Me talking to a recruiter (even though I am not looking for a job)

Me: If I walk into an interview, and they ask me to reverse a binary tree for a frontend Reac or Vue position or something along those lines, I will end the call and/or walk away from it.

Him: I get similar feelings from other programmers, I don't quite understand why the notion is as common

Me: Because it is fucking useless, it servers no purpose to a dev to know about that when building frontends with react, I link my github profile, for which they can find advanced backend-frontend related projects, compiler and interpreter projects, plus the title I currently have at my workplace and a bunch of other shit, I am not interviewing for a teaching position at an institute, but an actual place of work, for which if they want to know about DS and A they can review my profile which has a repo of DS and A in about 5 different languages including plain C++. I do not need to be offended by such notions since they server no purpose on the frontend, and neither do other devs. If anything it should be a casual conversation during the interview, not a basis for employment.

Recruiter: .........thank you for explaining this to me, I am sure I can bring it up to the agencies doing the reviews and interviews. Are you still interested?

Me: Are they going to give me a coding assignment for a project or a bs question like what I mentioned?

Him: I don't know

Me: then I am not interested

I’m getting fucking tired of having this conversation:

Company “we need x”

Me “ok. In order to deliver x I need y”

Company “we can’t do that”

Me “ok. Then can I have y”

Company “nah ah”

Me “what about Q?”

Company “nope”

Me “okay. Well until you decide to provide me with the resourcing needed, this is getting deprioritized”

Company “wait this needs to be top of mind”

Me “okay. Provide me with y, and I’ll deprioritize other work”

Company “wait we also need that other work”

Me “you’re only getting one. Pick which one you want first”

Company “we’ll get back to you”

Me (muttering) “no you won’t”

Company “what?”

Me “what?”

So one year ago I was working at this company from the US, me being in Europe, which automatically implies there is several hours of timezone difference.

The eng. manager decided we would have a release tomorrow (decision was made one month earlier), and stuff was being prepped up to make that happen.

In the US the workday was about lunch time and in EU it was one hour before finishing. The manager gets us in a meeting and asks me and another dude to do some testing that would take several hours to do. This testing could have been done several days or weeks earlier.

40 minutes after that meeting I get a private message from the PM asking for the status of the test...

Me: aaa.. well I started it and will continue tomorrow

Manager: wait what? we have launch tomorrow, this testing has to be done by tomorrow

Me: it's the end of the workday here, I got personal errands that I have to attend to

Manager: uhm ok ... I see...

I was just messaging something in the public chat right before calling it a day and the manager writes "thanks for the input, your day is over now", completely out of context to the conversation I was having with whomever.

There was no question of "can you stay extra hours and do this?", there was no "hey, I know your day is over we will pay you premium hours with this amount as according to our contract, could you do this now as we have release tomorrow?" ..no ..just .. "do it!". I automatically assumed that ..hey, maybe he wants to do this during and after the live launch (and yes I do admit my mistake of not asking just to be clear, but I assumed the manager knows that there is a timezone difference ..like it's a no brainer).

I can not tell you the heat sensation I had after that last reply from the manager ... it was completely uncalled for, and unreasonable.

I mean why not make a pre-launch phase where you put stuff on the staging server, and perform all the necessary tests and then when you get all the green lights from testing you then proceed with the actual deploy? ...no ... mention this like right at the end of the day before the launch....

And another thing that scratched my neuronal cortex is, how does he know exactly how long the tests would take?

I'm in a few women in tech groups. A woman, who is a highly experienced developer, shared that she had a conversation with her male friend, who is a startup founder. He said that his criteria for recruitment are high levels of math and physics since high school and early interest in programming (e.g. age of 10). She said his criteria made her sad and excluded.

A fellow woman developer commented that it's reasonable to feel sad when you learn your good friend is an idiot. I snorted some Monster out of my nose reading this and I'm still coughing and chuckling.

To be honest, the founder's requirements do sound super ridiculous, and I imagine his startup is made up of clones of the same guy type, wearing different shades of gray t shirts and sandals with socks.

What an absolute fucking disaster of a day. Strap in, folks; it's time for a bumpy ride!

I got a whole hour of work done today. The first hour of my morning because I went to work a bit early. Then people started complaining about Jenkins jobs failing on that one Jenkins server our team has been wanting to decom for two years but management won't let us force people to move to new servers. It's a single server with over four thousand projects, some of which run massive data processing jobs that last DAYS. The server was originally set up by people who have since quit, of course, and left it behind for my team to adopt with zero documentation.

Anyway, the 500GB disk is 100% full. The memory (all 64GB of it) is fully consumed by stuck jobs. We can't track down large old files to delete because du chokes on the workspace folder with thousands of subfolders with no Ram to spare. We decide to basically take a hacksaw to it, deleting the workspace for every job not currently in progress. This of course fucked up some really poorly-designed pipelines that relied on workspaces persisting between jobs, so we had to deal with complaints about that as well.

So we get the Jenkins server up and running again just in time for AWS to have a major incident affecting EC2 instance provisioning in our primary region. People keep bugging me to fix it, I keep telling them that it's Amazon's problem to solve, they wait a few minutes and ask me to fix it again. Emails flying back and forth until that was done.

Lunch time already. But the fun isn't over yet!

I get back to my desk to find out that new hires or people who got new Mac laptops recently can't even install our toolchain, because management has started handing out M1 Macs without telling us and all our tools are compiled solely for x86_64. That took some troubleshooting to even figure out what the problem was because the only error people got from homebrew was that the formula was empty when it clearly wasn't.

After figuring out that problem (but not fully solving it yet), one team starts complaining to us about a Github problem because we manage the github org. Except it's not a github problem and I already knew this because they are a Problem Team that uses some technical authoring software with Git integration but they only have even the barest understanding of what Git actually does. Turns out it's a Git problem. An update for Git was pushed out recently that patches a big bad vulnerability and the way it was patched causes problems because they're using Git wrong (multiple users accessing the same local repo on a samba share). It's a huge vulnerability so my entire conversation with them went sort of like:

"Please don't."
"We have to."
"Fine, here's a workaround, this will allow arbitrary code execution by anyone with physical or virtual access to this computer that you have sitting in an unlocked office somewhere."
"How do I run a Git command I don't use Git."

So that dealt with, I start taking a look at our toolchain, trying to figure out if I can easily just cross-compile it to arm64 for the M1 macbooks or if it will be a more involved fix. And I find all kinds of horrendous shit left behind by the people who wrote the tools that, naturally, they left for us to adopt when they quit over a year ago. I'm talking entire functions in a tool used by hundreds of people that were put in as a joke, poorly documented functions I am still trying to puzzle out, and exactly zero comments in the code and abbreviated function names like "gars", "snh", and "jgajawwawstai".

While I'm looking into that, the person from our team who is responsible for incident communication finally gets the AWS EC2 provisioning issue reported to IT Operations, who sent out an alert to affected users that should have gone out hours earlier.

Meanwhile, according to the health dashboard in AWS, the issue had already been resolved three hours before the communication went out and the ticket remains open at this moment, as far as I know.

During the interview they asked if I had other interviews or offers. I had one more interview and am offer. They emailed me the next day and say "we don't like to be strong armed". I'm assuming it's because I told them the truth about having an offer? We hadn't even talked about salary yet so it's not like I somehow "bullied" them into giving me more money.

Part of me didn't care because obviously this company was garbage and I dodged a bullet (plus I had an offer that was decent anyways). But the other part of me couldn't believe how fragile they were and how entitled they felt. Why ask the question if you don't want to know the answer? Where I'm at now, I got another offer before they made a decision. I had to decide within a couple days. I told them, and without any further conversation made me an offer 10k above the originally discussed salary. It was clear they were decent and so far I've been right.

We do infra as a code, and one of my coworker worked on the project alone. Few months down the road, when shit hits the fan, he just message me this is not working.

First of all, I did not write that shit, and also I was never part of the conversation during the decision making. So when shit hits the fan what do you expect me to do? Do some black magic and fix it magically???

Story of WTF happened to my job

During my employment in (name censored) was stressful, They claimed I didn't complete my task on time which they constantly remove me from git and documentation(which have to follow their style of returning data), I kept emailing, slack, WhatsApp calls them, mostly and predictably got ghosted and blocked.

So How the fuck am I supposed to push my code or code without the documentation (I can actually, prevent refactoring every time, following the documentation is the good way to go.)

On the sprint review, they will complain about me not committing and pushing the code. (I did commit locally, but can't push, they removed me from the fucking repo) and not done.

Tried reasoning, telling the obvious reasons with them, doesn't work. They come out the second reason of me "NOT COMMUNICATING". Sometimes I can get to git merge from dev to my branch and get tonnes of fucked up code. I reviewed the code, and I can't tolerate it.

Lately, I overheard them mocking and cheering me about to get fired over a zoom meeting (I was in there, they forgot to remove me). Their conversation is about me being a coloniser, a jerk, betraying Chinese ancestors for being not Chinese enough.

I was like: "Why the fuck does their conversation sound like they are tucked in the Qin dynasty?"

Frequently I got labelled as unprofessional.

How is cussing about my ancestors, personal and life a professional behaviour?

I find smart watches so rude.

You are talking to someone and the bloody watch goes dinggg..

So the person you are talking to, stops listening, checks their smart watch, and performs whatever action they want before getting back to the conversation.

I fucking hate it. Not only you are rude to me, but also broke the chain of thought and rhythm of the conversation.

Fuck you and fuck your smart watch.

The other day I saw the office boy and the janitor wearing a smart watch. Mind you, the salaries of these folks is not more than $250 a month. Yet they have a top quality smart phone and a smart watch, where the combo usually costs more than their monthly salary.

It's important to consume and show off, than to make the bloody ends meet.

A monkey world.

Hop on a call without taking a shower....

Client requests to turn on video for a face to face conversation......

Happened twice

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Interesting. A few hours ago I had a nice domestic conversation with my coleague about robot vacuum cleaners. He was talking about iRobot Roomba and I was talking about Xiaomi. Here's the result!

Interesting thing is that we talked in a *voice* conversation. Over Slack. Over Chrome. Over corporate VPN (openconnect).

Where's the spying link? Slack or Chrome?

My bet's on Chrome.

What does that tell you about the privacy of your sensitive conversations? :)
Hide behind VPNs all you like. If you have proprietary software (or hardware in the case of Huawei) - you're being watched and listened to.

EDIT: I'm on Linux, he's on MacOS

Submitted a ticket to the 3rd party IT provider today. Just like they always do they close the ticket instantly saying they did the work when they didn’t do anything.

Except this time they went one step further. They documented that they had a conversation with me and that they convinced me that I didn’t need the work done.

No such conversation occurred. I have not changed my mind nor have been given any reason to. They just want their ticket times to appear as fast as possible and are willing to lie through their teeth to achieve that.

Prepare for a shit storm motherfuckers.

A few days back I talked to a person who is far away from me with an air distance of 7937km and electronic signals moving at almost speed of light crossing countries. That was good decent conversation.

So, a few years ago I did an internship at this company really close to my house. It was a total disaster but a few months ago I decided to give it another shot and apply for a junior position there as I needed money and they knew me there. For some reason they hired me and now I work there for about 2 months.

There's one other developer here and my problem is that he's the senior here. Guys I don't know what to do about it, this guy is so controlling. He won't allow me to decide ANYTHING.

I have a whiteboard with all my projects and he wrote deadlines there (because his boss said he needs to set deadlines since he never finishes anything on time, but he decided to put that on me) when I finished something in time (like 3 days early!) I wanted to put that under the project on the board. But he didn't want it. No reason. Just no.

He's also constantly talking, all day long. He writes 1 or 2 functions per day. Maybe fixes a small bug. And then one day per week he actually works. Constantly complaining about me, bugging me, removing electricity from my screens, setting my wallpaper to 2 dudes kissing ect. ect. its fucking annoying me. This guy even plays video games on his nintendo or call of duty.. Working for other customers that have nothing to do with this company. And the boss thinks he's great..

So 2 days ago, the whiteboard filled with his drawings was completely emptied because of me. It felt so good, he was so angry he didn't talk all day, to no one. What else can I do guys? I can't go to my boss, the other guy in this office doesn't really care and he's on his side. But when I code I need to be able to concentrate. I can't even have a serious conversation with this guy because he just doesn't take me serious. He always thinks he's right and wants control of every little thing...

What do I do?

I'm currently watching the "it was my idea, I should get half the revenue" conversation play out in real time... For someone else.

I had the sense to turn down this "fantastic business opportunity"

So I met this person via a social platform.

They were absolutely silly and weren't able to hold a conversation. So I, like a normal person, just stopped trying to keep things alive.

Over the years, I have realised and learnt that if a person is interested in being friends, they'd put in efforts and I alone will not have to drag things on my shoulder.

I started cutting out people right, left, and center who I felt were taking advantage of me or using me in some way or another.

I ended up saving a lot of time and energy. I no longer feel drained or anxious about something not working out. Not dragging saved me from draining.

Anyway, they reach out to me again after few weeks and I was like let's give it a try to establish a friendship, because befriending people is my weak point.

The cycle repeats. At first I thought it must be because of the asynchronous nature of the platform so I drop my Telegram Id in case they preferred an IM approach.

I swear in the name of sweet lord, the retard does the same behaviour. So, I stopped communication.

And one fine day, the person tells me that they lack social skills and want to learn how to make friends and stuff.

Very fair point. So, me being me, gave them a few tips and critically pointed out their behaviour on how they reply with a one liner after every 2 or 3 business days.

Absolutely no change in their behaviour. They kept texting me the same.

At this point, I was like why am I doing it? I could find better people easily. Because for me, communication is everything. I cannot function without a good communication between two living beings.

So, I asked them why are they even trying to learn social skills when they barely implement it and don't want to change to which they reply saying that so they can use it to befriend people and network to getter better job opportunities.

I fuck them off.

And fuck such people who have intentions, are not clear enough about it, and play people for their own selfish gains.

And this where another learning I got from @scout is have boundaries.

Why do all good people in my life leave? Damn it! I need those good people back and be friends with them and not retards who cannot even communicate beyond one liner.

I can't work
I can't sleep
I can't eat
I can't code
I can't go have fun
I can't have a conversation

Because I've got a new exciting idea "💡" buzzing all over my mind all the time.

It's been 9 days already and it's still exciting, probably even more. I think that means it might be worth going ahead and realising it.

Me and @svc64 having a *casual* conversation

Real conversation with my shit bank
Me: Hey, I want to change the phone number associated with my card because I no longer have access to it. (aka stolen). I can't find the option to do so on your website anymore.
Them: Yeah, for security reasons you now have to come down to the bank (which involves standing in line for anywhere between 40 minutes and 2 hours) to do that simple change.

The actual fuck.

My current mentor - the lead dev at my company who's been around forever. He's patient and willing to explain anything once, and peppers every conversation with best practice. He's also been happy to learn from me on the rare occasion when I know something he doesn't. And to boot, he's working in a second (or possibly more) language

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

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

So I'm working on something and I get a message from the business owner saying that something is missing in production, we need to fix this quickly. Turns out it's some missing images. We have a placeholder in place, so no harm done, users just see a placeholder image there and it's a minor thing. (These images cannot be uploaded by the user, because no one had the time to complete a feature for it. So business people bother developers.)

Anyway, the business owner escalates this into a request to add those images quickly to the repo and push it to production asap. I said that it can be done, because it is very low risk, but as I've seen this kind of "going straight to the developer with my problems" behavior before, I wanted to bring the issue to a broader audience. Then the product owner (PO) steps in and asks why wasn't he involved in this. Then other PO's step into the conversation as well, because they manage the process to prioritize and handle bug reports. Then someone posts the bug and error prioritization assessment and what do you know, judging the issue from that scale, it ranks as being "low".

"But what do we tell the customers?!". Oh, fuck you! It's one customer! Not everything can be prioritized as critical! If we stop work to fix every single thing we get feedback on without doing a proper assessment and prioritization, that's all we will be doing.

This is why PO's exist. They will push the breaks and assess the situation, then prioritize the work accordingly.

One of our team mates is based out of the US office. We are physically distant, but after our manager's departure, we lost touch because our scope of work was different.

Me and two other team members work closely with each other from India and dude is alone, working out of the US.

Super smart, very polite, and a fun person to work and be with. Even when our interaction was less, I learnt so much from him.

Since, I am facing some challenges, I decide to use it as an excuse to connect with him for a coffee and also seek his guidance because he is senior to me.

Some things he mentioned,

1. Our new line manager asks him to do things on spot with no heads up. He has to drop everything and complete the ask.

2. Often times, poor guy, is asked to join meetings on immediate basis. Even while he is having his lunch.

3. He never got support from our new manager. Infact, based on the conversation, I realised that the manager supports me more.

4. He is facing same, if not more, issues with tech. And he didn't have any guidance on how to handle the issue.

5. A lot of times he is facing process and system problems which he isn't able to solve because the org culture is that of working in Silos. And he doesn't get any support from manager.

6. Tech has clearly pushed him back when he asked for help and other teams never respond to him.

My man was still smiling bright and was looking things from a positive lens that all of this is interesting and adds to the learning experience which will be valued when we decide to move on from this job.

These are the people who inspire me. Smiling in the time of adversity.

Even when he had his own challenges, he was ready to guide me and hear my frustrations. I offered him help and will make sure to stay connected so he doesn't feel left out and alone in the team only because we don't work together in physical space.

One thing I have learned over time is, while I am facing problems, someone out there is facing more and difficult problems then me. I always tend to blow up my problems out of proportion then what they actually are.

I am the dumbest person that I know and mark my words, I'll die because of my empathy. I wish I could help my team mate in any possible way.

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?

So... This is something that happened some time ago.

I went to my company's end-of-year celebration party. Since I've done mostly contractor stuff, I didn't really know anyone and thought this'd be a good chance to meet my peers.

My coworkers ended up being mostly HR people, and I couldn't find even one person with common interests.

It was a 2 hour bus ride away, and I had to stay over at a friend's place for the night, but that wasn't bad.

The party itself well...it started at 7pm and ended at... 4 am During that time I just wanted to be somewhere else. I felt alienated and out of place. I couldn't even play phone games since I had lost my phone the day prior.

The one conversation I had was forced upon me by a smug bastard who probably worked at HR or management. Wanted me to agree with him on something while I just wanted to go drink alone. He kept redefining words and moving goal posts every time I disagreed.

Most of the "party" was people 10-20 years older than me dancing to music I hadn't heard since I was in middle school.

The food was bad and sparse. The drinks... not even good either. Cheap pub drinks. No decent mixes.

To top it all off I couldn't leave early.

Just felt like ranting about this

I’ve become so indecisive in terms of knowing what I want from my career.
All I know is what I don’t want (to end up a in management)

I’m definitely getting a new job and right now it looks like I’ve got 3 offers on the table

Option 1, a previous company I worked for. Still the same problems with the company there as before but the work was interesting and unusual. and my line manager was a good guy.
They have practically no legacy code.
Not much in the way of company benefits but they’re local and it would be nice to see friends again.
So feels like the pull to this is strong.

Option 2, a fully remote company that I’ve been referred to by an ex-workmate.
They’ve not even tech tested me because they’ve read my blogs and GitHub repos instead and said they’re impress. So just had a conversation with them. I feel honoured that they took the time to look at what I’ve done in my own time and use that in their decision.
Benefits are slightly better than option 1 (more hols)
But they’re using .net 6 and get a lot of heavy use on their system and have some big customers. I think the work is integrations to start with and moving services into docker and azure.

Option 3, even though I’ve got an offer from this one but they can’t actually explain the work until We can arrange a call next week (they recruit and then work out what team your in, but Christmas got in the way of me having a call with them straight away)
It’s working on government systems and .net is their least used stack so probably end up switching to Java. Maybe other tech stacks too.
This place has much better benefits than option 1 and 2 (more hols and more pension), but 2 days a week in office.

All of the above pay the same salary.

Having choice feels almost as bad as having no choice.
It’s doing my head in thinking about it , (even tho I might as well not think about it at all until the call with option 3 happens).

On the one hand with option 3, using a tech stack that’s new to me might be refreshing, as I’ve done .net for 10 years.

On the other hand I really like c# and I’m very good at it. So it feels a bit like I should be capitalising on that and using my experience to shape how the dev is done. Not sure I and I can do that with option 3, at least for a while.
C# feels like it’s moving forward nicely and I’m not sure I can say the same for Java or other languages.

I love programming and learning new stuff but so unable to let things go. It’s like I have a fear that c# will move on without me and I’ll end up turning into one of those devs whose skills are a decade out of date.

Maybe the early years of my career formed me in this way.
Early on I worked at a company where there was a high number of Cobol devs who thought they had a job for life.
But then redundancies came and many left. Of those who stayed they had to cross train to Java and they just couldn’t do it.

I don’t think the tech was hard for them, I think they were just so used to not learning that they could no longer adapt.
Think most of them ended up retiring after trying to learn Java for a few years.

It can’t be only me.
Long story short. A second grade classmate suddenly reconnects with me. We talk about this and that, exchange some memories, the usual. 20 minutes into the conversation… she goes: Can you do a website for me for my….
I hate these kind of people, I mean you have a better change just telling me without the foreplay, it’s just making me angry.

Was having a conversation with a dev friend and he said, in every tech implementation, we are more or less doing CRUD operations at fundamental level.

To which, I agree with as there are three layers to tech

1. Data
2. Front end where the data is rendered
3. APIs to perform CRUD on data

Want to understand community's thoughts on this..

the environment in my home is very depressing (socially) . How can i change it?

this is not about being living in a small room with smells or something. this is about my family's social life and how it is impacting me.

living with mom and dad as a single child with extreme morals, moralist ideology and no/bitter relations is impacting me a lot.

i will try to cover some points that make us different from other people:

1. i come from a very nuclear family with my parents and me and no siblings. we have 2 cats though

2. we have always been poor and are still struggling. we don't a 4 wheeler, my dad closed his job to be a salesman and he doesn't earn enough for current expenses. we pay our bills from rents from shop and a room for rent on terrace. i am earning 5x my family now, so we are stable but being poor has always been a major impact for me

3. we follow this spritual philosopher/guru as our religion who preach good morals, various currently non existent ("but will be ruling the globe" ) practises and procedures . i am not much into them so i might explain them wrong, but from my 23 yo brain's understanding, some examples will be : extreme vegetarianism (no onion/garlic/egg) , no drinks/smoking , yoga, fasting, some communism/socialism philosophy, meditation , kirtana, etc

4. there is no love amongst my parents or their relatives. i don't know how we are living a loveless life. afaik , the relatives from both sides were bad and treacherous , they were the reasons for our struggles and now we hate them and they don't visit us.
among mom and dad :dad was never someone that mom loved, they just went with the family pressures, and since there was no way for mom to take a stand, she went with the hateful marriage, had me, they jointly struggled to keep me alive while hating each other and never even sleeping together, until i was a decent 23 yo earning by myself. they don't even have friends afaik.

5. cut to today, our lives revolve around not the love for one another but towards this stupid religion dictating the rules of our lives. there are 3 seperate rooms in which we 3 sleep, and mom dad gets into vicious fights on smallest of the things. i then jump in, trying to extinguish the fire by being even the louder voice. and end up hurting them and myself. at the same time , their bodies are now taking a toll : mom has some uterus/liver problems, dad is diabetic and one of our cat's legs don't work.

i just want to run away. i never had friends because they couldn't never relate with me, i didn't go to school picnics, didn't talked with girls, never got into discussions that people would find interesting.

i feel so seperated out from the world. i am an engineer by profession, i have a good number of people that knows me and respects me for my knowledge, but they end up mocking me for my social skills and different life rules when i try to be with them. and they are not at fault. i am the person that is the result of such a big messed up life.

their can't be another person on this planet that will be having a similar life situation, being loveless for so long. i don't see myself having a future at all : i am earning decent but what's the point?

i recently went to a trip with my friends. it was a fun little trip of 3 days. the people were : me, my friend of 9 years of friendship , my friend of 8 years of friendship, gf of the 9 yr friend and 2 stranger girls.
this was such an amazing environment for my brain : i never had a conversation with a girl for more than 10 mins. i envy my friends with gf kissing, going on trips , etc , but this.. this was awesome. the girls were chill , my 8 yof guy was a chick magnet and the setting was that he would woo the slimer girl while i would go with the short one. although nothing happened, i just observed how the guys and girls would talk and relate and how i am different.

it's my 2nd trip with friends, and its completely the same: i goto a trip, enjoy the best 6-7 days of my life, learn that i am very different from the world, that the world perceive of me as a very simple , naive person with limited social exposure, and that i have a very conservative beta male , moralist mamma's boy personna.

when i come home with these thoughts, i end up being angry , blaming them for this, because they are the ones who made me like this, weather due to their struggling life or just morals. and i end up being rude to them and being a sad regretful person.

i just broke my dad's phone because they were again fighting, being very loud and i wanted to end all this.

what should i do? can i change something? is it always going to be like this? who in this home can be happy with a shitty environment like this? will their be a girl that wants to see this mess by marrying me?

“Lazy mom lazy wow” presented by Gail Swanlund was probably the most impactful piece of art to me.

Through simplistic form, this art piece presents the idea of caring about oneself and quit the eternal rat race for money. But somehow for its metaphor, Lazy mom lazy wow chooses the notion and aesthetics of death and decay. The closest analogy I can think of is the music of American Football. Some kind of liminal, eerie aesthetics. Also, the movie Gummo and the game Life is Strange, part one.

The piece deliberately avoids being aggressive and celebrating its notion. It’s not “quit the rat race and celebrate because life is so good”, it’s “quit the rat race by putting yourself into coma so nothing matters anymore”. The descent into eternal comfort of realization that you don’t have to do anything anymore, but also sorrow of losing meaning.

It feels like launching Counter-Strike Source in the year 2051, only to walk around cs_office and realize there are no players anymore, and they will not return ever again. The sense of watching an old VHS tape of you having a conversation with your mom in the hospital as she’s counting her last days because of cancer. The sense of comfort of coming back to your hometown. You remember your childhood and your high school crush, only to realize that those moments won’t happen ever again.

!dev

Why must I always be the guy that has to connect with people?

So I'm applying to a retail job, and the section manager, lets call him Tim, is kinda low energy.

Come in four days later after the first meeting, to just let him know I put in the application. We're talking, talking some more, and he basically wants to hire me but says it usually takes 1-2 weeks for the background. Well that's nonsense for a retail position doing stocking, but alright.

And I'm heading out the door, say to him "dont kill yourself on shift", he doesnt even laugh, just flat affect, monotone, "I know I still got an hour and a half on shift."

And as I'm driving away I'm thinking, that's how the entire conversation was like.

It wasn't just misery or tiredness. The dude, Tim, I'd seen that face and heard that tone before.

Its the behavior of someone who actively doesnt want to be alive.

And as I'm driving away, I'm just thinking, how do I go back? How do I go to this total stranger, who I'm also applying for a job with, who I just met, and say *look, I dont mean to get personal and this is probably uninvited but I know something's up with you. You were like this last time I met you, and you're like it even more now. I know bro. I know. You think no one sees you're going through something, but I do.*

I see shit like this and it's so obvious and by the time I realize I should say something, the opportunity has passed, the moment has passed. And it's like, is it even my place?

But to see someone like that, to be familiar with that look on their face, and to let them walk away...

I just dont know.

I have joined a new company recently and I'm worried.
Really have worry because of my people skills and little doubt on the manager. I mean what do I know I just joined but still overthinking it.

There are people who speak confidently and I feel intimidated because in the casual conversations I don't feel like I can contribute at this point at least, it's been a week only. Other thing is as I do not know much about the work, I can't speak in the meetings. I know that I'm expecting a lot from myself here as I just joined but I have a history of being silent in the meetings and in my previous organisation I could deal with it as I got comfortable finally.
How can I be more interactive with people, given that some are cold?

About my manager, he is young. He definitely has a good IQ that's why he is a manager now.
The thing is, he talks a lot. Conversations are not 2 way, and he kept on saying things without even understanding that I'm overwhelmed. I have previously told him that I am overwhelmed, he listened, took 2 minutes and continued with his all work related talks.

I don't like the way he's stating his expectations from the time I didn't even join. He told me everything about the organization, on first day, he gave me a 2 months rough expectations of me. I don't agree with all the points he makes but it doesn't seem plausible for me to interrupt and say my thing. For example when he stated his expectations, I should have stopped him and politely tell that it's too soon we can discuss these things in upcoming weeks. But just because he continues rambling, I can't say it. It seems a small thing but I know it's not proper conversation and will create issues for me. As I have had similar kind of manager before, who used to ramble and didn't stop talking. But couldn't understand my problems etc.

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?

A good conversation should be like a mini skirt long enough to cover the topic and short enough retain interest

!dev
The conversation with my friend.

friend: "So you are getting a new Job?"
me : "Yea, maybe I will start a business tho. btw , what you do for a living now?"
friend: "I fap for living."
me: "aacha? come on serious."
friend :"serious only I am telling. I donate my sperm for RM150 per sample."
me: "WTF"
friend: "yeap. and that's how I made more virgin marry with my donation."
me: "YUCKS, stop it."

Finding myself with more and more time where I'm not engaged in conversation or listening to an actual person. What are the best dev-related podcasts to listen to whilst I work/code?