suggestions but if anybody want to chime in go ahead.1 -
Hey guys, first time writing here.
Around 8 months ago I joined a local company, developing enterprise web apps. First time for me working in a "real" programming job: I've been making a living from little freelance projects, personal apps and private programming lessons for the past 10 years, while on the side I chased the indie game dev dream, with little success. Then, one day, realized I needed to confront myself with the reality of 'standard' business, where the majority of people work, or risk growing too old to find a stable job.
I was kinda excited at first, looking forward to learning from experienced professionals in a long-standing company that has been around for decades. In the past years I coded almost 100% solo, so I really wanted to learn some solid team practices, refine my automated testing skills, and so on. Also, good pay, flexible hours and team is cool.
Then... I actually went there.
At first, I thought it was me. I thought I couldn't understand the code because I was used reading only mine.
I thought that it was me, not knowing well enough the quirks of web development to understand how things worked.
I though I was too lazy - it was shocking to see how hard those guys worked: I saw one guy once who was basically coding with one hand, answering a mail with another, all while doing some technical assistance on the phone.
Then I started to realize.
All projects are a disorganized mess, not only the legacy ones - actually the "green" products are quite worse.
Dependency injection hell: it seems like half of the code has been written by a DI fanatic and the other half by an assembly nostalgic who doesn't really like this new hippy thing called "functions".
Architecture is so messed up there are methods several THOUSANDS of lines long, and for the love of god most people on the team don't really even know WHAT those methods are for, but they're so intertwined with the rest of the codebase no one ever dares to touch them.
No automated test whatsoever, and because of the aforementioned DI hell, it's freaking hard to configure a testing environment (I've been trying for two days during my days off, with almost no success).
Of course documentation is completely absent, specifications are spread around hundreds of mails and opaquely named files thrown around personal shared folders, remote archives, etc.
So I rolled my sleeves up and started crunching as the rest of the team. I tried to follow the boy-scout rule, when the time and scope allowed. But god, it's hard. I'm tired as fuck, I miss working on my projects, or at least something that's not a complete madness. And it's unbearable to manually validate everything (hundreds of edge cases) by hand.
And the rest of the team acts like it's all normal. They look so at ease in this mess. It's like seeing someone quietly sitting inside a house on fire doing their stuff like nothing special is going on.
Please tell me it's not this way everywhere. I want out of this. I also feel like I'm "spoiled", and I should just do like the others and accept the depressing reality of working with all of this. But inside me I don't want to. I developed a taste for clean, easy maintainable code and I don't want to give it up.3 -
Being a development project manager is laughing at developer jokes with developers and then laughing at the developers with the business folks4
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Thing is, I do iOS development, I am almost a senior, holding a business on my own.. But I do not like iOS development and I am stuck here... Whatever company I go, I just get iOS stuff8
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I just finished posting this but think it deserves its own post.
If you're creating a business or "startup" (as people like to call it these days) don't assume the idea is novel or investors will just jump on board. Focus on the business fundementals, money and cash flow, even before launch, unless you can afford not to. But really you can't afford not to. Selling before launch means that you're effectively doing two things 1 you're collecting new customers and income for the business and 2 you're. raising awareness at the same time. Obscurity is death and failure.
Get you a good sales team and marketer when the time is right.
Have a year of runway.
Identify the sites and groups your target audience and investors frequent. Start conversations now, buzz is the hardest thing to generate.
Start building relations with customers and potential clients now. Discuss launch, ask them if they'd be willing to pay up front before launch, in order to secure a "lifetime membership", offer it as an early opportunity and charge extra. Giving a discount out of the gate is a mistake B/c it says to potential investors that you don't think it's ready or worth it yet. Of course if it's between making 1. Some money or 2. No money, don't let it be a deal breaker, offer a discount. Going from no clients to any clients is a BIG deal. If you can do 1 you can make it to 10, if 10, you can reach 100, we etc.
No one likes asking for money and yet it is as important if not more important than development. -
A shitty platform that, although open source, there is no clearly documented way of setting a development environment for it. This pile of crap states clearly that it does NOT support RTL languages. One of the core business requirements is Arabic support. What to do? Look for other platforms? WRONG!
Base the fucking business on it and ask ME to see why the SQL database is not encoding the Arabic characters correctly and to look into the logs that back-end puked. My expertise is mobile development anyways damnit. Sure the backend code is Java code (Java jokers and haters, not the appropriate place) and I know it but there is no fucking way to test that motherfucker or to build it! No fucking testing server can be made! Only instructions to get a Docker image pulled and set up.
FML.
"This company is a fucking م."
I cannot believe I am so frustrated that I am ending this rant with a fun puzzle.
Hints to help you decipher the quoted sentence:
Hint 1: That Arabic letter is the perfect letter.
Hint 2: You don't need to be an Arab to understand what it means.6 -
uncle bob and his “cLeAn aRcHiTeCtUrE” was a setup all along. His teachings were conceived by managers, the most useless part of our field, to cripple and disempower developers. They wanted to make our work excruciatingly slow and unnecessarily difficult, so they could maintain their job security.
It is obvious that if you were to ditch all that useless boilerplate, the work process becomes way easier, quicker and more streamlined. In that scenario, managers aren’t needed, at all.
They have played us for absolute fools. uncle bob is the biggest disgrace to ever happen to our field. Let’s leave this dark chapter in the past and move on into the world of quick, effortless development, with happy engineers, happy business and the complete lack of burnout. Also, it is time to make managers a thing of the past.8 -
//rant
Two weeks ago we delivered four parts from a request containing about 30 minor developments to ease general every day operations.. this week my boss demanded a specified fallout report about how those cut our expenses and costs, how many percentage those four of the total amount of savings all 30 developments would save and whatnot.
ARE YOU FUCKING SHITTING ME!? They've been in prod for ONE god damn week and the intended operations are not even launched yet! How about you go and CHILL THE FUCK DOWN!? I understand that whole part about growing business and getting it to stay alive, but you sir.. you.. GAAAH!! -
tldr: I am looking for recommendations for a basic website for my parents. GOTO question;
Pre-Story:
My parents have a small (offline) business. They have a website to give some general information and list their weekly offers.
When I felt that what has come out of the website-building tool (you know, clicky clicky stuff) looked a bit too early 2000's and is a total ripoff for what you get (almost 20€ per month), I created something with Google Sites for them. Feel free to roast me, but web development is not my field and now it looks much more modern, is mobile friendly and does what it is supposed to do. Weekly offers are edited in a google sheets file, which is embedded in the website. Not great, but this way my mom doesn't have to deal with editing a tables on the page - trust me, it won't look good. This also meant they could downgrade the hosting package to discard the clicky-tool and just the domain (maybe 1€ per month). The website itself is hosted for free by Google.
Some time ago GDPR became a thing and then I was tasked to have a look at it. (side note: I don't want to rant about being responsible for it, that's fine. My parents don't really ask me to do a lot for them.) You can't enter any data on the website, it's just very basic stuff and data protection wise there's just the "usual" stuff (cookies, embedded tools, logs). I added another site with a halfway complete privacy policy. Regarding the whole cookie issue (do not enforce unnecessary cookies) I couldn't find an easy solution. It's not 100%, but what can you really expect from a small business like this? I've seen worse.
Now to the question:
Can you recommend a good alternative to the current solution (Google Sites)?
It should be cheap (<3€/month incl. domain) and my parents should be able to make some basic changes (just text in predefined locations). I am not afraid to get my hands dirty - I can deal with some HTML, CSS, JS - but I don't want to sink a lot of time into this. No need for analytics or the like. Maybe a newsletter would be cool (with the weekly offers), but that's just a random thought of mine and definitely not necessary.
Thanks for reading :)18 -
#justathought
What do people need? What will be the requirements of future?
App development, webdev, blockchain,.. snapchat, tiktok, insta... These are all just careers and apps whose sole purpose is to engage people with their phones... Every new app/website in the market wants to make the youngest of the young and oldest of the old to keep their eyes fixed on this glass screen for as long as they can... For the current decade, this has been the most successful market and profitable scheme of business in the world, leaving other careers like medical, astronomy, mechanics., Etc far behind.
So is this the future? In the next generation too we will be having users who are addicted to smaller and smaller and larger and larger screens, with their spectacle width thickening ... Or are we going to shift to some other form of business?3 -
Overseas outsourcing has so many challenges and drawbacks. Companies now realizing this and now insourcing development and business processes for quality and real cost.
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#Warning really long post incoming and not sure if it can be considered a rant
My first job as a dev started 3 months ago and I noticed something strange/funny.
Here's the story our company is a software development one (we are aprox 300 employees), and most of our projects (70% more or less) are for a huge Insurance company in our country, a somewhat normal situation is that the company sends a dev to work full time at the insurance company for 6 months or a year (that usually is a lie and they spend 3 years or more there).
The funny part is this every Dev that is send there is mocked by everyone or receives condolences from the other devs.
I asked why and they just answered me that working as a dev in a really big company whose line of business isn't necessarily software or something related with technology is not a fun experience1 -
So, towards the end of a particularly disruptive Sprint, the Product Owner Manager, who asked for A3 pictures explaining the flow to him and had multiple meetings with us and business and rewrote a spec of something already in development and changed priority of stories, wants to know... what is taking so long and business wants all these changes next week.
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Should I be optimistic about my profession and growth as an android developer, or should i start gaining experience in other domains?
I am currently a Junior Android Developer in a small company which is a subsidiary of a bigger company (TATA) . I currently hold a working experience of 3+ years but in last 5 years , I have mainly explored Android App development the most. I did courses in it, then internships, then switched jobs to reach a decent salary package (more than INR 10 lakh per annum).
Recently I have been pretty worried regarding my career choices and i can't seem to be optimistic about my role as a mobile engineer. I joined my current company 4 months ago, but my switch this time gave me a hike of -10% (you read that right, it was a negative increment since previous company was asking me to relocate and i had no choice but to take this offer)
This switch made me worried not just because of the salary decrement but as a worthy candidate too. I know my tech stack well , but this time, I had very less options. I feel that the demand of a mobile engineer seems to be very less and I am not sure if its only me or for everyone in the same space as I am.
So , are jobs of Native Android Development really dying? My goal is to reach at premium salaries of INR 80-90 lakhs or 1-2 crores per annum, so can I reach there while just being a good android engineer? I am not sure what to run for. Please help
Some paths that i came to conclusion are for me, based on my limited knowledge are :
CONTINUE ON YOUR PATH : Stay in 1 place , grow as an engineer, get your salary/ role increase slowly and you will probably be able to reach that amount in 5-6 years
SWITCH YOUR PATH TO OTHER TECH SKILL : Do web frontend/backend courses in your free time, then grab a job of 4-6 LPA , start as a basic web dev, grow into senior dev and then reach that amount in 5-6 years (coz frontend/backend devs are the real deal?)
SWITCH YOUR PATH TO HIGHER STUDIES : do courses to crack foreign exam papers, then take out all your savings and got to foreign to pursue some masters in management, then do a job there and get settled / come back to India and grab a better paying job as a manager, then grow/switch into lead managerial roles and earn the goal amount in 5-6 years (coz foreign studies are the real deal/ foreign countries give fair wages to skill?)
GET INTO BUSINESS : start a business of something , grow it, reach that amount in 5-6 years (coz doing business is the real deal and only way to get lots of money in black/white)
Which do you think is the most accurate/realistic?15 -
Also focus more on how to deal with the business side of product development, how to 'deal' with sales/operations in a professional environment.
During my education the focus was mainly on the pure software engineering side, not so much on the 'real world environments'.
Personally I have no problems dealing with other departments, but some of my colleagues do struggle with the daily 'confrontations' between product development and operations. -
Leave it to an investing company 'dUe DiLigAnCe' document to list the following requirement:
"Schema of computing infrastructure setups for development, testing, and production"
Ah yes, the highly technical and well-known term of "schema of computing infrastructure"
God I hate business people, so clueless
BRB going to start my own business and make real money. if these neanderthals are top investors, i can be too2 -
Vague requirement for feature A received from client
Business consultant refines
Example mapping done
Acceptance criteria defined
Scheduled in sprint
Development done
Unit tests passed
Pull request reviewed
Code merged and deployed to system test
Functional testing successful
Deployed to UAT
Client asked to sign off
Client: "Actually I don't want that feature." -
I start testing a new NodeJS framework for, I'm still quite of guy who doesn't like JavaScript in the backend (for me still a quite poor language for a lot of operations). But where I'm working now they use NodeJS (in a very pigsty way to be honest), so I decide to refactor and rewrite the application and start search about frameworks, I'm particularly huge fan of Laravel and PHP for web development and I found a framework called AdonisJS, it's amazing, the ecosystem is very stable and solid.
I start to apply some nice concepts also in the simple Todo List that I'm doing (repository pattern, resources controllers and etc).
I'm really like, you can check on my github profile https://github.com/Messhias/...
Someone is already used this framework for a real business application? I'm liking a lot to play with it.11 -
Finally after 3 fucking months, 15-20 fucking meetings, I got sign off for a feature release. The development took 3 weeks and was completed in March end.
I know being a financial institution and feature was regarding system handling funds, business guys need to worry a bit as any mistake in code can mess up the funds disbursal. But fuckers took 3 months to give sign off.
However, it's finally released and I can relax for now. #peace -
Google Business continues to piss me off. Just because I don't have a physical storefront at which to receive clients for web development doesn't mean I'm not working in a legitimate business. The fact that there's STILL no option to hide my home address from searches for web developers nearby is just inexcusable. And it's not just me. There are TONS of at-home freelance workers who RELY on organic searches to stay afloat. But Google only cares about people who make decisions about how to run their businesses in the way Google finds beneficial.2
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Bsc Computer science (I've seen the maths in that course,it's a bit crazy but the programming modules is what I love)
or
BCom information systems (less complex maths,not much programming and a lot of finance and business based modules)but I can take a post graduate straight up programming and software dev course after that
Or
BTEch IT applications development(very practical experience on programming languages) plus in my second year I get industry experience.
Confused
Which one??1 -
So after the CIO pretty much does a table flip to the division about causing near daily customer impact we now have seven business day cool period for Changes and 13 cross functional teams stood up with 1, 15, 30, 60, and 90 day deliverables to an executive audience.
Guess what my team did today?
Offline a major Production database during the middle of the day, thinking they were in Development. Didn’t notice for 40 minutes. -
I hate trying to explain the difference between vendor and internal development. There is a clear difference. Siloed information and profit are important with a vendor to maintain the relationship with the customer. There are no real motives to do things at the best interest of the business with vendor development. Internal development is the exact opposite. There is a time where you need both but some kind of decision tree should be made around that. #rantoff
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My best friend (a consultant in salesforce) told me that he feels that software development is becoming like a blue collar casual job that anyone who has enough IQ can just pickup and start working. Have in mind that, he doesn't even have coding basics so I take his opinion with a grain of salt (since his work is just knowing the salesforce framework and teaching his clients what button to click where. He spends 80% of his day in business calls or meetings).
Personally I think that anyone can learn coding basics, but only certain people can stay in this field because you need to constantly grow, change, learn new things, have a huge treshold for failure and also somehow motivate yourself. Only 20% of my unversity peers are actually coding nowadays. Also only around 2-3 people out of 10 people in coding bootcamps actually become devs. So for me dev job is clearly not a casual job.
What are your thoughts on this?14 -
Right guys and gals, I need your opinions.
Recently was approached by a recruiter who thought I’d be a good fit for a role, a role that is a step up from senior dev but without moving into people / project management.
More like a bridge between architects and senior devs.
I thought what the hell, why not. So I agreed to go for it.
It could be quite a decent payrise (though that wasn’t my motivation for going for it) and I like the idea of doing more mentoring, design and research than I do now. It would involve stuff like learning new tech, coming up with examples and implementations of how the dev team need to use it to churn out user stories.
For the last few years I’ve been mainly a back end developer, which didn’t start by choice and I always liked to be full stack.
But the recruitment process for this role has been quite slow (number of reasons) and since then I’ve been given a new piece of work at my current employer doing some greenfield angular work, plus the c# back end.
I’m really, really enjoying this angular work. Haven’t done it for a while and it feels great to get back into it. Seem to be picking it back up with no problems, like the old magic is still there.
Also the money at my current place is good enough.
So now I’m wondering if I should bail on this other role in favour of seeing this out and maybe going back to being full stack (tho for reasons I’ll outline below in the long term that might have to be elsewhere)
But I’m also trying to remind myself that up until enjoying this work there’s a reason I decided to go for this other role.
Current place is a small company that has no project management process. It’s chaos, and everything’s an emergency. There are no requirements for anything, not enough people etc. No one has a clue how to run an IT project.
The one thing we do have is good development practices in our team and we have been greenfield for the last 12 months working on a new product. But we do tend to be pigeon holed into looking after a specific service/area.
But this new place if I got the role, is a bigger company (I’ve worked in small, medium and massive companies so I know what the difference is like), they’re a household name, they have resources for learning, putting people through aws certs, etc. They give people time each week to invest in themselves. Much more agile.
And thinking about it now you don’t often see a role that allows you to ‘move up’ without having to take on people/project management and still having time to be hands on.
(Just maybe more hands on with strategic work than delivering user stories for business as usual)
So just in general, what do you think? -
I'm attracted to the idea of producing content related to full stack development and/or gamedev (not that of my strongest point but I like to do that too) but something I cannot decide on is which language to target, as I'm a native Spanish speaker.
The only reason I see to do content in English is that it would reflect good on my CV and/or any future business opportunities, also that in regards to tech videos is what I watch on a daily basis as content in my native tongue is poorly produced and/or dated.
the only set back is that I suck a bit speaking English and my grammar sucks a lot, and that can ruin it for me.
what should I do?8 -
You work in a team, for a team to move forward successfully the team should work in sync. A team always has a goal and a plan to get to it. There are times when the team needs to take a different direction therefore the set path should always be available for change because our environments dictate it.
We all have different styles of working and different opinions on how things should work. Sometimes one is wrong and the other is right, and sometimes both are wrong, or actually sometimes both are right. However, at the end of it all, the next step is a decision for the team, not an individual, and moving forward means doing it together. #KickAssTeam
The end result can not come in at the beginning but only at the end of an implementation and sometimes if you’re lucky, during implementation you can smell the shit before it hits the fan. So as humans, we will make mistakes at times by using the wrong decisions and when this happens, a strong team will pull things in the right direction quickly and together. #KickAssTeam
Having a team of different opinions does not mean not being able to work together. It actually means a strong team! #kickAssTeam However the challenging part means it can be a challenge. This calls for having processes in place that will allow the team members to be heard and for new knowledge to take lead. This space requires discipline in listening and interrogating opinions without attachment to ideas and always knowing that YOUR opinion is a suggestion, not a solution. Until it is taken on by the team. #KickAssTeam We all love our own thinking. However, learning to re-learn or change opinions when faced with new information should become as easy to take in and use.
Now, I am no expert at this however through my years of development I find this strategy to work in a team of developers. It’s a few questions you ask yourself before every commit, When faced with working in a new team and possibly as a suggestion when trying to align other team members with the team.
The point of this article, the questions to self!
Am I following the formatting standard set?
Is what I have written in line with official documentation?
Is what I am committing a technical conversion of the business requirement?
Have I duplicated functionality the framework already offers?
I have introduced a methodology, library, heavily reusable component to the system, have you had a discussion with the team before implementing?
Are your methods and functions truly responsible for 1 thing?
Will someone you will never get to talk to or your future self have documentation of your work?
Either via point number 2, domain-specific, or business requirements documentation.
Are you future thinking too much in your solution?
Will future proof have a great chance of complicating the current use case?
Remember, you can never write perfect code that cures every future problem, but what you can do perfectly is serve the current business problem you are facing and after doing that for decades, you would have had a perfect line of development success.1 -
TLDR: Opinions of area of interest between these subjects (specializations):
1 Algorithms
2 Programming languages
3 Business analytics
4 Pervasive computing
Hi, I'm about to choose specialisation of my software development masters. I'm almost certain what I'll go with (algorithms), but I wondered what other people thought and would choose if they had the opportunity. I'm still not too experienced in all of these areas, making the choice a bit hard :-)2 -
Okay. Here's the ONLY two scenarios where automated testing is justified:
- An outsourcing company who is given the task of bug elimination in legacy code with a really short timeframe. Then yes, writing tests is like waging war on bugs, securing more and more land inch after inch.
- A company located in an area where hiring ten junior developers is cheaper than hiring one principal developer. Then yes, the business advantage is very real.
That's it. That's the only two scenarios where automated testing is justified. Other such scenarios doesn't exist.
Why? Because any robust testing system (not just "adding some tests here and there") is a _declarative_ one. On top of already being declarative (opposed to the imperative environment where the actual code exists), if you go further and implement TDD, your tests suddenly begins to describe your domain area, turning into a declarative DSL.
Such transformations are inevitable. You can't catch bugs in the first place if your tests are ignorant of entities your code is working with.
That being said, any TDD-driven project consists of two things:
- Imperative code that implements business logic
- Declarative DSL made of automated tests that also describes the same business logic
Can't you see that this system is _wet_? The tests set alone in a TDD-driven project are enough to trivially derive the actual, complete code from it.
It's almost like it's easier to just write in a declarative language in the first place, in the same way tests are written in TDD project, and scrap the imperative part altogether.
In imperative languages, absence of errors can be mathematically guaranteed. In imperative languages, the best performance (e.g. the lowest algorithmic complexity) can also be mathematically guaranteed. There is a perfectly real point after which Haskell rips C apart in terms of performance, and that point happens earlier on than you think.
If you transitioned from a junior who doesn't get why tests are needed to a competent engineer who sees value in TDD, that's amazing. But like with any professional development, it's better to remember that it's always possible to go further. After the two milestones I described, the third exists — the complete shift into the declarative world.
For a human brain, it's natural to blindly and aggressively reject whatever information leads to the need of exiting the comfort zone. Hence the usual shitstorm that happens every time I say something about automated testing. I understand you, and more than that, I forgive you.
The only advice I would allow myself to give you is just for fun, on a weekend, open a tutorial to a language you never tried before, and spend 20 minutes messing around with it. Maybe you'll laugh at me, but that's the exact way I got from earning $200 to earning $3500 back when I was hired as a CTO for the first time.
Good luck!6 -
When work says here you know java fix this Javanese application, you have to use this editor with these tools we will give you java 7 your tools need java 8 but that's okay we will install that later not give you admin on your box and not set your path to use the java 8 Jew included with the JDk and wouldn't give the standard Jre because I don't have a business case even though I just need java 8 to jun the tools. Oh well I guess I get paid for trying to figure out how to get it to run without permissions and with a virtualized development application1
-
Hey peeps just asking for some suggestions. We are currently having difficult times financially. My dad used to have food business but its now completely shut down and he is doing some sales job. My mom is somewhat educated (she completed till class 12th i guess) and knows very little abouts computers and stuff but she is interested in getting some job that's remote and computer based.
What things should i give her to learn that she could land a job in computer field?
Like am not talking about programming or development but other non tech fields people get paid for... Like data entry , emails writings etc. Currently i have given her courses to learn ms excel, ms word and basic English.
(Personally am also looking for a job but i know how you guys hate job postings . Checkout my website if you have something for me)3 -
Started my design/development agency in Jan. I work both direct to client and also on a whitelabel basis for other agencies and developers.
My 2nd biggest client is one of the said whitelabel clients. Unfortunately he has been unwell for a few weeks and is now taking another 3 weeks off. This week I have had to take over the running of his business (from a client and development standpoint) to ensure projects don't fall behind...they're already 2 weeks overdue with new RFQs coming in thick and fast. All this whilst running my own business.
Yesterday was a 16hr day and it doesn't look like it is going to let up :|
At least it's billable I guess?1 -
I've been studying a bit about business analytics and intelligence to diversify a bit from dev.
After a lot of looking around I've found it's all just glorified jargon which basically enables your decision to have backing of facts and logic. It sounds as if it's a great coverup tool but don't know if it actually helped decision-making.
Why does researching the market/competition need to have a thousand breakdowns/categories/focus areas.
I feel like an interpretation of business analytics is a very simple and intuitive solution but there is just too much random and wasteful metrics attached to it.
I believe it's just my nascent knowledge and experience speaking, but I never felt the same way about software development, financials, etc2 -
How difficult is it to decide for your own future?
It's a month that I'm in total panic 'cause of a difficult choice I have to make about my job.
I really need some external opinions and points of view from other developers, maybe more experienced than me (I'm a medium-junior JS developer).
The situation is as follows:
1) I work as a Frontend Web Developer for a wonderful enterprise-like company with 100+ employees, where the individual rights are fully respected, there are no whatsoever pressures and there is a peaceful paradise-like atmosphere most of the days. I also love my teammates, which is something rare because I often dislike other humans.
2) I received a proposal from a Fintech startup, which required me a long time to complete a complex programming test they gave me. They look all very young, modern, fast and passioned about their job. But they are only living with bank's investments and are not producing any money at the moment. Also, I don't know if Fintech will be a successful field in the future.
3) I received another proposal, from a Healthtec startup this time, which has a lovely mission in the medical field, has received millions of investments, it's gaining some KK net each month but has a team of only 2 developers (3 with me if I accept). I know one of the developers and I remember he had issues of not getting paid months ago.
What's the problem with the first company? I totally dislike the product we are building, the development stack (fully Microsoft-based), the company's view (they still sell and think about software like in the 90's) and how the repository is managed. Everyday there are huge problems that end up blocking the frontend work and the final product is super ugly and works only if you know all the quirks behind it.
It's an old-fashioned desktop app with inside Chromium which should execute some components like graphs, tables, forms and shit like this. Every component is configurable through a property editor which is an utter giant mess of collapsed menus. I also suspect that the company's main business model is based on the difficulty to use this software (because they sell licenses and courses to use it).
There are no modern UX/UI concepts applied at all, nor they seem to care about it.
Each time I propose something there is a huge chain of approval-waiting that end up in a stale mate.
Also, it's useless to show my frustration about all these issues because I count very little in a so populated office.
------------------------------------------------
TLDR: I need to choice if staying in a Enterprise Microsoft-based and old-fashioned company, but in which the atmosphere is paradisiac or accept the risk to work for a Fintech or a Healthtec startup.
------------------------------------------------
What would you do if you were in my situation? What's for you the most stable field in the future?
Many thanks for the attention!6 -
So I take a business class that is offered at my school and currently the whole class is working together to make a business.
Well me being me I get assigned to lead the website part of the business but we have a bunch of extra people in the group so I sit down with them, and I ask them a few questions like “have you done any web development before?” Or “do any of you have experience with photoshop?” Well I’m the only one who knows how to do anything, I’m also the youngest.
This is go my to be a long year -
I'm kind of lost guys 🤔(from the point of view of the career path).
Currently I'm unemployed and looking around for a new job inside and outside Italy, but most of them are quiet mediocre, from the point of view of salary(is hard to reach 40K pre-tax in Italy) or actual interesting work to do.
Leaving that aside, up to now I was always able to deal with any job that I had at hand, despite the industry, and this leaves me with an empty goal in the software development career because I feel capable to adapt to any technical environment.
The business side was always a second thought because it's quite boring most of the times(but I might change mind I think, given the chance).
And if you ask me what I like, I would say anything technically interesting/challenging, so no real preference here 😕
Have you ever had such period in your career?
Did you get the chance to find a way to move on?1 -
So udemy are currently doing sales
Can you guys recommend me some courses to buy? Of whatever subject you like (development, business, etc...)1 -
!rant
I want to make a web development and software development freelancing business. I had a great idea of a portfolio website for that business with a blog but the best way to make it it's using WordPress. I'm determined in making my own theme but I had a very dynamic and solid idea like adding some Easter egg videogames inside the webpage but with WordPress I can't do that. Another issue it's the time it would take to make this super website. Should I make the website as simple as possible and deploy it or wait until it's mostly done and deploy it?6 -
In the dynamic realm of software development, where the user interface meets the complex machinery behind the scenes, Back-End Expertise https://sombrainc.com/expertise/... emerges as the unsung hero. As businesses increasingly rely on digital platforms to connect, engage, and transact with their audience, the prowess of back-end development becomes paramount.
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User experience hinges on speed, and Back-End Experts understand the importance of optimizing performance. Through efficient coding practices, load balancing, and server-side optimizations, they strive to minimize latency and ensure that applications respond swiftly, even under heavy user loads.
Future Trends: Back-End Evolution
As technology evolves, so does the landscape of back-end development. Cloud computing, serverless architectures, and microservices are shaping the future of back-end expertise. Back-End Experts must adapt to these trends, embracing new tools and methodologies to stay at the forefront of innovation.
In conclusion, Back-End Expertise is the backbone of digital experiences. While users interact with the front end, the magic unfolds behind the scenes, where Back-End Experts craft the architecture that defines the reliability, security, and performance of applications. Their alchemy transforms lines of code into seamless digital experiences, leaving an indelible mark on the ever-evolving landscape of software development.1 -
Hussain Al Nowais
Address: P.O Box: 54457, Abu Dhabi, UAE
Phone: +971 2 6918000
Hussain Al Nowais is a global industrialist and business strategist with over 25 years’ experience in business management, banking, project finance, investment, industrial and real estate sectors. Mr. Al Nowais has a proven track-record in the development of industrial, infrastructure, and energy projects; and in the development and acquisition of businesses in the MENA region.Hussain Al Nowais is the founding member and Chairman of Al Nowais Investments. Currently, Mr. Al Nowais is spearheading the firm’s strategy of global expansion and strategic project development in energy, industry, infrastructure, oil & gas, healthcare, information technology, hospitality and real-estate.
#International Business, Hussain al Nowais #Hussain al Nowais
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