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Search - "crap reports"
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I've been fairly lucky with my bosses of late since I've progressed in my programming career. But my absolute worst boss was when I first started working in an office environment doing data entry. My boss at the time was terrible, and she was always against innovation or process improvement. She also always tried to make herself look good and taking credit for the accomplishments of others. If she screwed up it was your fault, and she was "always buried in email" so she could never respond to you for pto requests, or escalation of issues between departments. My whole family pretty much worked in various roles in the department and she fired my brother after my mother left the company for no reason, saying he was "sleeping", but I worked right next to him and he's tall and had to slouch just to comfortable see his computer screen since the same manager refused to approve work station improvements for him.
Our workflow was to receive daily spreadsheets of health care claims that we had to manually process and enter into the system. So being the lazy innovator that I am, and trying to find ways I can efficiently work, I delved into studying visual basic and programmed a few functions and tools in excel to analyze, highlight, and process some of the data since the claims on the spreadsheets always had a specific pattern. This was all before I had any formal education in computer science so the program was very basic and clunky but it tripled my efficiency. When I brought it up to my boss to spread it among the rest of our team so they could use it after a short 20 minute training, she struck it down saying any training or use of it would be a waste of resources since it was too technical and complex to be used and if I were to keep improving it or use it I would be fired. It was literally copy and paste from one spreadsheet to the other en masse and clicking a button to sort and fill in the blanks. Eventually I showed it to the director of the department when working on a large data entry project with her, and I was later offered a job as a technical analyst where I was responsible for the codebase that generated the reports for the department and specifically all the reports my old boss used where I would occasionally mess with her to get back at all the crap she gave me and my brother. Since all the reports were blind carbon copied to everyone, I would send out her reports on a delay while everyone else got them on time. It eventually got her in so much crap she had to step down as a manager. She still works in the same company that I started working at again earlier this year, and like the many careers she's ruined she eventually ruined her own within the company 😂4 -
I've been lurking on devrant a while now, I figure it's time to add my first rant.
Little background and setting a frame of reference for the rant: I'm currently a software engineer in the bioinformatics field. I have a computer science background whereas a vast majority of those around me, especially other devs, are people with little to no formal computer background - mostly biology in some form or another. Now, this said, a lot of the other devs are excellent developers, but some are as bad as you could imagine.
I started at a new company in April. About a month after joining a dev who worked there left, and I inherited the pipeline he maintained. Primarily 3 perl scripts (yes, perl, welcome to bioinformatics, especially when it comes to legacy code like is seen in this pipeline) that mostly copied and generated some files and reports in different places. No biggie, until I really dove in.
This dev, which I barely feel he deserves to be called, is a biology major turned computer developer. He was hired at this company and learned to program on the job. That being said, I give him a bit of a pass as I'm sure he did not have had an adequate support structure to teach him any better, but still, some of this is BS.
One final note: not all of the code, especially a lot of the stupid logic, in this pipeline was developed by this other dev. A lot of it he adopted himself. However, he did nothing about it either, so I put fault on him.
Now, let's start.
1. perl - yay bioinformatics
2. Redundant code. Like, you literally copied 200+ lines of code into a function to change 3 lines in that code for a different condition, and added if(condition) {function();} else {existing code;}?? Seriously??
3. Whitesmiths indentation style.. why? Just, why? Fuck off with that. Where did you learn that and why do you insist on using it??
4. Mixing of whitesmiths and more common K&R indentation.
5. Fucked indentation. Code either not indented and even some code indented THE WRONG WAY
6. 10+ indentation levels. This, not "terrible" normally, but imagine this with the last 3 points. Cannot follow the code at freaking all.
7. Stupid logic. Like, for example, check if a string has a comma in it. If it does, split the string on the comma and push everything to an array. If not, just push the string to the array.... You, you know you can just split the string on the comma and push it, right?? If there is no comma it will be an array containing the original string.. Why the fuck did you think you needed to add a condition for that??
8. Functions that are called to set values in global variables, arrays, and hashes.. function has like 5 lines in it and is called in 2 locations. Just keep that code in place!
9. 50+ global variables/hashes/arrays in one of the scripts with no clear way to tell how/when values are set nor what they are used for.
10. Non-descriptive names for everything
11. Next to no comments in the code. What comments there are are barely useful.
12. No documentation
There's more, but this is all I can think to identify right now. All together these issues have made this pipeline the pinnacle of all the garbage that I've had to work on.
Attaching some screenshots of just a tiny fraction of the code to show some of the crap I'm talking about.6 -
Today, I got some crap on my desk with possible bug reports from the field. They have been lingering somewhere for fucking MONTHS, and suddenly, an immediate answer was due. I was the unlucky one who was the least clueless about the product involved. SHIT.
OK, sifted through the reports. Some of them were duplicate, others obviously not our problem. No idea where to even start for the rest. FUCK, it's Friday!
But here comes "senior dev secret knowledge"(tm). Instead of saying WTF-IDK, I proposed an "action plan"(tm) (that BS term alone...) detailing the steps that we would need to take, and since I had no idea how long we would need, I just added enough steps in the "action plan"(tm) to make two weeks of investigation believable.
PM was very happy and just took that as direct customer reply. Now it's weekend anyway. :-) -
I submit all my code changes to the integration stream. Co worker integrates my code removes all my changes that breaks his hacky crap. Then complains his stuff doesn't work. I ask him why he he did not conform to the requirments says cause this is what worked before. I look at code see he assigns a value in the message to zero. I ask ever so politely why he is changing the incomming messages. He says this is what works. I Then send an email to him telling him this in an error. He reply saying this it what works. At stand up he complains and says no messages are getting through it doesn't work. The team tells him to revert to the original code. (My code) and update his code after two days of emails to bosses and complaining he reports it works with my code after he is done. He is the senior senior chief grand Pooba and makes more money than me.
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Senior: “we can go remote now, but you have to report what you did at the end of the day. Ex: 7am clock in work on bla bla to 10am. 10am -12nn still working on bla bla. Til end of day.”
What a crap. Now I don’t want to work remote with this bunch of reports at the end the day. Some bullshit in here.3 -
I effing hate Google Play & Google Play Console.
I've uploaded an app and the troubles haven't ended. It is a different error on different devices. Some of them are compile time, some of them run time, some of them just functions the way its not suppose to. And the worst part is that there is no way to track these errors. Google Play Console is utter Horse crap. People tell me that my app crashes and the console reports "nothing to show" under the crashes page.14