Owner of company I freelance for: I need you to find out what CMS [website] is running in.

[Checking...]

Me: It's running in Drupal

Owner: Prove to me that it's running in Drupal, because she's saying you're wrong.

Me: Who the hell is "she"?

Owner: The boss over at [PR Company we do work for]

Me: Is she a developer?

Owner: No, of course not. She barely knows how to run a computer.

Me: Then tell I said it's running in Drupal, and if she wants proof, tell her I'm the developer she has begged to fix two other failing projects and I have delivered both times ahead of schedule.

Owner: If you don't show me proof, I'll fire you. I don't need attitude from my employees.

Me: A.) I'm not your employee, you are my client. I don't clock in for you and you don't withhold taxes from my pay. B.) If that's how you want to be, tell her to use terminal and cURL the website for the response header, as well as cross-reference folder structure for CSS/JS file inclusion to show it's running in Drupal.

Owner: What the fuck is terminal?

Me: If you don't know what terminal is, neither will she, meaning you have no business telling me how to do my job. Stick with assigning me tasks and let me use my expertise to get them done. Micromanaging need not apply here, mmm'kay pumpkin?

Owner: You sure are grouchy today.

Me: Yep...

Things have been a little too quiet on my side here, so its time for an exciting new series:

practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 1: Dealing with the new backend team

It's great to be back folks. Since our last series where we delved into the mind numbing idiocy of former colleagues, a lot has changed. I've moved to a new company and taken a step up as a Dev manager / Tech lead. Now I know what you are all thinking, sounds more dull and boring right? Well it wouldn't be a practiseSafeHex series if we weren't ...

<audience-shouting>
DEALING! ... WITH! ... IDIOTS!
</audience-shouting>

Bingo! so lets jump right in and kick us off with a good one.

So for the past few months i've been on an on-boarding / fact finding / figuring out this shit-storm, mission to understand more about what it is i'm suppose to do and how to do it. Last week, as part of this, I had the esteemed pleasure of meeting face to face with the remote backend team i've been working with. Lets rattle off a few facts to catch us all up:

- 8 hour time difference to me
- No documentation other than a non-maintained swagger doc
- Swagger is reporting errors and several of the input models are just `Type: String`
- The one model that seems accurate, has every property listed as optional, including what must be the primary key
- Properties go missing and get removed at the drop of a hat and we are never told.
- First email I sent them took 27 days to reply, my response to that hasn't been answered so far 31 days later (new record! way to go team, I knew we could do it!!!)
- I deal directly with 2 of them, the manager and the tech lead. Based on how things have gone so far, i've nick named them:
1) Ass
2) Hole

So lets look at some example of their work:

- I was trying to test the new backend, I saw no data in QA. They said it wouldn't show up until mid day their time, which is middle of the night for us. I said we need data in our timezone and I was told: a) "You don't understand how big this system is" (which is their new catch phrase) b) "Your timezone is not my concern"

- The whole org started testing 2 days later. The next day a member from each team was on a call and I was asked to give an update of how the testing was going on the mobile side. I said I was completely blocked because I can't get test data. Backend were asked to respond. They acknowledged they were aware, but that mobile don't understand how big the system is, and that the mobile team need to come up with ideas for the backend team, as to how mobile can test it. I said we can't do anything without test data, they said ... can you guess what? ... correct "you don't understand how big the system is"

- We eventually got something going and I noticed that only 1 of the 5 API changes due on their side was done. Opened tickets. 2 days later asked them for progress and was told that "new findings" always go to the bottom of the backlog, and they are busy with other things. I said these were suppose to be done days ago. They said you can't give us 2 days notice and expect everything done. I said the original ticket was opened a month a go *sends link* ......... *long silence* ...... "ok, but you don't understand how big the system is, this is a lot of work"

- We were on a call. Product was asking the backend manager (aka "Ass") a question about a slight upgrade to the new feature. While trying to talk, the tech lead (aka "Hole") kept cutting everyone off by saying loudly "but thats not in scope". The question was "is this possible in the future" and "how long would it take", coming from management and product development. Hole just kept saying "its not in scope", until he was told to be quiet by several people.

- An API was sending down JSON with a string containing a message for the user with 2 bits of data inside it. We asked for one of those pieces to also come down as a property as the string can change and we needed it client side. We got that. A few days later we found an edge case and asked for the second piece of data to be a property too. Now keep in mind, they clearly already have access to them in order to make the string. We were told "If you keep requesting changes like this, you are going to delay the release of the backend by up to 2 weeks"

Yes folks, there you have it, the most minuscule JSON modifications, can delay your release by up to 2 weeks ........ maybe I should just tell product, that they don't understand how big the app is, and claim we can't build it on our side? Seems to work for them

Thats all the time we have for today,

Tune in for more, where we'll be looking into such topics as:

- If god himself was an iOS developer ... not
- Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
- Its more time-efficient to just give everything a story point of 5
- Why waste time replying to emails ... when you can do nothing instead

See you all next week,
practiseSafeHex

We're using a ticket system at work that a local company wrote specifically for IT-support companies. It's missing so many (to us) essential features that they flat out ignored the feature requests for. I started dissecting their front-end code to find ways to get the site to do what we want and find a lot of ugly code.
Stuff like if(!confirm("blablabla") == false) and whole JavaScript libraries just to perform one task in one page that are loaded on every page you visit, complaining in the js console that they are loaded in the wrong order. It also uses a websocket on a completely arbitrary port making it impossible to work with it if you are on a restricted wifi. They flat out lie about their customers not wanting an offline app even though their communications platform on which they got asked this question once again got swarmed with big customers disagreeing as the mobile perofrmance and design of the mobile webpage is just atrocious.

So i dig farther and farthee adding all the features we want into a userscript with a beat little 'custom namespace' i make pretty good progress until i find a site that does asynchronous loading of its subpages all of a sudden. They never do that anywhere else. Injecting code into the overcomolicated jQuery mess that they call code is impossible to me, so i track changes via a mutationObserver (awesome stuff for userscripts, never heard of it before) and get that running too.

The userscript got such a volume of functions in such a short time that my boss even used it to demonstrate to them what we want and asked them why they couldn't do it in a reasonable timeframe.

All in all I'm pretty proud if the script, but i hate that software companies that write such a mess of code in different coding styles all over the place even get a foot into the door.

And that's just the code part: They very veeeery often just break stuff in updates that then require multiple hotfixes throughout the day after we complain about it. These errors even go so far to break functionality completely or just throw 500s in our face. It really gives you the impression that they are not testing that thing at all.

And the worst: They actively encourage their trainees to write as much code as possible to get paid more than their contract says, so of course they just break stuff all the time to write as much as possible.
Where did i get that information you ask? They state it on ther fucking career page!

We also have reverse proxy in front of that page that manages the HTTPS encryption and Let's Encrypt renewal. Guess what: They internally check if the certificate on the machine is valid and the system refuses to work if it isn't. How do you upload a certificate to the system you asked? You don't! You have to mail it to them for them to SSH into the system and install it manually. When will that be possible you ask? SOON™.
At least after a while i got them to just disable the 'feature'.

While we are at 'features' (sorry for the bad structure): They have this genius 'smart redirect' feature that is supposed to throw you right back where you were once you're done editing something. Brilliant idea, how do they do it? Using a callback libk like everyone else? Noooo. A serverside database entry that only gets correctly updated half of the time. So while multitasking in multiple tabs because the performance of that thing almost forces you to makes it a whole lot worse you are not protected from it if you don't. Example: you did work on ticket A and save that. You get redirected to ticket B you worked on this morning even though its fucking 5 o' clock in the evening. So of course you get confused over wherever you selected the right ticket to begin with. So you have to check that almost everytime.

Alright, rant over.
Let's see if i beed to make another one after their big 'all feature requests on hold, UI redesign, everything will be fixed and much better'-update.

Worst of 2020:

Seeing company get stuck in an organizational swamp. Devs tend to be reasonably good at working from home...

Management isn't. Meeting quality has gone down the drain, half of management thinks "if the boss can't see me why work at all?", the other half has constant calls with tiny working groups where nothing is final and everyone is left confused.

I'm convinced: Everything management is afraid of about allowing devs to work from home is based on projection of their own weaknesses.

They're not passionate enough to work without oversight. They might not be introverts, but extroverts are perfectly able to communicate poorly, especially when a few digital hurdles get in the way.

The average developer might actually be more attuned to the intricacies of emotionless text chats, and preventing disruptive elements in video calls.

Also, unless someone physically helps a manager to remove their head from their own ass once in a while, their "gut feelings" about the market and products are actually just amplified bias caused by their endless self-absorbed yelling into the echo chamber that is their stretched out rectum.

Holy motherfucking hell, have I seen some weird projects float by in 2020, pooped out by isolated product managers whose brain clearly has melted when they had to survive without office fruitbaskets and organizational post-it walls.

Yeah let's promote our international character, by giving away travels and hotel bookings, using pictures of happy hugging people in foreign countries... Great promo during a pandemic.

Or let's get "woke" and promote the "colored users" on our platforms, by training ML to categorize people by skin pigment (Apart from how illegal and ethically insane that is on multiple levels, about 85% of our users pick shit like anime characters and memes for their avatar).

Or how about we make a Microsoft Store app, even though the vast majority of our end users are students using cheap Android phones, older iPhones, Macbooks and Chromebooks.

😡

Anyway, now that I have dressed up my Christmas tree with some manager intestines...

Best of 2020:

I got to play through my Steam backlog, work on hobby projects, and watch a lot of YouTube.

All this pandemic insanity has convinced me all the more that I want to work way more in Rust, and publish way more on open source projects.

I became maintainer/collaborator on a bunch of semi-prominent libraries & frameworks, and while no community is perfect, I enjoy my laid-back coffee-fueled debugging on those packages much more than listening to another crack addicted cocksucker in a suit explain their half-assed A/B test idea to me at 9AM.

So, 2021 will be me half-assing through the spaghetti at my official fuckfest of a job so I can keep filling my bank account — and investing way more time and effort into stuff I find truly engaging, into projects with a heart and a soul.

Them: Root, you take too long to get tickets out. You only have a few simple ones. You really need to rebuild your reputation.

Also them: Hey, could you revisit this ticket? Could you help ____ with this other ticket? Hey Root, how do you do this? Root, someone had a suggestion on one of your tickets; could you implement that by EoD? Hey Root, i didn't read your ticket notes; how do you test it? Hey, could you revisit this ticket for the fourth time and remove some whitespace? Hey Root, someone has non-blocking code review comments you need to address before we can release the ticket. Hey Root, we want to expand that ticket scope by 5-6 times; still labeled a trivial feature though.

Also them: Super easy ticket for you. Make sure you talk with teams A, B, C, D, E and get their input on the ticket, talk with ____ and ____ and ____ about it, find a solution that makes them all happy and solves the problem too, then be sure to demo it with everyone afterward. Super easy; shouldn't take you more than a couple days. Oh, and half of them are on vacation.

Also them: Hey, that high-priority ticket you finished months ago that we ignored? Yeah, you need to rewrite it by tomorrow. Also, you need to demo it with our guy in India, who's also on vacation. Yes, tomorrow is the last day. (The next day:) You rewrote it, but weren't able to schedule the demo? Now you've missed the release! It's even later! This reflects very poorly on you.

Also them: Perfect is the enemy of good; be more like the seniors who release partially-broken code quickly.

Also them: Here's an non-trivial extreme edgecase you might not have covered. Oh, it would have taken too much time and that's why you didn't do it? Jeez, how can you release such incomplete code?

Also them: Yeah, that ticket sat in code review for five months because we didn't know it was high-priority, despite you telling us. It's still kinda your fault, though.

Also them: You need to analyze traffic data to find patterns and figure out why this problem is happening. I know you pushed the fix for it 8 months ago, and I said it was really solid, but the code is too complex so I won't release it. Yeah I know it's just a debounce with status polling and retrying. Too complex for me to understand. Figure out what the problem is, see if another company has this same problem, and how they fixed it.

-------------

Yep. I'm so terrible for not getting these tickets out, like wow. Worst dev ever. Much shame.

LF work, PST.

I've had many, but this is one of my favorite "OK, I'm getting fired for this" moments.

A new team in charge of source control and development standards came up with a 20 page work-instruction document for the new TFS source control structure.
The source control kingpin came from semi-large military contract company where taking a piss was probably outlined somewhere.

Maybe twice, I merged down from a release branch when I should have merged down from a dev branch, which "messed up" the flow of code that one team was working on.
Each time I was 'coached' and reminded on page 13, paragraph 5, sub-section C ... "When merging down from release, you must verify no other teams are working
on branches...blah blah blah..and if they have pending changes, use a shelfset and document the changes using Document A234-B..."

A fellow dev overheard the kingpin and the department manager in the breakroom saying if I messed up TFS one more time, I was gone.

Wasn't two days later I needed to merge up some new files to Main, and 'something' happened in TFS and a couple of files didn't get merged up. No errors, nothing.
Another team was waiting on me, so I simply added the files directly into Main. Unknown to me, the kingpin had a specific alert in TFS to notify him when someone added
files directly into Main, and I get a visit.

KP: "Did you add a couple of files directly into Main?"
Me:"Yes, I don't what happened, but the files never made it from my branch, to dev, to the review shelfset, and then to Main. I never got an error, but since
they were new files and adding a new feature, they never broke a build. Adding the files directly allowed the Web team to finish their project and deploy the
site this morning."
KP: "That is in direct violation of the standard. Didn't you read the documentation?"
Me: "Uh...well...um..yes, but that is an oddly specific case. I didn't think I hurt any.."
KP: "Ha ha...hurt? That's why we have standards. The document clearly states on page 18, paragraph 9, no files may ever be created in Main."
Me: "Really? I don't remember reading that."
<I navigate to the document, page 18, paragraph 9>
Me: "Um...no, it doesn't say that. The document only talks about merging process from a lower branch to Main."
KP: "Exactly. It is forbidden to create files directly in Main."
Me: "No, doesn't say that anywhere."
KP: "That is the spirit of the document. You violated the spirit of what we're trying to accomplish here."
Me: "You gotta be fracking kidding me."

KP grumbles something, goes back to his desk. Maybe a minute later he leaves the IS office, and the department manager leaves his office.

It was after 5:00PM, they never came back, so I headed home worried if I had a job in the morning.

I decided to come in a little early to snoop around, I knew where HR kept their terminated employee documents, and my badge wouldn't let me in the building.

Oh crap.

It was a shift change, so was able to walk in with the warehouse workers in another part of the building (many knew me, so nothing seemed that odd), and to my desk.

I tried to log into my computer...account locked. Oh crap..this was it. I'm done. I fill my computer backpack with as much personal items as I could, and started down the hallway when I meet one of our FS accountants.

L: "Hey, did your card let you in the building this morning? Mine didn't work. I had to walk around to the warehouse entrance and my computer account is locked. None of us can get into the system."

*whew!* is an understatement. Found out later the user account server crashed, which locked out everybody.

Never found out what kingpin and the dev manager left to talk about, but I at least still had a job.

My second job. I've been hired as a research specialist, not a developer, but they found out I could code during the interview.

Boss: hey, so we have our main product line that shares the control panel for all the models, right?
Me: unh, yeah
B: well, we need to know how it works.
M: sorry?
B: yeah, I mean, we should have a manual with all the tech documentation so we know how everything works
M: ...and didn't you handle the tech docs to the developers?
B: uh...no, actually we requests feature to the devs (note: external company) with a phone call, or email...now we need the specs.
Me: omg

...

The other company (which is part of the same group) handles me the source code.
It is a huge, 25k lines of spaghetti written by at least 7 people, one at a time, uncommented.
After a month I produce a 50page doc with how everything works, after actually compiling my resignation letter 3 times.

M: boss, here the docs
B: fine, I'll take a look
15 mins later
B: this is not what we need! You cannot describe those algorithm like this!
( I described the algorithms with their block flow, with a punctual verbal description)
M: umh.. So how do you need it?
B: we need an excel table, with all the entering conditions on the rows and all the exit conditions in columns, and the description of the condition of work in the crossing cells!
M: are you even serious?

Cook A:
1 - Makes a soup
2 - Leaves a mess

Company: ☺️ What a nice cook, here's your promotion to senior Cook.

Cook B:
1 - Cleans kitchen
2 - Makes soup
3 - Cleans after themself

Company: 😡 What took you so long!? Cook A made it in 1/3 of the time.

This is the pattern I've seen so far in development... and it's sad

So, there is this company (let's call it A) with an average idea, who got the android app and webservices from a company(B) . The service was awful but cheap. The owner of the A was a friend and gave my company the handover to manage the project. I actually ranted about that on wk11(The worst project). Now, The project was terrible. It took me months to give it any real structure, fix the services, make it compatible with iOS. Now, that majority of the work was done, suddenly we were too expensive and the work was being given to another company while much of our payment wasn't going to come(Friggin company politics). But, guess which company did the project now go to, it was 'B'.
After a couple of weeks I see, inline styles and js errors start emerging on the website.
Tell you what, if there's any justice in this world, he will one day come back to me and then I will respectfully tell him to fuck off!
Thank goodness there's devRant to just whine about this shit!

I think I've finally realized something:
my boss does not actually listen to me.

Quite often during out weekly conference calls, he asks me questions about things I had just covered. I always assumed he couldn't hear because a) i'm rather quiet, and b) freeconferencecall.com bloody sucks.

But it happens for written things, too. I type an update on something in Slack, and an hour later he asks me for an update on it. I always assumed (likely correctly) that he has nearly zero reading comprehension. He writes like a 5th grader and only remembers a few nouns and one verb from anything he reads. But I swear he actively skips reading anything I write.

Now, however, I have frigign' proof that he ignores me. We have both been trying to get ahold of {Clover contractor} via email for months. We have gotten three replies, but twice scheduling prevented setting up a meeting, and once I simply missed the email amongst the flood of log spam I haven't been allowed to address.

I have asked the boss multiple times for the guy's phone number -- in emails, in Slack, and in front of everyone during our weekly conference calls -- and he has totally ignored me every. single. time.

Here's a transcript of my seventh(!) attempt:

Boss [2:13 PM]
Have you and {Clover contractor} met yet? If not make it happen. Stop letting it not happen. GIve specific dates and times. {Clover contractor} let's talk Tuesday 2pm or Wednesday 4pm which works better for you.

Root [2:14 PM]
For the seventh and last time, give me his phone number.
Getting ahold of him via email has not worked.

Boss [2:14 PM]
I am sendning one more, from that I want you to make the meeting happen asap.

Root [2:14 PM]
if i call him, setting up a meeting will be _easy_
Give me his phone number and I will handle this.

It is now 3:00pm and I haven't gotten a response.

Either he doesn't want it to happen, wants me to fail for some reason, or he's totally fucking oblivious. Yet ofc it's me who earns all of the blame when this meeting doesn't happen, and I'm likely to get yelled at in front of everyone, fucking again.

I'm really beginning to hate this guy.

I can't wait to walk out on him and watch the company come crashing down in my absence. It'll be sad to watch, but bloody hell does he deserve it for his arrogant incompetence.

My very first rant. I will try to make it count!

Recently my company had restructured with new GM who fired those who he didn't like and hired those who he did.

All ok I guess. And then...

We did a project for a big sportswear brand, interactive installation using WebSocket. My team developed the server with game engine and we also developed "shell front-end" with example code how to connect and interact with server.

Then we realized that our company was actually not hired by sportswear brand, rather by GM buddy-from-the-army tech vendor, who was hired by actual client.

Then, we also realized there is another company, that GM hired as freelancers, sitting at our office doing 'something'. And this 'other company' actually has same employees and address as GM's buddy company (meaning they are one entity with two names).

So.. what happened is that we get paid by party A, then we pay exactly the same amount to party B (which is actually same party A), and at the end... all our work was for free.

And then, this GM tells me I have to fire 2 developers from my team because we don't have enough business.

How did this guy even get to a position of this level?

Keep this between us, but I got sexually assaulted in a work party by a very old guy who worked at the venue.

I didn't bring it up because a) I had already resigned from that company and was on my notice period, and b) I was going to leave the country in a few weeks and couldn't be arsed having to think about it on my vacation or even after.

Still pretty awkward with myself because after that, the very drunk me got emotionally unhinged, went outside and cried my eyes out for no reason. 😐
Like, it wasn't even the worst assault that has ever happened to me so what was the hysterical crying and panic about ffs?

TL;DR, employers are often penny wise and pound foolish.

One morning, my vehicle had a potentially life-threatening condition that I needed fixed before I could drive to work. I was 3 hours late but made a productive day of it. Plus I had stayed late after work, for no pay, a couple of nights because I have the kind of work ethic that compels me to do weird stuff like that occasionally.

When the time clock report came out it showed I was 3 hours short for the pay period. I brought up that I had "paid it forward" a few weeks prior and asked for an exception based on that. I was told that a) all "extra" work had to have been approved prior to doing it and b) that pay period had already passed, so no, I'd need to make up the hours. Being pretty miffed at being so nickled-and-dimed, and for being expected to drive to work in spite of the possibility of losing my life, I just had them take it out of my time off.

Fast forward to my latest monthly review: After another potentially life-threatening vehicle breakdown and fix, I decided to ask whether I could have a couple of telecommute days per week to offset fuel and mileage to recover the repair cost for the wear and tear on my vehicle. The answer was "No, because then everyone will want to work from home and then we'd have no way to know if they're really working."

On that same day I got an offer for doing the same job at another company for 100% telecommute and at nearly twice the salary. I turned in my resignation two days later. Now they're scrambling to try to replace me.

I hate my job. I am furious at my colleagues.

Last November I asked my colleagues (A and B) to help me learn to use something, let's call it Tool. They said okay and set a date for training. Next week they said that they had too much work to do so we'll​ have to postpone. And the next date was also postponed and the next one too, and so on.

Three months in,​ colleague C kept dicking around and being a complete jackass telling me that he refused to work with me for I don't use the Tool.
Not like I didn't want to learn to use the Tool, I simply couldn't. I have long before googled how to use the Tool but in no way can Google ever tell me about our own company workflow, our methods, habits and such.

I was furious, but I am also a the most fucking patient person ever so I let it slide. The Tool wasn't actually needed that much to do my job anyways. And I have known for a while that colleague C needed to push someone under him to feel good about himself.

A few more dates had been set but got cancelled for reasons.
Meanwhile both A and B started to look down on me for not knowing how to use the Tool. I started to feel depressed.

Today B held a "workshop" about the Tool. It took two hours. He was not prepared, had a hangover and generally had a hard time concentrating.
He used aliases that he set up only for himself to show the usage of the Tool instead of commands that a beginner would understand (or google). He kept mumbling and I hsd trouble understanding him. His lecture lacked direction and was all over the place.

I am devastated and furious. I had been waiting since November for this training and when the time actually came he pulled something out of his ass and called it a workshop.

I didn't even get answers for my questions.

Now I feel that I am actually in a worse position than before because while I still cannot use the Tool, they can tell me that there was a workshop and I should've paid closer attention.

I want to quit so bad.

Saw an if statement like this in a hand me down company project:
If(!x && !Y && !Z && (A || (!B && C)))

Not laughing.

Not cursing.

Both for interviewing and being interviewed.

Some interviews could have been taken straight from a mexican telenovela.......

"Yeah, I worked for a year in the Walmart IT administration."

"Ok, what did you do?"

"Oh I had the high responsibility of taking care of swapping printer cartridges, programming the registers, stuff like that..."

"You apply for a senior database management role, you're aware of that?"

"Yeah. I took a bootcamp for 3 months in the evening after work. I'm up for the job and expect a payment of <lol, even having a stroke while writing a payment check that number will never happen>".

I made that up - but we had these cases... The story is just rewritten and mixed up for obvious reasons.

When I'm being interviewed, the same thing can happen by the way, too.

IMHO a interview is made not only for the company, but for me as an employee, too. I don't sugar coat it. I want to know what type of shit I'm getting into and how much I'm drowning in it.

Some "types" of interviewers react kinda funny when I start roasting them with questions...

For example, the authoritarian type usually reacts with disrespect. How dare u piss on my front lawn.... Kind of reaction. Which makes it hard not too laugh, because who wants to work for someone who throws a tamper tantrum during a interview? Even harder when the same guy promised you heaveb before (the flowery kind of bullshit, like everything's peaceful and fine and teams great and they have such a great leadership...)

Even worse is the patsy.

When you're sitting in an interview and the only answers you get are:

- Sorry, I don't know.
- I'm not allowed to ....
- Not in my area of expertise....

All just nice ways of saying: I will say nothing cause then I'd need to take some responsibility.

:)

The most Mexican telenovela stuff though in being interviewed is when I managed to divide a team of interviewers and it starts to become a "Judge Judy" or similar freaked out justice show...

A: "No, our team doesn't work that way".
B: "But you will in the short future, WE committed to it".
C: "Not that I'm aware of".

And me, an obvious sinner and person who enjoys entertainment and schadenfreude, just keeps adding kerosene to the fire.

"So, it seems like the team of A has its own rules which do not apply to B and C, do they also have greater funding?".

Oh it makes just fun to spur a good blood bath.

Recruiters are fucking unbelievable sometimes.

With about one year experience I applied to company A and company B. Kinda competitors in what dev skillset they're looking for.

Company A reviewed my CV and decided I don't have enough experience without giving me a chance to present my actual knowledge.

Company B tells me screw your CV come along show us what you got. I rocked the interview with an offer the next day which I accepted, absolutely thrilled.

Fast forward 7 months I get an email from company A, same recruiter, inviting me to an interview as they're "impressed with my profile and feel like I've gone a long way" (definitely just because company B hired me and I passed my probation)

Ah the joy responding to them that as I value honour and honesty quite highly I don't think I would be a culture match for company B where it is a norm to reject candidates and come back pouch them after they pass probation at competitors.

Eek.. instant apologies email and of course explaining it's not poaching but "exploring opportunities".

Screw company A, honestly.

!dev at all

Was chilling with my t mobile rep trying to get some issues resolved regarding what Verizon's bitchass was trying to do after i left their shitty company.

While i was there and my dude was working his magic i noticed this smoking chick walking around the store waiting for someone to help her out. So being that everyone was busy and sorta scared of talking to her( i can sense that shit) i told my boy to go and pick her as his customer, to be flirty and cool and shit.

My poor dude was all like "nah man I dunno how to talk to girls...."

I was telling him "bro, you ain't bad looking, just go, introduce yo ass and tell her that you'll take care of her in a min!"

"But i get all anxious and shit"

"Nah man, just talk to her like you did to me when we first met, she is just a customer, i aint telling you to ask her out on a date, just i dunno practice talking to girls! No harm with that! Specially this one b look at them leeeeeeegs!"

Now, why did I care? The reason is that he mentioned to me after seeing my wife (total babe) that he pictures me as a player. Which I was but that is beyond the point. And he said that he had always had trouble talking to girls.

So i told him what to do, said to be calm and confident. Ninja is an alpha salesman, and great with t mobile services, so he has that confidence, told him to exude that shit as if he was talking to a guy.

Homeboy got ballsy, drank 5 gallons of man the fuck up and went and did what I did. Then she went ahead and stand next to us, and i put on the good words for my dude "ah you got the best rep right here! G boy is bomb with everything!!" She was laughing saying that she hopes that he can help her with her phone.

"Don't worry, i got you, its just a small thing and if you want i'll show you what to do for future occasions"

"Oh so you don't want me to come back if it happens?"

"Haha you can come back any time as long as I am the one helping you out"

DAAAAAAAAAAAMN son!!

"Ok, but only if its you"

Daaaaaaaaaamn

Went better than expected. The dude needs more confidence, he aint bad looking at all and don't want him missing out on some of the babes we got walking around town.

Lord knows I had my fun with them.

I’m adding some fucking commas.
It should be trivial, right?
They’re fucking commas. Displayed on a fucking webpage. So fucking hard.

What the fuck is this even? Specifically, what fucking looney morons can write something so fucking complicated it requires following the code path through ten fucking files to see where something gets fucking defined!?

There are seriously so fucking many layers of abstraction that I can’t even tell where the bloody fucking amount transforms from a currency into a string. I’m digging so deep in the codebase now that any change here will break countless other areas. There’s no excuse for this shit.

I have two options:
A) I convert the resulting magically conjured string into a currency again (and of course lose the actual currency, e.g. usd, peso, etc.), or

B) Refactor the code to actually pass around the currency like it’s fucking intended to be, and convert to a string only when displaying. Like it’s fucking intended to be.

Impossible decision here.

If I pick (A) I get yelled at because it’s bloody wrong. “it’s already for display” they’ll say. Except it isn’t. And on top of that, the “legendary” devs who wrote this monstrosity just assumed the currency will always be in USD. If I’m the last person to touch this, I take the blame. Doesn’t matter that “legendary Mr. Apple dev” wrote it this way. (How do I know? It’s not the first time this shit has happened.) So invariably it’ll be up to me to fix anyway.

But if I pick (B) and fix it now, I’ll get yelled at for refactoring their wonderful code, for making this into too big of a problem (again), and for taking on something that’s “just too much for me.” Assholes. My après Taco Bell bathroom experiences look and smell better than this codebase. But seriously, only those two “legendary” devs get to do any real refactoring or make any architecture decisions — despite many of them being horribly flawed. No one else is even close to qualified… and “qualified” apparently means circle jerking it in Silicon Valley with the other better-than-everyone snobs, bragging about themselves and about one another. MojoJojo. “It was terrible, but it fucking worked! It fucking worked!” And “I can’t believe <blah> wanted to fix that thing. No way, this is a piece of history!” Go fuck yourselves.

So sorry I don’t fit in your stupid club.

Oh, and as an pointed, close-at-hand example of their wonderful code? This API call I’m adding commas to (it’s only used by the frontend) uses a json instance variable to store the total, errors, displayed versions of fees/charges (yes they differ because of course they do), etc. … except that variable isn’t even defined anywhere in the class. It’s defined three. fucking. abstraction. layers. in. THREE! AND. That wonderful piece of smelly garbage they’re so proud of can situationally modify all of the other related instance variables like the various charges and fees, so I can’t just keep the original currency around, or even expect the types to remain the same. It’s global variable hell all over again.

Such fucking wonderful code.

I fucking hate this codebase and I hate this fucking company. And I fucking. hate. them.

- Project for a 40+b$ company.
- No business analysis.
- Only some 64 pages tech paper dividing the project in 4 iterations (pretty well written).
- « Please estimate the first iteration ».
- Can we do it in 2 weeks? Only items in first iteration, I think we can but we need a BA before we accept the project.
- Confirmed by senior dev front. 10 days, says we need a BA before we accept.
- Confirmed by senior dev back. 12 days, says we need a BA before we accept.
- UX/UI senior designer says he can't estimate such a technical, says we defo need a BA before any estimations.

PM, who is actually the department manager, says OK we can do it. No BA and estimations are halved, UI/UX 2 days.

He fucking signs the contract.

SURPRISE MOTHERFUCKER, WE NEED STUFF FROM FUTURE ITERATIONS IF WE DON'T WANT TO THROW AWAY ALL THE FIRST ITER WORK.

PROJECT BECOME A CLUSTERFUCK.
NOBODY UNDERSTANDS ANYTHING. THE CLIENT HAS NO CLUE EITHER.

The fucking dep. mgr assigns another PM and says he don't have time anymore.

NOBODY HAS A CLUE WHAT THE PROJECT IS AT THIS POINT.

We have 3 days left.

Whole team came to a conclusion: the only sane thing to do is to give our grouped resignation letters.

Thanks. It was fun while it lasted. Your dep. can go to hell.

My first performance review as a graduate:
Boss: "we can't give you the rating you deserve because HR"
Me: "ok whatever, what can I do to get the rating I'm suppose to get?"
B: *lists job description of a senior developer* ... "Interview candidates, mentor juniors, start a project and make me profit"
Me: (if I can do that as a graduate, what am I doing here?)

My last performance review at the same company:
B: "we can't give you the rating you deserve because HR"
M: "ok what can I do to improve?"
B: *lists everything I did before the first performance review that wasn't expected of me*
M: (LoL funny, I just wanted to hear your response because I know you'd forget about the first review. Another reason to validate my resignation)

Fuck Optimizely.

Not because the software/service itself is inherently bad, or because I don't see any value in A/B testing.

It's because every company which starts using quantitative user research, stops using qualitative user research.

Suddenly it's all about being data driven.

Which means you end up with a website with bright red blinking BUY buttons, labels which tell you that you must convert to the brand cult within 30 seconds or someone else will steal away the limited supply, and email campaigns which promise free heroin with every order.

For long term brand loyalty you need a holistic, polished experience, which requires a vision based on aesthetics and gut feelings -- not hard data.

A/B testing, when used as some kind of holy grail, causes product fragmentation. There's a strong bias towards immediate conversions while long term churn is underrepresented.

The result of an A/B test is never "well, our sales increased since we started offering free heroin with every sale, but all of our clients die after 6 months so our yearly revenue is down -- so maybe we should offer free LSD instead"

So I was interviewing at company X, through recruiter A. It all went well - one of the best feedbacks I have ever received actually, but then they went quiet for a bit... only to have the recruiter A call me about 3 days later and tell me that apparently the project they had planned to get me on, was a no go for a while and that they would contact me again within a month or so.

Meanwhile, recruiter B called me up and sent me to company Y and asked me what my situation was at other interviews. I said that I was interviewing at company X and that they came back to me and said the project is delayed and they'll contact me within a month or so.

Recruiter B starts a rant about how he hates when companies do that and that he, as a recruiter, would loose trust in that company if something like that happened.

And now company Y goes quiet for 2 days. Recruiter B calls me and says exactly the same thing.

So naturally, I say - "ah that's a shame, you must be loosing trust in company Y now."

He pauses and says - "Well umm"... another big pause. "I see what you mean, but umm..." another pause and this awkward silence.

"thanks", I said and I hung up. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So Friday afternoon is always deployment time at my company. No sure why, but it always fucks us.

Anyways, last Friday, we had this lovely deployment that was missing a key piece. On Wednesday I had tested it, sent out an email(with screenshots) saying "yo, whoever wrote this, this feature is all fucked up." Management said they would handle it.

The response email. 1(out of 20) defects I sent in were not a defect but my error. No further response, so I assume the rest were being looked into.

In a call with bossman, my manager states that the feature is fixed, so I go to check it quickly before the deployment(on Friday).

THERE IS NO FUCKING CODE CHECK-IN. THE DEV BASTARD JUST SAID THAT MY USECASE WAS WRONG, SO MY ENTIRE EMAIL WAS INVALID.

I am currently working on Saturday, as the other guy refuses to see the problem! It is blatant, and I got 3 other people to reproduce to prove I am not crazy!

On top of that, the code makes me want to vomit! I write bad code. This is like a 3rd grader who doesn't know code copy-pasted from stack overflow! There is literally if(A) then B else if(!A) then B! And a for loop which does some shit, and the line after it closes has a second for loop that iterates over the same unaltered set! Why?! On top of that, the second for loop loops until "i" is equal to length-1, then does something! Why loop???

The smartest part of him ran down his Mama's leg when it saw the DNA dad was contributing!

Don't know who is the culprit, and if you happen to see this, I am pissed. I am working on Saturday because you can't check your code or you lied on your resume to get this job, as you are not qualified! Fuck you!

Im gunna get a lot of flak for this but just hear me out:

People keep asking me what it's like working in a male dominated industry. They have conferences for women in tech empowerment and I get forced to go to them because I'm the only female in the office.

The thing is. I don't feel oppressed. I get that we "need" more women in tech but from my experience and from talking to various women at my old university, the reason women are avoiding the tech industry isn't because it's male dominated and they feel out of place. It's because a) it doesn't interest them or b) they never thought of it as an option (like myself).

Computer programming should be in grade schools and highschool's just like math and science to help educated not only women but people in general that it's an option. That's what's going to help more women get in the tech industry. Not these bullshit conferences and women's rights in tech movements, and hiring women over men (even if she's worse than him in skill level) just because she's a woman.

Frankly I think it's downright shameful that companies that are male dominated feel the need to hire women over men just because of gender. If I'm applying somewhere and there's a better male candidate, hire him! I'd much rather your company have a good team then a "balanced" team. Great tech teams are what will bring along new and better technologies, not balanced ones.

Keep in mind I'm talking about Western Civilization here, I get that a lot of countries are still struggling with the balance of women's rights at all but this is Canada.

I also get that there are probably some women who want to join tech but won't because it's too male dominated but frankly that's a shit poor excuse. If you really wanted to join tech then being surrounded by make co-workers wouldn't deter you from living your life the way you want to. If you feel so uncomfortable around men that you won't go into an industry you love because it's male dominated then I'm sorry for you and you should probably see a councillor to get that worked out.

I feel more oppressed by having to put aside my programming and being forced to go to these conferences than I do in the every day workplace. My boss is literally more offended that I don't feel offended about being a woman "minority". He spent a week pestering me about how I would feel about this, that and the other thing if it happened to me.

I'm not saying nobody ever says anything even remotely sexist to me but frankly I could give two shits- I'm here. I'm coding. I'm good at what I do and I'm comfortable enough with myself that I can just blow off the comment (which probably wasn't even meant to offend me) and continue working. But you're going to get that wherever you go, this isn't a flaw of the tech industry. This is a flaw of the world and it goes both ways (men get flak too).

You have to integrate company A system with company B.
You look up B`s api documentation, write the necessary code, test it thoroughly. Done
__________________________________
A wild dev from B has appeared!!!
------------------------------------------------------

him > you cannot use this SDK to implement this solution. You must use a different one...

You > (coming back to him after scouring through the docs) . Ok which sdk is it then? I can't find it anywhere. Could you send it to me pls?
him > I don't kbow, my knowledge doesn't go that far. Send an email to the dev department.

After sending the email, and spending a couple of days trying to figure out which sdk was he referring to. His department answers that the sdk you should use, is the one you already used. The only one they have.

A couple of days lost, because certain smart-ass could not refrain himself from meddling in the project.

What would you do?

Note: Killing him is out of the question :)

HR: you didn’t write in your job experience that you know kubernetes and we need people who know it.

Me: I wrote k8s

HR: What’s that ?

…
Do you know docker ?
Do you know what docker is ?
Do you use cloud ?
Can you read and write ?
Are you able to open the door with your left hand ?
What if we cut your hands and tell you to open the doors, how would you do that ?
What are your salary expectations?
Do you have questions, I can’t answer but I can forward them. Ask question, ask question, questions are important.
What is minimal wage you will agree to work ?
You wrote you worked with xy, are you comfortable with yx ?
We have fast hiring process consisting of 10 interviews, 5 coding assessments, 3 talks and finally you will meet the team and they will decide if you fit.
Why do you want to work … here ?
Why you want to work ?
How dare you want to work ?
Just find work, we’re happy you’re looking for it.
What databases you know ?
Do you know nosql databases ?
We need someone that knows a,b,c,d….x,y,z cause we use 1,2,3 … 9,10.
We need someone more senior in this technology cause we have more junior people.
Are you comfortable with big data?
We need someone who spoke on conference cause that’s how we validate that people can speak.
I see you haven’t used xy for a while ( have 5 years experience with xy ) we need someone who is more expert in xy.
How many years of experience you have in yz ??? (you need to guess how many we want cause we look for a fortune teller )

Not much changed in job hunting, taking my time to prepare to leetcode questions about graphs to get a job in which they will tell me to move button 1px to the left.

Need to make up some stories about how I was bad person at work and my boss was angry and told me to be better so I become better and we lived happy ever after. How I argued with coworkers but now I’m not arguing cause I can explain. How bad I was before and how good I am now. Cause you need to be a better person if you want to work in our happy creepy company.

Because you know… the tree of DOOM… The DOMs day.

dear api author at my company pt. 2:

If you're gonna create an api method that takes some arguments.

And one of those arguments is an array.

THEN MAKE THE FUCKING ARGUMENT'S NAME PLURAL YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT.

REPEAT WITH ME, MOTHERFUCKER.
ARRAY, PLURAL, NON-ARRAY, SINGULAR.

I need to pass a shitload of filters for the data for this table, and for every suckin fuckin filter I need to singularize this shit. Thank god for es6.

I know this sounds like nitpick, but I swear to fucking alpha omega this guy is inconsistent as fuck.

Every time it feels like he makes up a new rule.

Sometimes I need to send arrays of ids, other times arrays of objects with an id property on each.

He uses synonyms too, sometimes it's remove, other times erase.

PICK ONE MOTHERFUCKER.

If you can't do the basic things well, then what is to expect of more advanced stuff?

Naming conventions you fucking idiot, follow them. It's programming 101.

You're already sending them as plural in the fucking response. Why change them for the request?

And that's just style, conventions.

This idiot asshole also RARELY DOES ANY FUCKING CHECK ON THE ARGUMENTS.

"Oh, you sent a required argument as null? 500"

We get exceptions on sentry UP THE ASS thanks to this useless bone container.

YOU'RE SEEING THE EXCEPTIONS TOO!!!!! 500'S ARE BUGS YOU NEED TO FIX, YOU CUMCHUGGER

And sometimes he does send 400, you know what the messages usually are?
"Validation failed".

WHYYYYYY YOU GODDAMN APATHETIC TASTELESS FUCK???
WHAT EXACTLY CAUSED THE FUCKING VALIDATION TO FAIL????

EXCEPTIONS HAPPEN AND THANKS TO YOU I HAVE NO IDEA WHY.

The worst of all... the worst of fucking all is that everytime I make a suggestion to change shit, every time, you act like you care.
You act like the api is the way it is because you designed it in a calculated manner.

MOTHERFUCKER. IF A USER HAS ONLY PRODUCT A, THEN HE SHOULDN'T BE ABLE TO ACCESS DATA FOR PRODUCT B. IT IS NOT ENOUGH TO JUST RESTRICT SHIT WITH ADMIN ROLES. IDIOT!!!!!

This is the work of someone who has no passion for programming.

Worst exp. on a collab/group project?

Had a few, here is one.

Worked with a dev team (of two devs) in Norway to begin collaboration on providing a portal into our system (placing orders, retrieving customer info, inventory control, etc)

They spoke very good English, but motivation was the problem. Start the day around 10:00AM...take a two hour lunch...ended the day at, if I was lucky, 4:00PM (relative to Norway time). Response time to questions took days, sometimes weeks. We used Skype, which helped, but everything was "Yea...I'll do that tomorrow...waiting on X....I have a wedding to go to, so I'll finish my part next week."

I didn't care so much, I had other projects to do, but the stakeholders pounded me almost everyday demanding a progress report (why aren't you done yet...etc..etc.)
The badgering got so bad I told the project owner (a VP) if he wanted this project done by the end of the year, the company would have to fly me to Norway so I personally push things along.
When real money was on the line, he decided patience was warranted.

A 3 month project turned into 9, and during a phone meeting with the CEO in December
O: "Thanks guys, this project is going great. We'll talk again in February. Bye."
PM: "Whoa...what! February!"
<sounding puzzled>
O: "Um..yes? It's Christmas time. Don't you Americans take off for Christmas?"
PM: "Yes, but not until Christmas. Its only December 12th. Your taking the whole month of December and January for Christmas?"
O:"Yes, of course. You Americans work too hard. You should come over here and see how we celebrate. Takes about a month so we can ease back into the flow of things."
<Jack is the VP>
PM: "Jack wanted this project completed by the end of the year, that is what everyone agreed to."
O:"Yes, I suppose, but my plane is waiting on me. Not to worry, everything will be fine."
<ceo hangs up>
PM: "Oh shit..oh shit..oh shit. What are you going to do!?"
Me: "Me!?..not a darn thing. Better go talk with Jeff."
<Jeff is the VP>
J: "This is unacceptable. You promised this project would only take a few months. I told you there would be consequences for not meeting the deadline."
PM:"But..but...its not our fault."
J: "I don't care about fault. I care about responsibility. I've never had to fire anyone for not meeting a deadline, but .."
Me: "Jeff, they are in Norway and no one is working this project for the next two months. You've known for months about them dragging their asses on this project. We're ready to go. Services have been tested and deployed. Accounting has all the payment routing ready. Only piece missing is theirs."
J: "Oh. OK. Great job guys. I guess we'll delay this project until February."
<leave the office>
PM: "Holy shit I'm glad you were there. I thought I was fired."
Me: "Yea, and that prick would have done it not giving a crap that it's Christmas."
<fast forward to Feb>
O: "Our service provider fell through, so I'm hosting with another company. You guys know PHP? Perl? I don't know what they called it, but it sounded so cool I bought the company."
PM: "You bought what? Are we still working with Z and B?"
O:"Yea, sort of. How's your German? New guy only speaks German."
PM: "Um, uh... no one here speaks German"
O:"Not to worry, I speak German, French, and Italian. I'll be your translator."
PM: "What? French and Italian?"
O: "On my trip to France I connected with a importer who then got me in touch with international shipper in Italy. I flew over there and met a couple really smart guys than can help us out. My new guy only speaks German, J only speaks French, and R speaks Italian, Russian, and a little English. Not to worry, I'm full time on this project. You have my full attention."

We believe the CEO has/had some serious mental issues, including some ADD. He bailed within the first month (took another vacation to Sweden to do some fishing) and left me using Google Translate to coordinate the project. Luckily, by the end, the Norwegian company hired a contractor from England who spoke German and hobbled together the final integration.

"Disregard what you're doing now. We need a FUNCTIONAL prototype (which will become the main app because refactoring is a waste of time huehuehuehue) with these features our POSSIBLE client MIGHT potentially need for TOMORROW's presentation."

"What do you mean that thing you were working on yesterday isn't done? Those are the times we estimated, right? By the way, our (still not confirmed) client thinks he'll choose us over that other company if we do changes A, B, C and D. Need it for yesterday."

I am currently working on my Master's thesis in the R&D department of a company that builds&sells mechanical appliances. Obviously a part of the thesis is outlining the various approaches.

Me: * Headphones on, browsing competitor's website for citeable content*

*Le boss approaches, starts looking at my screen*
B: Are you honestly preferring their approach over ours?!

M: *sets down headphones* What dou you mean?

B: *Begins rant about unfair competitors, how I dare consider defecting to a competitor*

M: Uhm.. I was just looking for sources so that i coukd write about different approaches...

B: Oh. Carry on then. *leaves*

M: *scratches head, opens devRant, begins typing*

Getting a rejection letter six months after starting a job when you haven’t applied to jobs since you got said job is weird. Like, what’s the point in even sending a rejection 8 months after a person applied?

Either:
a) they’ve already assumed you weren’t interested and have moved on with their life or
b) they were really REALLY interested in the possibility of working for your company and have been eagerly awaiting reply… only to be given the terse rejection email 8 months later.

And in neither of those scenarios is that person going to have a higher opinion of the company because you took the time to respond eventually.

I just… I don’t get it, mates.

Sometimes, being the only fullstack dev with access to a lot of systems gives you the ability to introduce functionality that:

A) prevents future errors

B) introduces new validations to users to make sure A) is prevented.

C) apply these changes to different projects

But most importantly...

D) without a single person in management getting involved or having to sign it off.

It's like running a company you own, but without owning it.

Granted with such power, comes the trust and responsibility of deploying changes with the adequate testing being done prior and handling change management, but fuck, sometimes I wonder if "god mode" for lack of a better term, is too much, or just enough to get the job done without the politics.

So lets see if i can get this devrant stuff right.

So a couple of years ago i worked for this company, where i worked in datawarehousing and business intelligence. I was in my 3rd year of working as a software engineer and was full of ideas, motivation and just wanted to do cool stuff.

Anyway, after the first couple of months of working where i learned what they actually wanted to achieve, i got some ideas on how to improve the workflow. They were just simple things, like updating our IDE (we were working with a very old Visual Studio version), getting useful editors, using some more modern ideoms like unittests, continous integration, etc. Simple stuff really.

So in my endless naiveness i went to my supervisor and told him my ideas. He was not particularly interested in my ideas and cut me off somewhere in the middle and said that he would talk to his boss.

So a couple of weeks after that (nothing happened), i went to him again and asked about it.
M:" Hey Bossman, have you thought about my ideas?"
B:"Yes."
M:"And?"
B:"We won't do them."
M:"None of them?"
B:"No."

So at this point i was a bit bummed out, but surely he has a good reason right? So i asked why.

M:"Why?"
B:"Well, because we always have done it the way we do it now."

I think i had a bit of a blank stare at that point, because he looked at me funny. If we would do things like we always have done them, we would be still in the stone age you moron.

God i hate it when people say stuff like that.

Our company maneuvered themselves into a classic technical debt situation with a project of a second team of devs.

They then left, signing a maintenance contract and now barely work on the project for exorbitant amounts of money.

Of course management got the idea to hand off the project to the first team, i.e. our team, even though we are not experts in that field and not familiar with the tech stack.

So after some time they have asked for estimates on when we think we are able to implement new features for the project and whom we need to hire to do so. They estimates returned are in the magnitude of years, even with specialists and reality is currently hitting management hard.

Code is undocumented, there are several databases, several frontends and (sometimes) interfaces between these which are all heavily woven into one another. A build is impossible, because only the previous devs had a working setup on their machines, as over time packages were not updated and they just added local changes to keep going. A lot of shit does not conform to any practices, it's just, "ohh yeah, you have to go into that file and delete that line and then in that other file change that hardcoded credential". A core platform is end of life and can be broken completely by one of the many frameworks it uses. In short, all knowledge is stowed away in the head of those devs and the codebase is a technical-debt-ridden pile of garbage.

Frankly I am not even sure whom I am more mad at. Management has fucked up hard. They let people go until "they reached a critical mass" of crucial employees. Only they were at critical mass when they started making the jobs for team 2 unappealing and did not realize that - because how could they, they are not qualified to judge who is crucial.

However the dev team behaved also like shitbags. They managed the whole project for years now and they a) actively excluded other devs from their project even though it was required by management, b) left the codebase in a catastrophic state and mentioned, "well we were always stuffed with work, there was no time for maintenance and documentation".

Hey assholes. You were the managers on that project. Upper management has no qualification to understand technical debt. They kept asking for features and you kept saying yes and hastily slapped them into the codebase, instead of giving proper time estimates which account for code quality, tests, reviews and documentation.

In the end team #2 was treated badly, so I kinda get their side. But up until the management change, which is relatively recent, they had a fantastic management who absolutely had let them take the time to account for quality when delivering features - and yet the code base looks like a river of diarrhea.

Frankly, fuck those guys.

Our management and our PM remain great and the team is amazing. A couple of days a week we are now looking at this horrible mess of a codebase and try to decide of whom to hire in order to help make it any less broken. At least it seems management accepted this reality, because they now have hired personnel qualified to understand technical details and because we did a technical analysis to provide those details.

Let's see how this whole thing goes.

This one ticked me off because of the sheer rudeness of a demand they made of me. I had been building a personal freelance brand around myself and my skills for many years. I had in the prior 3 years developed it from a freelance to a lean agency model. That was running in parallel with full time work and the FT employer was happy to allow it. Eventually that employer downsized me and almost everyone else on staff. But they liked me and gave me mini-projects to do on a contract basis. I began interviewing for FT work with other companies.

One agency I applied at gave me a phone screen interview. The main hiring person was also an investor in the agency. He noted my lean agency and said that a second interview would be contingent on my dropping my clients that I was working for on my own time, disposing completely of my personal brand, and even giving up my domain name.

I told him I’d think about it. But the more I thought about it the more angry I got about such a stupid request. Why does this new company I don’t even know I will like working for get to tell me to abandon my “Plan B” option for if I quit or they decide to lay me off?

They never called back but I wished they had so I could have had the satisfaction of telling them no.

- Hey man, ready to spend your last day in this company?
- I W A S B O R N R E A D Y

2013 Wanted to make games with unity, no prior experience. Failed horribly learning unity script. Nothing made sense.

2014 change in carreer from retail to sysadministration at a local small recycling company ( no prior experience other than being a digital native )

2015 Got bored at work, learned c# with scott lillys tutorials. It clicked!

2016 i enroll in cs at local university. Acing most classes, even got a b on the math module i took. I am 28 now and my life changed a bunch to the good thanks to coding, tech and cs.

A couple of months ago, the father of a friend of mine, asked me if I wanted to help him out with a project.

His late father, whom he inherited a one-person upholstering company from, once created a system in filemaker to do, among others, his financial administration. This system, however, grew organically as time went by, but he passed away before he explained to his son how it worked.

Now this man was running the company, using the parts of the system that he knows, but things were starting to break down. He asked me if I could help him understand what is going on and fix a couple of things.

However, the more I look at it, the more I realize what a monstrosity this has become, because the system has never been cleaned up. For example:

- There is a suppliers table, with the columns "E-MAIL" and "EMAIL". The latter one containing the supplier's website address.
- In order to be able to generate year reports, at the start of a year he copies the previous year's file, removes all records from it and starts using that as the new year's file. (This year, he accidentally created a shortcut instead of copying...)
- Some tables have a misterious column called "#1". It always contains a 1.
- The system consists of about 20 files, each of them containing a single table, although only 10 of them are really used. The other ones are just legacy.
- File, table, column, and layout names are capitalized randomly (all caps, no cap, starting uppercase) and are usually abbreviations, like "st2", "oms3", "off\rek", "b", "VERDBEST6" and "antst".
- One table has 92 columns.
- Of those 92 columns, only about 20, maybe 30, are in use.

Now, my task is finding out what parts are useful and in use, extracting those and create a baby monster out of the giant monster this system has become.

Sidenote: I actually enjoy having to learn a bit about accounting in order to understand this. Planning to use the knowledge I gain to keep track of my own finances.

Worst documentation I've seen?

Our "Coding Standards" 20+ page document. The team who put it together got so detailed, there wasn't much 'wiggle room' for natural deviations in a developer's coding style. For example, a section devoted to no abbreviations. So if you had a variable 'invoiceId', they complained you violated 'standards', even though 'invoiceId' matched a field name in a database table. Using Dapper or another ORM that relied on the 1:1 name match? Nope, you were still forced to inject your own mappers so the code didn't violate standards.

As you can probably guess, such a long, detailed document would have contradictions. I pointed out one of the contradictions. Example:

Page 5: Section B, sub-section B-5, paragraph 3 : "To minimize network traffic, when querying the database, request all the data necessary for the application."
Page 8: Section K, sub-section K-2, paragraph 4 : "For maximum performance, when querying the database, request only the most minimum amount of data necessary for the application ."

In a review I pointed out this contradiction (there were several more)
Me: "If we satisfy A, one could say the code is in violation of B. Which is it?"
<Pointy-Hair-Boss throws his pencil on the table>
PHB: "WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM WITH STANDARDS! It couldn't be more clear! We are a company of standards because without standards <blah blah..straw man argument..blah blah>"
<deciding not to die on that hill, I move on>
Me: "On page 12, paragraph 9 code is in violation if a method has more than 3 parameters. That seems a little restrictive given our interaction with 3rd party products."
PHB: "There you go again. As stated in the document, ALL code used by the company will comply to our standards. What part of 'ALL' do you not understand?"

Was he bluffing about requiring 3rd party vendors complying with our standards? Heck no. That's a story for another day.

!dev

I have a couple of thoughts about social justice controversies from these last years.

I think it's hard to have a good opinion about these events for several reasons.

One reason is that finding good information in 2019 is very hard.

Revenue based sites (thus unneutral) dominate the search results. You search about something and you find thousands of sites basically saying the same thing (because they copy each other).

That's why the existence of a free and open search engine is so important, so it's easier to find neutral hence good information on which to base your opinions, but they are prohibitively big for small groups to build.

Another reason is that controversies generate shock and shock curtails rational thinking. Maybe that's how the primitive brain works?

I'm not much of a scholar to feel confident to say that, but it's so recurrent that it's not too much of a wild guess.

When a controversy happens, a natural reaction is to pick a side. This means that:
a) we assume that there are only 2 sides, and
b) we must pick one of them

So, maybe the human is a bad politician by nature?

Also, because of the shock controversies generate, peaceful dialogue is very rare.

I have yet to see peaceful dialogue online about what patriarchy means to feminists and a lot of other terms they use.

I don't care much about feminists that vandalize or interrupt talks (yelling over someone else is abuse in my opinion).

But for the rest of them, I think discussing their ideas would be good.

I say this because most feminist discourse I see online is not open. Or maybe there are such instances but the web is so big that it's hard to find such instances.

I think some part of the modern feminist doctrine is bullshit, and some part is true.

I for one hate when some men I know in life expect their wives to be their cooks+cleaners (unless they want to do that, willingly). Personally, I'd encourage my wife to get a job (rightfully so, not just to meet some minority quota in some company).

I don't mind either calling a trans person the pronoun she wants.

But other ideas are awful, like the idea that meritocracy is patriarchy, so you need to force minorities to meet a proportionate quota. That's terrible reasoning.

Or the excessive self appreciation culture, like saying to yourself "you are pretty, you are beautiful, you are perfect". I think that grows arrogance and black-or-white thinking.

And some other ideas as well.

I guess the same you can say about any doctrine with different degrees. Some part is bullshit, some part isn't.

Some right wing people hate everyone who isn't white by default, but some want to have more immigration control.

I sure don't like the experiment of separating children from families like the current us govt did, but I wouldn't be happy either to know that by '99 50% of gangs members in the us were hispanic.

With this, I'm not going to say "embrace everyone's ideas" like an idiot. I hate when people do that. It's a stupid and weak reaction to radicalism.

In fact I think the way you fight radicalism and bad doctrines is that you listen to them and maintain good dialogue and counterargue in a respectful but insightful manner.

Making snide remarks, insulting or trolling won't change anyone's mind. That is just throwing fire to the fire.

In fact, when someone gets harassed because of something they believe in, usually it results in even more adherence to their beliefs, because of the usual assumption that success or goodness is full of strife.

So by telling a "sjw" or kkk member that they are idiots over twitter, you are in fact making them stronger believers in their doctrine.

Think of Daryl Davis, a black guy that made 200 members leave the kkk. How? He didn't tell them they were assholes, he somehow made friends with them.

I feel bad now because I've been trolling new devrant users a lot because of how they worsen the quality of the site, but maybe I should tell them that they are ruining the site somehow in a nice way and maybe they'll listen? I dunno...

So here's my problem. I've been employed at my current company for the last 12 months (next week is my 1 year anniversary) and I've never been as miserable in a development job as this.

I feel so upset and depressed about working in this company that getting out of bed and into the car to come here is soul draining. I used to spend hours in the evenings studying ways to improve my code, and was insanely passionate about the product, but all of this has been exterminated due to the following reasons.

Here's my problems with this place:

1 - Come May 2019 I'm relocating to Edinburgh, Scotland and my current workplace would not allow remote working despite working here for the past year in an office on my own with little interaction with anyone else in the company.

2 - There is zero professionalism in terms of work here, with there being no testing, no planning, no market research of ideas for revenue generation – nothing. This makes life incredibly stressful. This has led to countless situations where product A was expected, but product B was delivered (which then failed to generate revenue) as well as a huge amount of development time being wasted.

3 - I can’t work in a business that lives paycheck to paycheck. I’ve never been somewhere where the salary payment had to be delayed due to someone not paying us on time. My last paycheck was 4 days late.

4 - The management style is far too aggressive and emotion driven for me to be able to express my opinions without some sort of backlash.

5 - My opinions are usually completely smashed down and ignored, and no apology is offered when it turns out that they’re 100% correct in the coming months.

6 - I am due a substantial pay rise due to the increase of my skills, increase of experience, and the time of being in the company, and I think if the business cannot afford to pay £8 per month for email signatures, then I know it cannot afford to give me a pay rise.

7 - Despite having continuously delivered successful web development projects/tasks which have increased revenue, I never receive any form of thanks or recognition. It makes me feel like I am not cared about in this business in the slightest.

8 - The business fails to see potential and growth of its employees, and instead criticises based on past behaviour. 'Josh' (fake name) is a fine example of this. He was always slated by 'Tom' and 'Jerry' as being worthless, and lazy. I trained him in 2 weeks to perform some basic web development tasks using HTML, CSS, Git and SCSS, and he immediately saw his value outside of this company and left achieving a 5k pay rise during. He now works in an environment where he is constantly challenged and has reviews with his line manager monthly to praise him on his excellent work and diverse set of skills. This is not rocket science. This is how you keep employees motivated and happy.

9 - People in the business with the least or zero technical understanding or experience seem to be endlessly defining technical deadlines. This will always result in things going wrong. Before our mobile app development agency agreed on the user stories, they spent DAYS going through the specification with their developers to ensure they’re not going to over promise and under deliver.

10 - The fact that the concept of ‘stealing data’ from someone else’s website by scraping it daily for the information is not something this company is afraid to do, only further bolsters the fact that I do not want to work in such an unethical, pathetic organisation.

11 - I've been told that the MD of the company heard me on the phone to an agency (as a developer, I get calls almost every week), and that if I do it again, that the MD apparently said he would dock my pay for the time that I’m on the phone. Are you serious?! In what world is it okay for the MD of a company to threaten to punish their employees for thinking about leaving?! Why not make an attempt at nurturing them and trying to find out why they’re upset, and try to retain the talent.

Now... I REALLY want to leave immediately. Hand my notice in and fly off. I'll have 4 weeks notice to find a new role, and I'll be on garden leave effective immediately, but it's scary knowing that I may not find a role.

My situation is difficult as I can't start a new role unless it's remote or a local short term contract because my moving situation in May, and as a Junior to Mid Level developer, this isn't the easiest thing to do on the planet.

I've got a few interviews lined up (one of which was a final interview which I completed on Friday) but its still scary knowing that I may not find a new role within 4 weeks.

Advice? Thoughts? Criticisms?

Love you DevRant <3

So the incompetence of this knob-head are unbelievable, so in our company there's a particular method that required to return object specific way like
{
'a' : 'b',
{
'c' : 'd',
'e' : 0,
}
};
}

which somehow will be use everywhere in the project, I decided to create a constant class therefore anyone can use it and prevent redundant code. (re write the same thing over and over again). He decided to tell me to rewrite the same method for every-time I needed to return data.

My method is to avoid writing the same thing in repetition , that is why I place a method in a constant class where I call every-time I need to return those data in the specific way.

But he prefer writing it in repetition. OMG

My current situation:

Manager: How is Project A coming? Project A is top priority. I would like to see a PR today with fixes to the current tickets.

Me: Project A is priority! Sure!

*after 2hours*

Manager: How is project B coming along? I did not see any PR’s coming in?

Me: I am working on project A as it is priority.

*after 1 hour*

Manager: How is project C coming? There is one ticket pending. We need a fix for it today asap!

Me: Starts project C as project A would take more time. Starts Work on project C.

*after 1 hour*

Boss: How is project A coming? Where is the PR?

Me: As you said you need a fix for project C today, i started working on project C as it has only 1 ticket to be fixed.

Boss: I told you project A is priority, why are you working on project C?

Me: *doesn’t reply*

*after 1 hour*

Boss: There is a ticket pending in project D. Did you make a fix for it?

*This is my usual day at work.

*I am the only developer in my current company. It’s not a software development company.

*Note: I do complete all the work and create PR’s for all “pending” work at the end of the day for all projects and leave for home at around 10pm :)

What do you think? Lol

Over the past 2 months I have interviewed with several companies and 2 of them stood out at rejecting me. Let's call them Company A, and Company B!

> I know right? Developers are bad at naming!

I guess part of it is my fault too! I am old and slow. Doesn't like competitive programming and already forgot most of how to answer algorithm question. I can't even answer some of the algorithm question I've flawlessly answered back when I was fresh out of University.

## Company A

When I got chance to interview at Company A, they require me to answer HackerRank style interview. It's my first time in nearly a decade of working in the industry to feel like I'm in a classroom exam again. I hate it, and I deliberately voiced my distaste to the answers comment:

// Paraphrasing
// I'm sorry, I'm dumb!
// I never faced anything like this in real world work...
// ......

But guess what? My answer still pass the score, have a call with their VP, which proceed to have another call with their Lead Engineer.

Talked about my experience with Event Driven System and CQRS+ES and they decided that I am:
- Arrogant
- Too RND in my tech stack
- And overkill in CQRS+ES

And decided they don't need me.
They hate me for having a headstrong personality which translates as Arrogance to the perceiving end.

## Company B

Another HackerRank style interview. Guess I passed their score this time without me typing some strong comment and proceed to have another test with their Lead Engineer.
This time they want 5 question answered in google docs within 60 minutes.
Two of them stood out to me for being impossible to work on 12 minutes (60 / 5 if you're wondering). Or maybe I'm just old and dumb?!
The others are just questions copied word for word from Geeks For Geeks.

One of the question requires me to write a password brute force attack to an imaginary API.

The other requires me to find a combination of math `+` or `-` operation from `a strings of numbers` that results in `a number`.

My `Arrogance` kicks in and I start typing a comment

// Paraphrasing
// I am sorry but I feel this is impossible for me to think of in 12 minutes
// (60 / 5 if you're wondering)
// But I know you guys got this question from Rosseta Code!
// Here's the link, but I don't know the logic behind it

See? I've worked on this question back when I was still a University student and remember where to look at.

Unsurprisingly, I've heard the feedback that I was rejected although I've answered one of their question `FLAWLESSLY`. I know they are being sarcastic at this point. haha.

---

I was trying to be honest about what I can and can't do in the `N` minutes timeframe and the Industry hates me.

I guess The Industry love people who can grind `GFG` or other algorithm websites, remember the solutions out of their head, and quietly answer their `genuinely original question` without pointing the flaws back at them.

Today at 'Derp & Co' a fellow co-worker decided that had duplicated data on Relational DB is good!

- Dev: 'but what if we have 2 companies in diferents groups?''

- co-worker: 'Just call it company A and Company B'

- Dev: 'but... this is not what...'

- co-worker: 'Trust me Dev, is the easy way'

I want the professional way, not the easy (and damn wrong) way :(, I can't improve myself like this.

Also, dead line is here too... TT^TT
Last sprint and still with doubts about the DB structure.

TLDR: Ask irritating questions, you could end up saving the company money and time...

I’m working on a project where we are integrating 2 legacy web applications with each other.

Business Analyst/Project manager (BA) : Save all the contact details of the selected firm in application A into the database of application B, then expose that data later so that we can output it into the document when the user generates them.
Me: Seems a bit excessive, there’s even a fax number, nobody uses that anymore, are you sure we need all that?
BA: The old document has all that information.
Me: Please just check with client that witch fields are still needed in the document.
BA: Ok, fine, but it’s probably a waste of time…
BA: * Talks with client on phone for 10 minz *
BA: Ok client stays we only need the Lodgement Number on the document.
Me: We already store that and populate it in the document.
BA: I had budgeted 2 days labour for all that, you just saved us a lot of money!

Client A

At the first few meetings, told us they are giving sponsors to World Cup 2018 and we should totally talk about it loudly on media.

Then when we submitted our plan, they said things have changed and they no longer can mention about World Cup. We had to redo everything.

Now, they blame us that our service quality is so bad that we should learn from *some refernce* company. Said company is only talking about their sponsorship for World Cup.

---

Client B

Bought smallest package from us. Demand services greater than our largest package.

Gave us an information of a name spelled in "Barbu". We used that spelling and used it for various tasks in past few weeks. All approved by client.

Blamed us we are giving such a poor service that we cannot even spell "Babu" correctly this morning.

(2 months old in a company)
Team members to me: we are always there for you. Ask anything you need for.

Me(today): can you please discuss this topic with me?
Team member A: I'm sorry I'm busy
Me: okay

Me: can you please discuss this topic with me?

Team member B: I got to catch the train now.
Me: we catch same train. Let's discuss during the commute.
Team member B: NO. We will not get two seats together (it's easy to find two seats).

me (in my mind): I really need help here.
Me: okay

WTF IS SUPPORT FOR?

A: Can you help fix X?
B: Can you help Y?
C: I see Z just crashes, fix it.

Me (in my mind): Can you tell me WTF is the actual problem and what investigation you have done?

Why the fuck are we paying you monkeys?

My company should just pay me all your salaries, and I will write a monitoring system to send out these types of "alerts" in a month.

I am just sick of the things that's been going on.

Joined a mid level startup as full Stack developer working on angular and node js . Code base is too shit and application is full of bugs(100+ tickets are being raised for bugs)

Since the product owner(PO) wants to demo the application he is pushing for bug fixes.

UI code:
1. Application is not handled for responsiveness all these years, it is now being trying to address. Code base is very huge to address though .
2. The common reusable components of UI has business logic inside. Any small change in business logic we are forced to handle in common components which might break up on another components.
3. Styling in 40+ components are made global. Small css change in component A is breaking up in component B due to this
4. No time to refactor.
5. Application not at all tested properly all these years. PO wants a stable build.
6. More importantly most of developers have already left the company and we are left with 2 developers including me.

I am not in a position to switch due to other commitments adds up a lot to frustration

Which of the following can successfully lead a company for digital transformation?

A) CEO
B) CTO
C) Covid19

Most of 2020 was a bad dev experience for me. I was paid to remake a system because it was

a ) insecure
b ) inconsistent
c ) hard to mantain (spaghetti code)

I thought I could focus on the backend and just reuse the front end but even that was unusable.

Basically had to redo it from scratch and since I made the fatal mistake of letting THEM estimate how long it would take, I worked most of the year instead of just 2-3 months.

Never again. After being done with the project I still had to be 'reachable' for the coming weeks if anything happened.

I turned off my phone during one weekend and then the next thing I know the only other dev at that small company is asking me for details on the project (meaning they just decided to offload everything to him). Never heard from them again and I'm hoping that won't change.

Beware small dev companies with less than 5 actual devs.

Best: Dev wise this year has been bad or not-bad but nothing 'great' comes to mind.

My fun times and enjoyments were not derived from dev activities.

Why would a company (A) create another company (B) within itself?

Both companies are literally in the same building.

Company A is manufacturing plastic products and company B is all about company B's IT (sys admin, dev, etc.).

Don't use your senior software engineer title or years of experience as reasons in a debate or argument about software

My manager was asking me what steps needs to be done to perform a disaster recovery for our cluster( on production). I will be honest here, I have not maintained this type of cluster(kubernetes) in production before. However, I have enough understand of the system to answer my boss question. I basically told him there are A, B, C you have to do.

My senior developer jumped in and said "No you should do A,C, B because C is more critical than B. " I then replied to him: "I understand your point, I notice that too, but .." Before I can even finish my sentence, this dude has already rolled his eyes and interrupted me very loudly: "Have you worked with these systems on production before? I did". The asshole knows I haven't maintained Kubernetes on production yet of course.

I got super pissed at him and pretty much shouted back to him and my manager: "Just because I haven't worked on this system on production yet, does not mean my argument is wrong" .

I then dragged my managers, that asshole, and other engineers in a room and settle this out. In the end, people agreed with my steps over that asshole senior engineer dude because I gave them rational reasons.

The conclusion is: Your senior title is given by the company, It doesn't mean anything to me. Also, it doesn't make you more right than another person just because he has a "lower" title than you.

I've noticed looking at the card exit of a building that most people a) just carry their laptop without putting it in the backpack because the carpark is a jump away anyway, b) that stickers on said laptops can leak your infrastructure

No idea what made me interested in that, but if you take the average of people's laptop stickers (sadly not everybody had their laptop or maybe even a laptop at all, so I've got just 20) - you could probably tell what tools and what services the company is running.

Could be a funny coincidence and I was able to verify later by googling their company, but it's an interesting non trackable way to know what services and tools need to be exploited/emulated to possibly gain access to some high security network.

I feel like somebody had to have a talk/presentation about this, so I wonder, had anybody else seen something like that? or how far could this actually go?

Remember my first day at my job post from almost 2 weeks ago?

I have to say that I've built great connections in the company even though I'm introverted and am like bro-ey and joke-ey with everyone there.

All the package unboxing, sorting, cutting and moving made me more fit. I'm nonstop moving the whole day from point A to point B to point C etc. I even got a smart watch to accurately track my amount of steps (+25-33% more steps than Samsung Health in my experience). I'm at 11,000 steps everyday on average and I want to push this further.

Remember that Daniel? We've become great coworkers after the initial heat (we kept giving each other orders) and are having a breakfast with the department we are temporarily in.

We also get to leave the company 1 hour earlier because we are done with all of today's work. The department chief and the company chief are impressed.

Company A: Oh yes we work with this huge tech company all the time and our APIs are just amazingly well made! DONT WORRY!

Company B: Yeah we've worked together once or twice and nothing seemed to go wrong the last time. DONT WORRY!

Reality: 11 API warnings, no data transfer and a SQL error meaning nothing I've been working on actually worked. #Rantover

Storytime!

(I just posted this in a shorter form as a comment but wanted to write it as a post too)

TL;DR, smarts are important, but so is how you work.

My first 'real' job was a lucky break in the .com era working tech support. This was pretty high end / professional / well respected and really well paid work.

I've never been a super fast learner, I was HORRIBLE in school. I was not a good student until I was ~40 (and then I loved it, but no longer have the time :( )

At work I really felt like so many folks around me did a better job / knew more than me. And straight up I know that was true. I was competent, but I was not the best by far.

However .... when things got ugly, I got assigned to the big cases. Particularly when I transferred to a group that dealt with some fancy smancy networking equipment.

The reason I was assigned? Engineering (another department) asked I be assigned. Even when it would take me a while to pickup the case and catch up on what was going on, they wanted the super smart tech support guys off the case, and me on it.

At first this was a bit perplexing as this engineering team were some ultra smart guys, custom chip designers, great education, and guys you could almost see were running a mental simulation of the chip as you described what you observed on the network...

What was also amusing was how ego-less these guys seemed to be (I don't pretend to know if they really were). I knew for a fact that recruiting teams tried to recruit some of these guys for years from other companies before they'd jump ship from one company to the next ... and yet when I met them in person it was like some random meeting on the street (there's a whole other story there that I wish I understood more about Indian Americans (many of them) and American engineers treat status / behave).

I eventually figured out that the reason I was assigned / requested was simple:

1. Support management couldn't refuse, in fact several valley managers very much didn't like me / did not want to give me those cases .... but nobody could refuse the almighty ASIC engineers. No joke, ASIC engineers requests were all but handed down on stone tablets and smote any idols you might have.

2. The engineers trusted me. It was that simple.

They liked to read my notes before going into a meeting / high pressure conference call. I could tell from talking to them on the phone (I was remote) if their mental model was seizing up, or if they just wanted more data, and we could have quick and effective conversations before meetings ;)

I always qualified my answers. If I didn't know I said so (this was HUGE) and I would go find out. In fact my notes often included a list of unknowns (I knew they'd ask), and a list of questions I had sent to / pending for the customer.

The super smart tech support guys, they had egos, didn't want to say they didn't know, and they'd send eng down the rabbit hole. Truth be told most of what the smarter than me tech support guy's knew was memorization. I don't want to sound like I'm knocking that because for the most part memorization would quickly solve a good chunk of tech support calls for sure... no question those guys solved problems. I wish I was able to memorize like those guys.

But memorization did NOT help anyone solve off the wall bugs, sort of emergent behavior, recognize patterns (network traffic and bugs all have patterns / smells). Memorization also wouldn't lead you to the right path to finding ANYTHING new / new methods to find things that you don't anticipate.

In fact relying on memorization like some support folks did meant that they often assumed that if bit 1 was on... they couldn't imagine what would happen if that didn't work, even if they saw a problem where ... bro obviously bit 1 is on but that thing ain't happening, that means A, B, C.

Being careful, asking questions, making lists of what you know / don't know, iterating LOGICALLY (for the love of god change one thing at a time). That's how you solved big problems I found.

Sometimes your skills aren't super smarts, super flashy code, sometimes, knowing every method off the top of your head, sometimes you can excel just being more careful, thinking different.

A post today made me think about this interview I had about a year ago... I shall tell you all about it.

Went to a hiring event for this company everyone was cool but this one guy (who would have been my boss) was a total arrogant, douchey, know it all.

So anyways cue interviewing with him a week later. He says if I give you task A, B, C and they need to be done by the end of the week in which order do you do them. (Note: he literally said abc not actual tasks)

Me: I don't really know how to answer that question without more information.

Him: Well I like to see how people answer it... So think about it for a second.

Me: Ok I guess if doing one task would help me do the next task faster I would do it in that order. Like I can use code or concepts from C to do B faster.

Him: What if A would take 2 days and B and C would take 1 day.

Me: I don't see how that would influence the order I do them in.

Him: Would you complete one task after another or switch between them or do see simultaneously.

Me: It would depend on my previous answer and what would be the fastest way to get them done but without more info I literally cannot give you an answer of like I would do B, C, A.

Him: Would you do the longest task first or the shorter tasks.

Me: I don't know I guess it depends on if it would help you or somebody else move forward with something if I got a particular task or the shorter tasks done first.

So cue more of this kind of back and forth about arbitrary details about undefined theoretical tasks for like 10 minutes.

Suffice is to say I didn't get the job and I'm glad.

ME - me, TM - teammate
I was just recruited to the company. We're starting new project based on few modules.

ME: So this module will do X and Y, I will use good old interfaces and design based on abstractions so that stuff does not get glued too much.

TM: But why? Make good old processor with all the logic and throw objects at it.

ME: B-but unit tests, decomposition and othet stuff...

TM: *insists and forces me to agree*

ME: *gets shit done his way, TM checks on code review and complains but generally doesnt give a fuck*

ME: Ok, its done. Lets get shit shipped.

TM: Well, we were just told by PM that we will need to process one more source with much different logic that does not fit current solution (he did meant GOD-PROCESSOR, idea of his).

ME: What do you mean? *injects another contextual implementation of processing logic to template method pattern solution*.

TM: I will tell PM you cant make it because of the implementation.

ME: But I just did it...

TM: Impossible, processor needs to be reimplemented. Get your shit together!

ME: *still doesnt get the shit about the god processor love*

TM: *rage quits next month*

ME: *module gets reused once more 2 month later, profit*

I have to create python parser (3.6) using code provided by client (2.7), that they used in their company, and it is full of crap like:

if a==1:
if not b:
c = [1,2,3]
if a==2:
if not b:
c = [1,2,3]
if b:
c = [1,2,4]

Or:

text = ""
for i in something:
text += "real text " + some_string + " \n"
text += "another line " + some_string + " \n"
text += "and another " + some_string + " \n"
text += "and so on " + some_string + " \n"
... (many lines instead of one appended text block)

Of course above variable names are just for shortening code, but there are variables like oo, ooo, var_ or var__... cause you know, PEP8 does not exist.

Guys should I quit my CURRENT job ? I feel like I should find another job because of the following reasons

a. I suck. I know I can't complete the task given. The task given is to build a trading bot. I can't complete it because of my incompetent trading knowledge and i find it difficult to understand trading logic and I tried my level best even paying someone to private tutor me but the tuition fees are too high and I still don't understand. Btw I am from a web development background

b. It has been 3 months in this company. I feel like I am not doing anything. I feel like a loser who has been eating free salary without contributing anything. Sure I have managed to write few strategies on pinescript.

c. I dread everyday to even do anything. I use to feel accomplished in my previous job. Nowadays I cant hope to feel like a complete idiot.

d. I don't have the motivation or fire that I use to have when I was a web developer. I just hate looking at code nowadays.

e. Algo Trading is too difficult for me. I don't feel like I am progressing anywhere.

f. Nobody in my company knows how to build a bot or have any knowledge on this.

g. Python dataframes , plots, charts bores me to death and I am really no interested to even look at it.

I am just so frustrated as I am typing this and I am becoming tired and exhausted to go to work everyday because everyday I am so clueless on what to do. You need at least some idea where to go to but I don't. Everyday I feel like a complete clueless moron.

Oh, boy, prepare for the shit to fly at your face at light speed. Here it comes!

Been working for 6 weeks at this new company now. But at a department that has nothing to do with the job in my contract. Went to the boss and asked how long I have to do this the first week and he said "It will be 4-8 weeks. After this (department A) you'll be placed in department B". I was like "Ok".

6 weeks pass by and there's no sound from him. Went to his office and complained that something slowly needs to happen (changewise). He agreed and I went back to work.

Few hours pass by and my coworker gets a call from him that I will be working at department C from now on with no more information (such as end date) given. My coworker told me that and I asked if he didn't tell my coworker about the end date or any change of plans regarding department B. My coworker didn't know anything.

After the work ended I went to the boss again to ask him why there was this sudden change that he could have told me before in today's meeting or if this sudden change will interfere with our old plan. Instead he passive aggressively told me that he already told me that I will be placed at department B in 2 weeks.

No shit, Sherlock. I already fucking knew that you told me that. I just wanted to know if this sudden change changed our old agreement.

This company is so fucking unorganized. Jesus!

The saddest and funniest side of our industry is (atleast in India): someone works hard and makes it to the best colleges, do great projects on AI, ML; get a good score on Leetcode, codechef; gets a job in FAANG-like companies...

Changes colors in CSS and texts in HTML.

And, why is there so much emphasis on Data Structures and Algorithms? I mean, a little bit is fine, but why get obsessed with it when you never write algorithms in production code?

Now, don't tell me that, we use libraries and we should know what we are doing, no, we don't use algorithms even in libraries.

Now, before you tell me that MySQL uses B-tree for maintaining indexes, you really don't need to solve tricky questions to be able to understand how a B-tree works.

It's just absurd.

I know how to little bit on how design scalable systems.
I know how to write good code that is both modular and extensible.
I know how to mentor interns and turn them into employees.
I know how to mentor junior engineers (freshers) and help them get started.
Heck I can even invert a binary tree.

But some FAANG company would reject me because I cannot solve a very tricky dynamic programming question.

Do you have any annoying you want to get rid off, but you can't because of reasons?
I do. They are 4, but for now I'll talk about the gold medal winner.

When we met about 8-9 ago, she had just come back to town due to some very bad personal experience (not her fault). Anyway, she is polite, but her major flaw is that she is pushy. REAL BAD! And she gets mad when other people (including me) try to do it on her. Another one is having calls during random inappropriate times, because she had fight #N with her boyfriend, and last but not least, she will call when needs something out of someone.

Lately, her project is finding us a job, since we're both unemployed. Any job. The sad part is when she sends me job ads for dev jobs I don't qualify, e.g. Company X is looking for a dev with Y year of experience, knowing A, B, C & D technologies. I've told her that I don't qualify for most of the dev jobs she sends me, but she insists I should send my CV anyway, cause of reasons. Also, for some reason, I should be accounted to her for all my current choices when what I would honestly say is "BUG OFF".

Her latest endeavour is getting me one of her friends (a psychologist) as a "client". Her friend wants to have a professional website with writing posts/articles as a side dish. I'm not registered as a freelancer, so everything will be done under the counter, and her friend is OK with that. I'm no web developer, but I didn't refuse because of her backlash and also that would be a positive experience for me. Now, the juicy part. She gave her my phone number without my permission and she told me straight away. Her plan was having the three of us meet, though I don't know why and I didn't want her being around. I asked her to call me immediately, which it didn't happen. After being pestered by my friend for a couple of weeks if her friend called me, she finally did it on Monday. She didn't say to me anything I didn't know, but at least I have her phone now.

What I can offer her is a website skeleton with the usabilities she's asking. What I can't offer her is graphics/banner and security. And now I have to come up with reasonable price. Teams here ask 400-600€ for a complete website the way she asks, including VAT. I'm thinking around 100€ and I don't know when I can deliver the project. I've had some experience with Ruby and Sinatra, so I'll go with that, and I'll learn CSS along the way.

Thanks for reading till the end! 😃

I have an old manager that I worked with at an old job that got me shit canned for a failed web sockets implementation. He works at a new company and wants to talk.

What should I do?

A) I don’t trust this fucker. Ignore him.
B) Forgive and forget and try to get the job?
C) Something else.
D) SWAT the motherfucker.

Biggest lesson learned for me was believing some guy wearing a comb over & a fake tan who sounds like a car salesman. He claimed selling web app services to companies was no different than selling cars. It turns out that a lot of investors were not too happy that the company went under (b4 anything was released) b/c the CEO/CFO somehow managed to burn several million dollars on first class flights, cruises, 5 star restaurants, a luxury company car (for himself), hotels, etc.,. oh and even some fake tans!

Worst part about all that he wasn't even worth sueing because he had no money after all that. He even signed the 'company' car over to one of his kids!

Sometimes I think devs are like superheroes who are bored to death and just want to have the greatest world clusterfuck possible to be ... Amused.

Backstory: One project, fairly large (roughly 200 dependencies, a framework). I looked over the ticket backlog and a critical ticket title regarding the important framework caught my eye.

(Rephrased as title was gibberish)

Framework fork needed for supporting different versions of library X

...

Ok. They want to fork a whole fucking framework for a single library dependency.

😶

The framework that is the basis of like 30 - 40 % of all projects at our company.

😶

Maybe.. I just misunderstood it. (my hope dies several times a day, one more or less doesn't matter).

Ticker: Blablablablabla...

"to incorporate library X at version A and - for other projects - at version Y, we need to split the framework into two forks with different versions but same namespace."

🤮

Why. Just why. How the fuck can anyone come up with such an incredible stupidity?

After chewing some people's ears off....

It turned out to be very simple.

Just split off the library dependent part, which were like 20 plus classes.

Release it with two different versions, for library in version A and library B.

Done.

Sometimes devs terrify me.

Please. Never fork / branch a framework or anything "heavy" completely.

That's madness. Properly split what needs to be split and be done.

It's not that hard, hmkay?

Recruiter: I saw your resume and I found the perfect position for you but I have to confirm a couple of things.

Me: okay great.

Recruiter: I see you worked for a NOC for 2 years and your familiar with python.

Me: yes.

Recruiter: Great how does 50 sound.

Me: That's great I can definitely do 50k a year.

Recruiter: That's $50 an hour.

Me: Uh...... yeah definitely I can do that. What's the position again?

Recruiter: Senior Systems Engineer for B of A.

Me: Oh uhhh....... (In my head I'm like maybe I can fake it til I make it...)

Me: sigh..... I think you made a mistake....

I regret it but I would have lost them trillions possibly causing the financial collapse of the company for at least a week when they realize I'm not qualified.

In an IT management class, the professor wanted us to estimate the operation costs for a small IT company, breaking them down by service offered. I remember creating a markdown file, multiple times executing the line `echo $RANDOM >> estimations.md`. We rounded the numbers slightly, pimped the document a bit and submitted a nice PDF. When we had to present our work, the professor asked us how we had proceeded to calculate those results. We told him a story about an Excel file we worked on, but did not submit, because we thought he'd be interested in the end result and not care about those details. He asked us to submit that Excel calculation, because he wanted to comprehend our method. So we got together, created an Excel sheet, copied our "estimations" into column C and called it "service cost". For column B, we used the same "cost per man hour" value (scientifically estimated using the RAND() function) for every row. Finally, we divided the "service cost" by the "cost per man hour" for every row, put the result in column A and called it "effort (in man hours)". The professor, being able to "reproduce" our estimation, accepted our solution.

Randomly one day, out of the blue:

Echelons: You now have Workspace, and it’s a requirement you use it. Make it successful because we paid and are paying a large dollar amount for it, and our competitors have reported success with it. We want email communications companywide eliminated by 50% within the first 60 days.

Management: Ok, excellent! We want to do XYZ.

Echelons: Nope, can’t do any of that.

Management: Ok, how about a, b, and c?

Echelons: Nope, nope, nope.

Management: Alright, let’s try 1,2, and 3.

Echelons: Nope, not possible.

Management: What can we do then? We need further direction at this point.

Echelons: One group for all departments, posts, and attachments only. PDF, .jpeg, .png files only. Everyone in the company must be registered within seven days and using the platform. Only mobile devices allowed.

Management: We have almost 10,000 employees, and the SSO aspect alone could take weeks and months.

Echelons: Insignificant as Facebook said it should be easy to deploy. Also, every post not created by admin will need to be manually approved and done so within 5-10 minutes after its submission 24/7, 365.

Management: Ok, solved. A little shaky, but it’s working. Can we increase the number of admins and moderators?

Echelons: Only 1700 employees have registered; the app has been up 14 days now? What’s wrong? Where’s the engagement? Effective immediately, all members of management must be creating and starting 4 to 7 posts daily, including weekends.

Management: Our registration process with the SSO client isn’t smooth and clean across all devices. We had to implement training to overcome this. Can we increase the number of admins and moderators? Can we make all members of management either administrators or at least moderator? Can we at least turn on live streaming and video formats?

Echelons: No! 10 admin and mods max. Yes to streaming and video.

Echelons: Progress update, please. Include ROI timeline and impactful usage data. This must to pay for itself in the first six months and continue to pay for itself long term, along with showing XYZ company-wide growth quarterly.

Echelons: Hello?

Echelons: Hello?

Having Workplace shoved down your throat has been an interesting experience. Anyone have any exciting ideas or examples to share on what they have utilized with Workplace and increased employee engagement?

!dev

Today's world has gone so corrupt and full of crime that its almost impossible to be identified as honest/right, even if you are one. We thought that power of Internet would help identify the correct things but on the contrary, the internet is being used for declaring the wrong as right.

Thanks to sheer volume of duplicate data and social media's unverified content, we can no longer trust anything. Plus the effect of government and powerful people is so much that any big company you believe in would be forced to do whatever these big guns want.

Today if government wants to declare that "banana is a god fruit", they will simply generate enough news articles, social media tweets and rumours to do so. They know they can't proof it, but they can generate enough resources to change enough mindsets that what they are saying is not right but not completely wrong.
Even GitHub, which i once believed to have the ultimate method of preserving the truth is no longer a real thing. US govt has shown enough power to tell the world, that if we don't like something, then not even github is strong enough to preserve it

Our Indian government is also no less. Yesterday i heard the news that Gujrat government is slowly replacing the junior school's history syllabus to remove important historical events and replace them with chapters on hindu supremacy.

Currently i am not sure if its a real news but WHAT THE FUCK!?! They are going to erase the history? If the new generation gets the biased version of history, won't they grow up hating a particular commodity?
And forget the new generation, what about our generation? Did the books i read on history were also biased? Is this all political agenda why i like a particular commodity and hate the others? And how can i know if the facts i read are correct and truth? Who is the person verifying them and on what grounds is his decision correct?

Clearly no one can answer that because at the end, its highly opinionated.
If a newspaper A says "this guy is good" and newspaper B says "this guy is bad" , then after a 100 years, we would only believe the newspaper whose fossil remains in the museum and not the one which people believed to be correct 100 years ago.

And this is the problem. Corrupt people are generating enough content to make sure the biased version of history remains preserved while the original version gets lost with time.

I sometimes think that i should be buying a server deep below some glacier in the Antarctic ocean , hosting the real version of history. But there is no guarantee that government won't be tracing it back or make attempts to down

Job review time,
(just a random pick from the a list).
---
"Engineering Lead"
Translation: "Chief Calculator Officer"

"Anyone can design or spec a product, get it manufactured overseas and get it to market. But will it be good? Will people buy it?"
Translation: "We're looking for a miracle"

"Take on a top notch team that is going places in Electronics, R&D and advanced product development."
Translation: "Professional Excel engineer wanted"

"This company is a little-known success story that has been operating for over X years, making mission-critical electronic equipment for use by consumers, professionals, government and industry."
Translation: "Design weapons and tamagotchis."

"Working as part of the Senior Leadership team, you will have charge of the I.P. engine and product development team spinning up new ideas and throwing them out the door."
Translation: "You're success is our success. Your failure is your failure."

"The Role
- Generate New Ideas
- Push for new products
- Drive manufacturing
- Manage a cross disciplinary team that includes Electronics, Software and Mechanical
- Project Manage new projects to completion
- Interact with marketing and sales to drive results"
Translation: "We've never hired one person to be a whole team before but we think it will work."

"On your first day, we expect:
- Strong Leadership experience and skills
- Solid Engineering Fundamentals
- Experience taking new and existing products to market
- Experience with manufacturing high-tech, mission critical equipment
- Commercial Acumen
- Bachelors in Electrical or Electronic Engineering"
Translation: "We expect you know where to hide the drugs already."

"Nice to have:
- Experience with Defense or Medical Systems
- R&D background
- MBA, B. Commerce or similar"
Translation: "By clicking on this job ad your background check is already under way."

"In return:
- A loyal and oustanding team will be there to support you
- Extremely knowledgeable experts to guide you
- Incredibly smart founders to mentor you
- The opportunity to work on a real product
- Extremely generous salary package"
Translation: "Our last dev has removed the Warrant Canary. Can you pleeease put it back?!"

We use a open-source business management software (incl. crm, e-commerce, billing, accounting, warehouse, ...) that is highly customizable.

Previously we had "Company A" that customized it for my company. It was very expensive so they hired something to do the same but cheaper & inhouse. The codebase that "Company A" has written was terrible (confirmed by CTO & the new colleague").

Then the CFO wanted functionality A. Colleague said that this will take 2 weeks to implement. One week later, it was no longer needed & functionality B was now mandatory. Rinse & Repeat.

The CFO: "Why is nothing ever gonna get finished" or "why is the quality so bad?"

So they hired another person for the same position. This person has more experience so it costs them a lot more... And suddenly, everything works well

They contacted a few months later a consultant that analyzed the company. The consultant asked (for good reason) why such a small company has 2 people maintaining the in-house BM software. And suddenly, they wanted to get rid of the worst person. <enter my previous rant>

He is thrown out. Now the head of Operations wants to remove that software because it was not "sexy" enough (her words). So they introduced a glorified spreadsheet with less functionality. That new colleague was offered to take the lead on that project... And thus he fled to another company.

That project failed and now everyone is fired... And they hired back "Company A" to maintain that BM project.

So an employee sent a nice email saying she is leaving the company and this is her last day.

Then for the next three days I get reply-to-all emails saying “nice to work with you”, etc.

A. Why the fuck reply to all, I don’t care
B. Her last day was two days ago, wtf? Why are you replying?
C. Person leaving send that shit bcc. Though perhaps this was their final, `fuck you` to us all!

Just a whole pile of idiots.

When the CTO/CEO of your "startup" is always AFK and it takes weeks to get anything approved by them (or even secure a meeting with them) and they have almost-exclusive access to production and the admin account for all third party services.

Want to create a new messaging channel? Too bad! What about a new repository for that cool idea you had, or that new microservice you're expected to build. Expect to be blocked for at least a week.

When they also hold themselves solely responsible for security and operations, they've built their own proprietary framework that handles all the authentication, database models and microservice communications.

Speaking of which, there's more than six microservices per developer!

Oh there's a bug or limitation in the framework? Too bad. It's a black box that nobody else in the company can touch. Good luck with the two week lead time on getting anything changed there. Oh and there's no dedicated issue tracker. Have you heard of email?

When the systems and processes in place were designed for "consistency" and "scalability" in mind you can be certain that everything is consistently broken at scale. Each microservice offers:

1. Anemic & non-idempotent CRUD APIs (Can't believe it's not a Database Table™) because the consumer should do all the work.
2. Race Conditions, because transactions are "not portable" (but not to worry, all the code is written as if it were running single threaded on a single machine).
3. Fault Intolerance, just a single failure in a chain of layered microservice calls will leave the requested operation in a partially applied and corrupted state. Ger ready for manual intervention.
4. Completely Redundant Documentation, our web documentation is automatically generated and is always of the form //[FieldName] of the [ObjectName].
5. Happy Path Support, only the intended use cases and fields work, we added a bunch of others because YouAreGoingToNeedIt™ but it won't work when you do need it. The only record of this happy path is the code itself.

Consider this, you're been building a new microservice, you've carefully followed all the unwritten highly specific technical implementation standards enforced by the CTO/CEO (that your aware of). You've decided to write some unit tests, well um.. didn't you know? There's nothing scalable and consistent about running the system locally! That's not built-in to the framework. So just use curl to test your service whilst it is deployed or connected to the development environment. Then you can open a PR and once it has been approved it will be included in the next full deployment (at least a week later).

Most new 'services' feel like the are about one to five days of writing straightforward code followed by weeks to months of integration hell, testing and blocked dependencies.

When confronted/advised about these issues the response from the CTO/CEO
varies:

(A) "yes but it's an edge case, the cloud is highly available and reliable, our software doesn't crash frequently".
(B) "yes, that's why I'm thinking about adding [idempotency] to the framework to address that when I'm not so busy" two weeks go by...
(C) "yes, but we are still doing better than all of our competitors".
(D) "oh, but you can just [highly specific sequence of undocumented steps, that probably won't work when you try it].
(E) "yes, let's setup a meeting to go through this in more detail" *doesn't show up to the meeting*.
(F) "oh, but our customers are really happy with our level of [Documentation]".

Sometimes it can feel like a bit of a cult, as all of the project managers (and some of the developers) see the CTO/CEO as a sort of 'programming god' because they are never blocked on anything they work on, they're able to bypass all the limitations and obstacles they've placed in front of the 'ordinary' developers.

There's been several instances where the CTO/CEO will suddenly make widespread changes to the codebase (to enforce some 'standard') without having to go through the same review process as everybody else, these changes will usually break something like the automatic build process or something in the dev environment and its up to the developers to pick up the pieces. I think developers find it intimidating to identify issues in the CTO/CEO's code because it's implicitly defined due to their status as the "gold standard".

It's certainly frustrating but I hope this story serves as a bit of a foil to those who wish they had a more technical CTO/CEO in their organisation. Does anybody else have a similar experience or is this situation an absolute one of a kind?

Quick question, is it bad to quit from a job when the project is not finished yet, especially in a startup company?

My reasoning for quitting, boss doesn’t really understand how game development usually works and mostly assuming every project will be same.

Following is my rant of background story for my question.

The incident triggered me wanting to leave is as below.
G = another guy from incubating center
B = boss

G: hey B, do u know this game studio is releasing this title soon. It’s a local company. Sounds cool.

Then they went to check the company profile. Found that the company has abt 40 staffs in total.

B: hey lunadev, do u know them? They have 40 people to make 2 titles. I think we’re the smallest company in the world that developing mobile games. Ha ha ha.

Me: oh, may be their project scope is complex. But I don’t think ours is the smallest company in the world making game. (We have 5 in total including him) there are others with only 2 ppl making games. (My sarcastic side took over me and said) I think we’re the only company in the world that has such small manpower with shortest deadline.

B: then how long do u think our timeline should be?

Me: abt 2 yrs? (Me considering all the artworks, features, testing time that we have to do)

B: urmmm I don’t think it’s that long. May be abt 6 months or a year at most?

G: ya, abt 6 months. Mobile games are not like desktop games or others so should be abt 6 months. Shouldn’t take that long.

Me: ... :)

Then I packed up my stuffs and left for the day. As for side note, boss designed the game himself and it took him 5 years to add complex features. And sometimes he will still come up to us and ask us to add that feature just cuz he was just inspired by another game he just played. Now can they tell us, this game can finish in 6 months? On what ground?

And another thing that he does gets on my nerve is that he plays game during office hours while the rest of us rushing for his project and campaign.

So, if I quit now, they’d still be in the middle of development. Oh and I’m the main programmer developing the game. So, erm.. Is it wrong?

!rant

Pretty excited today! A buddy of mine wants to try getting into linux, he's mostly done Windows IT Helpdesk and some light Windows SysAdmin work but the company he works for is garbage and he wants/needs a change of pace. He's grabbing himself a raspberry pi 4 model B to use as his learning test bed. I'm grabbing one today or tomorrow so I can help him however I can to try and help get him comfortable with Linux so he can try to escape the hellhole that is his workplace. (I used to work there too, so you can trust me when I say it's fucking shite!)

Gonna start slow and easy and have him get comfortable with the terminal and ssh-ing in using keypairs.

Fuck yeah!!! I'm so excited for him.

He's wanted to get into linux for the last year or so but something at work would always happen to make him comfortable with his job again, like fuckface mcgee would finally get fired. And my dude would be like, "Okay, it's not all bad here, I'll stick it out a bit longer." Then they would just teplace fuckface mcgee with dipshit cockmouth and he'd fall back into a depression about working there. They finally put the final nail in the coffin recently and I think he's really motivated to do whatever he can to GTFO of there this time.

A little story which happened my SECOND day on the floor after getting hired to do customer-facing phone support for my current job (can't mention the name, NDA). Customer from Detroit calls in:
Me: "Thank you for calling (company), my name is Guru, how can I assist you?"
C: "Uhhh, yeah. I need to get back into my ID. I can't backup my tablet or phone, and y'all are kinda holding my data host-" <Loud gunshots>
C: "oh! Shit!" <sound of running feet>
Me: "Everything OK sir?"
C: "Fuck! Naw! Hang on!" <more running, jumps a fence, skids to a stop>
C: "Ok, I'm safe, I'm safe... So what I gotta do to get y'all to let me back into my shit?"
*MUTE* Me: "First of all, what the fuck are you doing on the phone with me when you should be either A) calling the cops because, I dunno, just maybe some trouser stain is attempting to kill you, or, B) FIRING BACK, MOTHERFUCKER!!"
*REAL* Me: "OK, first you gotta… (outlines step 1,2,3... etc)
C: "OK, that sounds easy enough. I'll try it when I get to the office, I'm on my way there now- shit. Hold on again..."
(talking to someone on the street): "what, him? That dude? Over there? That dude... In the shirt?What the fuck!? Are you sure? Hold on, sir! I'ma call you back..."
Last thing I hear before the line lets go is a large BOOM!

Sometimes it's best to just sit back and sip your coffee...

received two job opportunities today.

Company A - a startup company that aims to provide SAAS.

Company B - MNC, current product is stable and making money. They plan to move to SAAS later on (but not yet confirm)

Which should I join? Please advise~~

!rant
import analogies

Customer: So I have two emails and I'd like to be able to use them.

Me: Okay, I see you have both Windows Live Mail and Thunderbird...

Customer: Yeah, Thunderbird was the old one we used, we now use the Windows Live Mail, but it's always having problems.

Me: Well, Windows Live Mail isn't supported anymore, so I would recommend moving back to Thunderbird.

Customer: But that would mean I would have to get another email, right?

Me: No... *thinks for a moment* OK, imagine you have a garden hose that is connected to the main line of your house. You with me?

Customer: I guess...

Me: So the connection from your house is your email - or at least the server out on the internet. Now on the other end you have a hose splitter, and it splits off into two other hoses. Still with me?

Customer: Yeah...

Me: So on the end of the other two hoses you have two spray nozzles; one for each hose. Now one nozzle is from company A and the other is from company B. Both nozzles share some spray types on the heads, but there are a few heads on A that B doesn't have and vice versa.

Customer: OK...

Me: Those spray heads are Windows Live Mail and Thunderbird. They receive your mail from the same place, like the water, but they have different features. Does that makes sense?

Customer: I suppose.

I turned the job offer down. It was a fucking clown adventure. (Possibly even an attempt of a lateral arabesque?)

The position was filled and it turns out to my expections. It’s a bogus job! A PM from outside the company now has the role of an administrator. She has no IT knowledge which to me is just astounding of the incompetence of the upper management.

I mean.

What are the actually drinking up there? Is there drugs in the water? Actual drugs!?

We have hundreds of ”IT” systems spread over the planet. All of them are…wait for it… related to, you know, hardware and software and all sorts of integrations and data pulsations and the level of intertwined processes are staggering.

So, obviously it was a bogus title which will soon disappear after the next re-org.

I hate these larger-than-life-projects where all of a sudden an organism is created inside the ”normal” organism and the physical reality is vastly different from the surrounding space. And time. Time is also different. Not only are there actual time-zones to take into account but some projects are slower in time and some are faster than normal time. The guys that get that slower in time than normal time is the guys that ALWAYS should initiate projects from the start. They do know that shit is complex and the invent time. Very good. Some projects does not even come close to even enter the arena. Hell, they are not even in the parking lot! The mind-structures of insane management believing that the ”understand”.

Anyway. I turned it down. And it was the right decision almost certainly. I am now only the Level B Chief Supreme Commander of almost everything (except a lot of stuff).

The conversations that come across my DevOps desk on a monthly basis.... These have come into my care via Slack, Email, Jira Tickets, PagerDuty alerts, text messages, GitHub PR Reviews, and phone calls. I spend most of my day just trying to log the work I'm being asked to do.

From Random People:
* Employee <A> and Contractor <B> are starting today. Please provision all 19 of their required accounts.
* Oh, they actually started yesterday, please hurry on this request.

From Engineers:
* The database is failing. Why?
* The read-only replica isn't accepting writes. Can you fix this?
* We have this new project we're starting and we need you to set up continuous integration, deployment, write our unit tests, define an integration test strategy, tell us how to mock every call to everything. We'll need several thousand dollars in AWS resources that we've barely defined. Can you define what AWS resources we need?
* We didn't like your definition of AWS resources, so we came up with our own. We're also going to need you to rearchitect the networking to support our single typescript API.
* The VPN is down and nobody can do any work because you locked us all out of connecting directly over SSH from home. Please unblock my home IP.
* Oh, looks like my VPN password expired. How do I reset my VPN password?
* My GitHub account doesn't have access to this repo. Please make my PR for me.
* Can you tell me how to run this app's test suite?
* CI system failed a build. Why?
* App doesn't send logs to the logging platform. Please tell me why.
* How do I add logging statements to my app?
* Why would I need a logging library, can't you just understand why my app doesn't need to waste my time with logs?

From Various 3rd party vendors:
* <X> application changed their license terms. How much do you really want to pay us now?

From Management:
* <X> left the company, and he was working on these tasks that seem closely related to your work. Here are the 3 GitHub Repos you now own.
* Why is our AWS bill so high? I need you to lower our bill by tomorrow. Preferably by 10k-20k monthly. Thanks.
* Please send this month's plan for DevOps work.
* Please don't do anything on your plan.
* Here's your actual new plan for the month.
* Please also do these 10 interruptions-which-became-epic-projects

From AWS:
* Dear AWS Admin, 17 instances need to be rebooted. Please do so by tomorrow.
* Dear AWS Admin, 3 user accounts saw suspicious activity. Please confirm these were actually you.
* Dear AWS Admin, you need to relaunch every one of your instances into a new VPC within the next year.
* Dear AWS Admin, Your app was suspiciously accessing XYZ, which is a violation of our terms of service. You have 24 hours to address this before we delete your AWS account.

Finally, From Management:
* Please provide management with updates, nobody knows what you do.

From me:
Please pay me more. Please give me a team to assist so I'm not a team of one. Also, my wife is asking me to look for a new job, and she's not wrong. Just saying.

Can we patent an Idea? I have my product A ready for launch. Company B claims that we have patent for that idea. We both trying to solve exact same problem using exact same methodology. How should I proceed? Any legal advisors here?

Watched 2 different vendors struggle to get something going.

I stayed quiet during both meetings, the first, was a misconfiguration error on their project code. They were tailoring the product that they sold my institution, I could see the simple error: key-value settings on one of their json files (it is a dotneto app)
I don't get paid to troubleshoot the code for an external company, so I was silent, knowing full well this would take longer to get done, needless to say, I had originally advised against purchasing this product but was not listened to, very well then.

The other was a configuration issue on the side of a different Java based product, there were some strange XML configuration entries, some other project files that made little sense, but again: quiet.

Department head is concerned about the delays that this might cause and will still not ask if I am willing to help since he knows I A) was against this product purchase from the get go and B) knows DAMN well I will say that I don't get paid to troubleshoot the issues that third party vendors charging us over 100k of product "worth", they wanna spend the money on "enterprise" shit that does not work,they can deal with their own shit programs.

Morale of the story: money moves people. If there is no bling in my account: then I ain't doing it.

Now, I do get paid well for what I do, and for that I do bust my ass, for everything else: there is mastercard.

Can there be a happy rant?

This is going to be a bit of a rambling semi coherent story here:

So this customer who just doesn't know what their data schema is or how they use it (they're a conglomeration of companies so maybe you get how that works out in a database). For every record there's like a ton of reference number type things mapped all over the DB to fit each companies needs needs.

To each company the data means something different, they use the data differently, and despite their claims otherwise, I think there are some logical conflicts in there regarding things like "This widget is owned by company A, division B, user C.". I'm also pretty sure different companies actually don't agree on who owns what... but when I show them they just sort of dance around what they've said in the past...

So I write a report (just an SQL query that outputs ... somewhere ... I mean what isn't that?) that tells them about all the things that happened given X, Y, Z.

Then every damn morning they'd get all up in arms about how some things are 'missing' but sometimes they don't know what or why because they've no clue what the underlying data actually is / their own people don't enter the data in a consistent way. (garbage in garbage out man...)

So I've struggled with this for a few weeks and been really frustrated. Every morning when I'm trying to do something else ... emails about how something isn't working / missing.

In the meantime I'm also frustrated by inquiries about "hey this is just a simple report right?" (to be clear folks asking that aren't being jerks, and they're not wrong ... it really should be simple)

Anyway my boss being the good guy he is offers to take it over, so I can do some things. Also sometimes it helps just to have someone else own something / not just look it over.

So a few days into this.... yup, emails coming in about things 'missing' or 'wrong' every day.

Like it sucks, but it's nice to see it suck for someone else too as validation.

Alright guys, I need some advice now from you..

My employer is super impressed with my worked and they are willing to relocate me to the US (Seattle).

As you all are aware that I am actively trying to move out of my country but lately have realised that no matter what, it's home.

Also, I am way to close to my mother and don't want to leave her alone for an extended period of time as both my parents are ageing and I cannot be a selfish fuck to ignore them during their last phase of life.

I want to make the most to spend time with them.

Some key points that I need help with
- I am more inclined towards the UK/EU than US
- Need to spend time with parents/family
- Need to secure some cash for some key life moments

Some challenges:
- Cannot take parents along because they'd not be able to settle for more than 1.5 month outside for various reasons
- If I am moving out, why shouldn't I go to a place I love than a place I don't?

Some plans:
Plan A: Move to Seattle (6 months) > FAANG > Get a high paying high in India (all this in 2 year duration) > Settle down > Periodically travel Europe and explore hobbies

Plan B: Move to Seattle (6 months) > FAANG (optional) > Find a job in the UK/EU (4.5 year duration) > Fullfill EU dreams > Get a high paying job in India > Settle > Continue exploring hobbies

Plan C: Stay in India with current company (6 months) > IJP or EJP to the UK/EU (5 year duration) > Fullfill EU dreams > Get a high paying job in India > Settle > Continue exploring hobbies

I need to pick one while keeping in my that I can spend more time with parents and fullfill my dreams as well. I am confident that money will follow and I'll save enough for my retirement. Willing to trade off some extremely high paying jobs for a happier lifestyle.

is being a tech/dev person, a dead end job?

i have been thinking about this for sometime. as a dev, we can progress into senior dev, then tech lead, then staff engineer probably. but that is that. for a tech person :

1. their salary levels are defined. for eg, a junior may earn $10k pm , and the highest tech guy (say staff engineer) will earn $100k pm, but everyone's salary will be spread over this range only, in different slots.

2. some companies give stocks and bonuses , but most of the time that too is fixed to say 30% of the annual salary at max.

3. its a low risk job as a min of x number of tech folks are always required for their tech product to work properly. plus these folks are majorly with similar skills, so 2 react guys can be reduced to 1 but not because of incompetency .

4. even if people are incompetent, our domain is friendly and more like a community learning stuff. we share our knowledge in public domain and try to make things easy to learn for other folks inside and outside the office. this is probably a bad thing too

compare this to businesses , management and sales they have different:
1. thier career progression : saleman > sales team manager> branch manager > multiple branch manager(director) > multiple zones/state manager (president) > multiple countries/ company manager (cxo)

2. their salaries are comission based. they get a commission in the number of sales they get, later theybget comission in the sales of their team> their branch > their zone and finally in company's total revenue. this leads to very meagre number in salaries, but a very major and mostly consistent and handsome number in commission. that is why their salaries ranges from $2k pm to $2-$3millions per month.

3. in sales/management , their is a always a room for optimisation . if a guy is selling less products, than another guy, he could be fired and leads could be given to other/new person. managers can optimise the cost/expenses chain and help company generate wider profits. overall everyone is running for (a) to get an incentive and (b) to dodge their boss's axe.

4. this makes it a cut-throat and a network-first domain. people are arrogant and selfish, and have their own special tricks and tactics to ensure their value.

as a manager , you don't go around sharing the stories on how you got apple to partner with foxconn for every iphone manufacturing, you just enjoy the big fat bonus check and awe of inspiration that your junior interns make.

this sound a little bad , but on the contrary , this involves being a people person and a social animal. i remember one example from the office web series, where different sales people would have different strategies for getting a business: Michael would go wild, Stanley would connect with people of his race, and Phyllis would dress up like a client's wife.
in real life too, i have seen people using various social cues to get business. the guy from whom we bought our car, he was so friendly with my dad, i once thought that they are some long lost brothers.

this makes me wonder : are sales/mgmt people being better at being entrepreneur and human beings than we devs?

in terms of ethics, i don't think that people who are defining their life around comissions and cut throat races to be friendly or supportive beings. but at the same time, they would be connecting with people and their real problems, so they might become more helpful than their friends/relatives and other "good people" ?

Additionally, the skills of sales/mgmt translate directly to entrepreneurship, so every good salesman/manager is a billionaire in making. whereas we devs are just being peas in a pod , debating on next big npm package and trying to manage taxes on our already meagre , "consistent" income :/

mann i want some people skills like these guys

I need some advice. A year ago, one of my former colleagues got a job at one of my dream companies. We weren't besties but we had a good relationship. When I learned about her new job I congratulated her and told her that I'd like to work there too. A position at that company has been open for quite a while but I'm hesitating to apply because:
a) If I apply without telling her and the recruiters see that we used to be colleagues, it will seem strange that I didn't ask her for a referral
b) If I ask her for a referral she might sabotage me because she's probably grooming one of her friends for that position or she thinks that I was a horrible colleague and doesn't want to work with me again. If she liked me, wouldn't she tell me about the position?
On the other hand, the ad for that well paid position has been on their site for months so I'm starting to think it's either fake or they're looking for a special unicorn(which I am not)
Should I apply or is it a complete wasted of my time? (I already have a job)

TL;DR: idiot 'team leader' does mindless merge to master. Precious time wasted in a high pressure deadline environment.

So, i work currently at one of Belgiums largest consulting company's at brussels airport, we are moving their analytics platform to the cloud.

We use puppet to manage the systems.

When i started i noticed immediately that their 'development workflow' is hardly to be named as such, because they simply change stuff directly on server , manual 'temporary' fixes everywhere, hardcoded stuff, non validated code... Basically the way one would develop in their garage, not in a consulting company as this one. But that is just the beginning.

A month ago i did a major effort to equalize all the discrepancies between the codebase and the server. Ensured entire codebase to be validated, syntax checked, parsed, tested... It works. A 'great codebase overhaul' commit was PR'ed to master and got merged.

Yesterday the team lead, i'll call him 'B-tard' from here on, has also 'equalized the discrepancies between codebase, server and the restnof the stale branches on the repo' . i was doing my other work on my branch so no fucks given. This is where i should have given some fucks.

Anyways, today. The day starts every day with merging the master branch into your working branh because you need the latest working codebase, right?

Wrong!
This fucking dipshit smug b-tard has done a mindless merge of the entire codebase, effectively removing ALL validated working code for provisioning servers. Control blocks, lookup functions, lambda's... Basically everything he did not understand.

At the same time the project is already way beyond the allotted budget in pkney and time, so there is a huge pressure to have a working 'production' environment TODAY!

THIS MOTHERFUCKING B-TARD JUST MADE THAT IMPOSSIBLE.

i'm loving this assignment, i'm loving the PM, the collegues, the environment, the location... everything. All but this fuckibg b-tard that somehow got his position by sucking dick or licking ass or both...

I wanna get out asap.

Oh... While typing this and arriving at the room of the office... It is locked, i have no key.

Fucking asshole!

I'm trying to get into Full stack web development, coming from 1.5 years of Android development. During my studies tried out Backbone with Node once and played with Angular, hated it though.

As this is already some time ago, I was wondering which Tech Stack you would consider being

a) Beginner friendly
b) also ready for use in business?

I recently learnt Kotlin and am quite happy with it, I'd like to go deeper on that. Also, the company I'm hoping to work for talked about Drop Wizard, Spring, Vue, Angular and React.

Curious to hear your thoughts, Thank you :)

Okay I'm guessing everyone here has experienced something like this but...

I dev for Company A and we have various other companies and clients utilize our service. Now, a client from Company B comes to us and says that they are having problems signing in. Apparently the page just tells them "Can't sign in".

"That's odd," I think to myself, "because our failed sign-in messages aren't that terse and usually tell you why."

I look on the system, client is registered under Company B and has verified their email address. All good there. My guess? Trying to sign in to the wrong site (we have a jobs site too) because that sometimes comes up first on the googs.

We get an email from client just now: "Hi, still can't sign in. Please see screenshot below."

I shit you not, she was trying to sign in to her own company's website that clearly had "Company B" written above the sign in box.

Saturday 9:30am
Interview: #1
Company: A
Salary: they have no idea how much is a devops engineer paid, but they're looking for a devops engineer asap

Monday 9:30am
Interview: #1
Company: B
Salary: up to $50/hour for devops position

Tuesday 10:00am
Interview: #487 (final one with clients now)
Company: C
Salary: $6.25/hour for backend java + devops position

The name of today is Murphy.

So, the LAN at location A can't reach the one at location B. Turns out that something yet unknown is blowing fuses at location A, but after disconnecting a ton of unknowns, the router and a radio link station are up again. Yay Internet, but still no VPN connection to location B.

Needing the passwords for the OpenVPN servers, I notice that encfs4win refuses to mount the drive where the password manager files reside. Of course, any problem must have the company of other problems. Eventually, the encfs drive mounts on another computer.

So, I can access the OpenVPN computer running the client side and check the logs, which tell me that network B is unreachable.

Both networks and an encfs setup all die at the same time? Right, Murphy, what are you going to come up with next? No, don't tell me because I just got read errors from a hard drive.

Been consulting a friendly acquaintance on technical issues for some time now. An interesting side project in a field that I am not familiar. Well after some time you begin to be well versed and understand what it's all about.

Wrote some code. Made a website. Did some soldering and prototyping. Now I find myself in a position where most of the IP is a) written by me b) designed by me.

An official agreement has been a topic couple of times. The owner wants to hire me, but I don't see myself working there. He offered shares. I said yes. But nothing has been formalized.

Now the the CEO sends me an NDA that practically tries to make me sign over all the IP to the company. First correspondence I get from him since the beginning. Legislation is quite clear. Without written agreement IP is owned by the creator.

I lolled. They must think I am dumb because I try to help. I feel a hefty invoice for services provided generating in my accounting..

Let me run something by all of you. Let's say you once started freelancing as a "Plan B" in case your full-time gig dropped you. Over 12 years you've managed to build a long-standing personal brand around that occasional freelancing. You have several clients who adore you and the work you do and they tell you they would be lost without your talent and have nowhere else to go and nobody else they trust. You know, because in the past you tried to send them elsewhere (for various reasons) and they just kept coming back.

You get laid off from the full-time gig and ACME Company calls and interviews you as a top candidate they're really interested in for that same type of work for a full-time job they're offering.

Here's the catch...if hired, you have two months to basically erase your personal brand and agree never to do any freelancing work as before, even on your own time on evenings and weekends. ACME wants your full focus and attention. Additionally, you find out that the person you'd be replacing is being let go because they weren't sufficiently tech-skilled for the job. And, with a little digging, you find out that person _also_ had several freelancing gigs going on the side. Probably for the same "Plan B" reason. Which is probably why ACME is demanding exclusivity.

Your client base is small. ACME says "we don't care". The work you do is 90% automated and easily achievable in just minutes a day on a weekend or evening. ACME says "doesn't matter". You already had full-time work to begin with so you weren't doing a ton on the side. ACME couldn't be less interested in this "excuse". And you're not keen on the idea of burning down your brand, especially with no guarantees of any kind in the present IT industry hiring/firing/layoffs climate. ACME says this issue is make or break for them.

If you get to the offer stage do you:
a) Flip the bird to your brand and clients you've built up for over a decade and memory-hole it?
b) Negotiate a non-compete clause with ACME, agreeing not to take on any new clients while working full time for them?
c) Flip the bird to ACME and look for something else?

Asking for a friend. ;)

What do you guys think of code review? It was supposed to find potential mistakes in your code base, and share your knowledge with your co-workers, right?
In fact I have very bad experiences with code review, not just with 1 company, but quite a few. Code review process always comes to something like this:

Reviewer: Hey, I don't like your solution A because of disadvantages A1. You should implement solution B, because of advantage B1 blah blah...
Me: Yes, it's true that solution B provides advantage B1, but at the same time introduces much more complexity to the code base than necessary, and has disadvantage B2. I am aware that solution A has disadvantage A1 but it is justifiable and easier to overcome than B2 imo. In fact, solution A also provides advantage A2 that you might not know...
Reviewer: No, you HAVE TO implement B because of advantage B1 blah blah *repeating why B1 is awesome again*

I feel like it's just people trying to shove their preferences down my throat. Either code review is useless, or the companies I work for do something very very wrong in code review. Anyway, it's really discouraging me fron participating in team discussions.

A question on corporate reality, let me know which person is doing it right :

Person A is a young enthusiastic nd curious fresher who has joined an amazing company where there is a team of seniors above him.
They ask him to work on a project, give him some guidelines which he is able to quickly grasp and come back with an output (because he loves learning and working on it and challenges himself to do it quicker than before)

This goes on and on, the new guy is giving his 100%, but company realizes it and starts expecting more of him, his 100% is not satisfactory enough, he is expected to give his 110% . He is now feeling the pressure but still liking it (because he likes learning) even though it has started to effect his personal lifestyle. He no longer has time for friends and even codes during his nap times, but still believes that he's in his prime and its okay for him to grind wheels for a better future

-------------

Person B is a lazy ass half hearted fresher who's good with public relations. He knows he can do a work in 1 hour, but still does it in 2 hours and do it bad.
He is giving his 50% and seniors know it but still are expecting to get just 70-80% out of him because of his charming and cool personna.
He's cool, now dating office girls, actively partying and is now people's favorite and living a lavish life with equal salary as that of the person A.

Who is living their youth correctly?

A very long rant.. but I'm looking to share some experiences, maybe a different perspective.. huge changes at the company.

So my company is starting our microservices journey (we have a 359 retail websites at this moment)

First question was: What to build first?

The first thing we had to do was to decide what we wanted to build as our first microservice. We went looking for a microservice that can be used read only, consumers could easily implement without overhauling production software and is isolated from other processes.

We’ve ended up with building a catalog service as our first microservice. That catalog service provides consumers of the microservice information of our catalog and its most essential information about items in the catalog.

By starting with building the catalog service the team could focus on building the microservice without any time pressure. The initial functionalities of the catalog service were being created to replace existing functionality which were working fine.

Because we choose such an isolated functionality we were able to introduce the new catalog service into production step by step. Instead of replacing the search functionality of the webshops using a big-bang approach, we choose A/B split testing to measure our changes and gradually increase the load of the microservice.

Next step: Choosing a datastore

The search engine that was in production when we started this project was making user of Solr. Due to the use of Lucene it was performing very well as a search engine, but from engineering perspective it lacked some functionalities. It came short if you wanted to run it in a cluster environment, configuring it was hard and not user friendly and last but not least, development of Solr seemed to be grinded to a halt.

Elasticsearch started entering the scene as a competitor for Solr and brought interesting features. Still using Lucene, which we were happy with, it was build with clustering in mind and being provided out of the box. Managing Elasticsearch was easy since there are REST APIs for configuration and as a fallback there are YAML configurations available.

We decided to use Elasticsearch since it provides us the strengths and capabilities of Lucene with the added joy of easy configuration, clustering and a lively community driving the project.

Even bigger challenge? Which programming language will we use

The team responsible for developing this first microservice consists out of a group web developers. So when looking for a programming language for the microservice, we went searching for a language close to their hearts and expertise. At that time a typical web developer at least had knowledge of PHP and Javascript.

What we’ve noticed during researching various languages is that almost all actions done by the catalog service will boil down to the following paradigm:

- Execute a HTTP call to fetch some JSON

- Transform JSON to a desired output

- Respond with the transformed JSON

Actions that easily can be done in a parallel and asynchronous manner and mainly consists out of transforming JSON from the source to a desired output. The programming language used for the catalog service should hold strong qualifications for those kind of actions.

Another thing to notice is that some functionalities that will be built using the catalog service will result into a high level of concurrent requests. For example the type-ahead functionality will trigger several requests to the catalog service per usage of a user.

To us, PHP and .NET at that time weren’t sufficient enough to us for building the catalog service based on the requirements we’ve set. Eventually we’ve decided to use Node.js which is better suited for the things we are looking for as described earlier. Node.js provides a non-blocking I/O model and being event driven helps us developing a high performance microservice.

The leap to start programming Node.js is relatively small since it basically is Javascript. A language that is familiar for the developers around that time. While Node.js is displaying some new concepts it is relatively easy for a developer to start using it.

The beauty of microservices and the isolation it provides, is that you can choose the best tool for that particular microservice. Not all microservices will be developed using Node.js and Elasticsearch. All kinds of combinations might arise and this is what makes the microservices architecture so flexible.

Even when Node.js or Elasticsearch turns out to be a bad choice for the catalog service it is relatively easy to switch that choice for magic ‘X’ or component ‘Z’. By focussing on creating a solid API the components that are driving that API don’t matter that much. It should do what you ask of it and when it is lacking you just replace it.

Many more headaches to come later this year ;)

Story about someone elses rant
A = coworker;
B = random guy from company, but from another office;
C = manager we like a lot, cause he has IT background;

A asked B about a problem, because B worked with the that thing. B answered I dont know. So A asked C, and told him, im asking you, because B said, he dont know. C went nuts and pulled a shitstorm on B, like who WTF do you think you are, that you cant give at least a hint to A on the problem or Cc someone who may know more about the problem.

what i wanna say is, shouldnt it be common sence if someone asks me about a problem i navigate him to a person, who knows more than me? Even if its the first day i the office, I know this is my team leader he should see the bigger picture of the problem, so ask him. But telling idk is like, go fuck your self.

Need some advise. I suggested a feature over an email to a CEO of a B$ company, he replied “we also have same idea in pipeline”, they developed it 3 years later. A lot of screens are same as I sent.
Can I ask for credit legally.

How do I push a hiring offer to later and say no?

Context:

I work at company A and the manager, let's call her Jane, who hired me at company A, left shortly after to join company B at a senior executive level (very high up the ladder in a public company).

After few months, I decide to quit company A and started my job hunt. I received a job offer from company C.

Now, my relationship with Jane was super awesome. Jane was very supportive and thought very highly of me. She offered to write a LoR (letter of recommendation ) for me whenever I needed it.

Now, out of courtesy and maintaining the relationship, I mentioned to Jane that I quit company A and will be joining company C.

To which she immediately mentioned that she could hire me and setup my connect with one of the hiring managers in her team. We had our initial conversation and they skipped second stage (since I got a very high reference) and moved to final stage of the interview.

Now, I am not really keen on joining this company B as it will also require me to move outside of the country to a different timezone.

At the same time I don't want to sabotage my relationship with Jane and make sure I keep my options/doors open for some collaboration in future.

How do I go about telling Jane (and the team) that for now, I am focusing on joining company C and would like to explore the opportunity with her company/team in future, without damaging my professional image?

I started looking for something else. Send out my resume sunday, got an answer today and i’m invited.

Probably have an evaluation at the current company at the end of the month and i either want to have a plan B ,or just be gone soon because i’m the only frontender and i’m bored here most of the time.

There is one thing that will haunt me forever.
In my old job I was asked to fix some PHP code written by a guy who recently left the company.

Not only passwords were hardcoded in the code, but also he named all the variables like $a, $b, $c. And I still wonder, how comes he was not fired but left on his own terms?

Director walked in asking about the new homepage which we’re currently running an A/B test for. This page has been made and discussed by her direct colleague, the general director.

While walking though the page together with my colleage the designer the encounter a broken link.
Easy to fix ofcourse, and so we did, but shortly after he went back to hos room my colleage got an email asking who was responsible for this mistake.

It’s not one person. In first instance it’s our 6 headed web team. But after we deliver it multiple people test the page, and also the company who creates the A/B test sees tests and confirms.

This all happened during my holidays, but still i feel also responsible.

Couple of tiny mistakes, and still nobody in this whole process notices.
(At least 10 persons)

HOW THE HELL is that possible?!

Company A (mine) is building a site for company B, company B employs company C to manage their inventory database, company C exports inventory as JSON to company A, company C says, this field (SKUs) will be an object (skus = {...}) when it only has 1 value, but an array (skus = [{}, {}, ...]) when there are multiple SKUs, company A (me) tells company B to tell company C to ensure it's always an array.... company B is scared of company C and company A (me) is always cleaning up company C's shit

More a positive rant...
Just casually looked into an invitation to a collab tool my workplace set up for discussing optimizations of workflows, internal collabs, communication, yada yada...
Just to figure out, that there's A LOT of room for improvement being discussed and new ideas related to our work. Which is fucking great! Like "Hey we could maybe introduce A/B testing for our software" or "We should change the way our CI/CD works".
One of the best things I've seen so far: "We should do smth about (react) component XY, as it currently holds many configurable parameters for look and feel with too many possibilities" ... these components are like each 1 big file or so, that covers EVERY possibility. I had a feeling in my gut that some things were built quite complicated, but originally with a good idea/intention in mind. I thought that I just needed time to get used to new things. Now I know that I need to learn nevertheless but that things NEED improvement and that others agree on that, too.
I think this is a good sign when a company tries to reflect on itself to become better.

So I had this conversation yesterday while fixing yet another Windows laptop for someone else.

Other Guy = OG
Me = Me (Duh)

OG: So what are your plans after your apprenticeship?
Me: Uh, I'll probably start somewhere that's e-commerce related, kinda like my current company but somewhere else.
OG: Uh have you thought about being your own boss?
Me: Well yeah, but I wouldn't know how to attract customers and shit

-- This is the moment shit gets real
OG: OH BTW I heard that Germany is lacking AI developers, you should do that! It earns you shitloads of cash!
Me: Uhm.. well, that might be true b-
OG: There's no but dude, it's free money, you're smart.. I mean you can fix any computer, right? AI will be just as easy
Me: It's not like-
OG: Duh, don't make yourself look so bad I know you can do it!
Me: B..But I'm not interested in it at all
*silence for 5 seconds*
OG: Well.. I guess you do you then

After that we continued to have random chit-chat about his job and experience (He's a mechanic)

God I hate when people throw buzzwords around and try to convince other people to do what *they* want.
No, I don't want to develop a structure of 1000 ifs/elses, I'd rather keep doing what I'm doing, thanks!

I have called for a meeting with my manager's manager expressing concerns and ask for a role change inside the company.

How should I approach this?

My current project is this some IoT stuff being built on the cloud.

The role that I was recruited for and the one I am currently doing is very different thanks to the TPTB who suddenly decided some other team in a different country (lets call them B ) take on that role.

I see a lot of trash work assigned to my team that is a consequence of lack of understanding of the cloud stuff by people upstream and not automating steps in the engineering process like build,test, deploy ( which was part of my initial role description ) and I'm not liking my current role. But my manager doesn't give a damn.
He is just happy to be involved in the project.

I feel like I am having leftovers from a fancy restaurant in spite of having enough money to dine well in the same hotel.

When I bring out the concerns like lack of automating, cost savings in the cloud, improved security configurations to my manager, he doesn't seem to care and not voicing them upstream. If I bring up these topics in any discussion where people outside my team are also there,then I am quickly sidelined.

The rest of my team also don't seem to care. They just don't want to stand up and take responsibility.

So i want to know how finances work for tech companies. There are a lot of big numbers that come up when we talk about a company's finances, but i don't understand why the tech people are so down in the ladder, or why those no.s are not associated with the tech teams
Like here's a statement :

"company x is valuable at $42billion , their annual turnover is $5billion. With a profit of $2billion. The ceo has a worth of $1.4billion and company's share are selling at $1500 per share. Person a,b,c of the company hold's 2,3,4% in stocks and the investor sequoia capital is thinking of providing an investment of $25million"

This is a hypothetical company, but if this company is also providing its members of tech team @$20-200k per annum (depending upon seniority), then is it relatively too less? I mean the company is playing with numbers in millions, people are being attributed with billions and yet a developer has to satisfy in those numbers.

Is it because we are being paid by the no. Of hours/time? Because i want to know what other ways are there in which those managers and ceos and investors are being paid? I have heard far too many stories about devs leaving their jobs and starting businesses, and I don't think its only because their boss was a dick

I have to choose to accept an internship offer for dev role between company A and company B (potential PPO at both).

Company A: Unicorn startup ~3000 employees. A disruptor.
Company B: Early stage startup ~30 employees but has funding and all. Also, sounds promising. Loved their interview process.

Both are interesting to me and pay almost equally. Any inputs ranters?

Another Team: How do we do this thing? What aws role do we need?

Me: You do it like this, and I don't know the role by this guy does and all you have to do is ask him for the name of the role to assume.

AT: Ok, great.

AT: We're going to do it like this (wrong way, completely against best practices and completely against what the company architects dictate)

Me: No... thats the wrong way. Don't do it that way. That is bad, because (Reasons A, B, C). Do it the way I told you it should be done.

AT: Ok! I see thank you!

3 hrs later

AT schedules a meeting to go over options to do the thing ... including the WRONG WAY and they still haven't talked to That Guy to get the role name they need.

I went to an interview a few days ago, just out of curiousity, even though i was sure that i won't be getting any "android developer jobs" there . it was a mega job fair. in one company, me and my friend neil(fake name) went. the interviewer guy was willing to give neil a package upto 10LPA (its a great offer for freshers in my country) based on his current skills of php js, react,angular, ... web stuff .
I had this assumption( and neil did too , we both kind off had the same mindset) that a company teaches us things, we just have to be a little famous/accomplished. So i thought why not? i am accomplished. i got 2 apps on playstore, i am an AAD certified Android dev and know a lot of android stuff, i am quite famous. i am equally as deserving as neil.

But what happenned was something different. When my turn came, the interviewer said " If you have no knowledge of phy/js/node/angular, why are you sitting here?" to which i said " i presumed company would teach me, since i bring some level of expertise from other fields"

so he told me some hard truths **"Companies are fast paced. they don't have time to train you in everything. we seek for candidates having some level of knowledge in the domain, so that we could brush up your skills, increase your knowledge to current requirement and push you to production engineer asap, so that you could be worthy of your salary"**

This is completely correct. i have stuck myself in such a career that its very difficult to sell myself for other job profiles. And from what i have seen, companies seek a very high level of proficiency in this field and rarely recruit freshers( or even if they do, salaries will be aweful)

. Now i am so unsure about what to do next:

A.) keep learning more and more of android and look for job in it. And even if am getting an aweful job offer, just sulk and take it
B.) do open source work/gsoc work?( its a good way to earn more recognition/stipend/knowledge and sometimes even job offers)
C.) learn web dev, data sciences, blockchain, cloud or other stuff that i don't yet know
D.) go back to ds algo / competitive? (because having good competitive knowledge is a safe zone. you are assumed as apure fresher with 0 level of practical knowledge but good level of mathemetics)

I know i am going suck in all of the above except maybe (A) or (B) because (C) is something that am unsure would grab my interest (and even if it did, i am sure i need another 1-2 years to be somewhat good at it) and (D) is something i myself know am uncapable of , i am an average shit in maths(but might mug it all up if i pull all nighters for 1 year)

Degree is still on the way.
But once i have finished it'll help me do something like

std::cin>>a;
syd::cin>>b;
int sum = a + b ;
std::cout<<"sum of both numbers is:"<<sum;

My degree tells me that it is the most useful way of solving real world problems. By using c++ to cout statemens on terminal can solve all problems of a corporate company.

Recently we got a new project assigned and as always you are hyped, really really hyped...........

We were supposed to find all kind of driver updates (especially bios ones) for all devices the company owns. So first of all we thought:

EAAAASY! A little bit of web crawling, regex, etc.
.
.
.
.
B
U
U
U
U
T
!

We were sooooo soooo wrong these fucking manufacturer websites are absolutely awful to crawl or parse and nowadays there are no proper FTP Servers or something else anymore you could use to get the information. Every subsite is little bit different...
While coding and literally brute forcing possible urls (there was some kind of vague pattern) we learned AGAIN to appreciate proper developed and designed websites. Especially by devs who may have some more usage scenarios in mind for their site than simple human clients.

So thank you to all of you awesome web developers who design proper websites and web tools!

All in all it took us 2 weeks to come up with a proper solution (by the way we are a smal team of 3 devs) which somewhat works reliable and can deal with site changes etc.

Okay so there are a lot of things that are left by us students as "this would be taught to us on job, why bother now?" So i have many questions regarding this:

- is it a safe mentality? I mean University is teaching me, say a,b,c and the job is supposed to be like writing full letters, than am i stupid to stick to just a,b,c and not learning how to write letters beforehand?

- what is even "taught" on job? This is especially directed towards people in Big firms. I mean i can always blame that small ugly startup who treated me badly and not gave me any resources, but why do i feel its going to be same at every other company?

I guess no one is gonna teach me for 6 months on how to write classes with java, or make a ml engineer out of me when i don't know jack shit about ml.... That's the task for college, right?

I feel that when these companies say they "teach", you they mean how to follow instructions regarding agile meetings, how to survive office politics and how to learn quickly and produce an output quickly. I don't think that if i don't know how MVI works, then they are gonna teach me that, would they?i guess not unless they already have someone knowledgeable in that topic

- what about the things that are not taught in our colleges and we wanna make a career in it? Like say Android. From what i have experienced , choosing a career in a subject that's not taught you in grad school immediately takes away some kind of shield from you, as you are expected to know everything beforehand. So again, the same questions bfrom above

i did learned something from job life tho, and that too twice. Once it was when i first encountered an app sample for mvvm and once when i found out a very specific case of how video player is being used in a manner that handled a lot of bugs.

Why i didn't knew those approaches when i was not in job? Well, the first was a theoretical model whose practical implementation was difficult to find online that time and the second was a thing that i myself gave a lot of hours, yet failed to understand. However when i was in the company , i was partnered with a senior dev who himself had once spent 30 days with the source code to find a similar solution.

So again , both of above things could have been done by me had i spent more time trying to learn those "professional tools" and/or dwelve deeper into the tech. And i did felt pretty guilty not knowing about those...

If Company A owns company B & C. And profits from Company B were used in the incorporation and development of Company C.

Can company C list company B as a sponsor and partner along with the other sponsors? Or will that be automatically established if they're under the same parent company?

company B and C are listed and registered as independent companies and provide different services but both provide internet services.

I’m in the process of doing interviews and company A seems to like me - however company B just booked an interview for me. If company A calls me back for a job offer, what’s a reasonable time frame to give them my final answer?

Just in case, I want to keep my options open for company B depending on their offer.

so which job pays for improving an existing thing and not being a tool for your boss's whims? I guess the answer is a house-helper cause devs for sure aren't paid for clearing a shitty codebase.

i recently made a commit because i was do angry at the issue . this was the message "fixing a stupid bug from previous owner". it got squashed but i still felt better lol.
there are a few classes in our codebase that are so infuriating that i want to run a bulldozer on them and build from the ground up. multiple bugs ate caused from them, but we simply ignore because we know that our monkey iq QA won't be able to replicate them and we won't be answerable.
I hate to be in this position. the mgmt won't be giving me time to fix this shit but rather want us to add 2k more features to this Frankensteins monster.

adding to this, I can't get my satisfaction creating some hobby project and solving issues in that coz A) it won't be as massive as my company proj and B I won't be interested in building a dimmy project for a longer time, which does not attract any actual users :/

So I have two big named companies who have offered me a job after I graduate from college... Choice A is a defense contracting and technology company in the US and is very reputable. While, Choice B is a higher education software company and is reputable but not as popular as choice A.

I enjoy both work and think both would be a great platform for my career, however I don't know how heavy the weight of choice A's (more reputable) name on my resume will carry when applying for mid-career level jobs than Choice B.

Should I even worry about the name of the company?... Or mainly worry about what I would be doing at each company?

{TL:DR/ a super non web dev non frontend non interested person aka me somehow cracked the interview(through wrong practices i guess) landed into an internship that would have gone to a better person.I cracked the interview but am shit scared if i could stand the job}

- So 3 days ago i was talking to my friend regarding random stuff, when he told about needing a front end dev for making static template based html pages for their company.

- (I haven't ever worked in deep with web dev, just generated a few websites using mardown to html convertors, and was recently trying to learn flask/bootstrap/js) I was in need of some work so immediately requested him to talk about me in their company.

- yesterday i get an interview call from the hr of that company . She ask what i know, what they want and if i could do. I honestly tell them about my experience with web dev( with some maybe's)

- moments later , she adds me to a group with another guy, and gives us both a task to use create a clone of same website in 2 days.

- The website is a super graphically designed web page with lots of animations, custom mouses and what not. I could sense the basic elements out of it , like the nav bar and the carousals, but those animations were way beyond my knowledge. yet i start working on it

- I try with taking the clever top down approach of cloning the website and fixing its structure. It has such long code files of 10k+ lines, but i was still able to clean the css and html files and some of js code to make the website work

- later my friend calls and tells me that the other guy is a 1st year student / his brother and he doesn't know much stuff so he's kinda like me.

- He shows me a video of his code that he sent to him. That guy took the honest, bottom up approach, used the design as inspiration and was trying hard to create the similar design and animations via js.

- among other things, he also tells me that this challenge is super difficult and the level of difficulty in the work is certainly going to be lesser than this.

- In my task, I was super stuck at js because i haven't learned it much, therefore after spending 1.5 days, i made a submission without the main thing, i.e one particular carousal working

- later I get a call from another friend (B) of mine and while discussing random things, i show him my code over anydesk and ask him if he could somehow get my code to work. He asks for some time and sends me a complete refactored version of code with the same design but fully working carousal and other stuff.

- meanwhile i get to see the other guy's code and he had legit made all the designs and functions by himself, but his code looked less polished and different from the design.

- I pushed my friend(B)'s refactored version and added a comment on the group the carousal in mu code is now working.

- later at night my friend1 calls and tells me that their company was considering my submission and i would be getting the selection call

- I feel like a crazy fraud who somehow cracked the interview but is going to get his ass whipped. Where and how can i learn js, and jquery?

Our company (non tech) made Python available to install on company PCs sometime last year. Great! Only vanilla Python. Not so great. I opened a ticket to ask for the possibility to install additional packages, or if thats too much to ask, if they at least make some packages available (code review and somesuch was mentioned). Today (!), after several responsibility transfers, I finally had a conference call with someone in the company who
A) wanted to help me
B) was authorized to help me and
C) actually knew wtf I even wanted from them.

And after a goddamn hour of command line shenanigans and stackoverflow visits on both sides, I FINALLY have access to pipy.org and can download and install to my hearts content. However it was so long ago that I made that request that I kinda forgot what I wanted to actually DO with those packages...

My vague naive extreme understanding of interview questions are on a spectrum from situation a to situation b.

But what should the industry be doing? Is the industry just going wrong blindly copying big N companies hiring process without the same rationale? (e.g. they need computer scientists able to deal with problems specific to them at their size and that often means creating new tech, unreal problem solving abilities and cuh-rayzee knowledge)

a) stupid fucking theoretical shit that some people argue you won't ever need to be doing in practice for most companies, while giving you no ability to google, leetcode hard problems kind of stuff

b) practical work similar to what you'd be doing on the job, small bugs, tasks, pair programming on site with your potential future coworkers

Lots of people hate option a because it's puzzle/problem solving that isn't always closely related to what's on the job. Whiteboarding is arguably very much a separate skill. (Arguably unless it's like a big N company where you want computer scientists to deal with specific problems that aren't seen elsewhere, and you're making new tech to deal with your specific problems.)

We could go to the extreme of Option b, but it tends to trigger people into shitfits of "NO, HOW DARE YOU MAKE ME DO REAL WORK, BUT NOT PAY ME FOR IT AT THE INTERVIEW STAGE"

That's before we get into how to execute option b whether or not it's being given as a take home assignment (which is a huge pain in the ass and time sink, among other issues) vs a few hours at the potential workplace working with some of the future potential coworkers and soaking in the work environment (you have to figure out how to take the time off then)

Is it really just poor execution overall for the wrong use cases for the majority of the industry? What should the industry be doing in which cases.

Then this is all before HR screening with shit like where they might ask for more years of swift experience than its existed.

If a software company has 3 unique client projects, is it better to structure the discord server this way:

`-` is a category (parent) and `--` is a text or voice channel (child)

OPTION 1: category as project

- Project A
-- general
-- resources
-- design
-- dev team 1
-- dev team 2
- Project B
-- general
-- resources
-- design
-- dev team 1
-- dev team 2
- Project C
-- general
-- resources
-- design
-- dev team 1
-- dev team 2

OPTION 2: category as event

- Projects
-- projectA-general
-- projectB-general
-- projectC-general
- Design
-- projectA-design
-- projectB-design
-- projectC-design
- Resources
-- projectA-resources
-- projectB-resources
-- projectC-resources
- Developer discussions
-- projectA-team1-dev
-- projectA-team2-dev
-- projectB-dev
-- projectC-dev
- Meetings
-- projectA-meeting
-- projectB-meeting
-- projectC-meeting

?

What do you think is better.

PS. there is literally NO other communication service that can structure it exactly like this. Only discord is powerful and FREE to do it like this.

- Rocketchat isnt flexible enough to do this
- Slack requires me to pay first so i can do this
- Teams too

So fuck all of them I'll stick to discord unless someone can name me 1 single alternative service capable of structuring channels like this for a real time communication for FREE

There's been a fad in the company where the managers ask for the opinions of other departments to "get different perspectives".

On one hand, we get feedback by non-experts, which is obviously bad because they're not in their field. "Feature X is kinda complicated. We could simplify it by doing A." and the manager goes "that's a brilliant idea! Let's do that!" and the devs go "we did consider that, but it has drawback N. And perhaps you wanna do B, but that has drawback M..."

And then they were asking for us programmers for inputs on their designs for logos, etc. Naturally, as programmers, we wanted quick access to many functionalities. But marketing wants a simpler and more intuitive design, even if it involves more clicks. This wasn't in my job description! I just wanna code! Thinking is your job!

What is key for you? Money or growth opportunity?

Company A - offers X amount, and it's work environment is such that challenges you to learn and grow.
Company B - can offer you 20% more, but doesn't a lot of interesting things, your average turn around time for tasks is a day, two at best.

Which would you choose?

I’m currently into be process of doing interviews and to my worst luck, it seems like all of my offers may be collapsing tightly together within a week.

Some places seem to be more eager than others saying they will get back to me within a week, but I’ve also had an experience where a company seemed like they were really sure on getting me on board but it seems they’ve ghosted me when it came to providing an offer to sign.

For example, this Tuesday I should be hearing from company B who is willing to counter any other offer should another company wants me (I also told them that within a week I should know my answer for them) - which I assume is when I will be signing and making it official, but I am still waiting on company A whom I really want to work for (they still haven’t given an offer) and then there’s company C, which seems prospective and higher paying who will interview me but only after after company B’s deadline.

If I officially get signed on to B, should I still proceed with the interview with C regardless?

Some companies have told me that if someone is paying me (ex.) 75k that they’re willing to counter it - should I divulge details which companies is doing this?

I am feeling a lot doubtful right now.

I am an average undergrad student who has been dedicating efforts in java/Android for most of my college life.

As of now i have decent command over java , launched 2 simple apps on playstore, worked as an android dev intern in 3 companies and make decent medium complexity apps. I will say i am 40-60% down the path of an expert native Android dev.

However apart from Android, am dumb as a stick. I know shit about ai,ml, web dev, js , react, hybrid stuff, and am not very good with competitive programming and system topics ( os, Algorithms, networking, etc)

So this closes a lot of doors for me. I can't apply to some top tier companies as they would either want expert competitive skills or expert Android dev skills.
I had bad experiences with startups which are usually willing take rejected students like me for the post of a droid dev... there is usually low packages , high pressure, and treatment like a slave

So i am very unsure what to do next. I have tried to learn web dev/ ai-ml-data sciences. They are not very interesting to me, but again, what is interest really :/

What should be my focus now?
A) I could be learning competitive and other interview related topics so that i could crack interviews of top companies , and later try to get a position of android developer there.

B) i could focus on become better in Android and start learning things that i don't know like rx, kotlin, etc. I could then hope to crack interview of medium sized app dev companies which would mainly focus on my android knowledge in their interviews

C) i could increase my skill set and learn web dev or ai/ml topics to increase my recruiter pool. It would be like option B, but i will have more medium sized companies willing to take me.

Currently i am in a shit storm. I am about to go into a mass recruiter company in which i have heard would be doing more or less data entry work

When the service, platform or plugin is bought then the requirements as to why "we" bought it are created....WHAT ON EARTH COULD GO WRONG!??!!!!

I'm literally now going to be using their API, building a UI and feeding it back into our system where if they had someone who actually knew what we're trying to accomplish could have been done with some database tables............

I hate that mentality 'We need X oh look Company Y does it and look at their UI and features!...lets buy it...oh we also need A,B,C,D...thats ok bring in a dev he'll do it their Sales Guy says it can be done....

....coulda given you X,A,B,C and D if I was involved from the beginning, cheaper and quicker. But I digress here's the world's biggest bandaid.

Which should I choose:
Company A: much better pay and benefits, team seems nice, Glassdoor citing quite bad reviews about CEO and upper management.
Company B: current company. uninteresting field, team in distance, tech lead likes micro management and quite annoying in general. In middle of a project.

We are migrating database from A to B. I am developing software for B side.

I am glad that there is only one B database instance. More excuses for long breaks when it is down for creation from start that takes 30 min.

I requested a database B copy for development purposes. Company is not that “agile” for such things. There is no feeling of guilt on my side.

It seems that my barometer for whether I would stay long in a company is roughly 1.5 years. Because apparently that's how long it takes to gauge if:

(a) The work I'm doing is fulfilling or self-satisfying
(b) My colleagues make work a fun and challenging experience
(c) My bosses are people I can be proud to work for.

Right now, the tally thus far:

(a) The work is half crap, supporting old code (fuck Swig and Architect, by the way) or fixing bugs on old projects. New projects are always mismanaged, and I mean ALWAYS (let's do Agile and create tickets but hey the requirements are still in progress so do start anyway and we'll file everything as bug tickets until they're done)

(b) I'm sure it's an effect of going remote working for the last few months, but I'm feeling detached from my team. It's fine I guess.

(c) My manager is okay, he's a good guy who listens and is also technical so we get along. But his boss (who oversees several teams. including ours) is a total prick who loves to insult people at their expense as a joke. He knows nobody's gonna talk smack back so he just does it without repercussions.

I'll probably see if I can move around internally to a different division since the pandemic makes it difficult to find work externally. I'm grateful I have a job, but I shouldn't have to feel like I owe the company for that at the cost of my personal happiness.

Just gotta #survive2020 I suppose.

1 - Correct me if I’m wrong, but in true Agile, a product owner ought to be able to interact directly with the dev team, and vice versa, in the card/conversation/confirmation process of creating, estimating, and executing the user stories, correct?

2 - If Company “A” contracts with Consultant “A” to have software developed, and then Consultant “A” then contracts with Company “B” who then contracts with Consultant “B” to do the development, who would you define as the Product Owner?

3 - If Company “B” is barring Consultant “B” from talking with Company “A” and Consultant “B”, is Agile even possible?

Is this a justified code review comment or a bully?

Code reviews are weakness of this industry which has the potential to attract bullies. Abuse of the comment box in a pull request and bombarding the employee with hundreds of comments can cause stress, frustration, burnout and finally resignation and costs of fulfillment for the organization. While companies should find and stop bullying in the work place, what kind of code review comment is considered a bully and why? Any of below traits can mean you are dealing with a bully:

1. Claims the code needs to be changed but doesn't say how. So no matter how many times you change your code, he can repeat the same comment: "Your code is still bad due to blah blah and it needs to be changed".

2. Provides how the code should be changed, but the change doesn't add up to quality, security, performance, readability, etc. i.e. "Why did you use a for loop here? Use a while loop instead". Or "Why did you write it using three classes A, B and C? Instead write it using 4 classes D, E, F and G which does blah blah". In the later case, not following the review comment, you won't get approval. Following the comment means you need to rewrite your whole code. After which, you might again receive more comments to change other parts of your code!

3. Claims the requested change is due to standards but claimed standard does exist anywhere. Internet, company wiki, university course books, anywhere. In more severe cases of psychopathy, the bullying person refers you to a link which hours later turned out to be written by himself! Have fun describing what has happened to your manager or team leader... .

4. Asks the code to be changed in a way that supposedly is closer to standard or of better quality, security, performance, etc. But the proposed way will not work and is the main reason you didn't do that in the first place. So you start arguing forever in the comment box over why his method won't work!

If you cannot see any of the above traits, then keep calm, take a breath, fix your code. Otherwise you might be victim of a bully.

Our HR in the company did not send any newcomers to our Team and we are waiting for a whole year...

The work was not overloaded but the development progress are slowing down

Even I have been relocated from Team A to Team B after 6 months in Team A... They never came for both