New for avatars - emotions! You can now change your facial expression on your avatar to better capture your dev mood! Getting expressions working right turned out to be quite the undertaking due to the ripple effect of the various layers that each expression touched so our total layers just for men ballooned out from 300 layers to 1100. And @dfox re-architecting how layers work to handle the interconnectedness of expression meant tying together facial expression, skin tone, facial hair, and hair color to make sure everything stays in sync. It’s a fun new addition, I hope everyone enjoys!

I also want to apologize for the delay in getting this out, I meant to have this done ages ago but I got thrown a curveball at work and was laid off back in April and have been super stressed running around trying to find a new job for the past 3 months. I figured I’d have more free time to work on devRant, but hunting for work is so exhausting, it’s really taken its toll emotionally and financially (no unemployment benefits because according to my state even though we lose money every month “you’re still a corporate officer”). Things are finally looking promising on the job search front, and I expect once things get back to normal @dfox and I can get our release velocity back up, but until then, please bear with me.

P.S. If you have the resources, we certainly do appreciate your support with devRant++ Your monthly contributions really do make a difference! Thanks all!

Corporate IT: Here at Company A we are very proactive about CyberSecurity!

Dev: What is our cybersecurity plan?

Corporate IT: If any breaches happen we will terminate those involved and discontinue use of the offending product

Dev: That sounds reactive to me

Corporate IT: 😡 It’s proactive actually as we put together that plan of action BEFORE anything happened!

Dev: …

Corporate IT: YOU MUST COME INTO THE OFFICE. WE JUST RECEIVED AN URGENT NOTIFICATION FROM APPLE OF A SECURITY VULNERABILITY IN iOS DEVICES. YOU HAVE BEEN IDENTIFIED AS HAVING A MAC ASSET. COME INTO THE OFFICE IMMEDIATELY AND UPDATE IT.

Dev: I don’t use that mac, it sits in my office desk drawer unplugged. I’ll update it if I ever need it for anything. Which I won’t, we don’t do iOS dev anymore.

Corporate IT: NOOOOO!!! YOU MUST UPDATE IT NOW!!!

Dev: I’m not wasting time driving into the office this week. We have an important deadline we’re working on, I can’t afford to lose 2 hours to this. Plus it can’t be turned on right now, It’s been unplugged for 2 years.

Corporate IT: THAT WOULDN’T STOP A HACKER!!

Dev: …

!!good news
!!great news
!!linux dev lappy recommendations?

So, @Root might finally have a job! Woo!
(Pending a background check, drug test, cavity search, ...)

I'm excited, and kind of giddy. It's an open-office setup, but the devs are chill, the boss is chill (reminds me a bit of myself thus far, just... nice), pay is decent too. Drive is hell, but everything else feels kinda cushy. The parent company is super-stuffy corporate and has an HR and red tape fetish, but supposedly I won't have to interact with them at all. I start as soon as all of the background check nonsense comes through. (Don't get me started on that, please.)

One of the questions that came up, however, is what type of system I wanted to use. I requested a Linux lappy, and that's sadly a bit beyond the parent company's nontechnical IT department. They asked me for links to a few specific machines on amazon for options. (MacBook Pro or equivalent)

That's where this question comes in: Which lappys make great dev machines and also have decent linux (Debian/Mint/Ubuntu) support? The role is backend Rails development + some devops, so I don't need super-fancy graphics, though I will be attaching a 4k (hopefully IPS) display because space and pretty colors.

Recommendations welcome, as I should get back to them today!

Today I felt sorry for my boss.

Story behind it:
My boss always encourages me to do the right thing. One of those right things is to enforce quality gates in our build pipelines which, as many of you know, means that the build fails if certain quality parameters are not met. Now an external vendor team merged the code this past thursday for a large feature that they had been working on and our build failed majestically throwing out the statistics and the offending files and lines of code.

All hell broke loose and there were escalations and what not and people working extra hours and over the weekend to try and get it right. So, I get a call from my boss earlier today to explain to me how important it is to release the feature and how it's going to be very bad if we don't. He was trying to justify his ask which was to lower the quality criteria and let the build pass for this week. Of course the dev in me was furious but then I realized it's not him but the corporate culture. Why would he or anyone would risk losing their jobs over the quality of code?

If you work at a place where IT is a support function of the company's primary business, I understand the moral compromises you guys have to make sometimes to keep the ball rolling. Thank you for your effort to make the world a better place.
So, thank you boss for all your support. I know it's not always up to you to decide on things but keep up the good work.

My first internship was unpaid. "For the experience" and shit. My first task was to clear out an entire office full to the literal ceiling with the phones of people who had been laid off or quit. There were now just three old guys in the entire office. And me. Go figure. I need to find that picture, it's truly unbelievable.
My next task was to sort cables in the store room. Mind you, this was supposed to be a software dev internship.

I consistently had to ASK for work to do. If I didn't, I would just sit in my new office all day doing homework and playing with linux liveCDs and nobody cared.

So the third task they gave me was to try to restore a very old (like XP old) computer that had a broken hard drive, literally broken. Said they wanted to "repurpose it." As busy work I guess.

So I scrounged around the cleptomaniacal cesspool of dated and neglected tech and found a hard drive. Pop it in, chkdsk, fdisk, good to go. Spend hours installing XP while sorting more random cables and doing my homework because honestly writing a history paper is more valuable to my dev career than this complete bullshit. Finally get the thing working and go to report the miracle of rebirth to my higher-up. He says "oh cool," doesn't smile, and hands me a list of software to install.

I come back 20 minutes later - "Hey, most of these require corporate licenses."

Guy says "yup" and goes back to ignoring me. Never gives me a company card to buy licenses, or a list of ones already bought. I've revived the computer equivalent of Moses from the computer equivalent of permadeath just for this asshole to completely disregard that and give me an(other) impossible task, just to get me off his back. Excuse me for imposing with free (then-child) labor, you ass.
I spend maybe another week there doing homework in the office I cleaned and contemplating stealing everything of value. I guarantee they wouldn't have noticed though, which somehow made the idea less appealing.

I quit by texting my boss.

He never replied.

I wish I had stolen their laptop RAM.
It's probably still sitting on boss's shelf collecting dust and being a miserable, outdated fucking waste of space, just like him and his two remaining coworkers.

Dev: This is the first version of this new app, we’re still experimenting with how it’s going to work but initial headway is looking promising. It cost very little to make, came together very quickly and is already resulting in productivity increases for users. We’re just doing a bit of code cleanup now and we’ll make a move on the next iteration.

Corporate IT: This project is being completely mishandled! In order to successfully build an app you have to determine every single requirement beforehand! It takes millions upon millions of dollars due to the complex system of governance and approval that needs to exist. Massive numbers of stakeholders need to be involved and coordinated to even make so much as a login screen! I bet your project doesn’t even have a documented list of core values.

Dev: Has you ever successfully built an app using that methodology?

Corporate IT: 😡 That’s a loaded question. I went to school to study project management and have over 25 years of experience in the field. If you had the training and experience I do you would know that tech projects are naturally very volatile and there’s nothing you can do about that!

Dev: …

Man I really need to get this off my chest. So here goes.
I just finished 1 year in corporate after college. When I joined, the team I got was brilliant, more than what I thought I would get. About 6 months in, the project manager and lead dev left the company. Two replacements took their place, and life's been hell ever since.

The new PM decided it was his responsibility to be our spokesperson and started talking to our overseas manager (call her GM) on our behalf, even in the meetings where we were present, putting words in our mouth so that he's excellent and we get a bad rep.

1 month in, GM came to visit our location for a week. She was initially very friendly towards all of us. About halfway through the week, I realized that she had basically antagonized the entire old team members. Our responsibilities got redistributed and the work I was set to do was assigned to the new dev (call her NR).

Since then, I noticed GM started giving me the most difficult tasks and then criticizing my work extra hard, and the work NR was doing was praised no matter what. I didn't pay much attention to it at first, but lately the truth hit me hard. I found out a fault in NR's code and both PM and GM started saying that because I found it, it was my responsibility to fix it. I went through the buggy code for hours and fixed it. (NR didn't know how it worked, because she had it written by the lead dev and told everyone she wrote it).

I found out lately that NR and PM got the most hike, because they apparently "learnt" new tech (both of them got their work done by others and hogged the credit).They are the first in line to go onsite because they've been doing 'management work'. They'd complained to GM during her visit that we were not friendly towards them. And from that point on if anything went wrong, it would be my fault, because my component found it out (I should mention that my component mostly deals with the backend logic, so its pretty adept at finding code leaks).

What broke my patience is the fact that lately I worked my ass off to deliver some of the best code I'd written, but my GM said in front of the entire team that at this point "I'm just wasting money". She's been making a bad example out of me for some time, but this one took the cake. I had just delivered a promising result in a task in 1 week that couldn't be done by my PM in 4 weeks, and guess what? "It's not good enough". No thank you, no appreciation, nothing. Finally, I decided I'd had enough of it and started just doing tasks as I could. I'd do what they ask, but won't go above and beyond my way to make it perfect.

My PM realized this and then started pushing me harder. Two days back, I sent a mail to the team with GM in cc exposing a flaw in the code he had written, and no one bothered to reply (the issue was critical). When I asked him about it, he said "How can you expect me to reply so soon when it's already been told that when anything happens we should first resolve within the team and then add GM in the loop?" I realized it was indeed discussed, but the issue was extremely urgent, so I had asked everyone involved, and it portrayed him in a bad light. I could've fixed it, but I didn't because on the off chance if it broke something, they'd start telling me that I broke the tool, how its my fault and how its a critical issue I have to fix ASAP, etc. etc., you get the idea.

Can anyone give me some advice of how to deal with this kind of situation? I would have left but with this pandemic going on, market being scarce and the fact that I'm only experienced by 1 year, I don't think I qualify for a job switch just now.

!dev && rant

I just saw this video about car insurance and how they're essentially legal fraud. As I'm looking to get a driver's license and get myself a secondhand car, I looked what the costs actually are for mandatory car insurance that gets people so worked up...

€400 per fucking year?! And many companies that get well into the €1000?!!!! No surprise that people get so worked up about it! The budget of my entire fucking car would be only around €2000!!!!

Guess I'll be looking into building an electric bike then.. money grabbing corporate motherfuckers! And what for.. only because the average driver is a clueless operator of a killing machine?! FUCK THIS SHIT!!! 🤬

Not specifically dev related other than being hired as a dev, more a corporate thing.

I have medical issues that mean I can be a bit variable in my starting time. Company was aware and floated flexible hours as a possible solution, but never said it *was* a solution, and just left it there really breezy.

Nailed this down with my line manager a couple weeks later after HR lost their shit, apologised and thought nothing of it.

Few days later I read a blog post about IP clauses in contracts that reminded me I intended to ask, as mine didn’t have one.

Asked HR, no response for like an hour, then “we’ll get back to you on that”

Following week, pulled into a sudden meeting. “Sorry for short notice of meeting, but we’re terminating your employment effective immediately for ‘lack of commitment’”.

Utter. Bullshit.

The day before, the company literally had a company day where they banged on about their values and how they wanted to support their employees and foster an environment for good health and good mental health.

No disciplinary proceedings. My line manager found out 5 minutes before I did.

I emailed a few colleagues afterwards and apologised, and they were stunned it had gone down the way it did.

I was so blindsided and angry in the meeting, especially after I believed I’d found a company that was actually different and cared.

And I did my work, I stayed late quite often, even produced a couple internal devops tools in my time there.

The kicker is that it was within the probation period, so I have literally no recourse for any action against them.

What’s the most bullshit corporate clusterfuck you’ve been through devRant?

How to block productivity:

I am currently a working student at a huge corporation and tasked to write some smallish java applications. Nothing unusual.

To actually be able to write and compile java programs I need a JDK.
Except that the last corporate update for java removed my jdk and left me with only a jre. It so happened that my admin rights ran out.

To be able to install a new jdk, I need elevated rights, which I need to request. The fucking problem is nobody of my department, who I could talk to, is here or online to accept the request.

Guess who is now sitting in front of his dysfunctional dev environment :/

My fellow coworker dev just sent a staging site link to our CFO to review some new functionality...

CFO clicks on our corporate HQ link in coworker's email signature instead and berates coworker for sending him the wrong link...

This person is somewhat largely in charge of making decisions that affect our digital marketing, website budgets, and strategy.

I can't make this shit up.

Today I learned a lesson from corporate survival 101.

The difference between get it done vs get it right.

Boss, manager always want to get it done, while developers always want to get it right, most of the time. If you don't listen to your boss, manager and insist get it right, will eventually cost your job. I saw many get it done code, either the dev moves to another team or already left. They avoid their own code forever.

Perhaps be a good student, not the smart student is a good way to survive. Thought????

So a few days ago I shared about the conflict with my colleague on learning React. Today I was let go. Obviously I asked why they would do that and they said they feel the problem isn't even my React knowledge but the fact I don't grasp the fundamentals of OO programming.

Thing is in these 3 months there has not been a single code review. They are either going of what my lying colleague told them (they claimed he was excluded from giving feedback), or the consultants who were hired to help us. And yes, I got feedback I should improve but at the same time the assurance so long as I show improvement it'd be fine. And I was told they could see improvement. So I'm not sure what changed but suddenly there is no budget to keep me on. In any case it feels like shitty corporate bullshit.

But I can't say they are wrong. I struggle to explain simple concepts I know in words. I've worked a series of bad jobs where nobody cared how you did stuff as long as it got done. I feel I'm so behind now and so affected by bad knowledge it's even harder to fix than to learn the first time. So I'm wondering how to fix this.

I'm really gutted too because I loved this company. I was finally getting a fair wage instead of being underpaid. The people were excellent. I felt I could finally relax and feel safe at work. And now I feel betrayed. Which for someone with self esteem issues is very hard. Can't trust in myself and can't trust in others.

I'm gonna try and pick myself up in the morning, but today I feel totally shit. This wasn't how I'd expected things to go. I thought my manager had intended to talk conflicts over but instead I get the boot. And the advice to stop overselling myself. Real useful that. Like it is on me that they hired me despite my subpar interview because my CV looked good. It's a shitty excuse. In any case they're now stuck with a dev that walks out of work, throws false accusations about colleagues, and another person warned me about to not engage because nothing good ever came from it. He's gonna keep over engineering everything and make up for all the time he wastes outside of work creating a dysfunctional environment for everyone. But yeah, easier to fire the new person who does her best despite the odds. And who cautioned against over engineering because we kept missing deadlines. And who believes in refactoring when it is needed because that's how agile works. Yeah better keep someone who has no sense of work life balance and makes others miserable then claiming he's being driven out by your ignorance. And of course the consultants who throw your own people under the bus. Can't get rid of those now.

I can't figure out shit..
To be honest I created this profile just so I can write down somewhere what I am going through.
So, once upon a time I had graduated from college and went right into a corporate (has only been 2 years since). I was fortunate enough that I got assigned a project that was just starting, and even though I had no clue what was going on, I started doing whatever was assigned.
I initially worked in java and then finished all my tasks earlier than expected, so they switched me to another C++ project that builds on top of it.
Fast forward 2.5 years, I'm now the team lead of the CPP project and all my friends who were in the core team have left the company.
As usual, the reason behind it is shitty management. These mfs won't hire competent people and WILL ABSOLUTELY NOT retain the ones that are. I can feel it in my bones that it is time for me to leave, but fuck me if I understand what I am good at.
I have been able to handle all the tasks that they threw at me, be it java or c++ - just because I love logic and algorithms. I have been dabbling in ML and AI since 4-5 years now, but could never go into it full time.
Now I'm looking at the job postings and Jesus Christ these bitches do not understand what they want. I have to be expert in 34567389 technologies, mastering each of whom (by mastering I mean become proficient in) would need at least 6-8 months if not more, all with 82146867+ years of experience in them.
I don't know if I am supposed to learn on Java (so spring boot and stuff) or I'm supposed to do c++ or I'm gonna go with Python or should I learn web dev or database management or what.
I like all of these things, and would likely enjoy working in each of these, but for fucks sake my cv doesn't show this and most of the bitch ass recruiter portals keep putting my cv in the bin.
Yeah...
If you have read so far, here's a picture of a cat and a dog.

LONG RANT ALERT, no TL;DR

* Writes an email to colleague about why I can't create a page on our CMS without at least a H1 title. She wants to me to put up an image with text on it (like a flyer), for multiple reasons, I say I need a textless image. *

30 minutes later:
* Casually plans a frontend optimization project, by looking at files on the CMS, in order to make further development easier and less time-taking*

*** EMAIL NOTIFICATION ***
* clicks *

"Hello, this is [Graphic designer] from the company who created the image with text on it. I do not understand why you can't put display:none on your <h1> tag. Also, being a web company, we are used to making themes and my solution of display:none will work. It's pityful to work on a design only to have it stripped out from most of its concept. If you can't do that, do tell me what resolution you need."

My first reaction:

"Dear [Graphic designer], I am managing our corporate identity, our backend and frontend codebase, I am a graphic designer myself, and am also SEO-aware. For at least 8 reasons (redacted, 'cuse too long), I will need an image without text. As told to my colleagues, I need a 72/96 DPI 16:9 ratio image, 1920x1080 is a good start but may be bigger. Also, looking at the image, it'll have to be in JPG, at 100% quality, exported for the web. Our database software will optimize the image by itself."

Reasons are about SEO issues, responsiveness issues, CMS tools issues, backend and frontend issues.

Instead, I sent following email "We can't. Image please."

I mean seriously. A bit of clarity for you:

In my company, nobody has the slightest idea what I do. They don't understand how a computer works (we all know it works by magic, right?). So of course, when one thinks what we don't know, we know it better than the one who knows, my colleague thought our CMS was like a word document, and began telling me how I should display her bible-length text-infected image, by using some inline css styling display:none.

I tell her "nope, because of my 8 reasons". She transmits that to the agency who's done the visual, now I have this [Graphic designer] not understanding that there are other CMSs than Wordpress on the web, and she tells me, me being one of the most aware on this CMS we have, how I should optimize my site?

Fucking shit, she connects on our CMS for 1 second and she'll get cancer since it's so bad. I'm in the process of planning a whole new rewrite so the website is well designed (currently I am modifying a base theme made by an incompetent designer). I know the system by heart and I know what you can, or can't do.

Now I just received an answer: "so it's only a pure technical problem". NO, OUR WEBSITE WAS CODED BY A CHIMPANZEE WHO THOUGHT WEB DEV WAS AS EASY AS WRITING "HELLO WORLD" ON A SHITTY CMS THAT FORCES DEV USERS TO USE A FUCKING CUM-WHITE-THEMED EDITOR TO EDIT THE WHOLE SITE!!!

I can't just sneeze and "oh look, it's working!"

Hey everyone in all seriousness I am gonna be out of the dev field now - hopefully forever. I’m back in school now and hopefully will become employed in emergency response. Before dev, I have had jobs where I could directly help people with their troubles and I could reduce a lot of chaos. I really enjoyed it and I want to kind of steer my life back towards that. I find that while I was an employed dev, I felt like I was contributing a lot towards corporate greed, this wealth gap problem, and a bunch of other stuff. It all felt morally wrong (to me - not judging here). I also felt the worse I have ever felt in a job - constantly burned out, depressed, lonely, sleep deprived, and almost even ashamed of myself of how I constructed my life thus far. I had some good times meeting some cool ass people in some cool ass places tho.

Now, even though I’m still sleep deprived and EXTREMELY poor, I’m very happy now. I am excited to start this thing I’m more passionate about. It feels good to not feel my head hurt every day from trying to fix shit that will always break anyways. I feel so relieved to be away from the meaningless turbulence of it all. Just wanted to share my lil success here!!

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

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

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

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

Fucking.
Voice.
Recognition.

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

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

i genuinely like programming. it's like solving logical puzzles for me, challenges on a smaller or bigger scale, and this is fun.
i always feel this when working on something on my own, i.e. a full stack project where i take care of everything.

but i'm so sick and tired of corporate software development.
i'm tired of scrum, all these scrum meetings, it feels like they are sucking my life energy away. if at least i had the feeling that i work in a team where everybody contributes, the team work is nice and also project management is aligned.
i'm tired of having too many different tasks in too many different areas or projects and never having the feeling to be able to really concentrate on one thing, to be able to do a job well enough so that i'm content with it.
i'm tired of this feeling that what i'm working on is not meaningful. the feeling that my team is not part of a bigger story where everyone contributes their part and where there is a sense of productive collaboration between teams. the feeling that mismanagement will result in a lot of money being burned, because of work being thrown away or becoming irrelevant, or because of miscommunication, making promises that can impossibly be delivered on.
this feeling that i cannot really improve or fix the ship we are sailing with, but rather being handed a bucket and being told to constantly remove the leaking water and put it back in the ocean, but always at multiple sites of the ship all at once.
i'm tired of being the only female dev and altogether feeling so different from the rest of the team, feeling that i do not belong there.

even though i need to make a living, i just can't imagine anymore to spend so much of my lifetime for something that makes me feel so bad...

- "Hi A, we had a bug in production due to a changed category ID which we were not informed of."
- "Oh but my API just proxies the content from team B."
_____
- "Hi B, we had a bug in production due to a changed category ID."
- "Ah, I have nothing to do with category IDs, you should talk to my colleague C."
_____
- "Hi C, we had a bug in production due to a changed category ID."
- "I wish I knew anything about that, you should contact person D!"
_____
- "Hi D, we had a bug in production due to a changed category ID."
- *changes status to "Absent" on IM*

ERROR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS

Picking the web development field and becoming more of a business person than a dev.

I want to develop more interesting things (like games, AI, etc) rather than corporate websites and web apps. Now, I can't even write a mobile app ffs.

I can't even work on my hobby project lately.

Devving in style today.

In an age of GitHub and cloud computing, how can a freelance dev using their own laptop be classed as a security risk?

These crude rules laid down by corporate IT depts just make companies look silly.

So apparently 15 years of indie dev experience means nothing in the corporate world...

It began when I was tasked with creating a better and more engaging experience for our new Facebook page. This was in Facebook's early days, so there were not really any "best practices". We were making it up as we went along. I decided one way would be to game-ify things, since gaming, at the time, was a Big Deal on Facebook and people were starting to use it to build customer funnels.

Grasping for low-hanging fruit, I decided a Tetris variant around our topic would be fun. I had to hire a dev because at the time I was a static HTML web developer just getting into social media management. I knew nothing about game development or how to use Facebook's API for such things.

Long story short, we got about $10,000 (FB app devs came at a premium then) into the project when I came across a very recent article about the history of Tetris games. It said that even though Tetris had once been considered for all intents to be public domain due to it being created by a Russian coder during the Cold War, it had just been acquired by an IP protection entity that was charging royalties for any variant of Tetris created from a specific date onward and paying the original developer. So, even though I thought I had been thorough in my initial permissions checking, it turned out we were gonna be in deep doo-doo with licensing fees and restrictions if we released this game to the public.

I had to call my boss and admit my error. She was FURIOUS and really gave me an ass-chewing over it. I then had to call the marketing person whose budget I'd been slaving away at wasting. She was a bit more forgiving (her budget was in the millions). Then I had to call the corporate legal department and explain what was going on. They told me to immediately pay any outstanding hours, then fire the dev but not before getting him to send me all code and assets, deleting his copy, and then, upon my receipt of those assets, deleting MY copy so that nothing of it ever existed. And I was supposed to say _nothing_ to the dev about why he was being let go, so that there would be no "trail" leading back to this fiasco. (The dev hounded me for weeks asking what he'd done wrong. It killed me that I was bound and gagged by corporate legal and couldn't tell him.)

I was in so much trouble. I was literally in tears over it. I'd never wasted that much money in my life. That incident pretty much sealed my fate as far as any trust my bosses ever put in me again (not much at all). I was a bit of a pariah in a lot of ways for the next 5 years whereas I had come onto the team as a young social media rockstar at first.

After that, and a couple of other bad scenarios that were less my fault and more due to a completely dysfunctional management and reporting structure, they eventually "transferred" me to another team. Which was really just a way of getting rid of me by sending me to a department that was already starting to outsource overseas and lay people off. It was less messy that way. I was in the first set of layoffs.

Since then, I've had a BIG fear of EVER joining a large corporation EVER again. I prefer to work for small businesses now, even if I get paid less. Much less stressful from an office politics and impact of mistakes standpoint.

Getting the corporate hard sell - after I gave notice at my job I've had my skip level manager and then _his_ boss offer me changes to stay. It's messing with my head!

People seem to be crawling out of the woodwork to get me to stay and it feels a lot like this is how one gets into corporate politics... but I swear almost none of these people cared about me before. Make it make sense!

I am currently blocked from doing my job by a firewall policy handed down from corporate that prevents WSL2 from connecting to the internet. Three days of no dev environment and counting.

We make linux software to be hosted on linux in linux containers in linux. We use linux command line tools to make it work.

"NO! WE ARE THE ALL-POWERFUL IT DEPARTMENT AND YOU MUST USE WINDOWS BECAUSE FUCK YOU THAT'S WHY."

Anyone else here with anxieties, depression or what-not? I feel this could get heavy, but I feel this is the only place I could write this. So...

My 18-month-long programming course is slowly coming to an end. Time has come for us to be sent out to job interviews at various companies.
Every single time an interview comes up, I feel the exact same mix of my inconfidence, constant anxiety, "I'm gonna throw up", impatience and whatever else is there in my head. I figured it would get easier with each consecutive interview but it hasn't.
The questions they ask make me sick. The atmosphere is unfathomable. Robots are more humane.

- Why do you want to work with us?
I need money for my meds and something to down them with? I willingly put myself through this shit to become a corporate slave, what else is there to say? I can only hope I'll be writing any code here.

- Where do you see yourself in 2-3 years?
Far away from anything remotely related to an HR department of any sort?

- Had you been a fruit, which one would you be? Whatever would come out of my tears blended with semen? What the fuck is even that question?

Of course those aren't my actual responses, but conjuring the IRL ones to finish the process is a serious burden. And those are only some HR ones. After this barrage of questions they want my lifeless, flaccid body to write code. I mean ok, it's a software dev gig, but I already gave all I had on self-clairvoyance.

We'll be in touch!

Is there a strategy you guys have when you go to an interview? Any tips for taming the acrid beast running around in your brain? Is it too much to talk with a human in a humane language without "15 buzzwords to make the recruiter moist"?

!dev

WTF YOUTUBE, WTFFFFFFF!!!!!!

YOU PIECE OF SHIT MONEY HUNGRY SOULLESS CORPORATE CUNT OF A COMPANY.

I already hated all your shitty algorithms and your way of giving the middle finger to creators I love.

You want to be a trend following bitch and have "Stories" on users feeds, fine.

WHY THE FUCKING SON OF A CUNTIFICENT BITCH ARE YOU RECOMMENDING ME CHANNELS I KNOW NOTHING OF!!!!!!

Look at this shit... the fact that I am living in Brazil does not mean I give two fucks about youtubers here, I barely know the language.

I'M SUBSCRIBED TO 20 PEOPLE. IF THEY HAVE FUCKING STORIES, SHOW ME THEIRS. IF THEY DON'T, DON'T SHOW ME ANYTHINGGGGGGG.

Nope, definitely not going to work for that customer anymore. Fuck this shit. At least for this week.

My background: mid-30 years old, some kind of business & IT consultant / lead dev working for a mid sized CRM consulting company, with approx 15 years of experience in development and software architecture, most of the time "thinking" in C#, still learning new languages, being a cloud evangelist and team lead. We usually have customers with customers (B2B/B2C).
Personality type "campaigner" (ENFP-A).

Today the project lead of my client (a big corporation in the energy industry) told me that he still didn't order all the necessary resources for the cloud project. Just to be clear: He's on the client side. We (the architects, one internal and me) told him one month ago what we need for the beginning. Just a few things - an Azure subscription, a license for the CRM platform, and our dev tools.

And now let's guess when the project is planned to begin? Yeah, right: 1st of April. NO APRIL'S FOOL. And guess what? Next Tuesday we'll do the onboarding for the new (external) devs, and NOTHING will be ready. Yeah, just let us build stuff in our minds, and on the whiteboards, because it's an AGILE project, right? We don't need any systems and tools...

And now he sent me the questionnaires which need to be answered before any cloud service can be ordered by the corporate IT. And yes, he didn't answer a single thing, and just meant "Those are architecture questions" (they are not) and (of course) "please provide the answers until Monday morning, so we can FINALLY order the services."

Yeah, you fucktard. Of course it's MY FAULT now. Maybe I should write an email to your boss asking how we can speed things up a little bit...

So, some years ago, my old firm was bought by a much larger company.

A couple years later, my CTO resigned, as he needed a week deserved break. I acted as interim CTO for half a year, with the full support of the CEO.

But then higher management removed my CEO for a politician 🤡. His first move is to ask my ex-CEO who to consider for CTO.

He adamantly vouches for me, but in the end, I'm not "political" enough. (Sure I admit I'm not the most organized person, and do not sweeten arguments to suits, but I had won the full trust of my previous superiors *and* fellow devs, and had people to cover for organizational stuff, and have successfully navigated situations with the world's biggest tech orgs).

So I'm again a dev, and they hire this new CTO at twice my salary. But as you can probably guess, who ends up still doing all the CTO work on top of his dev work? Yeah.

That drove me to quit, not because of the demotion, but for a denied minor raise when I was doing the work of someone with twice my paycheck.

As could be expected, once I quit, the CTO barely lasted 6 months.

Fun part is, I've been freelancing (successfully) from them on, and I've been contacted by this CTO, trying to hire me to do some work in his new company...

I'm torn whether to tell him to bite me, charge him a shitton of money or any other funny ideas.

Mind you, I don't dislike the guy, and he's not particularly annoying to work with, so I guess this doubles as a rant against corporate clowns, and a bit of advice seeking.

Corporate IT: We don’t think you need Saas product A. We have SharePoint and SharePoint can do anything! Sharepoint eliminates the need for any and all Sass products, it all just comes down to customizing it!

Dev: …

How am I supposed to deal with unwanted swag? I attended a VR dev meetup (turned out to be pure corporate advertising) and someone placed unsolicited swag at my desk. After the corporate spiel I privately asked one of the coordinators where to return this because I don't want to put it to waste. He called me rude and walked away.

So about 3 weeks ago I was laid off from my dream job due to corporate bullshit. From the feedback received since then it is clear that the company made a mistake hiring a brand new React dev while they really needed an experienced one. Because the consultants who were supposed to be weren't. And the other in-house front end dev was an elitist asshole. And I never received proper feedback until it was too late. Actually I still don't have proper feedback save for some vague stuff which really sounds like the kind of feedback you'd give someone in the middle of their learning process. They even said eventually given more time I could have made it. But alas they felt they had to make a call in the best interest of the company.

Things moved fast since then, I took a week to recover and then I spent time updating my resume before getting back in touch with the recruiter who got me my last job. Great guy and he was happy to help me again. Applied to some positions, got some replies, first in person interview I go to they are immediately willing to take me on.

So now I'm supposed to start tomorrow but somehow I'm having my doubts. The company isn't an IT company but rather a fashion company. They believe in developing in house tools because past attempts with external companies resulted in them trying to push their vision through. Knowing who they worked with I agree, they tried to oversell all the time. But after talking with their developers I noticed they are behind on their knowledge. But so am I. So there was no tech interview which means I am getting an easy way in. And if they honour their word I'll be signing tomorrow for around my old wages.

So you'd think that sounds good right? And yet I'm worried it's going to be another shit show working on software without proper analysis or best practices. I mean the devs aren't total idiots, they are mediors like me and I think their heart is in the right place. They want to develop a good project but it will be just us 3 making a modern .net wpf application with the same functionality of the old Access based system currently in use. I was urged by the boss to draw on my experience and I think he wants me to help teach them too. But I'm painfully aware for my decade since graduating I'm a less than average .net dev who struggles with theory and never worked a job where I had someone more experienced to teach me. I coasted most of the time in underpaid jobs due to various reasons. But I'd always get mad over shitty code and practices. Which I realize is hypocritical for someone who couldn't explain what a singleton class is or who still fails at separation of concerns.

So yeah my question for the hivemind is what advice would you give a dev like me? I honestly dislike how poor I perform but it often feels like an insurmountable climb, and being over 30 makes it even more depressing. On the other hand I know I should feel blessed to find a workplace who seems to genuinely believe that people grow and develop and wishes to support me in this. Part of me thinks I should just go in, relax, but also learn till I'm there where I want to be and see if these people are open to improving with me. But part of me also feels I'm rushing into this, picking the first best offer, and it sure feels like a step backwards somehow. And that then makes me feel like an ugly ungrateful person who deserves her bad luck because she expects of others what she can't even do herself :(

!dev
EA can suck my inches. Fucking deprecated and greedy business practices. Now I'm fucking told me to play the game later, because "too many computers have accessed this accounts version of a shitty game that crashed my pc 3 times. Please try again later."

Stupid cunts, have you ever heard of a vpn? Or maybe listened to the people complaining about this issue since 2017. On top of that you apparently rendered geforce now useless with this error.

Good fucking lord, I haven't even mentioned origin, the big pile of shit, yet. The download functionality you praise like God's cum doesn't even hold out half an hour before it freezes, together while the whole UI. You cannot like your games with a steam account, so you'd have to pay for a game you already own.

...And a whole lot of other issues I probably haven't encountered yet.

It's more lucrative to sell this shitty account and then buy the fucking game I want to play on steam. I have a feeling that would be about the best option I have.

I'm tired of this shit, I just wanna play some games with friends. I did not play to be spit on my face by some corporate wankers

A great corporate culture, pleasant coworkers, a caring manager, meaningful work, and a good salary. Hmmm. Thank you for reminding me that I have a pretty close to ideal Dev job. I can live with what's missing. 🤠

can i work in any more horrible company than this?

> got a shitty macbook air as official work laptop. i am an Android dev btw, nd fuck knows how long it took to build apps on this, but it was still okay

> after 1 year some keys started getting slow to respond but still working fine

> recently a Senior dev raised request for better laptops and somhow we all got macbook pros woth good ram/processor

> returned my old laptop, got a mail after few seconds that my laptop has liquid damage! (in retrospect , i think i knew it as my bag once got drenched in rain)

> few days later, a mail chain starts where some guy is asking for $300 approval of fixes from my boss's boss!

now fuck knows how is it going to get paid, but i cant afford it on my monthly salary.

i am already on a tight crunch as my dad recently lost his job and i am paying emis for a car loan as well as a hand fracture loan, but i am surprised that am getting notified about this.

afaik,
1. the laptop's whole value is around $350 (some corporate quote that i once saw) .

2. the laptops should be fucking insured (we ourselves are a fuckin general insurance company) as its an obvious norm in corporate equipments. i shouldn't be penalised for this

3. i was working fine with this laptop and i can still work on it if given back.

4. this can be deducted at the time of fnf or from gratuity fund that these assholes hold onto until a guy completes 5 years and take it all for themselves if he doesn't.

5 i can buy this shitty laptop back and use it as my personal device, or get it repaired for less.

i don't even claim to have damaged it, why are they putting it on me 😭😭😭

I'm Front-end dev and corporate policy doesn't let me upload *.js files, so I rename them to *.txt and change everything in the DOM without their knowledge...

These ignorant comments about arch are starting to get on my nerves.

You ranted or asked help about something exclusive to windows and someone pointed out they don't have that problem in arch and now you're annoyed?

Well maybe it's for good.

Next comes a very rough analogy, but imagine if someone posts "hey guys, I did a kg of coke and feeling bad, how do I detox?"

It takes one honest asshole to be like "well what if you didn't do coke?".

Replace the coke with windows.
Windows is a (mostly) closed source operating system owned by a for profit company with a very shady legal and ethical history.

What on earth could possibly go wrong?

Oh you get bsod's?
The system takes hours to update whenever the hell it wants, forces reboot and you can't stop it?
oh you got hacked because it has thousands of vulnerabilities?
wannacry on outdated windows versions paralyzed the uk health system?

oh no one can truly scrutinize it because it's closed source?

yet you wonder why people are assholes when you mention it? This thing is fucking cancer, it's hundreds of steps backwards in terms of human progress.

and one of the causes for its widespread usage are the savage marketing tactics they practiced early on. just google that shit up.

but no, linux users are assholes out to get you.

and how do people react to these honest comments? "let's make a meme out of it. let's deligitimize linux, linux users and devs are a bunch of neckbeards, end of story, watch this video of rms eating skin off his foot on a live conference"

short minded idiots.

I'm not gonna deny the challenges or limitations linux represents for the end user.

It does take time to learn how to use it properly.
Nvidia sometimes works like shit.
Tweaking is almost universally required.
A huge amount of games, or Adobe/Office/X products are not compatible.
The docs can be very obscure sometimes (I for one hate a couple of manpages)

But you get a system that:
* Boots way faster
* Is way more stable
* Is way way way more secure.
* Is accountable, as in, no chance to being forced to get exploited by some evil marketing shit.

In other words, you're fucking free.
You can even create your own version of the system, with total control of it, even profit with it.

I'm not sure the average end user cares about this, but this is a developer forum, so I think in all honesty every developer owes open source OS' (linux, freebsd, etc) major respect for being free and not being corporate horseshit.

Doctors have a hippocratic oath? Well maybe devs should have some form of oath too, some sworn commitment that they will try to improve society.

I do have some sympathy for the people that are forced to use windows, even though they know ideally isn't the ideal moral choice.
As in, their job forces it, or they don't have time or energy to learn an alternative.

At the very least, if you don't know what you're talking about, just stfu and read.

But I don't have one bit of sympathy for the rest.

I didn't even talk about arch itself.
Holy fucking shit, these people that think arch is too complicated.

What in the actual fuck.

I know what the problem is, the arch install instructions aren't copy paste commands.
Or they medium tutorial they found is outdated.

So yeah, the majority of the dev community is either too dumb or has very strong ADD to CAREFULLY and PATIENTLY read through the instructions.

I'll be honest, I wouldn't expect a freshman to follow the arch install guide and not get confused several times.
But this is an intermediate level (not megaexpert like some retards out there imply).

Yet arch is just too much. That's like saying "omg building a small airplane is sooooo complicated". Yeah well it's a fucking aerial vehicle. It's going to be a bit tough. But it's nowhere near as difficult as building a 747.

So because some devs are too dumb and talk shit, they just set the bar too low.

Or "if you try to learn how to build a plane you'll grow an aviator neckbeard". I'll grow a fucking beard if I want too.

I'm so thankful for arch because it has a great compromise between control and ease of install and use.

When I have a fresh install I only get *just* what I fucking need, no extra bullshit, no extra programs I know nothing about or need running on boot time, and that's how I boot way faster that ubuntu (which is way faster than windows already).

Configuring nvidia optimus was a major pain in the ass? Sure was, but I got it work the way I wanted to after some time.

Upgrading is also easy as pie, so really scratching my brain here trying to understand the real difficult of using arch.

I didn't become a developer to be legacy's bitch. But we're all legacy's bitch.

I want to roam free. I want to piss in the rain and sing at strlen. I don't want to be in corporate meetings anymore.

I don't want to contort my ideas and good intentions to fit legacy's ugly painting.

I want to be free.

Please let coding be fun again.

I process more tickets than a brothel car park ticket machine

Corporate Training: to lock your screen press ctrl+alt+delete and select lock screen.

Non-Dev: need to lock screen, ctrl+alt+delete... It's not responding... Ctrl+alt+delete.... Wait why did my computer reboot.... NOOOOOOOO... MY WORK

Me, Dev: uhm I just used Win+L...

After having my soul suck away by "corporate", I installed VS code on my Windows 10 gaming machine.

Now, I have a pretty hardcore dev setup on my MacOS (it's unix-based and it's good, so stop the hate). I'm talking about fully automatized Rakefile that will provision it from scratch: vim, macvim, tmux, iterm configs, 15+ brew tools, 15+ brew-cask tools, themes, plugins, etc.

Installing VS Code, Node and MongoDB on Windows, just for the fun and giggles, and not having any of my hardcore tools, made me feel like... it's something silly and fun again. I'm once again that softcore developer with no stress and no constant self-reminder to improve workflow effectiveness.

Made me a little happy.

Checkout this picture, this is my Windows 10's "tmux" lol

That i will never get out of the corporate slave bullshit minimum wage matrix rat race salary as a dev because no one respects devs in serbia you get fat shitted on and used like a dumb underpaid slave

$3.75/hour

If corporate always bothers that they can't find any female dev to hire, then encourage them to look into femboys!

Didn't work much for last 6 months.
Manager calls and tells me that I've gotten a half yearly appraisal based on my performance.
Asks me if I have any questions or something to say.
Didn't say a word.
Appreciates me and tells me to keep working hard.
Left the room with a slight grim on my face.
No expectations, no f**k.

have a couple friends now who have gotten dev jobs at microsoft. I've since turned down their offers to apply and have them vouch for me twice now - not sure if their recommendations would mean anything to begin with at such a place.

this has gotten me a lot of criticism from peers and mentors who have chided me for "throwing away a golden ticket" on my resume.

at first I declined because I sure as fuck did not believe I had the skills to last very long there - and truth is I probably still don't.

but now I see it as a case of the cliche "corporate devil" that everything I believe in in terms of software freedom is squarely against.

I mean, I don't really think I have the chops to make it far with the open source and free software communities either, but if I had to pick a dream or a goal to move towards, that would be it. I don't want money or reputation. I just want to be free to tinker with the world as I please.

maybe I'll have the courage next hacktober... but until then, I'm just gonna focus on learning and self-improvement. no one can ridicule me for being a dumbass if I'm actually putting in the effort to learn and improve, right?

would welcome any advice for aspiring open source contributors, as I'm not really sure where to begin that wouldn't make me look like a total hack (pun not intended)

Joined a new startup as a remote dev, feeling a bit micromanaged. So this week I joined an established startup as a senior mobile dev where I work remotely.

Previous two devs got fired and two new guys got hired (me as a senior dev and another senior dev as a teamlead, also third senior dev will join next week).

Situation is that codebase is really crappy (they invested 4 years developing the android app which hasn't even been released yet). It seems that previous devs were piggybacking on old architecture and didn't bother to update anything, looking at their GIT output I could tell that they were working at 20-30% capacity and just accepting each other MR's usually with no comments meaning no actual code reviews. So codebase already is outdated and has lots of technical debt. Anyways, I like the challenges so a crappy codebase is not really a problem.

Problem is that management seems to be shitting bricks now and because they got burned by devs who treated this as a freelance gig (Im talking taking 8-10 weeks pto in a given year, lots of questionable sick leaves and skipping half of the meetings) now after management fired them it seems that they are changing their strategy into micro managament and want to roll this app out into production in the next 3 months or so lol. I started seeing redflags, for example:

1. Saw VP's slack announcement where he is urging devs to push code everyday. I'm a senior dev and I push code only when I'm ready and I have at least a proof of concept that's working. Not a big fan of pushing draft work daily that is in in progress and have to deal with nitpicky comments on stuff that is not ready yet. This was never a problem in 4-5 other jobs I worked in over the years.

2. Senior dev who's assigned as the teamlead on my team has been working for 1 month and I can already see that he hates the codebase, doesn't plan on coding too much himself and seems like he plans on just sitting in meetings and micromanaging me and other dev who will join soon. For example everyday he is asking me on how I am doing and I have to report this to him + in a separate daily meeting with him and product. Feels weird.

3. Same senior dev/teamlead had a child born yesterday. While his wife was in hospital the guy rushed home to join all work meetings and to work on the project. Even today he seems to be working. That screams to me like a major redflag, how will he be able to balance his teamlead position and his family life? Why management didn't tell him to just take a few days off? He told me himself he is a senior dev who helped other devs out, but never was in an actual lead position. I'm starting to doubt if he will be able to handle this properly and set proper boundaries so that management wouldn't impact mental health.

Right now this is only my 1st week. They didn't even have a proper backend documentation. Not a problem. I installed their iOS app which is released and intercepted the traffic so I know how backend works so I can implement it in android app now.

My point is that I'm not a child who needs hand holding. I already took on 2 tickets and gonna push an MR with fixes. This is my first week guys. In more corporate companies people sit 2 months just reading documentation and are not expected to be useful for first few months. All I want is for management to fuckoff and let me do my thing. I already join daily standup, respond to my teamlead daily and I ping people if I need something. I take on responsibility and I deliver.

How to handle this situation? I think maybe I came off as too humble in the interview or something, but basically I feel like I'm being treated like a junior or something. I think I need to deliver a few times and establish some firm boundaries here.

In all workplaces where I worked I was trusted and given freedom. I feel like if they continue treating me like a junior/mid workhorse who needs to be micromanaged I will just start interviewing for other places soon.

This literally happened in my current team, and I'm not even an experienced dev yet.
Incident happened like this :
Our team is working on a RCP based on eclipse plugins, which has a headless mode and a GUI mode. Now, in the GUI mode, my manager cum architect thought there are no need of user log files (long story) because the user can see the info on screen, whereas in the headless mode, she wanted me to print the logs onto the console and a log file as well.
Now it just so happened that our team had got a recent addition as a replacement to our lead developer (she left the company) who claimed she had 3 years of expertise and a masters degree, and she was assigned a task. The task was to format a custom file we were generating out of the product (basically dumping info in a file) in a human-readable format. Miss new-addition-masters-degree decided it would be a very good idea to redirect the standard java output stream to a file output stream ( which she used for generating the formatted file ) but somehow never realized that she needed to reset the output stream back to standard output.
Consequences were devastating. I wrote the logic for the logger ( yes, apparently any available logging mechanism won't do it, again, long story ) and had it printing to a file in tmp directory. The logs seemed to be working fine initially but after a few logs, specifically from the point where the formatter started working, all the logs got printed in the formatted file. And this file was supposed to be used by our clients to develop something on top of it. Naturally, I got the heat of it and then naturally, worried and nervous and curious and in a frenzied state of mind, I started debugging.
When I got to the actual fault, I seriously could not decide whether to cry or laugh or call up miss masters and scream at her. I decided to ask her about what the hell she had written and her answer was most of it was written by the developer she replaced, so she didn't know it would cause this much problem. Anyway, I fixed the leak after that and averted the catastrophe.
And that, fellow devs, is the story of how I solved a crisis in my first year at corporate.

!dev

Decided to spend more time on LinkedIn to familiarise myself and start looking for potential employment opportunities.

For past month or so, I've seen few decent opportunities, which is a nice start. However, for every decent post, I've come across:

- About a hundred of posts by self-proclaimed crypto experts who spout absolute gibberish and somehow get thousands of likes. 5 min google search and absolute minimum knowledge of economic theory discards 99% of their claims and statements
- Handful of idiotic "career advice" blog posts
- Numerous posts, both bashing and helplessly supporting shitty recruiter practices
- more crypto nonsense
- People jerking themselves off for running a profitable business (company launched a 1-5months ago)

Really starting to hate the platform, seems like all the integrity it had before becoming fully mainstream, has gone down the drain and it's become a straight up corporate circle jerk

Is it normal that no one from the management has even a minimal idea of what is going on? I mean, 90% of the team is completely incompetent, and 100% of the management as well. They know basically nothing about the system we are trying to keep alive.
I hate the corporate way that the manager is more a politician than a professional...
I hate that I have constantly to teach everyone and there is no one who can show me nothing, btw for the same salary... I don't even like this job. We have no access to half of the system we have to maintain, and 50% of the time I'm standing there with 3 managers around me asking how long will it take, while I have no access. I mean... c'mon.
My only hope is the data center they're building nearby, so maybe I can get a job there, or maybe I have to give a try to some junior web dev or network tech position in Amsterdam.
It's such a nice place to cry out my frustrations...

Have a question about raises.

Working in europe as a junior dev (had 2.5 year experience prior) but lowballed myself (because I had a 1.5 year gap from development) and started working here for 2.5k euro/month salary.

After my 3 months probation I noticed that Im doing better than 60% of my team and as soon as my probation ended I messaged my manager and asked for a raise to bump me up to 3.5k/month.

I am waiting for a raise for the past 7 weeks already. My manager keeps telling me that decision is greenlighted because I got very strong and positive feedback. However CTO is on vacation, once he comes back manager will be on vacation and so on. Basically a corporate clusterfuck.

So basically I will have my raise request approved what? 8 weeks after my original request? Also add a couple more weeks because I guess new contract will be signed from the beginning of next month, not retrospectively. So when I will actually get that increased salary? What the hell.

Since my original request havent even reached CTO yet Im thinking of amending my original request and asking for a bump up to 4k or quit the company and go contracting for the same 4k and pay 17 percent for taxes instead being employed fulltime while paying around 43% for taxes.

I am just pissed off that its taking 2 months to just get the 'okay' and I guess will take 3 more weeks to sign the new contract. It shouldnt be like that, I lost money while waiting so I think it would be fair enough to ask for a bigger bump.

Don't you just love it when there is no formal spec. you get a few mspaint slides and told a delivery date, scope and slides are changed by management weekly, not necessarily informing you of it. Then when your failing, deadlines pass you by you still have no clear spec 2 weeks before release, partial backend because core business devs are busy doing support on the legacy systems. No frontend cause it's been changed, redesigned and you've been forced to change frameworks and technology so many times due to corporate policy and legacy systems with another dev group holding your balls with what they allow you to do and use. Id complain but at least we've been told to be agile. This is my life now, we lost all hope and stopped caring. And management wonders why the deadlines and estimates are all off.

I've started working at one of the biggest names in tech (think Microsoft) for a while now, and I gotta say, it feels surprising very corporate, robotic and I haven't been able to connect with my team much. I worked at a start-up a while ago and my experience there was better in every way (except for pay). At the start-up, my boss was amazed at the amount of work I put out. Now here my performance is listed as "needs improvement.

Ever since I took this job, I have lost my self-confidence and I'm starting to doubt if I'm even that good anymore. My dad made remarks that maybe I shouldn't be in dev, and go into other fields of engineering. It was always my dream to work one of the big 5 like Google and Facebook, but now I'm still not happy.

What do I do? Should I try to adapt to that company, so I can make a few bucks? Should I go back to the start-up and ask for a job again? Will I be happy there?

!(dev|rant)

I just got an old refurb for the garage to run my camera capture stuff, as the raspberry pi wasn't cutting it. I thought for a split second about leaving the legit version of Windows 10 that came with it on it, and trying to do some in-home streaming over steam, but I found out very quickly that an old corporate refurb is not going to cut it for game streaming. And with all the complete nonsense you have to abide to make Windows usable(ie: disabling stuff you don't want), it's not going to be any use to me in Windows if it can't stream.

Also, for some reason, Windows just wouldn't use the built-in NIC at all. It reported the cable was unplugged, and just absolutely would not work. So, Debian it is, and lo and behold! The NIC works like a champ now. The camera capture works brilliantly too, so now I can turn off my desktop at night.

Linux just works. Windows, more and more all the time, is just more trouble than it's worth.

Two top do-overs:
1) Not be a dev and try harder to be an astronaut as was my original plan.
2) If #1 still gave trouble, at least not waste 6 years of my career doing a detour into social media and PR. It was the early days when the salary (6 figures) and bonuses (5 figures) at that level of the corporate hierarchy were nice. But other than a bulked up 401k and paid-off house, social media ended up being a dead end for me. Going back to dev work meant I had NOTHING skill-wise to show for that time. I am STILL trying to catch up.

So from now on 5% of my software dev performance will be related to DEI and I'll have to attend "trainings". Aside from the fact that it is complete BS, how does this have anything to do with software engineering and why is it so arbitrary, vague and hypocritical in general?

I'll summarize your goddamn 5%: don't be an asshole. Can I start working for real now?

Sounds pretty great for an american company that hires people offshore on the cheap and that treats them lowkey like second-hand slaves? But that's ok because life in their country would be worse without a job so we are "helping" them. How generous.

How low can corporate culture (if you can even call it that) go?

Dev goals for 2022? Best and worst DX in the past?

Wish to prioritize customers with useful business goals who are open to sustainable web dev, usability and accessibility.
Want to use even more CSS and find a way to use new features like parent selectors without sacrificing compatibility.

Continue learning and using Symfony, but also continue with my full-stack side project using JS or even better TypeScript for the backend also for the backend.

Best developer experience: getting new customers for my own business after leaving a company last winter.

Worst developer experiences:

Corporate customers with large budgets and design agencies seem to fancy all the antipatterns I thought bad and obsolete, like carousel content, animations everywhere, and autoplay videos on the home page. Poorly written, poorly thought, and sometimes contradictory, requirements. Customers and agencies changing their mind halfway through a project.

"Agile" daily meetings, not giving devops necessary repository permissions, and making Webpack mandatory for no real reason.

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

Tried to work in a corporate setting. Failed. After so many fights, product manager was constantly rejecting my work until I had no choice but to throw in the towel. Spent the next few years slaving away as an open source dev. Not begging for donations. Just decorum when I eventually launch. Instead, I get repudiated by the community, get my account banned at the location where I could have accessed the largest pool of relevant audience. No influencer or dev rel/advocate will respond to my supplication or say beyond a compliment

Barely pick up the pieces, to reimmerse into employed labour. Dozens of applications sent out. My inbox is silent as a graveyard. I start putting more effort into tailored cover letters for each opening, across multiple job boards. One finally rejects me

Even tried changing stack by applying for internship roles in nodejs. A dead end

So, I can't read cuz I was researching for my magnum opus. Now it has gone belly up, that's no more worth it. I also cannot work because my work is complete. It's just sitting on github like a mummy. No interactions, no stars or issues.

Posted on show HN. Not even a single upvote. The funny part is that even when I tried to lament my woes on devrant, their site has been down for hours

To think I was among those who trolled ronaldo with the "rejectnaldo" gimmick. Karma has turned around to bite me in the ass. Rejectnmeri

What to do with this enormous amount of empty time? I neither go out nor watch movies

Even though I'm not terminally ill or gnashing my teeth in physical agony, This is a rare moment when I wish not to have been born. There is no joy in life that makes unpalatable suffering worth it. Why does everything I do have to be contingent on the whims and choices of others? And I have to keep living like that, otherwise I'll return to my village to become a subsistent farmer, cultivating produce to eke out a living. Or seek unskilled labour, earning peanuts for waiting tables. It's a pathetic state of affairs.

All of this sucks tbvh

How to sow the seeds of panic in a dev organization. Pop up a message that your BitBucket license has expired and you can't push code changes until it is renewed. Happened today. Amazing how fast the corporate cogs can turn when productivity is on hold and you still have to pay the devs.

So this is my first job at a corporate company and my God I need to apply for permission and wait for it for so long just to install common freewares for dev like VS Code. Is this normal? Really I am pissed when requirements pop up and I get stalled for over a week.

I am an average Dev who is striving to improve. I currently work in a setting where I have the most experience in a corporate setting. I came from a very disciplined team where I had a great mentor. Now I am in a looser team with very bright people who don't have that experience. They are mainly JavaScript devs without much production experience. We are working in .net but they don't like working with back end code or databases. This is a 3 month contract. I want to do a good job. I have made enemies in the past and I just want to leave on a good note.

Fucking large ass corporate companies that outsource some apps with fucking internal politics. Can't decide the scope of what we're working and won't even let us decide or proceed with our dev.

Ah the joy transitioning from the unrestricted apprentice network to the tightly restricted prod and dev network and environment. U can be sure thst the corporate proxy will give you a dropkick to ure face when trying anything that was released in the last 5 years...

Not dev related so don't shoot me. If you like writing I figure you maybe might enjoy this and thought I'd share.

This is a section from an unfinished novel about 2050s America, set in a corporate subsidized mega-fevela sprawling across washington state, ruled by gangs and patrolled by the officers of a bankrupt nation suffering through austerity and on-and-off again spasms of mass civil conflict.

"Averice - Sex, drugs, and vice, in the downfall and dying days of america."

we lived in a smoke government, where everything was bullshit they blew up your ass so you could continue make believe while
you were bent over with your head in the hole in the ground you mistook for your ass to start with. And if you questioned it all, one bit, the mouth organ of the state would command
hate upon you, like an old latin curse, with a lexicon armada of phrases like "terrorist", and "troubled individual" to character assassinate you by drowning you in the humbling river of societies mass delusion giver, those two sweet letters "TV."

No, we were on the industry edge here, inventing better bait to catch what the state politiburo labelled 'bandits', all for what?

It had, in later years become fashionable to call those who didn't want to be stolen from any more, projected as it were, "thieves", in the same fashion as those in the middle east, defending
their homeland from foreigners, were labelled "insurgents." Tyranny had not so long ago grown a sense of irony it would seem.

And if you became enemy number one of the state, as thousands were, you would spend your days on the run, always looking over your
shoulder for the states vanish vans--black escalades with men in dark suits and mirrored glasses, like bugmen with shiny inhuman, and inscrutable eyes full of alien malice.

These were sordid summers, full of plastic playhouses where the cost of a days wages you could lay with a synthetic lover and pay away the days tense tax for a good lay, and forget your toils and troubles. And so many were kept in poverty because of easy habit and routine that they forget they were not living.

But for me, I had none of it. I preferred the troubled thing on the corner when I could coax one into my state issued sedan. She was sulky, with bright blonde curls, 19, maybe 20, with empty eyes, as if watching some invisible horizon. And in the glow of the blue neon, among the wet sidewalks, and trash, she leaned into my car. No words were exchanged. I nodded, and
she got into the car, a miniskirt, and slinky little handbag.

This was no more than state business with a bureau guy like me, and for her, little more than the prison trade taken public.

She huffed some powder and climbed spraddle leg onto my lap, grabbing me along my jawline, eyes locked onto the depths of my soul, and
for the next ten minutes as she moved on top of me, I was motionless property while my lusts became animal, and she, my cream cup.

After, I arrested her to the standard protests, but she new the game and quickly hushed. This was the verdant arithmetic of the state. I was awarded x amount of pension points for every criminal, no matter how, and it was no gentle hand, not the judge, not the jury, or the executioner of their will. It was the rigid touch of a long arm, dislocated from the law, and now, like frankenstein's monster, cobbled onto the mechanism of the state not unlike the manner of a combine harvester.

We were the owners of all by virtue of all we could take, and we took all we could get. The serial romeos of state police power, romancing
the unwilling citizenry with televised patriotism and five minute power talks at the beginning of the corporate day.

It could be paradise or a wasteland if we wanted it to be. And for a time it was.

Edit: devrant always breaks my formatting. sigh.

Does anyone know a good resource for learning how to use Git properly? I've learned piecemeal over the last year, but still run into stupid conflicts when transferring a project between machines that often requires me to redownload the repo and then download the changes from the dev server before starting again.

I'm an independent shop, so I don't have any senior devs or corporate policies to refer to for best practices.

Thanks in advance!

I have a great chemistry with this coworker.

He lacks some depth of android knowledge but is always very interested in adding new google libs to the project, so we often discuss and come up with the safest, scalable solutions.

He is SE2 and I am SE1.

But one thing that is interesting about him is the way he gives estimations for the tasks. He takes usually that much amount of time that i would take, for a task, but he would quote half the time estimates.

the bosses usually come on the last days to check the feature demo, but QAs gets the first build when a task is completed. I have seen his first builds that goes to QA and most of the time, boy it has some amazingly stupid bugs.

dude would just put a util function, then run the build, if everything compiled, he would just give the build to QA directly. he wouldn't even check that the util function gave an expected output or not.

He is simply wasting QA time n efforts, and risking product quality by not testing enough, but he almost always gets a clean chit for this behavior just because he did the work super fast.

Dude is super cool and i don't envy him for his good luck, but rather think of him as an inferior dev. However bosses think of him as a better dev and my TL even once told me to "be like him"

So i guess this is how corporate works. I will try to apply this in my next role in current/next organisation.

My last promotion was/is my first Software Development job and a significant increase in pay.

I worked for this company for 12 years, quit for 2.5 years, got a job in a different industry in the mean time, and taught myself to write some code.

Due to some personal changes, I ended up coming back to this company.
After being in the engineering team for a year I applied for the corporate software dev gig. They liked I had floor experience and took initiative to teach myself.

I would consider myself entry level and it shows on my resume, so I was surprised they took a chance on me. The boss says I'm doing a great job, so that feels pretty good!

ugh, company discussion on WhatsApp sucks. i want to take a leave from this new company i joinedbas i am bored the hell out

the company policy is that we got 16 pl 7 mandatory leaves and 8 emergency leaves. pretty good deal i guess. but as a new joiner, i am on probabtion for 6 months and I can't take either of those mandatory/paid leaves.

i was neck deep in work so could not get time to call my manager. plus had a 1 hour incredibly boring and frustrating call with another 50 yo tech lead from another team who was goin on an on like a 90 yo uncle with his wartime stories so could not think straight.

i sent my manager a "hey a***" at 7.08 pm on WhatsApp.

that's a great shoot oneself in the foot situation. i could not call because it's 7.08 pm, and don't wanna give an impression of a corporate non living dev who makes or supports making calls at odd hours. i also can't dele6 the message coz that would be more awkward

but i had went with the creepy hey text , and didn't wanna keep him waiting, so quickly add anothe message with the context : "i wanted to discuss a small leave related query, will call tomorrow"

another classic shoot oneself in the foot.

the probation guy wants to take leaves? he doesn't have any, what could he talk about it? oh right, i was gonna cheese him to give me an informal permission. but now i made it all formal.

noice :/

!dev

So, few people who know what shitstorm I've been through, considering that I've cut off all social media except Reddit and devRant.

I am one of those hotheads who will rebel against anything which is even slightly wrong or unacceptable so after my twitter incident, I've been thinking to change my behavior and attitude, which has caused me and my best friend problems and I let him down and embarrassed and I think he also gave up on me but more to that later (or maybe I've covered it up in my last rant). The point is I want to improve myself, grow myself and for the sake of that I've quit free-lancing, and took a mildly great opportunity in a meteor js based company, I like their office, I join within 2 months (2 months till my support period ends), also I've become quite a twitter addict so I had to shut down my old account.

But I have an idea to learn about the corporate environment and raise voice against them, which in my eyes is an action that should be needed.

Somewhere down the line, I wanted to achieve my dream i.e. to get my doctorate degree, I was so obsessed about it. But frankly speaking, I've given up on that too.

So. yeah, cheers to a new life

var life = new Life();

Not exactly a rant, but I'm wondering where to go next with my learning.
I'm a c# dev and I want to get more into massive, scalable, distributed application development.
I sort of want to be with the "cool kids" i.e. open source, node.js, docker, scala, you name it. I get that open source moves quickly, but I get the feeling that every new framework is a fad.
Then again there is the corporate world with shitloads of money who are invested in .net and will very soon want people who can redesign their software so that their management can use all the buzz words.
I'm thinking into get into consulting and claim my slice of pie there by designing their solutions to go on the cloud so they can throw even more money at microsoft.
Anyway, I'm doing a bit of soul searching so feel free to throw in your 2 cents

Need advice about switching to contracting.

TL;DR;

So I had 2 years of exp as an android dev, then I had a 1.5 year gap from doing android and now for the past 6 months Ive been doing android again fulltime. Im thinking of switching to contracting due to my debts and boring project and life crushing slow corporate processes in my current fulltime job, so I need tips and advices as to where should I start looking for new contracting gigs and in general what should I pay attention to. If it helps, I am based in EU, but am open to any EU/US gigs.

Now the full story:

Initially when I joined my current fulltime job after a break I had zero confidence, lowered my and employers expectations, joined as a junior but quickly picked up the latest standards and crushed it. Im doing better than half devs in my scrum team right now and would consider myself to be a mid level right now.

Asked for a 50% bump, manager kinda okayed it but the HQ overseas is taking a very long time to give me the actual bump. I have been waiting for 10 weeks already (lots of people in the decision chain were on and off vacations due to summer, also I guess manager sent this request to HQ too late, go figure). Anyways its becoming unnaceptable and I feel like its time for a change.

Now since I have mortgage and bills to pay, even with the bump that I requested that would leave me with like maximum 700-800 bucks a month after all expenses. I have debts of around 20k and paying them back at this rate would take 3 years at least and sounds like a not viable plan at all.

Also it does not help that the project Im working on is full of legacy and Im not learning anything new here. Corporate life seems to be very slow, lots of red tape kills creativity and so on. I remember in startups I was cooking features left and right each sprint, in here deploying a simple popup feature sometimes takes weeks due to incompetence in the chain. I miss the times where I worked in startups, did my job learned nre skills and after 6 months could jump on another exciting gig. Im not growing here anymore.

So because my ADD brain seems to be suited much better for working in startups, and also I need to make more money quick and I dont see a future in current company, I am thinking of going back to contracting. All I need right now is to build a few side apps, get them reviewed by seniors and fill my knowledge gaps. Then I plan of starting interviewing as a mid level or even a senior for that matter, since I worked with actual seniors and to be honest I dont think getting up to their level would be rocket science.

Only difference between mid and senior devs that I see atleast in my current company is that seniors are taking on responsibility more often, and they also take care of our tools, such as CD/CI, pipeline scripts, linters and etc. Usually seniors are the ones who do the research/investigations and then come up with actual tasks/stories for mids/juniors. Also seniors introduce new dependencies and update our stack, solve some performance issues and address bottlenecks and technical debt. I dont think its rocket science, also Ive been the sole dev responsible for apps in the past and always did decent work. Turns out all I needed was to test myself in an environment full of other devs, thats it. My only bottleneck was the imposter syndrome because I was a self taught dev who worked most of my career alone.

Anyways I posted here asking for some tips and advices on how to begin my search for new contract opportunities. I am living in EU, can you give me some decent sites where I could just start applying? Also I would appreciate any other tips opinions and feedback. Thanks!

I have to participate in this retarded conference for 2 days and then I will have to join this fucking summer gathering on my weekend and that will take whole day. Fuck this fucking corporate bullshit. Better give me a fucking raise or better yet start fucking managing this scrum team because half of devs are not pulling their fucking weight.

Fucking BA too lazy to update issues with new details after grooming so each time I pick a new task I either have to somehow remember what we discussed weeks ago or I have to spam you with questions so you would run around like chicken without head while gathering answers to questions that were already discussed because you are too lazy of a fuck to compile notes. And even that is not enough, my merged MR's apparently dont cover all the use cases because your'e too incompetent to even figure out how our app works and define properly the task.

And then theres supposedly a techlead dev whos not taking a ticket when theres 3 days left till end of the sprint and he goes: "But a task spillover will happen!!!". Yeah so I guess just sit on your ass and wait for new sprint so you could pick yet again another low hanging fruit task and marinate it for weeks.

Motherfucker I checked your MR's in the last 6 weeks you did 1 week worth of work. You are a techlead but your only dev colleague is asking us for help daily because you dont even help him Fucking lazy and incompetent bastard.

I started as a dev. Because corporate wants to save some money for their bonus they put two jobs into one. DevOps is born. Fuck you!

I AM A DEV! LET OPS DO THEIR JOB! I DON'T WANT IT!

Fuck corporate inductions program. I just wanted to Dev.