Got assigned an intern to mentor him, with an explicit order not to do any of the legwork for him.

We start out with some fuzzy requirements. Intern starts overengineering a generic solution, so I make out a best architecture that conforms to the business requirements and I explain it to the intern why are we going to use such approach and tell him how we are going to do it in three phases.

I explain the intern the first phase, break it down in small tasks for him and return to my projects...

After a couple of days of no words from the intern, I decide to check up on him to see how is he progressing, only to hear him complaining the task is boring. So, instead of doing the assigned tasks, he decided he should do a "design" for a feature I told him explicitly not to do, since it is going to be designed by the design team later on.

I explain it to the intern that we have to do the boring task first because we can't proceed with the next phase of the implementation without the necessary data from the phase one.

Intern says okay and assures me he got it now. Few days later, I check up on him, and he tells me he feels he is doing all the work and that I don't contribute to the project. I call up my boss and tell him intern wants a meeting. Since I was working from home, I quickly pack my things and head to the office. Boss talks to the intern before I managed to get to the office. Once I got there, I meet the intern, and he tells me everything is okay. I ask what did the boss say to make things okay all of a sudden, and he tells me he said we are a team now. Our company has a flat hierarchy model, so he tells me he doesn't feel he needs a mentor, that we are both equal, and that I have no idea how to work in a team, and then proceeds to comfort me on how human interaction is hard and that I will learn it one day... I was like wtf?

I tell him to finish the phase one of the project and start with the phase two, and I leave home again.

I call up my boss and ask him what did he say to the intern, and he says: "nothing much, just explained the project a little bit and how it fits in the grand scheme of things.". I ask about the equal team members thing, and me not being a mentor any longer, the boss goes wtf, saying he never said anything about that to him.

So the kid can't focus on a single task, over-engineers everything and doesn't feel he can learn anything from developers with more experience, doesn't want to obey commands, and also likes to lie to manipulate others.

Tomorrow we'll decide what to do with him...

Sorry for the long rant, it was a long stressful day.

Meeting with smooth suit guy:

"So, our company has pivoted"

I hate everything about this guy, not having slept well at all, I fucking snapped:

"Pivoted? Oh wow, what a wonderfully refined word to describe that your asinine business model smacked flat into the mud, that your obtuse bubble of vague ideas popped and your childish dreams of piles of undeserved gold got caught up by the hard reality that your product does not add any tangible value -- yet you tricked your sheepish retarded investors once again to fall for a new hype-filled pitch deck? Congratulations. At least you probably snort enough coke to keep believing in yourself..."

The guy nervously wiped his nose, stuttered, and walked off looking angry and a little confused.

So it turns out, my boss is apparently the major "sheepish retarded investor" in this company.

Today I got a mail from him. I expected fire and fury, nuclear ICBMs crashing into my desk.

"Thanks for your feedback, this is why I invite you to meetings. Could you take a look at their new pitch slides and preliminary API docs for me?"

Mother of god, was listening to the US govt hearing of zuckerberg about the recent scandals. The amount of very fucking simple obvious questions he 'could not' answer normally...

Govt person: Would you be willing to change Facebook's business model if this was required for the security and privacy of Facebook users' accounts?

Zuck: I don't understand your question.

Sorry, WHAT?! You don't need particular rocket science to understand what's being asked here. A combination of common sense and knowing the English language and English grammar in combination with maybe having finished some form of education should be enough to understand this ridiculously easy question.

Do you need it written on a golden plate with fucking blue letters in Facebook's font with the S letters as dollar signs while drinking 10 gallons of 'fuck every persons privacy'?!

Or maybe shoving it up your ass in the form of heated/glowing metal letters of 10+ inches in height? We could arrange that as well.

The windows/microsoft fanboy I've ranted about multiple times.

- wouldn't use anything except for windows. Even if required for a project (I would if really needed, have done that a few times already)
- refused to use any framework/language not written by Microsoft
- tried to get other projects to use windows/.net when it wasn't required and it was only linux/php guys (and that fit the projects perfectly)
- ONLY wanted to use Skype and whatsapp. Always bragged about how he had 10gb of Skype history.
- didn't want to use anything related to linus torvalds or open source because 'those are open source and have no business model so they're bad'

And then: he suggested the use of windows server right after one was hacked (windows vuln that wasn't patched yet) which caused the devops guys to want to install a new Linux server for it.
Even the windows sysadmin pointed to the door when he said that and gave him a huge 'GTFO' face cD

Yeah, fuck him.

Business model...

My current project at work: purchase verification, aka anti-fraud.

It's been two weeks, and my boss is flipping out because it isn't done. A robust anti-fraud solution. in two weeks. And he thought one week was a little much.

like, fucking really?

There are companies whose entire service is helping combat fraud. and he wants this done in a bloody week?

What makes me laugh through my tears of frustration is that the company that moved into the previous office? Yep, anti-fraud. Their entire business model is providing anti-fraud services to other businesses. They even tried selling him on it when they moved in. Bossman sales guy turned it around and sold my freaking desk out from under me instead.

But like. They're a small company: they had 9 people when they moved in, and were looking to add three more, so a total of 12 people. (I totally considered jumping ship, but their stack was too different.)

So. Bossman wants me to replace 9-12 people and their entire business in a fucking week. Yeah.

"Oh, but it's just sms verification" says he. What he also wants is the ability to flag users as fraudulent, have sticky verifications so they can't bypass them by backing out, have email checks as well as sms, have deferred verification to allow collecting required info (e.g. phone number), verification fallback, lockouts, manual admin whitelisting, admin blacklisting, and different rules per merchant and rule groups for affiliates to apply to all of their merchants, and of course the ability to customize those merchant/affiliate anti-fraud rules. But he shortens this gigantic list to "I want sms verification," despite actually asking for all of the above. I don't want to know about the mental gymnastics and/or blindfolding required to equate the two, but he's nuts.

Yeah.
All of that.
In a goddamn week.

And I get chewed out when it isn't done? Fuck off.

Go build me a goddamn 5m ft^2 castle out of basalt and marble using only your toothbrush and a rusty garden trowel, and have it done in a week. No outsourcing.

talk about ridiculous.

Wrote my friend Sam a letter when I was still working in support. I think it still holds up today.

---

Dear Sam,

I understand that you will join us in our overseas office. Congratulations on landing that job. It’s good steady work. I’ve been doing it for the last ten years.

Your still young so maybe I can give you some little wisdom that will help you in your working years to come.

Let me begin by shedding some light on phone calls.

I try. I really do try Sam. But it is getting so hard for me to hold back the rage that builds up during certain phone calls. Especially the ‘Sorry, I just don’t know anything about computers! -giggle-’ ones.

Those are the times that I have no access to what they see. I’ve no team-viewer, can not take over that screen in any other way. And why-oh-why can I not take over that terminal session dear Sam? It’s because the caller can not double-click an icon or find a terminal session number.

And what is the reason for this? Because they ‘just don’t know anything about computers! -giggle-’. This is a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card. Beware of these callers Sam.

There is nothing so nerve-wrecking then finding yourself at the mercy of people describing Internet Explorer (do not even get me started) as ‘the big ‘E’, if they use Chrome for their webmail then they most likely will say ‘Mail’ if they mean Chrome. There is no logic Sam. That is just the way these people work.

They will suck all enjoyment out of your work. They will make you want to hunt them down in dark office hallways and show them your tears Sam. Because cry you will.

Sure, I understand that not everyone can be tech savvy. Why, if everyone would be, where would that leave us? No. I love the technologically challenged. They put the fiber in my internet. They make me LOL for real. After the initial anger subsides anyway.

But just below that well-willing folk, on the other side of that border… there they dwell: Management.

Nice cars, suits and iphones Sam. First thing a new manager will require is a brand spanking new business-card. It will hold his/her new title. Then an iphone or overpriced android model will follow suit.

Then they will barge into your office, holding it like it’s the next best thing since sliced bread.

Any manager will automatically assume that you will drop anything you are doing at the present moment to acknowledge the presence of greatness. Failing to do so will result in awkward yet fulfilling situations. I recommend that you do not take your hands of the keyboard and give only the slightest of nods after 5 minutes of complete silence and glaring.

Well… you feel the glare. You do not glare yourself. You do not break eye-contact with the monitor. It does not even matter if you are typing for real or not. I once clicked away happily for 5 minutes. I just typed ‘he is still there’ over and over again. Do not break down Sam. This moment will decide your relationship with this individual.

After the nod there will be a flood of words aimed in your general direction. You can disregard anything that is said. It boils down to ‘can not operate device’.

You then take the device from this person and put it next to you on your desk. You’ll ask the name of this simpleton, write it down on a sticky-note, slap that on the phone. Then you’ll write a random date in the not so near future on another sticky and hand that to the bewildered person in front of you.

It will usually utter some incoherent words about ‘needing, time or but’ (I find that ‘but’is a word they like. They tend to use it three or four times consecutive before you usher them through the door).

Now you’ve won Sam. Well… not really. But it will feel good, I can guarantee that.

This must do for now. A new suit is glaring at me for the last five minutes.

Felt good to do something productive with this time.

Take care,

Baltasar

P.s. I just noticed that there is some foam around his mouth. So if you encounter this, don’t worry: it seems to be perfectly normal.

I ended up quitting my first job for many reasons, but this talk still haunts me:

"our workers need to input this data and they tab a lot because [...]"

Me: "ok... Where do they get the data from?

"A standard model compiled via web, sent via mail and then printed for them."

Me: "..."

Them: "..."

Me: "how about we make the import automatic?"

Them: "but then what will our workers do?"

To this day I am still impacted by this dialog... Not much for the stupidity from a business logic point of view (there are many bad companies, and this is not the only one I met in my career), but rather for the implications our job has and for the fact bs jobs are a thing because we are SO used to the capitalism that the bad guys are the ones removing boring tasks, rather than the shitty system which forces you to do a repetitive and automatable task and which reduces you to a shell doing a job a machine could do... And thanks for the wasted paper/ink, global warming ain't gonna get worse on its own!

> Root struggles with her ticket
> Boss struggles too
> Also: random thoughts about this job

I've been sick lately, and it's the kind of sick where I'm exhausted all day, every day (infuriatingly, except at night). While tired, I can't think, so I can't really work, but I'm during my probationary period at work, so I've still been doing my best -- which, honestly, is pretty shit right now.

My current project involves legal agreements, and changing agent authorization methods (written, telephone recording, or letting the user click a link). Each of these, and depending on the type of transaction, requires a different legal agreement. And the logic and structure surrounding these is intricate and confusing to follow. I've been struggling through this and the project's ever-expanding scope for weeks, and specifically the agreements logic for the past few days. I've felt embarrassed and guilty for making so little progress, and that (and a bunch of other things) are making me depressed.

Today, I finally gave up and asked my boss for help. We had an hour and a half call where we worked through it together (at 6pm...). Despite having written quite a bit of the code and tests, he was often saying things like "How is this not working? This doesn't make any sense." So I don't feel quite so bad now.

I knew the code was complex and sprawling and unintuitive, but seeing one of its authors struggling too was really cathartic.

On an unrelated note, I asked the most senior dev (a Macintosh Lisa dev) why everything was using strings instead of symbols (in Rails) since symbols are much faster. That got him looking into the benchmarks, and he found that symbols are about twice as fast (for his minimal test, anyway), and he suggested we switch to those. His word is gold; mine is ignorable. kind of annoying. but anyway, he further went into optimizing the lookup of a giant array of strings, and discovered bsearch. (it's a divide-and-conquer lookup). and here I am wondering why they didn't implement it that way to begin with. 🙄

I don't think I'm learning much here, except how to work with a "mature" codebase. To take a page from @Rutee07, I think "mature" here means the same as in porn: not something you ever want ot see or think about.

I mean, I'm learning other things, too, like how to delegate methods from one model to another, but I have yet to see why you would want to. Every use of it I've explored thus far has just complicated things, like delegating methods on a child of a 1:n relation to the parent. Which child? How does that work? No bloody clue! but it does, somehow, after I copy/pasted a bunch of esoteric legacy bs and fussed with it enough.

I feel like once I get a good grasp of the various payment wrappers, verification/anti-fraud integration, and per-business fraud rules I'll have learned most of what they can offer. Specifically those because I had written a baby version of them at a previous job (Hell), and was trying to architect exactly what this company already has built.

I like a few things about this company. I like my boss. I like the remote work. I like the code reviews. I like the pay. I like the office and some socializing twice a year.

But I don't like the codebase. at all. and I don't have any friends here. My boss is friendly, but he's not a friend. I feel like my last boss (both bosses) were, or could have been if I was more social. But here? I feel alone. I'm assigned work, and my boss is friendly when talking about work, but that's all he's there for. Out of the two female devs I work with, one basically just ignores me, and the other only ever talks about work in ways I can barely understand, and she's a little pushy, and just... really irritating. The "senior" devs (in quotes because they're honestly not amazing) just don't have time, which i understand. but at the same time... i don't have *anyone* to talk to. It really sucks.

I'm not happy here.
I miss my last job.

But the reason I left that one is because this job allows me to move and work remotely. I got a counter-offer from them exactly matching my current job, sans the code reviews. but we haven't moved yet. and if I leave and go back there without having moved, it'll look like i just abandoned them. and that's the last thing I want them to think.

So, I'm stuck here for awhile.
not that it's a bad thing, but i'm feeling overwhelmed and stressed. and it's just not a good fit. but maybe I'll actually start learning things. and I suppose that's also why I took the job.

So, ever onward, I guess.
It would just be nice if I could take some of the happy along with me.

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

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

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

A little run down would be:

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

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

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

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

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

- Indentation is a mess.

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

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

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

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

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

WEB FUCKING THREE

Ok, some of this shit is interesting, let's get that out of the way:

Crypto - great for doing illegal things, great for financial speculation, interesting mathematically. But as likely to replace actual currency as I am to replace the fucking Queen.

NFT - should be written on the headstone of humanity. Entirely fucking useless, planet-roasting bro-wank dressed up as a revolution in...pretending to own shit. The only difference between a Bored Ape owner and my nephew pointing at a castle and insisting that it's his, is that he isn't thousands and thousands of pounds out of pocket by doing so.

Metaverse - AR and VR have been around before this dogshit rebrand, and they'll outlive it.

No, it's not that. It's that we now have a new species of parasite - the "Web3/Metaverse" LinkedIn guru insisting that this shit is even needed, let alone the next big thing.

Web 2.0 was a stupid fucking term alright, but it did represent a new generation of technologies that were badly needed, and adopted by the entire community. Web3 is a bunch of shit that some cunts think they can get rich off, so insist that we need. I wouldn't even give a fuck but I've already spent hours of my life explaining to clients and peers that this is UTTER FUCKING BOLLOCKS, there's no need for a blockchain in your app, there's no need for a blockchain in virtually anything. Yeah if you want some fucking 3d in your app or your page I'm your man, but if you keep saying 'metaverse' I'm going to fill it with easter eggs.

None of this shit was needed before and none of it is needed after. Have you looked at web3 games? It's Steve Buscemi asking 'how do you do, fellow computer games?', it's a fucking gambling app pretending to be something a human would do. Clash of Clans and Candy Crush already cornered the market for that type of fucking mug, right now you're making the Candy Crush business model look responsible and efficient. You CUNTS.

I built a tracking suite for our fleet of printers quite some time ago. Once a day, "bizteam" (aka sales) gets an alert detailing how many printers are in critical need of attention (out of paper, mechanical error, etc.), and how many of them are flat-out offline. They don't seem to care. I mean they do, I think? but. the offline percentage hasn't changed much in the past month or two.

These printers constitute a primary part of our business model and... screw it. they're goddamn important, okay?

A full 16% of our printers are OFFLINE. Most of those HAVE BEEN OFFLINE FOR 3 FUCKING MONTHS.

3% of our printers have been online BUT OUT OF PAPER FOR OVER A MONTH.

and what really baffles me...
We've convinced a few of these merchants to actually plug in their goddamn printers. (and yes, they actually *paid* for these things, and they're absolutely not cheap.) Some of those were previously both offline AND out of paper, yet after being plugged in, they're *STILL* OUT OF PAPER?! What the crap, people! It's a printer! it's not difficult! It's the same as every other fucking printer you have! and it's probably the same goddamn fucking model!

Did AlexDeLarge skullfuck your brain into mush? FIX YOUR SHIT!

College can be one of the worst investments for an IT career ever.

I've been in university for the past 3 years and my views on higher education have radically changed from positive to mostly cynical.

This is an extremely polarizing topic, some say "your college is shite", "#notall", "you complain too much", and to all of you I am glad you are happy with your expensive toilet paper and feel like your dick just grew an inch longer, what I'll be talking about is my personal experience and you may make of it what you wish. I'm not addressing the best ivy-league Unis those are a whole other topic, I'll talk about average Unis for average Joes like me.

Higher education has been the golden ticket for countless generations, you know it, your parents believe in it and your grandparents lived it. But things are not like they used to be, higher education is a failing business model that will soon burst, it used to be simple, good grades + good college + nice title = happy life.

Sounds good? Well fuck you because the career paths that still work like that are limited, like less than 4.

The above is specially true in IT where shit moves so fast and furious if you get distracted for just a second you get Paul Walkered out of the Valley; companies don't want you to serve your best anymore, they want grunt work for the most part and grunts with inferiority complex to manage those grunts and ship the rest to India (or Mexico) at best startups hire the best problem solvers they can get because they need quality rather than quantity.

Does Uni prepare you for that? Well...no, the industry changes so much they can't even follow up on what it requires and ends up creating lousy study programs then tells you to invest $200k+ in "your future" for you to sweat your ass off on unproductive tasks to then get out and be struck by jobs that ask for knowledge you hadn't even heard off.

Remember those nights you wasted drawing ER diagrams while that other shmuck followed tutorials on react? Well he's your boss now, but don't worry you will wear your tired eyes, caffeine saturated breath and overweight with pride while holding your empty title, don't get me wrong I've indulged in some rough play too but I have noticed that 3 months giving a project my heart and soul teaches me more than 6 months of painstakingly pleasing professors with big egos.

And the soon to be graduates, my God...you have the ones that are there for the lulz, the nerds that beat their ass off to sustain a scholarship they'll have to pay back with interests and the ones that just hope for the best. The last two of the list are the ones I really feel bad for, the nerds will beat themselves over and over to comply with teacher demands not noticing they are about to graduate still versioning on .zip and drive, the latter feel something's wrong but they have no chances if there isn't a teacher to mentor them.

And what pisses me off even more is the typical answers to these issues "you NEED the title" and "you need to be self taught". First of all bitch how many times have we heard, seen and experienced the rejection for being overqualified? The market is saturated with titles, so much so they have become meaningless, IT companies now hire on an experience, economical and likeability basis. Worse, you tell me I need to be self taught, fucker I've been self taught for years why would I travel 10km a day for you to give me 0 new insights, slacking in my face or do what my dog does when I program (stare at me) and that's just on the days you decide to attend!

But not everything is bad, college does give you three things: networking, some good teachers and expensive dead tree remnants, is it worth the price tag, not really, not if you don't need it.

My broken family is not one of resources and even tho I had an 80% scholarship at the second best uni of my country I decided I didn't need the 10+ year debt for not sleeping 4 years, I decided to go to the 3rd in the list which is state funded; as for that decision it worked out as I'm paying most of everything now and through my BS I've noticed all of the above, I've visited 4 universities in my country and 4 abroad and even tho they have better everything abroad it still doesn't justify some of the prices.

If you don't feel like I do and you are happy, I'm happy for you. My rant is about my personal experience which is kind of in the context of IT higher education in the last ~8 years.

Just letting some steam off and not regretting most of my decisions.

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.

The obvious one:
E-Corp (aka. Evil Corp).
First they acted all evil, and then they wanted to control the world.
A brilliant business model tbh., but not very humanistic one.

Fuck startups.

Back when I was an wee lad I interviewed for an startup, not knowing that startups are not real companies. The scumbag interviewer, who was also the owner of the outfit, asked me what I was looking in a company. I said "fair wages, a non-antagonic environment and projects with real roadmaps".
He asked me to elaborate. I said, "You know, if today your product is a sales platform, I do not want to come into work next week and discover it is now an air travel tickets marketplace, or come back the very next day and discover it is now an automated pizza factory, or in the next day and it is now a crypto exchange..."

The scumbag looked PISSED. "Sorry, but we are looking for someone who likes the challenges of a dynamic environment (read: we do not have a business model and we hate the very idea of trying to make money out of our company), and you do not fit the profile"

Startups are not real companies, i.e. they do not systematically charge money in exchange for goods or services in amounts that exceed the cost of providing said goods or services. Most startups are just tax fronts for money laundering schemes. The rest are just playthings for rich assholes who can't get a real output-producing job. Those two categories are not mutually exclusive.

Take Facebook, for example. The poster child of startups. The Zucker that owns it just announced they are setting impossible performance targets on purpose, not even attempting to hide the fact that it is just a way to lay off large quantities of employees without using the words "massive lay offs". Companies, real thin-margin, lots-of-regulation profit-driven companies do not do that. They are not some sort of "capitalist woke", real CEOs just know that if their companies largely miss performance targets on their tenure, purposely or not, next it will be their neck on the chopping block. Because they can be fired if the KPI charts say they suck. But the Zucker cannot be fired, not even after commanding their beanbag and tap beer offices to be heated exclusively by burning hundred dollar bills.
So the Zucker is not interested in performance. Not even in lay offs as expense cutting measures - investors are an infinite source of free money for startups. The Zucker just wants to project power, especially now that engineers are not so confident in the stability of they high-paying jobs.

So are irrelevant 500-souls-or-less self-aggrandizing startups. Their owners are there because it is in vogue to have a startup or ten. And will have that startup pivot to whatever sounds fancy that season. After all, only poor people care about things like EBITDA and profit margins repeatability - A.K.A. "getting more money".

Fuck startups.

Some undocumented, never touched, 15 years old recursive function at the core of our business model suddenly stops working in a niche scenario, debugger is not available and I have to find out why.

So I know most of you got some kind of hate for Facebook and Zuckerberg (aka Z U C C) now, but ffs, watching some of the highlights of this congress-thing that went on makes me more or less feel sympathy for him and his idea, even tho I know he wants to achieve exactly this.

Some of the questions asked can suck a big fucken data-dick. "How many Facebook Like-Buttons are there on Non-Facebook pages?", "How many data-categories do you gather?", "How do you sustain a business model and stay free?" - DUDE WHAT IN HEAVENS NAME?? And they ask that shit so serious and so "now-i'm-going-to-bust-you"-esk, but actually the question is just plain stupid and shows how the questioning side has no clue about the shit.

My point of view is that people decided to have an online life and have to take what it does. Having a smartphone with a Facebook service installed (owning an account or not) is enough to track your location, stored under your IMEI or some shit like that. They may not even go that far but that's just my opinion.
If you are online everything can see you and use you that way. Borders are a fictious thing. A dude in Czechia can easily shoot you when you're on the German side of the border between those two countries. And still we gave up on walls...:p

Welcome to a world which is ruled by dumbass people where nerds who just want to have some fun need to defend themselves because the people up there don't know a single shit.

My level of frustration with Microsoft is growing to a point that I'm unable to contain it.

They buy Github, it was a great tool for developers because is FUCKING WORKED! New features were never beta tested on users unless they requested it.

Why in the absolute fuck am I getting all these new experimental bullshit features that literally make it harder for me to do my god damned job?

They provide me NOTHING but grief and sleepless weekends while I fix the god damned pipeline that's worked perfectly fine for YEARS.

Your business model is bad and your products are SHIT.

Fuck you Microsoft, I cannot even stress it enough. If I had a time machine that could go back 5 years and my options were: Tell the world about Covid, make sure Trump never became president, or stop the Github purchse. I would hunt down and brutally attack the team of executives that decided to buy Microsoft.

Words cannot adequately describe how much I want Microsoft to fuck off. If the company was a person and they died in a house fire it wouldn't be enough.

I just want a VCS that does what it's supposed to do. I don't need pipelines, I don't need image repos, I don't need static code analysis.

I JUST NEED A FUCKING VCS THAT CONTROLS VERSIONS OF SOFTWARE YOU IGNORANT FUCKS.

"Smart" home gym equipment: expensive hardware for some grand, proprietary software, and ongoing subscription fees in the $50/mo ballpark.

The SW is usually designed so that even shit that could have been local is instead stored remote as to make the subscription look more worthwhile. The large front-up cost serves not only as revenue, but also to anchor the vendor lock-in.

Open source hackers could potentially unchain the HW so that users would actually own what they purchased, but there is a catch: the HW is sold at a loss, and the subscription is the business model.

Freeing up the HW would render the subscription rather useless, and ramping up the HW sales prices to profitability would destroy any demand.

Basically, it's products that are technically feasible, but not economically viable. Which is why they are not the future of home gyms.

IBM. Fucking IBM. I have not heard ONE person say “We should totally become an IBM shop!” Because only people who were already STUCK with IBM when better options presented themselves still use IBM bullshit. And those people... ooooooh those fuckers are in SO MUCH denial. “Yeah but IBM does such-and-such too.” YEAH? Well your business model shouldn’t be built on businesses held captive to your antique bullshit. That shit is Stockholm syndrome. Textbook, fucking Stockholm syndrome. Don’t tell me “It used to be we could only have EIGHT character file names.” THAT SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN A THING. EVER. Fucking THINK about it. If you have to justify something based how much WORSE it used to be, that thing probably fucking sucks.

Wanna hear a story? The consultancy firm I work for has been hired to work on a WPF project for a big Fashion Industry giant.

We are talking of their most important project yet, the ones the "buyers" use to order them their products globally, for each of the retail stores this Fashion giant has around the world. Do you want to know what I found? Wel, come my sweet summer child.

DB: not even a single foreign key. Impossibile to understand without any priopr working experience on the application. Six "quantity" tables to keep aligned with values that will dictate the quantities to be sent to production (we are talking SKUs here: shoes, bags..)

BE: autogenerated controllers using T4 templates. Inputs directly serialized in headers. Async logging (i.e. await Logger.Error(ex)). Entities returned as response to the front end, no DTOs whatsoever.

WPF: riddled with code behind and third party components (dev express) and Business Logic that should belong to the Business Layer. No real api client, just a highly customized "Rest Helper". No error reporting or dealing with exceptions. Multiple endpoints call to get data that would be combined into one single model which happens to be the one needed by the UI. No save function: a timer checks the components for changes and autosaves them every x seconds. Saving for the most critical part occurring when switching cells or rows, often resulting in race conditions at DB level.

What do you think of this piece of shit?

Company top execs: "We need to optimize our costs and reduce our expenditure by x€ to keep the profit margin at acceptable levels for the shareholders"

YOU ARE PUSHING OUT SHIT PRODUCTS DAY IN AND DAY OUT THAT YOU FUCKING SUITS THINK WILL BE THE NEXT BIG THING BUT NOONE REALLY WANTS OR NEEDS. WE ALREADY HAVE A TON OF THOSE BORN-DEAD SHITCAKES HANGING AROUND ABD NEW ONES ARE ALREADY BEING PREPARED FOR LAUNCH.

"OPTIMIZE COSTS"? HOW ABOUT YOU STOP PRODUCING SHIT AND STICK TO YOUR FUCKING CORE BUSINESS MODEL!!!

"OPTIMIZE COSTS"? WE HAVE A ZERG OF OLD FUCKS, WHO ARE STILL WAITING FOR THE FUCKING SMS TO START THE NEXT TECH REVOLUTION, ON OUR PAYROLL. ALL THEY FUCKING DO IS PLAY SUDOKU IN THE KITCHEN AND DISCUSS TECHNIQUES ON HOW TO RAISE GOATS!!!

"NO MONEY TO GIVE A PAYRISE TO DEVELOPERS"? WHY DONT YOU JUST FUCKING GET RID OF THE USELESS DUDES BASICALLY DOING THEIR TENURE AND CLOSE SOME OF THESE FUCKTARDED PRODUCTS THAT 4 PEOPLE OUTSIDE OF THE FUCKING COMPANY USE BUT NEED A TEAM OF FUCKING 20 TO MAINTAIN! NO!!! THEY WILL NOT BE THE NEXT BIG THING! NO!!! ANYTHING YOU SHITCAKES WHO THINK MOBILE APPS IS THE "NEW EMERGING MARKET" WILL EVER CREATE THE NEXT FUCKING BIG THING!!!!!

STICK TO YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS AND STOP CREATING USELESS SHIT THATS MAADE BY FUCKING USELESS PEOPLE!!!!

FUUUUUCCCCCKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!!!

!rant

tl;dr at the bottom

This might not be a popular opinion, so please, if you throw things at me, limit yourselves only to tomatoes and other soft projectiles. Thank you!

So this being said, i must say ut: i actually like how facebook use this data overall. While i am completly against privacy violation, that data is given up by ourselves with a choice to do it, so we can't hand them for it. However, i think the fact that we got ads for what our interests are is quite awesome! For example because of this i found webcomics and artists i curently hold really high in my praises and this might not have been the case if FB had another business model.

This being said, i just think people should focus on problems more important than how social media manages to earn some bucks, and while is our choise to be part of that we can't simply call ourselves "products". History holds many stories about civilization that gaved no choice if you wanted or not to be a product so we could be at least glad it is not the case anymore.

Anyway, if you read all the way down here, tnaks for your time!

TL;DR: Facebook is no holy church but it actually not so bad, we can find things we get to love or actually needed in the first place in their targeted adds system. At least we have a choice to be part of this or not!

#Happy_Rant

Seeing BYJU's and WhiteHat Jr losing millions in valuation makes me happy, as it was something I had predicted (Im not flexing btw).

The whole business model is dumb, teaching CHILDREN coding and teaching them how to make `apps` via online learning.

Students study Comp Sci for literal years before they even begin coding something useful, and even then there are so many professional developers walking around who barely understand the code that they write.

It's just natural selection at this point.

Get an email from a client, who has been stringing me along for about 6 months, but ringing me up for advice on tonnes of different shit for free. Basically did his original website but his business model has changed to make his existing site irrelevant. Suggested months back doing a simple one pager as a stop gap with key messages. The bastard said no to that "just take it down for now and redirect to my LinkedIn page". He keeps saying we are getting stuff together and we hope to get together in September. However, yesterday he sends an email "we are getting a student in over the summer (not a Dev or designer or anything). Could you recommend any "web builders" so we can get on with the website in August. By that he means those drag and drop fucking pieces of shit website templates full of wysiwyg editors for creating shit typography. I give them free help and guidance and they think that I'm not going to want to smash him in his fucking face for his last email. The cunt.
I have an idea for 'having the last laugh' but I am open to suggestions from some devRanters, all legal of course.
P.S. I post quite a bit here about shitty clients, but I do have a number of really good clients who value my work and experience and have been with me for many years. It's just some that treat the profession with disdain and that they can easily do it themselves if only they had the time. These fuckers then wonder why their businesses fail.

Why do most people think that machine learning is the answer to their poor business decisions. I have recently had a client who won't stop talking about how his business will grow to Google's scale if I get the model to 97% accuracy . Regardless to say his data is noisy and unstructured. I have tried to explain to him that data cleansing is more important and will take most of the time but he only seems to care about the accuracy and how he is losing investors because I haven't reached that accuracy. This is fucking putting alot of pressure on me and it's not becoming fun anymore. I can only hope he achieves his ambitions if I ever get that accuracy (Ps: From the research papers I have read on that problem, the highest accuracy a model has ever got to it 90%)

I was inspired by the abundance and uniformity of modern data-selling startups. Despite being different companies, they have a lot in common: questionable ethics, lack of a real business model other than selling data, pseudo-approachable and friendly bullshit aesthetics, talks about dIvErSitY and eQuALitY. Now, I propose one more thing for them to have in common — this logo. I hereby announce it to be public domain now, free to use for all.

I may have over delivered my service to this first customer i got.

It doesn't help that pricing was dirt cheap and i over promised in a bid to make it attractive.

But in my hurry to please the client, I've been feeling so much stress since last 24 hrs. Dealing with customers suck. I hate this.

They can be little dumb and doesn't think much before blaming you if something's not working as expected.

I hate this feeling and now i remember why my initial business model was designed such that I wouldn't have to deal with clients.

But somewhere along the way, i forgot about that. :/

I wish I could get rid of this customer.

This is why I hate Windows:

For about a month now, I've been learning/working on salesforce, so my Macbook was enough for me.
Today there was a bug in something I built in iur Python backend, and since it has a dependency on windows, I booted the old guy up.

And this is what I see. For about 1.5 hours this went on.

Then it started, but system consuming 100% disk and 80+% CPU. Can't do a thing.

And when zoom finally opened (for a quick meet), the camera turned on halfway down the meeting, and then the system restarted on it's own.

Old man showing that same screen again for more than 30 minutes.

Since I have dual boot on this one, I hard-shutdown it using power button, and now boot into ubuntu 20. This works so beautifully (although it froze for about 5 seconds before popping up the updates panel, something I CHOSE to keep enabled). I try going back to Windows, and it's hell again.

Here I am now trying to set up a ec2 instance and setup the app source there so that I can debug with RDP.

And yeah, Component Object Model is a motherfucking bitch. Person who invented it should die. People who build apps leveraging this should die. Business leaders who say "Hey this app (built with COM) can solve the problem easily, so use this" should die choking on their own phallus. And developers like me who keep using this because "the last guy did this" should die too.

Microsoft and it's products are the death of sane people.

Fucking Gates. Its the same damn hardware.

My own colo server. My own cloud. My own infra.

Fuck all of the CSP's and their fucking broken TOS and their data privacy violations!

Why do you think Amazon is so cheap? Because when they discover a product/service/software on AWS makes money, they WILL Reverse engineer it, make it and price you out of the market. It's their business model!

So I enventually spent 2 years working for that company with a strong b2b market. Everything from the checkouts in their 6 b2c stores to the softwares used by the 30-people sales team was dependant on the main ERP shit home-built with this monstruosity we call Windev here in France. If you don't know it just google and have some laugh : this is a proprieteray FRENCH language. Not french like made by french people, well that too, but mostly french like the fucking language is un fucking french ! Instructions are on french, everything. Hey that's my natural language okay, but for code, really ?

The php website was using the ERP database too, even all the software/hardware of the massive logistic installation they had (like a tiny Amazon depot), and of course the emails of all employees. Everything was just handled by this unique shitty and so sloooooow fucking app. When there was to many clients on the website or even too many salespeople connected to the ERP at the same time, every-fuckin-piece of the company was slowing down, and even worse facing critical bugs. So they installed a monitor in the corner of a desk constantly showing the live report page of Google analytics and they started panic attacks everytime it was counting more than 30 sessions on the website. That was at the time fun and sad to observe.

The whole shit was created 12 years ago and is since maintened locally by one unique old-fashion-microsoft dev who also have to maintain all the hardware of all the fucking 150+ people business. You know, when the keyboard of anyone is "broken" cause it's unplugged... That's his job too. The poor guy was totally overstressed on a daily basis and his tech knowledge just saddly losts themeselves somewhere in the way. He was my n+1 in a tech team of 3 people : him, a young and inexperimented so-called "php developer" who was in charge of the website (btw full of security holes I discovered and dealed with when I first arrive at the job), and myself.

The database was a hell of 100+ tables of business and marketing data with a ton of specific logic added on-the-go during years. No consistent data model or naming. No utf8. Fucked up relations that ends with queries long enough to fill books. And that's not all, all the customers passwords was just stored there uncrypted. Several very big companies and administrations were some of these clients. I was insisting on the passwords point litterally all the time, that was an easy security fix and a good start... But no, in two years of discussions on the subject I never achieved to have them focusing on other considerations than "our customers like that we can remind them their password by a simple phone call if they lost it". What. The. Fuck. WHATTHEFUCK!

Eventually I ran myself out of this nightmare. I had a few bad jobs already, and worked on shitty software already. But that one really blows my mind (and motivation for a time too). Happy it's over.

I hate silicon valley.

They enable so much of the state's and federal government's bullshit, the corporations and the banks subversion and destruction of society.

It's time to pop their fucking tech bubble.

From here on out, any time you hear or read the words 'startup', be sure to comment with "you mean speculative marketing investments?"

Because most tech runs on shit-tier semi-polished iterations of glorified CRUD anyway, thats all most of it is. And it 100% relies on grabbing network share through massive advertising and presence campaigns. A lot of vc money is being flushed straight down the toilet and this is a point to emphasize. Crash the fucking tech sector. Do it.

It'll have a knock on effect to the advertising space, which will put the hurt on google's bottom line when they and their ilk are already under pressure for all the poisonous, monopolist shit they pull like helping china build their surveillance tech.

Extra points for emphasizing "pot-fueled ideas sketched out on napkins while sitting in fucking chipotle, in unwashed sweater vests, originated by guys who are fresh out of college and never ran a business in their life. 90% of them fail in the first year. VCs and investor are losing their shirts." etc.

The entire dishonest fucking trade relies on other people's money, being bought out in either techno land-grabs or turf-protection e.x. atlassian acquiring trello, a **glorified todo app**.

Thats the business model. Hell go build your own and make a buck.

Build your own. Build something better and most of all... *fuck silicon valley*.

Let it burn, let burn, let it burn.

Question for the old timers: is it possible to work as a dev for the rest of your life and be happy?
.
.
.
Does it get any better or is dev burnout baked into the business model of every company?
The CEO flat out admitted it was exactly that where I'm at a few weeks ago 😞

Having the data model defined by the business people.

I got my dirty fingers on this leak of an AMAZING ML model capable of pondering EVERY PARAMETER IN THE UNIVERSE and saying if your business idea needs improvement or is good to go.
BEHOLD THIS 100% PURE PYTHON SOLUTION:

```python
import random

def magic(*args, **kwargs):
if random.random() > 0.5:
return "Good to go!"
else:
return "Requires improvement on value proposition"
```

This LEAK is from a startup that just received 4 BILLION USD IN VENTURE CAPITAL to improve their AI SYSTEMS.
Literally enough money to solve world hunger forever.
Who else is gonna invest in NEW THERANOS ADVANCED A.I. RESEARCH INTERNATIONAL INC?

If Microsoft acquires GitHub, it will be far from the end of git. Even if it is an EEE play, there are still many FOSS variants that will enable the use of git without having to deal with Microsoft's toxic business model.

I still have my gitlab install, and I will continue to use it.

Was just wondering now but what is devrant business model ?

Hearing that a company plans to digitalize the entire business model and move away from bureaucracy 💪

Hearing that said company plans to run the entire infrastructure on an iMac in the office 😨

I disagree with the hate on MS on buying GitHub. Could you imagine if facebook decided to do that? Or Google? At least MS is straight up about its business model: give me money I'll give you products

This remote agency that we use to help us build our mobile app is taking the piss out of us. They always have stupid questions, more stupid questions and on top of that at least they don’t work fast. So a task that should take a day it takes them a week and when they deliver it’s not exactly what we’re asking. Despite the fact that they’ve already asked me tons of questions they went ahead and implemented something I haven’t asked for because they thought it’s better. Well guess what read your fucking requirement documents that I spent 2 days writing. It’s all there bullet point by bullet point including the way it should work with examples and justification plus a flow charts to make it super fucking clear. It must be their business model to fuck around, stay on the project for as long as possible and ask for more money. They can’t be that stupid.

Disclaimer: I hold no grudges or prejudices toward [CENSORED] company. I love the concept of the business model and the perks they pay their employees. Unfortunately, the company is very petty, and negligence is the core of the management. I got into an interview for the position, of Senior Software Engineer, and the interview wouldn't take place if wasn't for me to follow up with the person in charge countless times a day. The Vice President of Engineering was the most confused person ever encountered. Instead of asking challenging questions that plausibly could explain and portray how well I can manage a team, the methodology of working with various technology, and my problem-solving skills. They asked me questions that possibly indicated they don't even know what they need or questions that can easily get from a Google Search. I was given 40 hours to build a demo application whereby I had to send them a copy of the source code and the binary file. The person who contacted me don't even bother with what I told her that it is not a good practice to place the binary in cloud storage (Google Drive, OneDrive, etc) and I request extra time to complete the demo application. Since I got the requirement to hand them the repository of the codebase, it is common practice to place the binary in the release section in the Git Platform (Jire, Azure DevOps, Github, Gitlab, etc). Which he surprisingly doesn't know what that is. There's the API key I place locally in .env hidden from the codebase (it's not good practice to place credentials in the codebase), I got a request that not only subscript to an API is necessary but I have to place them in the codebase. I succeed to pass the source code on time with the quality of 40 hours, I told him that I could have done it better, clearer and cleaner if I was given more grace of time. (Because they are not the only company asking me to write a demo application prior to the assessment. Extra grace was I needed)

So long story short, I asked him how is it working in a [CENSORED] company during my turn to ask questions. I got told that the "environment is friendly, diverse". But with utmost curiosity, I contacted several former employees (Software Engineer) on LinkedIn, and I got told that the company has high turnover, despises diversity the nepotism is intense. Most of the favours are done based on how well you create an illusion of you working for them and being close to the upper management. I request shreds of evidence from those former employees to substantiate what they told me. Seeing the pieces of evidence of how they manage the projects, their method of communication, and how biased the upper management actually is led me to withdraw from continuing my application. Honestly, I wouldn't want to work for a company where the majority can't communicate.

Well it's a bit long but worth reading, two crazy stories in one rant:

So there are 2 things to consider as being my first job. If entrepreneurship counts, when I was 16 my developer friend and I created a small local music magazine website. We had 2 editors and 12 writers, all music enthusiasts of more or less our age. We used a CMS to let them add the content. We used a non-profit organization mentorship and got us a mentor which already had his exit, and was close to his next one. The guy was purely a genius, he taught us all about business plans, advertising, SEO, no-pay model for the young journalists (we promised to give formal journalist certificates and salary when the site grows up)
We hired a designer, we hired a flash expert to make some advertising campaigns and started filling the site with content.

Due to our programming enthusiasm we added to the raw CMS some really cool automation: We scanned our country's radio charts each week using a cron job and the charts' RSS, made a bot to search the songs on youtube and posted the first search result as an embedded video using some reg-exps. This was one of the most fun coding times I've had. Doing these crazy stuff with none to little prior knowledge really proved me I can do anything with the power of will.

Then my partner travelled to work in an internship in the Netherlands and I was too lazy to continue it on my own and it closed, not so surprisingly for a 16 years old slacker boy.

Then the mentor offered my real first job. He had a huge forum (14GB of historical SQL) but it was dying, the CMS version was very old and he wanted me to upgrade it to the latest. It didn't seem hard at first, because there were very clear instructions in the CMS website on how to do that. However, the automation upgrade scripts didn't work well because the forum owners added some raw code (not MVC plugins but bad undocumented code) and some columns to the SQL tables. I didn't give up and decided to migrate between the versions without the scripts. I opened a new CMS and started learning by heart all of the database columns so I can make a script to migrate between the versions. The first tests ran forever because processing 14GB of data on a single home computer is not a task meant to be done. I didn't give up. I made an old forum and compared the table structures and code with my mentor's. I think I didn't exhaustively finish this solution, the task was too big on my shoulders and eventually I gave up. I still owe thanks for that mentor for teaching me how to bare with seemingly (and practically) impossible tasks, for learning not to fear from being a leader and an entrepreneur and also for paying me in time even though I didn't deliver anything 😂

Last week I wired up my home network (including custom modem and routers) myself, because the stuff my ISP wanted me to use was garbage.
Luckily Germany has "router-freedom" so ISPs are not allowed to force us to use their device to dial into the network.
I did everything myself, because the 'technicians' they kept sending me were just idiots who didn't know anything, considering the highly paid job they are doing. Usually they told me, to get the device from my ISP, because my "Router" (actually a business grade, standalone Modem by Cisco, to feed my Router) didn't even have WiFi ( lol ). Also all Technicians didn't arrive at the agreed date but at some other time. I wasn't able to wait any longer.
So I did it myself.

Consider me something more like a student of theoretical computer science. Not actually supposed to be experienced with hardware stuff.

The ISP is serving me with a DOCSIS 3.0 Network based on the television cable network in my city. For some reason they are providing the internet-access to only one socket in the apartment, which has a rather uncommon "WICLIC" connector. After having trouble getting an adapter for WICLIC to common coaxial F-Connectors (used by every DOCSIS-Modem), I made one myself.

After setting up everything (not that hard, once the connectors fit) my modem told me, that, while I'm perfectly connected to the ISPs internal Network, I still can't access the internet.

So I called the ISP...
After getting ranted at, about that what I'm doing is illegal and only certified employees are allowed to do this and I will break more, than actually do good and that I can't just connect my own "Router" (again I needed to correct her: Modem) I hang up the phone.
Also she accused me of hacking their devices because I'm not supposed to see my IP address... (My Modem told me on its web interface. I didn't even need telnet for that.)
I went to the ISPs head office, told the first desk as many technical terms as I could remember and got forwarded to something like the main technician.

He was a really nice guy. The only sane and qualified person I dealt with at this company. He asked me for my Address and Device Model, I told him my MAC and last internal IP, I had seen and he activated my internet access within a minute.
We talked a while about the stupid connector that ISP is using in the homes and he gifted me some nicer adapters to connect my modem to the wall.

Why do ISPs hate their customers that much?

So we’ve taken over from a project team that disbanded... read: “cut their contracts because fuck this, I can earn more working for better people”.

Me and one other guy have been tasked with saving this heap of shit.

Obviously the project guys left saying “it’s nearly done, just this one feature”. Because cut contracts are easier to deal with if “everything is almost done”.

We jump on and find that’s not the case at all... this thing, is a beast, a big old stats analysis program... so we’re like “cool, let’s see what’s going o...OH MY GOD”.

The “recalculation” function was core to this POS. The contractors had done it in C# through entity framework... it took 24 hours to run, over a reasonably small data set that was due to double every 2-5 years.

So... here’s the deal, it ran over night.... then failed. And no cunt had noticed. Entity framework “can’t commit because I’m muddled up as fuck, did you really just put the whole db in EF in memory to work with it?” Exception.

Que 6 months of me and my lead doing the job properly.

Anyway, the failure: I ended up in Hospital again with a Crohn’s flare up... about 5 months in.

Fuckall to do with all this nonsense I just wanted to tell a story. it was an interesting/fun project to fix and my lead was a legend... so happy days.

Similar story, different set of contracted devs... they’d been defining requirements with the business users using the term “Risk” which the business users knew as a group of risks.

The domain model had been written RiskGroup<>—

Salesforce. Although I wasn't involved in the purchase or the implementation, I spent many 100 hour weeks dealing with the crapshoot of an implementation. A large company abused that software to the point of no return. They used that thing for everything, and then they didn't even use it right for the one thing salesforce is good at. So I guess I don't have anything against salesforce itself besides its scalability issues, custom SOQL syntax, user model, and pricing. I'm more upset about the salesforce developers/business owners that decided it was okay to use salesforce for things it was never meant for, like inventory, project management, 3rd party sales team, and so many other things that caused what should have been sub-second queries to take 30 to 60 seconds.

So I decided to run mozilla deep speech against some of my local language dataset using transfer learning from existing english model.
I adjusted alphabet and begin the learning.
I have pc with gtx1080 laying around so I utilized that but I recommend to use at least newest rtx 3080 to not waste time ( you can read about how much time it took below ).

Waited for 3 days and error goes to about ~30 so I switched the dataset and error went to about ~1 after a week.
Yeah I waited whole got damn week cause I don’t use this computer daily.

So I picked some audio from youtube to translate speech to text and it works a little. It’s not a masterpiece and I didn’t tested it extensively also didn’t fine tuned it but it works as I expected. It recognizes some words perfectly, other recognize partially, other don’t recognize.

I stopped test at this point as I don’t have any business use or plans for this but probably I’m one of the couple of companies / people right now who have my native language speech to text machine learning model.

I was doing transfer learning for the first time, also first time training from audio and waiting for results for such long time. I can say I’m now convinced that ML is something big.

To sum up, probably with right amount of money and time - about 1-3 months you can make decent speech to text software at home that will work good with your accent and native language.

Conspiracy theory:
There is no parent CSS selector because Google effectively controls web standards, and if that existed then it would be extremely easy to hide ads, ruining their business model. Do you a-- help help they've got me hehgxh dry jvcgk cc d

When I talk about release a personal project to GNU/GPL license (when it's finished, some day) people looks at me like "wow, be careful". It makes me think about the mythology around silicon valley and how the idea of writing a killer app or a nice machine and instantly grow rich became a standard, even when it's terribly wrong and false...

I have fucking HATED Windows 10 from day one. Now I'm hearing there are new vacillations of this genius programming train wreck that I think is designed to force monetize Microsoft's business model.
After a short while I managed to get to a point where I can maintain W 7. In fact, I'm using my old computer right now. Because I could not get this rant to load onto Devrant website. If you are reading this we know that it is because 10 sucks consistently.
I save my files onto a backup hard drive so I can find 'paper file' type solution for whatever random crap might block me at the keyboard. In fact, I still use paper and file cabinets so "technology" doesn't bring me to a screeching halt every time something like "no record of that account" or "wrong password".
Why the hell does my PASSWORD work from W7 but not from W10?! And it's getting WORSE by the day! I'm about to take a fucking hammer to my new fucking computer. And to that guy who smarmy says something to the effect of 'don't be such a pussy... just fix it and you will be happy.' Well. Fuck you too!
Now. That being said. Anybody have a suggestion on what to try next? And don't say something like, 'take your computer to Micro Center or Geek Squad'. I've done those guys twice each. And for a small phenomenal fee they have each time made things slightly worse plus lost parts of my saved data each time.
Oh. And "reset to previous" doesn't work either.
Suggestions?
Probably better at this point to attempt to solve my own problems wrong for free at this point. Maybe I'll learn to program in Linux or some such thing.
Forrest
for suggestions please contact me at
res0naza@yahoo

Github has a very cool business model. They launch most of their services for free in public repos and have a pay for using them in private repos. So when people use them and like them in open environment, github get free advertisements for potential customers that might use that in closed environment.

Google also has a similar model with its gsuite, but it has its advertisements business model over it that makes it look bad.

Personally, i like github's model but google gets a bad light for not being privacy focussed, while github is thriving.

I don't care about market cap. Stick your hype-driven business practices up your ass. Infinite growth doesn't exist. I won't read your fucking books and attend your fucking bootcamps and MBAs. You don't have a business model. Selling data is not a business model. Fuck your quick-flip venture capital schemes, and especially fuck your “ethics”.

I will be the first alt-tech CEO. I only care about revenue. The real money, not capitalization bubble vaporware. You don't need a huge fleet of engineers if you're smart about your technology, know how to do architecture, and you're not a feature creep. You don't need venture capital if you don't need a huge fleet of engineers. You don't need to sell data if you don't need venture capital. See? See the pattern here?

My experience allows me to build products on entirely my own. I am fully aware of the limitations of being alone, and they only inspire lean thinking and great architectural decisions. If you know throwing capacity at a problem is not an option, you start thinking differently. And if you don't need to hire anyone, it is very easy to turn a profit and make it sustainable.

If you don't follow the path of tech vaporware, you won't have the problems of tech vaporware, namely distrust of your user base, shitty updates that break everything, and of course “oops, they raised capital, time to leave before things go south”.

A friend of mine went the path I'm talking about, developed a product over the course of four years all alone, reached $10k MRR and sold for $0.8M. But I won't sell. I only care about revenue. If I get to $10k MRR, I will most likely stop doing new features and focus on fixing all the bugs there are and improving performance. This and security patches. Maybe an occasional facelift. That's it. Some products are valued because they don't change, like Sublime Text. The utility tool you can rely on. This is my scheme, this is what I want to do in life. A best-kept secret.

Imagine 100 million users that hate my product but use it because there are no alternatives, 100 people in data enrichment department alone, a billion dollars of evaluation (without being profitable), 10 million twitter followers, and ten VC firms telling me what to do and what data to sell.

Fuck that. I'd rather have one thousand loyal customers and $10k MRR. I'm different, some call it a mental illness, but the bottom line is, my goals are beyond their understanding. They call me crazy. I won't say it was never about the money, of course it was, but inflating your evaluation is not “money”. But the only thing they have is their terrible hustle culture lives and some VC street wisdom, meanwhile I HAVE products, it is on record on my PH. I have POTDs, I have a fucking Golden Kitty nomination on health and fitness for a product I made in one day. Fuck you.

I cannot remember having seen a more unethical and pushy user interface than the one of viagogo.

I'm a frustrated to close the entire tab within the first 10 seconds. It's a sad story on on how it tries to instill a sense of urgency to BOOK NOW!

100 people are looking RIGHT NOW at the YOUR offer! Stop thinking, act fast! BUY IT, YOU FOOL OR IT IS GONE!

Here, see all those other options are already sold out m( Oh look, that option over there? Just sold out in this very instant you lazy ass.

I have seen something similar on booking.com and airbnb, yet this egregious implementation truly gets my blood boiling and sets a new low.

I'll take my business elsewhere.

If you develop a web shop, treat your customers as actual adults. Let them breathe. Let them make an informed decision.

If you need to rush them, your business model is broken.

If my employer would ask me to develop something like that, I'd escalate hard. If that wouldn't suffice, I'd reject implementing that anti-feature and would look for a new job out of principle.

What is DevRant's business model? It's a really great community, and I'm interested about how it's monetized (or plans for the future)

How does devrant make profit?
Are you, hexical labs, accepting donations, or what's the business model?

One of my uncle is becoming a classic nightmare.

He was kind of getting offended that I never payed much attention to his request of making a website for his impromptu travel agent sidejob.

He claims he gets approached by some people for tour packages. His revenue model is simply taking the payment from them with his commission and passing over responsibilities and everything else to some other travel agent. I don't know how he has the connections to make it happen or build it as a sustainable business but that's none of my business.

Anyway, what irritates me most is that he doesn't seem willing to invest in building the site. I strongly suspect he expects me to build it free ( free as in I cover expense for server and domain ) for him. He didn't have a solid plan on what features he is looking for in the website or even come up with a proper name for the site. He basically told me to buy whatever I think is good.

When I asked him to pay some money for buying the server space, he has gone mum about it.

My best guess is that he is probably looking on internet to do it himself and outsmart me.

Well, good for me.

At school during my first Java project we had to make a simulation of a parking garage and what effects price changes would have in order to find the most optimal business model from some company.

At the project kick off.

School: "we will be checking your code for plagiarism. if you use code from the internet, even if its 2 lines you need to mention the source. otherwise you will fail this cource."

We go on to do the project.

Friend of mine who was in another class sees a group presenting a 2 days old version of my teams application. theres literaly a credits button that displays the names of the people that worked on it in a popup.

Me: mentions to a teacher that my project was stolen.

They literaly didnt even change the name and pulled the entire repository from github and handed it in.

The fucking teacher doesnt even check the code / git logs after i mentioned that the entire codebase was stolen from a public github repository.

There was an endless mountain of proof to support my claim such as our team members names hard coded in the code they handed in and about 500 commits from our accounts.

I will from now on NEVER EVER mention sources when i hand in code at school.

To be honest with you, I’ve never had a bad experience with PHP.

Yes, it’s “dirty” compared to something like Haskell, but it’s not a bad thing. Dirty things usually bring simplicity and allow implementing the intended case super quickly, at the cost of breaking apart at scale. There are no bad tools, there are wrong tools for the job.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil. The more I launch new projects for me/other companies, the more I come to the realization that the vast majority of the projects out there will never see scale. They will be proven non-viable/impractical and deemed obsolete way before they outgrow the $20 VPS they were hosted on.

Sometimes (all the time, really) launching quickly like there is no tomorrow is the most viable business strategy. If (yes, “if”, not “when”) your project outgrows PHP and gets to the point when PHPs abstraction model is the bottleneck, you’ll have the money to rewrite the project in any language out there, trust me.

As someone said on biking subreddit to a person that asked how to buy the newest super-aero helmet, “if the aerodynamics of the old helmet is what holds you back, someone will be sending you the new one for free”.

I'm between Node js and (yes) blockchain. Node has amazing possibilities, and well distributed could end with the crappy servers era. Even my crappy server could fall to node in some weeks.
Blockchain is the best chance I see to take control over a market full of companies stuck in the middle's XXth century business model, and has a lot more to provide

I am having a shift of mindset, I learnt programming to create solutions that will make impacts in local communities - I live in Africa ... but lately, I just want to make money, alot of it.
I dont have any inspiration to continue any work for < SGD'S IMPACT PROJECT>. I plan to send my resignation letter to all.
I will probably just remodel/replicate another capilalist business model...
When I am rich enough, I can think about making an impact.

What do you think of Elixir + Phoenix to build API’s? Is it a better choice than a more established language like Python or something more new like Scala or Clojure?

At my company we're going through a watershed moment where we're starting to discuss and think about re-building our digital foundations and nothing is off limits. I'm leading the discussion about our architecture where everyone can have their say into what the future looks like for our applications. We're currently on a Drupal (CMS)  + PHP7/Symfony (Backend Content Repository) + Symfony Twig templates (Frontend)

Even though I have been developing in PHP most of my career, I personally love Elixir and spend a lot of my time away from work learning it but many of my reasons feels subjective like pattern matching, it's actor concurrency model, immutable data and not having to deal with classes/objects, and I'm not entirely sure how that translates to business value, advocating successfully for a tech stack change requires solid reasoning and good answers to challenges like how do we find Elixir developers when existing devs leave, how easy is it to build a CI/CD pipeline for Elixir/Phoenix, etc.

There is a difference between HR and CHRO, senior marketing expert and CMO, senior developer and CTO.

There is a work ethic stance of always staying in your scope and saying "that's not my job" to any extra stuff someone asks you to do. This is acceptable and perfectly normal. Any team member has a contract, and you owe your company nothing beyond that.

That stance is however only acceptable from regular workers, not a chief board members. For any acronym position that starts with a capital letter C, that stance is not acceptable anymore. That's the difference.

Board members should have a share. Board members should have the right to dictate how a company is, at least proportional to their share or more.

Only those who display T-shaped skills, ownership and interest in the whole business model, not just their scope, are eligible to graduate up to a chief position. If you're not a chief officer, but you want to get there, this is what you do. Analyze the business as a whole and come up with measurable and provable ways of making it better, because this can't be formalized, and thus can't be a part of your contract. This is the surest way to the top.

I am of course speaking of the companies where the main priority is the business and its ethics and not the founder's ego. The latter can't be saved.

I'm feeling burnt due to the lack of direction at my job instead of overwork.
I'm working as a data scientist at a large corporation and have been remote for a little over a year. I'm very savvy at programming and other technical skills but my manager wants me to develop my leadership skills and want me to move to a management role eventually. So he's been kinda "grooming" me to take on more leadership responsibility in the projects I'm currently involved in.

However, to be honest, I'm a little torn about getting more management or leadership responsibilities. I'm an extreme introvert and absolutely abhor meetings and having the same thing to people all the time and this sort of things stresses me out very easily. My manager seems set on pushing me towards pursuing a path towards leadership and just basically assumed that this is what I want out of my career and started putting me in the deep end without asking me what I want.

I really want to voice my honest thoughts about what I really want to do in my career (to be a technical specialist rather than a manager) but I've kinda procrastinated over the past year when he first started "grooming" me for a leadership role and it's my bad that I didn't tell him earlier.

Right now, I'm thrown in the deep end. I'm given a lot of projects without much of any direction and I'm asked to figure out the people I need to reach out to, the types of meetings I need to set with them, the relationships I need to develop both in and out of my department, etc. However, my real passions lie in writing code, fixing bugs, building models, understanding new technologies and applying them to the business, etc.

On paper, I'm involved in a ton of projects and I seem to be a really busy worker. But right now, I'm having a lot of difficulty reaching out and developing relationships with people that I barely have any actual work to do during the day, because I'm constantly waiting for replies from people or for permission or red tape to get some key information or access to a system in order for me to build something like a model or a program for a particular project. I'm spending maybe 1 or 2 hours of my workday actually "working" which is attending meetings, reading emails, etc., reaching out to someone for the n-th time (even though they continue to ignore me), etc. And that's because I'm blocked on all of my projects - I need an essential piece of information, data, or access to a system or server and the person I'm reaching out to to get this isn't responding. I brought this up with my manager and he says he's gonna try to reach out to these people to help me but so far, it doesn't seem like his help has been effective as I'm continuing to wait.

Though I get paid pretty well, I feel guilty logging in to work everyday and doing very little work, not because I'm lazy but because there really isn't much work for me to do because I'm waiting on so much here and I'm at a point where I can't make any progress in any of my projects without the approvals or other critical information that others aren't providing me.

I know I probably should find another job and I'm currently looking but in the meantime, is there anything else that I should be doing at my current job to hopefully make this situation better?

And now Bell (among others) is pushing to censor the Internet in Canada, too. Why adjust their failing business model when they can just whine and complain, and have the government smash out the competition for them?

Thanks, America. Always paving the way to a big, fat cauldron of shit at the end of the capitalist rainbow.

How does devRant makes their money?

Hypothesis 1: they word count our rants to identify most well known tech terms and sell it to hiring companies and consulting firms.
Hypothesis 2: they aggregate rants on an specific management fad or technique and sell it to management research and consulting firms
Hypothesis 3: currently burning through investor cash and plan on filling the place with ads when that runs off.
Hypothesis 4: something along the lines of "devs of the world, unite!"

Or is there another way?

Idea: management strategy diversification experiment.
Basically we fund a company that has exactly the same fucking business model that we have, but a radically different management strategy. If it works, we know our culture needs some meddling.

How does on-call work for your company? Our product is mostly used in the US so any pages we get are mostly in the US time. Despite that, our team has US and EU folk and me (an EU folk) am expected to wake up middle of the night for any pages that occur. I consider this a really shit model not just for employees but for the business, but I wanted to know if this is common and I'm just not seeing the point of this.

What exactly is the business model of medium? I skim through 100s of articles everyday, most of them are tech based and i am able to read them fully. But on some articles , it shows "you have reached your limit" and shows a pesky blocker?
Likes is it
if (new Random.nextInt() % new Random.nextInt() ==0) {blockArticle();}

Right?

If we don't count gaming there are 2 different categories of laptops; consumer and business.

Business laptops are better quality and more durable than consumer laptops. That's just a fact. Therefore the extra cost.

Now my question: Does Microsoft 'favor' business laptops in terms of Windows 10 and Windows 10 updates?

Because I have a business model laptop and since the beginning Windows 10 worked flawless and still does and I never had any problems despite running mutiple programs and services.

While some of my friends have consumer laptops and they are complaning day in day out about their Windows is always updating and programs always crashing.

So does Microsoft 'favor' business models in terms of Windows 10 updates and stability or am I just lucky?

I am currently weeks apart from releasing my pet project, which I am working on for almost 6 years now. Of course, there were a few stops here and there, but overall I've spent a lot of time and effort on this to make it work. It is far from complete but I am really happy with the results.

Now, since I am not a professional by any means - it is all a hobby for me - I was wondering, that how much my work would cost, if it were to made by professionals. Below the details so you can get a grasp of the thing.

The whole system is for our family business. We are selling parts for an old-timer truck model. The website was pretty much done already, people like it, it only needed some polishing and adding of the new features. But the thing behind it is monstrous (at least for me).
Apart from the custom-made CMS for the website (most of it was done already and didn't need to change), we can handle orders, partners, prices, stocks, overdue partners, pretty much anything a CRM would do.
There is a logic to automatically make orders based on import prices, or give the customer a custom discount based on the price gap of each product. There are products, which can contain other products, and their prices are dynamically changed based on a given formula, once an underlying product price changes. We can send e-mails when an order status changes, and there is also a page, where a user can interact whit their order, like changing the shipping or the delivery address. The system is (or will in the following weeks) also connected to multiple shipping companies' API, so we can order deliveries and print labels directly from our system. The whole thing is a custom made Laravel project by the way. There are countless more features, but I've just spent 2 hours explaining all to my father and was only be able to cover like half of it.

And why it is all custom made, you ask? Well, the business logic is a bit twisted, so it would be hard to operate as a regular web shop, since the availability of the products are uncertain, given the fact that it is a model, which isn't manufactured in 30 years. So, we can't just accept and send orders without confirming. It is also a thing, that people usually don't know what they need to order for their truck, so we have to help them, so they don't waste their money and the precious last pieces of a part unnecessarily.

Sorry for this rather long post, and it might feel like I just want to brag (well, I kinda do), but I am honestly interested in what such a custom product would cost in the market.

Thank you for your time answering.

Basically any idea without any monetizing strategy whatsoever or just the idea of "selling data". What data and to whom?!

So this lockdown gave me time to think and strategize on how to run my software business more efficiently
Launch the model
3 days later remodel the structure
Launch it
3 days later review
Rectify
Redesign draft a new strategy
Review launch it

!rant

Question: I am working on learning MVC/MVP/MVVM/MVPVM and I have read a bunch of articles and done some tutorials but I need some help relating it to n-tier (I think that's what they're called) systems.

I have worked on and I am used to the Presentation (ui) layer > BAL > DAL > DB pattern. How does MVC (and others) relate to the different tiers in a tiered system? I have read that model == DAL, controller == BAL, and view == presentation layer, but I have also read that MVC is meant to extract the presentation layer and that business logic and data logic should be used elsewhere. Can I get some clarity?

Before he began dropping the 20K proposed to remodel my flat, I told my father I much preferred a contractor who was recommended by someone I knew, as opposed to using a big corporation like Home Depot. FAMOUS LAST... a neighbour in my building highly recommended the contractor we chose. And, week 7 [or is it 8?] of what was proposed to take no longer than two weeks has begun afresh!
On Friday the fellow who is the owner of the contract remodeling company was here touching the paint. He was here because I forbade the two painters he sent to do the initial painting job.
My internet cut out suddenly around 1300 Friday. He set to leave for the weekend shortly after that. I mentioned the outage to him. The essence of his reply was that there was no way it could have had anything to do with him. The following day, my internet provider sent a tech out to diagnose the problem. What was the problem? The head of the remodeling firm removed a face plate from the wall where there were telephone wires and disconnect them when he tore the wires as he replaced the face plate.
Although the tech told me he wasn't going to charge my account the $85.00 fee for his services because the outage was caused within my flat, I wish to be sure of this. Which brings us to the punchline.
My internet provider is a lame ass business model, dreamed up by a squint-eyed ex-circus monkey, never well endowed in the top story, and now just plain sad.
There were some 911 outages in Washington State last Thursday night. All during the day Friday when you dialled their freephone #. the recorded announcement, before saying anything else, told you they were experiencing heavier than usual call volumes, and my wait would be greater than `10 minutes. Fine. What fried my La Croix silk was that after their customer service dept closed for the weekend, that outgoing message remained.
Today, I wanted to contact my provider to see if they would know if the $ was going to be charged to my account. After pressing the 'send' key, my computer came back with an error message, saying they were having technical difficulties. So, I went on over to the 'chat' page. There's nothing to click on to take me to this enfabled location. So, can't reach them by phone unless I want to hear, every 30 seconds whether or not I wish to, how sorry they are for my delay.
A few years ago I would've used this as an excuse to have a technicolour meltdown. The reason I'm posting this is that I am now able to see beforehand what I'll be doing to myself getting upset over the circumstances. When I do reach somebody, I'm going to tell them as lightly as possible, that if they were an airline, I wouldn't board any of their aircraft. Ever.

Sometimes I'm questioning all my skills... I have a maven based project which uses hibernate as OGM to the mongo database. Everything working fine and already in a productive environment.

Now I changed some lines of code at the business logic to adjust for the changed database model. So far so good.

After compiling and running on the test environment: exception! "no persistence provider for Entity Manager named xy" are you fu***** kidding me? I changed nothing at that point!

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.

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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.
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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!