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Search - "can't win"
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!rant
After over 20 years as a Software Engineer, Architect, and Manager, I want to pass along some unsolicited advice to junior developers either because I grew through it, or I've had to deal with developers who behaved poorly:
1) Your ego will hurt you FAR more than your junior coding skills. Nobody expects you to be the best early in your career, so don't act like you are.
2) Working independently is a must. It's okay to ask questions, but ask sparingly. Remember, mid and senior level guys need to focus just as much as you do, so before interrupting them, exhaust your resources (Google, Stack Overflow, books, etc..)
3) Working code != good code. You are an author. Write your code so that it can be read. Accept criticism that may seem trivial such as renaming a variable or method. If someone is suggesting it, it's because they didn't know what it did without further investigation.
4) Ask for peer reviews and LISTEN to the critique. Even after 20+ years, I send my code to more junior developers and often get good corrections sent back. (remember the ego thing from tip #1?) Even if they have no critiques for me, sometimes they will see a technique I used and learn from that. Peer reviews are win-win-win.
5) When in doubt, do NOT BS your way out. Refer to someone who knows, or offer to get back to them. Often times, persons other than engineers will take what you said as gospel. If that later turns out to be wrong, a bunch of people will have to get involved to clean up the expectations.
6) Slow down in order to speed up. Always start a task by thinking about the very high level use cases, then slowly work through your logic to achieve that. Rushing to complete, even for senior engineers, usually means less-than-ideal code that somebody will have to maintain.
7) Write documentation, always! Even if your company doesn't take documentation seriously, other engineers will remember how well documented your code is, and they will appreciate you for it/think of you next time that sweet job opens up.
8) Good code is important, but good impressions are better. I have code that is the most embarrassing crap ever still in production to this day. People don't think of me as "that shitty developer who wrote that ugly ass code that one time a decade ago," They think of me as "that developer who was fun to work with and busted his ass." Because of that, I've never been unemployed for more than a day. It's critical to have a good network and good references.
9) Don't shy away from the unknown. It's easy to hope somebody else picks up that task that you don't understand, but you wont learn it if they do. The daunting, unknown tasks are the most rewarding to complete (and trust me, other devs will notice.)
10) Learning is up to you. I can't tell you the number of engineers I passed on hiring because their answer to what they know about PHP7 was: "Nothing. I haven't learned it yet because my current company is still using PHP5." This is YOUR craft. It's not up to your employer to keep you relevant in the job market, it's up to YOU. You don't always need to be a pro at the latest and greatest, but at least read the changelog. Stay abreast of current technology, security threats, etc...
These are just a few quick tips from my experience. Others may chime in with theirs, and some may dispute mine. I wish you all fruitful careers!219 -
So my school got invited to this coding competition for high-schoolers and among them, I was a part member and part mentor along side our CS professor since I was the most proficient coding stuff (although most of I do were JS and Python stuff although i can read other code)
Then this guy showed up.
He was picked by the faculty to take the WebDev competition. He knows how to use Photoshop for Photo retouchings and stuff but here's a problem.
He can't code nor make a proper website design.
So being the kind person I am, I volunteered to teach him what I know about frontend and HTML. This goes on for 4 weeks of nonstop practices, coding sessions and finally, Code In The Dark-style practice (which involves the person to code a full website for only 15 minutes).
When he was able to finish and mastered some of what I taught. I gave him the go signal and we were on to the road to victory.
Unfortunately our first try, we won nothing.
He said after the competition "I give up man, I can't take this!" but I said, "Just because you lost a f*cking competition once, doesn't mean you're a motherf*cking loser in life. There's still one more chance."
So I pressured our WebDev guy to be more better, taught him about mockups, JavaScript and etc.
Then the second attempt a year later, me and the WebDev guy won and moved on the finals. However, he didn't win the finals and I was the lone champion reprsenting our school.
Although he didn't win, he was happy I carried the torch and win the prize.
Prior to that, he asked me "Hey, how to be like you?"
I only answered, "Achievements are just gold with cloth and paper. Wear it lightly".
Fast forward to today, he's now the school's head design coordinator and layout designer for their newspaper column. He also practices his coding skills by frequenting on our coding sessions even when the competition was over.
But whenever someone asks "who taught you this?" he would only look to me, smile and say "that person right there".7 -
I'm a little late to this, but that Python master/slave issue.. what the fuck is up with that?!
You say that you're offended by words.
=> Fuck off. If you want to serve social justice, help people in third-world countries that need your help.
=> Also, you do realize that the use of master/slave is just as much applicable to technology as client/server or host/guest are, right? It's a relationship between fucking machines or code blocks, not humans.
You say "why the outrage over this?"
=> Fuck off. Your SJW bullshit has no place in technology. It's a fucking word in fucking code!!!
You say that you're improving the Python project with this.
=> Fuck off. It breaks existing documentation and needlessly abstracts terminology that is used pretty much everywhere. What do you prefer, conciseness and a language to be easy to understand or for it to become all cushioned to soothe your frail feelings?
You know, there's something else that I wanted to talk about that's related to this. I have Asperger Syndrome, which on paper is a disability. In practice it's difficulty to socialize while having an above average IQ. That "disability" is what drove me into technology. When I see job listings actively prefer people with disabilities for social justice, you know what? That offends ME. Because I wouldn't want to be chosen as the best applicant just because it ticks social justice boxes. I want to be chosen as the best applicant because I outcompeted every other applicant with actual skill and fitness to do my job.
Also, when a company sells you a defective unit, would you be happy? Of course not. So why are you happy when they employ a defective? I am someone that would - on paper - be impeded by natural selection, because I am "handicapped". But I'm all for it. Humanity is what it is today - shit - partly because defectives have become widely accepted into society. Call me a bigot, but I'd rather be called that than to not raise concerns about this trend.
On the subject of handicaps, that's a term that's used in games, what for aiding the player that can't win against the regular opponent (which is usually just a fucking bot, wtf yo). I am handicapped, therefore YOU shouldn't use the word in a sense where it's totally reasonable to use it!! Says no one ever, me neither. Grow a fucking pair and realize that code isn't written with the intent to offend anyone. So why are you?23 -
toxic workplace; leaving
I haven't wanted to write this rant. I haven't even wanted to talk to anyone (save my gf, ofc). I've just been silently fuming.
I wrote a much longer rant going into far too much detail, but none of that is relevant, so I deleted it and wrote this shorter (believe it or not) version instead. And then added in more details because details.
------
On Tuesday, as every Tuesday, I had a conference call with the rest of the company. For various, mostly stupid reasons, the boss yelled at and insulted me for twenty minutes straight in front of everyone, telling me how i'm disorganized, forgetful, how can't manage my time, can't manage myself let alone others, how I don't have my priorities straight, etc. He told the sales team to get off the call, and then proceeded to yell and chew at me for another twenty minutes in front of the frontend contractor about basically the same things. The call was 53 minutes, and he spent 40 minutes of it telling me how terrible I've been. No exaggeration, no spin. The issues? I didn't respond to an email (it got lost in my ever-filling inbox), and I didn't push a very minor update last week (untested and straight to prod, ofc). (Side note: he's yelled at me for ~15 minutes before for being horribly disorganized and unable to keep up on Trello -- because I had a single card in the wrong column. One card, out of 60+ over two boards. Never mind that most have time estimates, project tags, details, linked to cards on his boards, columns for project/qa/released, labels for deferred, released to / rejected from qa, finished, in production, are ordered by priority, .... Yep. I'm totes disorganized.)
Anyway, I spent most of conference call writing "Go fuck yourself," "Choke on a cat and die asshole," "Shit code, low pay, and broken promises. what a prize position," etc. or flipping him off under the camera on our conference-turn-video-call (switched due to connection issues, because ofc video is more stable than audio-only in his mind).
I'm just.
so, so done.
I did nothing the rest of the day on Tuesday, and basically just played games on Wednesday. I did one small ticket -- a cert replacement since that was to expire the next day -- but the rest was just playing CrossCode. (fun game, fyi; totally recommend.)
Today? It's 3:30pm and I can't be bothered to do anything. I have an "urgent" project to finish by Monday, literally "to give [random third party sales guy] a small win". Total actual wording. I was to drop all other tasks (even the expiring cert lol) and give this guy his small win. fucking whatever. But the project deals with decent code -- it's a minor extension to the first project I did for the company (see my much earlier rants), back when I was actually applying myself and learning something (everything) new, enjoying myself, and architecting+writing my own code. So I might actually do the project, but It's been two days and I haven't even opened single file yet.
But yeah. This place is total and complete shit. Dealing with the asshole reminds me of dealing with my parents while growing up, and that's a subject I don't want to broach -- far too many toxic memories.
So, I'm quitting as soon as I find something new.
and with luck, this will be before assface hires my replacement-to-be, and who will hopefully quit as soon as s/he sees the abysmal codebase. With even more luck, the asshole king himself will get to watch his company die due to horrible mismanagement. (though ofc he'll never attribute it to himself. whatever.)
I just never want to see or think about him again.
(nor this fetid landfill of a codebase. bleh.)
With luck, this will be one of my last rants about this toxic waste dump and its king of the pile.
Fourty fucking minutes, what the fuck.34 -
long rant = this;
Jesus. Fucking. Christ.
The task: get Windows 7 on my mom's new Lenovo running win 10.
First idea: dual boot. Go into disk utility and shrink win 10 partition leaving empty partition. Easy!
Unfortunately it all went downhill from there.
Restart, can't get into boot menu. Google says you have to do that from Windows. Ok.
Laptop says BOOTING FROM CD IS NOT SUPPORTED. WTF??
Go into BIOS, enable legacy boot, prioritize legacy. Restart. Ok, it boots from disk.
Go to install 7 on the empty partition and it can't because its an unsupported partition format or some shit. Whatever, wipe everything. Ok, installing windows.
Windows installed, need drivers. Go download them with another computer and go to copy them over with USB disk. Windows doesn't detect it. THIS POS DOESN'T HAVE STANDARD USB DRIVERS?!?!?
Of course, the laptop didn't come with any driver software. I end up burning a fucking CD like its fucking 2001 so that I can get the goddamn wifi driver on it.
Ok, I have wifi. Go to Lenovo site, find driver page. Select all the drivers I want for the model/OS and click download. Lenovo site says "hey, use this driver update software." I'm like, hey asshole, why don't you just give me the drivers i asked for. But fine.
Driver update software downloads, I install it, nothing happens. I run it, it says it's already running. Still nothing. What the goddamn flipping fuck?
I go download the drivers individually. I try to install USB driver. It says my system is not supported. .............Try to install chipset driver, not supported. ............ I can install maybe half of the drivers and I still can't even use a fucking USB mouse. Gonna have to wait for windows update to find it sometime two days from now.
I hope everyone in charge of Lenovos fucking ass backwards pointless piece of useless fucking shit drivers gets raped to death with a serrated knife.22 -
!!rant
!!ANGER
Micromanager: "Hey, Root!
Since you're back, and still not feeling well, we have an easy ticket for you: Rewrite the slack integration gem! Oh, you don't have to re-implement all of it, just make sure it all works the same way it does now. That bitch you worked with once over a year ago who kept throwing you under the bus to management and stealing credit for your work? Yeah, she wrote the original code like four years ago. It's perfect, so don't touch it. but she can fill you in on all the details you need and get you up to speed on how to test it.
But yep! It should be simple. and I just knew you would love this ticket, so I saved it just for you. Nice and quick, too, to get you an easy win.
You know, since you have to repair your reputation with product. and management. and the execs. and the rest of the team. and me. Yeah, product doesn't trust you so they don't want to give you any tickets. They just can't trust you to get them out and have them work. So you have a lot of hard work to do."
Spoiler: The bus-thrower wasn't much help. (Surprise.)
Spoiler: The ticket was already in my backlog -- one of a grand total of two tickets.
Spoiler: I don't find the ticket fun. Maybe if I was to write the entire implementation with a nice DSL? but no, "don't touch the perfect code." Fuck you.
Spoiler: It isn't going to be nice or quick. But, she (micromanager) is looking to lose me, so that really is an easy win. for her.
And. just. argh. fuck you. i've been exhausted and dying for well over a year, but you've kept ignoring that (and still are, despite me providing goddamn legal forms from fucking doctors stating it in plain fucking english, which you also fucking ignore), and you just keep piling on the work and demanding the ridiculous of me despite it. Yeah I can pull it off sometimes. No, I really shouldn't, and I'm surprised I can. (also, "Time off? What, and lower your productivity even more? ____ doesn't even take vacations. And how are you doing on that ticket?") And no, none of my tickets have ever had any fucking problems. Not even when there are upstream service outages. Not. a. single. fucking. one. Ever. And the only things I've ever missed were things that bloody product never put in the fucking ticket, so fuck you with your "repair your reputation" bullshit.
god, i fuckiNG HATE THESESTUPOID ANWETLJAF SAJEWTKW BITCHFACEDUCKFUCKERS
Why the FUCK am I still fucking working here?
Right, because I've been burned out and dying so much I can't pass a fucking interview so I can fucking leave.
jasdkl;fk
ugh. Anyway. If you ever find yourself starting work at a Cali fintech company whose internal mascot is a very fine duck? Just run. I absolutely guarantee you will be miserable.rant root swears oh my micromanager duckfuckers "trivial" ticket root is fucking fed up root swears a lot holy shit rewrite an entire library in 2-3 days14 -
Hackathons should not be judged by non-technical people.
I went to a Hackathon yesterday, and only two teams (mine included, of course 😉) made projects that I thought sufficiently fulfilled all the judging criteria.
The winning "project"? Literally just a two slide proposal about asking Niantic to turn the summer time free lunch distribution bus into a Pokestop. Because obviously the best way to motivate children who can't afford food to go get free summer lunches is to use a tie-in with a smart phone game. Because Niantic is so famously responsive to community requests. Because you can totally turn a bus into a Pokestop.
It was absurd, and I have no idea how it fulfilled the "impact" and "viability" judging criteria (as for the third criteria, "innovation", I suppose not coding anything at a Hackathon is pretty innovative!)
I knew that some flashy bullshit project would win, even if it was utterly unviable, but I didn't realize just how disgustingly absurd the winning project would be13 -
micromanager: "Quick and easy win! Please have this done in 2-3 days to start repairing your reputation"
ticket: "Scrap this gem, and implement your own external service wrapper using the new and vastly different Slack API!"
slack: "New API? Give me bearer tokens! Don't use that legacy url crap, wth"
prev dev: "Yeah idk what a bearer token is. Have the same url instead, and try writing it down so you don't forget it?"
Slack admin: "I can't give you access to the slack integration test app, even though it's for exactly this and three others have access already, including your (micro)manager."
Slack: "You can also <a>create a new slack app</a>!" -- link logs me into slack chat instead. After searching and finding a link elsewhere: doesn't let me.
Slack admin: "You want a new test slack app instead? Sure, build it the same as before so it isn't abuseable. No? Okay, plan a presentation for it and bring security along for a meeting on Friday and I'll think about it. I'm in some planning meetings until then."
asdfjkagel.
This job is endless delays, plus getting yelled at over the endless delays.
At least I can start on the code while I wait. Can't test anything for at least a week, though. =/17 -
(I wrote most of this as a comment in reply about Microsoft buying GitHub on another rant but decided to move it here because it is rant worthy. Also, no, I'm not a Microsoft employee nor do I have any Microsoft stock).
Microsoft buying GitHub makes sense. They contribute more to the open source community on GitHub than any other company. (Side note, they also contribute/have contributed to the Linux Kernel).
Steve Ballmer isn't running the show anymore. Because of that, we have awesome things like:
* Visual Studio Code - Completely free and powerful light weight IDE for coding in just about any script or language. This IDE is also open source, hosted on GitHub. It can be installed on Win/Mac/Linux.
* Visual Studio Community Edition: fully featured flagship IDE free for solo developers and students, can be installed on Win/Mac.
* Fully featured Sql Server running in a Docker container.
* .Net Core, which can be compiled to native binaries of Windows, MacOS AND Linux. You can't even do that with Java, you have to first have the JVM installed in order to run any kind of Java code on any of those operating systems. .Net Core is also an absolutely beautiful framework with so many features at your disposal.
...and more.
Yes, they've done bonehead things in the past but who/which company hasn't. Yes, they have Cortana. Yes, they force Bing on you when searching with Cortana (does anyone actually regularly use Cortana? Or Bing?). Yes, their operating system costs money. Yes, their malware-style Upgrade-to-Windows-10 tactics were evil and they admitted such. Yes, they brought ads and other unfortunate things to Skype. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't concerned about that Skype bit translating over into GitHub. BUT, the fact that so many of their employees use GitHub daily means they are dogfooding the platform, which is a positive thing.
Despite the flaws, from the perspective of a software engineer they really should be given a lot of credit for all these new directions they are moving in now. They directly aim to help and contribute to the developer community. Plus, Windows 10 is finally getting a dark theme! haha.
I think Microsoft buying GitHub makes a lot of sense. Of course do what you want about it, feel how you want about it, but casting the same ol' shade at them for anything they do seems a bit like automatic reflex more than anything else.
I'm bracing myself for the impending wave of angry hornets from the nest I just kicked. In all seriousness though, I welcome discussion on the topic even if you feel differently than I do. I'm not saying there's no reason to dislike them, just saying there are lots of new reasons to hate them less and/or appreciate what they are doing now.19 -
Been reading devrant posts for a month or so, this is my first actual post. I'm hoping it will be therapeutic. ☺️ I need something to keep me from killing my boss when I see him again tomorrow..
Some backstory: Currently working in HR for the last 7 or so years with complete shit for brains boss, even worse when it comes to anything related to technology. For almost two years I've been working to get another bachelor's degree. This time in computer sciences, to make a career switch to systems and software engineer. Last week I roughly had the following wonderful conversation:
Boss: we've needed new Recruitment software for a while now. Can't you make us one as a school project?
Me: 'Make us one?' It's not really that simple.. I'm barely halfway through my education, maybe I could do it, but it would take me quite a long time even if I could work on it fulltime.. Combining a halftime job with a fulltime education is taking up enough of my time as it is and I have more than enough school projects btw..
Boss: it would be a win-win. Work a little harder in your spare time and when you graduate you have a real-life project on your resume.
Me: I'm sorry, i'm failing to see the 'win' for me here.. I work 10 hours a day, 7 days a week on average, trying to combine work and studies. I'm pretty much maxed out..
Boss: Your coworker(also extreme dumbass) told me you wrote some quick code the other day that helped him out. Don't underestimate yourself, I'm sure you can do this.
Me(in complete disbelief by now): I wrote him an Excel-macro! They don't even teach me that at school. It's a very very very long way from actual software development! I'm sorry, it just can't be done.
Boss: Thats too bad. I expected you to welcome an opportunity like this and be more motivated towards this company..
Me: ***more disbelief and silence, just staring at him***
I'm sorry you feel that way.
***walked away***
WTF, I work my ass off for 7 years for this fucking shithead.. Even before I started this bachelors degree I had at least some understanding of the work developers put in their software. It blows my mind, no, it fucking angers me how people think making software is so simple.. Why do you think it's a 3-year education you fucking cunt?
Please, someone tell me how I can keep myself from ramming his fucking head through a wall tomorrow...6 -
Nobody cares what the code does when it works. Everybody cares about it when it doesn't work. You just can't win. 😤3
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Some words of wisdom passed on by our Scrum.
1. I am responsible for setting boundaries. Work time, sleep time, family time, me time. If I don't set them properly, things WILL get unbalanced very quickly. (And I would add, burnout will follow closely).
2. Being productive isn't about doing more and more in less time. It's about doing only the most important things well, and either saying no to the other things, or finding another way to get them done. (Prioritize!)
3. I can't win (let alone run) a marathon by thinking of it as a 26 mile long sprint, or a week as a five day sprint. (Eat a digital elephant a byte at a time).
4. Loved ones are good judges of when things are in and out of balance.
5. Taking time off is essential. Vacations, yes, but also nights and weekends. (Or you WILL burn out and hate what you do).
Comments in () are mine.1 -
Rant Init...
That moment you write some magnificent code and everyone is sleeping so you can't share it with anyone but you feel like the room should turn into an exciting musical where you win an award. (Best code can ONLY be written between the hours of 12am and 6am)
The next day, you try to explain to your significant other (user) how amazing this new genius way of doing that "thing" was, in hopes of sharing your excitement but all you get is a "you're such a dork" instead.
You may even try to share it with a coworker or fellow programmer but somehow they just don't see how exciting it is for you.
Rant completed...7 -
Microshaft!!!
NO I DON'T WANT TO GIVE UP ALL MY DATA JUST TO GET AN EXPLORER DARK THEME!!!
YES I DISABLED TELEMETRY PARTIALLY!!
YES I STILL WANT TO RECEIVE UPDATES REGARDLESS OF WHETHER I EXPRESS MY DESIRES TO NOT BE TRACKED IN FULL!!!
NO I REALLY DON'T WANT TO HEAR SHIT ABOUT "THIS FUCKING QUESTION HAS BEEN ANSWERED SOMEWHERE ELSE"!!!
(https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us... - certified Microshit MOTHERFUCKERS!!!!!)
AND NO I DON'T WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU THAT AFTER RE-ENABLING TELEMETRY THAT MY PRIVACY SETTINGS ARE STILL TOO LOW!!! AND CERTAINLY I DON'T WANT TO SEE YOUR WORTHLESS "FIX ME" SHIT UNABLE TO FIX JACK SHIT!!!
AND LIKE FUCKING HELL DO I WANT TO REINSTALL WANBLOWS, FUCKING KEEP MY SHITTY FILES THAT ARE FUCKING BACKED UP BUT LOSE ALL MY CUSTOM CONFIGURATIONS!!! LIKE FUCKING HELL!!! NOT BECAUSE YOU CAN'T FIX YOUR OWN BLOODY SYSTEM AFTER I DID MY PART TO GIVE MY DATA TO THE SHAFTLORDS AGAIN!!!
FUCK YOU MICROSOFT!!!!23 -
TL;DR I'm fucking sick and tired of Devs cutting corners on security! Things can't be simply hidden a bit; security needs to be integral to your entire process and solution. Please learn from my story and be one of the good guys!
As I mentioned before my company used plain text passwords in a legacy app (was not allowed to fix it) and that we finally moved away from it. A big win! However not the end of our issues.
Those Idiot still use hardcoded passwords in code. A practice that almost resulted in a leak of the DB admin password when we had to publish a repo for deployment purposes. Luckily I didn't search and there is something like BFG repo cleaner.
I have tried to remedy this by providing a nice library to handle all kinds of config (easy config injection) and a default json file that is always ignored by git. Although this helped a lot they still remain idiots.
The first project in another language and boom hardcoded password. Dev said I'll just remove before going live. First of all I don't believe him. Second of all I asked from history? "No a commit will be good enough..."
Last week we had to fix a leak of copyrighted contend.
How did this happen you ask? Well the secure upload field was not used because they thought that the normal one was good enough. "It's fine as long the URL to the file is not published. Besides now we can also use it to upload files that need to be published here"
This is so fucking stupid on so many levels. NEVER MIX SECURE AND INSECURE CONTENT it is confusing and hard to maintain. Hiding behind a URL that thousands of people have access to is also not going to work. We have the proof now...
Will they learn? Maybe for a short while but I remain sceptic. I hope a few DevrRanters do!7 -
About 18 months ago my non-technical Manager of Applications Development asked me to do the technical interviews for a .NET web developer position that needed to be filled. Because I don't believe in white board interviewing (that's another rant), but I do need to see if the prospective dev can actually code, for the initial interview I prepare a couple of coding problems on paper and ask that they solve them using any language or pseudo code they want. I tell them that after they're done we'll discuss their thought process. While they work the other interviewing dev and I silently do our own stuff.
About half way through the first round of technical interviews the aforementioned manager insisted we interview a dev from his previous company. This guy was top notch. Excellent. Will fit right in.
The manager's applicant comes in to interview and after some initial questions about his resume and experience I give him the first programming problem: a straightforward fizzbuzz (http://wiki.c2.com/?FizzBuzzTest). He looked as if the gamesters of Triskelion had dropped him into the arena. He demurs. Comments on the unexpectedness of the request. Explains that he has a little book he usually refers to to help him with such problems (can't make this stuff up). I again offer that he could use any language or pseudo code. We just want to see how he thinks. He decides he will do the fizzbuzz problem in SQL. My co-interviewer and I are surprised at this choice, but recover quickly and tell him to go ahead. Twenty minutes later he hands me a blank piece of paper. Of the 18 or so candidates we interview, he is the only one who cannot write a single line of code or pseudo code.
I receive an email from this applicant a couple of weeks after his interview. He has given the fizzbuzz problem some more thought. He writes that it occurs to him that the code could be placed into a function. That is the culmination of his cogitation over two weeks. We shake our heads and shortly thereafter attend the scheduled meeting to discuss the applicants.
At the meeting the manager asks about his former co-worker. I inartfully, though accurately, tell him that his candidate does not know how to code. He calls me irrational. After the requisite shocked silence of five people not knowing how to respond to this outburst we all sing Kumbaya and elect to hire someone else.
Interviews are fraught for both sides of the table. I use Fizzbuzz because if the applicant knows how to code it's an early win in the process and we all need that. And if the applicant can't solve it, cut bait and go home.
Fizzbuzz. Best. Interview. Question. Ever.6 -
Just got a call from an Indian scammer. He did the whole press Win + R shabang and I did what he said but the run box didn't appear (maybe cause I'm on a mac) I tried a few more times and then had a moment of enlightenment, I have a mac so that must be why the shortcut isn't working. He then goes on a rant saying everything is fine because he is the best technician and he can fix my mac too. He threatens to hack me and get my name and hack my computer but then goes straight back to his script and asks me to open my browser. I'm asked to go to a website which he mumbles so I don't understand and ask him to spell it for me. This of course is unacceptable and he goes no just type whatever you feel like typing, immediately changing his mind to xvideos.com instead. I say I can't visit the site since I am at work and he goes straight into trying to recruit me. Promises of infinite money and all I could ever wish for. Then he says I should work for him and he would pay me to watch porn which I politely decline. The final interaction was me letting him know I need to get back to work and to tell his call center buddies to never call me. He got super mad at me for accusing him of working at a call center whilst you can hear other calls in the background. 10/10 interaction.6
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Two years ago: company exec (Mac fan) buys a Surface Pro to show off our .NET application to customers as he travels. Hands it to me (I build releases) and I iron out a few Win 8 bugs since we'd always used Win 7 before. Get it set up, get to like the device a little, he takes it home... and returns it within 24 hours because he didn't mesh well with Windows. (Again, Mac user.)
8 months later he buys a Surface Pro again. I install our latest release, verify that everything is working as expected with hardware we normally don't use, and give him a controlled setup that will just work when he's at a customer site. Once again, he returns the Surface within 24 hours because he can't get used to Windows.
At least we verified Windows 8 compatibility, I guess.1 -
Tl;dr porn is ruining my life.
Today I had a meeting with the project leader and the CTO. They had bad news, which did not come as a surprise.
In short, they said I did not pass the expectations they had, and unfortunately need to find somewhere else to work.
This is my third time being told to find somewhere else to work, and I really can't describe how it feels. I was even told that I maybe I should reconsider my future as a developer, and kids can do programming better than I can do.
It's really difficult when all you've done in the last year is to learn and improve your current skills.
I have good grades, a unique experience, built lots of unique projects, and a GitHub portfolio with high activity. The apps I've built are used by many customers today. I also have a blog with 600 k views where I share dev tips.
The thing with this work if I'm going, to be honest, is that they expected someone with senior experience, and unfortunately, I don't have that thus it takes many years to build it. So I started here with almost scratch experience of the things they needed.
On the other hand, it feels like a relief in that I can finally focus on my personal business. And maybe this wasn't the right place to work, maybe it requires a couple of jobs until I find the right place.
Despite the bumpy ride, and what such people tell you, I'm not going to give up.
10 years ago, my school teacher told me I was going to be a carpenter (nothing against that) but I manage to get an MSc degree in the engineering field.
There's a lot of shit going into your head when you receive such message like "What if they are true, what if I can't handle programming, what if I'll never be anything etc".
I'm not giving up, this is just a great story every successful person has.
What my number one problem is, and I will f*** win is porn addiction. Get rid of that, and the future is bright.
Sorry for mixing so many things here.14 -
So rewind back about 24 years. I was a little kid who thought computers were the coolest thing evar, and our family had just gotten our first machine (a monstrous tower from a company named CyberMax, running Win 3.11 on DOS 6, 33MHz and a 250MB hard drive).
My aunt (big into coding at the time) came by with a box full of disks and loaded the machine up with all kinds of games and fun stuff. One of the thing she installed was Hoyle Classic Card Games (https://playclassic.games/games/...)
My parents fell in love with this and played it for hours. The problem was, the process to get it started, while not complicated, was still a pain in the ass. You had to either hammer F6 to get the startup menu and type a bunch of commands to switch to the directory and start the game, or let it boot into windows, then leave windows for DOS and do the same thing.
On a lark, when we had gotten the machine, mom had also bought this little dos programming handbook. I can't find it nowadays, but it went into very exhaustive detail on the cool things you could do with batch files. I was a voracious reader, especially on anything to do with computers, and one of the things the book covered was how to write startup menus using the CHOICE command! Little me figured out that you could write this into the AUTOEXEC.bat, and have a menu come up on every start!
It took me a couple days of piddling around (again, I was like 6 or 7, and this was the first "program" I'd ever written), but I eventually got it to the point where you'd turn the computer on, and the first thing it would do is ask if you wanted to go into windows, or if you wanted to play cards. I was proud as hell when this was set up and working!
I didn't do much writing of programs since then (I was more interested in games at the time), but yeaaaarrrs later, I encountered Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby, fell in love, and I've been hacking code ever since2 -
Business ppl asks for program to be created.
Business ppl send out 5 one hour meeting invites for the week.
Boss puts me in 5 day training for 7 hours a day.
Business ppl tired of me saying I've had no time to develop their stuff.
Boss asks why I haven't made progress on business ppl program.
Trainer upset I'm doing business ppl program instead of the training.
We can't win.2 -
*sees how Facebook kicked me out of my Bitlbee session again*
Me: "Motherf-..."
Still there's some friends of mine on Facebook who apparently got really hooked.. can't for the love of the holy Raven seem to get them away from that shithole.
"Alright then Facebook.. your win. I'll install Messenger and Pages Manager again to at least have your shit be semi-usable again 😑"
*installs said apps*
"Holy shit that battery is draining fast, and I'll have to go out in half an hour"
*plugs phone in fast charger*
*phone while charging keeps on dropping battery level*
FACECUNTS!!!!!! 😤
*powers off phone to conserve battery life and goes off to cook a meal*
*comes back to boot up the phone again and uninstalls those Face-crapps*
*phone immediately starts raising its battery level super fast*
Coincidence? I think not 🤔🤔🤔2 -
Hello, I'm now gonna rant for a bit. I'm usually not a ranty person (wait, why am I on this site again?) , but here we go. I sometimes feel misunderstood about my side projects.
I don't know about you guys, but when I program on my free time, sometimes I just want to grab a glass of wine and explore things I think bout during the day. So, during the start of my CS-education, when I started to get my programming feet a little warm, I wrote this tic-tac-toe game (as you do...), and I thought "Well I know how to play the game. Surely I can program an AI to play against". So I thought hard for an evening or two and came up with something that wasn't too shabby (I can't win).
Then another time when learned about creating GUIs we got to do simple menu based stuff with buttons and pulldown menus following a certain structure, but we also learned that positions of components can be set freely. So I thought "Well, if I can freely change the positions of components, surely I can animate stuff and if I map that to some keys I can create a real time game!". So I wrote a small platformer with two squares that ideally succeed in killing one another. After animation I started fantasising about 3D rendering, so I created a small application which creates the illusion of 3D, which was cool and all, but that got me dreaming of creating a real 3D engine. It became almost like a cause of mine; to understand how it all works and create a 3D engine from scratch.
So now I've written a 3D engine. A simple one, mind you, without all the bells and whistles, but still a 3D engine.
So, after all this rambling, what is this rant about? It's about how people react to all this. The reactions are divided. Some are impressed, mostly people who cannot program, but others are like "hm...". For example, during job interviews, when people ask me if I've done anything on the side and I mention this, people usually go like ".... hm... :| Well that's great. So mostly just done your own stuff?". Well YES! What is that supposed to mean? That I've not created shippable applications? I've explored, which I myself believe is valuable! I believe I've learned something along the way. And most importantly I've enjoyed it. Maybe I'm over interpreting this, but sometimes it feels like people don't even understand the joy in it, like it's illogical. Why create something that in the end won't create any real value?
Am I alone in this? Or perhaps, have I just written far to long and uninteresting a rant for anybody to read this far? I don't know. You tell me.13 -
My first job was actually nontechnical - I was 18 years old and sold premium office furniture for a small store in Munich.
I did code in my free time though (PHP/JS mostly, had a litte browsergame back then - those were the days), so when my boss approached me and asked me whether I liked to take over a coding project, I agreed to the idea.
Little did I know at the time: I was supposed to work with a web agency the boss had contracted to build their online shop. Only that he had no plan or anything, he basically told them "build me an online shop like abc(a major competitor of ours at the time)"
He employed another sales lady who was supposed to manage the shop (that didn't exist yet). In the end, I think 80% of her job was to keep me from killing my boss.
As you can imagine, with this huuuuge amout of planning and these exact visions of what was supposed to be, things went south fast and far. So far that I could visit my fellow flightless birds down in the Penguin's republic of Antarctica and still need to go further.
Well... When my boss started suing the web agency, I was... ahem, asked to take over. Dumb as I was, I did - I was a PHP kid and thought that Magento, being written in PHP, would be easy to master. If you know Magento, you know that was maybe the wrongest thing I ever said.
Fast forward 3 very exhausting months, the thing was online. Not all of it worked yet, but it was online and fairly secure.
I did next to everything myself, administrating the CentOS box the shop was running on, its (own) e-mail server, the web server, all the coding required for the shop (can you spell 12 hour day for 8 hour pay?)
3 further months later, my life basically was a wreck, I dragged myself to work, the only thing I looked forward being the motorcycle ride home. The system worked though.
Mind you, I was still, at the time, working with three major customers, doing deskside support and some admin (Win Server 2008R2 at the time) - because, to quote my boss, "We could not afford a full time developer and we don't need one".
I think i stopped coding in my free time, the one hobby I used to love more than anything on the world, somewhere Decemerish 2012. I dropped out of the open source projects I was in, quit working on my browser game and let everything slide.
I didn't even care to renew the domains and servers for it, I just let it die without notice.
The little free time I had, I spent playing video games and getting drunk/high.
December 2013, 1.5 years on the job, I reached my breaking point and just left, called in sick at least a week per month because I just could not see this fucking place anymore.
I looked for another job outside of ALL of what I did before. No more Magento, no more sales, no more PHP. I didn't have to look for long, despite what I thought of my skills.
In February 2014, I told my boss that I quit. It was still seven months until my new job started, but I wanted him to know early so we could migrate and find a replacement.
The search for said replacement started in June 2014. I had considerably less work in the months before, looks like he got the hint.
In August 2014, my replacement arrived and I got him started.
I found a job, which I am still in, and still happy about after almost half a decade, at a local, medium sized ISP as a software dev and IT security guy. Got a proper training with a certificate and everything now.
My replacement lasted two months, he was external and never really did his job - the site, which until I had quit, had a total of 3 days downtime for 3 YEARS (they were the hoster's fault, not mine), was down for an entire month and he could not even tell why.
HIS followup was kicked after taking two weeks to familiarize himself with the project. Well, I think that two weeks is not even barely enough to familiarize yourself with nearly three years of work, but my boss gave him two days.
In 2016, the shop was replaced with another one. Different shop system, different OS, different CI. I don't know why and I can't say I give a damn.
Almost all the people that worked at the company back with me have left for greener pastures, taking their customers (and revenue) with them.
As for my boss' comments, instructions and lines: THAT might not be safe for work. Or kids. Or humans in general. And there wouldn't be much left if you put it through a language filter...
Moral of the story: No, it's not a bad thing to leave a place if you're mistreated there. Don't mistake loyalty with stupidity!
And, to quote one of my favourite Bands: "Nothing matters when the pain is all but gone" (Tragedy + Time by Rise Against).8 -
Sometimes when I can't find an error, I just rewrite the problematic code. Often I end up solving the error and having cleaner code. Win win.3
-
Hot take: Windows 11 is just to enable them to bake Teams into the OS like they did with IE.
They gotta get sued and split up this time! Their "Facetime" is skype and they had it preinstalled. Don't compare a business messenger to a private video chat platform!
I don't use slack, but they obviously wan't to win agains them by just making it part of the OS. This can't be legal!16 -
sooooooooo for my current graduate class we were to use the MVC pattern to build an IOS application(they preferred it if we did an IOS application) or if you didn't have an Apple computer: an Android application.
The thing is, they specified to use Java, while in their lectures and demos they made a lot of points for other technologies, hybrid technologies, such as React Cordova, all that shit, they even mentioned React Native and more. But not one single mention of Kotlin. Last time I tried my hand at Android development was way before Kotlin, it was actually my first major development job: Mobile development, for which we used Obj C on the IOS part and well, Java on the Android part.
As some of you might now, I rarely have something bad to say about a tech stack(except for VBA which I despise, but I digress) and I love and use Java at work. But the Android API has always seem unnecessarily complex for my taste, because of that, when I was working as a mobile development I dreaded every single minute in which I had to code for Android, Google had a great way to make people despise Java through their Android API. I am not saying it is shit, I am not saying it is bad, I just-dont-like-it.
Kotlin, proves a superior choice in my humble opinion for Android development, and because the language is for retards, it was fairly easy for me to pick it up in about 2 hours. I was already redesigning some of my largest Spring applications using half the code and implemented about 80% of the application's functionality in less than 3 hours(login, fragment manipulation, permissions, bla bla) and by that time I started to wonder if the app built on Kotlin would be ok. And why not? If they specifically mentioned and demonstrated examples using Swift, then surely Kotlin would be fine no? Between Kotlin and Java it is easy to see that kotlin is more similar to Swift than Java. So I sent an email. Their response: "I am sorry, but we would much rather you stick with the official implementations for Android, which in this case is Java for the development of the application"
I was like 0.o wat? So I replied back sending links and documentation where Google touted Kotlin as the new and preferred way to develop Android applications, not as a second class citizen of the platform, but as THE preferred stack. Same response.
Eventually one of the instructors reflected long enough on it to say that it was fine if I developed the application in Kotlin, but they advised me that since they already had grading criteria for the Java program I had to redo it in Java. It did not took me long really, once I was finished with the Kotlin application I basically rewrote only a couple of things into Java.
The end result? I think that for Android I still greatly prefer Kotlin. Even though I am not the biggest fan of Kotlin for anything else, or as my preferred language in the JVM.
I just.......wish....they would have said something along the lines of: "Nah fam please rewrite that shit for Java since we don't have grading criterias in place for Kotlin, sorry bruh, 10/10 gg tho" instead of them getting into an email battle with me concerning Kotlin being or not being the language to use in Android. It made me feel that they effectively had no clue what they were talking about and as such not really capable of taking care of students on a graduate level program.
Made me feel dirty.12 -
I just gave robocopy another try, in order to get my WanBLowS D: drive and my file server synchronized again, in preparation to move that file server VM to a LXC container instead.. bad choice. I should've used rsync in WSL.
Hey you Not so Robust File Copier for WanBLowS, how many attempts of you fucking up my file server's dotfiles does it take before I configure you right with every fucking option you have specified? How about you actually behave somewhat decently like rsync where -avz works 99% of the time, in local, remote, any scenarios that you can think of that aren't super obscure?! HOW DIFFICULT CAN IT BE, REDMOND CERTIFIED ENGANEERS?!!
Drown in a pond of bleach, Microshit certified MOTHERFUCKERS!!!!
Well, at least this time it didn't fuck up my .ssh directory so I can still authenticate to the VM.. so I guess that at least that's a win. Even that you can't take for granted anymore with this piece of garbage!!!4 -
Today I'm ranting about Windows. No, it's not "WiNdOwS sUcKs!", it's more like "But why!?"
See, I'm an IT guy for the year, and in my office they use Windows. Now once upon a time, they had Active Directory and all that (well, actually, they still do) but then they got some new computers running Windows 10, and for some reason they just couldn't join them to the domain!
Why can't they, you ask? Well, Microsoft only allows Win 10 Pro and up to join a Domain, and since these computers came with Win 10 Home, that wasn't possible.
Long story short, I now have some 30 computers that need to be upgraded (possibly from 7) to Win 10 Pro, and joined to the Domain.
Thing is, I would like to do that all in one go, so I look into how to automatically setup Windows.
"Ah! Got it, provisioning packages!"
Lest you think they work let me spare you now: they don't. Just like real computers where everything is different, provisioning packages failed to work twice, and after wasting about a week trying to make it work, I gave up.
So now I realized that I need to try a different method, a custom windows image. Issue is, I've got no clue how to make one. See, microsoft decided to go all in on the provisioning packages thing (they do have advantages in certain use cases), and seemed to decide that making custom images was no longer necessary, so they documentation was nearly impossible to find.
But after a lot of searching, I figured out how to do it:
1. Install Windows in a VM.
2. Put it in audit mode.
3. Install your stuff.
4. Create an unattend.xml file with certain customizations.
5. Put the unattend in Windows\System32\Sysprep
6. Generalize the image.
7. Boot WinPE.
8. Open the console.
9. Capture the image.
10. Wait an hour or two.
11. Done!
I'm over simplifying, it was a huge PITA, and yet there were still issues.
Maybe another time I'll talk about those.27 -
So, a few months back my mother had some issues with her windows 10 box not being able to do proper backups to a backup partition. At the same time I was pulling insane hours at work and writing on a eBook on commission for a guy, besides having small kids with on and off flu and shit.
Needless to say, I didn't have time to look at the backup issues. Well, even though my mom is one of those dogs you can't teach new tricks, she has always been resourceful enough to get help with things.
This time she picked up the phone and called Microsoft Support, got some guys to remote in and take a look. They messed around a bit and said they were done.
She phoned me up later that day to tell me how proud she was of herself for doing that. Of course, she skipped telling me the important bit about she actually calling them, rather describing it as "Microsoft was just on my computer and fixed it".
You can imagine my immediate reaction, cold sweat running down my back, adrenalin rushing in as I dug through the details of what had happened.
A few days later she calls me up again and tells me the problem is back, and we agree that even though the MS dudes was not able to fix it at first, she should try again, as she had a ticket to reference.
The next attempt by MS actually fried her partitions, and apparently they had f-ed up trying to delete and recreate the backup partition.
That's not the worst of it though. Since they fried her disk, her computer crashed and naturally the remoting won't work. In our country, they have no people on the ground to do hands on help, and they didn't have a partner near by. Her not having a win 10 usb stick, nor a spare computer to make one, she was in a surreal predicament.
She was also quite pissed, and pissed off mums are not to be messed with. She managed to get Microsoft to agree to cover the costs of a non-partner to visit her to fix the problems, and using her as the middle man, they made an agreement with the 3rd-party tech support company.
After the box was fixed though, some more issues arose... regarding billing. The 3rd-party tech support was unable to get in contact with the person at MS that was going to sign off on the bill, and again using my mom as the middle man, it was agreed that my mom, as the customer, was to be reimbursed for the bill to the 3rd-party.
Guess what... 3 months went by, with weekly follow-ups and nagging from my mom, and still no money...
At this time, I had time to help her, and after some digging and borderline stalking, we managed to get the phone numbers of some of the higher ups in my country, and she started calling them directly.
After talking to a couple who refused to help, she reached the Vice President of the country branch, and was finally able to talk to someone who gave a shit.
Still took over a month more to actually get the money, but now she had someone who actually gave her statuses, receipts and ETAs.
FUCK!4 -
Ahh it's been a while since I've posted.. My skills with python are getting better (I'm a beginner) and I know for everyone else it's probably nothing but my first big project/idea I came up with was to program a simple rock paper scissors game that prints if you win lose or tie. I got the input and random output right without having to look anything up and that actually makes me proud of myself which is rare but for the printing out you win, lose, or tie I looked it up but I'm noticing that I'm getting better.
Then today I made a coin flip script that returns heads or tails in like 2 minutes and the only reference I used was my own code!!
Thanks if anyone actually read it I envy a lot of you for doing it for a living and I can't wait to do it too :)6 -
My non dev friend called me in middle of night for getting shortcut virus removed! I would have blasted 🔫 him but I felt pity on the guy as I know that he is poor with tech stuff
Any he had only windows, so I Google up solution and replied back to him.
He asked where to put it. I told him in cmd. He is like what so I told him to press win+r then in that type d and "black" 🏴 window will appear. Type in that.
guess what he typed exactly as mentioned in the reply and didn't replace the drive name properly .😑
I told him to put proper drive and saw that he missed spaces so l told him that he missed space 😤 and he put only one space and it still had problem so I had to explain it in weirdest was possible( shown in fig 1.1 had been writing report and figure gave yo be mentioned with number 😅)
Finally. It was all done! Well some pf my cs ( !counter strike but computer science friend) are worse then this can't use teminal or even connect to WiFi (wpa-enterprise @ college with mschap v2 and peap auth which is crackable using twin tower and brute force) properly, do I guess it not BA's that this guy cry to get rid of shortcut virus (virus > wifi setup) 😬
Finally I feel relived after ranting 😪5 -
Hey...just wondering...
In Germany its quite common for M$ nazis to call Windows "Windoof" , which means Win-stupid...
I'm not aware of anything similar in English or other languages...And that can't be ;)
Enlighten me please!9 -
You could win free Premium!
But you can't even complete the survey.
Well played! Spotify!
Every time when you're facing depression, and doubt yourself. Just think about there are companies much bigger than yours, and they struggling to put a form together... 🤦♂️5 -
FUCKING MICROSOFT IIS SHIT.
I'm a .NET dev since 13 years and EVERY FUCKING TIME STUPID IIS MOTHERFUCKER AND STUPID WINDOWS SERVER have a different problem setting up because of some permission.
You can't never get a site up in IIS without loosing time and patience having weird 400/500.x errors because every fucking machine have to set up some tweaky and hidden permissions.
I have 2 identical fucking win servers and deploying a .NET core applications and on one works (test server) and obviously, on the production server it gives troubles.
FUCK YOU MICROSOFT FUCK YOU I would take the IIS devs personally here and whip them to death until they don't resolve the fucking thing3 -
We're having a mini-hackathon at our school last Saturday as a final exam of our Web Engineering course, showcasing what we learned throughout. The theme is all about helping university students gain their productivity and improve their interaction with technology.
Me and my team tried to create a note-sharing platform for students. We loved the idea and we're so excited to create it. But excitement turned into shit hole during development.
A fuckton of merge conflicts, divisive code conventions, and usage of god-awful Bootstrap for front-end came in. 😱😬😣
Despite these things, we are able to win the hackathon (i still can't believe we won). but he worst part of winning is that the prize is not cash nor the internship (the judges are from the company who somehow looks for interns), but fucking useless GIFT CARDS!!
But in the end, we're proud of it. I thought that it will be just a concept but in the end, it became real and it turned out to be great. ☺4 -
VS Code for sure. Same experience on win/*nix systems, built in debuggers, terminals, flexible configuration. I am so deep in love and can't recommend it more
-
Gods are always looking out for me.
I got up at 4am to finish the work.
The meeting is at 9am.
So Gods turn the power off at 6am.
They want me to learn my lesson.
They just want me to plan ahead, manage my time and task wisely.
They just want me to become a better being.
They keep teaching me at every possible opportunities.
Yes, I understood. Yes.
But you know what, Gods?
Fuck you. Big fat ugly smelly fuck you. I can't tell you all to go die because you all are immortal and shit. So fuck you. I will never manage my time. I will always work at anytime anyhow I like. You think you can teach me? LMFAO. LOL. ROFL. You will never win. I will survive all the pain and shit. I will do what I like. So fuck you.2 -
After I cured my depression with Vortioxetine which was prescribed to me because of pure luck, I can notice that something has changed.
I can't tell if I like or don't like something anymore. It doesn't matter now which food to eat, what music to listen to, I just can't see the difference. I dropped all my side projects, quit my job and got another, much easier one. I don't see the big picture of things anymore. I also lost my ability to reverse-engineer problematic outcomes and find solutions.
I used to be an architect but now I can't design anything, I just forgot how to do what I could do without thinking. I forgot Lisp and Clojure, functional programming is too hard for me now. I just don't understand it.
My iq also significantly dropped.
Summarizing all that, and also remembering that liking or not liking something implies that you have a personality, I can only see one reason – I probably don't have a personality anymore.
Here's a summary of my experiences from when I was depressed:
depression makes you dumb
you struggle with simplest tasks
you only eat and go to the bathroom because sometimes your basic instincts win
depression takes your power of will – the most valuable thing you have
society doesn't understand and shames you
you can't think
you can't focus
you can't study
you need money but you can't make it
you don't have that save space inside your thoughts anymore
you don't have dreams
your sleep schedule is fucked
every night there's a nightmare and you can't wake up
you can't cry
they prescribe you one neuroleptic after another and they only makes it worse, turning you into a vegetable
you feel nothing but shame and irrational infinite guilt10 -
Linux or Windows - still a problem for inexperienced computer users.
I was an IT professional for 35 years but haven't looked at a line of code for 10 years. And it certainly looks different today -
I have trouble using my smart Phone. I have always disliked the intimidation tehniques practised by Microsoft over the years. When
I was running OS2 in the 90's I couldn't get any software for it because MS had persuaded the developers not to release any OS2 versions until Chicago (AKA WIN95) was released. I was forced to use Windows for years until I finally decided to try Linux. Linux
is a great answer but unfortunately unless you are a current programmer there seems to be some situations that force you to maintain a version of Windows (setting up devices, Printers and developed software). Now that UEFI has been introduced as the standard in new PCs it is very difficult just to install and run Linux. So as WIN10 (the most invasive and slow running Windows to date) is the only "Valid" OS - MS is still dictating what we can and can't do. I decided to sell my new PC and pick up an old BIOS PC so that I could run linux and Win 7 to accomplish
my needs. How long can this go on? When will Linux be a "valid" Operating System. And when will a non-programmer be easily able to setup his hardware and find necessary software to run on Linux.9 -
For two projects, I have been in a solo work pattern, been a time bottleneck, and been irreplaceable on the projects. Four months ago I told management, "If anything happens to me these projects will be in trouble. I want to train a backup. I can't sustain this momentum. It isn't good for me, or for the success of these projects."
Four months later I still have no backup. They decided to diversity hire some new developers in the wrong area and now there is no money for a backup for me. I can't do all the work on both projects as a solo developer. I could have if I wasn't pushed into doing trial and error development on a poorly defined MS Dynamics API. Since the projects were behind schedule the customers lost confidence in the company to deliver. So the executives railroaded both project managers to save face.
Instead of addressing the development issues they did a bunch of other silly things. I got a job offer lined up and issued my resignation. That news absolutely exploded. After resigning my executive decided to say how awful I am in front of the customer in an attempt to save face for the company. The customer contacted the recently railroaded project manager and asks why. Former project manager tells customer, "You noticed how much faster the development of that part of the application went when he joined. You noticed how much better the quality of the project was. What do you think is happening? Do you think that a very good developer and an experienced project manager are to blame for the failures here?" So the executive is 13/10 pissed off because I may have accidentally struck a death blow for millions of dollars of business. I committed to taking care of the handover to the customer, and the company can't afford to get rid of me without completely losing confidence of the customer. The developers that I work with don't blame me at all and they are disgruntled that executive tried to character assassinate me and realize that it could have been them. I sense that I also may have initiated a developer mass-exodus. So the last few days have been the most stressful of my career but none of it is sticking to me because I followed all of the correct process.
You play stupid games you win stupid prizes.4 -
I have this friend of mine, he was a former course mate and we can call him J.
J called a week ago saying he wanted to come stay with me for a few days and I said no problem buddy come home I'm always around.
When he came around he sounded quite different than the J I used to know. The first thing he said when I opened the door for him was "Do you know God?" and I was like "Hunh... Is that the latest javascript framework?". With my reply I was expecting laughter as a response but seems like buddy is serious.
J: Are you ashamed of him?
Me: What's up man? Jesus ain't coming anytime soon *still joking*.
J: Yes, he is. And we...
Me: Okay. Cut the crap man.
That night was quite long as we argued religious stuff front, back and center. I asked him why he became so religious but his response wasn't really clear. What I could sense from the discussion was "he's in it for the money" because while we were arguing he mentioned that God spoke to him that he would own a Mercedes Benz this year, so for that he created a WhatsApp group luring people to join to receive gospel messages and in turn ask them to sow seeds and make offerings all in the name of God. I was both pissed and perplexed by such an act of selfishness. Why don't you just get a real job, I asked J, and he said the jobs he could find doesn't match his taste :/
The religious argument continued to day 3 and I wasn't feeling it because it has affected my work as I couldn't even concentrate on most task that was supposed to be completed that week. I called him the next day and told him he shouldn't come to my place if he won't boycott the religious arguments we normally have at night because those are my working hours and the arguments wasn't helping matters. I ended the call when I got no response.
Throughout the rest of that day I felt guilt for what I had said to him, maybe there would have been a better way of putting out my reasons to him or atleast allow him arrive home before telling him what I just told him. I felt really bad that night, so the next day I tried to reach so he could come around when he's available but his line wasn't going through.
Few hours later I got a call from another friend we can call E.
--- E: Hey, have you seen J lately.
Me: Yes, he has been with me for few days now.
--- E: Is he there now.
-- Me: No he's not.
--- E: I need to let you know what's up. J isn't feeling okay. He has been with me for quite a while but recently this year he started acting strange. I think he has some mental issues.
-- Me: Mental what?
--- E: Yes. One time he pulled of his shirt running towards the street. I asked him where he was going and he said "they're calling me... they're calling me".
-- Me: That must be serious, I never paid attention I just noticed he was acting too religious.
--- E: Yes man. It took some time before I myself realised what was going on.
--- Me: So what do we do?
--- E: I've spoken to his brother and we also informed the police he was missing, I never knew he was with you.
--- Me: I'll try reaching out if I find him I'll get in touch.
--- E: Okay.
Hanging up the phone, I have never felt so broken in my entire life. All through those time I was arguing with someone in need of help.
How could I not have known. I'm stupid... I'm stupid... I'm stupid! I kept stumping my palm on my head. Shame unto me.
There were moments in our arguments with signs of clear red flags, some things he said wasn't just right but I ignored just to win the arguments. At one point he claimed he was God, at another point he said he doesn't need to work to become rich that money will visit him, he said some really bizarre things if I was observant enough I would have noticed but fuck me I didn't.
Next day, I got a call that he has been found and has been taken to a psychiatric hospital. He was suffering from bipolar disorder. When I got there, he no longer recognises me. This was the same person we both argued few nights ago.
This short experience was devastating for me. I cried like a baby right there in room filled with his family and some other friends.
No one knew why I was crying, it was just me and my guilty conscience. This would have been prevented atleast a little if I had acted differently. I can't hug him now... It's of no use. I can't tell him how great a friend he is and and how much he deserves the world now because it would be useless.
I pray day and night that he gets well soon and I could tell him how sorry I am for not realising he had a condition unknown to me.
I get to visit him twice a week and hope he gets back to the J I've always known, my buddy for life 💑
For anyone reading this:
Sometimes the people around you might look okay from the outside but I promise you there is a lot going in on the inside. Show love to whoever call you their friend and also don't take arguments personally (I failed this test), some people uses arguments to validate theirselves and some might not be as sane as you think.
#ListenMoreSayLess11 -
Soooooo, why is it that so often 'security' just means bloody mindedly getting in your way for no reason?
Coz I fail to see how whitelisting a subnet of private IPs that are already only accessible through company VPN presents any kind of security risk, especially since the blocking software is literally only on our company laptops and can be easily bypassed by being on the VPN on *any other device*. But nooooooo, we have to go to the this other company our umbrella company owns (who by the way are making every dev at our company redundant in six months) and beg them to change each individual IP address every time we create a service.
Really does feel like security often means either 'our parent company doesn't understand security so we just need to go through the motions and *look* like we are doing things properly' or 'we just want to get in your way enough that we win in the who gets made redundant fight because you can't actually get any work done and we can'.
Bonus points: on the website for the blocking software they use, it literally recommends using Internet Explorer for everything. I'm surprised they haven't tried to enforce that on us as well.1 -
Not sure if this should be a proper rant about the reasons behind this, or a simple 'so much win' situation..
CTO asked how I'm doing with task xy.. my answer: mostly should be fixed, but I'm trying to figure out this zz thing.. It is so fucked up, I can't make sense of it.. before I could really finish the sentence CTO was like: shut up, don't tell me about it, we know, just please fix it..can you fix it? Please say yes..and don't talk about this anymore.. 😂😂😂6 -
Win 11 has made my computer use MISERABLE!!!
The sound keeps going out. The shit won't print right, no detail, no light and dark, always too light or too dark and Nothing like I edited it in GIMP. Fucking Shit!!!!! I want these designers to have permanent scabies. It won't print the objects the size Ichose. It keeps having to reinstall printers after every update. There are 5 clicks for what used to be 1 click. Did people magically stop getting carpel tunnel!??? The copy/paste and other icons are thin, same color almost as background and anyone over 50 can't SEE them!6 -
So hanging out with my in-laws tonight. It apparently is super bowl Sunday. I don't know a damn thing about football and could care less about it.
Them: who do you think is going to win?
Me: I guess the better team?
Them: yes but who are you rooting for?
Me: don't know who's playing?
Ahhhhhhhggg I can't stand sports people.
And there they are yelling at a TV like someone on the other side will actually hear them.
Does anyone else have a similar situation?15 -
Just my luck that I get the best wk76 story ever on wk77. Either way:
So some of you may know that the current project I am on has some shared code components with one of the other projects in the product line. And we have some differences in our processes. This leads to a lot of fun.
So, I was working on converting one of our shared components into a more modern language. It would save us time, money, and sanity by allowing us to more easily maintain our product. Sounds like a win-win right? That's what I thought. Until I had a meeting with the other team. THEN THE QUESTIONS ROLLED IN. Well who is going to integrate our product with yours? (You?) Are you changing the interface? (Not really.) Are you going to generate a design document? (Absolutely not especially since the interface isn't changing for the most part.) Well you are changing the type of one parameter in one method from an undocumented unmanaged type to a well documented managed type that we control. Shouldn't you generate a document to document that change? (Again absolutely not.)
So first they basically browbeat my lead into putting me in charge of their integration effort. Its fine though, as they gave me an account to charge. However, when I was finally able to get a machine with their build environment on it (at least two months later), they then told me that that account was closing and I had to wait until next quarter. So fuck me right. And because of their process I would break them if I were to check my changes in.
So fast forward to today. They are translating some shared components for the same reason that we are. However, they are changing code that while shared is technically "ours" and that will DEFINITELY break us if they do this work since this is the code that controls our algorithms. And while we have a fault tolerant process, or at least more fault tolerant than the other group's, we are currently doing a huge amount of development in the part they want to change. And when we ask them "who is going to do this work to integrate our product with your changes?" they stare at us slack jawed. Like "um, you right? it doesn't affect us." Like MOTHERFUCKERS!!! YOU LITERALLY JUST FOIST ALL THIS WORK ON US TO INTEGRATE WITH YOU BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T HAVE THE PEOPLE TO SUPPORT IT!!! BUT YOU CAN PAY THIS GUY FOR SIX MONTHS TO DO ALL THIS WORK THAT WILL BREAK US BUT CAN'T SPARE HIM TO INTEGRATE WITH US!?!?!? EVEN IF WE'RE PAYING HIM AND NOT YOU!?!?!
I will let you know how this goes when we have the discussion. I am drinking right now because it it easier and better for my emotional and physical health than bum fights. -
Somebody ranted about his teacher showing windows presentation and teaching nothing. I wanted to comment that post but i have enough material to make the whole rant out of it.
Well at least you have those presentations! In my school we have 2 IT classrooms one with win xp, 1ghz cpu, 0,5gb ram computers and one with win vista, 2 core 2ghz cpu and 2gb of ram PCs.
Guess what room our teacher is using... of course the worse one! The second one is fine, few years ago another theacher had been using it!
I tried to convince him to change rooms but he is coming up with silly exciuses! (like "server is not working here!", well i fixed it with my friend but why are you even talking about it when you are not using yours in old class!)
PS. That server is useless anyway, every pc is connected to router that is connected to internet so supervisor pc is not mandatory, only acces restriction is enforced by win accounts.
I heard from students from my class (that picked that optional IT course) (i'm in high school) that gimp is not working because pc's are so bad!
Sometimes even notepad frezzes.🤔
Not only class is shite but teacher clearly has no idea what is he doing. (in order to pass the final from IT you need to learn simple C++, up to simple foo objects) and of course he isn not even talking about that! On one lesson about sorting algorithms he gave everybody 10 small pieces of paper with numbers on them and told everybody to sort them manualy, because he didnt know how to do it himself! So there is no doubt they wont be able code it.
I need to mention that i volontered to "clean, fix" that classroom (in order to convince teacher to move). And in that class i saw programms written in c++ on every computer! That means somebody was teaching propely before! 😣
I feel sorry for those guys, they are just waisting time. I would fall for it as well but i decided i can learn coding in home ;).
Well, results are shocking, after 1 month of coding i learned C# and i can basicly make any algorithm i ever wish. I learned about computer operation so well that i can nearly teach computer science. (i helped my friend in usa that is a electronic student with that and i'm very proud of it 😁) and it class still can't even use all 3 loops correctly... 😥 Ok i must admit i have been coding for a looooong while so i had time to learn basic c,c++ and pc operations before, but point still stands.
Why the hell are you wasting life of those studends? Why are you giving them a choice to learn coding WHEN YOU CANT EVEN USE PC YOURSELF?! (that it course is optional so you can apply if you want so)
I dont regret not bothering about it.1 -
I have a gaming laptop with a 125gb ssd and 1 TB secondary drive. Ssd has just 20 GB free.
I wanna dual boot windows 10 and arch. Most of the secondary drive is full of steam games. Win 10 for gaming and arch is for projects.
What's a good way to partition the drives for arch? I can't guess how much space either will need in the future. And what do I do with the other drive?7 -
Here, a full retrospective of my Apple products ownership.
iPhone SE – after Android, I was absolutely amazed by how fast it worked. No UI lags, camera works absolutely instantly no matter the light conditions, all the GPU-heavy games work butter smooth.
After camera and charging port failures on Xperia flagship and CPU literally melting through screen rendering it unusable on Meizu, it was enough to make me interested in Apple products.
When I was using Meizu, I actually got a twitching eye which was triggered by UI lags. After two months of using iPhone, I noticed that something was missing – my eye wasn't twitching anymore.
iPhone actually cured me.
MacBook 12 – a 900 grams laptop with passive-cooled mobile CPU running many Chrome tabs, heavy Webpack HMR build, VSCode and Slack just fine. Yes, you can't play games, but I don't even require it from a laptop this tiny.
Butterfly keyboard that internet hates so much actually increased my typing speed and comfort compared to MX Red mechanical keyboard, and ForceTouch trackpad made me forget about mouse. I learned how to disassemble the Butterfly keyboard if I ever need this but the keyboard never failed.
I use this laptop to this day and it still even smells like the day one, a beautiful smell of a new Apple product.
iPhone X – got it because of the camera, stayed for great battery life and amazing OLED display. I use telephoto lens exclusively and it made me lay off my Canon DSLR with Helios lens which stays on my bookshelf covered in dust to this day.
True black of OLED display which is undistinguishable from the screen bezel is stunning. To this day, battery surely works for one and a half days and I watch youtube really often.
I sometimes struggled to unlock iPhone SE with wet fingers, but with FaceID, as soon as I look at the screen the phone is unlocked. Works perfect every time, never had an issue with this.
Stainless steel body feels premium compared to aluminum. Stereo sound is a major selling point if you're like watching videos and playing games on your phone. Overall amazing product and a huge improvement over SE.
Apple Watch series 4 – really comfortable fit. Nice battery life, once I forgot about it for like ten days during lockdown and it was still working, even though on power reserve mode. Really reliable in terms of battery life and liquid protection. Very satisfying Taptic Engine crown clicks. I run every day and Apple watch always measure my heart rate correctly, and the running app is well designed and a pleasure to use. Overall a nice accessory to have if you use iPhone.
Powerbeats Pro – great sound and battery life. I switched from Shure SE215 which was great, but it had wires. I listen to a lot of music so the sound quality is important for me. When I was choosing earphones I visited a store where you can listen to them all. I listened through earphones like Noble Audio Kaiser Encore and JH Audio Layla, and of course $4000 Laylas sound better than $249 bluetooth earphones, but the difference in sound doesn't justify the difference in price to me.
Powerbeats pro is the Apple H1 chip true wireless earphones with largest driver of them all which makes them sound better than AirPods Pro – it's just physics. Bass in Powerbeats is amazing, which is also true for my Shures, but Powerbeats also win in clarity.
It connects seamlessly to both my MacBook and my iPhone, and everyone in voice chats can hear me really good.
Huge case is a major throwback compared to AirPods, but the battery life of earphones themselves is so great that I just leave the case at home and only carry earphones and it works for me.
Apple Link bracelet in space black – really better than I expected. Intricate detailing, literally the steel that Rolex uses, top-notch finishing and polishing – all that for just 450 dollars. I only used it for several days now, but it already feels like a really satisfying product.
Before all that I was using Linux. It took a year for elementaryos devs to fix wifi for my laptop. Ubuntu looks and feels ugly. Pop OS felt like garbage. Manjaro was also just that – garbage. KDE Plasma – I don't even want to talk about that. A monstrocity where you accidentally click a wrong switch in the settings and your system won't boot up again. Also, PulseAudio. Struggles with proprietary drivers and software updates.
Windows? I serviced a lot of Windows PCs through my career and it never, never worked as intended. I'm no dumbass, I always managed the rights correctly and never installed sketchy apps. My latest ryzen gaming build with a lot of ram also lags somehow even in Windows 10 UI.
Before I switched, I defended Linux.
My life was a lie.
I'm sorry to everyone who I offended based on their opinion on Linux.33 -
When my manager, blatantly miscommunicated several things to me a couple of years ago, and scapegoated me by saying a comment I NEVER once heard said about me, in any context ever, "you communicate badly-- you need to communicate better", I took it seriously.
Fast forward, two years later. I'm doing wonderful at my job, yet I cannot get over that incident. I thought about it some more. Why did she say that to me? Why did she address it to me after her mistake? Why was she not aware of the real reason I missed the meeting?
Out of all useful bits of knowledge I gathered over the years, it's kinda comical that psychology came in the most handy at the workplace. There's very little to be gained from trying to psychoanalyze strangers, friends, and family... but it's almost saved my life at the job.
You see, if I attack an approach even in the most formal tones, or even worse, defend my approach, there's nothing coming from that. The situation now becomes my situation. When I become "aware" of the truth of the situation I become able to control the situation, not just myself. That way, you're not in a fisticuff fight with your boss, and you are not left defeated by the situation. Exercising control of the situation in such a manner that they are left defeated by the situation, not by you directly, is the only way you can win as an employee.
Any other way, you'll get under-appreciated, underpaid, overworked, overlooked, etc.
So, my boss at the time, was defeated by the situation of her being a bad leader; and instead of clarifying those feelings to me or ignoring them entirely... she validated her false self using her real emotions.
You can only reverse that, by developing fake emotions, to display a real self.
They can't blame you, and when they feel self-defeated, they cannot pretend it was you who caused it (bringing it back to a sane level of reality). They might rage if they're childish but it will not cause a single hair in your body to twitch because you did not "respond to their email" or "throw someone under the bus for their convenience", the situation did, they beat themselves by attacking you while the situation came down on them.
If I had to explain I would say that the situation is controlled by creating a mirror of the employee that follows their orders perfectly. That employee won't feel defensive: they already do everything right. The employee is crafted by becoming aware of the teams impacted in the situation and their true intent and creating "the situation", "the owner".
"The owner" reflects to people from the perspective of the situation and not from your own. This way you can't make a wrong move and are not emotionally involved with yourself.
It enables you to emotionally notice others. It also makes you safe, because you have the situation-mirror that's really doing the battling. The situation-mirror eventually creates a situation where the other person starts attacking reality (the situation) instead of attacking you.
Now, it's up to you whether you want to use that as a way to cooperate with your boss to beat this new reality, or as a way to gain coherence on your reality outside of your boss. I have noticed most people tend to realize this somewhere along the line and retreat and stop fighting, and quit their jobs.
I've been doing this in a corporate environment for a couple of weeks. I have already become greatly stressed and subjugated by the company for which my company works for. 20 of them sit here every day and devalue everything. Yet.... They're completely incompetent, spoilt, lazy and worst of all, they control how the software is being created. There isn't a single person on their side responsible for their requests to make sense and work with each other. So you can imagine how much blame they need to assign to us devs. They don't know what they want but want something anyway and then they'll see if that's what they want but everything under the tightest deadline possible. They're all clients and they all escalate to the board of directors any bad word directed at them. So you can imagine the narcissism that develops in that environment.
I have made them argue with reality and self-defeat numerous times. They have now started to back off and are being more polite and courteous. They have also not escalated anything anymore. Just as I was faking "happy" while I felt intimidated by them. I have not committed a single angry act and yet they are not feeling superior anymore. The reality of the situation is that we need to make a software and if you make them battle this instead of battling you, they can't beat you.6 -
Today was a rather funny day in school. School starts for me at 13:40 because our timetable planners are so qualified for this job.
First 2hrs: Physics, fine its good
Second 2hrs: Discrete Maths (however you want to call it)
Goal is to write a text (30 pages, 10, etc all those standard settings). Teacher prefers Latex over word, but we can do it in word if we want. We could choose a topic, I took primes because it looked the best. I decided to use latex because I'm a fetishist and it simply looks better in the end. A classmate was arguing with our teacher about ides: texmaker vs kile. And I'm like "I use vim". So my teacher is like kk
Later that class, when we actually started doing stuff I started the ssh session to my server because I don't know any good c++ compilers for win and I'm too lazy to get a portable version of cygwin (or whatever its called). So in my server I open vim and start coding my tool for Fermat Primes (Fermatsche Primzahlen, too lazy to actually translate). And this teacher seriously is the best teacher I ever met in my life. Usually teachers are like " dude r u hakin' the school server?" and I'm like bruh its just vim and I'm doing it this way because I cannot code on your PC coz I can't install a compiler. And this teacher is like "oh hey you actually use vi, all cool kids used it in 2000. I first though u were kidding and stuff..." And we continued talking about more of stuff like that and I have to say that this is the first teacher that actually understands me. Phew
Now I'm going to continue writing my 30 pages piece of trash latex doc and hope it'll end good1 -
I really regret switching to manjaro. So many things keep breaking, like my laptop won't sleep anymore, it stays up, whenever I plug in another display I get an error thrown at me. Among other weird behaviors (all screen related) that I can't seem to fix and make the experience feel like I'm running a very clunky win-poop machine.
On the other hand, setting up a very custom sddm theme and installing certain software like hadoop, rust, gimp, xfce tweaks and other things was such a breeze D: just "yay hadoop" and 90% of the work was done.
Grhhh... Wondering if I should accept defeat, and maybe switch to Linux MX or spend hours fixing what probably is a display driver issue that's pissing me off 😠2 -
!rant from a support guy
I was tasked to migrate an Exchange 2003 server (yes, those are still used) for an upcoming Office 365 deployment. There are no direct upgrade path from one another, as far as we know
My task was to export PSTs from mailboxes. Great, a native tool exist for that in 2003 (exmerge). But only for less than 2 GB mailboxes because ANSI/Unicode! Half of our mailbox busts that limit. Oh, it seems Exchange 2007 has a PowerShell command for exporting to PST as well! But pre-SP3, that command relies on a local installation of Outlook on the server (DAFUQ), and has been superseded by another "standalone" powershell command. So I install a bogus Windows 2012 server only for that purpose, with Exchange Management Tools (which, by the way, is bundled with the Exchange installation setup and REQUIRES to have IIS installed on the target machine. Also, if you install ONLY the Exchange 2007 Management Tools and wish to uninstall them afterwards, you can't because the uninstaller wants me to select an Exchange Role to remove, which are all unchecked in my tools-only setup). Never worked, and Google-fu says that the newer Exchange 2007 New-MailboxExportRequest command seems to have removed Exchange 2003 support.
So i'm back to installing a pre-SP3 Exchange 2007. Then the older Export-Mailbox powershell command whines about 64bits and 32bit incompatiblity-- actually I ***HAVE*** to have the whole OS/software stack 32bit ONLY. Don't ask me why!
Some article I found says I could fire up an XP virtual machine for that, I go for Win 7 x86. "Sorry, Microsoft Exchange won't be installed on a workstation environment because reasons." All right then, let's go for an old Windows Server 2003 x86. Have you tried to boot this up in an Hyper-V environment where mouse and keyboard support for Windows Server 2003 are apparently optional? No keyboard AND mouse events sent to the guest machine at all.
* Sigh *, let's use a Windows Server 2008, but WATCH OUT! Microsoft has discontinued x86 support on their W2008 R2 release, so non-R2 for me. Even then, mouse event wasn't sent until I installed guest additions.
After all, export-mailbox ended up working, but that costed me two days of banging my head against the wall. (Oh, and I take internal calls inbetween as well...)
And that's why I aspire to be a programmer. Thank you for nothing, Microsoft!4 -
Start my Monday by trying to decipher non-tech people's "bug" reports whee they submit a small portion of a web page where some problem occurs, when I asked them to include the ENTIRE browser window including the URL of the page they're on.
Business Analyst says most of the forms aren't working, because they're not creating leads in the CRM system. I made a column in the form list where I explicitly mention the form submission destination, such as email, CRM, newsletter, or some combo of these. Forms work, she just can't read.
Just can't win.3 -
I feel bad for ranting about this.
So I just came out of a projects where a teammate was really slow. It's not that they weren't trying, like I was sitting across from them and can see them working. But seriously fing donkey balls, SO SLOW and subpar, it wasn't slow and steady to win the race, it was slow and steady to just barely pass.
Like we had two weeks for this project, we've had all of the planning done, now on the last 4 days it was just finishing up the implementation. And everything to come out of this person would take ages, slow everyone else done, and would need to be redone by someone else.
I really do feel bad for hating, cuz this person is doing there best and it's just not good enough. They listen, pay attention, but it's like they can't improve.
It just sucks... Because their ambition and effort is not being paid off and is pulling us down...3 -
!rant
Guys, just a question. Let say in a company either your boss, senior or manager who always wants to win a conversation no matter what the issue is and whoever is at fault.
e.g.
Me: Roasters can't lay eggs
Boss: Yes they can
....
(After few minutes you are bore and want to end the conversation)
Me: Yes, yes fucken Roasters can lay eggs. You are right. Now fuck off.
Question Again:
Will you work for someone who wants to win the conversation?2 -
I hate quotes/estimates so damn much
Quote too high and we don't win the work
Quote too low and I screw myself/other devs over
And then there's the fact that most initial quotes for an entire project are based off nothing but a few marketing slides from the potential client; we do re-estimate after winning the work and nailing down what the client actually wants, but obviously it can't be too far from the initial quote
And then there are other people on the company (not devs, obviously) who like to casually expand the scope without checking how much time it'll add4 -
Not so much of a "tool" but as someone with a small monitor, I can't imagine my life without workspace in linux and/or virtual desktop on win 10
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Story of my first successful project
Being part of a great team, I've shared in a lot of successes, one I am particularly proud of is my first attempt to use agile methodologies in a deeply waterfall-managment culture.
Time was June/July-ish and we applied for a national quality award where one key element in the application stated how well we handled customer complaint resolution.
While somewhat true (our customer service is the top-shelf good stuff), we did not have a systematic process in resolving customer complaints. Long story short,
the VP lied on her section of the application. Then came the 'emergency', borderline panic meeting (several VPs, managers, etc) to develop a process to better manage
complaints before the in-house inspection in December.
As most top priority projects go, the dev manager allocated 3 developers, 2 DBAs, and any/all network admins we would need (plus all the bureaucratic management that wanted their thumb in the pie).
Fast forward to August, after many, many planning meetings, lost interest, new shiny bouncing balls, I was the only one left on the project. The VP runs into the dev manager in the hallway and asks "Is my program done yet? If its not ready before December with report-able data, we will not win the award."
The <bleep> hit the fan...dev manager comes by...
Frank: "How the application coming along? Almost done?"
Me:"No, haven't really started coding. You moved Jake and Tom over to James's team, Tina quit, and you've had me sidetracked helping other teams because the DBAs are too busy."
Frank: "So, it's excuses. You really think the national quality award auditors care about your excuses? The specification design document has been done for months. This is unacceptable."
Me: "The VP finished up her section yesterday and according to the process, we can't start coding until the document is signed off."
Frank: "Holy f<bleep>ing sh<bleep>t! No one told you *you* couldn't start. You know how to create tables and write code."
Me: "There is no specification to write to. The design document is all about how they plan on reporting the data, not how call agents will be using the application to serve customers."
Frank: "The f<bleep> it isn't. F<bleep>ing monkeys could code against that specification, I helped write it! NO MORE F<bleep>ING EXCUSES! This is your top priority from now on!"
I was 'cleared' to work directly with the call center manager and the VP to develop a fully integrated customer complaint management system before December (by-passing any of the waterfall processes that would get in the way).
I had heard about this 'agile' stuff, attended a few conference tracks on the subject, read the manifesto, and thought "I could do this.".
Over the next month, I had my own 'sprints' and 'scrums' with the manager (at the time, 'agile' was a dirty word so I had to be careful of my words and what info I shared) and by the 2nd iteration had a working prototype.
Feature here, feature there (documenting the 'whys' and 'whats' along the way), and by October, had a full deployed application.
Not thinking I would get a parade or anything, the dev manager came back from a meeting where the VP was showing off the new app to the other VPs (and how she didn't really 'lie' on the application)
Frank: "Everyone is pleased how well the project turned out, except one thing. Erin said you bothered him too much with too many questions."
Me: "Bothered? Did he really say that?"
Frank: "No, not directly, but he said you would stop by his office every day to show him your progress and if he needed you to change anything. You shouldn't have done that."
Me: "Erin really seemed to like the continuous feedback. What we have now is very different than what we started with."
Frank: "Yes, probably because you kept bothering him and not following the specification document. That is why we spend so much time up front in design is so we don't waste management's time, which is exactly what you did."
Me: "We beat the deadline by two months, so I don't think I wasted anyone's time. In fact, this is kind of a big win for us, right?"
Frank: "Not really. There was breakdown in the process. We need better focus on the process, not in these one-hit-wonders."
End the end, the company won the award (mgmt team got to meet the vice president, yes the #2 guy). I know I played a very small, somewhat insignificant role in that victory, I was extremely proud to be part of the team. -
Worked for a bozo I met on freelancer platform, we communicated and the dude gave me some tasks on mobile to theme the application and add some specifics I wasn't awarded project and I thought I was playing nice in order to win project and show ability whatfffff!!!!!, I didn't see it coming. To cut story shot I finished the job sent the apk and sent the code and the guy never responded again, what am I please ? a bozo too or a dunce and a Dunder head. I can't explain what I just did.10
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I hate moving parts in headphones... Why can't they atleast make them out of metal. I mean do you really need to make flimsy ass tech to make people buy more of it ? Well that gave me a good idea the headphone drivers and lads are still usable i might hook up a new headphones out metal !... Nah i will just buy a new one (god damn you companies and smart business policies you win again)1
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The life of a normal person is like waking up every day with a zero on the scale of suffering. You did something good — here are -20 points to that scale. Something bad happened — well, here are +10 points. Being a bipolar person, my life is like beginning every day with +500 suffer points. Every day is a devastating uphill battle to just break even.
Why live then?
You can't win. If you have a healthy sleep schedule, do sports and eat healthy, it's still +500 every day. One mistake like fucking up your sleep schedule — boom, you now start at +700.
In Japan, a new breakthrough in psychiatry is happening as they were able to tie bipolar disorder to a HHV6 herpesvirus messing up the operation of Parkinje cells in human brain, unreachable to the immune system because of blood-brain barrier. A nasal spray treatment is proposed. If successful, bipolar disorder could be cured forever.
Until an actual nasal spray is released, I decided to wait because it's a huge bummer killing myself only some three years before this breakthrough.
But if their experiments will never come to fruition and my conventional therapy will not be successful, I will kill myself.
I don't want to live like this.6 -
I once was working on my family's business during summer and was doing something on the laptop that was there (according to the owner, it was in a "good shape" - oh my god that laptop nearly gave me cancer: an old Toshiba, running W10, with half the F keys not working - specially F5. I CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT F5 OH MY GOD -, and also the ➡ key (arrow keys). It was bought in a flea market and some IT guy, a friend of the owner, repaired it a bit and installed the OS because a laptop that old ran WinXP or Win Vista for sure) when suddenly it died on me.
I rebooted the thing and right before the time it should be showing the windows logo, the screen froze (on a black screen with some text) and it started to beep. Loudly. A loud continuous beep. I turned it off and on some times after that, seeing if turning it off and on did something (as it seems to work LoL) and it continued with the beeping. After a quick search I found out that that was a common problem with Toshibas that old, and that I needed to press F2 (that key worked thank god) when the black screen with the text showed up (I don't remember what was written there, it were some booting instructions, I think).
It worked. Great. Now the N key doesn't work when I press it. Greeeeeeeaaaaaat. Also it seemed that, when I opened the start menu, it would automatically write "nnnnnnnn(...)" without me pressing any key (pressing any key would make it stop though, maybe it was stuck).
Then I told the owner not to turn it off, because the laptop would start beeping and such (and I know he'd panic about it).
From then on I think it went off for good and now he's been using his own Toshiba, that runs Vista and is slow as all hell.
Moral of the story: he should have been used his crappy PC from the beginning, at least all its keys work
(Note: watching him type hurts my soul. When one is used to use both hands to type, and is fast-ish on the keyboard and uses tabs to change fields, watching someone type with only one hand every 2" or so and using the mouse to change fields hurts. So much time wasted 😭) -
So,I bought a new laptop (comes with windows preinstalled). I quite like macOS and (some) linux distro. "I'll triple boot, suffer to hackintosh it, install either Ubuntu GNOME or Elementary OS and leave Windows 10" I thought.
Upon further reflection "But why would I need win 10?"
// searches "Why use windows?"
// google "Why is windows so bad"
" Nah, I haven't used win in a long time, I'll give it a go. We were buddies when it was XP. It can't be that bad, it must be better now."
//A few days later it finally arrives
//proceeds to use win10
//unnecessarily complex registration
//makes a new 16gb i7 sluggish
"Let's see what's running on the background"
//downloads ubuntu GNOME, hastily9 -
I go to add a method call in a business logic class that's used exclusively in a particular service, and get blocked in the PR by some other guy-
Other Guy: refactor this into the shared framework referenced by all our microservices
Me: it is only and would only be used in this service
OG: what about the other business logic class in this service?
Me: it's not used there, and if it does end up used there then we can refactor it into a class that they both reference then
OG: I need to know when the abstraction of this function will be done. is it going to be delivered next sprint?
Me: YAGNI - better to avoid doing extra work when we don't know if we'll even need it
OG: tbh you can still abstract it with some generics and lambda magic, but im not gonna enforce that
Me: premature abstraction is the root of all evil (tongueout)
OG: not really, its the root of not having a million miles of tech debt in 2 years
I just can't win for losing with the anti-YAGNI yogi.1 -
Hate writing Technical Design documents. Hate it when there are no Technical Design documents. Can't win.4
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"We can't install the latest Win 10 features and security improvement on your PC due to low disk space."
Time to clear up.
Should I delete my hands and feet too?
: /6 -
Hate it when clients told you a specific requirement but then changes it the last minutes. You can't justify or argue. Can't do nothing about it but only follow. Just a high paid slave.
Example:
Client-verbal: background color of all 5 pages
Me-with email verification: ok. I will bg color of all pages will be red based from our last meeting.
Client email reply: ok
After a few days
Client: I think we have misunderstanding. What I meant was 4 pages red only. The 5th page should be maroon.
Me in my mind: wtf. Of course I can't argue but just agree and follow. The demo is near and he'll just inform the last minute. I will not win this argument.
Also, there are no acceptance criterias in the user story.6 -
How do you guys separate your working environments for different projects?
My situation is that I have one gaming project which requires having Windows OS (for testing purposes since can't run that game on Linux or Mac OS)
Then I have 2-3 other projects (freelancing/fulltime gigs) which don't require Windows so I use macbook for them.
Then I have other projects for my freetime (self development and stuff) and also need an environment just to be able not to work and chill instead
I tried separating these concerns with using tools such as evernote, trello and etc. but it's really getting out of hand.
Using different users for Win/Mac is not an option since I dont want to be switching between different users all the time.
Should I consider using some VM's to have my working environments for different projects separate? Will I use performance when using these VM's?
Buying 5 laptops just to separate everything doesnt make sense as well.6 -
Why isn't Gooogle buying Atlassian to stock up G Suite with Wiki and Slack, then piss off Microsoft and win the Market over with better products?
Im reading everywhere now that MS Teams has the hugest Userbase and so much features to come bla bla bla
Fuck MS Teams, it's shit, looks like it and it's software so I can't smell it. Thank god for that, else it would smell like the afterback of a diaarhetic horse.
Every fucking Tecnician at my company is arguing, that MS Teams is better, because more users are active. WTF Poopface, they have more user, because it comes included with O365???
Our people are so stupid, I bet they won the IT Certification in a Lottery or flew to Turkey to buy it at a Bazaar.
And who the fuck are the Product Managers at Google, gonna hit them a couple of times with a broom to wake up. You fucktards are missing a huge market.7 -
I work for a media company with different business units such as radio, print, newspaper etc and radio is the largest (most money) of them all. The online unit (dev & social media) was relatively small until recently. So IT and budget is mostly focussed on radio.
Last budget meeting we asked to upgrade our internet and hardware (we have shitty laptops and very shitty screens). CTO of the group says to me: "I don't really belive in the internet because I don't really understand it so I can't see why you need these upgrades...nobody else complains about these issues."
Me internally: "how the fuck did you become CTO....??"
Me to him: nobody complains because they are sales consultants who reads emails and make phone calls all day...
CTO: I'll look into it but i'm not really convinced...
How do you win this fight??? -
It's 2023 and smartphones can't even properly upload files in background.
When an upload is running in background while I watch YouTube or use other apps, the upload just stops at some point. The speed indicator in the top bar goes down to a few KB/s and I know immediately the upload has stopped well before it could have finished.
When re-opening the tab, I see a blank page and a loading bar. This means the tab has unloaded. Now I will have to re-select all those files again, which comes with its own troubles ( https://devrant.com/rants/9879401/... ).
Mobile browsers need to have a "protect this tab from unloading" option. Samsung already introduced a "keep open" option in the task switcher to protect individual apps from unloading in background. Why not do this on tab level?
Once the user locks their screen, this alone might interrupt the uploading process. On laptops and desktop computers, the upload keeps running in background.
Come on, this should be as easy as childs' play for billion-dollar corporations. Aren't smartphones "smart" enough to detect that a page is currently uploading files so its tab is not unloaded?
If smartphones can not accomplish this simple task that desktop computers and laptops can easily handle since the 2000s, it is a sad and embarrassing state.5 -
Fucking hate to explain basic shit to computer illiterate. Usually I don't mind, but right know I working on the project, want to automate one thing I need to do every morning, put two numbers to web page(I will explain details maybe in next rant). So I am only one who fix, buys computers, printer(for some problems I call for other repair man.). Generally speaking working as IT guy. Firm has like 50 computers, some of them has SCADA software. Some computers have Win 7, some win 8 and others win 10, can't upgrade those computers, not enough money(I can deal with this problem). And yes, computer buying is not the fastest, easiest thing too. Because is public firm, I need to do public buying(I don't know how to translate to english), and most of the time wins the lowest price, I am ok with that. But I can't on item specification write I want that model pc or it components. Example: I can't write I want intel processor, however I can write number of cores, frequency. But it's not that bad, usually i have template for all things I buy. One of the worst thing is this, our firm bought new bookkeeping software version, old version was using visual foxpro framework. Good thing I didn't initiate the purchase, because right know I would be jobless, not because I would be fired, but because our senior accountant would drive me crazy. In fact accountants drive me crazy, but I can handle it for now. As I wrote before our form has about 120 workers, major part of workers are old, like my parents age. (I am 28 btw. Mom is 55.). As you all know what happens if you say you work with computers. So our accountants are like 60 years old, got new program, don't know how to work with it, and they ask me how to do certain things. if I don't know how to I ask program's support, every question is like 90 Eur. So in short accountants expect I should know their work and how program works. If I try say something they don't like, they try to make my day hard. Next thing is our billing program. Man that worked before me done some payments import. And when I came everyone expect me to do that. Ok I did that because that people working with billing program would probably fuck it up. And I semi automated that, so I don't mind that much. Sometimes that program fucks up, like it happened yesterday, it send email invoices attachment without filename. Example: people got this attachment ".pdf"(no filename, only extension), And if you save it you need do OPEN WITH command and then select pdf reader or rename file (I don't know what easier). And surprise surprise our firm, customer support redirects all phone calls, emails to me. But I did explain to customer support what to say to people. Still they redirect it to me.
PS: This is my first job after school. I work as part time.
TL;DR Thinking my life, carrier choices. accountants are not the nicest people.8 -
In our middle schools' science-type after school program we got a client from a hospital. We interviewed her on what kinds of problems she had in her workplace. She talked a lot about impaired vision and such. Most people were doing stuff like button extensions for people who can't feel well. I'm creating a NN for recognizing numbers. I trained the model to 99% accuracy and got to teach my friend about GitHub! Win win!2
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After Years, I've Returned! CEO and Founder of Team/Company Productions HH108!
New Announcements!
new Team Member otogi-cho 🦊🌺
Welcome to the Team!
Otogi-Cho 🦊🌺
Togi is our devloper in charge of Combat systems and polish work.
HH108 Hopes to Post a Working Beta Version of our new game "Filthy Frank'z" With a Post war theme of endless zombies chasing after you a Filthy Frank! (Hotdog) It's up to you and your allies to decide how to win!
We can only express how excited we are to launch this beta release!
In the meantime sit back and realize just how lame life is without this game...ik that's right, you can't!
Beta in current progress (no current release)
Be back soon with more info, screenshots, updates and more!5 -
So a few months ago a broke screen of my laptop, currently I quite broke so I can't change screen and for some time I was using TV as screen, but ofc. Windows have to crash or do similar shit and know it doesn't send signal via HDMI, probably it's showing some info, but signal is only send when it boots windows or something.
So my girlfriend give me her old laptop (4gb RAM and I3 processor, bit touchscreen :/) and windows aren't updated for quite a long (it was still windows 8) and I tried to update it. Ofc it has to be problem, DISM doesn't work, downloading iso doesn't work, fml. I guessed I have to live with that, but later disc usage starts to be around 100% and freeze for few minutes (shitty Win2k PC at uni was more responding). Then I try to refresh windows, DISM starts working, updates semi-working. I left with 21 updates with error and there starts conversation:
Me: install 21 updates
Win: kk. Or actually no
Me: please
Win: the best what I could do is 8.
Me: it's something
Win: actually fuck it, only 4
Me: I'm done *typing Manjaro xfce*
So now I have dual boot with Manjaro which use 40% ram with Firefox open, when windows has 30% alone. I can't play anyway and DF is on Linux so fuck Windows.
I am noob when it comes to Linux and everything actually, but it makes me want to learn and improve.16 -
I really like Linux but it makes me mad when apps I use, like Adobe XD, are available for everything but Linux.
I'm not even going to start with HBO not being able to load streams on Linux. I payed money to stare at a black screen.
I tried to use PlayOnLinux for Adobe Creative Cloud but XD doesn't even appear there.
I also hate dual booting because when I'm using Win or Linux for a bit I tend to make different desktops for different programs/IDEs/browsers and I like them to be open at all times for easy access when I want to do shit. Dual booting means having to open all this again
VMs are even worse in that they tend to be very slow and when I see choppiness when moving windows I immediately "nope" out of that shit
I can't put up with Windows's bs anymore, but not being able to use the software I need is even worse.
I don't know what to do2 -
I'm never committing to finishing another PC game ever again... And sticking to arcade, short games only.
Playing Nu no Kuni 2 for the last 3 days... 25hrs and counting... Now at final boss... I think and I can't get infinite HP in Skirmish... So Keep getting entire force wiped out one hit with his laser beam which keeps getting stronger....
It's like a fly vs us. In order to win it's gotta slowly chip away at u, but he can die at an instant any time...
Oh and the 25hrs includes massive cheating and speed hacking to move faster.2 -
What do you think would be the effect of giving out awards for the best open source code on GitHub or whatever?
My theory is that awards would actually make people to stop working on less significant repositories (that clearly cannot win the awards) and focus on the major repositories, the most starred and forked ones so as to get a share of the prizes. Maybe there would be times when commits(which are way better than the current code) are not merged onto the main branch coz doing so would introduce another coder in sharing the prize. The clustering of everyone's efforts on the major repositories would leave the less significant but useful repositories neglected. Can't say the number of times I have copied code from these repositories. I think awards would be disruptive to the open-source Ecosystem. Am high and am out ppl. Go savage the comments. Wait do such awards exists...haha.2 -
"being gifted is a curse. You are f*cling crippled, you believed you were gifted, but you have been crippled the whole time."
I never could agree more to these words (healthyGamerGg, a youtube therapist specialized in people with issues related to videogames)
If you read my last rant you may in fact know i have a lot of issues with the implications of our jobs and truth be told, it all boils down to my iq.
Or better: to the fact i have a decent skill for abstracting stuff (iq is so freaking generic)... It can be a blessing while solving issues, but it feels awful when you realize that no matter the amount of money, you will still need something else to be happy the first day of work.
Sometimes I really wonder if I am an a-hole, stupid or if i think these 2 things to deny the fact my reasoning is correct.
On a side note table top games are very easy to enjoy: as soon as I sit at the table my brain goes: "the game is gonna be very boring if you play normally, at the best you are gonna learn a new strat, at the worst you are winning and it'll be just an ego jerk off... What if you play stuff you feel like to play and enjoy the ride and the conversation without planning to win?"
Except cards against humanity and yogi. Those two must be won!
(Yogi is a game where you play cards which give you restrictions e.g: "keep an index on the tip of the nose for the rest of the game" or "place this card on your head for the rest of the game" you lose as soon as you fail any of the cards you played or if you declare you can't draw)4 -
So yesterday, when I went to someone else in our office to look how their pc build ended up, I decided to help them setting up windows
All pcs there are on windows 7 except for personal laptops, which I left home because I rarely need it there my colleague was working on his laptop though, so I was obviously gonna use a Windows 7 PC.
I didn't want to use 3rd party software, not because I'd think they're bad, just because I did it with the cmd a few times in the past, so I erased the USB stick and made it bootable, after that I remembered that win 7 can't mount drives without 3rd party software, but tried stuff from the Internet about xconfig, it didn't work (also I got a bit off track trying to automate some stuff of it with a .bat file cause I got tired of doing it manually)
After hassling with it for 2 hours I told my colleague to give me his laptop, mounted the drive and copied the stuff over, plugged it into the other pc and started the setup.
What annoys me is that I didn't even think of just opening the archive with 7zip or something and moving it over, or using Windows 10 in the first place...
Further, I tried to make a multiboot USB stick with different OSs today, 15 minutes of Google and a bit less for actually getting the stuff on the drive and I was done, my stupidity and stubbornness won't get in the way of installing Windows does anymore...