I am bloody sick of being on my own.

I was the sole dev at the last few jobs I've held, with the exception of API Guy -- who didn't really help much, and who got fired / quit six months after I started. Every other job I've either been the only dev, or the only web dev. (Exception:My boss at my previous job was a Rails dev, but he has zero time to code, and was significantly less experiened so he could only rarely help anyway.)

But now I'm in a company with a bunch of other devs, and they're all ostensibly senior devs, so you'd think I should be able to ask questions, right? And get answers? that actually help? like "Hey, you built this; how does it work?" No bloody way.

So far every time I've asked someone for help, they've been incompetent. I asked about what a few flags did, and got an answer that basically said "you just gotta know. oh, and the labels aren't up to date, so don't trust what they say." I asked the head of the "product team" about a ticket that he wrote, and he changed what it meant four times within two days. I asked about another, and he said "oh, that isn't reproduceable." Thanks. I asked about mailers, and got two very different, very incompete walkthroughs from the more senior devs (9+ years on this codebase) that didn't help. I asked two people about how users and roles work, and still have no idea what kind of user (there are like twelve?) is what, what roles even exist, or how to check for permissions. `@current_user` is a thing, but idfk what it holds since that can change considerably, and there's an impersonation feature that changes how it works, too. I ask the product guy again about where to link something, and he has no idea. I ask said product guy about what this feature needs to do, and he doesn't know. I ask what the legal team needs, and i get nothing. I ask the designer where the goddamn CSS lives, and he doesn't know; he apparently just puts it wherever he feels like, even if it's a completely unrelated stylesheet. As long as it works, right?

I ask very simple and straighforward questions, and it takes them forever to get back to me saying what amounts to "idk, ask someone else."

This feels like the same crap all over again, except now there are a bunch of devs I can ask that give me basically the same answers as the sales people always did. Always "idk" or a confusing mess of an 'answer' that skips most/all of the important bits. At least these people don't [usually] contradict themselves.

So, @Root is all alone, again.
And currounded by incompetence.
Again.

For fuck's sake.
Can't I catch a break?

When you hit run after an hour of powercoding:

Old Mcdonald had a bug,
E I E I bug.
And on that bug he had a bug.
E I E I bug.
With a bug bug here and a bug bug there.
Here a bug, there a bug, everywhere a bug bug,
Old Mcdonald had a bug.....
E.....I.........E............I.................

[FATAL ERROR] : Program has ended for a simple reason...not telling why though...here's a completely unrelated line of code you may want to take a look at :)

What is the most ridiculous over-the-top "startup" thing you've been the victim of as a developer?

Alternatively, what kind of weird startup luxury would you absolutely love to have at your company?

For me, at various companies I've worked at/visited:

1. Hammocks & fatboy beanbags. Current employer has a "Netflix & Chill" corner with nice couches, and a small gym. I have encountered isolation/flotation tanks at the office of one of our partners... which is cool, but over the top in my opinion.

2. A fully automated aquaponics garden in the lunchroom. Was awesome, until some fish died and started to rot.

3. One hoverboard per employee, at previous employer. I splashed hot chocolate milk in an arc over three desks. A coworker broke his ankle while watching me spill chocolate milk.

4. Daily scrum standup meetings, on socks, in a big bouncy castle. Not kidding. Fucking ridiculous... (but secretly fun). That employer also had spiral slides between all floors, a tiny half-pipe with tiny skateboards, and someone who rode a unicycle way too much. It was a fucking circus. Stuck in the office of a Fintech company.

5. Soldering bench (at my current company), with drawers full of breadboards, servos and electronics components. Completely unrelated to my work, but it was my idea. It's just great to build a simple kits together with another random coworker while brainstorming platform features & refining specs... much better than meetings with bullshit slides.

6. Unlimited energy drink. Developed a serious caffeine habit (15-20 cans a day), and almost got a stomach ulcer. Not beneficial to employee health.

7. I really do love working from home + unlimited holidays. Just being able to honestly say "fuck you guys, I'm gonna get drunk and play games today", and at other times working until 4am and sleeping in the next day, or taking a week to work in a park in Rome... It makes work truly feel like my favorite hobby. Combined with a good sprints and curious/ambitious people, you can easily track productivity anyway.

Dear Customer,

I think you misunderstand the reason I sent you some documents for review.

I sent the examples to you so that you could see what your inputs produced.

I didn't send them to you so that you could fart out your mouth and about what you want like a little kid.

If there's shit on the page it is because you put that shit in the system ....

Please have someone else who is going to put a little bit of effort into this 'super important project' contact me.

Also bullet points don't work like this:

- Here I talk about a thing but
- and here I continue that thought with no context and incomplete sentences
- Also this is unrelated.
- But this is about the first bullet point again.
- Here I repeat another bullet point but I say it in a completely different way.

I've been working exclusively from home for over 2 years now. I've been seeing several posts from people talking about adjusting to working from home, so I figured I would compile a list of tips I've learned over the years to help make the adjustment easier for some people.

1) Limit as many distractions as possible. WFH makes it much easier to get distracted. If you have roommates/family members at home, ask them politely to leave you alone while you're working. Make sure the TV is turned off, put your phone on silent, etc.

2) Take regular breaks. I find it easier to accidentally go hours without taking a real break from work. Try working in half hour intervals, and then taking 5-10 minute breaks. Read an article, watch a youtube video, grab some coffee/tea, etc.

3) When you eat lunch, eat it away from your computer. I often find myself eating lunch trying to wrap up fixing a bug, which makes it feel like I never really "took a lunch." Lately I've been trying to step away and do something else completely unrelated to work.

4) Get ready for work like you normally would. It's very easy to wake up, throw on your favorite pair of sweats and sit at the computer with messy hair half awake "ready" to start the day. Instead try doing your normal morning routine before sitting at your computer. It will help your mind and body go into "it's time to work" mode.

5) Keep your work area clean. I find it very difficult to work when my workspace is cluttered. Studies have shown working in a messy place tend to make us less efficient.

6) Keep your work area work related. Try to only have the things you need for work in your workspace. If you're working from your personal computer this can be difficult. I always end up with camera/music equipment left over from the previous night's photo editing/jam sessions. So try to clean off your desk when you're done for the night so it's ready for work in the morning.

7) Prepare for meetings. I have alarms set 10 minutes in advance so I can go from programming mode to meeting mode. During this time I'll go to the bathroom, grab a snack, water, mute all my email notifications, close any non essential programs, get my code ready if I need to present it.

Stuff is hard & stressful right now, but hopefully these tips will make it a bit easier. If anyone else has any good tips please share them.

Today I met a random guy who contacted me through Facebook to teach him some C++.

He wanted to create a small anomalies detection system on x-ray images with OpenCV (for industry purposes).

The guy came from Nigeria, where he studied medicine, but here has to work on two completely unrelated minijobs to survive.

And he still finds energy to keep learning new crazy stuff like C++ (he definitely chose the hard path to learn some programming).

And that's it, there's no moral for this fable, just a short story. Learn whatever you want from it.

Completely unrelated to dev stuffs but I just pre-ordered the first physical album in my life 😍

Can't wait till half December 😋

I feel like at some point it'll become more shit than it's ever been. Partially due to the fact that it seems like EVERY school is trying to get the students into computer science at this point.

NOT EVERYBODY BELONGS IN COMPUTER SCIENCE. PLAIN AND SIMPLE. IT'S NOT FOR EVERYONE.

I feel like some kids that are being forced to do computer science will basically be like "huh there's money in this, maybe I could do this" but they're completely shit at it, when they would have been MUCH better off doing something else.

Side rant, somewhat related actually:

I had a teacher last semester that has to teach one of the computer science classes starting this year (I was not taking her computer science class, it was an unrelated class). From what I've seen, she does not seem fit to teach the class at all.

She's supposed to be teaching some simple programming (no clue what languages, I didn't bother to take the comp sci class). And she knows that I know the stuff, so she would ask me about the simplest things. Which is 100% fine...if she wasn't teaching a computer science class.

She just does not seem fit to teach a computer science class. I'm sure that the school basically just threw her in there because they needed SOMEONE.

I'm honestly kinda scared for the students in the class that might want to go further into computer science, only having taken that class and having met the requirement for a more advanced class, but then being thrown into a class where they don't know a fucking thing.

!dev
!!politics (kinda)

Here’s a gem from our recent harassment and diversity training at work:

Speaker: “All of these things are protected from discrimination in California! Wow! It’s a huge list, isn’t it? Now let me ask you a question: is a single white male under 40 protected?”

Everyone: *crickets*

Fucking really?
After immediately jumping on all of the other speaker’s questions, you can’t answer this one?

And later, here’s another gem:

Speaker: “If you witness an employee harassing another employee outside of work and work hours, completely unrelated to work, should you report it? What if you ask the person being harassed and she says no?”

Speaker: “Always report it! While it’s not *technically* required by law, you must report it! Why? Because you have the same protections she would! And maybe it’s easier for you to say something than for her.” (Surprise gendering was her own addition)

Fair on that last point, but against the person’s wishes? Totally not cool. Maybe it wasn’t harassment, or you don’t know the situation. Heads up: you probably don’t. Or maybe it wasn’t a big deal at all, but you think it’s earth-shattering. But all that reporting it against someone’s wishes does is create drama and possibly legal trouble. And if it wasn’t harassment or the case goes poorly, you just created enemies for yourself, or for one or both of them if you’re reporting it anonymously, and possibly even ruined one or both of their jobs/careers by doing so. Good fucking job, asshole.

Snitches get stitches.

Tl;dr younger people on here, especially passionate ones, don't worry about comparing yourself to people who appear to have tremendous laurels, those people are probably completely full of shit.

I say kids because you may be like me and more likely to underestimate your ability or more likely to be modest about your accomplishments, and you're too young to know you're doing that.

Either way. I've been doing a web development boot camp the last six months. It's been quite good with the teachers, and some of the classmates. Hell career services is now run by this woman who really actually seems like she knows what she's doing. It's pretty awesome.

That said, my teammates on the group projects have been a different story. I've primarily stuck with some of them out of loyalty and friendship. But one guy in particular has pissed me off to no end. He said he was a computer scientist going for masters. I thought I could learn from this guy. Now I wonder if he's a pathological liar.

Our first project he made one commit. Ripped straight from the homework. It was a simple api mash-up so alright. Fair enough. Next project was when he really started to piss me off.

He didn't do shit the first week and a half. No PM, no design, no programming. Nothing. Comes in two days before project is due, and me one other guy are fucking scrambling. Because of course no one else is there.

I live significantly further than my teammates mind you. We're busting ass. This fucking guy, this dumbass pick who is convinced he's a genius that will work in higher academia clobbers our whole fucking repo.

Why you ask? To put in an unrelated commit that replicated homework from the week before. Why you ask, again? Because this person is a borderline sociopath trying to appear busy in the commit logs.

We're onto the third project now. I spend days designing something original. Side note: I fucking hate design.

So I design my heart out come up with something awesome. This fuck ass, disappears. And another group member. This was the end of November, I hear from this prick last week about refactoring to ES6. But here's the kicker-fucker, our shit ALREADY WAS IN ES6!

I go in Saturday, slack a message I'll be late. I see this fucking "genius dedicated computer scientist" leaving the fucking university shadily checking to see who was watching. He saw me see him. Coward tried to shrug it off.

Here we are, end of semester. He gets the same certification as I do. The difference? I actually know what I'm taking about, I haven't paid in full to fail.

So never, ever fucking ever take what someone says on their resume or LinkedIn as truth. The better it sounds, the more full of shit they may very well be.

And as for our presentation on Saturday? I plan on handling that but letting him do all of the talking. Let's even see if he knows what the project is about :).

Aaaah, I fucking love it to death, when customers spontaneously decide to hire a separate, unrelated company to add new content pages to the website developed by our company.

That furuncle of a company must have had real pro devs to just create a new /html folder, dump their shit content in there and just manually add links in the existing CMS pages.
HOLY FUCK!
As you might already have expected, the /html folder contains:
- static *.html files for every page
- inline CSS in the *.html
- the crappiest PHP mailing script I have ever witnessed
- images with random resolutions, mostly too small

The layout of these puke-ridden pages obviously doesn't fit neither the existing color palette, nor has anything common with the current layout or typography at all.
These bastards don't even use Git!

Come on, dear customer, could you PLEASE fucking NOT hire a completely separate company to do OUR job?
PLEASE? PLEASE?!

I had to compare the whole deployment folder with our repo to find out what else these brain-damaged cunts changed in our code!

Just found out why my computer didn't sound like a jet engine anymore: Both of the video card's fans were dead, and it turns out they're kinda useful for not overheating during a game.

On a completely unrelated note, websites look really shitty at 480p.

VB3.

In my last rant I mentioned I used to convert VB3 code to .Net. Before that, I used to work on the VB3 product itself. This software emulated something from the real world, and as such complied with a bunch of regulations that changed on a regular basis, and always had additions and removals that were to be done on a strict schedule (e.g. "we're adding a new product next month, so we have to be able to sell it by the first of the month"). As such, it was a huge sprawling mess.

One day, I was given a task to change some feature slightly. The task was simple enough and really only required adding one line of code. I added that line and clicked "Run".

Error: Too Much Code

What? What do you mean too much code? I asked a colleague for help. "Oh, don't worry, it happens when a function is too long. Just remove one or two of the comments and try again." The comments were, naturally, old deleted code that was quite meaningless so I had no qualms about removing some. It worked, and I went on with my life.

This started happening on a regular basis on our larger functions. But there were always comments to remove so it wasn't a big issue.

One day, though, it happened on a five-line function. This was puzzling - the error had always happened when a function was too big but this one clearly wasn't. What could the error mean? I went to the same colleague.

Apparently, there's also a limit to how big the entire code base can be. "Just find a function that isn't used any more and delete it." And so I did. There were many such functions, responsible for calculating things which no longer existed so they were never called. For months, I'd find functions and remove them. Until there weren't any more. I checked every function and subroutine in our codebase, and they were all used; I checked every possible code path and they were all needed.

What do I do now, I asked? The colleague, who was an expert on VB3 but worked on another project, came and take a look.

"Look at all these small functions you made! No wonder you're running out of space!" Apparently each function created a lot of overhead in the compiled executable. The solution was clear. Combine small functions into large monolithic ones, possibly passing flags in them to do completely unrelated things. Oh, and don't comment on the different parts because we have no room for comments in our code base.

Ah, the good old days.

Why does Scrum feel like micromanagement?

I seriously hate daily standup, ours go on for half an hour, sometimes longer and I have to listen to completely unrelated shit I don't know anything about. I cannot explain how disconnected I feel. I'm the only dev working on their website. Some days I don't even need to check in, I have nothing to say.

Estimations:

2 days = One day of actual coding, one day of doing something completely unrelated.
3 days = One week
5 days = Two weeks
7 days = Forget about it...

Recently I got an E-Mail from PayPal.de with the headline "Your account gets limited". Fun Fact: I don't have a PayPal account.
This Mail got me curious though, as it couldn't be a phishing mail, since I don't have a PayPal account in the first place, so I opened the e-mail just to get greeted by pure emptiness. It was completely empty. I thought to myself "oh no, is this some sort of new trick? Did I get infected by some sort of a weird hacky backdoor trojan already?!"

Name: PayPal.de
Original E-mail Address: NULL (never seen this before)
I then realized, that Thunderbird blocked the only content from this mail: a clickable image.

This is getting even more confusing the longer I examine this unique mail. The image is showing me a domain from a site completely unrelated from PayPal, so it was obviously no phishing, but I didn't trust this clickable image, so I looked up its hidden link to find an even more confusing redirection to not a picture upload site like the image suggests, but to a game key reselling site instead, like wtf? What was the whole point of this whole e-mail? Was this a weird try to make advertisements for more than one website? It wasn't even a ref-link or something like that. It was just weird, iunno.

Instead of a rant I have a story for you.

I was browsing my emails and eminently pissed off, as I usually am. Came across an email from
michael@michaelnthiessen.com

and thought "fuck this guy and his adverspam!"

Because whats more rational than hating someone you don't know, over something they didn't do, because of something completely unrelated to them of which they have no control?

Totally human.

The email looked like this

"I have some fantastic news for you:
Clean Components will be released again on April 21!
"

With a "🎉" emoji. I'm in a more vile mood than usual today.

It goes on.

"Even better, I'm significantly dropping the price, so you'll definitely want to pick it up!"

How presumptuous.

I fire off a quick reply.

"What a bunch of bullshit.
I decide to change careers and a month later, just like in 2008, this fucking pandemic happens and the economy and hiring
Starts collapsing.

And here I am getting sent this bullshit.
"

I had to rewrite and shitcan the response a few times for civility. I guess this is me being polite, but I was suddenly compelled to vent to this total stranger over what in all likelihood was an *automated* email.

Six and a half hours later I got a reply.

"Hey James, I'm sorry this pandemic has been rough on you.

I hope things turn around for you soon.

If it would help, I'd give you the course for free, but if you've switched careers I'm not sure it's relevant any more?

Michael
"

My god. A lone voice of calm in a wasteland of 24/7 bad and worsening news. Sometimes simplicity is the soul of class.

Hes got it in spades.

And here I was thinking "today might be the day. Thank god for giant bottles of hydrocodone."

It's not true that all gingers are soulless demons.
Some of them are angels in problem glasses.

No but seriously, hes a cool guy in my book.

Check out his site if you're interested in Vue at

michaelnthiessen.com

how to learn web development in 2018:

- watch youtube video of that new shiny promising framework

- spend hours trying to set up development environment

- spend another hours waiting for the dependencies to install

- spend the next few hours wondering and googling why it wont work even at fresh install

- spend another few hours redoing everything just to make sure you haven't missed a step

- realize that the youtube video you watched is uploaded last week, and now the framework developers mysteriously decided to change literally everything

- spend hours looking for another youtube video until you realize that now you are watching completely unrelated youtube video

- spend next hours wondering how your life become this pathetic while overthinking all of your past mistakes, and now you are just this lonely pathetic person with no clear future and that you will spend the rest of your life working at a fastfood chain below the minimum wage with no social life living on your parent's basement.

!rant

I need to pick a CSS framework for a[n eventually very large] React/React-native project at work. Any suggestions?

While I'm very good with CSS, nobody else is,
and eventually everyone is going to be touching the project, so it needs to be pretty easy to use.

I'm thinking of picking Bulma, or one of the newer, lighter frameworks, but I just don't know. (I'm also getting a lot of pressure to pick Bootstrap3 so we can... copy tables from unrelated sites? I guess? idgi)

Anyway, I have until Wednesday to completely convert over (it'll take me a day), and I still don't know what to pick yet.

Suggestions/advice welcome!

Go to fucking hell SO!

Question: "How to do X?"
Answer: "You can solve your particular problem without doing X."

God fucking damnit, yeah some noob tried to use X to solve a completely unrelated problem and thank god somebody pointed out a better solution. But since all other questions about doing X are labelled as duplicates of this question, could you dickheads at least provide an actual answer to the question instead of an answer which only works for that particular problem and has nothing to do with X?

On a completely unrelated note......Love Death and Robots is on Netflix and shit is sooo good it ain't funny.

10/10 would recommend.

I'M GONNA KILL THIS MAC

what the FUCK!!!???!!!??? IT WORKED YESTERDAY!!!!

Now the whole iOS build pipeline fails again complaining smth about distribution profiles. Then about certificates. And then it starts using a completely unrelated certificate and complaining that provisioning profile does not include it...

what the f...

IT FUCKING WORKED YESTERDAY!!!!!!

Sometimes, while coding, I get distracted by a tiny voice telling me: "Stop that! You're at work!"
But then I think: "Well, coding IS work."
To which the tiny voice replies: "Yes, but it's not YOUR work."

Damn you, tiny voice, I hate when you are right.
My current career(completely unrelated to programming or even CS) is probably my greatest distraction... and I hate that. =P

Murphy's law is completely true.

Deployed my own software the very first time on a customer system on monday.

Today I'm at a job college class when my boss calls me: "...Hey yeah (unrelated) (yadda yadda) the software does not function for anyone").

I fucking knew it.
We don't have a proper project planning nor a real project manager/lead, we don't do QA, and now it's gone to shit.

I did my own testing extensively on monday & Tuesday, everything looked alright and worked like a charm.

I'm looking forward to the weekend already...

Gender Bending For Fun and Profit.

I love how in the 'make your avatar' area, if you select female, and then click facial hair, theres nothing to select from.

Like a massive fuck you to every gender bending "down with meritocracy" purple haired dicksniffer in sanfran.

Also I'm sorely disappoint for desk items, theres no

1. giant dildos

2. anime figures/weeb shit

3. mini monoliths (I asked the site devs about this, they replied "we can't do that dave.")

4. a shirtless option for my female avatar

5. edgy scrolling numbers and code, like in the matrix

6. hoodies. They're the modern leather jacket.

7. Big nasty gnarly biker beard which I'm currently in the process of growing. How am I supposed to intimidate other anonymous cowards and mock them over the size of their beard compared to my own avatar's e-beard size? It's quiet girthy and lengthy, I assure you!

This is completely unrelated, but I thought devducks were like quick one-off debug sessions that could be bought from other devrant users.

I was disappointed when I discovered it was just merch.

On the otherhand I'm glad as fuck it's not. Site would be flooded by broken-english speaking goat humping dickheads.

How am I supposed to show off my ability to code with completely unrelated avatar change ups when no one will allow me to emasculate my avatar?

Boss: oh so you are working on that unrealistic 3week project ? Let me also assign you some completely unrelated office work.
Me: But I'm a programmer, researching other companies and contacting them looking for new projects is not part of my job descrip...
Boss: oh don't worry I'm sure you'll do great!
Me: that's not what I'm sayi...
Boss: ok I have to go now, have it ready by tomorrow!
Me:(crying internally)...ok.

I am beginning to hate the relationship between email and my clients. I never thought it would come to the point where email is the worst communication platform I've ever used because some of my clients simply don't know how to use it properly.

I have one client who never uses the subject header in his emails. This makes conversational threads very difficult to follow, and I can't just scan the inbox I have for him. I have to actually do searches on my emails just to find recent conversations.

For some reason nobody knows how to start a new email thread. I have multiple clients that will just take the last email that I sent them, regardless of what it's about, and start a new conversation completely unrelated to the other email by hitting"reply". I end up with email threads that are 60 to 100 emails long and contain many different subjects, which again makes it hard to find anything. Never mind that they've usually put two or three important attachments, or username password combinations, or other valuable information in there amongst all the noise.

Worst of all, I have a few clients and co-workers who insist on starting a new email thread whenever anything about a particular issue comes up. This means that just today I have five separate email threads about the same goddamn issue from the same damn person. Am I supposed to respond to each thread with the same damned information? One of these people is supposed to be both a media consultant and an SEO expert and really should know better. Also, if you do actually send me an email with a subject like "the robot.txt error", please don't give me one sentence about that and five paragraphs about what color you'd like the background to be. That's ridiculous. How the hell am I supposed to find that later? Especially since we already discussed this in the other email that sitting in my inbox.

I swear I am setting up a bug tracking system simply so that my clients can log in and leave me bug reports, and feature requests, and will stop filling up my poor email boxes with what amounts to piles and piles threads that I have to sort through.

For a person who suffers with a form of ADD this is extremely frustrating. Why is it so difficult for my colleagues and clients to write good emails with good subject lines, and reply to the right damn emails?

Am I just being too anal, or does this bother others as well?

Annoys me so much how obviously lazy my department has been with one of its products. We have an iPad app that does document management and eForms and stuff. Its not perfect but not the worst. Then they decide they need to build an app to handle a specific kind of eForm. They just went "well this app already does eForms so lets just adapt it".
Worst. Decision. Ever.
the app is simply a branch off the original app. despite being a completely different product which isnt even concerned with the same business objects. it has been hacked until it does what it needs to. And i have to somehow maintain this trainwreck.
As a result we have a branch in our main Git repo that contains a completely different product, which is basically an iOS wrapper for an HTML eForm with ~5000 lines of jQuery to further hack on the functionality that the eForm provides.
And they wonder why iOS developers have been leaving and some keep threatening to leave. Even the Delivery Manager wants us to just do what is needed and get it out the door and never look at it again. How are we supposed to care when thats the attitude of the people who are supposed to be invested in it. Im surprised the client hasnt told us to get lost the app is so hideously broken and unmaintainable. Performing an action on the form can break a completely unrelated section somewhere else. We have lost control.
And they just keep adding more scope, ignoring our concerns cos hey its too late to just start changing the whole approach of the solution.

First company:

- being sat at an office that didn't have chairs with proper back support. It would kill my back every day. Like sitting on a bar stool coding.
- not having access to basic resources (cafeteria, salary bonuses)
- being seriously underpaid ($200 under)
- not having an IT process pipeline (yeah, this is a huge one): no JIRA, no git, no VCS, no continuous integration, etc. I fucking spend 45% of the time fixing coding-unrelated shit.

Second company (very aggravating):

- dumb frontend bitch and privileged colleague who both kept telling me months on end to shut up and who wouldn't listen to my advice on anything, while my advice would actually help the company advance in productive ways. The key here is being told to shut up while stagnating. i.e. dead end job.
- people advancing in the company based on nepotism and favoritism, based on having tits and ass, rather than skills and independence.

- pointlessssssssss meetings where decisions are made solely based on the opinion of Mr. favorite senior dev. The rest just sits there like a bunch of sad saps and yay-nodders. Incompetent PO's who "would like to hear your input" but then when you give it, they completely dismiss you.

- pointlessssssssss monthly meetings with stakeholders, where the dev teams do nothing but clash and act like pussies in front of the PM just to get in his favor, but behind scenes continue to make the same mistakes and telling the CEO everything is fine. Goodness, how can it get more unproductive.

- completely antisocial and nepotistic 'colleagues' who won't even talk to you, let alone smile at you or be friendly. You saying good morning and them pretending you're vapor that doesn't exist. Go go company atmosphere! Especially during lunch, those are the worst times. Imagine sitting at lunch where everyone looks like you killed their dog and the rest is huddled up in little high school groups.
What else? The incessant and pointless smalltalk that makes me want to bang my head against the wall. Talking about dogs, kids, what show was on tv last night. The fuck man, do you have a brain?!

Third company:

- HR bitches who think they are the shit and developers are antisocial, helpless misfits, but they work with computers and they don't even fucking know what a status bar is! The irony!

- forced socializing and stigmatization for the opposite. Imagine coming into a company and you don't say good morning. Should that be a problem? No. Instead, everyone starts dogging on you and hating you just because you didn't smile in their faces and said: hiiiiiiiiiiii how did you sleep? Did you feed your dog? Fuck you.
Elliot (Mr. Robot): "Wouldn't it be awesome if there was a mute button for life?" -boop, boop, boop, boop...- Ahh.. there.. that's much better."

- CEO's sucking up to you but when it comes to salary increase, they say shit like: "Ahhh ya know, it's kinda difficult." Yet another dead end job.

It drives me crazy when I'm in the middle of coding and another dev member from my team interrupts my session to tell me something completely unrelated to work 😡

Be me

Have a company wide incident happen during on call

Say you're rolling back a change in a service that might have been the cause

Have someone laugh and say that change was just a new endpoint and completely unrelated

Be embarrassed

Have a senior director point out the code change that was the issue

Embarrass yourself in front of the entire company (it impacted everyone)

But hey atleast it wasn't my change

Writing coroutines for io_uring. Submissions aren't working (they go through but the operation never seems to complete). Just fixed a few segfaults because of error cases not destroying coroutine handles correctly. Been on this for two days, finding more and more things I need to do that unrelated to the task at hand. Don't have issue tracking set up yet because haven't had time. Mountain of things that need to get working just for a demo is only growing. Layered maps of data structures and code flow are in my head as I'm trying to mentally debug some of this. I'm focused, completely dead to the outside world.

Then I feel a small scratch on my cheek. Three hours of mental mapping and a deep stack of thought, vanishes into thin air in a single moment.

The trade-off is worth it though.

*Have idea.

*Start thinking about it.

*Start seriously thinking about it.

*Push yourself to do it.

*Have a mini unconscious panic attack that tells you you're gonna fail.

*Do something else completely unrelated to what you wanted to do.

*Feel good about the meaningless shit you just achieved.

*Recognize you're procrastinating.

*Try to stop.

*You can't cause you're stupid and lack the control and discipline to trick your own mind.

*Watch video about how to overcome procrastination.

*Get a more firmer understanding of it.

*Realize you're a helpless piece of shit.

*Cry till dead inside.

*Resume daily mindless shit.

Just checked my work email to see what's coming in today....

And see someone on the London scheduled a 9AM meeting with me at 5:30AM my time.

Yes thanks for the advance notice...

Not going to be in the morning though and well the whole thing is BS based on some stupid new requirement that doesn't make sense.

Basically asking to migrate a while application to a new platform that no one understands yet.... Just to add a completely unrelated be feature...

Feature: 1month
Migration: 1 year based on the pre-reqs needed

Sure go ahead throw me off a bridge into a task thats completely out of my ability in an area I have no experience or understanding almost completely unrelated to the role in which I applied for.

So we had this legacy Objective-C codebase for a mobile app that was actually pretty good: I'd inherited the codebase and spent the past several years gradually improving it and I was actually quite proud of the work I put into it. So of course management decides to scrap it (with NO consultation from the engineers) and outsource a complete rewrite of the app in C# for Windows Universal.

Let me tell you. That code was without a doubt and without exaggeration the *worst* code I've seen in my close to 30 years of experience as a developer. I mean they broke every rule in the book, I'm talking rookie mistakes. Copypasta everywhere, no consistent separation of concerns, and yet way too many layers. Unnecessary layers. Layers for the sake of layers. There was en entire abstraction layer complete with a replicated version of every single data class *just* to map properties in pascal case to the same property in camel case. Adding a new field to a payload in the API amounted to hours of work and about eight different files that needed to be modified. It was a complete nightmare. This was supposed to be a thin client, yet it had a complete client-side Sqlite database with its own custom schema (oh and of course a layer for that!) completely unrelated to the serverside schema, just for kicks. The project was broken up into about eight or nine different subprojects, each having their own specific dependencies on various of the other subprojects in such a tightly-knit way that it made gradual refactoring almost impossible. This architecture was so impressively bad, it was actually self-preserving!

Suffice it to say it was a complete nightmare, and was one of the main reasons I ended up leaving that company. So just sayin', legacy code isn't always bad. :)

Proudest bug squash? Probably the time I fixed a few bugs by accident when I was just trying to clean up an ex-coworker's messy code.

So I used to work with a guy who was not a very good programmer. It's hard to explain exactly why other than to say that he never really grew out of the college mindset. He never really learned the importance of critical thinking and problem-solving. He did everything "by the book" to a point where if he ran into an issue that had no textbook solution, he would spin his wheels for weeks while constantly lying to us about his progress until one of us would finally notice and take the problem off his plate. His code was technically functional, but still very bad.

Quick Background: Our team is responsible for deploying and maintaining cloud resources in AWS and Azure. We do this with Terraform, a domain-specific language that lets us define all our infrastructure as code and automate everything.

After he left, I took on the work to modify some of the Terraform code he'd written. In the process, I discovered what I like to call "The Übervariable", a map of at least 80 items, many of them completely unrelated to each other, which were all referenced exactly once in his code and never modified. Basically it was a dynamic collection variable holding 80+ constants. Some of these constants were only used in mathematical expressions with multiple other constants from the same data structure, resulting in a new value that would also be a constant. Some of the constants were identical values that could never possibly differ, but were still stored as separate values in the map.

After I made the modification I was supposed to make, I decided I was so bothered by his shitty code that I would spend some extra time fixing and optimizing it. The end result: one week of work, 800 lines of code deleted, 30 lines added, and a massive increase in efficiency. I deleted the Übervariable and hardcoded most of the values it contained since there was no possible reason for any of them to change in the future. In the process, I accidentally fixed three bugs that had been printing ominous-sounding warnings to the console whenever the code was run.

I have a lot of stories about this guy. I should post some more of them eventually.

Small company, sole engineer. Non-tech management. Increasingly fancy job titles despite working alone most of the time, with the promise of hiring someone (again) I can actually manage soon.

Backlog of projects/tasks is truly a mindfuck, with new things being added each week. This backlog will never ever get done, and nothing matters anyway because the next idea is "the future", all the time.

While I have influence on some aspects of decision making, it usually ends up being what the boss wants. Actively opposed a project because it's just too big of an undertaking, it was forced through anyway. I'm trying to keep the scope manageable as I'm building it now, and it's hard.

"It's the future, we absolutely have to do this. It will be the biggest thing we've ever done."

Boss's excitement then quickly faded since it's actually in development, now nobody really seems to want to know where it's at, or how it will all work. I need to scope it out, with the knowledge that many decisions boss signed off will be questioned when he actually looks at it. We now have even more "exciting" ideas of utter grandeur. Stuff that I can't even begin to comprehend the complexity of, while struggling to keep a self imposed deadline on the current one.

Every single morning we sit on Zoom for a "valuable" "catch-up". This is absolutely perfect for one thing: Completely destroying whatever drive and focus I have going into the day. Unrelated topics, marketing conversations, even more ideas, ideas for ideas sake, small problems blown out of proportion, the list goes on. I recently argued in detail why it should be scrapped or at least be optional to attend. No luck, it's "valuable".

Today a new idea was announced, and we absolutely have to do it ASAP because it can only be better than the current solution. I raise my concerns, saying it's not as easy as you make it out to be, we should properly think about it. Nope! We'll botch something to prove that it works... So you'll base your decision whether it's good on some half ass botch job that nobody really has the mental capacity to actually pay attention to. What a reliable way to measure!

"Our analytics data isn't useful enough to tell us the impact of things we do. We (you) have to fix this." Over the last 2 or so years, I've been pushing for an overhaul and expansion of our data analysis capabilities for exactly this reason. Integrating different data sources into a unified solution so we can easily see what we're doing, etc. Nope, never happened.

The new project idea which is based on wild assumptions is ALWAYS more important than the groundwork.

Now when I mentioned that this is what I wanted to do all along, it got brushed aside. "We don't need to do anything complicated, just fix this, add that, and it's done. It should be an easy thing to do. This is very important for our decision making." Fine, have it your way.

I'm officially burned out. It's so fucking hard to get myself to focus on my work for more than an hour or two. I started a side project, and even that effort is falling victim to my day-job-induced apathy.

I'm tempted to hand in my resignation without another offer on the table. I just need time to rediscover my passion, and go job hunting from that position, instead of the utter desperation of right now.

If you've read through all this rambling, kudos to you!

I'm using framework X, I managed to google and fix the bug in a few seconds, nice!

I'm using framework X with library Y, I managed to google and fix the bug in a few minutes, nice!

I'm using framework X with library Y and Z that adds certain features, I managed to google and fix the bug in a few hours, I need a bathroom break and coffee but great!

I'm using framework X, runtime environment version 3, library X and Z and am trying to achieve T because god knows why and managed to only find 2 old stackoverflow topics and 1 reddit post almost completely unrelated but I tried their code anyway and I feel so miserable I'm behind schedule and can't seem to be able to fix this stupid issue what am I doing with my life oh please...

Callum, not everything is a "useless fad" just because you don't like it. I understand that you think AWS lambda functions are "just an expensive con for morons", but for our batch processing use case they really do make a lot of sense.

Running some numbers to show they cost 10x more for a completely unrelated always-on service with a completely different request pattern is either naive, stupid, or malicious, and considering you're meant to be a principle architect, I'm really not sure what's worse 🤦‍♂️

Guys I am facing a dilemma and i want to hear your opinions.

The background story:
I am completely self taught, currently i am learning something totally unrelated to programming at the uni. Maybe one day when i've finished that shit I will apply somwhere for a job as a developer. Until that the self education continues.

I've recently finished a big sideproject. I've rewritten my father's old shitty joomla company website from scratch with complete cms and integrated stockkeeping and billing features. After some minor fixes it is working perfectly and honestly I am kind of proud of myself. Now that I have some free time available i need something to work on again.

TL;DR - Here comes the question:
Should I broaden my knowledge in webdev even more (there is much room for improvement and i am starting to get the grasp of it) or start digging into game developement (which is my dream for ages although i didn't have the courage to dive into it until now)?

I have project ideas for both but simply can't decide. :/

I am appreciate your time for reading && telling your opinion on this.

There's this online game I like to play, basically you can play against 2 or 3 other people / robots. It's been free to play for almost a decade, but recently they decided to limit how many games you can play each day, unless you buy membership. It's not much, about 2€ per month, so I bought it to support the devs, they're doing good work and they're not spamming players with ads, so they need to get money for those servers somewhere.

But now I kinda regret it; there used to be a whole lot of casual players online all the time, now casual players reach their daily limit and when I log on in the evening, there are almost exclusively paying members left, giving you absolute shit for the tiniest mistakes.

On a completely unrelated note, what casual / relaxing multiplayer games would you recommend that don't require too much thinking & long-term skills?

Been bughunting the last week or so on this import job that is suddenly running so slowly that it takes more than 24h and is restarting on top of itself.

It used to run in anywhere from 4 to 8 hours, which was bad enough. You see, it ran on timer scheduled by our main site. So our deployment window was determined by when this job finished, and if it didn't finish during work hours, then no deployment that day.

So we got the idea to move it to a separate service to eliminate that deployment window bottleneck. And now, seemingly unrelated, it is just running slow as shit.

There is a lot of bad design in the code, and we know we want to build a completely new solution. But we also absolutely need this import to run every day until a better solution can take over.

We've taken care of some of the most obvious problems that could cause the poor performance, but it's unclear whether it's going to be enough. And with a runtime of about a day and wild variations of the most atomic partial imports, it's extremely tedious to test as well...

Any fellow devs here who have a completely unrelated degree? The impostor syndrome is real.

Ah yes, I'd be happy to completely change the thing I'm working on, that is now unrelated to how you originally described the task to me.

Stackoverflow is full of pedantic cunts who can’t admit they don’t know how to answer your question, I just spent 20 minutes having 4 people tell me because they didn’t have “the full code” they couldn’t help with the problem, despite by the end of me posting more and more (completely unrelated) code they were LITERALLY complaining because I hadn’t added fucking “#include” statements 😑

Why do product managers think their roadmaps/decisions are completely unrelated to our technical decisions? Information/transparency are key themes in the architecture process. In order to accept the risks, you must first understand them.

I wanted to update my previous rant in the comment but what happened is such a fucking nonsense I think it deserves its own.

For those who don't want to look what it is, just another C++ noob (aka me) complaining about how the language was a bitch to him by throwing a random SEGFAULT on release while it didn't show up on debug. Welp.

Half an hour and a ton of std::cout later (thought I would try to read a disassembly ? Think again) I figured out what was the problematic section of code. And guess what ? It was a section I didn't even modify and I never had problems with. Something completely unrelated to what I was rightly imagining causing the issue.

To identify which exact subsection was throwing the error to my face I added more tag code.
Rubbing my hands and ready to fix the fuck out of this damn shit, I built it, launched it…

And all of a sudden the code worked.

All I did. Was to add more cout to know which line fucked up. And now it works.

So. Serious question now: is it a clear sign from heaven I should stop working with such languages and should go back in my shitty high level languages kindergarten ?

We got a relatively cheap logic analyzer (we is me and my dad) and we tried finding the drivers for it.

Their website was a dead-end and it didn’t come with any disk or something. Somehow, Seleae’s website had a suitable driver, and it is completely unrelated to the product we bought.

(Seleae is a company that sells god-tier logic analyzers)

WHAT THE FUCK, SPARKFUN?!

Also, regarding the devRant rewrite project I am currently searching for some nice (and practical at the same time) design for the profile view.

The more I learn frontend the more I like it. Imagine, actually becoming good at something makes you hate it less! I know, I know, I was shocked too.

Completely unrelated question:
if you have all the mods for the factors of a product, is it possible to derive the factors from the modulus?

(lol you know what this is about).

The product "fingerprinting" I talked about a while back is starting to allow me to find the modulus of factors, and I want to know what I can do with that if anything.

Angular 5 was just released! *Yay*

on a completely unrelated note: does anyone get the versioning/naming scheme of angular?

App development in 2019:

1. Open app A
2. Open completely unrelated app B.
3. Scrolling in App B changes the sound in App A. Not raising or lowering volume, mind, but full on dropping samples and warbling the sound.

It's almost impressive how fucked up that is.

It wasn't really the project itself, but more the execution of it

Last semester we were tasked with writing a new programming language from scratch. We were a team of six people, everything went great to begin with. We discussed language features, the framework runtime it should run on and even what language to write it in.

Fast forward two weeks, nobody is doing anything but me, the two dudes tasked with helping me were both no-shows and the others were busy documenting the syntax and semantics of the language.

I basically ended up having to write the whole language myself with no breaks no help and no guidance.

A few weeks before deadline I completely burned out and couldn't do anything other than just sit and stare at the code; mentally exhausted and not in a mood to do anything other than doing mindless unrelated tasks. But alas work had to get done.

And it did get done... Sorta.
Our beautiful statically typed, statically scoped concurrent programming language that was supposed to compile to BEAM code was neither statically typed, statically scoped, and the output ended up being half-working elixir code that only worked on the most specific of cases.

I don't want to work with those guys again.

When I cant find an answer to my problem on stackoverflow:
I either made a extremely stupid but unrelated mistake, did the whole thing completely wrong from the start, or was using the wrong framework/library everyone avoids or hates ...

Can I rant about how I am so curious that when I try to learn a new thing I always end up reading for something completely unrelated?

Compilers should just work for raw C with only static memory allocation. This isn't the bad old days where a couple of dudes wrote a short book explaining how C might probably should possibly work. I hear supposedly we have standards now.

Well, last week I lost 2 days to our compiler randomly forgetting that it wasn't okay to put a globally allocated uint32 at an address ending in 9. What? It had been handling this case without issue for more a year, but now after changing completely unrelated code we have this problem.

I'm not sure how to even deal with this idiocy so no doubt I'll continue working on it this week, too.

Thanks a lot, GCC.

The biggest problem I see with current state of AI is the feedback loop it creates in people.

For example, some (usually older people in higher positions) perceive long emails as a sign of courtesy, involvement, and hard work. As a result, others have started using AI to write longer emails for them, to get on "the good side" with their higher ups. And now that many use AI to generate longer emails, those same higher ups got used to it and started to perceive short, straight-to-the-point emails as "rude". So even more people are looking into using AI to generate longer emails as they don't want to seem rude. At that rate it's not long until those that rely on AI to write "better" (== longer) emails get promoted over some hard working person who simply doesn't care to write long emails.

Even though AI didn't do anything, it somehow still "trained" people to start using it and even rely on it, and it even indirectly rewards people who use it for completely meaningless and seemingly unrelated tasks. And in a few years, whatever comes out of this will be used to train the next generations of AI, creating even more of a feedback loop that people will be completely unaware of until it eventually crashes onto itself. Because that loop can't be observed in the AI itself, it has to be observed in the people.

This is more of an essay than a rant. TLDR at the end. I simply can't choose from all the shitty lecturers I've had, so I'm going to have to go through them one by one. But of background. I'm currently in 7th year of college, I did a multimedia degree in 2 years, a intro course to Software Dev and I'm currently in my final year of my Software Dev degree. So let's start.

Intro Software Course
- we had a database module, which was thought by, I shit you not, the head of the psychology course in the college, she attempted to teach us Databases using access. And not even using SQL, using access GUI components and it's query builder. Need I say more?

1st year software dev
- We had a networking module, the guy that taught the labs, he literally didn't say more than 12 words the entire 12 week semester, his answer to any question you asked him was a grunt and "research it"

- We had a psychology module, I have no fucking idea why, but instead of learning something useful we were told to read this and get in touch with your feelings...

- database module. Yes we actually did SQL here, 12 weeks of select statements and normal form, talked about by a guy in a monotone voice, who sounded like he was contemplating bringing in an assault riffle some day. Also instead of using MySQL he decided to use Ingres. Why I will never know.

2nd Year Software Dev
- We had a module called Algorithms and Data Structures. The lecturer gave us problems she couldn't solve. Simple problems. She was also crazy. Absolutely nuts.

- Object Orientated Programming. I had this lecturer for 3 semesters up until 3rd year. This guy did COBOLT in college, graduated in the 70s or something and went straight into teaching, he taught us Java for nearly 2 years. He literally copied and pasted texts from PDFs and read through them in class. He told myself and another guy at one stage he really didn't care, and was just counting down the days to his retirement.

- Databases again, different lecturer from 1st year, taught us for 2 semesters (24 weeks) and somehow managed to teach us nothing.

3rd Year Software Dev
- software engineering.. This is where the biggest cunt I've ever met was introduced. He arrives into class 15 minutes late every time without fail, talks shit about stuff that has no relevancy to the topic at all, tries to turn everything into a rugby metaphor and every time you ask a question he somehow dodges it and swiftly changes topic. This cunts past profession? A Project Manager. Fucking typical. This dickhead has also thought me 2 other modules.

4th yr Software Dev
- El cunto mentioned above for 2 more modules. Need I say more.
- real time systems, this module took the piss, the module was written by the lecturer which is what earns his space here. Assignments given to us, which required more time to do than we had in labs so we had to work at home, the problem we that is we were using an obscure RTOS called OS9 which would only work on the college computers. When brought to the lecturers attention he just said "figure it out"

Internet of Things - There was 2 lecturers, each lecturer seemingly working off a different plan, one week you'd have one lecturer, the next would be the other one going on about something completely different and unrelated to anything else we'd done.

Some lecturers didn't even make this list as I couldn't be bothered trying to think back about how shit other ones were. These were the ones that always stood out in my mind.

My main take away point from this is that you go to college for the paper which says you have a degree. Learning things that are going to benefit you in a career is up to yourself.

TLDR; 90% of my college lectures were shit. You need to learn useful stuff yourself.

Stack overflow is full of useless assholes, like I asked a specific question about a problem I am having that is similar to another problem that exists but it is not the same at all in terms of how to fix and instead of helping I’ve got 2 downvotes on it and a comment linking me to a completely unrelated stylistic based question based on something I SAID I HAD ALREADY TRIED CHANGING IN MY QUESTION!!! Here’s my question btw in case anyone can help here before I smash up my laptop 😑:
I have a piece of code in which I am trying to read in words which have been categorised using a number and then placed in a text file in the following format "word-number-" with a new line for each word. However, despite not mixing cin>> and getline and having tried a number of methods I still cannot get it working.
So far I have attempted using a cin.ignore() call to clear any '\n' char's from the buffer, as well as checking if the file is opening in the first place (it is), and using the >> operator instead throughout my code however I could not get that working either. When I place the get line call inside the condition of the while loop, the while loop doesn't run, however when I make the while loop condition a .eof() call it will run once however when I try to print the text that has been read from the getline call it just prints a blank line.
if(file.is_open()){
while(!file.eof()){
getline(file, text, '-');
count++;
cout<<count<<endl;
cout<<text<<endl;
if(count%2 == 1){
wordBuff = text;
}else if(count%2 == 0){
if(stoi(text) == wordClass){
wordList.push_back(wordBuff);
}
}
}
file.close();
}
While I recognise there are a lot of other questions on this out there I cannot seem to get any of their solutions to work and the vast number being related to people mixing the >> operator and getline doesn't help, so any tips or solutions will be of great help

Ok completely unrelated to develop stuff but has anyone else started watching the unmasking a killer series? Holy shit it is so fucking good. They brought on actual victims of the East Area Rapist/Original Nightstalker/Golden State Killer and it just fucking shows how scary it is. It's such an interesting documentary.

completely unrelated to work but when i'm a speedreading retard and i meet somebody who is an even bigger speedreading retard, it infuriates me despite the irony of pot calling kettle black

like bruh i gave you what you asked for, READ

I can't get anything done
I know I want or have to do something, but I always waste my time on something completely unrelated.
Afterwards I feel bad, and when I notice what I should've done and what I actually did I get a bit depressed

I just don't have the self-discipline for this shit, and I have no idea how to get it

I almost never enter a commit message for my private git repos. Sometimes I even forget what I did to some of the files (Unreal Engine files are mostly binary except the config and c++ files, so not that easy to check for changes). That combined with my bad attitude to change some stuff here, then fix a minor bug there and then start something completely unrelated leads me just saying fuck it and commiting without message.

I had a pretty good year! I've gone from being a totally unknown passionate web dev to a respected full stack dev. This will be a bit lengthy rant...
Best:
- Got my first full time employment dev role at a company after being self-taught for 8+ years at the start of the year. Finally got someone to take the risk of hiring someone who's "untested" and only done small and odd jobs professionally. This kickstarted my career, super grateful for that!
- Started my own programming consulting company.
- Gained enough confidence to apply to other jobs, snatched a few consulting jobs, nailed the interviews even though I never practiced any leet code.
- Currently work as a 99% remote dev (only meet up in person during the initialization of some projects.) I never thought working remotely could actually work this well. I am able to stay productive and actually focus on the work instead of living up to the 9-5 standard. If I want to go for a walk to think I can do that, I can be as social and asocial as I want. I like to sleep in and work during the night with a cup of tea in the dark and it's not an issue! I really like the freedom and I feel like I've never been more productive.
- Ended up with very happy customers and now got a steady amount of jobs rolling in and contracts are being extended.
- I learned a lot, specialized in graph databases, no more db modelling hell. Loving it!
- Got a job where I can use my favorite tools and actually create something from scratch which includes a lot of different fields. I am really happy I can use all my skills and learn new things along the way, like data analysis, databricks, hadoop, data ingesting, centralised auth like promerium and centralised logging.
- I also learned how important softskills are, I've learned to understand my clients needs and how to both communicate both as a developer and an entrepeneur.
Worst:
- First job had a manager which just gave me the specifications solo project and didn't check in or meet me for 8 weeks with vague specifications. Turns out the manager was super biased on how to write code and wanted to micromanage every aspect while still being totally absent. They got mad that I had used AJAX for requests as that was a "waste of time".
- I learned the harsh reality of working as a contractor in the US from a foreign country. Worked on an "indefinite" contract, suddenly got a 2 day notification to sum up my work (not related to my performance) after being there for 7+ months.
- I really don't like the current industry standard when it comes to developing websites (I mostly work in node.js), I like working with static websites (with static website generators like what the Svelte.js driver) and use a REST API for dynamic content. When working on the backend there's a library for everything and I've wasted so many hours this year to fix bugs and create workarounds related to dependencies. You need to dive into a rabbit hole for every tool and do something which may work or break something later. I've had so many issues with CICD and deployment to the cloud. There's a library for everything but there's so many that it's impossible to learn about the edge cases of everything. Doesn't help that everything is abstracted away, which works 90% of the time but I use 15 times the time to debug things when a bug appears. I work against a black box which may or may not have an up to date documentation and it's so complex that it will require you to yell incantations from the F#$K
era and sacrifice a goat for it to work properly.
- Learned that a lot of companies call their complex services "microservices". Ah yes, the microservice with 20 endpoints which all do completely unrelated tasks?

Today we started with meeting, which was super heavy and intensive for three hours.
Boss was in a bad mood and trashed my coworker.
And there were a lot of details and questions to another section of work, but I was supposed to listen with full attention to all problems and answer the questions.
After meeting was over, we both realized that he wishes to fire my coworker soon.
Anyway, my RAM got overfilled with details completely unrelated to my current task.

The question is...
How am I supposed to concentrate after that and do a difficult coding task that requires my full concentration?
How to be efficient in the remaining working hours of the day?

Why some devs simply join the team, assess where they are positioned, and ALWAYS find ways to avoid doing work but to "lead/help" others... managers event encourage this kind of behavior that ends up harming productivity, examples of this:
- sharing "interesting" news of new technologies sometimes completely unrelated to the current stack
- informing about potential risks on libraries and versions
- infinite code reviews with stupid comments around how things should be done according to him/her

Is it just me ? or there will always be a newcomer with this kind of attitude? why managers can't see they are actually harming productivity?

(imagine all of this said in Undoomed's "hey moron" tone)

Hey, moron, fuckin moron! How about if you're a noob with no actual programmer on your side, you just tell me so we can work it out together, instead of sending a moronic 4page "acceptance criteria" that pretend you know what you're talking about, and then bury me under loads of moronic noob questions that reveal you as thenmoron you are, all of that for a fuckin 50 quid?! I thought it's me being an idiot, not being able to do the task within two days timeframe, but now I see you're just too much of a moron to have any idea how much these things take. And now you nonchalantly mention a one-line one point from the four page document full of drivel, which (loads of moronism credit for me here) i didn't notice amongst all of that other mundane drivel, which actually like doubles the whole workload on the task, but your moronic document, which makes 3 parts of the same algorithm into three separate MILESTONES, makes this whole thing that nearly DOUBLES the workload into a shitty SEVENTH SUBPOINT of the completely unrelated first "milestone"?

FUCK YOU, YOU STUPID ROBBERY CHEAPFUCK, and fuck me for letting myself be tricked by all your fancy wordings that pretend you actually know what the fuck you are asking for, so i assumed you did, so I missed THE POINT, WHICH ACCORDING TO THE SEGMENTATION LOGIC OF THE WHOLE REST OF THE DOCUMENT SHOULD BE 3 SEPARATE FULL-SIZED MILESTONES, NOT A SINGLE SUBPOINT, YOU FUCKING FUCK!

... so much for still trying to at least a bit trust people.

FUCKING DISGUSTING MORONIC CHEAPSKATE FUCK.

and I can't even tell him to fuck off through the rectum he came here because he's all nice and polite so I would be the asshole!

"hey, please, can you build me a house?"
*house is basically finished*
"oh, great job, i love it, but i think you might have missed the fineprint in our contract that says that the house is supposed to stand inside an entry hall of a multibillionaire-sized mansion, so could we please sort that out and add it to the building real quick before i pay you the toolshed's worth we agreed on based on the contract? "

FUCK. HIM.
FUCK
FUCKFUCKFUCKSHITFUCKERYFUCKDISGUSTINGIDIOTICFUCKINGFUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!

i thought i can be a shitty liar and a con man, but this is some next level shit that would be totally beyond my abilities to pull off...

YES I KNOW IT'S MY FAULT I DIDN'T COMB THROUGH THAT BULLSIT "SPECS" OF HIS LETTER BY LETTER TO MAKE SURE THERE'S NO CON BULLSHIT LIKE THIS HIDDEN AMONGST ALL OF THAT MUNDANE SELF-EVIDENT PSEUDO-TECHNICAL DRIVEL, SHUT THE FUCK UP.

fucking disgusting moron, pretending all nice and innocent probably even to himself because he HAS NO FUCKING IDEA WHAT HE EVEN ASKS FOR.

i bet it's one of those pukefucks who get an overpriced contract for 50k without even knowing or caring what programming is, because "i'll just outsource the core functionality of the app for 50 quid to some naiive idiot who lives in the illusion that people are not diarrhorea-worthy pieces of feces, and this other third of the app to some other moron for hundred quid and then i somehow outsource gluing it together to some third poor sod, and that's 49.8k quid of pure profit for me, yay"

and now i'm torn between three options, just cancelling the "contract" with a comment saying "fuck off, you con man", or cancelling it with a lengthy explanation why he's a know-nothing piece of shit who conned me already into having done something worth about 5x more than his shitty "acceptance criteria" requests, or just start conning and bulshitting him back, which won't net me any money, and waste my time, but at least will also waste HIS time, which might be nice because he seems to be on a tight schedule so if i play this right i might have the chance to sink his whole contract which might be mighty nice satisfying...

FUCK THIS, ALL OF THIS, FUCK HIM, FUCK ME, FUCK ALL OF YOU, I SHOULD HAVE STARTED FUCKING OVER EVERYONE RUTHLESSLY A LONG TIME AGO BECAUSE FUCK THE WHOLE WORLD, WHY SHOULD I CARE WHEN NOBODY ELSE DOES, WHY SHOULD I BE DECENT WHEN NOBODY ELSE IS, AND IT ONLY ROYALLY BITES ME IN THE ASS.

stupid fucking lobotomized fuck, IF YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO SOMETHING, DON'T OFFER YOURSELF TO DO IT FOR MONEY AND THEN CON-SOURCE IT TO OTHERS YOU SHITTY BARFPILE!

FUCK.

Isn't it great when you get urgent tasks, but the documentation required for it can't be found or doesn't even exist, and the devs that worked on the project before are no longer in the company? And then the producer gives you some document that is completely unrelated?

So.. in the AngularJS we had Promises and Deferred objects and in Angular we have RxJS and Observables and Subjects... and I spent last few hours googling for something like "deferred equivalent in angular" with no useful result at all, because, well, "Subject" is not the first damn thing to come to mind when looking for "Deferred" synonyms.. who the hell is making up these names?
It's like "well, since this is a new framework, it should also have completely different(and unrelated) names, so that it does not resemble the old one at all".

Back to work from a week on holiday. Find out that both mine and my girlfriends companies have announced redundancies on the same day (completely unrelated companies in different fields). We've both made it through the first round ok (which is more than some so massively grateful) but we are still at risk of loosing our jobs. We have some savings to fall back on but that will only cover rent for so long. Never underestimate how quickly things can go to shit.