Its Friday, you all know what that means! ... Its results day for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

*audience: wwwwwwooooooooo!!!!*

We've had a bewildering array of candidates, lets remind ourselves:

- a psychopath that genuinely scared me a little
- a CEO I would take pleasure seeing in pain
- a pothead who mistook me for his drug dealer
- an unbelievable idiot
- an arrogant idiot obsessed with strings

Tough competition, but there can be only one ... *drum roll* ... the winner is ... none of them!

*audience: GASP!*
*audience member: what?*
*audience member: no way!*
*audience member: your fucking kidding me!*

Sir calm down! this is a day time show, no need for that ... let me explain, there is a winner ... but we've kept him till last and for a good reason

*audience: ooooohhhhh*

You see our final contestant and ultimate winner of this series is our good old friend "C", taking the letters of each of our previous contestants, that spells TRAGIC which is the only word to explain C.

*audience: laughs*

Oh I assure you its no laughing matter. C was with us for 6 whole months ... 6 excruciatingly painful months.

Backstory:

We needed someone with frontend, backend and experience with IoT devices, or raspberry PI's. We didn't think we'd get it all, but in walked an interviewee with web development experience, a tiny bit of Angular and his masters project was building a robot device that would change LED's depending on your facial expressions. PERFECT!!!

... oh to have a time machine

Working with C:

- He never actually did the tutorials I first set him on for Node.js and Angular 2+ because they were "too boring". I didn't find this out until some time later.

- The first project I had him work on was a small dashboard and backend, but he decided to use Angular 1 and a different database than what we were using because "for me, these are easier".

- He called that project done without testing / deploying it in the cloud, despite that being part of the ticket, because he didn't know how. Rather than tell or ask anyone ... he just didn't do it and moved on.

- As part of his first tech review I had to explain to him why he should be using if / else, rather than just if's.

- Despite his past experience building server applications and dashboards (4 years!), he never heard of a websocket, and it took a considerable amount of time to explain.

- When he used a node module to open a server socket, he sat staring at me like a deer caught in headlights completely unaware of how to use / test it was working. I again had to explain it and ultimately test it for him with a command line client.

- He didn't understand the need to leave logging inside an application to report errors. Because he used to ... I shit you not ... drive to his customers, plug into their server and debug their application using a debugger.

... props for using a debugger, but fuck me.

- Once, after an entire 2 days of tapping me on the shoulder every 15 mins for questions / issues, I had to stop and ask:

Me: "Have you googled it?"
C: "... eh, no"
Me: "can I ask why?"
C: "well, for me, I only google for something I don't know"
Me: "... well do you know what this error message means?"
C: "ah good point, i'll try this time"

... maybe he was A's stoner buddy?

- He burned through our free cloud usage allowance for a month, after 1 day, meaning he couldn't test anything else under his account. He left an application running, broadcasting a lot of data. Turns out the on / off button on the dashboard only worked for "on". He had been killing his terminal locally and didn't know how to "ctrl + c a cloud app" ... so left it running. His intention was to restart the app every time you are done using it ... but forgot.

- His issue with the previous one ... not any of his countless mistakes, not the lack of even trying to make the button work, no, no, not for C. C's issue is the cloud is "shit" for giving us such little allowances. (for the record in a month I had never used more than 5%).

- I had to explain environment variables and why they are necessary for passwords and tokens etc. He didn't know it wasn't ok to commit these into GitHub.

- At his project meetups with partners I had to repeatedly ask him to stop googling gifs and pay attention to the talks.

- He complained that we don't have 3 hour lunch breaks like his last place.

- He once copied and pasted the same function 450 times into a file as a load test ... are loops too mainstream nowadays?

You see C is our winner, because after 6 painful months (companies internal process / requirements) he actually achieved nothing. I really mean that, nothing. Every thing was so broken, so insecure / wide open, built without any kind of common sense or standards I had to delete it all and start again ... it took me 2 weeks.

I hope you've all enjoyed this series and will join me in praying for the return of my sanity ... I do miss it a lot.

Yours truly,
practiseSafeHex

Oh, man, I just realized I haven't ranted one of my best stories on here!

So, here goes!

A few years back the company I work for was contacted by an older client regarding a new project.

The guy was now pitching to build the website for the Parliament of another country (not gonna name it, NDAs and stuff), and was planning on outsourcing the development, as he had no team and he was only aiming on taking care of the client service/project management side of the project.

Out of principle (and also to preserve our mental integrity), we have purposely avoided working with government bodies of any kind, in any country, but he was a friend of our CEO and pleaded until we singed on board.

Now, the project itself was way bigger than we expected, as the wanted more of an internal CRM, centralized document archive, event management, internal planning, multiple interfaced, role based access restricted monster of an administration interface, complete with regular user website, also packed with all kind of features, dashboards and so on.

Long story short, a lot bigger than what we were expecting based on the initial brief.

The development period was hell. New features were coming in on a weekly basis. Already implemented functionality was constantly being changed or redefined. No requests we ever made about clarifications and/or materials or information were ever answered on time.

They also somehow bullied the guy that brought us the project into also including the data migration from the old website into the new one we were building and we somehow ended up having to extract meaningful, formatted, sanitized content parsing static HTML files and connecting them to download-able files (almost every page in the old website had files available to download) we needed to also include in a sane way.

Now, don't think the files were simple URL paths we can trace to a folder/file path, oh no!!! The links were some form of hash combination that had to be exploded and tested against some king of database relationship tables that only had hashed indexes relating to other tables, that also only had hashed indexes relating to some other tables that kept a database of the website pages HTML file naming. So what we had to do is identify the files based on a combination of hashed indexes and re-hashed HTML file names that in the end would give us a filename for a real file that we had to then search for inside a list of over 20 folders not related to one another.

So we did this. Created a script that processed the hell out of over 10000 HTML files, database entries and files and re-indexed and re-named all this shit into a meaningful database of sane data and well organized files.

So, with this we were nearing the finish line for the project, which by now exceeded the estimated time by over to times.

We test everything, retest it all again for good measure, pack everything up for deployment, simulate on a staging environment, give the final client access to the staging version, get them to accept that all requirements are met, finish writing the documentation for the codebase, write detailed deployment procedure, include some automation and testing tools also for good measure, recommend production setup, hardware specs, software versions, server side optimization like caching, load balancing and all that we could think would ever be useful, all with more documentation and instructions.

As the project was built on PHP/MySQL (as requested), we recommended a Linux environment for production. Oh, I forgot to tell you that over the development period they kept asking us to also include steps for Windows procedures along with our regular documentation. Was a bit strange, but we added it in there just so we can finish and close the damn project.

So, we send them all the above and go get drunk as fuck in celebration of getting rid of them once and for all...

Next day: hung over, I get to the office, open my laptop and see on new email. I only had the one new mail, so I open it to see what it's about.

Lo and behold! The fuckers over in the other country that called themselves "IT guys", and were the ones making all the changes and additions to our requirements, were not capable enough to follow step by step instructions in order to deploy the project on their servers!!!

[Continues in the comments]

I’m a senior dev at a small company that does some consulting. This past October, some really heavy personal situation came up and my job suffered for it. I raised the flag and was very open with my boss about it and both him and my team of 3 understood and were pretty cool with me taking on a smaller load of work while I moved on with some stuff in my life. For a week.

    Right after that, I got sent to a client. “One month only, we just want some presence there since it’s such a big client” alright, I guess I can do that. “You’ll be in charge of a team of a few people and help them technically.” Sounds good, I like leading!

    So I get here. Let’s talk technical first: from being in a small but interesting project using Xamarin, I’m now looking at Visual Basic code, using Visual Studio 2010. Windows fucking Forms.

    The project was made by a single dev for this huge company. She did what she could but as the requirements grew this thing became a behemoth of spaghetti code and User Controls. The other two guys working on the project have been here for a few months and they have very basic experience at the job anyways. The woman that worked on the project for 5 years is now leaving because she can’t take it anymore.

    And that’s not the worse of it. It took from October to December for me to get a machine. I literally spent two months reading on my cellphone and just going over my shitty personal situation for 8 hours a day. I complained to everyone I could and nothing really worked.

    Then I got a PC! But wait… no domain user. Queue an extra month in which I could see the Windows 7 (yep) log in screen and nothing else. Then, finally! A domain user! I can log in! Just wait 2 extra weeks for us to give your user access to the subversion rep and you’re good to go!

    While all of this went on, I didn’t get an access card until a week ago. Every day I had to walk to the reception desk, show my ID and request they call my boss so he could grant me access. 5 months of this, both at the start of the day and after lunch. There was one day in particular, between two holidays, in which no one that could grant me access was at the office. I literally stood there until 11am in which I called my company and told them I was going home.

    Now I’ve been actually working for a while, mostly fixing stuff that works like crap and trying to implement functions that should have been finished but aren’t even started. Did I mention this App is in production and being used by the people here? Because it is. Imagine if you will the amount of problems that an application that’s connecting to the production DB can create when it doesn’t even validate if the field should receive numeric values only. Did I mention the DB itself is also a complete mess? Because it is. There’s an “INDEXES” tables in which, I shit you not, the IDs of every other table is stored. There are no Identity fields anywhere, and instead every insert has to go to this INDEXES table, check the last ID of the table we’re working on, then create a new registry in order to give you your new ID. It’s insane.

   

    And, to boot, the new order from above is: We want to split this app in two. You guys will stick with the maintenance of half of it, some other dudes with the other. Still both targeting the same DB and using the same starting point, but each only working on the module that we want them to work in. PostmodernJerk, it’s your job now to prepare the app so that this can work. How? We dunno. Why? Fuck if we care. Kill you? You don’t deserve the swift release of death.

    Also I’m starting to get a bit tired of comments that go  ‘THIS DOESN’T WORK and ‘I DON’T KNOW WHY WE DO THIS BUT IT HELPS and my personal favorite  ‘??????????????????????

"full stack" means "you'll be doing everything from gathering client requirements through data architecture up to the UI design and of course implementing all of it"

"backend" means "you'll be coding everything from database through server-side code and client-side code including html and css"

"we need you on-site all day every day" means "we have no idea how and why we should use repositories with remote access despite being a company developing an internet app, and we don't trust that you would be working anyway"

"interesting challenging projects" means "the same boring crap as every other company, running on an incredibly botched and dezorganized codebase".

"competitive pay" means "actual pay is around 1.5 times the minimum allowed pay, and everything else is being siphoned off into (stupid and useless) 'benefits' like massage and fitness discount coupons"

"friendly collective having fun at numerous company events each years" means "it is mandatory for you to participate on our weekend drinking retreats but you'll only find out when we fire you because you're 'not a team player' after you refused to participate on those"

##Real fuckening STORY##
Angry client: this feature is not working like we discussed !

Me: it is.. *giving some explanation*

Client : no, this is not the right way

Me: But this is what we documented while gathering requirements, and YOU signed in the documentation..

Client : that long document? you don't expect me to read all of that talk just for this simple feature..

Me inside: *killing him 5 times in 5 different ways

Client's logic (stolen from the Facebook page "I love programming")

School principal : P / Me : M / Interviewer over Skype : S

P. I recently heard you run a software club in our school.
M. Yes. (started from March)
P. Well, one software community seems that he found you somewhere, and asked me if we can do a quick interview.
M. Sure. What is it?
P. So he will connect to skype.
M. Let's start then...

*A few moments later...*
M. Wwwwhhhhaaaaattttttt?
P. Calm down! What's the problem?
M. How can I have more than 5 years of android development?
S. Ok. Recorded. Next question.
M. (uhhh)
*A few moments later...*
M. What? Why in the heck do I use subversion?........
Yes... Ah... Ummm....
No! Why should i make a gui client for subversion?
*A few moments later...*
S. Do you have hacking experience?
M. Of what? I know hacking is illegal here..
S. Like... Anything!
M. Do YOU have an experience?
S. Yup.
M. What?
S. Google.
M. How?
S. (silence) Ok. Let's move on.
M. (wtf is this guy)
*A few moments later...*
S. Okay. We were about to hire you but you didnt met our job requirements.
M. ......What? What was the job?
S. Web developer Intern
M. I got no questions regarding "web".
S. I know devs should be great at all things.
M. Shut the hell up. What company are you?
S. (says something)
M. (Searches in google) Doesnt come in search results.
S. Where did you searched it? (trembling voice)
M. (Searches in naver, search engine of korea) Nothing. Are you sure you are a company?
S. (ends call)

Hate these fake interviews. And i have no idea how they found my school
I never wrote my school anywhere.

I have to let it out. It's been brewing for years now.

Why does MySQL still exist?

Really, WHY?!
It was lousy as hell 8 years ago, and since then it hasn't changed one bit. Why do people use it?

First off, it doesn't conform to standards, allowing you to aggregate without explicitly grouping, in which case you get god knows what type of shit in there, and then everybody asks why the numbers are so weird.

Second... it's $(CURRENT_YEAR) for fucks sake! This is the time of large data sets and complex requirements from those data sets. Just an hour through SO will show you dozens of poor people trying to do with MySQL what MySQL just can't do because it's stupid.

Recursion? 4 lines in any other large RDBMS, and tough luck in MySQL. So what next? Are you supposed to use Lemograph alongside MySQL just because you don't know that PostgreSQL is free and super fast?

Window functions to mix rows and do neat stuff? Naaah, who the hell needs that, right? Who needs to find the products ordered by the customer with the biggest order anyway? Oh you need that actually? Well you should write 3-4 queries, nest them in an incredibly fucked up way, summon a demon and feed it the first menstrual blood of your virgin daughter.

There used to be some excuses in the past "but but but, shared hosting only has MySQL". Which was wrong by the way. This was true only for big hosting names, and for people who didn't bother searching for alternatives. And now it's even better, since VPS and PaaS solutions are now available at prices lower than shared hosting, which give you better speed, performance and stability than shared hosting ever did.

"But but but Wordpress uses MySQL" - well then kill it! There are other platforms out there, that aren't just outrageously horrible on the inside and outside. Wordpress is crap, and work on it pays crap. Learn Laravel, Symfony, Zend, or even Drupal. You'll be able to create much more value than those shitty Wordpress sites that nobody ever visits or pay money on.

"But but but my client wants some static pages presented beside their online shop" - so why use Wordpress then? Static pages are static pages. Whip up a basic MVC set-up in literally any framework out there, avoid MySQL, include a basic ACL package for that framework, create a controller where you add a CKEditor to edit page content, and stick a nice template from themeforest for that page and be done with that shit! Save the mock-up for later use if you do that stuff often. Or if you're lazy to even do that, then take up Drupal.

But sure, this is going a bit over the scope. I actually don't care where you insert content for your few pages. It can be a JSON file for all I care. But if I catch you doing an e-commerce solution, or anything else than just text storage, on MySQL, I'll literally start re-assessing your ability to think rationally.

When the client requirements for the ios/android app is that the source code has to be php...

Requirements vs Delivery - Guide to Programming
This one is a killer and I've received it in multiple forwards in office email, and we always have a good laugh seeing this joke.

Client: “Our next requirement, and this is something big you know, we need an elephant”
IT Team: But why don’t you adjust with a buffalo, even it is big…. and black?”

Client: No, we need an elephant only, let me explain our current process……” (client explains for an hour)
IT Team: Fine, I understand your requirement. But our system supports only a buffalo…

Client:We need only an elephant!
IT Team: Ok, let me see if I can customize it for you”

Requirements are taken as follows:
Client wants a big black four legged animal, long tail, less hair. Having trunk is mandatory. The same was documented, signed off and sent to offshore for development!

At the Offshore Development Centre,

Design/Development – Based on requirement all features are supported in base product (as buffalo), for trunk alone a separate customization is done.

Finally the customization is shown to client:

So this other senior dev got seriously ill a couple of weeks ago and the project he was working on was assigned to me. His code was so aesthetic, loved his work, the structured code helped me a lot in meeting the deadlines. He returned a few days back and now the company has given him two weeks notice because "his pace is slow". I am frustrated, PM is frustrated. The guy is such a gem that he is still helping with all the new requirements client is throwing at us.

Got to love when the client has no requirements, other than, they want a website and they need it done as soon as possible.

Well in that case.... Here's your website.

<html>
<header>
<title>Useless</title>
</header>
<body>
Hello world
</body>
</html>

Soms week ago a client came to me with the request to restructure the nameservers for his hosting company. Due to the requirements, I soon realised none of the existing DNS servers would be a perfect fit. Me, being a PHP programmer with some decent general linux/server skills decided to do what I do best: write a small nameservers which could execute the zone transfers... in PHP. I proposed the plan to the client and explained to him how this was going to solve all of his problems. He agreed and started worked.

After a few week of reading a dozen RFC documents on the DNS protocol I wrote a DNS library capable of reading/writing the master file format and reading/writing the binary wire format (we needed this anyway, we had some more projects where PHP did not provide is with enough control over the DNS queries). In short, I wrote a decent DNS resolver.

Another two weeks I was working on the actual DNS server which would handle the NOTIFY queries and execute the zone transfers (AXFR queries). I used the pthreads extension to make the server behave like an actual server which can handle multiple request at once. It took some time (in my opinion the pthreads extension is not extremely well documented and a lot of its behavior has to be detected through trail and error, or, reading the C source code. However, it still is a pretty decent extension.)

Yesterday, while debugging some last issues, the DNS server written in PHP received its first NOTIFY about a changed DNS zone. It executed the zone transfer and updated the real database of the actual primary DNS server. I was extremely euphoric and I began to realise what I wrote in the weeks before. I shared the good news the client and with some other people (a network engineer, a server administrator, a junior programmer, etc.). None of which really seemed to understand what I did. The most positive response was: "So, you can execute a zone transfer?", in a kind of condescending way.

This was one of those moments I realised again, most of the people, even those who are fairly technical, will never understand what we programmers do. My euphoric moment soon became a moment of loneliness...

My company does estimates in two ways.

1. Sales person just throws a number out there, always short, and we panic code to make it happen before the client decides twice as long isn't worth it.

OR

2. The devs are told to give an estimate before having a chance to find out all the requirements, THEN ARE TOLD THEY ESTIMATED TOO HIGH AND TO LOWER THE NUMBER!

FUCK THE ESTIMATING!!! GIVE US TIME AND ACCEPT OUR ESTIMATES!! SALES PEOPLE DONT HAVE TO STAY UP IF WE NEED TO CRAM!!

Client: We need to add a field to the model that serves as a unique identifier

Dev: You already have one, it’s the _id property

Client: We want another! This one is for a task number so we can make a connection between the database record and our ERP.

Dev: Ah I see. I can add that for you. Is this truly a unique identifier or will you be using the same ERP identifier for multiple database records?

Client: I already said it’s a unique identifier. One ERP record to one database record, end of story! To do otherwise would be absolutely ridiculous! You should think for yourself before you ask silly questions.

Dev: My apologies I just want to make sure to clarify exactly what the requirements are.

**6 months later**

Client: HOW COME I CAN’T ASSIGN THE SAME UNIQUE IDENTIFIER TO MULTIPLE DATABASE RECORDS??? CAN’T PROGRAMMERS GET ANYTHING RIGHT EVER??

Dev: …

I've had my share of incompetent coworkers. In order of appearance:

1. A full stack dev. This one guy never, and I mean NEVER uses relationships in their tables. No indexing, no keys, nada. Couple of months later he was baffled why his page took ten seconds to load.

2. The same dev as (1). Requirement was to create some sort of "theme" feature for a web app. Hacked it by putting !important all over the place.

3. The same dev again. He creates several functions that if the data exists returns a view, and if it doesn't, "echo '0'". No, not return 0 or return false or anything, but fucking echo. This was PHP. If posted a rant about this a few months ago.

4. Same dev, has no idea what clean code is. No, not just reusable functions, he doesn't even get indenting right. Some functions have 4 spaces, some 2 tabs, some 6 tabs! And this is inside the same function. God wait until he tries Python...

5. Same dev now suggests that he become the PM. GM approves (very small company). Assigns me to travel to a client since they needed "technical assistance about the API". Was actually there to lead a UAT session.

Intermezzo, that guy went from fullstack dev to PM to sales (yes, one who calls clients to offer products) to business development, to product analyst in the span of two years.

After a year and a half there, I quit.

6. New company, a "QA engineer" who also assumes the role as the product owner. Does absolutely no tests other than "functional tests" in which he NEVER produces any form of documentation. Not even a set of test cases. He goes by "intuition".

7. Same guy as (6), hands me requirements for a feature. By "hands me" I mean he did that verbally. No spec documents, no slack chat, no Trello card. I ended up writing it as a card in Trello. Fast forward to the due date, he flips out because that wasn't what he wanted. Showed him the card. He walked away, without thinking of a solution how this mess should be handled.

Despite all this, I really don't want him (6&7) to leave the company. The devs get really stressed out at this job and he does make a really good person to laugh with/at.

*In teams meeting with client*

Manager: Yes we can do all of that and it will be actioned very quickly. We will make all of these feature requests top priority. We will set aside everything we are currently working on in order to get this done!

Dev: ...Are you writing any of this down?

Manager: I don't need to, I always remember everything!

Dev: Just so you are aware, I'm not writing anything down. You're going to need to create a ticket with requirements spelled out for each one of these promises you're making otherwise they won't get actioned by the team.

Manager: I know that!

Dev: ...

*Later that day*

Ticket Title: Action client feature requests TOP PRIORITY!!!

Ticket Description: *empty*

Dev: ...

I was a good programmer.

My teachers always impressed by work..
I was like coming up on my own solutions not from books. Never remembered any algo but still the one who solve mostly every problems

Well then..

joined companies after college.

I thought I will learn so many new things..

Yes i learned but I'm feeling like I'm losing the spirit of problem solving

I'm just doing same thing, same logic, making similar kind of application with just little difference.

Nothing is like i'm making something new... All I'm doing is using predefined java and android method..

To create some predefined designs and working.

Fucking similar client requirements.

Seems like time to quit job and dedicate myself toward research

I know it's a boring rant... I'm just fucking
*frustrated*

For some
Hope hope = new Hope() ;

tl;dr stupid clients with their stupid requirements.

Client: (on Monday) hypothetically could you implement "A"?
Me: (on Monday) yeah I could do that by Friday, let me know if you want me to start it.
Client: (on Thursday) hey remember we talked about "A" well do "B" instead and I'll need it by Friday still.
Me: "B" is completely different than "A" and will take probably twice as long.
Client: but you told me you could do it by Friday.
Me: ............ I want to smash your face.

Just last month we finished a big project for a client. The company had their lawyers make a contract to transfer ownership for the website to them.

One of the requirements was to deliver all code in a word file. And just that. In the whole contract was not a word about transfering the production environment to their servers. Or supplying a working version. The files and database. No just the word file.

As of today still wondering what they where planning to do with a word file with hunderds of pages of code.

Offcourse we deliverd a working version to their servers. But why are there people making decisions about things they understand nothing at all.

I'm getting so pissed off by this client, here's the gist

We signed agreement defining the following deliverables:
- news page and news article page
- releases page and release info page
(it's a guy from a record label)

After the signature we (me and my colleagues) went to work and finished all that (+ a little more actually, yea I know never overstep your agreement right but we did) and we got paid (all good)

Now after payment he's asking us to do more (some kind of mail installation thing), so I obviously tell him, as I actually have many times before, that our agreement only stretched as far as those 4 deliverables and we wouldn't work without a new agreement defining a new set of requirements or an hourly rate.

Next he goes and tells me the following
==
We already have an agreement. I'm not paying you on an hourly rate as you are not next to me. Let me know
-- First off no we don't, the agreement only covered the 4 pages
== immediatly after
Also you really need to work on your costumer service. Your attitude is very rude. I don't know how many clients you have but all this distrust attitude is not in your favours. Let me know if you want to proceed?
-- Are you fucking kidding me? I am rude and distrustful? I JUST DO MY FUCKING JOB YOU PRICK

Sorry just need to let off some steam

Ok I have 2 more hours to work today. I bet I will get these 3 important things done.

*important email comes in*
*laptop runs out of batery*
*client finally calls back after 4 weeks*
*data structure has to be reorganized urgently due to new requirements*

After dealing with all of that, I close all windows in order to go home. The last window is the thing I wanted to do in the first place.

Every fucking time its the same shit:
Our nontechnical managers meet with the client and try to pass technical requirements to us..
These pieces of shit don't get that this only makes things worse.

Making everyone waste fucking time trying to understand requirements that would be a lot fucking easier if any of us were is any fucking meeting.
But nooooo... We have to fucking be the whole team in fucking meetings with these cock suckers so they can realize they didn't get shit and the back and forth bullshit begins:

We ask questions
They don't know
They schedule meeting with client
They ask their moronic way
The client answers
They schedule meeting with us
We ask questions...

And this fucking loop goes on for-fucking-EVER!

Fuuuuuuck this!!

A client came to the startup I was working at, to discuss a potential schools/universities based project. Their requirements were as follows

1. Full control of every class's daily routine (based on teacher's availabilities).
2. Multiple-choice exam feature (Timed).
3. Individual dashboards for teachers, head of departments, the Headmaster for every school onboarded on the platform.
4. Scores analysis of every student in every class (Report card).
5. Attendance feature for every student.

And so on.

Guess their budget for the above.

200 USD. FUCKING 200 US Dollars !!!!

My stomach hurt that day from laughing.

After my college I was about to start freelancing.
I met a client and had a chat with him about requirements and all.
He was really nice guy. Then he asked me "What will be the size of the website?? A4 or Bigger??.
On the next day I started looking for full time jobs.

Client: "We don't want line breaks in that column make it 500px wide!"
Me: Makes the column 500px wide. Sees that the line breaks are still there. Asks if it should be made wider to fit the text.
Client: "Just implement what we send you"
Me: Ok (thinking wtf)
Client after testing: "Why are there still line breaks?!?"
🙄😥😤😭
Why the actual hell can't they get there freaking requirements in order?!? This shit happens with every fourth request!

Boss: Here's the next project that I would you to start immediately.
Me: So the client wants <Application Name>
Boss: Yes and it's due on Friday after 2 weeks.
Me: Yes can be done. By what time today you can give me the requirements.
Boss: Not today, I will give you the requirements next week Friday.
Me: So I should start the project next week Friday.
Boss: You have to start the project today
Me: Start with what? There is no requirement. Excuse me, I need a break.

Yes, senior developers get stuck just as much as junior developers do, the difference is that they get stuck in places that junior developers can’t even access. That is partially because senior developers are expected to do so much more than just simple coding, they need to also grasp and untangle client requirements, communicate clearly and thoughtfully with the team, be some sort of guiding/mentoring/leading figure, make sweeping architectural decisions, and so on and so forth.

A junior developer is struggling with making relevant columns of a table a nice shade of purple. A senior developer is struggling with making sure that implementing new client requirements will not have a destructive impact on the current infrastructure, there will be no regressions elsewhere in the system, tries to pinpoint what prior assumptions the new stuff breaks (it inevitably does), and how to reconcile everything.

Client: "Dear Mr. I still have not received the final version yet. I had planned to send it out to my customers at the end of the week."
-------

Me (1st answer I did not give):
"Ok. I accept your statement as true, since I did not send you anything. Furthermore I respect your wish."

Me (2nd answer I did not give):
"Well I am sorry. Before today you did not once mention that there was a deadline. ASAP is not how I do things. Please do your project management."

Me (answer I gave): "Dear Client, due to a huge demand for our services we are forced to prioritise. We are doing our best to complete the project as fast as possible. Please understand however that we can not reschedule with 3 days notice. Because of technical requirements the product can be send on Friday next week. Please let us know if this works out for you. - Kind regards. Me. "

-__-""""

Hope my client will understand & stop changing the requirements again and again in midway :|

During a company wide status meeting where all product managers, architects and directors assemble:

Me: *A product architect leading a team of devs*

Directors: So are there any issues or risks you see in delivering the next build in target time for Client 1?

Me: There are too many changes in feature requirements. First they said we can use a shared NFS for storage. Now they are asking to switch over to SFTP pull mode.. blah blah..

Directors: Oh I see.. well we can support both solutions then.

Me: But the deadlin..

Directors: *ignores what I say* Will be a good marketing point for future.

Me: But there are too many regressions in integra..

Directors: *ignores what I say* We should also meet deadlines. That is the most important thing.

Me: Its not as easy as 1+1=2.. The team needs more time to..

Directors: *ignores what I say* Ok lets move on to the next point. What about Client 2?

Me:

A few months ago, I decided to let go some old clients with bad behavior and/or bad projects, since I noticed this was affecting my mental health (lowering my self esteem, make me feel depressed, anxious, etc).

I was exhausted of doing miracles in projects without git, build files, staging enviroments (yes... you can imagine), and receive all sort of curses when sudenly something stopped to work.

I set some requirements to work with any new project/client: 1) project needs to be under version control, 2) it must have staging enviroment, 3) I must work with build files.

As I still have contracts running, I'm communicating this to clients as soon as I finish my obligations.

Today, one of these clients told me they are leaving to work with another developer.

Reason: They said my new requirements are unreasonable and they prefer doing the old way.

My boss gave me a project without any meaningful requirements and asked:
boss: can you finish this in 9 months?
me: well I really can't give you any estimate.
boss: well just do it.
8 months later I summarize all weekly requirements that the client has given and estimated I should be able to finish the project with just 3 months, if only the requirements are ready and not changing from time to time. What a f***ing waste of my time? Why the f*** people do this? And after all this my boss said:
boss: I think we should be able to finish this project faster.
YOU THINK!

!(short rant) && (long story)

So these last 2 months of my life have been quite topsy turvy. Everything was pretty much unexpected and now I am on my way to Banglore, which is referred to as the Silicon Valley of India.

All this started in mid Feb when one day my ceo dropped a mail to all of us saying he wants to covey something important. A little background story about my company before I go on. We were a bunch of 6-7 tech guys working on a location based analytics product and had a decent client base. I had joined them in November 2017 and I was very hopeful that I would get to learn a lot owing to the good seniors from reputed universities and their experience. Coming back to the day, the ceo called us and dropped a bomb on us that the funding is depleted and we only have enough money to pay you salaries for this month. "We didn't anticipate that this day will come but currently we are in talks with some companies that are looking to acquire us. I am very much hopeful that we will figure something out by the end of this month(Feb). Until then, I can't stop you from applying to other companies but don't reveal that we are in this situation." So, keeping my fingers crossed I was waiting for the acquisition and wasn't looking for any other opportunities.

The company work was under hold and during this time one of my friends approached me with his idea. Since I had nothing else to do, I agreed to work with him. I was living in Mumbai, the city with one of the highest living standards in India, and I was paying exorbitant rent without any income. There was no news until mid March when the ceo called and dropped bomb#2 that an Indonesian company is looking to acquire us and he had scheduled an interview for the entire team. This isn't what I had signed up for. Indonesia wasn't a country I had even considered, let alone leave the country. Still I appeared for the interview and it went very well.

No news from the company or the ceo after that. One of my friends advised me to start applying to other companies and not rely on this acquisition. Now the problem was I couldn't reveal about the acquisition in my interview, so I used to give some bullshit about me not liking the work here. The company didn't buy it because how can someone judge a company in just 4 months. So obviously I didn't clear the interviews, also partially because I didn't meet their technical requirements.

March end, I moved to my hometown in Gujarat because obviously I had started to get broke in this expensive-ass city. The friend with whom I was working with also didn't have any issue since it was just tech and coding and I could do it remotely. Comes mid-April when the ceo called and said the acquisition is done and gave me some details about it. For confidentiality sake I can't reveal the details but I figured enough red flags for me to go with it.

*Eye of the tiger playing in the background*
Now started my quest of finding a decent job. The edge I had now was that I could reveal about the acquisition to the other company. I started applying left right and center to any company I could find. Amazon, saavn and some good-ass Indian companies. The thing that now came in my way was my experience. I am 23 year old(soon to be 24) with around 20 months of experience. Everyone wanted a 3-5 year experience guy/girl. Soon, my entire optimism was draining and I even considered going back to my first company.

During this time, I got a call from this company in Banglore who were looking for a candidate which best suited my profile. I went all guns blazing and appeared for the interview. I had 6 rounds of technical interview plus 1 logical reasoning. And since I was giving the interview remotely, I had one round on each alternate working day. Everyday was a challenge and I spent the nights in anxiousness and anticipation. Meanwhile I was appearing for other interviews too, since I wasn't too hopeful about my chances in this one.

Cut to April 27, I got an offer from this company and without negotiating they offered me the package I was hoping for.

After this entire ordeal, I realised one thing. Whatever happens, happens for good. Looking forward to this new city, new company, new people and new environment.

Today was the most fuckedup day of my internship as a software developer. I have this shithead manager who doesnt know how to explain the client requirements properly and keeps on fucking yelling at me for not understanding the requirement and not coming up with the right output. That asshole compares me with the other teammate as to how fast he is and how slow i am to even write 5 lines of code in python.(I am new to python). He has yelled at me in his cabin with the door open so that everyone on the floor could hear. Most humiliating and disappointing day of my life. I dont feel like seeing that shitheads face again. I just have a month left and i will be happy if the opportunity doesnt get converted to a full time. Todays events have made me doubt myself to a great extent and has left me disheartened. Ranting abt it makes me feel a little better.

I got transferred to a new city at the client location for few months.
I got the credentials for internet access, but I was not able to get internet. I contacted the admin and after troubleshooting it for few minutes, he asked where is Internet Explorer in this laptop?

I immediately understood, why they need me here. I was using a MacBook. 😐

PS: In the end, he gave me the full access without any credential requirements.

<Email thread>

Manager: Hey @iiii, please, create stories for {things that shall be done}. You will be responsible for that implementation next sprint.

Me: *procrastinating like a bitch*

**several hours later**

Dev from another team: Actually, we discussed that with {upper management guy} and it seems like those things are unapplicable for current project, so we'll send a letter to {client} to remove those requirements.

Manager: @iiii, don't create stories.

</Email thread>

Me: *welp, good thing I did exactly nothing so far*

This is something that happened 2 years ago.

1st year at uni, comp sci.

Already got project to make some app for the univ that runs in android, along with the server

I thought, omg, this is awesome! First year and already got something to offer for the university 😅
(it's a new university, at the time I was the 2nd batch)

Team of 12, we know our stuffs, from the programming POV, at least, but we know nothing about dealing with client.

We got a decent pay, we got our computers upgraded for free, and we even got phones of different screen sizes to test out our apps on.

No user requirement, just 2-3 meetings. We were very naive back then.

2 weeks into development, Project manager issues requirement changes

we have a meeting again, discussing the important detail regarding the business model. Apparently even the univ side hadn't figure it out.

1 month in the development, the project manager left to middle east to pursue doctoral degree

we were left with "just do what you want, as long as it works"

Our projects are due to be done in 3 months. We had issues with the payment, we don't get paid until after everything's done. Yet the worse thing is, we complied.

Month 3, turns out we need to present our app to some other guy in the management who apparently owns all the money. He's pleased, but yet, issued some more changes. We didn't even know that we needed to make dashboard at that time.

The project was extended by one month. We did all the things required, but only got the payment for 3 months.

Couldn't really ask for the payment of the fourth month since apparently now the univ is having some 'financial issues'.

And above all: Our program weren't even tested, let alone being used, since they haven't even 'upgraded' the university such that people would need to use our program as previously planned.

Well, there's nothing to be done right now, but at least I've learned some REALLY valuable lesson:

1. User Requirement is a MUST! Have them sign it afterwards, and never do any work until then. This way, change of requirements could be rejected, or at least postponed

2. Code convention is a MUST! We have our code, in the end, written in English and Indonesian, which causes confusion. Furthermore, some settle to underscore when naming things, while other chooses camel case.

3. Don't give everyone write access to repository. Have them pull their own, and make PR later on. At least this way, they are forced to fix their changes when it doesn't meet the code convention.

4. Yell at EVERYONE who use cryptic git commit message. Some of my team uses JUST EMOTICONS for the commit message. At this point, even "fixes stuffs" sound better.

Well, that's for my rant. Thanks for reading through it. I wish some of you could actually benefit from it, especially if you're about to take on your first project.

When the stupid client is unable to explain the requirements correctly the first time and drops a frickin bomb 3 days before the deadline and boss still want to "meet" the deadline.

Me: "if this goes on, I will be dead on the line by the deadline"

Spent the last 3.5 days developing none stop for a client. Met all their additional deadlines and requirements.

It's been worrying me for for a month.

I'm now seriously happy and relieved.

What the fuck is wrong with the designers? We have had meetings with the client, a proposal drawn up, a project spec written, budget agreed, witeframes drawn up exactly to spec. Designer involved in all stages for input and ideas. Now the designers have the wireframes, they are supposed to create based on these. No they make up what goes on the pages that bare no resemblance to the wireframes in terms of requirements. I am fucking fuming. I have sent the designs back with a note. Please provide designs based on the wireframes.

Dev: What are the requirements?

Client: I want to make my boss happy so that I get lots of money and promotions.

Dev: What does your boss want?

Client: He wants to be happy

Dev: …

Client: Also I don’t want to expend any effort or resources to achieve this

Dev: …

I couldn't sleep. I was staring at the blinking cursor. A slow, comforting blinking. Like everyone else, I had become a slave to the JavaScript ecosystem. If I saw something like a new build system, or a new framework, I had to have it.

My client changed the requirements again. I'm in pain.

- "You want to see pain?" my colleague said. Go read Apple support forums. That's pain.

I became addicted. Every time I died and every time I was born again. Resurrected.
During the night, I was crying in the Apple forums for an official answer that would never come. During the day, I was surfing StackOverflow to fix my problems. You get "single-serving" friends there. They help you, you help them, and then you never see them again.

- "Then you install Stack and boom, you're done. It's that easy to go functional."

That's how I met him.

- "You know why they make so many javascript frameworks?"
- "No, why?"
- "So that they can distract you while they put backdoors in them. So that you don't have time to check all of their code".
- "You are by far the most interesting "single-serving" friend I've ever met"

Then, my hard disk died. Of course, I didn't have backups: nobody has enough space for all those node_modules folders. All my addictions, lost.

Then I wrote him. If you asked me now, I couldn't tell you why I wrote him. We chatted a lot.

- "It's late, I should really go search another hdd on ebay"
- "Ebay? You called me so you could have my old hard disk."
- "No, I..."
- "Come on."

He sent me his old hard disk. It was a 256MB hard disk, but it was fine for running Arch. Then he asked me to rant about my problems in front of him.

- "I want you to rant as hard as you can"
- "Are you serious?"

We ranted all night about our bosses and clients and their fucked up requests. We kept in touch, and after a while more people were ranting with us. Every week, he gave the rules that he and I decided.

- "The first rule of devRant is -- you don't talk about devRant. The second rule of devRant is -- you don't talk about devRant."

I like to think this is how devRant started. This might also be the reason why we never see @trogus, only @dfox. A lot of shit still needs to happen.

At a certain client, was asked to help them with an "intermediary" solution to stopgap a license renewal on their HR recruiting system.

This is something I was very familiar with, so no big. Did some requirements gathering, told them we could knock it out in 6 weeks.

We start the project, no problems, everything is fine until about 2.5 weeks in. At this point, someone demands that we engage with the testing team early. It grates a little as this client had the typical Indian outsourcing mega-corp pointey-clickey shit show "testing" (automation? Did you mean '10 additional testers?') you get at companies who put business people in charge of technology, but I couldn't really argue with it.

So we're progressing along and the project manager decides now is a great time to bugger the fuck off to India for 3 months, so she's totally gone. This is the point it goes off the rails. Without a PM to control the scope, the "lead tester," we'll call her Shrilldesi, proceeds to sit in a room and start trying to control the design of the system. Rather than testing anything in the specification, she just looked at the existing full HRIS recruiting system they were using and starts submitting bugs for missing features. The fuckwit serfs they'd assigned from HR to oversee this process just allowed it to happen totally losing focus on the fact this was an interim solution to hold them over for 6 months and avoid a contract renewal.

I get real passive aggressive at this point and refuse to deliver anything outside the original scope. We negotiate and end up with about 150% scope bloat and a now untenable timeline that we delivered about 2 weeks late, but in the end that absolute whore made my life a living hell for the duration of the project. She then got the recognition at the project release for her "excellent work," no mention of the people who actually did the work.

Tl;Dr people suck and if you value your sanity, you'll avoid companies that say things like, "we're not in the technology business" as an excuse to have shitty, ignorant staff.

*looks for jobs in system administration*

For our client in $location we're looking for a Network and System Administrator ... to manage our local IT infrastructure (so far so good) ... that's Microsoft-based.

Fuck that company.

*looks further*

Requirements: deployment and maintenance of servers, backups and storage, updates, yada yada.. fine with me.
yOU wiLl mAiNtAiN WanBLowS sUrVaR sYsTeMs

Fuck that company too.

Does anyone here in Belgium even work with fucking Linux servers?! Or should I really relocate to the Netherlands to get something decent?!!

Client: "My proposed deadline can't be met? Maybe we should go to your office and sit right next to you to see how you work."
Yeah right, that surely speeds things up. Even if the ever-changing requirements require at least triple of the time allowed.

So my boss thinks that it takes maximum of two days to create a website in WordPress.
I agree with that, but what about the million requirements of the client and you about the theme? and custom dashboards?

PS: Only one developer will work on one website!

Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server.

There is no technology on Earth that speaks worse of Microsoft than is this crap. Nothing they ever made (not even Comic Sans) is as bad as Sharepoint.

No proper editor. Everything is slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow. To run it you need a state-of-the-art server. There is no way to make the UI modern, as Sharepoint itself is built upon 1995 era HTML. Tables in tables in tables in tables in tables. And even if you do a web part that's readable, it will be wrapped in shit and presented to the client anyway.
It's so easy to break too. Most of the time I was just watching why the fuck it didn't work. Huge problem with caching as well. Deploying any change requires 10 minutes of manual labor.

I get why companies want to use it. Out of the box it's got quite a few very nice features, and aside from the problems setting it up, and hardware requirements, it works decently well.

But I won't come near it unless I'm paid 100$ per hour or starving to death.

So we have this HUGE ass project , really challenging , that my boss and "PM" have been meeting with the client for months now...

I got on board , guess what?

NO ONE HAVE A FUCKING CLUE ON WHAT THE FUCK THEY WANT!!!!!

ALL FUCKING GENERIC REQUIREMENTS!!! WHAT THE FUUUCK!!!

[ insert fucking pitch screaming!!!! ]

FUUUUUUUUUUCK YOU!

When you ask a client for website requirements and they respond by pulling out their phone, opening a random indie game and swiping around, saying "It should be dynamic and colorful, like this game."

When you slog many nights and whole weekend to complete a particular feature and then..
The client changes the requirements :|

WHAT THE FUCKIN FUCK..

Me: junior dev

Assignment: build a REST search service that also does (thing x)

Me: gosh I just can't figure out how to make (thing x) work! Nothing I try works and there are no online resources!

*goes to meeting with client*

Client: (thing x) is impossible in our application, so we are expecting (much more manageable thing)

Me: awesome! I think I can build that

Manager who can't code: what are you talking about, (thing x) is clearly better and it should be possible to do

Manager: *sends email outlining shifted requirements after the meeting, including (thing x)*

Did I ever tell you kids about the time I worked for a company that got a contract to develop an iOS application around some object detection software that had been developed by another team?

Company I was working for was a tiny software consultancy, and this was my first ever dev job (I’m at my second now 😅). Nobody at the company has experience building mobile applications but CEO decides that the app should be written in React Native because _he_ knows React Native.

During a meeting with the client, CEO jokes about how easy the ask is and says he could finish it in a weekend. Please note that Head of Engineering had already budgeted a quarter for the work. CEO says we can do it in a week! And moves up the deadline. And only assigns two engineers to project. I am not one of those engineers.

The two engineers that are put on it struggle. A lot. They can’t seem to get the object detection to work at all, and the code that’s already written is in Objective-C. I realize one of the issues is that the engineers on the project can’t read Objective-C because they have no experience with Objective-C or even C. I have experience with C, so I volunteer to take a look at it to try to see what’s going on.

Turns out the problem is that the models are trained on one type of image format and the iPhone camera takes images in a different format.

The end of the week comes, they do not succeed in figuring out the image conversion in React Native. There’s an in-person demo with the customers scheduled for the next Monday. CEO spends the weekend trying to build the app. Only succeeds in locking literally every other engineer out of the project.

They manage to negotiate a second chance where we deliver what we were supposed to deliver at the original schedule.

I spent the weekend looking up how to convert images and figure it would be a lot easier to interface with the Objective-C if we used Swift. Taught myself enough Swift over the weekend to feel dangerous. Spoke to Head of Engineering on Monday and proposed solution — start over in Swift. Volunteer to lead effort. Eventually convince them it’s a good idea (and really, what’s the worst that can happen? If this solves our main problem at the moment, that’s still more progress than the original team made)

Spend the next week working 16 hour days building out application. Meet requirements for next deadline. Save contract.

And that’s ONE of the stories of my first dev job that got me hired as a senior engineer despite only having 10 months of work experience in the industry.

doNotMessWithITTeamInAFuckingProject();

Last night me with my team have a discussion with my project team. Currently we have a project for our insurance client building a Learning Management System. The project condition already messed up since the first day i join a meeting. Because since its a consortium project with multiple company involved, one of company had a bad experience with another company. It happened few years back when both of company were somehow break up badly because miss communication (i heard this from one of my team).

Skip..skip... And then day to day like another stereotype IT projects when client and business analyst doing requirements gathering, the specs seems unclear and keep changing day by day even when I type this rant I'm sure it will change again.

Then something happened last night when my team leader force our business analyst to re index the use case number (imho) this is no need to be done, and i know the field conditions its so tough for all team members.

So many problems occured, actually this is a boring problem like lack of dev resource, lack of project management and all other stereotype IT projects had. Its sucks why this things is happening again.

Finally my fellow business analyst type a quite long message in our group and said that he maybe quit because its too tired and he felt that the leader only know about push push pushhhhhy fcking pussy, he never go to the client site and look what we've done and what we struggle so far.

I just don't know why, i know this guy earlier was an IT geek also, but when he leading a team he act like he never done IT project before, just know about pushing people without knowing what the context and sound to me like just rage push!

Damnit, i maybe quit also, you know we IT guy never affraid to quit anytime from the messed up condition like this. Even though we were at the bottom level in a project, but we hold the most main key for development.

Hope he (my leader) read this rant. And can realize what happened and fix this broken situation. I don't know what to say again, im in steady mode to quit anytime if something chaos happen nearly in the future.

doNotMessWithITTeamInAFuckingProject();

While this wasn't technically a real client, it's still one of the most insane requests I've ever had.

I chose to specialize in software engineering for the last year and a half of my degree, which meant a lot of subjects were based around teamwork, proper engineering practises, accessibility, agile methods, basically a lot of stuff to get us ready to work in a proper corporate dev environment. One of our subjects was all about project management, and the semester-long coursework project (that was in lieu of a final exam) was to develop a real project for a real client. And, very very smartly, the professors set up a meeting with the clients so that the clients could tell us what they wanted with sixty-odd students providing enough questions. They basically wanted a management service for their day-center along with an app for the people there. One of the optional requirements was a text chat. Personally not something I'm super interested in doing but whatever, it's a group project, I'll do my part.

The actual development of the project was an absolute nightmare, but that's a story for another day. All I'll say is that seven juniors with zero experience in the framework we chose does not make a balanced dev team.

Anyway, like three months into the four-month project we've got a somewhat functional program, we just need to get the server side part running and are working our asses off (some more than others) when the client comes in and says that 'hey, nice app, nobody else has added the chat yet, but could you do voice recognition okay thanks?'.

Fucking.
Voice.
Recognition.

This was a fucking basic-ass management app with the most complicated task being 'make it look pretty' and 'hook up a DB to an API' and they want us to add voice recognition after sitting on their ass for three months??? The entire team collectively flipped its shit the second they were out of earshot. The client would not take no for an answer, the professor simply told us that they asked for it and it was up to us whether we delivered or not. Someone working on the frontend had the genius idea of 'just get them to use google voice recognition' so we added the how-to in the manual and ticked the requirement box.

What amazes me about all that is how the client probably had no idea that their new last-minute request was even a problem for us, let alone it being in a completely different ballpark in terms of implementing from scratch.

After I spent 4 years in a startup company (it was literally just me and a guy who started it).

Being web dev in this company meant you did everything from A-Z. Mostly though it was shitty hacky "websites/webapps" on one of the 3 shitty CMSs.

At some point we had 2 other devs and 2 designers (thank god he hired some cause previously he tried designing them on his own and every site looked like a dead puppy soaked in ass juice).

My title changed from a peasant web dev to technical lead which meant shit. I was doing normal dev work + managing all projects. This basically meant that I had to show all junior devs (mostly interns) how to do their jobs. Client meetings, first point of contact for them, caring an "out of hours" support phone 24/7, new staff interviews, hiring, training and much more.

Unrealistic deadlines, stress and pulling hair were a norm as was taking the blame anytime something went wrong (which happened very often).

All of that would be fine with me if I was paid accordingly, treated with respect as a loyal part of the team but that of course wasn't the case.

But that wasn't the worst part about this job. The worst thing was the constant feeling that I'm falling behind, so far behind that I'll never be able to catch up. Being passionate about web development since I was a kid this was scaring the shit out of me. Said company of course didn't provide any training, time to learn or opportunities to progress.

After these 4 years I felt burnt out. Programming, once exciting became boring and stale. At this point I have started looking for a new job but looking at the requirements I was sure I ain't going anywhere. You see when I was busy hacking PHP CMSs, OOPHP became a thing and javascript exploded. In the little spare time I had I tried online courses but everyone knows it's not the same, doing a course and actually using certain technology in practice. Not going to mention that recruiters usually expect a number of years of experience using the technology/framework/language.

That was the moment I lost faith in my web dev future.

Happy to say though about a month later I did get a job in a great agency as a front end developer (it felt amazing to focus on one thing after all these years of "full-stack bullshit), got a decent salary (way more than I expected) and work with really amazing and creative people. I get almost too much time to learn new stuff and I got up to speed with the latest tech in a few weeks. I'm happy.

Advice? I don't really have any, but I guess never lose faith in yourself.

Fuck uninspired jr devs that are simply collecting a pay check.

I have been handed a project that a jr dev was allowed to wallow on for over two fucking years. This lazy mother fucker managed to create 5 functions, a whole fucking mess of bullshit that I now have to straighten out on top of the 8 other things that I have to deliver on in the next month.

They never followed requirements. Not-a-one. The API is fully broken. The DB schema is BEYOND fucked. There's ZERO validation/sanitation on I/O. The deployments only work half the fucking time. Their code is so spaghetti I'm getting triggered from when I worked at Olive Garden with Eminem. But hey, at least they were able to demo it to the client to say "it works".

I don't condone violence, but every time I find malformed if statements, linter exceptions, broken deploy configurations in this project -- I just want to kick them in their stupid fucking face.

Wherever you ended up you piece of shit, I hope your dreams of becoming a rich asshole only bring you unending despair. I believe you can make it though, because you're already halfway there.

Me and my manager throughout 2020

January:
Me: So umm, we can release the new app version
Manager: No we promised client X app first go build that
Me: umm, ok.

February:
Me: so the app is done, but client hasn't setup area L so there is no data there
Manager: ok, I'll have them setup area L soon ™️

March:
Manager: area L is too much work to setup, use workaround L thats way better
Me: ok ...

April:
Manager: client is nitpicking on design and layout please make this mess even greater
Me: ok, anything else?
Manager: yeah also start on app for client Z!
Me: and our app update?
Manager: later son! Risk tooo muchos!

May:
Me: the mess for client X is done, and first version for client Z is also ready for test
Manager: ok good work, here is a new set of things to mess up
Me: but... Seriously, wtf?!
Manager: clients want quality
Me: ah ok, not nitpicking, cool

June:
Manager: client X went MIA, but client Z will send you a weekly list of things they don't understand and want to change
Me: ah great, truly worth postponing my February holiday to release nothing

July:
Manager: so, how we doing on all them changes
Me: well, I am a loyal custodian with alot of pleasure in my work!
Manager: ah ok good!
Me: any news from client X??
Manager: who
Me: mkay ... n.v.m

August:
Me: can we release yet?
Manager: change, we can!!!
Me: are you Obama?
Manager: ambitions
Me: fuck you pay me

September:
Me: I am confident we can now release all 3 apps as promised mid september
Manager: great!! Good work

Also manager: you know that immensely complex area within the app? That needs a complete rewrite because we have bad ux there!!!
Me: ok... To which requirements?
Manager: good ux, we must have standards
Me: but the layout of page R id generic as page F so then we need to align there as well
Manager: go! Do!
Me: ok I'll come up with my own requirements then
Manager: we also need documentation
Me: really!!!! How clever of you to fire colleagues T & P and we now have zero workforce for that
Manager: things will get better someday
Me: ah, great! Put it on my calendar

October:
Me: I need a sabbatical biatch
Manager: a what?

Project management site, exclusively for use by our team and clients.

- The client creates a new project.
- They list the requirements, supplying all the necessary files and content.
- We challenge any stupid stuff by offering alternative solutions.
- We all sign off on the requirements and no more are allowed to be added or modified. If they forgot anything, it's on record who's to blame.
- We estimate time and cost to complete the build.
- If they accept, we finally begin the work
- At each stage of every requirement, we mark the status as pending, in progress, ready for testing and delivered.

Much less stress due to minimising change requests. Plus easier to follow than an email chain and easier for them to use than a jira portal.

A morbid realization (I am just wasting your time keep scrolling)

Unless someone takes a stand for the user, and their comfort and requirements, unless someone looks a client straight in the eye and says "no, I will not do that, and neither will my team" and denies them their request, nothing will change, good devs will keep losing their spark to save themselves frustration, good people will walk away and the tyranny that we face daily grows... unless someone stands up, someone who cannot be knocked down, or reprimanded and told they're wrong for fighting for what's right.. unless someone stands up for what is right and fair... nothing changes... and nothing ever will... poor programs, bad games and content, lower standards, frustrated users, annoyance that you don't matter as a user or a dev will never go away... unless someone says enough. But no one will, money is the boss, morality a liability, and people an abundant resource. This world is backwards, devs are carrying the blame and no one who is able, cares enough to say "that's enough!".

Agreed to work on a mobile app project on Android. No contract signed, just was given what the client wanted from this sub-contractor.

No specific details given, had to figure out a lot of the minute details of how they wanted the application to behave. We would deliver a working part of the product before getting a % of the pay. We charged $30 /hr on a mobile app, low as heck.

It was me and another developer, neither of us had any contact with the clients to ask questions, all questions had to go through the sub-contractor. Many arguments and months later we find that what they're asking for only a phone manufacturer can do. Sub-contractor blames us for not doing our "research" when she/he was the only one able to contact the client to get requirements.

Sub-contractor wanted us to refund money. We declined but offered solutions.

Sub-contractor goes to client and manages to get approval of what we were able to do. Finally a light in this dark tunnel spanning 7 months.

On the day of releasing to the client the finished app, we get notification from Google that the app won't be published due to a recent policy change that came into effect in January. WTF.

Go back to sub-contractor, tell the bad news. Once again he/she says it's our fault for not doing the "research". Yeah as if we knew what Google is going to change. Asks for paid money back. We refuse.

We lastly suggested that we remove what Google wants removed on the app and release it that way.

We had billed 300 hours cumulative divided among 3 people (including the sub-contractor who didn't appear to do anything), and just 2 months of development. It's been 7 months and we were only paid for 240 hours, the rest was unpaid, and the sub-contractor still wants to make us give it back. /rant

Dear Client,

You said it was of paramount importance that this software work flawlessly. I've worked hard to make it so, even when your indecision and lack of attention to detail indicate you don't care as much as you say and have made the project late.

Yesterday when I handed you a step-by-step user acceptance test plan, you delegated it to someone not as familiar with your specific requirements. You said you don't have time for such things.

I will remind you of those words when the project launches and you find something you dislike.

Sincerely,
Me

Long story short: University fucked up single sign on.

For every online service I have, I set a different password, randomly generated ~ 20 characters long. At our university we have multiple systems but they offer a single sign on service which is quite nice because it is so non-transparent which service now uses which authorization. I changed my password a while ago and around the same time they also updated our mail client. Since then I am not able to log in which is not a big deal for me because I have mail forwarding.

Yesterday however I needed another service and also got rejected with my password. I knew from a friend that the passwords are fucked up and that some services have different restrictions (only 12 chars max.), so I decided to search how to reset my password. What the fuck was wrong with these people? It takes you five different pages to get the tiniest bit of information how to reset the password. Then on one page you can login with your single sign on and change the password. On that page you can also set the single sign on password, but if you enter an invalid password (in respect of the the other services) guess what? No feedback that you just locked yourself out of half the systems. Nice job. Also the password requirements are not next to the input fields where you change the password. Noo. That would be way to easy, remember the little small one line on the wall of text three pages ago? There you go.

Ok step one done. Now it should work, shouldn't it? Ohh no not so fast. One needs to activate the seperate service. Where you ask? Perfectly fine question. On the top of page four is a fucking one line table which looks like some five year old had some fun in excel. The button which takes you to the activation page is nearly invisible because of the non existing contrast. Also it is not a button but some arrow pointer thingy. Behind set arrow you have a page listing all differnt kinds of services, the description which you find on page two btw. No padding to decipher this shit what so ever. Nearly on the bottom is your needed button. Yes finally.

Finally I want to login, no good. Try again. Still no good. Go back to the fucked up excel table look at my username and think to myself what's the difference here? The table is so small and again no margin or padding. Apparently they cut of the last character of my normal username which i have which is fucking ridiculous.

What is wrong with you people, we are a TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY, is it so hard for you to find someone decend to unify this shit?

Client: "But why isn't it working. It should work"

Dev: "Sorry but it's not in your requirements"

Client: "But it should work"

fffockins 😡

This is PART 1/2 of a series of rants over the course of a software engineering class years ago.

We were four team members, two had never failed a class, I’ll refer to them as MT and FT, male and female top students, respectively, and an older student with some real world experience who I’ll refer to as SR.

Rant 1: As I was familiar with the agile methodologies I became the Scrum Master and was set with the task of explaining it to the team members, SR showed up late and nobody seemed interested in learning new methodology. At this point I knew we'd have trouble as a team.

Rant 2: FT made up her project proposal without informing anybody, which required a real client/product owner. We only figured it out after her proposal was accepted as the project, so we ended up working with fake requirements.

Rant 3: This one is partly my fault. I researched first and then worked, which meant I was the last to turn up my work. In one activity MT pressures me and I agree to a deadline so everyone can send their work to the teacher in a timely manner. Since I was the last to finish, I was also asked to give the doc some formatting, which I did in a hurry so it wasn't the best.
The next day MT and FT start complaining about me, saying I took too long and that they expect me to do better next time or else. At the same time they were stressed and in a hurry because we had to explain the project outline in front of the class and they didn't study.
Turns out copying and pasting all your work in less than an hour means you don’t learn anything. FT actually asked me for help days before and I sent her a website in English, which she wasn't very good at, so she just ran it through Google Translate and called it a day.
Later FT called me rude for interrupting MT in the presentation, which I did because he started making up stuff about the project.

Rant 4: SR expressed his dislike for school through profanity in variable names and commit messages. This caused MT and FT to dislike him. I thought it was immature but if anything it should’ve been reported to the teacher and move on.

Rant 5: I was stuck trying to get the REST API working for the project Admittedly this was my fault, too, because I was pushing for the usage of things nobody was familiar with for the sake of learning. This coupled with SR’s profanity led to drama and the progress was dropped, starting over from scratch.

At this point I stepped down from the Scrum Master role as nobody seemed to listen anymore.

This was not exactly the worst work culture because the employees, it was because the upper level of the organization chart on the IT department.

I'm not quite sure how to translate the exact positions of that chart, but lets say that there is a General Manager, a couple of Area Managers (Infrastructure, Development), some Area Supervisors (2 or 3, by each area), and the grunts (that were us). Anyway, anything on the "Manager" was the source of all the toxicity on the department.

First and foremost, there was a lack of training for almost any employee. We were expected to know everything since day-1. Yes, the new employees had a (very) brief explanation about the technologies/languages were used, but they were expected to perform as a senior employee almost since the moment they cross the door. And forget about having some KT (Knowledge Transfer) sessions, they were none existent and if they existed, were only to solve a very immediate issue (now imagine what happened when someone quit*).

The general culture that they have to always say "yes" to the client/customer to almost anything without consulting to the development teams if that what was being asked to do was doable, or even feasible. And forget about doing a proper documentation about that change/development, as "that was needed yesterday and it needs to be done to be implemented tomorrow" (you know what I mean). This contributes to the previous point, as we didn't have enough time to train someone new because we had this absurd deadlines.

And because they cannot/wanted to say "NO", there were days when they came with an amount of new requirements that needed to be done and it didn't matter that we had other things to do. And the worst was that, until a couple of years (more or less), there was almost impossible to gather the correct requirements from the client/user, as they (managers) "had already" that requirement, and as they "know better" what the user wants, it was their vision what was being described on the requirements, not the users'...

And all that caused that, in a common basis, didn't have enough time to do all this stuff (mainly because the User Support) causing that we needed to do overtime, which almost always went unpaid (because a very ambiguous clause of the contract, and that we were "non-union workers"**). And this is my favorite point of this list, because, almost any overtime went unpaid, so basically we were expected to be working for free after the end of the work day (lets say, after the 17:00). Leaving "early" was almost a sin for the managers, as they always expected that we give more time to work that the indicated on the contract, and if not, they could raise a report to HR because the ambiguous clause allowed them to do it (among other childish things that they do).

Finally, the jewel of the crown, is that they never, but never acknowledge that they made a mistake. Never. That was impossible! If something failed on the things/systems/applications that they had assigned*** it was always our fault.

- "A report for the Finance Department is giving wrong information? It's the DBA's fault**** because although he manages that report, he couldn't imagine that I have an undocumented service (that runs before the creation the report) crashed because I modified a hidden and undocumented temporal table and forgot to update that service."

But, well, at least that's on the past. And although those aren't all the things that made that workplace so toxic, for me those were the most prominent ones.

-

* Well, here we I live it's very common to don't say anything about leaving the company until the very last day. Yes, I know that there are people that leave their "2-days notice", but it's not common (IMHO, of course). And yes, there are some of us that give a 1 or 2-weeks notice, but still it's not a common practice.

** I don't know how to translate this... We have a concept called "trusted employee", which is mainly used to describe any administrative employee, and that commonly is expected to give the 110% of what the contract says (unpaid overtimes, extra stuff to do, etc) and sadly it's an accepted condition (for whatever reasons). I chose "non-union workers" because in comparison with an union worker, we have less protections (besides the legal ways) regarding what I've described before. Curiously, there are also "operative workers", that doesn't belong to an union, but they have (sometimes) better protections that the administrative ones.

*** Yes, they were in charge of several systems, because they didn't trust us to handle/maintain them. And I'm sure that they still don't trust in their developers.

**** One of the managers, and the DBA are the only ones that handle some stuff (specially the one that involves "money"). The thing that allows to use the DBA as scapegoat is that such manager have more privileges and permissions than the DBA, as he was the previous DBA

Have you ever talk with client and start coding and ui design in your mind while client explaining the requirements?

I like what I do for a living.

I build software, mostly from scratch or early stage products. Those are different industries, different companies, different technologies, frameworks and languages. Systems that impact economy in a different way.

When I develop software I am picking different parts of same project and try to understand how companies earn money and what are advantages of their software. What are required regulations and requirements to sell the stuff.
How the money flows from client and what they’re changing for. I especially try to understand stuff from business perspective.
When I pay my debts and luckily be still alive but unemployed and with minimum income from stocks / properties rental I will have plenty of time to duplicate many of those businesses.

I picked programming cause it’s touching all parts of economy basically without any skill requirements and certifications. It’s young impactful industry that is luckily not yet regulated. You just need laptop, like to solve puzzles and have plenty of free time and you can create everything. Never forget about it.

Cloud corporations try to make people think differently but it’s just that simple.

Client writes a bug report: This and that doesn't work.
Me: This functionality never was implemented. Please open a feature request.
Client: But this is a bug. Without this feature, the service won't work as we expect.
Me: But this wasn't in the requirements for release. So you have to contact the PM for a feature request.
Client: THIS IS A BUG! FIX IT!
Me: GO FUCK YOURSELF! THIS IS A NEW FEATURE AND YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR IT!
Unfortunately, I never sent the mail. But I kept it in the drafts. Maybe someday...

I hate hearing "this should be a quick one" from the client. Especially when your code base is a fucking legacy with no documentations, no testing, and a multisite that shares the same classes where functions has some crazy if conditions just to satisfy each site's requirements.

Two years and a lot of money my company has been building a peice of software for a client, I spent the day yesterday talking and watching the client, our software doesn't even come close to matching their requirements. It barely matches the brief my boss wrote and *never showed me*.

The following isn't necessarily a lesson I've learnt, but rather solidified it very much: FOLLOW THE SODDING BRIEF AND ACTUALLY LISTEN TO THE CLIENTS.

Also don't hire low paid devs just because they're cheap because they WILL produce shocking, unmaintiable and unchangeable code.

I honestly think starting this again will be much faster.

I’m working at an architecture firm these days, so I don’t have many “dev” stories to tell. However, I’d like to share this anecdote to reassure (or demoralize) you all that the kind of nonsense we’ve all dealt with as software developers isn’t limited to the software industry.

I’ve been working on a project to build townhomes and apartments on vacant lots in an urban environment.
Space is limited, so the client assured us early on that they would be centralizing all the mechanical equipment (water heaters, air conditioners, etc.) in the basement of each building. We finally got all the apartments laid out and presented them to the client last week. During that meeting, we get a casual “oh, by the way, we need a 3-foot by 3-foot mechanical closet in each apartment.” Did the project manager push back? Of course not. Have our deadlines been adjusted as a result of changing requirements? Don’t be silly! Starting tomorrow morning, the team gets to feverishly search for an extra 9 square feet in each of a couple dozen different apartment layouts that are already “cozy” in time to meet our next deliverable.

Clients suck.
Changing requirements suck.
Pushover PMs suck.
In every industry.

Fuck my company. Let the technology people work with technology.

I work at a small company who constantly brings in people who are absolutely useless. The project manager requires me to take items out of azure Dev-ops into an excel because he will not take the time to understand how a board works. The business analyst hands bullshit requirements in formats which no one but him can understand under the pretense that the Devs and architect can ask him when they feel like it. The CEO wants a power-point which again the technical teams have to prepare for him because the project manager or BA will not have time for it. However they make sure to gut the estimates handed over by the Dev team and introduce unfeasible deadlines.

Meanwhile the client has zero problems as the work still somehow gets done due to people in the Dev team overextending. Goddam leeches wasting mine and my teams time doing bullshit.

If hiring managers really want to hire based on skill, what they should be doing is testing for one thing:

The ability to take a specification, written in general language, notice deficiency, communicate with the 'client' (manager) to hash out what needs done, and the (explicit) ability to read documentation on libraries or tooling outside the dev's core skillset.

If a dev can read a spec, talk to a client to work out whats lacking, and then identify what they need to know and where to find it, thats 90% of the skills they need from what I can see.

tl;dr version of it, is they should be explicit about the requirements for reading/implementing specs and finding the correct documentation.
Something along the lines of
"can you form your letters? Are you able to follow instructions on the back of a cake box? Then there may be a position waiting for you!"

I was forced to attend a attend a meeting because I was wearing formals and had already completed my work.
They introduced me as a UI guy and thought the client won't have any changes in UI because it is a per there requirements. Apparently they were wrong.

Client: I just want a very basic modification, something a skilled developer could do in a couple hours.

Me: sounds great, can I look at your requirements?

*sees user-defined fields, workflows, navigation, roles, styling, customization everywhere*

D:

There is nothing more fulfilling than working you ass off 2 days, learning a new technology, and getting it to finally work as per the requirements and then ...

getting told that the absolute cunt of a client forgot the release date, announced its release 2 days early and decided to casually ask why there is no app on the released URL (it's a tiny Agonizing Reality [AR] app meant as a gimmick on the invitation cards for an upcoming convention).
My boss told me, the thing I worked on is now being scrapped and will not be released.

Yes, I wish the clients could slowly die in agony by a tree growing out of their appendix. Nature shall reclaim their corpses and feed a happy pig which I would happily have a feast of. 🤗

Attention: incomming resentful boiled up for months rant.

Hands down G2APAY is the worst because:

Merchant account aproval takes fcking months. It starts with unreasonable delays in documents approval. I mean insane nitpicking. They want to see merchants name surname and address on every god damn document that you submit even if for example bank statement doesnt include these details. I had to manually edit pdf’s just so that they would fck off and approve the merchant application. Insane requirements for document check also combined with their email only support answering only once a week you will have to wait one month just to get your account approved.

Then you get to the fun part, approval proccess for vendor gateway and webhook integration. They are nitpicking everything you can imagine: about website not having https, website forum missing some icons, merchants phone number being from another country then he is, and bunch of other hundreds of problems imagined only by them. Again combined with their one email reply per week policy you will waste atleast one month to finish up your integration.

Now finally you are their client and you think you can chill and go back to focusing on your business? Nope bro. Prepare for threatening emails. Last time I got a request to install https or my merchant application will be shut down. I was given 3 days notice on a fcking friday and had to do it.

Then g2a backend is crashing quite often. Combined with their one email per week policy you are fcked in the ass if your users were not able to pay through g2a and you will get no compensation.

Their backend documentation is shiet. Not clear how to integrate everything and after you integrate they make changes without publishing any changesets. Your integration is working? Good luck if it will still be working tomorrow.

And the very worst part is that they stopped proccessing credit cards like month ago with zero notice. Its been weeks and still zero news about bringing card proccessing back. They sad that they were acquired by some other company so shitty support got even shittier now while they are in a proccess of handover.

So yeah thats the worst vendor I have ever seen in my life. For example integrating paypal took me 30 minutes. Integrating stripe and getting all documents reviewed took me one business day. Same with paymentwall integration and document approval took 1 business day. Support is amazing and even have a phone number that I can reach if urgent problems arise. Thats how it should be. Thats why I can pay percentage of my transactions with a smile for them.

Sorry for the typos since im typing on my shiet phone while driving.

Eat a bag of dicks g2apay. I hope you go bankrupt and shutdown.

Client : I want an online store

Me: oh nice, send me your requirements document and a preferred website.

Client: 24hours later, sends me images of the products... wtf

So I took up a website development project, and the customer sent me a clear requirements document (yay!). I make the website, show the demo and boom, suddenly the client wants COMPLETELY different things. Fml.

Client: "Please make carrots with these tomato seeds."
Me: "But that's not possible."
Client: "These are strict requirements. Or we have to find someone who can."

** takes said tomatoes and makes them physically look carrots. Presents said carrots excited that I may pull this off **

Client: "These carrots are not blue like all known carrots. We've decided to go with someone else."

Ffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuu

Lately it seems that I end up knowing more about the client's requirements than the client themselves. Does it seem very weird as a developer for this to happen?

It was 3 months project, but it takes 9... bad management and the client changed his requirements every weekend. I quit the job after it.

Client: We are completely unable to plan a construction project successfully. We want you to use AI to do all of our project planning for us. Our requirements are that instead of needing to spend any money or time planning we just want to press a button and have a computer instantly put together all of our project plans for us. The program also needs to identify optimizations on it’s own and change all related plans enterprise-wide. All copies of the plans should be able to be kept up to date at all times so we’re never looking at an old plan again. We also want the ability to print.

Dev: …

Client: we need a report that <unclear requirements>
Me: alright, here's what you requested.
Client: that's not what I asked for.
Inner me: THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT YOU ASKED FOR!! WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK REEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

This is a message to all “yes man” developers:

Yeah… we just got in that the client has new requirements for you to complete by EOD:

1. Go to the gas station
2. Buy two gallons of gasoline
3. Order two 2 ft long dildos online
4. Go to the center of your town
5. Scream “fuck me corporate daddy, I’ll do anything for you” 100 times
6. Shove one dildo into ur ass and one in your mouth
7. Pour gasoline all over yourself
8. Light yourself on fire
9. Contemplate what little self respect you have for yourself and the rest of the world…

We had 1 Android app to be developed for charity org for data collection for ground water level increase competition among villages.

Initial scope was very small & feasible. Around 10 forms with 3-4 fields in each to be developed in 2 months (1 for dev, 1 for testing). There was a prod version which had similar forms with no validations etc.

We had received prod source, which was total junk. No KT was given.

In existing source, spelling mistakes were there in the era of spell/grammar checking tools.

There were rural names of classes, variables in regional language in English letters & that regional language is somewhat known to some developers but even they don't know those rural names' meanings. This costed us at great length in visualizing data flow between entities. Even Google translate wasn't reliable for this language due to low Internet penetration in that language region.

OOP wasn't followed, so at 10 places exact same code exists. If error or bug needed to be fixed it had to be fixed at all those 10 places.

No foreign key relationships was there in database while actually there were logical relations among different entites.

No created, updated timestamps in records at app side to have audit trail.

Small part of that existing source was quite good with Fragments, MVP etc. while other part was ancient Activities with business logic.

We have to support Android 4.0 to 9.0 of many screen sizes & resolutions without any target devices issued to us by the client.

Then Corona lockdown happened & during that suddenly client side professionals became over efficient.

Client started adding requirements like very complex validation which has inter-entity dependencies. Then they started filing bugs from prod version on us.

Let's come to the developers' expertise,
2 developers with 8+ years of experience & they're not knowing how to resolve conflicts in git merge which were created by them only due to not following git best practice for coding like only appending new implementation in existing classes for easy auto merge etc.

They are thinking like handling click events is called development.

They don't want to think about OOP, well structured code. They don't want to re-use code mostly & when they copy paste, they think it's called re-use.

They wanted to follow old school Java development in memory scarce Android app life cycle in end user phone. They don't understand memory leaks, even though it's pin pointed by memory leak detection tools (Leak canary etc.).

Now 3.5 months are over, that competition was called off for this year due to Corona & development is still ongoing.

We are nowhere close to completion even for initial internal QA round.

On top of this, nothing is billable so it's like financial suicide.

Remember whatever said here is only 10% of what is faced.

- An Engineering lead in a half billion dollar company.

The moment when I email the client about their recent changes in the requirements and the reply is "I am altering the deal. Pray that I don't alter it any further"

That's it, where do I send the bill, to Microsoft? Orange highlight in image is my own. As in ownly way to see that something wasn't right. Oh but - Wait, I am on Linux, so I guess I will assume that I need to be on internet explorer to use anything on microsoft.com - is that on the site somewhere maybe? Cause it looks like hell when rendered from Chrome on Ubuntu. Yes I use Ubuntu while developing, eat it haters. FUCK.

This is ridiculous - I actually WANT to use Bing Web Search API. I actually TRIED giving up my email address and phone number to MS. If you fail the I'm not a robot, or if you pass it, who knows, it disappears and says something about being human. I'm human. Give me free API Key. Or shit, I'll pay. Client wants to use Bing so I am using BING GODDAMN YOU.

Why am I so mad? BECAUSE THIS. Oauth through github, great alternative since apparently I am not human according to microsoft. Common theme w them, amiright?

So yeah. Let them see all my githubs. Whatever. Just GO so I can RELAX. Rate limit fuck shit workaround dumb client requirements google can eat me. Whats this, I need to show my email publicly? Verification? Sure just go. But really MS, this looks terrible. If I boot up IE will it look any better? I doubt it but who knows I am not looking at MS CSS. I am going into my github, making it public. Then trying again. Then waiting. Then verifying my email is shown. Great it is hello everyone. COME ON MS. Send me an email. Do something.

I am trying to be patient, but after a few minutes, I revoke access. Must have been a glitch. Go through it again, with public email. Same ugly almost invisible message. Approaching a billable hour in which I made 0 progress. So, lets just see, NO EMAIL from MS, Yes it appears in my GitHub, but I have no way to log into MS. Email doesnt work. OAuth isn't picking it up I guess, I don't even care to think this through.

The whole point is, the error message was hard to discover, seems to be inaccurate, and I can't believe the IRONY or the STUPIDITY (me, me stupid. Me stupid thinking I could get working doing same dumb thing over and over like caveman and rock).

Longer rant made shorter, I cant come up with a single fucking way to get a free BING API Key. So forget it MS. Maybe you'll email me tomorrow. Maybe Github was pretending to be Gitlab for a few minutes.

Maybe I will send this image to my client and tell him "If we use Bing, get used to seeing hard to read error messages like this one". I mean that's why this is so frustrating anyhow - I thought the Google CSE worked FINE for us :/

>"We need this project finished for tomorrow"
<"But we don't even know what the client wants for parts X, Y and Z"
I'm currently in a sinking ship of a company that has no proper project management or documentation. Requirements mutate with the lead manager's biorhythms and all projects are delayed because he's incapable of scouting or retaining talent.
Unless I've misread their financial situation, I don't think they'll stay in business throughout the year without some major restructuring.

This is long rant/story:

My manager conducts sync-up meetings regularly. The idea is to sync up all developers on current state of work. He does’t conduct stand-ups. He doesn't have time for it. He rather discusses on individual basis if we are blocked. The rule of the sync-up meeting is NOT to discuss any blockers or problems but simply explain each other what we are doing and how we plan next.

Sometime ago, the manager brought up and explained a new way of working in the sync-up meeting. At this point, a new developer in the team was absent due to sickness.

Today, there was a sync-up meeting and the manager started to question the new member about the newly introduced way of working. He was unaware of it and the manager never communicated this important information via email or any mode of communication available.

So, the conversation goes on as follows:

"Manager": — "Why didn’t you complete your task as per the new way of working?"
"Employee": — "Well, I've no idea. Am I supposed to do? I’ve been working as usual like any other"

"Manager": — "We have a new process and you have failed to follow it, so we’re late in delivering your work"
"Employee": — "I’ve already finished my work on time. I've raised a pull-request this morning"

"Manager": — "It doesn’t matter, it is not merged to main branch and so we can’t include your work in the release"
"Employee": — "I’ve no idea about the new process"

"Manager": — "Haven’t you asked around about what happened from previous meeting"
"Employee": — "Yes, I have. I was told which tasks were handled, but nothing about a new process"

"Manager": — "Aren’t you interested to learn it?"
"Employee": — "Why won’t I be interested? I was on a sick leave and I have no clue what happened here"

"Manager": — "What’s happened is past now, let’s not focus on it"
"Employee": — <Dumbfounded>
The Employee felt ashamed in front of everyone. He did his job but it didn’t pay off.

…. After an hour … the Employee had a talk with the Manager

"Employee": — "You shouldn’t have pointed me out in front of everyone. It made me feel real bad. You should have emailed this information if its important for the team."
"Manager": — "I have no idea what you’re talking about. When did I say so? I think you’ve a bright future in the team. You should be focusing on doing better things."

Employee goes back to work. A minute later, the Manager sends a PowerPoint screenshot of the process in the group chat.

**The Process**
It's about delivering release packages based on priorities defined by client. Each release package is a set of work items or requirements. Individual developers are assigned to work items. They are expected to deliver on planned delivery timelines in order to consider a work item into a release package.

Just love it when the client discloses their requirements in phases. M sitting here with the complete stack waiting for him to come online and fuck me a little more as he discloses the next phase. Client's done this 3 times already. Fuck that asshole.

Supervisor: Go interview the client for requirements
Client:i want insert,update blablabla and searching,
Me: Delete?
Client:Nope we want store the data blablabla forever..
*after few weeks*
Supervisor:Can i see the progress?
Me: sure
Supervisor: where is the delete function? I want the delete button !!
Me: :/ *why the hell i hav to meet the client if i need to fllow my supervisor requirements*

#PracticalStudent #Internship #Confusing

Well... I can think of several bugs that I found on a previous project, but one of the worst (if not the worst, because the damage scope) it's one bug that only appears for a couple of days at the end of every month.

What happens is the following: this bug occurs in a submodule designed (heh) to control the monthly production according the client requirements (client says "I want 1000 thoot picks", that submodule calculates the daily production requirements in order to full fill the order).

Ideally, that programming need to be done once a week (for the current month), because the quantities are updated by client on the same schedule, and one of the edge cases is that when the current date is >= 16th of the month, the user can start programming the production of the following month.

So, according to this specific case, there's an unidentified, elusive, and nasty bug that only shows up on the two last days of every month, when it doesn't allow to modify/create anything for the following month. I mean, normally, whenever you try to edit/create new data, the application shows either an estimated of the quantities to produce, or the previous saved data. But on those specific days it doesn't show any information at all, disregarding of there's something saved or not.

The worst thing is that such process involves both a very overcomplicated stored procedure, and an overcomplicated functionality on the client side (did I mentioned that it dynamically generates a pseudo-spreadsheet with the procedure dataset? Cell by cell), that absolutely no one really fully understands, and the dude that made those artifacts is no longer available (and by now, I'm not so sure that he even remember what he done there).

One of the worst thing is that at this point, it's easier to handle with that error rather to redesign all of that (not because technical limitations, but for bureaucratic and management issues).

The another worst thing (the most important none) is that this specific bug can create a HUGE mess as it prevents the programming of the production to be done the next day (you know, people tends to procrastinate and start doing things at the very end of the day/week/month)... And considering that the company could lose a huge amount of money by every minute without production, you can guess the damage scope of this single bug.

Anyway, this bug has existed since, I don't know, 2015 (Q4?) and we have tried so many things trying to solve it, but that spaghettis refuse to be understood (specially the stored procedure, as it has dynamically generated queries). During my tenure (that ended last year) I spent a good amount of time (considering what I mentioned on the last rant, about the toxic environment) trying to solve that, just giving up after the first couple of weeks.

Anyway... I'm guessing that this particular bug will survive another 4-ish years, or even outlive the current full development team... But, who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ?

Me: (Talking to new recruits) "Remember, you should only ever work on one project at a time. The different requirements, complications, and resolution times will fuck you over. That's the last thing you need, being new to the team and all that. If the client needs more man power, then-" (you get the idea)

Also me: 3 monitors and working on 4 projects. *Sips coke*

If the client wants too increase the scope or change requirements, that's fine but put the difficult decision in their hands.

Do you want to delay delivery or drop something else.

Not really a rant (?)

I started my first programming job in January this year. I went there staight after Highschool, so i had no real experience, knew only the basics of software development and my written code was quite a mess. So one of my first real tasks (after 2 months) was to write a business logic for batch handling (for a warehouse management system). I invested quite some time to develop a suitable architecture, talked with some other developers and wanted to cover the whole thing with unit tests (which really nobody at the company uses). So I spent about 3 weeks to write the whole thing, test it and improve it many times. It worked perfectly and I got pretty good feedback from the code-review.

1 month ago - the code worked perfectly and was multiple times testet (also by the client) - the client came with some totally new requirements for the batch handling. I tried to impelemt them, but soon found out, that the architecture doesn't supported them, it was not build for the required handling and would soon become a totally mess, if i tried to make it work.

So I was pretty mad, because I had to change the whole fucking thing, but I also wanted to make it better. I hab gained some experience and decided (with some help of a senior dev) to make a completely new try with a different architecture, that can be easily expanded, if needed. I build my concept, wrote and tested the whole new code in 3 days. Fucking 3 days compared to the initial 3 weeks, and it worked, better and even faster.

I was quite pissed to delete the old code, and especially that i had wasted 3 weeks for it and had to struggle with many different things. But I lerarned so much from it and also in the months between, that I was also really glad that I had the opportiunity to write it again.

This whole thing made me now realize that this is, what I really like to do and what I'm good in. I really enjoy learning new things and for me, programming is the best and easiest way to do it. Despite alle the cons and annoying side effects of it, I really found my dream job here.

Why are banks so absolutely archaic and stupid when it comes to tech? I work in a Services based company and currently engaged with a very famous bank to build accounting software for Mutual Funds. The day to day stupidity of this client is driving me absolutely crazy.

They couldn't give us proper requirements, and my company was stupid enough to kickoff the project without official sign off. Not only did they change the requirements, but they added a shit ton MORE features, and essentially bullied us into completing it all in the same timeline. Their attitude is pathetic, they shit talk our dev team, they make us build the worst possible UX, and then complain that it's not looking good and not working well. They have absolutely no idea about any of the technical stuff and think that software is a magic box that will give them what they want.

I swear I have a lot of examples but I'm so angry right now that my words are fumbling and I can't think straight. Stand up is in 45 minutes and I'm just dreading it. Idk how to tell everything, it's just... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

We rewrote the whole thing, except for iFraming some old pages in. We had to, the system was fucking awful and couldn't cope with any of the new mission critical requirements.

Client didn't understand the scope. Our project leader somehow snuck it in and we worked on it for months. We were sure we'd be kicked off the whole project... Somehow things didn't crash and burn. How it didn't blow up defies rational thought and the laws of physics. The new system worked, the client was happy, and boss made a lot of money.

Lead dev worked weekends for what feels like an eternity, it really was his baby and no one else on our company could have done it. It's where I finally learned how to do things the proper way; DDD, unit testing and TDD, architecture, building strong components in front-end, you name it. Before that I had a great nose for code smells and how not to do stuff, but now I got to see a proper system for the first time. It was glorious.

Then lead dev left and the system degraded quite a bit because new team didn't keep to the architectural patterns or general best practices. But we had a good run.

A few years ago, i had a task to implement a webservice of an insurance-company into our .NET Development.

The security requirements of this insurance-company webservice were top notch.
As a client you had to build a request that used a negotiated certificate, canonical header structures, security timestamp, a secret token in header, ...

To configure all this stuff via web.config WCF was pure pain in the ass.

After many phonecalls and emails, i finally managed to meet all security requirements to send a valid request.

First, i didn't recognized my breakthrough, because my client still had thrown exceptions while calling the insurance-webservice.

Why was that?

The exception told me on the most possible gentle way, that .Net isn't able to process an unsecured response, when there was a secured request before.

So there was top notch security for requesting, but dumbass unsecured responding with all the precious customer information.

*epicfacepalmnuclearexplosionfollowing*

I even had to raise the. Net Version of our. Net client, because i wasn't able to configure that it is allowed to process an unsecured response after using a secured request.

Whyyyyyyy?!!?!!1el even!?!

Film a documentary/reality television series chronicling how A. I.'s eventually self destruct trying to make sense of client requirements.

I once went to a client to get a brief for a website (the twat can't be bothered to write it, so he gets me to do it). I wrote all the details down and fired as many questions as I could. When I got back I wrote up the notes into a brief and sent it back to check before I costed it. He said it was spot on, so I sent an estimate. A few days later he must have shown it to another director, they both call me on speaker phone. Them: Will it do this, will it do that? Me: "It" doesn't exist, if you want to add some requirements then write or extend the brief and I will re-cost it.
They ignored that and rang a little later. Them: We have been discussing it, will it do .... and will it do.... Me: I repeated what I had said earlier, but my tone of voice had changed to reflect my annoyance. I never heard from these pathetic twats again. Moral: I always do background checks on a company, as well as accounts and financials check it's good to tap in to your network of colleagues, designers, freelancers. It can set the alarm bells going long before you commit any time.

If I were to do-over, I would:

- Know that the world is MUCH bigger then even the largest city in the most populous country, and I get to pick where I'm going. So I'm going where the grass is green and bosses are not allowed to physically assault their employees, thank you very much.
- Do not care for missing or useless requirements, and only deliver the PoC. the requirements will all change the very second a client, BA or boss look at the PoC, anyway. Let them come.
- know that companies will replace you and do not need you, just as you do not need them. fuck their needs and live your own life. If they ask for overnight unpaid overtime, leave immediately and laugh all the way home.

I have started a new journey on a company on Jabuary 25. I put a lot of effort but apparently the client told my employer I took too many time in my onboarding process (they expected me to be ready in two weeks or less) and they deactivated my slack account (this was on monday, because although I had holidays I turn on my machine in order to advance). The client said this on friday and I got awared on monday. I feel frustrated... Because I put a lot of effort resuming the documentation and even my team mates said it was unfair; some of them took longer than two weeks and they havent make a PR.
So it seemed to me strange as I said... Some of the conclusions we arrived were: We should ask for credentials 1 week before. The other thing was: The guy who technically interviewed me was really important in the project and he has a cool posibility on Barcelona (spain). We assumed that the client feel angry or sad about this and because they want to keep still the relation but want other provider to supply that dev guy, they arose with silly and stupid time requirements. I did all I could taking into account they didnt give me all the credentials at the same time; the first one came one week after.
Soooo here I am... Enjoying a good bench time and learning angular !!!!... sincerely... I wanted to release some shots to the air jaja

When client keeps changing requirements..

Client: can you build a website like that for the MissWorld competition and it should have a payment gateway.
Me: what other requirements do you have?
Client: hmmn..just something to showcase our agency.
Me: what's ur budget?
Client: around $100
Me: ** you must be kidding **

We accepted a property listing project for a client.
I have been looking online for references and inspiration regarding design, features, plugins etc.

And this is what I just found. I shit you not. $20 and you get everything. WTF.

May be I will just buy it and give it to my client. $20 and you have like 40 lines of features, if not lied, which are more than enough to meet my client's requirements.

Why the heck am I working?
Am I the one who is charging too high to my client?

Describe one instance when you thought, "Fuck this shit, I'm done with this client". Preferably when the client came up with stupid/impossible requirements

...a project with well defined requirements that doesn't change shape every day making useless any attempt to define a solid code structure...my dear client I can do all you want but you can't change your ideas every 10 minutes

I was sitting in a client meeting recently and we were discussing the client's social media requirements. We said we'll setup Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google+ profiles when the replied "What about Whatsapp?"

We said "That's a messaging app".

Client "Well, we want to receive messages, so set us up with a Whatsapp profile too"

Fun day at work.
Client sends me requirements over WhatsApp voice notes.
Says he can't send email because hes too tired.
His Requirements don't make sense.

I figured out what he wanted and then rewrite the requirements using simple language and less jargon.

Hes not happy. I reduced two paragraphs of his "requirements" to a single sentence which make more sense.
His voice notes seem like rambling.

Ugh.
He comes up with features for this webapp that cannot be tested unless you build the companion app which is coming up later.

Now he wants us to design the screens for the app which we will have to use our designer for.
Expensive. Considering most of his app is not completely thought out.
I have no idea what to do now.
We still haven't completed the requirements.

Alright apache2.2 with php5.6 session upload progress works, client has apache2.4 and php7 on his server...now... WHY THE HELL DON'T IT WORK. All THE DAMN REQUIREMENTS ON THE DAMN DOCS ARE THERE. Fuck i could have went to bed and made the same progress

If any of you have been following my last few rants, you'll know I've been working on a project with a particularly difficult client, trying to meet wholly unrealistic deadlines with only one other developer.

The situation has reached the climax. The client had a call with our project manager and boss on Monday to discuss things. Despite them still not having paid a single bill since October, they've demanded the release date be moved to the 6th April. Apparently we'd agreed to release on this date, despite making no such promises, the (optimistic) deadline we were working towards has always been, since it was set about 2 weeks ago, the 16th April.

Apparently AWS migration won't take as long as we think it will, because the designers that do the CSS for this project say so, despite knowing nothing about the architecture of the requirements of the system once live (like if backups are required and what of).

The bottom line is that client is ending development with us the day after the project goes live to give it to their own in-house team. If they want us to work more after the date, they have to buy blocks of days.

To make things better, a large part of new functionality relies on an external API we can't even begin to do learning tests with, let alone integrate due to back-office errors on their end. They've had since Friday to give us our token, yet here we are.

Something tells me my holidays booked for for the first week of April are going by the wayside.

I'm finishing up the most depressing client engagement ever. Ultimately it all traces back to their worthless Expert Beginner EA who thinks he's a genius but can't write code. I don't mean that he's not great at it. It's some of the worst I've ever seen by a person in his position.

In the time I have left here I could do so much to help them clean this stuff up so that future developers could ramp up more easily and there wouldn't be tons of duplicate code.

But I've just given up. You can't help someone who thinks their code is perfect. I don't even bother suggesting stuff any more (like don't have two methods in a class - a "real" one and one for unit testing) because he gets mad or just says that's his "pattern."

If I have a useful improvement, first he'll want me to put all new code in some new library, which is fine as an end result but you don't start with putting single-use code in a library separate from where you're using it. You work with it for a while to see what's useful, what's not, and make changes. But, you see, he just loves making more libraries and calling them "frameworks."

He tells me what he wants me to name classes, and they have nothing to do with what the classes do. When you haven't done any development yet you don't even know what classes you're going to create. You start with something but you refactor and rename. It takes a special breed of stupid to think that you start with a name.

I've even caught the dude taking classes I've committed and copying and pasting them into their own library - a library with one class.

The last time we had to figure out how to do something new I told everyone up front: Don't waste time trying to figure out how you want to solve the problem. Just ask the EA what he wants you to do. Because whatever you come up with, he's going to reject it and come up with something stupid that revolves around adding stuff to his genius framework. And whatever he says you're going to do. So just skip to that.

So that's the environment. We don't write software to meet requirements. We write it to add to the framework so that the EA can turn around and say how useful the framework is.

Except it's not. The overhead for new developers to learn how to navigate his copy-pasted code, tons of inheritance, dead methods, meaningless names, and useless wrappers around existing libraries is massive. Whatever you need to do you could do in a few hours without his framework. Or you can spend literally a month modifying his framework to do the same thing. And half the time his code collapses so that dozens of applications built on his framework go down at once.

I get frameworks. They can be useful, but only if they serve your needs, not the other way around.

I've spent months disciplining myself not to solve problems and not to use my skills.

Good luck to those of you who actually work there. I am deeply sad for the visa worker I'm handing this off to. He's a nice guy and smart. If he was stupid then he wouldn't mind dragging this anchor behind him like an ox pulling a plow. Knowing the difference just makes it harder.

So I snapped during pointing session and told the BA that I didn’t have time to explain software engineering to the team….then they proceeded to make up new requirements that the client didn’t ask for which resulted in more complex error handling that presents the user with a list of generic message; I try really hard to keep implementation details out of those meetings, because all it does is bog down the team and waste time, but I suppose I fell into that trap.

*Dev is non-native english speaker

Dev: we need the VPN ip.
Me: the server ip or the connected device ip.
Dev: the server.
Me: gets the ip.
Dev: this doesn't work, is this the VPN ip ?
Me: Gives the device ip. Works.
Dev: OK. Works now.

Could have just asked for the client IP in the first place but s/he didn't know how to.

I have been trying to freelance for people who don't speak english as a first language and getting the Requirements is the hardest part of the job. 😫 .

P.S. Suggestions needed from remote freelancers. What's your workflow like.

How do you feel when in the middle of tight deadline, your client calls you and tells you that he has changed some little detailing in the requirements, like naming, color schema etc. This needs to be done within the deadline. You tell yes and tell him to send email.
After receiving the email, you find out it's not little it's bag of new features listing.
Now either you have to overwork or let the client go....

Oh Lord give me the strength and the brainpower to step a way from freelancing or at least overcome the humongous pile of shite tied to the aforementioned barely lucrative activity.
AMEN !!

Recently got a client. We had an agreement on requirements, deadlines and on pricing. It's a job that can be done in a week if all the resources are at hand.
He reaches back a couple of days later and says :

Him: Listen I am on an intermediate...
Me: Mmhmm.
Him: I had a talk with the actual owner and he can only pay you in June.
Me: I see, but that I can't do. That means if the website is live by the 15th I'll have to wait for 2 weeks at least before getting paid.
You'll have to come up with something that makes more sense.

fml.

Got a pretty epic message yesterday:

"Hi, I just had a friend on phone and we got a rather "simple" idea for a website. 

Just a user ID and a password users would pay for. Then they would get access to their videos.

We are willing to pay 350 bucks for a working version and up to 680 depending on the result at the end of the project. 

Know anyone that could be interested? Or would you be? 

Have a good night. "

Solid.

Many of you commented on my previous rant regarding my first ever freelance gig that I would definitely be back with even more to rant... here I am.

What was supposedly a 1 to 1.5 month long project became one that is stretching beyond 3, if lucky, else 4 months long. Requirements and scope evolving more complex and with variations more intense than pokemon evolutions.

I fucked up. I signed a contract that nobody would have. I didn't plan or protect my ass enough to prevent such shit from happening. I severely underestimated and hence under quoted. This is one of the nightmare situations a freelancer could be in (in my opinion). I mean it could only get better... Right? I'm preparing myself for one hell of a payment at the end of the project. Brace yourself, payment is hopefully coming as fast as the number of seasons it took for winter to come in GoT.

On the bright side, I'm currently working on a new project with a client that is indeed much much better than this first. I mean he is a nice person and communications thus far has been nothing short of great.

I guess it's good to start with your expectations rock bottom, that way nothing else can be worse, I hope.

Been developing a "3 months planned" project for almost a year now because PM cant say no to requirements, ive been finding previously disabled functionalities that client is asking for again, i think this is never going to end...

Is it just me or are all the stoopid people in middle management? Why do these clueless people always impose completely nonsense requirements? Like 'You have to process all entered client data but you are not allowed to store it, nowhere, because of GDPR, storing data is evil!' But when customer logs on all his not persisted data has to be pushed to the frontend immediately. WTF THIS IS CRAZY

Couple of advices from the QA guy

1) Don’t do the bare minimum bc the PM asks that. The people that write up the tasks/requirements don’t know their shit sometimes. Or even worse, they just copy paste what the client asked.
2) Confront the PM and ask more time to build something robust and scalable. When shit don’t work, people will blame the devs which is not fair. Is not easy but put your foot down when you’ve being asked to build shitty stuff bc the client want it ready now.

When freelancing, do you charge for estimations?

Situation is that I'm a sole android developer (4 years experience) and each time I encounter some agency or a client I feel like I'm between a rock and hard place.

Some of the clients come with ready with list of requirements and ready backend/design sketch and they want me to give them a rough estimate.

It's as if they expect me to take only 2-3 hours for estimation and that's it. But actually this was the second time where I had to spend around 10 hours investigating everything so I would be able to give a half decent estimation at least.

This particular client's project turned out to be a mess and I had to spend 10+ hours to estimate only 70% of his project. I asked him if he would be able to pay under a reduced tarrif and the client was shocked, started doubting my competence level and so on.

In the end I gave him a rough 400 hours estimate and he started complaining that others estimated only 200 hours for his project. So in the end I just wasted my time.

Now it's my bad that I voluntarely invested too much time in this estimate without notifying client prior that I might ask to pay for estimation, next time I will try to do this ahead of time.

It feels like only big agencies who have free resources have a competetive edge against sole freelancers, it really sucks wasting so much time to estimate half baked requirements and assets. Also most of these clients and agencies are purely lazy and most of the time they don't even plan signing, all they need is someone to estimate their work for them.

I'm thinking of starting to charge for estimations and communications in a form of consultations. Is that a good idea?

So I am a Software Engineer at a small scale company.
I need to coordinate with customers, understand the requirements and design and develope the solutions.
These sometimes include changing the current product a bit and customize it to fit the client needs or maybe creating a plug-in that could work with the current product and get the job done.

I love the research, design and planning part of the job, I would be super focused and will find solutions for complex stuff. Plan it all to the smallest things.
I know the solution so I can think of what code would be there what would be needede whats already there etc.

But when it comes to coding the solution my laziness kicks in.
My mind is like you already know the solution why you need to code it to.

Then I start procrastinating and end up putting myself under a pile of stuff when the deadline approaches.

FML

if jira exists and client sends requirements via mail

I hate reactive management.

It's when your boss instills fake urgency every time a client asks for something close to impossible, or <x> competitor is doing something in a different way he deems the best.

Everything must be dropped, the sprint put on hold, fuck requirements, everybody has to do overtime, why are you not contributing?, why are you going home when you have to?, fuck do I care you have a 1 hour commute - this <y> thing has to be made by sunrise tomorrow or it's a showstopper.

And it's never a showstopper. 90% of the time the feature gets dropped one-two months down the line.

Everytime I applied long leave, my client and PM will plan for important feature, but they say start the sprint and for other new people i have to give KT, and they will take care. I know how that will screw up the system. So at the time it's nightmare​ late night at office, in office time KT, no weekends, stand-up for 1hr(every time QA will ask, what we get after this sprint). Stupid clients changing the requirements after stand-up.

Everytime code base screwed and need to refactoring. So as much as possible core functionality I'll complete and only bug fixing for newbie. I hate those days.

When i hire devs at my company i will treat them exactly the same way i was treated.

At first I'll hire by normal procedures top level engineers so my company can live. And then I'll continue hiring even after all positions are closed. I'll fuck with all the engineers and anyone who wants to work for me by exactly the same way i was getting fucked with by 20+ companies -- I'll drag them around with 3+ interviews over the course of 4+ weeks and even if they fulfill all the requirements and knowledge and skills i require, I'll STILL reject them and degrade their self esteem. Fuck you. I'll fuck you up and degrade you and make you feel worthless -- exactly the same as i was treated.

I'll give them a vague rejection letter, that doesn't explain why they got rejected. Or just make up some bullshit reason for rejection that isn't even true. I'll also wait 2+ weeks additionally until i respond with rejection letter, just to fuck with people even more -- exactly the same way as i was treated.

If they put they have 7+ years of experience, I'll reject them because of not having 8+ years of experience -- exactly the same way as i was treated.

If they answer all technical questions correctly, I'll reject them and tell them I chose another candidate because they fit better -- exactly the same way as i was treated.

If they pass through 4 interviews after 1 month of interviews, I'll give them a positive feedback. And then ghost them with no response -- exactly the same way as i was treated.

On technical interviews I'll ask them some ridiculous questions no one knows and are not related to their job position, and then reject them for not knowing those answers -- exactly the same way as i was treated.

On HR interviews I'll milk the information from them of projects and clients they worked with, and then contact those clients to steal them from him so i can earn money and reject him instead with a vague reason -- exactly the same way as i was treated.

I'll give the developer a whole ass project to develop over the course of 10+ days, and then reject them for a vague reason, and use their source code to sell to my client while developer worked for 0$/hour and i got paid thousands -- exactly the same way as i was treated.

I now LIVE to build a company not because i want to earn money, not because i want to have a company, not because i like engineering (although all of those are true and i want to achieve), but now a NEW top priority goal and REASON i want to have a company -- is so i can be able to abuse innocent people mentally and psychologically. Degrade people. DESTROY their self esteem. I LIVE FOR THIS NOW. I AM FUCKING TIRED OF GETTING TREATED LIKE THIS UNDESERVINGLY AND NOT HAVING THE OPTION TO FIGHT BACK. I WILL NOW FIGHT BACK BY DOING THE SAME THING TO OTHER PEOPLE WHO ARE STRUGGLING AND DESPERATELY LOOKING FOR A JOB. I WANT TO CAUSE HARM AND VIOLENCE PSYCHOLOGICALLY.

EXACTLY. THE SAME. WAY. AS. I. WAS. TREATED.

!Dev
TL Dr :- Debugging a software I barely know about was slow and ended up breaking in the shop it was used in and reverting the changes does not solve the problem

I asked my father a few days ago why he was buying a dedicated server for his ERP software and not using a client computer as his server which he is doing in his shop currently. He said that it was slow on other computers in the LAN which is an wired. The solutions given by the company that made it did not work. Big bills would sometimes also dissapear which took around 30 minutes to make. So when he bought the computer to home during lockdown I pulled up the debugging guide from the company which summed up to check latency,ram and add these files to exclusion list of your antivirus. Latency was kinda high at the first when pinging another computer on the LAN but I was testing on WiFi so it could be pretty inaccurate. The computer met the ram requirements so that was not a problem. I checked the data path by opening the software and accidentally typed something but I did not worry since the changes needed to be manually accepted. I added the files to the Windows defender exclusion list and shut it down.

Next day :- My father calls me up and says the software is working on the server but is broken on other computers. So I check if the changes were automatically accepted for some reason and yes that happened. So so pull up a guide to configure the software in multi user mode and I replace the mistyped setting with the correct one and it still does not work. My father asks me to undo everything by using anydesk. I remove all the exclusions I added to Windows defender and disable windows firewall. Still does not work. Restart the computer and software. Still does not work. Check permissions on data folder. They are correct.

WTF I reverted all the changes I made and the software does not work on other computers.

This is a part rant-part question.
So a little backstory first:
I work in a small company (5 including me) which is mostly into consultation (we have many tech partners where we either resell their products or if there is a requirement from one of our clients, we get our partners to develop it for them and fulfill the client requirements) so as you can see there is a lot of external dependencies. I act as a one-hat-fits-all tech guy, handling the company websites, social media channels, technical documentation, tech support, quicks POCs (so anything to do with anything technical, I handle them). I am a bit fed up now, since the CEO expects me to do some absurd shit (and sometimes micro manages me, like WTF I am the only one who works there with 100% commitment) and expects me to deliver them by yesterday.

So anyway long story short, our CEO finally had the brains to understand that we should start having our own product (which i had been subtly suggesting him to do for a while now!).

Now he came up with a fairly workable concept that would have good market reach (i atleast give him credits for that) and he wanted me to suggest the best way to move forward (from a both business and technical point of view). The concept is to have an auction-based platform for users to buy everyday products.

I suggested we build a web app as opposed to a mobile one (which is obvious, since i didnt want to develop a seperate website and a mobile app, and anyway just because we can doesnt mean we have to make a mobile app for everything), and recommended the Node/react based JS tech stack to build it.

At first he wanted me to single handedly build the whole platform within a month, I almost flipped (but me being me) then somehow calmed down and finally was able to explain him how complicated it was to single-handedly build a platform of such complexity (especially given my limited experience; did I mention that this is my first job and I am still in college, yeah!!) and convinced him to get an experienced back-end dev and another dev to help me with it.

Now comes the problem, I was to prepare a scope document outlining all the business and technical requirements of the project along with a tentative cost, which was fairly straightforward. I am currently stuck at deciding the server requirements and the system architecture for the proposed solution (I am thinking of either going with AWS - which looks a bit complicated to setup - or go with either Digital Ocean or Heroku):

I have assumed that at peak times we would have around 500-1000 users concurrently

And a daily userbase of 1000 users (atleast for the first few months of the platform running)

What would be the best way forward guys?

I did some extensive (i mean i read through some medium blogs! and aws documentation) research and put together the following specs (if we are going through AWS):

One AWS t3.medium ec2 instance for the node server (two if we want High Availability by coupling with the AWS load balancer and Elastic Beanstalk)

The db.t3.small postgres database

The S3 Storage bucket (100gb) for the React Front end hosting

AWS SNS for email/sms OTP and notification

And AWS CloudMonitor for logging amd monitoring.

Am I speculating the requirements properly, where have I missed??

Can u guys suggest what is the best specification for such a requirement (how do you guys decide what plan to go with)?

Any suggestions, corrections, advices are welcome

Changing instances to arrays. So we've all had this issue:

Option 1 was the most flexible and abstract option where a lot of functionality could be built on this.

Option 2 was the fastest solution, that would solve only specific problems.

The whole Agile philosophy points to option 2. The problem is that clients will always want to add that functionality in option 1, and changing requirements makes us lose time, the precious resource that managers supposedly cherish, yet they always want us to choose the fast option.

We're at that point where the client wants to add functionalities, but since we already built with the previous requirements in mind. Ugh.

Changing instances to arrays.

I had to do a project for my A-levels.

The task was to get a client and develop and application based on their requirements. Naturally I made my friends my clients so that I could make something I was interested in.

The teacher constantly changed my requirements during the start, because he liked everyones applications to be somewhat similar (Probably easier to mark), which demotivated me.

The timescale we were set around easter time was to have a demo by the end of summer which didn't need to work properly, and then a completed version after the Christmas holidays.

I wrote about 90% of the program over my 2 weeks off for Christmas, most of that while drunk, high, or both, and managed to complete it within them two weeks.

I went back to the code a couple months later, with no memory of writing it, to set up a demo to show my teacher and I was actually surprised at it. It was the first project of that type that I had worked on, and while there were a couple noticable bugs, it actually worked fairly well, and was really well documented. I was expecting a pile of buggy spaghetti.

Another potential client contacted me, they wanted a website building. I asked what the aim of the site was to the reply "there's no aim, a friend said I should get a website".

They run a gardening service. So I gave them a few examples of aims. They decided they wanted to showcase their work with the hope that it would bring in more jobs.

I emailed them a list of requirements as we had decussed over the lengthy phone call.

Two weeks after no response I get a call, "is my website built yet"

I explained that with the tiny budget and without content there is nothing really that could be built.

Needless to say I never heard from him again

After three months of development, my first contribution to the client is going live on their servers in less than 12 hours. And let me say, I shall never again be doing that much programming in one go, because the last week and a half has been a nightmare... Where to begin...

So last Monday, my code passed to our testing servers, for QA to review and give its seal of approval. But the server was acting up and wouldn't let us do much, giving us tons of timeouts and other errors, so we reported it to the sysadmin and had to put off the testing.

Now that's all fine and dandy, but last Wednesday we had to prepare the release for 4 days of regression testing on our staging servers, which meant that by Wednesday night the code had to be greenlight by QA. Tuesday the sysadmin was unable to check the problem on our testing servers, so we had to wait to Wednesday.

Wednesday comes along, I'm patching a couple things I saw, and around lunch time we deploy to the testing servers. I launch our fancy new Postman tests which pass in local, and I get a bunch of errors. Partially my codes fault, partially the testing env manipulating server responses and systems failing.

Fifteen minutes before I leave work on the day we have to leave everything ready to pass to staging, I find another bug, which is not really something I can ignore. My typing skills go to work as I'm hammering line after line of code out, trying to get it finished so we can deploy and test when I get home. Done just in time to catch the bus home...

So I get home. Run the tests. Still a couple failures due to the bug I tried to resolve. We ask for an extension till the following morning, thus delaying our deployment to staging. Eight hours later, at 1AM, after working a full 8 hours before, I push my code and leave it ready for deployment the following morning. Finally, everything works and we can get our code up to staging. Tests had to be modified to accommodate the shitty testing environment, but I'm happy that we're finally done there.

Staging server shits itself for half a day, so we end up doing regression tests a full day late, without a change in date for our upload to production (yay...).

We get to staging, I run my tests, all green, all working, so happy. I keep on working on other stuff, and the day that we were slated to upload to production, my coworkers find that throughout the development (which included a huge migration), code was removed which should not have. Team panics. Everyone is reviewing my commits (over a hundred commits) trying to see what we're missing that is required (especially legal requirements). Upload to production is delayed one day because of this. Ended up being one class missing, and a couple lines of code, which is my bad (but seriously, not bad considering I'm a Junior who was handed this project as his first task at his first job).

I swear to God, from here on out, one feature per branch and merge request. Never again shall I let this happen. I don't even know why it was allowed to happen, it breaks our branch policies. But ohel... I will now personally oppose crap like this too...

Now if you'll excuse me... I'm going to be highly unproductive and rest, because I might start balding otherwise after these weeks...

I've actually already discussed this one on here I believe

I see this job looking for an android developer for Kotlin with UI experience with XD & Figma and experience with Firebase. I have all of these qualifications so I throw my resume into the fray within an 2 hours the recruiters contact me. they have an offer of 76,000 and I'm looking for junior so I'm like, eh whatever, I give them a copy of my resume and we hold discussion for a few days and then radio silence. I then see a job posting EXTREMELY similar but with a "different company" so I throw my resume in and again within 2 hours I get a call only THIS TIME ITS THE INTERNAL HR. She sounds interested we have a good conversation and sets me up for 96,000 and they schedule me for my first interview within the week. Interview goes great, next I meet with the CTO and we have a pretty good conversation, I'm expecting a technical exam but it doesn't happen instead they give me a case study. they send me requirements for an app API to use, architecture, and a week time span to do it. I finish the app with extra features within 6 days, in my understanding of MVVM and I was excited and happy about this app because its JUST NICE. a week goes by and I meet with the tech team. They grill me on my application, scalability, use cases, how would I advertise or place advertisement and I'm answering everything they love the UI (I included mockups I made on XD), they say everything sounds good everyone leaves with smiles they say they have to find out on what team to place me because they have multiple apps and that HR will be in contact with me in the next few days... A WEEK GOES BY and I randomly get the declination email that next Friday. When I asked for feedback they said it wasn't true MVVM. I was devastated until the next week when I was accepted for a higher paying job that didn't require me to move. After I accepted this job guess who calls? THE FIRST RECRUITER and for this long I was wondering if this was the same job due to the very similar job description so I ask "is your client XXXXXXX?" it was I just told him "I'm good" and hung up

I am working as business development officer,I was keeping on discussing requirement with my client since ,5-6 days she was almost ready next day she suddenly put the whole requirements which I help her to figure out what actually she want or look like she posted the same to upwork for other developers to bid.

Into a bunch of open source hogging meat heads because no one likes paying for things their own peers toil days and nights creating and creating more under documented over expensive licensed stuff (because agile) while throwing buzzwords to clients just make business while simultaneously choking the life out of underpaid overworked devs and engineers with the skill of running away from responsibility trying to save their own skin with the inept ability to look like a hero/King at the end of the day with a single mail sent with psychic communication or the lack thereof with people who are slogging their asses off to fix a problem created to the vulnerabilities and bugs introduced due to the impatience of the same moron who couldn't afford to give his employees/subordinates more time to figure out an elegant solution to a non existent problem created in the confusion of improperly documenting unnecessary requirements of an ignorant or unknowing client who is way too eager to process way too much load with way too less resources all the while whining about lack of features theyre not gonna use.

client has no clue what he wants and keeps changing the requirements of the projects; wants to deploy "to a desktop app like electron but faster, but also as a lib for developer to use on a server like a CMS" 🤦🏻‍♂️; takes two hours in a call and literally tells me that he want to "hear himself speak" so he can clarify what he needs...
me: NOP

This is the situation:

I worked on a small project on freelance.mx: The project name is: "A Grid System with Bootstrap and Hover.css | Fontawesome Combination"

By the time I finished it, the client changed almost half of the requirements and told me that I didn't complete the work as It was supposed to and asked me to change it. He wanted that grid system to work as a sidebar as well...

He asked me then to make some modifications and adapt the code to fit the new requirements. I said: "I would do that but I would need to charge you more for that since a grid system and a sidebar are two distinct things and also these are new requirements"

Today is 7 days since I haven't heard anything from him and I sent him a message. He said that I didn't finish the work properly and marked the work on the platform as "Incomplete".

What should I do? This is unfair... Is there any way I can get the payment from this guy?

This is the first job I have on freelance.mx and it will make me have bad reputation.

Any advice?

After a year of using mongo in prod and personal projects I have realised some things. Its really nice early on the project, especially when there are changing requirements and for small projects or proof of concepts.
But when you make commercial software things tend to get more complex and relational. Stakeholders want reporting and even a report building which a document store isn't the best at.
With most projects projects when they get big things get relational and this becomes more and more expensive to handle in terms of compute power and developer time.
I don't doubt mongo has its place, maybe as an secondary specialised data store or if the project is inherently document oriented.
Blog over.

Client gives requirement. I take time to code and design it and make it loook good. Client changes requirements . i lose passion on the project. I make a shitty app. I get bad rep

It's not a real dev regret but it's related to it: Not being able to fix a price or a value for my skills.
It's a real regret.
Just coming out of college I have tried my hand at freelancing at found it real hard to fix a value for what work was offered because I just found it weird to fix a monetary value on something that I've done for free for my entire life ( at school and uni I mean).
To make it worse my first experience was with a grad student who wanted me to complete her project.
Now being from India, I know that we have a stereotype of doing work for a lower price.
But this girl took the cake.
She wanted me to create a custom Image classifier using tensorflow.
It had to train with live images and then detect those images in the live video feed.
It's quite simple but still training the basic network(which would be used to just detect features) would take a decent amount of time and effort.
No pre trained models was also a prerequisite for her.
After hearing all her requirements I asked her what price she was willing to pay.
She said 50$ lump sum.
Being really confused as to what to say to that I just stopped replying.
To this day I have no clue what would be a reasonable price to quote a client like that.
After that I just continued dealing with people I knew personally and am currently doing that as an internship. But entering the proper freelancing system again has become a kinda weird thing in my head now, since I have no clue as to what price to put on my skills.
Is there any advice that any of the more experienced people would give?
Also consider the fact that I'm relatively fresh out of college and have no corporate experience.
Even if you've read my rant and have no advice it's okay. I guess this is a path of self realization after all.

New project last week*
Today:
Client asked for the trello board of the new project, but I didn't manage to create it because the requirements are vague.

Finished setting up the board today and clutched everything.

Lesson learned: pressure is key 😂

Do you have that one person you work with that you just can't stand for whatever reason?

I've been having a tough time with this one project at work and been falling behind because we hired a junior dev and 2 inexperienced freelancers. So to help me out my boss let me use his office for the day to avoid all of the noise.

I had been under the impression lately that I didn't like my job due to the constant context switching and being isolated for the day was a really nice refresher.

Then the project manager starts harassing me at 430pm saying the client is now expecting something deployed in the morning with no warning or requirements. Way to set client expectations.

That one moment made me realize that the context switching wasn't what I disliked about my work. It's that one person. They're so bad at what they do that it makes my job so much harder.

Ugh. So for one of my classes (Projects In Computer Science) we have to break up into groups; Around 4-6 people per group and build some software for different local companies in the city that I live in.

Well.... the company that my group chose is so damn frustrating. Essentially we are making a glorified Applicant Form system for their website (there's more to it than just that). So you would think that the company knew what sort of fields would be needed for these forms.... Well no, we are over a month into this project and still have barely began coding shit because they are so fucking slow to respond to our emails, don't pick up our calls, or put off doing absolutely anything related to our project! Our professor asked that we would have a written copy of the project requirements made and signed off by the client within the first 2 weeks of classes starting. Took them over a month to get around to that, and still even after signing off on the requirements said that they were missing key forms that we needed to account for... Its your damn fault for not telling us that. We completely wasted our time planning out the database and structuring the front-end/back-end to work for the forms they had given us, and now there's yet another one with inconsistent fields, meaning we need to rethink out most of our system to account for this data. We only have 3 months total, 1 which is already gone and practically wasted, and even still we don't have any sort of confirmation on what form fields we have to account for.

Fucking hell just spend a little bit of time for both our sake, and your own to get us the finalized forms fields and requirements for this project. Honestly at the rate things are going we probably wont be able to finish, which sucks ass since this project is perfect resume material.

Seriously this company desperately needs us to make them this program since their current system is absolute shit. They are literally getting a system that would cost upwards of $20,000 for free, yet they don't seem to care much that we probably wont be able to finish due to their faults. If we didn't have a time cap on this project I wouldn't really care, but the fact that we only have 3 months, plus school work in other classes, exams and a personal life, its making this project a lot more stressful than it needs to be.

Its not like we have a project manager either, so all the emailing and communication is being done by myself. Honest to god, all they have/had to do was sit down for 1 hour of time to decide what they all needed and we would probably have been able to finish this project.

I don't know if many rememeber me but at one point this year I had to turn UDP basically into tcp, handshake, packet ordering, resend on failed, ACK response, and 4k bit aes encryption. Fucking done, it works, signed the last version and pushed to client, client loved it, just what he wanted, paid out contract then turned around and asked me to setup his server for one day with no further expectations and an extra 250, said sure don't mind, as I am setting shit up I decided to test if his business isp really blocks tcp, guess what? NOPE IT WORKS JUSY FUXKIJG FINE AND I COILD HAVE KUST RIPPED A PREMADE CORE AND GOT PAID AND SET IT UP AND HE WOULD NEVER know, but maybe theirs some weird circumstances that require the core to be made only with udp, so after I was done I asked why only udp if his line allowed tcp? Requirements maybe? NOPE HE JUST DOSENT UNDERSTAND TCP FUUUUUUUQQQQHDJDIOAJEJDICJDNXIKZMZJDJCU

When your boss wants to use a WordPress plugin (online reservation system) but ended up customizing (client's requirements) it because of its limitation and wants you to finish it for a week because the client need it ASAP but adding those features will take a month to implement.

Hey remote workers.

What would be your advice for someone with experience that's interested in exploring remote work.

I'd like to target this question to remote workers that live outside USA/EU/UK. Say South America, South Asia.

A little introduction.

I'm a full stack engineer, did one project in embedded systems with QT/C++/RPI can do backend in Python, Node, Java, C#. I have some experience with React Native (just 2 apps)

I currently I do full stack with Node, React, postgres and caching with couchdb.
I gather requirements, write the projects, proposals and then I do the implementation. (Really full stack, I kinda like it though, when I'm bored with code I pick up an issue and contact the client to socialize/get answers. I found out that nondevs like to feel they talk to a human not a robot)

I'm making about 600usd/month (dev in a poor country) working 30hrs /week. I'd like to ramp up my income, working remote part time to fill up about 50hr week.

What can I expect?
Where do I start?
Are there part time opportunities for working remote?
What kind of roles are in demand?

I thought I posted about this awhile back but I didn't. I'm glad since the story is so much better now.
6 weeks ago: Told I'm going to be on a super fun JAMStack build with lots of sexy animations. Sweet, this will be a fun build!

5 weeks ago: Find out what the timeline on this incredibly ambitious project is. I start raising flags cause everything needs to go PERFECT for this to not blow up and/or turn in to a dumpster fire.

4 weeks ago: Project "kicks off" with a meeting with the client. We find out that they've decided to do another round of revisions on their design comps, but we have what we need for sprint 1. We provide a list of all the assets/information we still need for sprint 1 success.

3 weeks ago: Still waiting on some assets for sprint one, but we're fumbling our way through. Still waiting on the PM to get around to doing their PM job and building out our backlog / gathering requirements for us.

2 weeks ago: Sprint 1's end date comes and goes. Still need assets from the client, I've personally asked them for the same asset 3 different times. Sprint 1 gets extended 1 week.

1 week ago: We deliver sprint 1 page templates, minus the resources we're still waiting for. Get chewed out by the client regarding the pages not looking like their comps (Yeah, no shit sherlock, you never sent us the assets)

This week: Working on Sprint 2 commitments. We have 2x as many page templates to deliver, per developer, as we had the first sprint. Still waiting on Sprint 1 assets. Don't have Sprint 2 assets. Wait, what about the global styles? They still haven't sent those to us yet either.

Requirements? Guess I'll spend valuable dev time tracking those down for myself.

Client? Well, they're pissed off we haven't hit our commitments yet.

Oh well, at least we have a pimple faced, fresh out of college, CS major, with no real development experience rolling on to this cesspool of a project.

Other devs? Well, we're out of fucks to give. Lets just watch this thing burn.

Oh, I forgot to add, we have 17 page templates to deliever between today (2/27) and 3/18. #NoFuckingWay

So I've only been at my current company for about 9 months but from about a month in I had quite a few concerns regarding the ability level and knowledge of my fellow developer and line manager. The other developers skill set is severely lacking.

And the line managers knowledge of the web is about 10 years out of date.

A potential client approached us with a web project with some interesting requirements and features which I was looking forward to building.

6 months later the project lands on me to start.

Line manager leaves company for another job

I build out the project. Happy with how everything works. Send off for approval, and to client to test.

Client starts getting pissed off, because what I've built doesn't do anything they require. I look back at my brief confused.

Turns out that the project had been scoped out completely wrong. Not enough questions had been asked, and a lot assumptions had been made by my ex-line manager

All resulting in a very pissed off client who want their money back, which I completely support.

I try to salvage the relationship by rescoping the project asking the questions that should've been asked in the first place. Give some very generous timings. Client appreciates my efforts but ultimately decided they don't want to work with my company anymore

And that's that, a project I was genuinely looking forward to building, completely spoilt senior staff being incompetent.

I was very close to handing in my notice, fortunately, my new line manager is actually a developer.

I have a guy that will come in a few hours to discuss about an e-commerce website he wants to start his business. I've accepted to do it freelance.

Things are a little quick for my taste, but I know myself enough to know that if I don't jump head first, I'll back out and miss on an opportunity to add something valuable to my resume (and get a bit of money).

The thing is : I have nearly zero experience in 1) e-commerce websites and 2) client relationship and managing. So that will be a great challenge to me, but that's precisely what I need right now.

Anyway, I'm coming to you to ask a few questions : assuming his requirements are simple and common for an online shop, should I create it from scratch or would it be wiser to use a dedicated framework (Prestashop, Wix, etc.). If the latter, which one would you recommend, cost and efficiency-wise.

Still assuming simple and common requirements, how much time would it likely take, for an average developper (I'm no Linus Torvalds) working on average 8h a day ? More like 2-3 months, or more like 5-6 months ? I'm leaning more towards 2-3, but since I don't have experience in these kind of websites, I find a lot of user stories that might take me time to figure out.

Last but not least, what would be approximately an honest price, technical costs aside (domain, host, potential framework, etc.) for that kind of work. And for maintenance ?

MQTT - all I used to know about this is its name, untill few months back a client sent us some requirements which included MQTT. I opened its specification and I was fucking shocked! I am implementing almost similar protocol in most of my applications (which needs subscription based service) for last 3 years. I have developed IoT apps, remote monitoring systems, HMI systems using the same fucking protocol! Even I had implemented the same thing on HTTP using long polling a few years back!!

Now I feel like open sourcing my protocol. But I don't know where to start. Any help please?

You send out an email to your client with corrections on the requirements they have sent you (you know, those crappy requirements we all get), basically explaining how their application should work. They thank you for being there for them. An hour later, you get an email from the client with questions on why the development is going so slow...

Wow.

I started learning WordPress out of curiosity.
Configuration and deployment was easy peesy.
Site is up and running, BUT
Real challenge is, customize it according to clients requirement.
I purchased paid theme as well. It has theme builders installed to.

But I couldn't make it according to client requirements.

I neither found any resource where I could learn WP site customization.

What I'm doing wrong?

1: be able to fulfill my wishes without needing a dev genie, nor be bound to its rules
2: get an infinite number of wishes
3: be able to read minds without the need to see the person (to make understanding client requirements easier)
4: get the ability to find a solution for any problem
5: get a brain that doesn't forget anything, and can process multiple tasks and thoughts at once
7: change societal opinion, so that working is bad, and staying home 24/7 playing games is good and deserves a reward
8: get the ability to convince people and be socially acceptable
9: understand women

I can go on but that's all I can think of for now

What is challenging of becoming freelance programmer, is that not only have to deal with stupid requirements from the client, and attitude of certain client. We also need to face the challenges of other freelancer defaming you , bombard you with a bunch of negativity.

So here's the story, there is this guy knowing that I give the service for creating mobile app for 50USD and client happy with the price. While he get NONE of the business as the price is 80USD.

Bad (or at least uninformed due to unclear requirements) design decisions lead to somewhat perplexing (and above all, frustrating) problems down the line...

Here I am, wrote a cli client for event bus subscription, and since EC2 is eqv to Docker, had to fix the main function to keep it alive - now the deploy stage on the ci/cd pipeline fails due to startup script timing out. But why tho?

I’m not really sure whether I should’ve designed this differently from the get-go or whether my build and deploy configs don’t match anymore due to recent changes and I should figure out what’s wrong with them... or both.

Bottom line is: I have no idea what I’m doing.

A friend outsourced a project to us with partial requirements. We developed it as per the requirements and submitted the app and admin portal to his client. I was aware of certain critical features missing in the requirement. Generally we provide an admin portal to manage the backend of the app, but in this project a backend was to be made but the adding or modifying users section was not mentioned in the requirement. My team presented the project and convinced them to create or modify users writing SQL queries on the production DB (they are sales guys with no technical knowledge)

P.S - we won't be responsible for any DB errors :P

When the client expects miracles.