!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!

Good Morning!, its time for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

Todays contestant is a very special one.

*sitcom audience: WHY?*

Glad you asked, you see if you were to look at his linkedin profile, you would see a job title unlike any you've seen before.

*sitcom audience oooooooohhhhhh*

were not talking software developer, engineer, tech lead, designer, CTO, CEO or anything like that, No No our new entrant "G" surpasses all of those with the title ..... "Software extraordinaire".

*sitcom audience laughs hysterically*

I KNOW!, wtf does that even mean! as a previous dev-ranter pointed out does this mean he IS quality code? I'd say he's more like a trash can ... where his code belongs

*ba dum tsssss*

Ok ok, lets get on with the show, heres some reasons why "G" is on the show:

One of G's tasks was to build an analytics gathering library for iOS, similar to google analytics where you track pages and events (we couldn't use google's). G was SO good at this job he implemented 2 features we didn't even ask for:

- If the library was unable to load its config file (for any reason) it would throw an uncatchable system integrity error, crashing the app.
- If anything was passed into any of the functions that wasn't expected (null, empty array etc.) it would crash the app as it was "more efficient" to not do any sanity checks inside the library.

This caused a lot of issues as some of the data needed to come from the clients server. The day we launched the app, within the first 3 hours we had over 40k crash logs and a VERY angry client.

Now, what makes this story important is not the bugs themselves, come on how many times have we all done something stupid? No the issue here was G defended all of this as the right thing to do!

.. and no he wasn't stoned or drunk!

G claimed if he couldn't get the right settings / params he wouldn't be able to track the event and then our CEO wouldn't have our usage data. To which I replied:

"So your solution was to not give the client an app instead? ... which also doesn't give the CEO his data".

He got very angry and asked me "what would you do then?". I offered a solution something like why not have a default tag for "error" or "unknown" where if theres an issue, we send up whatever we have, plus the file name and store it somewhere else. I was told I was being ridiculous as it wasn't built to track anything like that and that would never work ... his solution? ... pull the library out of the app and forget it.

... once again giving everyone no data.

G later moved onto another cross-platform style project. Backend team were particularly unhappy as they got no spec of what needed to be done. All they knew was it was a single endpoint dealing with very complex model. There was no Java classes, super classes, abstract classes or even interfaces, just this huge chunk of mocked data. So myself and the lead sat down with him, and asked where the interfaces for the backend where, or designs / architecture for them etc.

His response, to this day frightens me ... not makes me angry, not bewilders me ... scares the living shit out of me that people like this exist in the world and have successful careers.

G: "hhhmmm, I know how to build an interface, but i've never understood them ... Like lets say I have an interface, what now? how does that help me in any way? I can't physically use it, does it not just use up time building it for no reason?"

us: "... ... how are the backend team suppose to understand the model, its types, integrate it into the other systems?"

G: "Can I not just tell them and they can write it down?"

**
I'll just pause here for a moment, as you'll likely need to read that again out of sheer disbelief
**

I've never seen someone die inside the way the lead did. He started a syllable and his face just dropped, eyes glazed over and he instantly lost all the will to live. He replied:

" wel ............... it doesn't matter ... its not important ... I have to go, good luck with the project"

*killed the screen share and left the room*

now I know you are all dying in suspense to know what happened to that project, I can drop the shocking bombshell that it was in fact cancelled. Thankfully only ~350 man hours were spent on it

... yep, not a typo.

G's crowning achievement however will go down in history. VERY long story short, backend got deployed to the server and EVERYTHING broke. Lead investigated, found mistakes and config issues on every second line, load balancer wasn't even starting up. When asked had this been tested before it was deployed:

G: "Yeah I tested it on my machine, it worked fine"

lead: "... and on the server?"

G: "no, my machine will do the same thing"

lead: "do you have a load balancer and multiple VM's?"

G: "no, but Java is Java"

... and with that its time to end todays episode. Will G be our most incompetent? ... maybe.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

I knew I was about to get laid off so I stopped caring and started answering questions on stack overflow all day every day instead of working.

10k rep later I got a new job via stack overflow careers that pays twice as much.

Moral of the story? Be efficient... even when you are not.

!rant

I was in a hostel in my high school days.. I was studying commerce back then. Hostel days were the first time I ever used Wi-Fi. But it sucked big time. I'm barely got 5-10Kbps. It was mainly due to overcrowding and download accelerators.

So, I decided to do something about it. After doing some research, I discovered NetCut. And it did help me for my purposes to some extent. But it wasn't enough. I soon discovered that my floor shared the bandwidth with another floor in the hostel, and the only way I could get the 1Mbps was to go to that floor and use NetCut. That was riskier and I was lazy enough to convince myself look for a better solution rather than go to that floor every time I wanted to download something.

My hostel used Netgear's routers back then. I decided to find some way to get into those. I tried the default "admin" and "password", but my hostel's network admin knew better than that. I didn't give up. After searching all night (literally) about how to get into that router, I stumbled upon a blog that gave a brief info about "telnetenable" utility which could be used to access the router from command line. At that time, I knew nothing about telnet or command line. In the beginning I just couldn't get it to work. Then I figured I had to enable telnet from Windows settings. I did that and got a step further. I was now able to get into the router's shell by using default superuser login. But I didn’t know how to get the web access credentials from there. After googling some and a bit of trial and error, I got comfortable using cd, ls and cat commands. I hoped that some file in the router would have the web access credentials stored in cleartext. I spent the next hour just using cat to read every file. Luckily, I stumbled upon NVRAM which is used to store all config details of router. I went through all the output from cat (it was a lot of output) and discovered http_user and http_passwd. I tried that in the web interface and when it worked, my happiness knew no bounds. I literally ran across the floor screaming and shouting.

I knew nothing about hiding my tracks and soon my hostel’s admin found out I was tampering with the router's settings. But I was more than happy to share my discovery with him.

This experience planted a seed inside me and I went on to become the admin next year and eventually switch careers.

So that’s the story of how I met bash.
Thanks for reading!

My boss is technically my coworker.
I screamed my lungs out after it became clear that he didn't give a shit about employees that bring him money. After snatching all funds from a finished project on time, failing to deliver on the promise about bonuses (it's what I used to motivate employees to deliver the project on time), refusing to buy a new chair to replace the one held together by scotch tape and careful balancing, I decided to quit with maximum damage.

I screamed so that everybody would hear it. That encouraged another guy to get in with quitting, and within 1 month most of the team had quit, leaving the boss with a risk of lawsuits for prepaid contacts not delivered.

Knowing that piece of shit, he probably recovered and is treating other people badly, but at least every single person from the team experienced the biggest jump in careers straight after that.

"You claim you are a developer and don't know what firebase is? Pfft"

Words uttered by one of my classmates flexing on some 4th semester college inmates. I don't know what's more annoying his squeaky voice, the pretentiousness of using headphones as a necklace during class or that I was just like him when I was a freshman (minus the low hanging fruit flexing).

God fucking damn, I'm not even mad at his obnoxious pampered kid semblance, it's the irony of this enlightened fago falling into the god forsaken rat race. Why?

Because he hasn't been magnanimously disappointed by one of the most corrupt systems I've ever been witness of, yeah keep talking about firebase to the teacher who just nods pretending she knows what you are talking about.

I've had this same teacher before and your nice asynchronous ES6 express nosql solution will come last compared to all the WordPress templates she'll approve because they are pretty and all the time you invested, yeah, right into the crapper, seriously it would've been more satisfying to just masturbate everyday until Christmas break. I'm not pissed at him, annoyed by his semblance maybe, but I actually pitty him because the system will take a big shit on his face and he's just smiling.

Damn it, all these careers ruined by lazy ass professors who think leaving a shitload of diagrams as homework counts as teaching. And before any quirky brother interjects with "oh maybe your University is shit", "muh University verry gut u suk", you shut the fuck up! I know my university sucks even tho is "one of the best ones" by the corrupt media's standards, I'm here to vent about issues, real fucking issues happening in real corrupt systems, I'm taking about professors sexually abusing students, not going to classes, no centralized teaching systems, fucking chaos.

I'm happy for you if you feel good about the piece of paper you hang on your wall that certifies you as Bobby the guy who not only learned a shit load about computers, he also bent his ass so far for us and payed us so much money for it, it's funny he thinks himself as smart.

I know, I know, you went to an ivy league college, have a wonderful job and owe some money, good for you, some are not so lucky and I'll make sure those lazy asses who take advantage of the system lose their jobs.

I'm so sick of this shit we call "moodern educashion"

I've been fairly lucky with my bosses of late since I've progressed in my programming career. But my absolute worst boss was when I first started working in an office environment doing data entry. My boss at the time was terrible, and she was always against innovation or process improvement. She also always tried to make herself look good and taking credit for the accomplishments of others. If she screwed up it was your fault, and she was "always buried in email" so she could never respond to you for pto requests, or escalation of issues between departments. My whole family pretty much worked in various roles in the department and she fired my brother after my mother left the company for no reason, saying he was "sleeping", but I worked right next to him and he's tall and had to slouch just to comfortable see his computer screen since the same manager refused to approve work station improvements for him.

Our workflow was to receive daily spreadsheets of health care claims that we had to manually process and enter into the system. So being the lazy innovator that I am, and trying to find ways I can efficiently work, I delved into studying visual basic and programmed a few functions and tools in excel to analyze, highlight, and process some of the data since the claims on the spreadsheets always had a specific pattern. This was all before I had any formal education in computer science so the program was very basic and clunky but it tripled my efficiency. When I brought it up to my boss to spread it among the rest of our team so they could use it after a short 20 minute training, she struck it down saying any training or use of it would be a waste of resources since it was too technical and complex to be used and if I were to keep improving it or use it I would be fired. It was literally copy and paste from one spreadsheet to the other en masse and clicking a button to sort and fill in the blanks. Eventually I showed it to the director of the department when working on a large data entry project with her, and I was later offered a job as a technical analyst where I was responsible for the codebase that generated the reports for the department and specifically all the reports my old boss used where I would occasionally mess with her to get back at all the crap she gave me and my brother. Since all the reports were blind carbon copied to everyone, I would send out her reports on a delay while everyone else got them on time. It eventually got her in so much crap she had to step down as a manager. She still works in the same company that I started working at again earlier this year, and like the many careers she's ruined she eventually ruined her own within the company 😂

Job interview.

Head of development: "I'm looking for the perfect php developer with perfect MySQL knowledge."

Me: "We'll ok. Good look with finding that unicorn. I think we are done here."

The problem with some people is that they are the gatekeepers for other people's careers and that they are begging to be bullshitted: "Yes of course I am the best of all php developers! And I don't only know MySQL but am pretty awesome in YourSQL as well!" As if I want to work in a team posers.

I am about to switch careers completely to become a iOS/Swift developer. What a journey it turned out to be...

Besides the fact that I just bought a house and am about to get my first child, I had to do it.

My current job just doesn't feel right anymore. After 7,5 years the culturefit is gone.

Besides, I really love programming for many years now and I fell in love with Swift about a year ago. Spent many hours programming a day, reading blogs, watching vids, building my first complicated App. A few months ago, I wondered why I didn't pursue this path earlier.

I spoke to three different company's... They all wanted to move further, but just one company really felt right. A small business of 5.

After we met, they asked for a second meeting, a code presentation. I ever did this before, so it was weird talking about the code I wrote. Definitely different that just coding it alone.

The last and third time, last week, I asked them what I would be doing, projects and how they lead the small company of 5. We had a great meeting and agreed that I start september 1st.

Now I'm just waiting for the contract to come through! Its been 7 days though. Starting to get a little worried. I really want this!

When I was a kid I used to spend a lot of time using computers: when I was 4 y/o my aunt used to go for me at school and she took care of me (and sometimes my brother) while my parents were at work, she's a graphic designer so she had a Mac or something like that (that was in 2002 and it was an old model) and to not annoy her she putted random music videos there (also the reason why I have the music taste that I have); when I was 6 or 7 y/o my dad was fired and my mom got a job in the capital city but my parents didn't wanted to moved because they thought that that could somehow affect me and my brother in a negative way so without having my mom around I could do whatever I wanted so after school I used the computer all the time; this continued 4 years and I started to be curious about how the computer that I always was using worked; when I was 11 y/o my parent bought me a notebook and I started to investigate about computers but then I read something about html and I really wanted to know what it was; when I was 12 y/o my parents changed me to other school (I was starting what in US may be junior high) and all the students had to chose a workshop for each year so I chose graphic design and was very disappointed because we did nothing at class, except for that when the teacher decided to teach us html and I really wanted to know I hoped that the rest of the year she kept doing it but it was just one class and then she told us to use wix.com... But I never stoped asking "how do computers work?" so for what can be considered in US high school I decided to apply for one with technological careers, specifically computer sciences and I was accepted. It is an 8 semesters career (a normal high school here is only 6 semesters) but I thought it was worth it. On 2nd semester I learned to write "programs" with pseudo code and I loved to do it, I made a lot of things with that limited tool... :") Then, in 3rd grade I was introduced to C and since that day I'm definitely not the same. It's been 2 years now and I it's really beautiful to remember that I'm who I'm thanks to the little girl that never stoped asking questions. :')

Recently I've been working on a side project and I've been working on it a lot over the last week, with lots of late nights.

My girlfriend said to me the other day, "do you not wanna give it a rest for a bit, you'll be starting your new job soon, you'll get fed up of it".

I then explained to her that, programming is on of those few careers where you'll continue to do programme and do side projects, even after a full day of it, and I couldn't imagine it any other way.

I can't wait to start work.. but then I also don't wanna lose out on project time 🙁

I'm not enjoying my current experience with the web.

I feel sad, alone most of the time.

Let me disclaim first that I don't have like an apocalyptic view of the world, I actually think it's improving (in very broad terms).

I also understand that the web is a complex thing and everyone being happy with is going to be very unlikely, specially as more and more people use it, since the entropy will naturally increase.

I don't have solid evidence of what I'm saying next and I'm not even entirely what exactly I'm saying, but maybe I'm onto something.

I feel that when the internet first started, businessmen were like "meh, geek stuff".

But slowly, things changed, and every greedy person tried to just fucking unload his greed filled cum onto it

And now it feels like 1984. And I hate when people reeeee 1984. But it does feel like it.

The ads are like "ok, I know you like that other shit, but CHECK THIS SHIT OUT".

It's AI driven to maximize profits, with little care for people happiness.

I miss when youtube had related videos. The algorithm wasn't perfect but at least it was exactly that, related videos.

Now though, youtube likes to be smart. But not smart in a way that enriches your youtube experience.
It's smart in a way that maximizes ad revenue.

"what? did you think we were going to use AI to make you happier? that we were going to enrich your youtube experience?
NO MOTHER FUCKER! OF COURSE NOT. We're gonna use it to show you whatever shit that will make us richer faster."

Controls for customizing the recommended videos behaviour? Pff, no.
They're gonna decide for you what it is that you like
They're going to decide what you should be watching.

Everytime i turn on my samsung tv, the youtube app recomends me watching "BETTER THAN SEX EYE LINER". Jesus christ, what the shitcum, I'm the only motherfucker on the house that uses youtube, and I couldn't care less about this cunt's disguised ad video, let alone fucking eye liners.

Why youtube, why do you promote whatever porn video VEVO uploads?

Why do you ruin every youtube rewind?

Why do you pander to the lowest common denominator?

Why can't you be shining beacon, a moral company considering you're a cultural icon?

Fuck you youtube, and while we're at it, fuck you too samsung, I must have been drunk the day I bought this shitty closed source software piece of shit "smart".

And these are just 2 companies. The internet is FILLED with these greedy bastards. They have no passion for their products, for making people happy. They only have passion for the MUNNNEY.

Thanks a lot business schools, thanks a lot CEOs of the world, thanks for making the world a happier place.

Ok, now that I said that, I want to back up a bit.

Youtube may bot be perfect, but it's ad revenue system enables some youtubers I love to be able to make that their careers.

I appreciate that, so maybe youtube isn't that bad... so sorry for saying those horrible things man!

How did I learn programming ?

Because careers page on EA said: "Bachelor's degree in Computer Science"

I saw a video on YouTube, iJustine goes on a Linus Tech Tips studio tour in Canada. Its a huge studio and he has like 50 people working for him. He has 2 script writers. He has created a fake kitchen and some kind of a garden to shoot videos inside of the studio. Its amazing how people make careers out of YouTube.

Stack Overflow is the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their programming knowledge, and build their careers.

But don't worry, no one will ever answer you lol.

> at my previous job as mechanical engineer at an HVAC company
> was given recurring monotonous task
> decided to start a sizeable side project to automate it
> people got pissed at me because it worked too well, i.e., took their jerbs
> decided automating things was more fun than actual current job; also, people should be more hyped about continuous improvement
> switched careers into web-development

i.e., my most successful project was the one that changed my life for the better.

Conversing with developers can be frustrating.

Here is a good one from today. 2 people 1 women (let’s call her W) and one man (let’s call him M)

W: “Hey guys! Our team is looking for lots of great developers. Front end, back end, data, dev ops. At above market salaries with a great team! Reach out to me is you want to chat. I would love to hear from you.”

Translation: I have a great offer and want to help others achieve and strive in their careers.

M: “also, guys/less-gendered-alternative plz” proceeds to chastise this women about using the word guys.

Translation: I have no level of social awareness, but I have a need to feel big and important. So I’ll take offence for those who aren’t offended to make me feel better about my lack of fucking personality.

————

I’m not really concerned about opinions about the gender issue. It isn’t about that.

It’s just tiring dealing with these people’s bullshit.

It’s time to grow up folks, stop arguing on the fucking internet.

————

I also once saw a developer chastise 2 women we worked with while we were out for drinks for the exact same thing; using the word guys.

He was so busy “defending” them from themselves that he ended up making them uncomfortable and then they left.

He was saying “don’t exclude women” while fucking excluding the only women there.

What a fucking douche.

Sales guy: Hey, you're technical. Can you tell me how I'd go about doing (foobar) in this webapp I have here?
Almond: Err... I've never dealt with that webapp in my life. I wouldn't have a clue.
Sales guy: ...but you're a dev right? Oh well, never mind. Anyone more experienced around here that may know?
Almond: No idea, but I seriously doubt any of the devs will have used it. Maybe one of the other sales guys will?
Sales guy: So you're telling me *none* of the devs around here will know how to do this?!
Almond: Very unlikely (thinking why the hell would any devs be using a sales app, but whatever)

...15 minutes later...

Sales guy: Ahah, I figured it out! (Explains what buttons he had to click in crappy app to do foobar)
Almond: Glad you got it sorted!
Sales guy: I'm really surprised none of you devs could figure this out, but I could. Perhaps I should change careers and be a dev.

...what?!

I swear to god if I see another goddamn todo list tutorial im gonna fucking switch careers. JS fanboys with their blogs... jesus christ i thought npm was spoiled but god, try googling angular tutorials... Seriously, you pick a framework and write a useless shitty blog article about the most obvious implementation? Is that your thing now? Write a tutorial on how to make a mailchimp clone? too hard? I thought so. Your mum must be very proud of you crackhead

I'm still in college.
But seeing so many Devs rant, I'm already thinking of changing careers.

I've been thinking about how to answer this for a while, but I'll approach it from a different angle. The time I (nearly) lost faith in my dev future wasn't because of a technology, bad programming language or an external influence. It was *me*.

The first job I had after the PhD, I was (in the first couple of weeks) tasked with updating various packages on a live Redhat server. "No problem", I thought, "I've done this before many a time on Debian, easy as pie!"

Long story short, I ended up practically bricking the server because I mistyped and uninstalled something I shouldn't have, didn't understand a piece of configuration, then tried to bodge it back and cocked things up further. Couldn't even log in via SSH, the hosting company had to be called, a serial connection set up, etc.

To say I was mortified, embarrassed and had my pride dented would be a massive understatement. I seriously thought I'd get fired on the spot, and that I should perhaps change careers to something where I couldn't cock things up as much.

...but you can't think like that, otherwise the world leaves you behind. So I picked myself up, apologised profusely, took some relevant training, double checked everything I was doing on that server in future and got back to work. After a few months of "proving myself", it was then seen as nothing more than a rather amusing story, and I became a senior dev there a couple of years later.

If you didn't became a developer what would you be? What's your plan B?

Mine is to be a psychologist.

Getting my first dev position. 3 months of boot camp being told I'd find a job locally in no time, only to find out the true cost; 8 months (after program completion), 100+ applications, 5 interviews, two call backs, and a lot of emotional nights questioning my decision to switch careers.

Feels good to have the first year of work under my belt. Unfortunately I'm back in the hunt.

Onwards and upwards!

I was talking to a CS student here at my University the other day. We were discussing our high school careers. He had the opportunity to take 6 different CS classes, but he cheated his way through most of the classes.

Meanwhile, I had the opportunity to take a huge total of 0 CS classes. But boy did I desire the ability to take CS classes.

It's kind of sad that students who desire to learn get left out in the rain, while people who can take classes just cheat their way through the courses.

Trying to decide which course to take next on edX.org. It looks like either Java or Python is the next language I am going to take on as almost all the courses I'd like to take are done in those two languages.

I guess I will start "Software Construction in Java" from MITx tonight. I always have a hard time wanting to start courses in a language I am not very familiar with, idk why, just having to constantly lookup the docs for methods and struggling to make proper format irritates me. So I go in waves, I will not move out of my comfort zone for many months, then start something new eventually. Really, work is wearing me out, thinking about switching careers again to be honest. I just don't know what, I thought I would like an office job, turns out, I would rather be out and about moving around. I wonder what the age cutoff is to be a police officer?

Worst career choice: Not following computer science because there were few careers for computer techs pre-2000s.
Best career choice: Do a 2 years course in CNC (paid by the government). Also, the worst carer choice because I got my burn out in the first (one of the best in the region) molding company I worked for.

None.

But i have lost faith in the careers of one too many peers.

Stay frosty putos

Universitys need to change how they handle experienced developers trying to get a degree.

To be honest, I'm 16 in Highschool and would class myself as a junior dev. I have been talking to the "Careers Councilor" and she claims I will have to pay the full amount for a cs degree although I probably won't attend 99% of the lectures in the first year.

I understand it would be incredibly hard to work out how a experienced person should pay in comparison to a newbie. Could it be based on the lectures you attend but then again it would make a degree less valuable.

In my country (New Zealand) the first year of University is free but will this be waisted?

I know I want to branch off into networking and maybe hardware so could I do that while the class learns Scratch, HTML, CSS and actually how to code?

I would love your opinions and if anyone knows some other options that would be great, thanks!

CS education needs to focus on running students through each branch of the field so they can find their focus . Once they have decided on one, they should then dedicate their studies to that branch. General knowledge of all branches of programming is good but it isn't realistic for one to be experienced In each. This is coming from a dev who dropped out of college to start his web dev career because the university of Tennessee had put me through three years of c++ courses and not one web development course. Also the math requirements should be based on which branch one picks. If they are going into web development, I do not think half of their classes should be advanced mathematical courses. We deal primarily with simple business mathematics. Even when dealing with a project that is powered by more complex mathematical formulas, the company would most of the time have an engineer if not a team of engineers that would design these formulas in the mockup process which would then be passed down to the web development team for execution. I get that universities want to think about the experience as a chance to learn and flourish in all regions with a sense of well roundedness but I am not inclined to think that way. Let's prepare our youth for their future careers. Btw my first three jobs did not ask a thing about college but only my work experience. Experience takes the flag almost every time. I'm pretty tired of applicants literally coming from their ceremony with their diploma in their hand begging for a job and bragging about their HTML,CSS skills and wide knowledge of c++. Sorry but it's a no go and if it takes them nearly as long as it took me to teach myself the craft then they will be graduating at 22-24 and sinking another 2-3 years into learning the web dev ropes. Ain't nobody got time for that when your paying 40g worth of student loans 😂. I'll take it a step further, tell your CS professor to shove it, spend the amount of time you would have wasted there with learning laravel/vue.js. When you've got your head around it, come in and I'll give you a job!

"...keep an eye on your careers page maybe another opportunity will come up". Nah. Fuck you

During class...

dammmmn are there even offices like that?
(img from: gig, some gaming company's pic on their careers page)

Calling All Developers!

This is very very random, but I am taking an IT Careers class for my software Development degree. As my last assignment, I need to interview a software developer. I don't know any personally and we were told we can reach out to people online who have had lots of experience. I don't know if this is too weird, but I need an interviewee just to answer about 20 questions. I'm so stuck and don't know where to go!

A peeve of mine is when someone in the software industry denigrates a technology/tool/framework outside of his role eg webdevs on sysadmin stuff or viceversa.

I'm not trying to shame anyone for having subjective experiences, I just think that if you're gonna talk about tools that are not on your domain, then you need to be twice as humble as usual.

I'm a webdev and I don't post around how I KNOW how to make ssh secure, while other people devote their entire careers to that and all related matters.

What prompted me is seeing some not webdevs do this here that seem to be sysadmins/devops (can't tell for sure since I don't know them), but in real life, I've seen people from any role do this, webdevs too, even testers!

Imagine you had cancer, and you had a tumor extraction, and the oncologist said to the surgeon "step aside son, let me show you how to deal with cancer".

Question about burnout here!

I've been a developer for a year and a half now and I've reached a point of burnout. Experiencing a lot of external stress as well as internal (handled well with a fantastic and supportive team)

I'm taking some time away from work and having a much needed break but I'm worried that for now, I can't code! I've got no drive at all to learn anything new, I'm just sat here waiting for a production push.

I'm by no means thinking of changing careers or leaving my current role and the lack of concentration is likely as a result of stress, I just wanted to hear some of your stories so I feel a little less alienated!

Being new to this is pretty overwhelming at times!

I'm getting to the point where every time I encounter a new bug to fix I die a little inside. So tired of stuff not working and as soon as I get one thing fixed another blows up. Unresolved problems and open loops keep me awake all night. I sometimes want to switch careers but what else is there for me after more than 2 decades of this? I guess I could flip burgers and mow lawns. The burger flippers make about what I made in my last job and the guy who mows my lawn makes twice that much.

So, I'm heading back down the rabbit hole. I did some web dev (backend) on the side years ago, but I've been out of the game since. I want to change up careers at this late date and I had forgotten how cathartic manipulating raw code could be. So now I'm relearning and learning all kinds of good stuff via the internets and was excited to find this community. Not much of a ranter but this should be fun.

Before I decided to switch careers (PM to Dev) I would drink coffee, black, sometimes with 2+ shots of espresso on those nasty days...

It's been 18 months into this transition and I find that by about 9AM a strong dark coffee with 1+ shots of whiskey is required on any day...

No regrets on the switch, Just didn't see that coming is all...

Just came across a few rants blaming coursework, which doesn't have anything to do with programming. To them I wanna say two things:

1. Programming is modelled on everything other than programming. So it helps to know a bit about that 'everything'.

2. The famous author James Altucher has had 14 careers in 25 years. Not 14 jobs. 14 careers, including photography, authorship, entrepreneurship, finance planning, and more.

So stop bitching and eat your frog/broccoli.

Saw lots of regret posts about being in dev field. Then why bother living that way?

Not like engineering, medicine or business management fields, I believe programming needs passion similar to art related careers like acting, music and painting etc. So if you don't have any passion for programming, you won't be successful or satisfy at all.

That doesn't mean it is all good and happy days for every passionate programmers. We sure have ****ed up days (probably more than other fields.) Seriously that's why we have devrants. No? But it doesn't reach to the point of regret to me.

Here our national programming language is probably PHP. The pays are lower than your part-time fast food chain workers. The internet speed is in kbs with 2 digits most of the places. Government doesn't give a crap about IT. No IP copyright laws and so on. I probably would earn more and live better if I were not running this IT business.

But hell yeah I never regret at all.

Honestly, school is useless for me as of right now. I know I should be well rounded and stuff, but do I honestly need to know the symptoms of cervix cancer while going into a tech career? My eyes have been set on tech for my whole life, ever since I left the womb, and I know that if I do switch careers, it'll be from comp sci to cyber security not from IT to med school...

I feel like I could really be devoting my time towards something better than writing a 5 page essay on a healthy food choice.

Every night I think to myself, "You know what, I'm going to lock myself in a room and write bash scripts all day" but then I wake up in the morning, and remember I have to take a quiz on reproductive systems, learn about the procedure of organ donations for driver's ed, write 2 paragraph definitions of vocab words, and read a book about communism.

The most useful thing I learned last year, was how to efficiently navigate the java API, and that's something you don't even learn, you just encounter it. Schools need to start having more specific specialties and stop enforcing knowledge of pointless topics.

I'm not saying to remove all core classes and stuff, I'm saying why waste space in our brains with something we won't use ever again? I get it, some people don't know what career they're looking for yet so you can't make them choose, but it honestly sucks some serious ass that I can't learn what I want to at school, and as a matter of fact, I can't even learn at home, because they're filling my schedule with pointless work because they feel that they have to fill our time somehow.

Point of this long ass rant is: Why lock yourself in a room and learn about something if it isn't something you want to learn about? The space in our brain is finite enough, why can't it be filled with things we're interested in rather than things that will only be used to get good grades in the future then overwritten with useful knowledge. Same thing with time. We have a very finite amount of time in a day, and now that I think of it, a lifetime. Why spend it on something that doesn't, and never will, make your life enjoyable?

FUCK

Anyone here who graduated in industrial sector engineering fields but managed to switch their careers towards IT/development? Considering that I do have related competences and solid foundations on 2/3 languages.

My job fucking sucks. The pay is good but I'm not doing shit since 2 weeks. Everyone works superslow because there is no shit to do and boredom kills us slowly. My family says that I just need to be assigned to a project and be patient. I don't want a super fast no free time environment, but if there are no challenges any single day what is even the point of getting up in the morning.

It's FUCKING depressing :(

Software Developer Interview Questions!

Hey friends, for my IT Careers class I have been assigned to interview a software developer. I was wondering if some people would be willing to answer the following questions. Thank you so much!

Name:
Title of position:
Company you work for:

1. What is a typical day at work like?
2. What are your hours like? Are you ever on call?
3. What are the best parts of your job?
4. Are there any downsides?
5. What influenced your decision to choose this career? Are you glad that you did?
6. What education did you need to get?
7. Do you specialize in certain languages or types of programs?
8. Do you work remotely or at the job site?
9. What is your pay like? Are you paid by the hour, or do you get a salary?
10. Was there ever a specific project you've worked on that was your favorite?
11. Does your job require any work outside of work hours?
12. What are the biggest obstacles you run into as a developer?
13. If you could change something about your job, would you? What would it be?
14. What are some tasks you must complete for your job?
15. Is there anything you wish you knew before starting your career?
16. Are there days that seem too repetitive?
17. Do you often have to learn new languages?
18. Have there been any big changes in your career since you first started?
19. How long have you worked as a developer?
20. Is there any advice you would give to college students looking to pursue a development career?
Any responses are appreciated! Thank you so much!

[Fairly existential career question] How fulfilling would you say your career in development has been?

[Long rant] for years I had been planning on becoming a rabbi, majored in religious studies etc, until I realized there would be no way out of my rapidly growing debt if I chose to continue on that path. i had to drop out 3 years into my undergrad due to financial issues, and as it is now working full time im barely holding my head above water. I spent a lot of time being sad about it until i decided to change things and started getting into accounting before I discovered coding. I am SO GLAD I discovered coding cause accounting was so boring...Now I'm excited to be going back to school for software development and I'm in a bit of a pink cloud having discovered something thats both exciting/fun/challenging AND lucrative... But i do worry about 5, 10 years in the future, will i still be as stoked about it? Religious leadership was and is something I know i would feel ~fulfilled~ over a lifetime, and while my newly discovered passion for coding literally keeps me up at night getting fired up on solving problems and writing my little newb programs, i think I'm afraid of burnout?

[Tl;dr] I'm making an education+career switch to software development and i wanna know how folks feel about their career years into it, do you still love it just as much? Feel jaded? Regretful? Happy?

Anyone else have experiences with recruiters popping out of the woodwork like gnomes to ask you to either downgrade or totally change careers?

Just the other day someone on LinkedIn asked me to teach at a charter school... for half the pay. Why would ANYONE??

Is there any other programmer that started as an architect (building architect, not IT)?

I'm divided between two different careers and working around 15hours a day because I can't focus on one. Is this a normal thing?

I work as an architect for the past 6 years and were always interested in the technology part of it.

Soon I got to be a BIM coordinator and started using Dynamo for Revit.

After that, I got involved in learning Python and now start studying web dev (front-end)

Programming is very addictive! I get it now why IT people stay in their dorm like it's a cave

In architecture there's always a client you need to make happy, while in programming I create things the away I want them to be, without all the boring formalities that I am used to.

I can learn it for free and there's a huge community to help on it. All careers should be like this.

I'm happy, but really tired 😪 my social life is resumed to hanging out with my dogs

Another rant got me thinking about this.

There must be plenty of us on here who have worked as part of or with a customer support department at some point in our careers.

What is the stupidest idea you've ever heard with regards to support?

To start things off my last place had problems with support, over worked, under staffed and expected to support 12+ versions of the same software, some clients were running installations over 15 years old without ever having applied an upgrade.

The management decided that they would get rid of the conventional triage system for tickets, you know the sort priority 1 would be system down etc.

Instead we had to log tickets at whatever priority the client said it was. Customer report written by the client has a spelling mistake? Yep that's a P1.

Client wants to change the colour of their menu? Yep P1

As you can imagine that went down like a shit sandwich

I want to switch careers from 3.5 years of IT and cybersecurity to development. I have no CS degree and am 22 years old.

Do you think companies treat someone like me differently compared to some college graduate with no tech experience? Or that the only experience that matters is dev experience?

Im having a sort of dilema. I recently started taking freelance work for web developement (and design ack) and Im uncomfortable with the state of the industry. Ill explain: Say if I bid a client for a simple 1-3 page site w contact form (a new page, not migration) My suggestion is to use djangocms, django, or just static html/css/js (ie bootstrap), which produces clean, fairly secure, and fast sites. Of course I can throw a templated unoriginal wordpress site together in a few hours 2 days latest, so I offer that option as a sidenote on the bid, charging almost 2x more. For some reason I dont understand they choose the wp shitshow. I explain all the reasons that not the way to go( which I wont list, if u dont know, u never used it. google up) but they dont care abt the details, they rather pay more for shit job. OFC I reluctantly deliver what they want, but as a result my portfolio is full of unoriginal shit Im not happy showing off. I have a few sites Ive done on the side my prefered way, but they not deployed and sit in my github for all intents n purposes unviewable to potential clients.
I want to be proud of my portfolio, and it to be a representation of what Im capable of. BUT, I gotta eat, and work is better than no work.

There are so many "wordpress designers" oversaturaring the field and it lowering the overall standard of what we are capable of. I just begining my dev journey, but if I cant have a body of work Im proud of, theres no way I can see doing this the rest of my life, and that makes me really sad. My love of developing, coding, and IT/computers in general drove me to change careers from audio engineering to web development, and the fact that this fucking mr. potatoe head of a CMS is slowly turning that love into hate really pisses me off. So Im ending this !rant looking for hope.
Your thoughts?

Semi-colons(;), ruining lives, relationships and careers since 1995.

Because, what else could make you want to hit your boss with a keyboard?

Imposer Syndrome

Something we may encounter at somepoint in our careers. I've been reading a few articles after feeling some of the effects of this yet none seem to offer helpful solutions.

Has anyone got any advice or good tip that's helped them in the past?

When you have been away from coding for few years and then realise the next level position you want to go for requires coding expertise. :(

what have i got myself into???? full stack development for my internship without previous and complete knowledge of it... i guess i have 2 months to do intensive training and practice to prepare myself AAAAaaaaaAaaa

Can't wait until next Wednesday night for my careers meeting, the careers teacher that's interviewing me really hates bad language and I've already decided when she asks what skills I have I'm going to tell her I know Brainfuck (which is only half true but she doesn't need to know that😉)

Today I talked to a recent full stack developer bootcamp graduate who decided to change careers when she was having a hard time finding a job as a UX designer.

I can't help but judge her by her website. It is beautifully made. The CSS transitions are clean, the details are fine and it had an amazing feel. However, when I took a peak at the console I found out it was made with a SquareSpace template.

With UX background and being a recent fullstack bootcamp graduate, why make it with SquareSpace? It just feels really off. With that background you should at least be able to make a static Gatsby React page and host it on Heroku or Github.

Am I overreacting?

My aim for this year is to change to a job which doesn't feel like that movie groundhog Day.

The current project I'm on makes me want to switch careers.

!rant && !dev
My current organization conducts world wide special recruitment drives for women who have taken a break in their careers and who are willing to start again! And recruitment will be specifically for tech positions.

Isn't that great! I think, this should be followed by each and every organizations out there.

Hardest thing about changing careers and becoming a programmer has to be going to the job you can't stand everyday. I'm a school teacher and I'm just tired of it. The unruly kids, the low pay, and the stupid administration with all their useless curriculum ideas that never help the children.
Hopefully I can fully get a grasp of Android/Java so I can leave this place this year.

I'm struggling with learning JavaScript and wondered if anyone had advice that would make learning and retaining it a little easier.

I've been through multiple HTML and CSS fundamentals courses on various apps and a couple on JavaScript and though I have the basics more or less down the more advanced stuff is really kicking my brains butt.

I would ask this on Sololearn but 90% of people on there are morons who struggle to even use the app let alone read. A page can give you the answer to a question that follows and you got people saying that they need help with the answer. I mean how dumb can you be?

I'm not looking for an easy ride but I do feel I lack direction and with so many resources out there I'm a bit lost as to what experienced devs think are good.

I'm pretty consistent on at least on hour a day, 7 days a week. Though I only have about 2 months of experience which isn't crap in regards to the bigger picture. So I'm still extremely green but also very dedicated and want to learn so I can change careers.

Anyways opinions and or criticisms are welcome.Cheers.

Systems/IT person here-am very keen on learning code again. (Got CS degree long time ago). I'm nervous to switch careers but would love to try DevOps! Any advice?

!rant does anyone know what sustainable computing is? I googled it but I don't think I understand much..like, if I took this as my major for uni then what will my potential careers be like? Is it a better choice then software engineering? 😕😕😕

I'm seeking opinions and thoughts on my predicament.

I have 2ish paths before me.
Next year I resume my studies in Science Communication and Computer Science in particiliar a bachelor of science, I have considered then doing master in managent or computer science.

1) I am able to have a income of about 800 AUD a fortnight (this is to support me during study without requiring work) plus extra from a part time job whilst I study for about 2 years. Throughout this time I would like to skill up in a variety of fields as immensley as possible.

2) I can accept a full time junior web developer job while I study, this job is with a great government research organisation which as a first FT job looks great on a resume, it is is project based work where I get given a project and code and pretty much complete it. The job is flexible, I can mostly work where-ever I want, at home, at a cafe, travelling. With maybe a meeting once a week. The pay is about 65kAUD a year.

Both options are very attractive options with each containing there own pros and cons. With the extra money I could learn more or use it to grow a business or do more.

However without the FT job I could still earn about 1-1.5k a fortnight for alot less time.

I am still discovering what to do in life, I'm very good at public speaking and would like to experience and learn more about lots of different things. My current knowledge is very broad from engineering to CS, graphic design, authoring, trade skills, Digitial design and more.

Ideally I would like to learn how to lead people, to make the world a better place and help people. Figuring out where my strengths lay and where to apply them is difficult as I am fascinated by so many things.

I worry about taking the FT job as it might detract from my studies and lead me to pursueing mostly only web development work as well as take up time that might be better spent on extra study or in a leadership position in a uni club.

The PT job is a IT Systems Technician in the Australian Defence Force.

Which is a interesting experience within itself, different from civilian life and also I would be learning about systems that I might have less experience with.

I have such broad interests in alot of fields that I don't seem to be focussed on select things or areas like other devs I've met, Science Communication is a versitile field, one of my professors expertise is on doctor who and it's role in science engagement, she has written books on it. Others are in public policy or directed podcasts or even made games. Despite my broad interests computer science was always a gield I did well in.

Any thoughts, opinions or questions are welcome.
I have a blog/portfolio I put my work and projects up if it helps people know more about me, you can find it at curiosityplace.wordpress.com

#justathought

What do people need? What will be the requirements of future?
App development, webdev, blockchain,.. snapchat, tiktok, insta... These are all just careers and apps whose sole purpose is to engage people with their phones... Every new app/website in the market wants to make the youngest of the young and oldest of the old to keep their eyes fixed on this glass screen for as long as they can... For the current decade, this has been the most successful market and profitable scheme of business in the world, leaving other careers like medical, astronomy, mechanics., Etc far behind.

So is this the future? In the next generation too we will be having users who are addicted to smaller and smaller and larger and larger screens, with their spectacle width thickening ... Or are we going to shift to some other form of business?

I have my first tech interview on Thursday and I am very nervous. I am a full stack web dev student at a CC who is finishing my program next quarter. I switched careers so this is not my first rodeo.It's for a role of technology specialist and gave a vague description of uploading data to the mainframe and working directly with developers and QA.Only skill question the recruiter asked was how well I know SQL. Great company and location for me. What can I expect? I know they are going to do an assessment but I am unsure if it will be programming based.

I'm planning to get out of engineering and into tech. Can I expect to make at least 60k in an entry level position? Will I need to get more skills or take a significant pay cut in order to change careers?

Applied few big IT companies to be software developer, well don't have been any IT interview (changed careers) for big international company. In interview I will solve some software problem (I guess), so how I should prepare?

Wtf published it? Company profile under JD and JD is nothing but BS