Shopping for fridge with sister in law.

"Yeah that one is nice but it doesn't have an app"

"Why do you need an app for your fridge"

"I don't know, but this other fridge has an app, so I think if it doesn't have an app it's not that good"

"But it's very energy-efficient, silent and spacious. The one with the app is the same size, has a worse energy rating, is noisier and is more expensive as well"

"Yeah I know but if there's no extra features that's kind of boring"

"You are everything that's wrong with modern consumers"

I hired a guy on upwork. His english is shit. But hes done the work correctly. Fast forward today he asked me "off topic question but do u have any female friend who can accompany me to fuck?"

WTF IS THIS SHIT

That is not professional AT ALL. I dont give a shit about the fact he cant get no bitches so hes begging me as if im some kind of a pimp. On upwork?? Gtfo.

Now i understand why companies want to hire only people with college DEGREES because they have went through the process of conforming and dont ask stupid shit questions. Eliminates a lot of bullshit and Neanderthals like this guy

Ffs

Hey, Root? How do you test your slow query ticket, again? I didn't bother reading the giant green "Testing notes:" box on the ticket. Yeah, could you explain it while I don't bother to listen and talk over you? Thanks.

And later:
Hey Root. I'm the DBA. Could you explain exactly what you're doing in this ticket, because i can't understand it. What are these new columns? Where is the new query? What are you doing? And why? Oh, the ticket? Yeah, I didn't bother to read it. There was too much text filled with things like implementation details, query optimization findings, overall benchmarking results, the purpose of the new columns, and i just couldn't care enough to read any of that. Yeah, I also don't know how to find the query it's running now. Yep, have complete access to the console and DB and query log. Still can't figure it out.

And later:

Hey Root. We pulled your urgent fix ticket from the release. You know, the one that SysOps and Data and even execs have been demanding? The one you finished three months ago? Yep, the problem is still taking down production every week or so, but we just can't verify that your fix is good enough. Even though the changes are pretty minimal, you've said it's 8x faster, and provided benchmark findings, we just ... don't know how to get the query it's running out of the code. or how check the query logs to find it. So. we just don't know if it's good enough.

Also, we goofed up when deploying and the testing database is gone, so now we can't test it since there are no records. Nevermind that you provided snippets to remedy exactly scenario in the ticket description you wrote three months ago.

And later:

Hey Root: Why did you take so long on this ticket? It has sat for so long now that someone else filed a ticket for it, with investigation findings. You know it's bringing down production, and it's kind of urgent. Maybe you should have prioritized it more, or written up better notes. You really need to communicate better. This is why we can't trust you to get things out.

*twitchy smile*

Worst fight I've had with a co-worker?

Had my share of 'disagreements', but one that seemed like it could have gone to blows was a developer, 'T', that tried to man-splain me how ADO.Net worked with SQLServer.

<T walks into our work area>
T: "Your solution is going to cause a lot of problems in SQLServer"
Me: "No, its not, your solution is worse. For performance, its better to use ADO.Net connection pooling."
T: "NO! Every single transaction is atomic! SQLServer will prioritize the operation thread, making the whole transaction faster than what you're trying to do."
<T goes on and on about threads, made up nonsense about priority queues, on and on>
Me: "No it won't, unless you change something in the connection string, ADO.Net will utilize connection pooling and use the same SPID, even if you explicitly call Close() on the connection. You are just wasting code thinking that works."

T walks over, stands over me (he's about 6.5", 300+ pounds), maybe 6 inches away

T: "I've been doing .net development for over 10 years. I know what I'm doing!"

I turn my chair to face him, look up, cross my arms.

Me: "I know I'm kinda new to this, but let me show you something ..."

<I threw together a C# console app, simple connect, get some data, close the connection>

Me: "I'll fire up SQLProfiler and we can see the actual connection SPID and when sql server closes the SPID....see....the connection to SQLServer is still has an active SPID after I called Close. When I exit the application, SQLServer will drop the SPD....tada...see?"
T: "Wha...what is that...SQLProfiler? Is that some kind of hacking tool? DBAs should know about that!"
Me: "It's part of the SQLServer client tools, its on everyone's machine, including yours."
T: "Doesn't prove a damn thing! I'm going to do my own experiment and prove my solution works."
Me: "Look forward to seeing what you come up with ... and you haven't been doing .net for 10 years. I was part of the team that reviewed your resume when you were hired. You're going to have to try that on someone else."

About 10 seconds later I hear him from across the room slam his keyboard on his desk.

100% sure he would have kicked my ass, but that day I let him know his bully tactics worked on some, but wouldn't work on me.

meeting with PM, 1:1
me: well, to be honest, i think there is also some room for improvement concerning communication in our meetings. the discussion culture in our meetings could be more open.
PM: what do you mean? i don't know what you're talking about.
me: well, i feel sometimes that in meetings, you overly challenge what colleagues suggest. on the other hand, it's really hard to argue against what you are saying. what you say is often like engraved into stone and it is hard to argue against that, but the next day you might have changed your mind again and then things are different, but engraved into stone again.
PM: hmm. can you give me some more concrete example?
me: well... (gives some examples) it's just that it would be nice if you would listen more to what people say in meetings and try to understand what they actually mean or want to say, instead of saying "nah, that's not how we do it" or "no, that's wrong"... just.. well, have more trust in our skills, try to find out what people mean before you discard what you think they said... a bit more of appreciation and openness.
PM: oh, i can tell you, i'm the MOST open manager in this whole company.
me: ...
PM: but anyway, i will think about it.
me: well... okay. also i see there are some challenges within our team concerning intercultural communication. i mean, communication between Germans and Indians is in general a bit problematic in our company, and maybe it is a good idea to have some workshop together concerning intercultural competences... i think we could benefit from that. (what i actually meant is, these problems exist, but currently i see them more on his side or between him and Indian colleagues, because e.g. he tends to harshly criticize people in daily standups, and if we "direct" Germans already feel affronted by his behavior, how must Indian guys feel about it? in fact, 2 Indian devs already left the project. also communication doesn't really work well, in a way that there's often a great mismatch between his expectations and what Indian devs actually think they have to do)
PM: i can tell you, i really understand our Indian colleagues, i really know how to work with them. also, their working style has greatly improved since project start. (which doesn't feel quite right after he totally ripped apart the work of one guy in the last sprint review meeting)

of course, that's not the whole conversation, but it's kind of a symptomatic example for the whole situation...

I am Done! I am extremely burnt out and unhappy with my work. I have been doing this professionally for over 5 years now and much longer than that unprofessionally.
This new company I joined finally gave me the salary I always dreamt of but now I am extremely unhappy and depressed and anxious all the time. And I don't like the work I am doing. I don't like the team. I hate being isolated at home for over 2 years, working from home. I had a mental breakdown in the middle of the meeting the other day. And after that, I said. that's it. I am done. So, I gave the resignation letter. I don't know what I am gonna do. But I sure as hell can't do this shit any longer. But now, the fucking hr is making it even more difficult for me by not letting me leave without serving the notice period. I told her I am on fucking medication and I am having severe mental health issues. Now, she wants to see the medical certificate. Or I have to pay two months' salary. WTF? If I had that kind of money lying around, I wouldn't have slaved myself away at your shitty company, would I?
I went to my psychiatrist whom I have been seeing consulting for the last couple of years now. I asked for a medical certificate and he thinks it'll hamper my future career. So, he said I should get a certificate from a general physician. So, that's the world we live in then? You can't even speak the truth? And the way HR is behaving over the mail makes me feel like a total slave. I mean I am not at all fit for work these days, and it feels like, if she had her way, she would tie me down to a chair and ask me to push out code. what the fucking fuck. This is some fucked up industry and I think I am finally done with software development. But now, I don't have any idea what I am gonna do with my life or how am I gonna earn money. I am so burnt out and anxious that even the thought of working again gives me panic attacks. even working from home. What the fuck do I do?

I AM TIRED

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am just tired of all those fuckers.

Bring the fun and curiosity back.

School education? Mostly rinse and repeat, learn from heart and do as you are told.

First job? Take these bread crumbs, shit out gold ingots, please.

There are few who had either very kind and gifted teachers / persons in their life or had a strong will / desire to learn by / for themselves - but it's hard to combine fun and curiosity with the - most of the time - very harsh reality and environment we live in.

I'd really wish that it would get back to fun and curiosity and not the endless myriad of bitching, hissing and fighting it usually is.

What I find most tiresome in education is the overflow of information with no value - most content is outdated, wrong, harmful, not precise and especially not helpful.

Thinking about good education I've got very fond memories of hanging out in IRC chats, talking with people who were "ancient" (la me 15-20, them 40 plus ;) ) and not being "shood" away, but rather getting fed by book recommendations, hints, appointments when they had more spare time to explain in private IRC sessions etc.

The atmosphere was always a "we might not have time for it, but we'll try and don't worry if you don't understand it".

When I'm trying to find information today... It's really 90 - 95 % filtering, 4 % try and error, 1 % finding what I need.

I installed WhatsApp after 7.5 years.

My family forced me to do so because they make all the plans there and I am left out.

I am strictly using it for family and specifically for cousins while ignoring everyone else.

While the group is inactive except for when we all meet (which is once or twice a year).

I am also on Instagram which is 99% of the time deactivated and the only reason I have it is when I did my backpack, I met some real awesome people and the only way to stay in touch with them was via Instagram. Too bad that I did not have it then.

Yes, you can hate me for doing this. But I need to get this off my chest here. I am integrated with Meta ecosystem, but I am making sure I tread carefully and take all measures to protect myself from any kind of damage.

"So Alecx, how did you solve the issues with the data provided to you by hr for <X> application?"

Said the VP of my institution in charge of my department.

"It was complex sir, I could not figure out much of the general ideas of the data schema since it came from a bunch of people not trained in I.T (HR) and as such I had to do some experiments in the data to find the relationships with the data, this brought about 4 different relations in the data, the program determined them for me based on the most common type of data, the model deemed it a "user", from that I just extracted the information that I needed, and generated the tables through Golang's gorm"

VP nodding and listening intently...."how did you make those relationships?" me "I started a simple pattern recognition module through supervised mach..." VP: Machine learning, that sounds like A.I

Me: "Yes sir, it was, but the problem was fairly easy for the schema to determ.." VP: A.I, at our institution, back in my day it was a dream to have such technology, you are the director of web tech, what is it to you to know of this?"

Me: "I just like to experiment with new stuff, it was the easiest rout to determine these things, I just felt that i should use it if I can"

VP: "This is amazing, I'll go by your office later"

Dude speaks wonders of me. The idea was simple, read through the CSV that was provided to me, have the parsing done in a notebook, make it determine the relationships in the data and spout out a bunch of JSON that I could use. Hook it up to a simple gorm golang script and generate the tables for that. Much simpler than the bullshit that we have in php. I used this to create a new database since the previous application had issues. The app will still have a php frontend and backend, but now I don't leave the parsing of the data to php, which quite frankly, php sucks for imho. The Python codebase will then create the json files through the predictive modeling (98% accuaracy) and then the go program will populate the db for me.

There are also some node scripts that help test the data since the data is json.

All in all a good day of work. The VP seems scared since he knows no one on this side of town knows about this kind of tech. Me? I am just happy I get to experiment. Y'all should have seen his face when I showed him a rather large app written in Clojure, the man just went 0.0 when he saw Lisp code.

I think I scare him.

I know folks do their best, but come on Apple, this can't be that hard. Bought an IPhone at an estate sale (elderly individual died suddenly, so no one had knowledge of the apple id, passwords, etc) and I've been trying to convince apple to clear the activation lock. (AS = Apple Support)

<after explaining the situation>
AS: "Have you tried putting the phone in recovery mode? That should clear the lock"
Me: "I've already done that. It prompts for the apple id and password, which I don't have"
AS: "You need to talk to the owner and get the information"
Me: "As I explained, I purchased the phone at an estate sale of someone who died. I have the bill of sale, serial number, the box, obituary. What else do you need?"
AS: "Have you tried contacting a family member? They might have have that information."
Me: "The family members at the sale told us this is all they had. This kind of thing has to happen. I can't believe Apple can't clear the activation lock."
AS: "Yes, we can, but I'm very sorry we take security seriously."
Me: "I understand, what do I do now?"
AS: "Did you log out of the phone? Go to settings ..."
Me: "Yes, I tried all those steps before calling. It prompts for the AppleID and password."
AS: "Did you try entering the password?"
Me: "No, I don't have it. I already explained there is no way to know"
AS: "Yes..yes...sorry...I'm just reading the information in front of me. I found something, have you tried submitting a activation lock removal request?"
Me: "Yes, it was denied, didn't tell me why, which is why I'm calling. What about taking this phone to an Apple store? I have all the paperwork."
AS: "Sure, you can try. You might need the death certificate. The family or the coroner will have a copy."
Me: "What!? Apple requires a death certificate to unlock a phone!? I'm pretty sure not even the family is going to give a total stranger a death certificate"
AS: "Sorry sir, I'm just reading what is in front of me. Without that certificate, there is no way to prove the person died. You can try the Apple store, but they will likely require it."
Me: "That's a lot of drama for unlocking a phone. A *phone*"
AS: "Yes sir, I understand. If there anything else we can do let us know and thank you for being an a apple customer."

Next stop, the Apple Store.

Years ago we hired a new employee in our department, her first week was kind of slow, she had training materials to get through but otherwise didn't have much newby work for her. I noticed she was missing one day, she wasn't at her desk or in the area training, I found her hiding behind a door playing a video game and texting on her phone. She didn't last long there. She should have asked for something to do, or asked what she could be doing, instead of sneaking off and playing on her phone.

I have this pact with my neighbor - if someone delivers a package to them, I knock on their door when I notice it to let them know and if they don’t answer, I take it into my apartment and leave a note. Same goes if she or her kids see a package delivered for us and we don’t answer.

So last month, we have a flooding incident in our complex and her flat’s damaged so they have to leave to stay at a hotel for a bit. It’s only supposed to be until the 20th (of last month).

So when she gets a package a few weeks ago, I knock and when there’s no answer, take it into my apartment and leave a note.

Note stays on the door for days.

And then it disappears, so I assume she’s home.

But she never answers the door.

And then I see workers in her place.

So now I don’t know if it’s the workers who picked up the note or if she was back and I missed her.

But it’s been a couple of weeks and I’m starting to worry about her. Like, the day of the flood she almost died and I ended up coming over to help (getting her oldest to do CPR, talking to 911, trying to keep people calm), so I know she’s not feeling great lately.

And I’m the kind of idiot that never thought to exchange numbers.

So I’ve resorted to internet stalking and messaging her on Facebook.

And knocking on the downstairs neighbor’s door since I know they’re related. They didn’t answer. I’ll try again later.

I have no idea what else to do. I mean, I don’t think I can contact the office and be like “Can you please provide me contact information for my neighbor? I have their stuff. Thanks.”

#awkward

So, as I'm currently cut off from the world of tech, my anxiety in regards to research has settled and I actually enjoy doing it again on my terms. It just makes me jealous to look at all these people developing cool stuff and wanting to get in on the project and maybe improve a part or two, particularly the robot kind. I want to slap some neural nets on majority of the robotic shit I see, or optimize them, or do something to make them more robust... But I don't have a research position right now where I can spend time and money doing that. So I just sit in front of my laptop and sulk.

... And literally this is why we can't have nice things. Cuz I'm not hired to make nice things. Literally.

I think I’m going to lose my mind. This stupid website I’m working on keeps going down and at the worst times possible. Nothing we do seems to help. I’m again awakened in the middle of the night to attend to it and still have no good answers why. My anxiety is through the roof because I can’t get back to sleep after tonight’s outage. The client is beyond pissed even though a ton of problems would be solved if they would just get off of some legacy software and onto something more modern. But they insisted it be this way and the budget is already blown and then some even if they changed their minds. If it’s going to be that I continue losing so much sleep and sanity, I may just have to quit this job. I hate the thought of that because I always want to see things through to a happy conclusion. And I like my teammates and don’t want to let them down. But I’m too old for that kind of no-sleep development lifestyle now. Nobody’s shitty website is worth my physical and mental health.

ever had the experience that people want you to do UI development or think you can only do / you love UI development, just because they like your UI?

my former boss (dev) thought i had spent most of my development time for my in-house web app (student project) for the UI and didn't see the work i had put in the business logic behind (which was more). also, he wanted me to completely switch to 100% UI development after my studies. when he asked me what kind of work i could imagine in the future, i said different things, but also that i somehow hate UI development. XD if i have to do it sometimes, fine, no problem, but doing only UI sounds fucking boring to me.
however, then i got another boss and worked on new topics which i like and which are rather far away from UI development.

one day my former boss asked me how i was doing with the new topics, and i told him about the cool stuff i did. he was somewhat surprised and told me, he didn't know that i was also enthusiastic about those topics, and he had always thought that i was most interested in UI development.

...did you actually hear anything i said? xD
also, just because i can, doesn't mean i want to. 🤷‍♀️

A certain person here on devRant was annoyed about my phone being named “Beyond”, seeing a screenshot of my settings.

What they said: “the name, beyond, reeks pretentiousness and arrogance, you say you’re better than other people”

What really happened: during one of my manic episodes, I discovered the band named Death Grips. Their music resonated with me and helped me to cope with my derealization. In one of their songs, I misheard lyrics, and heard the word “Veyon” that was never there in the first place. Upon my inner voice pronouncing it, as it usually happens to me, a brand-new universe appeared before me, where Veyon was a name of a megacorporation that exists in a shaky spacetime plane somewhere in India. If you want to go there, three outcomes are possible: you can actually come to their building that appears to be normal, with people working inside you can talk to, and no signs of trouble in sight. Or, you can try to walk to their building, but you will never reach it. GPS will show you slowing down gradually as you get closer, but to you, it would look like you’re just walking with your regular speed, as if nothing happened. Like a function trying to reach its asymptote, you’ll never come to your destination. The third outcome is by far the most interesting one. You will reach the building, but it will be abandoned, with doors scattered on the floors randomly, some of them will disappear after you walk in, rendering you missing in this universe. Oh, and floors are guarded by robots and turrets, and they are made by Grumman, the military aviation manufacturer. Yes, Grumman, not Northrop Grumman. This building in the third outcome originates from the spacetime plane where Northrop and Grumman never merged.

The whole thing raced through my mind in a millisecond. I liked it and decided to squat the name, but it was already taken by Veyon open source software (Virtual Eye On Networks).

In some time, I bought a new phone second-hand, and named it Veyon. The next day, I took it to shower with me. It turned out that the seller lied to me about it never being fixed. It was, and in the process its water resistance was compromised. So, this phone was damaged beyond repair the next day I bought it.

The same day, I went and bought the same phone model, but brand new, and in black, as I originally wanted. I was grateful for this opportunity that helped me escape the situation where I would've been using the phone of the colour I disliked just because I cheapen out. I know myself, and I would’ve been feeling uneasy every day, hesitant to sell it and get a new one because “nothing is wrong with it, quit being this picky, it’s just a colour”, but wait, don’t I deserve to make the colour a significant enough reason to switch the phone because I care about colour, especially if it’s me who’s paying the money? Did I make this money rightfully, or am I an impostor who gets paid because of intricate lies I tell? Do I actually tell them, or do I make that up to somehow convince "them" I'm innocent? Or do I try to get attention?

I’m terrible at dealing with that kind of mess, So, I was grateful.

The only thing left to do was to name my new phone. I decided not to name it “Veyon” again, just in case. So, I named it “Beyond”, as this word is probably what the actual song said.

The monstrosity of a story above is the usual thing for me to feel. I was really hurt by you telling me the name I chose was a display of pretentiousness. Do I deserve to be pretentious? I say yes, but my voice is shaking, as flashbacks of my awful mother abusing me come in the way.

You hurt me with that comment. Let’s meet? :)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I messaged the CEO ...

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

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

Me: and how does one maximize value?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

%&#$ YOU SIMON SINEK.

INTERVIEWER: Let’s say client wants a gif in the EDM design but older outlooks don’t support it. How do you solve it?
ME: Maybe we can try using iframes if outlook supports them and host gif somewhere and use iframes to show it.
INTERVIEWER: Any other solution?
ME: We can probably also detect the email client and just show gif for all other email clients but a picture for outlook.
INTERVIEWER: No but the client wants the gif to show on all email clients
ME: But outlook doesn’t support gifs!!!
INTERVIEWER: yeah
ME: …..
INTERVIEWER: …..

I thought maybe I missed something having been a junior dev and never developing edms. So jumped on the internet after the interview and my second answer is literally how everyone does it. What even was the point of that question? At no point she said yeah that’s a good solution and that’s how we do it in the industry. If outlook doesn’t fucking support gifs then what the fuck kind of solution am I supposed to bring to the fucking table in 5 fucking minutes.

Anyone else have that kind of manager who you ask a simple, single sentence question of, and get a ten volume essay of a response back from?

How do you deal? I'm usually a very capable, independent and initiative driven person but holy fuck.

All we need here is a:

"Hey manager, you assigned me this thing. I'm wondering what we should do about this particular edge case I've seen a few times in past roles?"

and a

"I'm not sure. Check with Steve, he should know, as his team worked on it and did x, y and z. If he doesn't know, come back to me"

and we're done.

Instead I get the entire Lord of the Rings saga written in zalgo.

"And in a stunning turn of events, he got it to work!"

But seriously... I've literally been throwing shit at a wall and seeing what would stick.
Fucking DTOs and getting shit out of a database. I need better resources on how to do this properly!

Anyways, I found that just using 'object' and letting the compiler deal with the rest of the bullshit actually allowed my code to work and run. I'm still a little in shock.

I'm over here trying to keep things in a nice one-to-one because that's what my PM recommended... and instead I just get slammed by Type casting nonsense and more errors than I can begin to understand. And unfortunately, Stackoverflow is of no help because everyone's issues are very nuanced and unrelated to my problem... Maybe I'm the problem? 🤷

But here it is working without all that bullshit. I don't know man... This code base is not the rager I was expecting. I'm getting my ass kicked with code that doesn't fall in line with the book I'm learning from.

You know how they say, "forget everything you've read and learned"? I'm feeling that really hard right now.

Constantly fighting the urge to rip everything down and do it based on what my book is recommending, but then the logical natured side of me is like "you ain't got that kind of time to be unfucking someone's work, only to get caught in more trouble. Your ego is not worth it"

Anyways, it's fucking late here and I'm glad enough to not have to think about this issue anymore. Bye.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FML or how I made myself unhireable

TL;DR: Working as a QA.
Changed jobs.
New job sucked.
Left after three months.
Got laid off from the next one after 4 months (not my fault).
Got depressed.
Got a Dev job back in the first company.
Job sucks, cannot leave… (5 months in)

Full rant:
I was doing pretty well as a QA Enginner. Started with internship, then junior in company A, then big pay rise moving to company B, where I quickly got promoted to Senior. As I was nearing 3yrs of exp, I decided it’s time for a change, as things were getting worse project-wise and felt like I was regressing. Also I was constantly bombarded with offers of +50% of my salary I could easily land, while company offered 10%.

Moved on to company C. This is where it started getting rocky. I was told I would be working on this one project, strictly test automation, nothing exciting but an easy gig. However week in, I was told to work on this other project 50/50. This was a startup kind of thing. It was a nightmare. Only manual testing. Most tickets had only a vague title, no description, no requirements, nothing. How do one test something without any knowledge how it should work? Besides that, the project lead on the client side was aggressive sometimes.
The workload was immense - 4 devs, 2 of them doing heavy overtime, so the output was like 6 devs and half of a tester….
Despite raising the problems, nothing was going to change, nor I could switch projects. The job began to heavily affect my mental health. Decided not to prolong my contract and left after 3 month probation period.

Quickly landed a job in company D. As my burnout as a tester kept bothering me more and more I decided that this was going to be my last job as a QA and next one will be a Dev. You see, I never enjoyed the tester part, I always enjoyed the automation part more. The plan was to learn in free time and after 18-24 months start applying for a dev role to see if I can land one (switching inside D was not an option). All plans went to hell, as I was handed a one month notice by the end of my third month. A month before my wedding… I was told the company was having financial issues and was laid off with about 30% of people in the company (mostly new hires).

I got depressed. I wouldn’t get out of bed for a few days. I never thought something like this would ever happen to me. Standing by my decision I was applying for development jobs, but most recruiters seeing either only QA experience or my recent 3 and 4 month employment periods weren’t responsive. Applying for testing jobs was a bit better but still nothing like before C and D.

Since company B I stayed in touch with my former manager, and he kept telling me that a new team has taken over most of the shitty work, and they are now working on cooler stuff and have more coming. He encouraged me to come back, as he has always thought highly of me professionally.
Looking at my options, I could probably get another testing job with lower pay, maybe I could land a junior Dev with like 1/3 of my salary or I could go back. So in my dark time I have reached out to my manager and just like that he got me a Senior Dev position, same pay as in company D.

Finally what I wanted right? Yeah… As soon I as joined all the new initiatives were being dropped one by one, and backlog got flooded with bugs and sh*t again. Five months in I hate my job again. Cannot leave cause no one will hire me…

Where I made the mistake?
Shouldn’t leave B despite facing regression and being underpaid?
Shouldn’t leave C no matter what?
Shouldn’t come back to B?

I'm just super disappointed in people. A lot of people flaky and not as good as I think they are. I tend to be an idealist, and I believe in helping others to do a net positive. But what I find is that people just don't give a shit about anyone else except for themselves. If it's even a slightest inconvenience to them they won't do it. You ask for one little thing despite you helping them out a shit ton, and they won't do it for you.

Also, I'm so tired of people who always come up to me and talk big game about how we should work on a project together. But when shit hits the fan and I say let's do the work they don't do anything. Or I have to drag them along to get anything started.

Yeah, everybody is out for themselves, but I wish we were more kind to others and learn to take a hit to our own convenience every once in a while.

But maybe I should just find a better group of people to hang out with and fuck you all to my current group of friends. JK.

I'm going for a run to clear my head. Hopefully after I come back I'll be in a better mood.

!RANT
Web Devs - I need your opinions.

To make a long story short, when my fiancé and I first moved in together I changed cities. One day at the grocery store we ran in to one of his old buddies, whom I had never met. His buddy works as a counselor at a non profit organization for mental illness. His friend asked me some questions to get to know me and found out I was a web developer. He instantly got exited and told us they needed a new website for their non profit, and asked me what I charged. Being shy, put on the spot, newer to the industry (uncomfortable talking $ due to inexperience) and seeing the guy was paralyzed I felt I HAD to say yes. I also said I would consider donating the site to them, as I knew my other web dev friends had done that for other non profits.

They were easy to work with and the build went smooth. We chose Wordpress so that they could go in and update the site on their own. I was under the assumption that I would create the site for them, but that they would take care of changes on their own, that I wouldn't be "supporting it". I even trained the friend 2-3xs on how to use Wordpress and make changes, but they ALWAYS have changes every month, including slides and content creation. Being a noob at the time, I KNOW it's my fault for not being more clear on the I'll build it but not make changes thing, and I've tried to kind of get them to see that I'm too busy, politely.

We'll, 3+ years later I've now found success in a different career path that takes up ALL of my free time after my 9-5 corporate web dev position, and am no longer interested nor able to do freelance work, including supporting existing sites. Since we don't have a contract in place, and they've never given me a cent, i was thinking of giving them a notice at the end of this month saying as of 2018 I will no longer be able to take care of their website, and that they'll have to find someone else by that time? I feel bad because it's a non profit and they don't have a lot of money. I'm afraid they won't find someone else nor be able to afford it. The situation is a little more sticky since this is my fiancés friend and I don't want them to feel like I'm leaving them high and dry, cuz I know they're very thankful for the site. I just wish they understood that I never promised to do changes for them every month. Even if they offered me money, I just don't have the time. I'm 100% fine if they want to keep the site and my code, although they really could use a redesign anyways cuz my code back then was terrible. What are your thoughts on this? Is 5 months fair? Am I doing the right thing?

I think I've reached some kind of job nirvana. My coworkers and I all complain about our work. We're overworked, underappreciated, underpaid, and and have to deal with all sorts of bullshit all the time. Pretty much everyone who has been on the team longer than a year is talking about quitting.

But I started at this company as a level 1 tech support phone technician before I transferred into the DevOps side of things, and that tech support job was SO much worse. Way more stressful, way less pay, mandatory overtime, horrible scheduling, being forced to remain calm while people hurl insults at you over the phone, and it was a dead-end job with a high turnover rate and almost no opportunities for advancement of any kind.

And every time I think back on that job, I realize that what I have now is actually pretty great. I'm paid well (still underpaid for the job I do, but catching up really fast due to my current boss giving me several big raises to keep me from quitting lol). I deal only with other tech people like developers and data scientists so no more listening to salesmen insult me on the phone. I'm not in any sort of customer service role so I can call people on their bullshit as long as I'm professional about it. I'm salaried so they can't make me work horrible shifts. 99% of my days are a normal 9-5 workday. I actually have a reliable schedule to plan around.

People treat me like the adult that I am.

I'd get a similar experience at other, better-paying companies, for sure, but what I have now is still pretty great.

I'm sure I'll be back in a few days to rant about more nonsensical bullshit and stress, but for now I'm feeling the zen.

I used to be at a company where it was kind of expected that you worked long days, which made it quite difficult to balance work and private life. It got so out of control that I was even called to work while I was on my holiday. At first I started with shutting off my phone after work hours, but the real solution I found was moving away from that company.

Pretty much everyone at my new company just stops working when the clock hits 4 or 5 pm unless there is something critical that needs to be done. Seeing that also discourages me (and everyone else) from working long days. We are also quite open about our workload so if anyone thinks they’re overwhelmed they can find a relevant person to talk to and eventually a solution is found. The salary isn’t incredible, but the work/life balance and the benefits I get are just way better than getting paid more and living to work.

I think a lot of people go for the high salaries, most of the time disregarding the other part of the equation. If the company has a meh work culture with low regard to employees’ work/life balance, there isn’t much the employee can do besides finding a place to work with better wlb. I’d pick a great work/life balance and peace of mind to a high salary any day.

I'm just FUCKING DONE. Everyone around me looks at me like a fucking paycheck they either don't want to pay me or like one they want from me but that I can't make enough of. Every time I open my stupid cakehole something stupid flies out of it that offends someone or makes me look incompetent or sets me back somehow. I'm not suicidal but I don't want to be on this planet anymore. I'm stranded here with nobody who wants to hire me and people around me who are tapping their feet waiting for people to hire me. I have nothing in my bank accounts to cover enormous and increasing monthly expenses coming up on the horizon and no way to pay for them. I have a stupid president who just keeps making it worse and worse with every stupid thing that comes out of his geriatric mouth or that he signs with his shaking dementia-ridden hand. He just keeps taxing me and taxing me and now has an army the size of the FUCKING NATIONAL GUARD of IRS agents ready to FUCK ME UP THE ASS if I have just one business expense out of order. I have all of this responsibility for my family and none of the power to do anything for them. And now that most of my kids are adults, none of them can afford to move out for the long-term future and also they're not able to get much money to help out so it's still incumbent on me to carry them until they're like FUCKING 35 YEARS OLD OR SOMETHING! The wife is pretty much sick of me and my shitty attitude about it all and she says she thinks that I think it's all her fault. We don't have any kind of romantic relationship anymore (well, I have all the interest and she has all the avoidance).

Also, I'm a man, and white, and straight, and "privileged" (oh, so privileged) so I'm the _worst person on the planet_.

I was born on this earth to be a FUCKING WARNING, not the lesson. When that meteor comes, let it take me out first.

I think I've noticed a human behaviour I wasn't aware of before.

That in any group, there will always be at least one bully..

I had thought once the current bully wasn't in the group anymore, that the group would finally become civilised !

But no, it seemed once the top bully was gone, another would replace them..

I wonder if that would continue until there was only 2 people left in the group ? ( Actually I do remember such a group, and yes, the other one was a bully ! )

People who you had known for decades, suddenly become a bully, why ?

Is it some kind of alpha human behaviour ?

Why can't we just get along without some asshole trying to make our lives more difficult..

How do you handle work colleague who is becomming too chummy? Got this one guy who is my age at work (we are in late 20's), we've been working for the past 5 months in the same team. At first I was in a bad place so kinda overshared my personal life with him so did he. Went out for drinks and etc.

Problem is that its becoming weird in the office now. I am trying to fix my habits like quitting drinking and quitting smoking and all I get from him is pressure about why Im not going out and etc. He doesnt even really know me, just assumes that if Im not hanging out with him I just sit in my home on a couch. And in the end what if I do? What kind of guilt tripping is this?

Also I feel that he as a senior is kinda undermining me. I am not a senior but definetly also not a junior anymore, and he treats me as a junior while he has at least half of knowledge gaps as me. He has been working remotely for some time now and I noticed even how dynamics in the office changed. I see other devs coming up to me for advice and I see that I am actually competent enough to help them. If my big ego senior was here, he would be sucking all of the attention out of the room and I would be in his shadow yet again. Its just weird.

Old old organization makes me feel like I'm stuck in my career. I'm hanging out with boomer programmers when I'm not even 30.

I wouldn't call myself an exceptional programmer. But the way the organization does it's software development makes me cringe sometimes.

1. They use a ready made solution for the main system, which was coded in PL/SQL. The system isn't mobile friendly, looks like crap and cannot be updated via vendor (that you need to pay for anyway) because of so many code customizations being done to it over the years. The only way to update it is to code it yourself, making the paid solutions useless
2. Adding CloudFlare in the middle of everything without knowing how to use it. Resulting in some countries/networks not being able to access systems that are otherwise fine
3. When devs are asked to separate frontend and backend for in house systems, they have no clue about what are those and why should we do it (most are used to PHP spaghetti where everything is in php&html)
4. Too dependent on RDBMS that slows down development time due to having to design ERD and relationships that are often changed when users ask for process revisions anyway
5. Users directly contact programmers, including their personal whatsapp to ask for help/report errors that aren't even errors. They didn't read user guides
6. I have to become programmer-sysadm-helpdesk-product owner kind of thing. And blamed directly when theres one thing wrong (excuse me for getting one thing wrong, I have to do 4 kind of works at one time)
7. Overtime is sort of expected. It is in the culture

If you asked me if these were normal 4 years ago I would say no. But I'm so used to it to the point where this becomes kinda normal. Jack of all trades, master of none, just a young programmer acting like I was born in the era of PASCAL and COBOL

Web dev...

I used to be a developer, long time ago I decided to start a whole different page in my life but it brought me back to web dev.

the reason I gave up on programming in general is simple, it started to transform into an abomination of some kind.

an example would be this massive amalgamation of frameworks, "packages", package managers and so on.

Frameworks, all do the same thing in a the most terrible way it could possibly do it. DI containers with massive constructors... constructing objects where you won't even need them.

Package managers with uncontrolled flow of shitcode that people blindly embed in to their software and call it a day!

Most of the products I came across while searching for a solution were just as bad as I would make it, I understand, today we need software solutions by "yestarday", and basically it is one of the reasons I had to do it all my self and jump back in to this hell. But cant we do a bit better ?

I know streams are useful to enable faster per-chunk reading of large files (eg audio/ video), and in Node they can be piped, which also balances memory usage (when done correctly). But suppose I have a large JSON file of 500MB (say from a scraper) that I want to run some string content replacements on. Are streams fit for this kind of purpose? How do you go about altering the JSON file 'chunks' separately when the Buffer.toString of a chunk would probably be invalid partial JSON? I guess I could rephrase as: what is the best way to read large, structured text files (json, html etc), manipulate their contents and write them back (without reading them in memory at once)?

Maybe as a student my burn outs does not count so much, but i must say, i had some.

Worst part is that each kind of landed just before the ending of the semester. You know, that nightmarish part when everbody throws homeworks, tests, projects and presentations at us, while we barely have time to prepare for the incoming exams. Such a wonderful life indeed.

But this time was waaaay worst. And that only because i wanted to do so much this year, i started always early to do my assignments and so on but in the end i was so stuck on their bullshits that i barely had time to work on my things.. i haven't touch any programming project on my own since march!

And i quite have a lot of them planned. I had over the semester and i have now over the summer. But I AM SICK OF THIS. And i figured out that would be for the best to take a break from this things gor a few weeks over the summer. I like this world, the world of programming but i fear that sometimes i might not be good enough to swallow others bullshit for my living, i hope i will be able to keep myself afloat with my own projects and ideas.

Anyways, i hope you all guys have it better than me and those of you who doesn't.. well, i am here for ya!

Cheers 🍻

Imagine you're in a company, one year in now. You've tried your best to amass as much knowledge of legacy services as you can (specially given no documentation) and you think you've done the best you can.

Now imagine your manager is upset that you haven't gotten as much domain knowledge as an engineer who's been in the team for five years now. Then also imagine that your manager whenever asked about specific product or tech or any knowledge on a service just keep tagging the 5 year engineer. If he ever gives an update in slack on any incident, he doesn't read what everyone has written in the channel so far, but invites the team on a call, and asks them to verbally tell him what to write as an update so as to show he actually understands it all and is showing leadership. What do you do?

Also I've read a good manager let's his team self function without any micromanaging but I feel this is literally hypocritical (lack of knowledge comparison) and useless of him to essentially making no decisions or understanding anything without pointing fingers. What would you all do about this kind of manager, or am I just inexperienced and maybe not seeing what he's actually doing and contributing.

So I'm working on something and I get a message from the business owner saying that something is missing in production, we need to fix this quickly. Turns out it's some missing images. We have a placeholder in place, so no harm done, users just see a placeholder image there and it's a minor thing. (These images cannot be uploaded by the user, because no one had the time to complete a feature for it. So business people bother developers.)

Anyway, the business owner escalates this into a request to add those images quickly to the repo and push it to production asap. I said that it can be done, because it is very low risk, but as I've seen this kind of "going straight to the developer with my problems" behavior before, I wanted to bring the issue to a broader audience. Then the product owner (PO) steps in and asks why wasn't he involved in this. Then other PO's step into the conversation as well, because they manage the process to prioritize and handle bug reports. Then someone posts the bug and error prioritization assessment and what do you know, judging the issue from that scale, it ranks as being "low".

"But what do we tell the customers?!". Oh, fuck you! It's one customer! Not everything can be prioritized as critical! If we stop work to fix every single thing we get feedback on without doing a proper assessment and prioritization, that's all we will be doing.

This is why PO's exist. They will push the breaks and assess the situation, then prioritize the work accordingly.

Well, seems working in toxic corporate environments for too long has had an effect on me

"Please ask permission the day before when you have do something in the morning that will make you late" I wound up not being late after all but anyway

Sorry I come from a place where the only to get that kind of stuff down was by being cagey with information and leaving things as vague as "I have to run an errand" at the last possible minute

This is more of an advice seeking rant. I've recently been promoted to Team Leader of my team but mostly because of circumstances. The previous team leader left for a start-up and I've been somehow the acting Scrum Master of the team for the past months (although our company sucks at Scrum generally speaking) and also having the most time in the company. However I'm still the youngest I'm my team so managing the actual team feels a bit weird and also I do not consider myself experienced enough to be a Technical lead but we don't have a different position for that.

Below actions happen in the course of 2-3 months.

With all the things above considered I find myself in a dire situation, a couple of months ago there were several Blocker bugs opened from the Clients side / production env related to one feature, however after spending about a month or so on trying to investigate the issues we've come to the conclusion that it needs to be refactorised as it's way too bad and it can't be solved (as a side note this issue has also been raised by a former dev who left the company). Although it was not part of the initial upcoming version release it was "forcefully" introduced in the plan and we took out of the scope other things but was still flagged as a potential risk. But wait..there's more, this feature was part of a Java microservice (the whole microservice basically) and our team is mostly made of JS, just one guy who actually works as a Java dev (I've only done one Java course during uni but never felt attracted to it). I've not been involved in the initial planning of this EPIC, my former TL was an the Java guy. Now during this the company decides that me and my TL were needed for a side project, so both of us got "pulled out" of the team and move there but we've also had to "manage" the team at the same time. In the end it's decided that since my TL will leave and I will take leadership of the team, I get "released" from the side project to manage the team. I'm left with about 3 weeks to slam dunk the feature.. but, I'm not a great leader for my team nor do I have the knowledge to help me teammate into fixing this Java MS, I do go about the normal schedule about asking him in the daily what is he working on and if he needs any help, but I don't really get into much details as I'm neither too much in sync with the feature nor with the technical part of Java. And here we are now in the last week, I've had several calls with PSO from the clients trying to push me into giving them a deadline on when will it be fixed that it's very important for the client to get this working in the next release and so on, however I do not hold an answer to that. I've been trying to explain to them that this was flagged as a risk and I can't guarantee them anything but that didn't seem to make them any happier. On the other side I feel like this team member has been slacking it a lot, his work this week would barely sum up a couple of hours from my point of view as I've asked him to push the branch he's been working on and checked his code changes. I'm a bit anxious to confront him however as I feel I haven't been on top of his situation either, not saying I was uninvolved but I definetly could have been a better manager for him and go into more details about his daily work and so on.

All in all there has been mistakes on all levels(maybe not on PSO as they can't really be held accountable for R&D inability to deliver stuff, but they should be a little more understandable at the very least) and it got us into a shitty situation which stresses me out and makes me feel like I've started my new position with a wrong step.

I'm just wondering if anyone has been in similar situations and has any tips or words of wisdom to share. Or how do you guys feel about the whole situation, am I just over stressing it? Did I get a good analysis, was there anything I could have done better? I'm open for any kind of feedback.

One of my seniors is leaving the team. Honestly, I did not talk about personal stuff with him but during this lockdown, he was the only one whom I talked to this much. My most projects are with him, so in the team I kind of only know him. And now he is leaving, I feel so heavy.

I was anyway feeling no interest in my work, and now this, I really don't want to work at all. I don't want to be in this team, really without his guidance I can't do good. And this reminds me now I don't have anyone in the team to guide me. It's the same feeling as you get old and now no one to support you and you need to support yourself and slowly others. It's frightening.

On a good note, I hope things will turn out to be good for him, he's a nice person after all :) Everyone respected him, and he was trusted so much.

I just realised I have 1TB of MS OneDrive Cloud space lying around unused. DAMNNN!!!

Just yesterday, I was thinking of backing up all my content to cloud (because just in case and past experiences of losing data).

I did a quick fact check and figured that I have ~450 GB of unbacked data.

After quick calculations, I came to a number of how many Google accounts I'll need for 15 GB per account of drive space.

Today, I was playing around with my Microsoft Developer account and saw OneDrive. I thought let's check how much free space does MS Dev subscription offers.

It showed 1024 GB. FUCK! My balls dropped.

Now here's what I did...

I have a local drive of 500 GB, which holds all the unbacked data. Now I setup my local OneDrive there and put everything into OneDrive.

And then, I moved my local Google Drive into OneDrive. A nested setup for important stuff.

So this way, less important stuff is backed up on cloud and accessible everywhere.

And more important stuff gets synced on Google Drive and OneDrive, both.

Did I do the right and sensible thing with this kind of setup?

MS Developer subscription says they expire it in 90 days but until today, they have auto renewed it always.

I still have ~500 GB of space which can be consumed.

Also, overall MS ecosystem seems much better to me than Google. Moreover, MS allows custom domain mapping which Google doesn't.

Let's see how can I entirely migrate to MS ecosystem in near future.

When my brain was overloaded and overwhelmed during rapid-cycling bipolar disorder, my life and my thoughts were a complete mess. Somehow, when I heard or imagined plurals of certain words, like "cans" or "cups", my brain painted pictures of a cute civilization of living soda cans. They fought oppression that came from us humans, but lacked mental capacity to do so. I felt really sorry for them and wanted to help. The more ordinary the word were, the more striking effect it had on me.

The rapid-cycling fashion of bipolar disorder is often triggered by unfit prescription medicines. This kind of disorder is among the most lethal mental disorders there are, with a huge percentage of patients committing suicide.

If you can't make sense of your thoughts, if your emotional responses seem inadequate or too strong, to the point when you can collapse crying after some random thought, stop whatever you're doing and seek help. Ask friends and family to find you a psychiatrist, as by the time you need help, you may lack mental capacity or emotional resource to find a doctor by yourself. To me, even the idea of leaving my bedroom and going somewhere was painful to think about.

If your thoughts appear to be "put into your brain" against your own will, if they make no sense, don't attempt to make sense of them. They are nothing but a random noise produced by overwhelmed synapses.

On the topic of having to make decisions as a dev that shouldn’t be made (solely, at least) by devs…

There’s a lot to like in my current work environment: I enjoy being around my colleagues, I get to do a variety of tasks, and many of them interesting to me and/or great learning opportunities, the pay doesn’t suck and so on… there’s also not much pressure put on the dev team from other parts of the organisation. The flipside of the coin is that nobody who should express some kind of vision as to how we should develop the product further does so.

Me and my fellow devs in the team are so frustrated about it. It feels like we’re just floating around, doing absolutely nothing meaningful. It’s as if the business people just don’t care. And we are the ones ending up deciding what features to develop and what the specs are for those etc. and I really don’t think we should be the ones doing that.

One would think that’s a great opportunity to work on refactoring, infrastructure, security and process improvements and so on - but somehow we get bothered just enough by mundane issues we can’t get to work on those effectively. Also, many of the things we’d want to do would need sign-off from the management, but they are not responsive really. Just not there. Except for our TM, but they don’t have the power neccessary… at least they are trying tho…

I have an idea of starting my own business and I need your feedback guys. Literally appreciate any kind of feedback.

So Im an android dev who has 3 years experience under his belt. I am working fulltime and I think its time to scale. I want to open my own agency where I would take on big clients and build apps for them. I personally am able to manage/see through the whole project, handle all communication and also work on the android side if necessary. I would start from smaller projects worth of 30-40k for startups, basically create MVP for them and charge for support after that.

Problem is that as far as I understand if you want to "open your own kitchen" you need to be well connected. I dont know any big clients who would trust and purchase my services, because after all who I am? Im nobody just a dev at this moment. So I need a strategy to build some relationships with businesses.

So Im thinking long game. What if I would first open a recruitment/hiring agency? I would focus in specifically mobile dev recruitment. I have the soft skills and I already participated in dozens of recruitment processes. I also have the tech skills, I would be a competent recruiter. Maybe I could do that for a year, just communicate between devs and clients and place devs. My thinking is that in around one year I would be able to build a massive network of clients and devs.

And then, I could try opening my own dev agency. Using my gathered contacts hopefully I could land some decent projects for start and build my team or outsource from that point on.

Ofcourse Im not sure if I could pull this off alone, I would need a detailed strategy and some mentoring. But what do you think is this a viable plan?

Dependencies suck.

I wanted a ruby gem and needed an older version of ruby to run it. Fine, what's the best way to get multiple ruby versions on one system, apparently rvm.

Now I want rvm.

I can't have rvm without getting gnupg first though.

Before I can get gnupg I need brew.

Now I have brew setting my computer on fire compiling god knows what so it can get gnupg so I can get rvm so I can get the ruby version I want to get the gem I want!

It's been running for quite a while...

This isn't the first or last time that the convenience of packages and versions leads to a maze like trail of prerequisites you need to follow.

I'm sure there's some tool that would've helped with my problem, but the problem shouldn't be this bad to begin with!

I understand why it happens but it still sucks and it's a lot of wasted time.

Frankly I'm expecting some people will have gotten so used to this kind of insanity that they won't get why I'm renting about it, oh well, it made me feel better and gave me something to do while brew is melting my machine.

“Lazy mom lazy wow” presented by Gail Swanlund was probably the most impactful piece of art to me.

Through simplistic form, this art piece presents the idea of caring about oneself and quit the eternal rat race for money. But somehow for its metaphor, Lazy mom lazy wow chooses the notion and aesthetics of death and decay. The closest analogy I can think of is the music of American Football. Some kind of liminal, eerie aesthetics. Also, the movie Gummo and the game Life is Strange, part one.

The piece deliberately avoids being aggressive and celebrating its notion. It’s not “quit the rat race and celebrate because life is so good”, it’s “quit the rat race by putting yourself into coma so nothing matters anymore”. The descent into eternal comfort of realization that you don’t have to do anything anymore, but also sorrow of losing meaning.

It feels like launching Counter-Strike Source in the year 2051, only to walk around cs_office and realize there are no players anymore, and they will not return ever again. The sense of watching an old VHS tape of you having a conversation with your mom in the hospital as she’s counting her last days because of cancer. The sense of comfort of coming back to your hometown. You remember your childhood and your high school crush, only to realize that those moments won’t happen ever again.

We can say I'm so called senior in my company. Not exactly a senior because I have like 2.5 years of commercial experience, but everyone in the company has much less.

As I'm kind of technology enthusiast, I have a lot of personal experience with Linux, Docker, I'm basically quite familiar with a lot of stuff both in theoretical and practical manner. That's why often I'm helping my less experienced friends to solve some issue, help with docker, help with deployment, and I'm really happy to do so.

Recently I was helping to deploy something ASAP on environment no one is familiar with and it took me couple of hours to do so, as it required changes in a lot of places. Even our team lead was happy about it.

tl;dr

I've just got email from my boss, that I should focus less on helping others. Not even a "thanks, good job". After I literally helped this company to get their shit together

Since I quit binge-eating sugary stuff, my body became capable of feeling true hunger. Not in my stomach, as that kind of feeling in my body is probably fucked up forever, but in my head.

When I feel hungry, it’s probably too late. This is exactly what I feel:
- dizziness
- FOV slightly decreases
- tunnel vision, things in peripheral vision become blurry and obscure. I “see” them, but my brain doesn’t process them quite as good
- colors become less saturated
- it’s very difficult to combine and analyse multiple concepts to derive a conclusion, basically the thing I do at work that wins me bread
- thought process becomes “single-threaded”. I can follow just one thought at a time and cannot go deeper than 3-4 levels, my brain just drops it by making the whole thought feel like some kind of slimy clay that cannot be comprehended, let alone expressed with words
- difficult to express thoughts with language, I have hard time talking, especially explaining
- want to sleep, but can’t, as brain is frantically trying to stay awake

It’s probably the mechanism developed evolutionary. That single thread remains active at all costs to allow me to find food, and brain doesn’t let me sleep, as it thinks if I fall asleep I’ll die. It’s amusing to see my brain actively killing thoughts that are not “important”, I feel like a real-time OS or an Erlang application. Perhaps thinking is really a very costly process in terms of how much energy it takes.

When I finally eat something, especially if it’s a proper meal, I feel a very pleasant sensation, probably it’s my brain telling me “thank you”, releasing dopamine to actively reinforce that “finding food is a very very good thing and it’s very important”. FOV pops back into place, peripheral vision becomes clean and sharp, thoughts awaken, eager to occupy all the treads that became available.

Browser automation is a PITA. I’m going on my fourth side mission with this crap and I honestly still look like a newbie. I’ve tried Java Selenium with Chrome, Excel VBA with IE9, Vanilla JS in the browser console, and tonight I’m thinking to concoct some kind of hybrid CDP & Selenium approach in Chrome. Never used CDP before, not even sure where to start but I heard it sucks like anything else unless you get some extra libraries and plugins and stuff.

It doesn’t help that I can’t get just anything I want from our IT Department. It would be another PITA to ask for puppeteer. If puppeteer is totally legit please let me know.

Selenium sucks. The buttons don’t click, the waits don’t wait. Its unusable. Iframes are annoying as all hell but I can deal with that. HTML Tables suck too. It doesn’t help I have to restart my whole java program and whole Chrome every time an element doesn’t get picked correctly. Scripting one single element can take all fucking night.

Chrome dev tools what the fuck. Why the fuck is the DOM explorer in the same window as the web page I’m working on?? I can’t undock it. Am I supposed to use a fucking TV screen to work with this bastard?? If I use the remote chrome tools on port 9225 or whatever - It Still Renders The Whole Fucking Page Alongside The Console. Get Out Of My Way!!! The nested HTML CODE IS ONE CHARACTER WIDE ALL THE TIME. I can’t for the life of me figure out what the fuck I’m looking at. Haven’t you people ever heard of A HORIZONTAL SCROLL BAR at least.

Fuck I tried using getElementById, and the Xpath thing and its not all that great seeing I have seemingly 1000s of nested Divs all over the god damned place oftentimes containing a single element. I’m finally on chrome now should I learn Jquery now? I mean seriously wtf.

I use this one no code tool for dev it has web automation built in. As you can imagine its just as broken as anything else!! I have 10 screens to navigate it gets stuck on the second screen all the damn time. Fuck I love clicking the buttons when my script misses and playing catch up with it.

So as a work around to Selenium not waiting even 1 millisecond when I use explicit wait or implicit wait or fluent wait, I’m guessing maybe I can attach both Chrome Dev Tools Protocol (CDP as ive called it earlier) and selenium to the same browser and maybe I can use CDP to perform a Wait with any degree of success. Selenium will do nothing more than execute vanilla javascript Element.click(); This is the only way I know to even ACTUALLY use selenium beyond the simplest html documents possible. Hell I guess CDP can execute js idk.

I can’t get the new selenium that has CDP but I do have some buggy ass selenium from a few years back. Yeah, I remember reading there was a pretty impactful regression defect in the version I have. Maybe I’m being gaslighted by some shit copy of selenium?

The worst part is that I do seem to be having issues that the rest of the internet’s devs do not seem to be having. People act like browser automation is totally viable and pretty OK. How in the fuck hell is my Selenium Test Suite going to be more reliable my application under test?!!?? I’ll have more fucking bugs in my test suite than in my application. Today, I have less than half a test script and, I. already. fucking. do.

I am still SUPER PISSED at the months of 12 hour days (always 8 hours spent on normal sprint work btw only 4 to automation) I spent trying to automate our regression tests. I got NOWHERE.

I did learn a lot about HTML and JS though like I’m not that mad…but I’m just trying to emphasize my achievement on my task was zero.

The buttons don’t click. There are so many divs and I swear you sometimes need to select a div somewhere in the middle sometimes to get it working. The waits don’t wait. XHR requests are invisible. Java crashes 100 times before I find an xpath and thread.sleep() combo that works. I have no failure modes to use — Sometimes I click the same element 20x in a script because I have no way to know if it clicked the first time! Sometimes you gotta scroll the page to make the click work. So many click methods all broken. So many wait methods all broken. Its not just the elements don’t click! There are so many ways to click that almost work but surely they all fail the same in the end. ok at this point I’m just repeating myself…

there yet even more issues that I can’t remember…and will soon remember as I journey into this project yet again…

thanks for reading I hope I entertained and would love to hear your experience!

Another consultant. He/she sends out meeting request about system X to me and a few other guys/girls. X is actually a, you know, global thing. It is well known but not incredibly famous but well known.

But she/he mispells it. It is not even close. So, he/she just guesses how it should be written. It is not a big thing. But I am truly interested, and a little worried, about how that kind of mind work. Is she/he convinced that that is how X should be written? I think not because X is not an actual word but just a product name. In this case the product name is synonymous with the company name. If you pronounce X as he/she has written it will just be distinctly different than the correct way of saying it.

So I got this meeting request in my calendar which just sits there in its erroneous way and it irritates me. Mostly, I am annoyed by the fact that he/she did not bother to look up the correct spelling. And it has now been a week or so and it has not been corrected so I must then conclude that he/she still is ignorant of X. Which leads me to the conclusion that he/she is not really that motivated.

I am perhaps a grumpy old developer but I do think I can spot incompetence a mile away nowadays. I’ve been at it for over 15 years now.

My start up job got to spark. Problem I face is, completing things as soon as possible, problems are simple but even taking 2 days on something is a big thing. So, I'm just stuck doing lots of urgent tasks and I'm tired every other day because of this.
I don't want to meet people from my workplace as everyone is kind of workaholic and that also makes me not to do anything, I mean yeah, I can't handle stress, it's hell. Rather I want to work for a big company having interesting problems to solve and people who are professional and there to help you. Professionalism is not present here, managers are using bad words for their reportees, and that's a norm. My manager pinged me and literally said that I'm slow. WTH!!!

I have joined a new company recently and I'm worried.
Really have worry because of my people skills and little doubt on the manager. I mean what do I know I just joined but still overthinking it.

There are people who speak confidently and I feel intimidated because in the casual conversations I don't feel like I can contribute at this point at least, it's been a week only. Other thing is as I do not know much about the work, I can't speak in the meetings. I know that I'm expecting a lot from myself here as I just joined but I have a history of being silent in the meetings and in my previous organisation I could deal with it as I got comfortable finally.
How can I be more interactive with people, given that some are cold?

About my manager, he is young. He definitely has a good IQ that's why he is a manager now.
The thing is, he talks a lot. Conversations are not 2 way, and he kept on saying things without even understanding that I'm overwhelmed. I have previously told him that I am overwhelmed, he listened, took 2 minutes and continued with his all work related talks.

I don't like the way he's stating his expectations from the time I didn't even join. He told me everything about the organization, on first day, he gave me a 2 months rough expectations of me. I don't agree with all the points he makes but it doesn't seem plausible for me to interrupt and say my thing. For example when he stated his expectations, I should have stopped him and politely tell that it's too soon we can discuss these things in upcoming weeks. But just because he continues rambling, I can't say it. It seems a small thing but I know it's not proper conversation and will create issues for me. As I have had similar kind of manager before, who used to ramble and didn't stop talking. But couldn't understand my problems etc.

Do you ever feel like you're not deserving of any kind of following on social media? I have a very small following and I don't know why. I did publish some open source software and wrote a few blog posts but I don't think I should be followed or have followers. I keep thinking I should remove the followers and hide myself or make my accounts private.