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Search - "crazy boss"
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A "support" guy my boss got in. I had told my boss numerous times, "Get rid of this guy, he's only wasting our time and money. And he's going to end up doing something where we will end up having to put out the fires."
Sure as a pair of nuts on a squirrel, this crazy bastard goes and DELETES a client's database. Yes folks, in fucking production. A live database. The heart of the business' transactions are... *poof*... GONE!!!
No backups for the day! No synchronisation beforehand! No nothing... just GONE!!! Fucking flat-lining!
Well, when I realised what he has done, I had to remove myself from the room before shit got outta hand!
I told the boss man that is the last straw and he needs to go...
The long and short of it...
- The client had luckily only lost about half a days data.
- I'm no longer at the company.
- This dumb fuck still is.18 -
My most awkward recruiter interaction?
Just graduated college and got 'suckered' by an programming position ad that turned out to be a recruiting company. It was fine since they charge the company for their services and not me.
After a couple of weeks of waiting (they initially promised I would/could have at least 3 interviews a week, which hadn't happened.) I decided to start looking again on my own, found a position, and I was hired.
About two months later I get a phone call:
<skipping the pleasantries>
R: "I see you are working for D, congratulations. I've started the paperwork for our reimbursement."
Me: "Reimburse for what? I found that job on my own."
R: "D is one of the companies we work with and when we submitted your resume, they told us you were already hired."
Me: "And?"
R: "And you signed a contract and now its time to pay. The fees only start at $500"
Me: "Not me. I have the contract, it states, in the second paragraph, I am not responsible for any hiring fees."
<couple of seconds of silence>
R: "Yes, but that is only if we negotiated the contact. Since you went behind our back, we couldn't start the process"
Me: "And?"
R: "And its a breach of contract."
Me: "I'm not a lawyer, I don't understand what you're saying. It says right here on the contract I signed, I don't pay any fees. No where does it say I'm not allowed to look for a job on my own. Right?"
R: "Um..yea..right..right...but you were hired by one of our contracted companies."
Me: "No way I would have known that. Maybe you should have set up an interview long before now."
<R is getting pretty angry at this point>
R: "I'm sure we gave you list of companies we work with. Contacting those companies is a breach of contract. Unless you want our lawyers to get involved, the fee is only $500. Failing to honor your side of the agreement and we'll be forced to contact your employer and begin garnishing your wage until the fee is paid. You don't want that, do you?"
Me: "There was no list and I am allowed to find a job on my own. Again, I'm not responsible for you not setting up an interview so do whatever you think you can do. Have a good night"
<I hang up>
About a week later..
Boss: "Got a phone call from XYZ Recruiting requesting a wage garnishment. Do you know anything about that?"
<I explain the situation>
Boss: "Oh good grief. We've worked with them a couple of times and we contact them on an individual basis for new hires. You're fine"
Me: "You're not going to garnish my paycheck?"
Boss: "No no no, that's not how this works. He was probably trying to scare you into paying their crazy fees."
Me: "What if they get their lawyers involved? I don't want to cause any trouble"
Boss: "Ha ha...XYZ Recruiting is a couple of guys in an office and we have lawyers on the 3rd floor who eat and breath this shit. They know that and you won't hearing from them again."5 -
My first job: The Mystery of The Powered-Down Server
I paid my way through college by working every-other-semester in the Cooperative-Education Program my school provided. My first job was with a small company (now defunct) which made some of the very first optical-storage robotic storage systems. I honestly forgot what I was "officially" hired for at first, but I quickly moved up into the kernel device-driver team and was quite happy there.
It was primarily a Solaris shop, with a smattering of IBM AIX RS/6000. It was one of these ill-fated RS/6000 machines which (by no fault of its own) plays a major role in this story.
One day, I came to work to find my team-leader in quite a tizzy -- cursing and ranting about our VAR selling us bad equipment; about how IBM just doesn't make good hardware like they did in the good old days; about how back when _he_ was in charge of buying equipment this wouldn't happen, and on and on and on.
Our primary AIX dev server was powered off when he arrived. He booted it up, checked logs and was running self-diagnostics, but absolutely nothing so far indicated why the machine had shut down. We blew a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened, to no avail. Eventually, with other deadlines looming, we just chalked it up be something we'll look into more later.
Several days went by, with the usual day-to-day comings and goings; no surprises.
Then, next week, it happened again.
My team-leader was LIVID. The same server was hard-down again when he came in; no explanation. He opened a ticket with IBM and put in a call to our VAR rep, demanding answers -- how could they sell us bad equipment -- why isn't there any indication of what's failing -- someone must come out here and fix this NOW, and on and on and on.
(As a quick aside, in case it's not clearly coming through between-the-lines, our team leader was always a little bit "over to top" for me. He was the kind of person who "got things done," and as long as you stayed on his good side, you could just watch the fireworks most days - but it became pretty exhausting sometimes).
Back our story -
An IBM CE comes out and does a full on-site hardware diagnostic -- tears the whole server down, runs through everything one part a time. Absolutely. Nothing. Wrong.
I recall, at some point of all this, making the comment "It's almost like someone just pulls the plug on it -- like the power just, poof, goes away."
My team-leader demands the CE replace the power supply, even though it appeared to be operating normally. He does, at our cost, of course.
Another weeks goes by and all is forgotten in the swamp of work we have to do.
Until one day, the next week... Yes, you guessed it... It happens again. The server is down. Heads are exploding (will at least one head we all know by now). With all the screaming going on, the entire office staff should have comped some Advil.
My team-leader demands the facilities team do a full diagnostic on the UPS system and assure we aren't getting drop-outs on the power system. They do the diagnostic. They also review the logs for the power/load distribution to the entire lab and office spaces. Nothing is amiss.
This would also be a good time draw the picture of where this server is -- this particular server is not in the actual server room, it's out in the office area. That's on purpose, since it is connected to a demo robotics cabinet we use for testing and POC work. And customer demos. This will date me, but these were the days when robotic storage was new and VERY exciting to watch...
So, this is basically a couple of big boxes out on the office floor, with power cables running into a special power-drop near the middle of the room. That information might seem superfluous now, but will come into play shortly in our story.
So, we still have no answer to what's causing the server problems, but we all have work to do, so we keep plugging away, hoping for the best.
The team leader is insisting the VAR swap in a new server.
One night, we (the device-driver team) are working late, burning the midnight oil, right there in the office, and we bear witness to something I will never forget.
The cleaning staff came in.
Anxious for a brief distraction from our marathon of debugging, we stopped to watch them set up and start cleaning the office for a bit.
Then, friends, I Am Not Making This Up(tm)... I watched one of the cleaning staff walk right over to that beautiful RS/6000 dev server, dwarfed in shadow beside that huge robotic disc enclosure... and yank the server power cable right out of the dedicated power drop. And plug in their vacuum cleaner. And vacuum the floor.
We each looked at one-another, slowly, in bewilderment... and then went home, after a brief discussion on the way out the door.
You see, our team-leader wasn't with us that night; so before we left, we all agreed to come in late the next day. Very late indeed.9 -
This rant is a confession I had to make, for all of you out there having a bad time (or year), this story is for you.
Last year, I joined devRant and after a month, I was hired at a local company as an IT god (just joking but not far from what they expected from me), developer, web admin, printer configurator (of course) and all that in my country it's just called "the tech guy", as some of you may know.
I wasn't in immediate need for a full-time job, I had already started to work as a freelancer then and I was doing pretty good. But, you know how it goes, you can always aim for more and that's what I did.
The workspace was the usual, two rooms, one for us employees and one for the bosses (there were two bosses).
Let me tell you right now. I don't hate people, even if I get mad or irritated, I never feel hatred inside me or the need to think bad of someone. But, one of the two bosses made me discover that feeling of hate.
He had a snake-shaped face (I don't think that was random), and he always laughed at his jokes. He was always shouting at me because he was a nervous person, more than normal. He had a tone in his voice like he knew everything. Early on, after being yelled for no reason a dozen of times, I decided that this was not a place for me.
After just two months of doing everything, from tech support to Photoshop and to building websites with WordPress, I gave my one month's notice, or so I thought. I was confronted by the bosses, one of which was a cousin of mine and he was really ok with me leaving and said that I just had to find a person to replace me which was an easy task. Now, the other boss, the evil one, looked me on the eye and said "you're not going anywhere".
I was frozen like, "I can't stay here". He smiled like a snake he was and said "come on, you got this we are counting on you and we are really satisfied with how you are performing till now". I couldn't shake him, I was already sweating. He was rolling his eyes constantly like saying "ok, you are wasting my time now" and left to go to some basketball practice or something.
So, I was stuck there, I could have caused a scene but as I told you, one of the bosses was a cousin of mine, I couldn't do anything crazy. So, I went along with it. Until the next downfall.
I decided to focus on the job and not mind for the bad boss situation but things went really wrong. After a month, I realised that the previous "tech guy" had left me with around 20 ancient Joomla - version 1.0 websites, bursting with security holes and infested with malware like a swamp. I had never seen anything like it. Everyday the websites would become defaced or the server (VPN) would start sending tons of spam cause of the malware, and going offline at the end. I was feeling hopeless.
And then the personal destruction began. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I was having panick attacks at the office's bathroom. My girlfriend almost broke up with me because I was acting like an asshole due to my anxiety issues (but in the end she was the one to "bring me back"(man, she is a keeper)) and I hadn't put a smile on my face for months. I was on the brink of depression, if not already there. Everyday I would anxiously check if the server is running because I would be the one to blame, even though I was trying to talk to the boss (the bad one was in charge of the IT department) and tell him about the problem.
And then I snapped. I finally realised that I had hit rock bottom. I said "I can't let this happen to me" and I took a deep breath. I still remember that morning, it was a life-changing moment for me. I decided to bite the bullet and stay for one more month, dealing with the stupid old server and the low intelligence business environment. So, I woke up, kissed my girlfriend (now wife), took the bus and went straight to work, and I went into the boss's office. I lied that I had found another job on another city and I had one month in order to be there on time. He was like, "so you are leaving? Is it that good a job the one you found? And when are you going? And are you sure?", and with no hesitation I just said "yup". He didn't expect it and just said "ok then", just find your replacement and you're good to go. I found the guy that would replace me, informing him of every little detail of what's going on (and I recently found out, that he is currently working for some big company nowadays, I'm really glad for him!).
I was surprised that it went so smoothly, one month later I felt the taste of freedom again, away from all the bullshit. Totally one of the best feelings out there.
I don't want to be cliche, but do believe in yourself people! Things are not what the seem.
With all that said, I want to give my special thanks to devRant for making this platform. I was inactive for some time but I was reading rants and jokes. It helped me to get through all that. I'm back now! Bless you devRant!
I'm glad that I shared this story with all of you, have an awesome day!15 -
Before anyone starts going batshit crazy, this is NOT a windows hate post. Just a funny experience imo.
So I was tasked with installing ProxMox on a dedicated server at my last internship. The windows admin was my guider (he could also do debian). (he was a really nice/chill guy)
So we were discussing what VM's we wanted and the boss (really cool dude by the way) said he wanted a VPS for storing some company stuff as well. Fair enough, what would we use? I suggested debian and centos. Then we started discussing what we'd do if the systems would fuck up etc (at installation or whatever).
So I didn't wanna look like a Linux Nazi so I suggested windows. Then the happy/positive guider/windows admin suddenly became dead serious (I was actually like 'woah' for a second) and said this:
No. We're not going to fucking use windows for this. For general servers etc sometimes, fair enough but we're talking about sensitive company data here. I don't want that data to be stored on a proprietary/closed source system, hell what if there's some kinda fucking backdoor build in, who can fucking verify that? We're using Linux, end of discussion.
😓
I was pretty flabbergasted as he's a nice guy and actually really likes windows!
Linux it became.5 -
!rant
!!git
Who here uses `master` for development?
My boss (api guy) tried to convince me that was normal practice. I gently told him that it sounded crazy and very very bad.
Here's the dev path I'm enforcing on my repos:
(feature branches) -> dev -> qa* -> master -> production*
*: the build server auto-pulls from these branches, and pushes any passing builds to staging/production.
Everyone works on their own feature branches, and when they're happy with their work, they merge it into `dev`. `dev`, therefore, is for feature integration testing. After everything is working well on `dev`, it gets merged into `qa` for the testers to fawn over and beat with sticks. Anything that passes QA gets merged into `master`, where it sits until we're ready to release it. When that time comes (it's usually right away, but not always), `master` gets merged into `production`.
This way, `master` is always stable and contains the newest code, so it's perfect for forking/etc. Is this standard practice, or should I be doing something different?
Also, api guy encourages something he calls "running a racetrack" -- each dev has their own branch (their initials) and they push to that throughout the day. everyone else pulls from it regularly and pushes to their own branch. When anyone's happy with their code, they push from their (updated) branch to `qa` (I insisted on `dev` instead.)
Supposedly this drastically reduces the number of merge conflicts when pushing to an upstream branch due to having a more recent ancestor node?
I don't quite follow that, but it seems to me that merging/pushing throughout the day would just make them happen sooner? idk.
What are your thoughts?30 -
For one small project my boss planned in about 60 hours.
Crazy that it only took me 5.5 hours. 😄
Such an extreme happened only once.4 -
An intern I was supposed to lead (as an intern) and work with. Which sounded kinda crazy to me, but also fun so I rolled with it. But when I met her I quickly found out she didn't even have a coding editor installed and when I advised one she was "scared of virusses". She had Microsoft Edge in her toolbar, and some picture of a cat as a background. We were given some project by our boss, and a freelance programmer helped us set it up on Trello. Great, lets start! Oke maybe first some R&D, she had to reaeach how to use the Twilio API. After catching her on WhatsApp a few times I realised this wasnt gonna go anywere. After a few weeks of coding and posting a initial project to git I asked her if she could show me the code of the API she made so far..
She told me she was using the quickstart guide (the last 3 FUCKING weeks) which contained some test project with specific use cases.
The one that I did 3 weeks ago that same fucking morning.
AND SHE WAS STILL NOT DONE...
A few days later I asked her about the progress (strangly, I wasn't allowed ti give her another task bcs the freelanc already did) and guess what... She got fking pissed at me
Her: "I will come to you when im done, ok?"
Me: "I just want to see how it is going so far and if you are running into any problems!"
Her: "I dont want to show you right now"
She then goes to my fucking boss to tell him I am bothering her.
And omg... Please dear god please kill me now...
Instead of him saying the she probably didn't do shit. He says to me that the girl thinks im looking down on her and she needs a stress free environment to work in. She will show me when its done. ITS A FUCKING QUICKSTART GUIDE YOU DUMB BITCH.
He then procceeded to whine to me about the email template (another project I do at the same time) which didn't look perfect in all of his clients.
Dont they understand that I am not a frontend developer? Can you stop please? I know nothing about email templates, I told you this!!!
Really... the whole fucking internship the only thing the girl did was ask people if they want more tea. Then she starts cleaning the windows, talk to people for an hour, or clean everyone's dask.
all this while I already made 50% of the fucking product and she just finished the quickstart tutorial 😭. Truly 2 months wasted, and the worse thing is I didn't get any apprication. They constantly blamed me and whined at me. Sometimes for being 3 minutes late, the other for smoking too much, or because I drink to much coffee, or that I dont eat healthy. They even forced me to play Ping Pong. While im just trying to do my job. One of the worst things they got mad at me for if when my laptop got hacked bcs it was infected with some virus. He had remote access and bought 5 iPhones 6's with my paypal while I was on break. I had to go home and quickly reset all my passwords and make sure the iPhones wouldnt get delivered. strange this was, this laptop I only used at the company. So it must have been software I had to download there. Probably phpstorm (torrent). Bcs nobody would give me a license. And the freelancer said I * have to *.
the monday after I still had to reinstall windows so I called them and said I would be late. when I came they were so disrepectfull and didn't understand anything. It went a little like this:
Boss: why u late?
Me: had to reinstall my laptop, sorry.
Boss: why didnt you do this in your own time?
Me: well, I didn't have any time.
Boss: cant you do this in the weekend or something? Because now we have to pay you several hours bcs you downloaded something at home.
Me: I am only using this laptop for work so thats not possible.
Boss: how can that even be possible? You are not doing anything at home with your laptop? Is that why you never do anything at home?
Me: uhm, I have desktop computer you know. Its much faster. And I also need to rest sometimes. Areeb (freelancer) told me to torrent the software. He gave me the link. 2 days later this happends
Boss: Ahh okeee I see.. Well dont let it happen again.
After that nobody at the compamy trusted me with anything computer related. Yes it was my own fault I downloaded a virus but it can happen to anyone. After that I never used Windows again btw, also no more auto login apps.8 -
Boss: we are going to build a blockchain. ( he is smiling proudly)
Me: we are doing data visualization boss!!! Why we need the blockchain?!?!?
Boss: I am disappointed in you!!! You don’t read any Tech news or follow the market trends? BlockChain is tending nowadays... ( showing angry emoji using his face)
Me: it is not related to our work by anything!!! What we will visualize? A success of the transition? The amount of it? A visualization of the nodes?
Boss: (shouting) there are a lot of opportunities using the BlockChain in our days, and it is critical to our business...
Me: boss, there many opportunities using the ******* BlockChain, and I am leaving this company by the end of the month... find a ******* BlockChain developer to visualize the ******* process...
Boss: ........ (silence)
Me: .... (already resigned)7 -
I hate how willing companies are to let someone go over money.
I’ll use a real life example with someone I knew. This person joined a company at the entry-level developer and worked up to a senior level. His pay rises were around 3% per year with around a 5–7% promotion raise (there were two of these).
At this point, 4–5 years after joining, he was making far under what a senior developer salary was in his area. Eventually, he interviewed on the team of a friend at another company and was offered a 40% increase. Four-Zero. CRAZY.
What the company did is baffling to me.
His boss said they may be willing to increase 5%, but there was no way they could even match what the other company offered, let alone beat it. The benefits were better at the new company, but he would’ve stayed with the original for a salary match.
So he left…
But what did the original company do? Hired a new senior level developer for the same dollar amount the dev was offered at the new one, then lost about 6 months ramping up that developer due to a super complex code base, and the new developer turned out to be much less capable than the one they just let go.
So wtf? It’s flat out stupid on the company’s part. Some sort of effed up pride or something.
They’d rather let someone walk out the door, knowing it’ll cost just as much to replace them, plus losing literally tens of thousands of dollars on ramp up time, and they gamble on getting a capable developer instead of a known, proven, loyal developer.
Thankfully, the younger tech companies understand this, and many pay people appropriate to level and talent, regardless of what they were making before they advanced to that level.11 -
I vehemently despise the popular image of developers as borderline autistic savants living on junk food and working 24 hour days!
You see, I bought into that vision and became that person. When I first started working as a developer, I would work crazy long hours, eating junk food while neglecting my health and personal life. This behavior was encouraged by my boss and co-workers, and became expected, with the sales people boasting about it to the clients, like is somehow proved I was a better developer.
It's no big surprise that this kind of life comes at a cost and can not be sustained. I burnt out, my life fell to pieces and my body fucked out on me.
It's taken me years to repair the damage and I am still doing so.
I now work at a company that understands the importance of a healthy work/life balance, and I take full advantage of that.
Perhaps if I had a wise mentor when I first started, I could have worked smarter instead of harder and respected the needs of my mind and body.
I am that mentor now.
Developers are smart people, we should stop glamorising a stupid lifestyle.12 -
Came to work and there ware my boss and CEO waiting there next to my place.
"Hey, you remember that you mentioned yesterday that you had a break through and the thing is finally starting to do something? We have few journalist downstairs can we show them a demo in like five minutes?"
"Ok, give me five minutes and don't click here and there otherwise it blows up."
My boss came back from presentation after ten minutes that it doesn't work, after little investigation turns out to be hw issue, replaced hardware went to the conference room and it worked.
Crazy deadlines? No, just another day at work. -
My dear diary,
Today, the guy that convinced the boss to completely replace our functional CMS website (marketing used to update it) with a static one he was writing from scratch in PHP + jQuery, has published our MailChimp Api Key on StackOverflow, because he couldn't make the API to work.
Boss didn't complain, but I don't think he understood what happened. Just asked the guy for not doing that again.
It was a crazy day.12 -
My colleges and I were talking about salaries in our company. Our team as about 10 members. Many of us are receiving interesting offers from other companies, and we concluded that we were being underpaid.
In this life, unless you ask to, no boss will raise you, even if you put some extra effort and work the shit out of you, to bring that profit, new client or something else good to the company.
Nobody was interested in talking directly about that to our manager. Just a side note, our manager is an awesome senior developer and a very nice guy. It shouldn't be too hard to talk about this issue to him.
I waited until our annual performance and salary revision to talk about it. Everyday our team talks about this. Everyone is going crazy.
So I went straight to the point, during this meeting with our manager, and said that we needed to be raised. All of us, because other companies were offering much better salaries.
He said to me: "Take this paper, write down what value should every one receive, including myself."
I took this opportunity and put down the values, raising about 600€ for each one.
I looked at it and said: "This looks ok. I'll will ask your colleagues to do the same task. Wait here."
So he went and requested everyone to do the same thing, without explaining why.
Guess what happened? Some mother fuckers actually cut on others salaries, instead of raising everyone equally.
Anyway the manager said he would show that to the CEO, and maybe something would happen.
We were all raised in the values I said so, because the CEO want us to be among the companies that pay the most.
After the backstabbing, no one ever talked about that. Except for 3 good fellow developers, that thanked me for my initiative.11 -
Best carrier choice: leaving the old company I worked for...
TLDR version: I yelled at owner/director to shove it..got layed off the next day. Never regreted that day!! EVER!!
Long version: I was asked to implement storing of CC numbers (yes, the whole lot) & their matchig CVC numbers..plain text, no encription.. company didn't even fulfilled standards to store last four digits.. so I yelled at the 'big boss' that he is crazy and that I won't do it.. Next day, I got handed a letter that said they have to lay me off due to lack of work and that my position is redundant & no other workplace for me.. Never been happier in my life!!
I wanted to quit for some time, due to crazy stuff they asked me to implement & how!? & toxic personel. I was called Hitler (& am actually proud of this!!) cuz I was work oriented & didn't kiss mrs.Director's ass.. I wasn't slacking like the rest of them did, so of course, I was the bad guy..
Anyhow, fast forward 6 months, got the best job ever & am now here for 5yrs+.7 -
I swear I work with mentally deranged lunatics.
Dev is/was using TFS's web api to read some config stuff..
Ralph: "Ugh..this is driving me crazy. I've spent all day trying to read this string from TFS and it is not working"
Me: "Um, reading a string from an web api is pretty easy, what's the problem?"
Ralph: "I'm executing the call in a 'using' statement and cannot return the stream."
Me: "Why do you need to return a stream? Return the object you are looking for."
Ralph: "Its not that easy. You can return anything from TFS. All you get back is a stream. Could be XML, JSON, text file, image, anything."
Me: "What are you trying to return?"
Ralph: "XML config. If I use XDoc, the stream works fine, but when I step into each byte from the stream, I the first three bytes have weird characters. I shouldn't have to skip the first three bytes to get the data. I spent maybe 5 hours yesterday digging around the .Net stream readers used in XDoc trying to figure out how it skips the first few bytes."
Me: "Wow...I would have used XDoc and been done and not worried about that other junk."
Ralph: "But I don't know the stream is XML. That's what I need to figure out."
Me: "What is there to figure out? You do know. Its your request. You are requesting a XML config."
Ralph: "No, the request can be anything. What if Sam requests an image? XDoc isn't going to work."
Me: "Is that a use-case? Sam requesting an image?"
Ralph: "Uh..I don't know...he could"
Me: "Sounds like your spending a lot of time doing premature optimization. You know what your accessing TFS for, if it's XML, return XML. If it's an image, return an image. Something new comes along, modify the code to handle it. Eazy peezy."
<boss walks in from a meeting>
Boss: "Whats up guys?"
Ralph: "You know the problem with TFS and not being able to stream the data I had all day yesterday? I finally figured it out. I need to keep this TFS reader simple. I'll start with the XML configs and if we more readers later, we can add them."
Boss: "Oh yea, always start simple and add complexity only when you need it."
Frack...Frack..Frack...you played some victim complaining to anyone who would listen yesterday (which I mostly ignored) about reading data from TFS was this monumental problem no one could solve, then you start complaining to me, I don't fall for the BS, then tell the boss the solution was your idea?
Lunatic or genius? Wally would be proud.4 -
#First
I joined a start up and worked after college hours as an intern over there. I would usually bunk my college and go to my internship. I had limited knowledge at that moment. I worked very hard over there because I wanted (still want) to gain practical knowledge.
Almost a month into it and I had to take a break from it because I had college work. Rejoined the same start up during my vacations. Worked quite a lot and learnt quite some stuff. I continued the internship after my one month vacation for another month once my college started. All this while I was not being paid, not even a little bit of allowance. But that didn't matter because I wanted to learn
Fast forward six months to November 2016. I have been placed in an MNC through my college placements. One day I get a call from this start up owner(we had become good acquaintances by then) if I was willing to work as a paid intern while I was working on the projects that the company landed (so I guess as a free-lancer) and as an unpaid intern while I was working on the company projects. I agreed. Jump to December. I have joined and started working on an Android project of this very big company.
At time point, I should inform you'll that I'm not very good at Android and that the company size is very small. Company owner plus the tech lead in one city (where I'm from) and another two full time employees in another city. Out of which one quit to start his own company apparently. The start up would primarily employ interns and provide exposure to them while getting their work done.
Back to the story. The tech lead vaguely assigns everyone their work. Everyone over here includes new interns and previous interns like me who will get paid some amount. 3-4 days into the project, the tech lead quits. The tech lead and the company owner call three of us and says that one of you will have to be a project manager for this project. And then both of them and 2 of my colleagues look at me. And I don't know what to say. I hesitate initially because it's too much responsibility but agree to it finally.
The next day I come to office and read about the project thoroughly and catch up with my colleagues about the progress. The entire day I'm panicking about what I'm going to do. In the evening, my boss tells me that we have to go for a meeting with the client for whom we are doing this project. At this moment, the shit out of me has been scared. Mostly because I don't know what the fuck am I going to do over there apart from being stupid and asking dumb questions. So we reach the client's office and wait for him. The entire time I'm thinking to myself that I'm going to drown this company by opening my mouth. Surprisingly, all the questions that I asked seemed legitimate and I asked a lot of questions. And so I didn't drown the company after all...phew!
It's been more than a week. And holy fuck! What a pain it is to manage people. Half of my time is spent on updating excel sheet about their progress, where are they stuck and what is needed. And the other half about thinking what the fuck am I doing or how am I gonna do it.
So to sum up, intern-turned-freelancer-turned-project manager who has no idea what the fuck is going on. Seems pretty crazy, don't you think.6 -
I'm extremely lucky I'm not violent person. What happened today for some reason just completely pissed me off. I'm not sure why it got under my skin so much, but I feel completely disrespected.
I went to our marketing person's office to discuss a basic requirement for our api. Very simply, we have a lot of old shitty date that doesn't have a lot of fields filled out (worse yet, some are simply bogus values like crazy random dates and whatnot).
She put in a ticket claiming our most recent change started changed the creation dates to be empty. Easy enough to disprove, because the marketing software we have shows a records of all the edits for each contact, and if it came from our api it'll be labeled as "Web API". So of course I check the example contacts she give us, and there's no history of changes, meaning they never had the date to begin with (which is correct, as until now we didn't track creation date WHICH IS NOT MY DECISION. So dude 10 years ago probably made that decision).
So I start asking what exactly we're using it for. She does an absolutely horrible job of describing it and keeps telling me "no you absolutely have to be able to do all this, it's our requirements". By "this" she wants me to magically give all these contacts correct creation dates after the fact.
Eventually she gets the whole campaign idea out and I point, politely, that they're probably violating GDPR. She starts yelling saying her and her boss have been doing marketing for years and they know what they're doing. So I (less politely this time) said that's fine, I just want to talk with her boss to make sure he understands he's in the grey area and that if I'm the one building this, I'm kind of liable as well.
She clearly didn't like that, but I thought whatever, let's just agree on some requirements and I'll pass it on to my boss (who genuinely shits on her every single day and is constantly saying she never knows what she's doing).
So I go back , do some work. A little later I have to go print something off which is next to her office. Her door is shut, but I can hear her from down the hall yelling at someone about the conversation we just had. She actually starts mocking me. Doing the "stupid person" voice. This goes on for longer than our conversation.
Like I said, I know I'm right and she's just venting because she doesn't want to admit she's made a mistake. But for some reason it just completely broke me. I'm new but up until this point everyone had been pretty open about how they feel about me and my co-worker. But she just didn't need to go that bloody far.9 -
Post after a long long time...
Wanted to reply to so many comments and mentions, rant about a bunch of topics, do a face reveal after I went for a vacation with family and got some pictures, update y'all on my job hunt, but was busy like hell.
Anyway, time for a story.
After my rejection with Meta and Booking, I started preparing like crazy and my interviews started going well. Refined my LinkedIn further and recruiters started reaching out as well.
Over time, with efforts and feedback, I was able to build a good pipeline.
One of my dream companies reached out to me and I got hired in just 1 round and all others were merely a formality. I was euphoric, but at the same time didn't get over excited as this seemed fishy.
They made a very good monetary offer and I didn't talk to my manager yet regarding resignation. They are pushing me for an early joining.
Read a bunch of Glassdoor reviews and also spoke to a friend who just recently quit that organisation.
He confirmed that the company has 3 months of notice, has sandwich leave policy, and some other XLT political mess.
I decided to decline the offer tomorrow.
Day saved? Not yet.
Because of this I slacked off work a lot. I am super screwed with work items pending because I thought I'd quit.
My boss resinged and new one isn't that supportive yet. He is trying to change everything overnight. Typical.
I ended up performing poorly in other companies because I was confident I'll pick this offer and didn't prepare for upcoming good companies.
Moreover, we have our offices opening up from April and I might be asked to relocate to another city which does not have a team but just because it is on paper, they might force me to be in office 50% of the time.
And what's worse is, my relationship with tech is deteriorating and they are putting the entire product team in bad light.
I have a planned weekend trip coming up, so I won't be able to prepare for interviews or work on case studies so that shit will pile up more.
I am sooooo fucking screwed. Life was stable and then all of a sudden too 180° flip.
I am hysterical right now.16 -
Around 2 months ago, I worked at Subway. AMA (just joking. Don't do it.)
I worked there for a week (I could write a lot about the environment) and quit it because of how entitled, lazy, rude and crazy the boss was.
The boss was the usual crackhead woman straight from the dumpster.
She used the Subway Instagram and Facebook pages as her private personal pages.
She told us to follow the Instagram page, like everything and comment on every post.
I didn't do it. Instead I shared the page with my friends and we laughed our asses off.
End of story.6 -
So there's this developer I work with. Let's call him Kevin.
I am a UX designer, former Developer from IBM - but I really love design, so I made the switch. My background however, usually makes working with Developers easy.
But not this guy! I provided a clickable prototype complete with code to easily inspect with Dev tools for measurements. I provided mobile references for some screens but not all.
Kevin submits screenshots for me to review the design. Looks nothing like the prototype, so I get out my Wacom tablet and basically draw redlines over the screenshot. "No border here, 22px should be 20px, etc."
His response was:
"I need you to say exactly what you one (want?) each pages and mobile pages to look like, text size of the font, etc.
You did a lot of red marking, so I am asking for clarification."
So basically asking for red line specs. I asked a month ago if he wanted all the mobile screens, or if what I provided was enough along with the style guide. He agreed. So now I'm majorly pissed off.
Maybe it's also the fact that one of the other developers has to hold his hand, because everything he does is bad. 😡 And his lack of ability to articulate a damn sentence effectively drives me crazy. Cherry on top, I suppose.
Would love to bring this up with my boss. ♥️ And suggestions. 😍3 -
Warning: Long rant ahead!
So we built an amazing system for managing swarms of drones, and we have flown hundreds of hours, testing, etc.
Comes a client and says, that he wants to buy our system, but he wants to integrate it in a bigger system that is supposed to orchestrate many small systems.
Sounds like a deal.
So they send me on a week course (see previous rant: https://devrant.com/rants/2049071/...) to learn how to integrate our system in theirs.
I was sure that they have some API or something and it should be a breeze. but apparently they give us an SDK that includes all their files, and we have to build and run their entire system, and then build our own API inside of it!
And the reason we needed a week-long course, was to know all the paths where the XML configuration files exist!
So for the last month, I am hacking away inside this huge program, navigating thousands of files in a language I don't know, in order to build an API for their system, so that I can use it on our side.
Yesterday they informed us that a new version is available.
And sure enough, waiting in my inbox this morning was a link to download a new SDK.
No Changelog, No Instructions, Just a zip file with over 25,000 files.
So I phone my contact in their company to ask how exactly I am supposed to update their files, and his answer was: diff them!
WHAT! 25,000 files, half of them built by the c++ compiler, tens of configuration files scattered in different places, linking all the new libraries from scratch, are they crazy or what?
And then he tells me that they are working for 15 years this way. That's why everyone hates them I guess.
going to have a long day...
P.S. many more rants to come from this integration.4 -
I don't know if I'm being pranked or not, but I work with my boss and he has the strangest way of doing things.
- Only use PHP
- Keep error_reporting off (for development), Site cannot function if they are on.
- 20,000 lines of functions in a single file, 50% of which was unused, mostly repeated code that could have been reduced massively.
- Zero Code Comments
- Inconsistent variable names, function names, file names -- I was literally project searching for months to find things.
- There is nothing close to a normalized SQL Database, column ID names can't even stay consistent.
- Every query is done with a mysqli wrapper to use legacy mysql functions.
- Most used function is to escape stirngs
- Type-hinting is too strict for the code.
- Most files packed with Inline CSS, JavaScript and PHP - we don't want to use an external file otherwise we'd have to open two of them.
- Do not use a package manger composer because he doesn't have it installed.. Though I told him it's easy on any platform and I'll explain it.
- He downloads a few composer packages he likes and drag/drop them into random folder.
- Uses $_GET to set values and pass them around like a message contianer.
- One file is 6000 lines which is a giant if statement with somewhere close to 7 levels deep of recursion.
- Never removes his old code that bloats things.
- Has functions from a decade ago he would like to save to use some day. Just regular, plain old, PHP functions.
- Always wants to build things from scratch, and re-using a lot of his code that is honestly a weird way of doing almost everything.
- Using CodeIntel, Mess Detectors, Error Detectors is not good or useful.
- Would not deploy to production through any tool I setup, though I was told to. Instead he wrote bash scripts that still make me nervous.
- Often tells me to make something modern/great (reinventing a wheel) and then ends up saying, "I think I'd do it this way... Referes to his code 5 years ago".
- Using isset() breaks things.
- Tens of thousands of undefined variables exist because arrays are creates like $this[][][] = 5;
- Understanding the naming of functions required me to write several documents.
- I had to use #region tags to find places in the code quicker since a router was about 2000 lines of if else statements.
- I used Todo Bookmark extensions in VSCode to mark and flag everything that's a bug.
- Gets upset if I add anything to .gitignore; I tried to tell him it ignores files we don't want, he is though it deleted them for a while.
- He would rather explain every line of code in a mammoth project that follows no human known patterns, includes files that overwrite global scope variables and wants has me do the documentation.
- Open to ideas but when I bring them up such as - This is what most standards suggest, here's a literal example of exactly what you want but easier - He will passively decide against it and end up working on tedious things not very necessary for project release dates.
- On another project I try to write code but he wants to go over every single nook and cranny and stay on the phone the entire day as I watch his screen and Im trying to code.
I would like us all to do well but I do not consider him a programmer but a script-whippersnapper. I find myself trying to to debate the most basic of things (you shouldnt 777 every file), and I need all kinds of evidence before he will do something about it. We need "security" and all kinds of buzz words but I'm scared to death of this code. After several months its a nice place to work but I am convinced I'm being pranked or my boss has very little idea what he's doing. I've worked in a lot of disasters but nothing like this.
We are building an API, I could use something open source to help with anything from validations, routing, ACL but he ends up reinventing the wheel. I have never worked so slow, hindered and baffled at how I am supposed to build anything - nothing is stable, tested, and rarely logical. I suggested many things but he would rather have small talk and reason his way into using things he made.
I could fhave this project 50% done i a Node API i two weeks, pretty fast in a PHP or Python one, but we for reasons I have no idea would rather go slow and literally "build a framework". Two knuckleheads are going to build a PHP REST framework and compete with tested, tried and true open source tools by tens of millions?
I just wanted to rant because this drives me crazy. I have so much stress my neck and shoulder seems like a nerve is pinched. I don't understand what any of this means. I've never met someone who was wrong about so many things but believed they were right. I just don't know what to say so often on call I just say, 'uhh..'. It's like nothing anyone or any authority says matters, I don't know why he asks anything he's going to do things one way, a hard way, only that he can decipher. He's an owner, he's not worried about job security.13 -
Boss only likes stuff he can see and that looks pretty. Doesn't understand code, servers, containers, DBs, etc. Praise is attributed by something looking nice in the frontend, whether or not it does crazy stuff behind the scenes.
Spent a week working on a project whilst boss was away. Got to about Thursday and thought, oh poop, I've built all this API stuff, but not much frontend. So I panic built frontend screens with no functionality just so I had something to show.
Wish I had another dev to share backend progress with (and code review)...8 -
I just want to share this:
When I start working at my last job, I have little idea of what a unit test was.
My boss on one meeting said that unit testing will be mandatory (wich is ok and umderstandable).
Almost a *year* after that, no one still care about them. I see myself doing them the best I can, but I saw things like wrap the assertion line with "try / catch" to lie to the coverage and unit test percentage. Or in other cases directly uploading *manually* the code on the server without test at all.
And then, as the only developer who do the unit test ok I have to do the missing ones and repair the fake ones.
Then when something explodes the question all the managers love to ask "Did we had the testing?"
At least I quit... that job was some crazy shit, this is just one story of many.
Like that other time that my co-workers did not understand why I needed to do POJOs on an android app because the big bad JSON that the app used was working fine.... -
Hey guys,
I think the topic of this week is very important.
Older, experienced devs are giving their skills and advices to the younger one.
Some of you maybe know it, I'm a young developer, who started his apprenticeship at september.
I'm feeling good there, the others are friendly. I learn a Lot there. I had experience before I started there. It's my Hobby to code so I started coding when I was 14.
You can't know anything, everyone makes mistakes, this is what I've learned and this is important to remember.
There are these days like today, when your Boss isn't there and you have to work alone. You have to do many things, and you are desperated because nothing Works, you can't ask anyone, you are completly alone. There are these days, when nothing seems to work. But there are also these days when everything Just Works fine and you are happy with yourself.
This is important to remember.
For me its very hard. Days like today are driving me crazy and I'm very sad, even when I know, that this is Kind of normal not to know everything and have Problems, especially when you are young as me and started your first apprenticeship 3 months ago.
Tomorrow I'm also alone, I'm a Little Bit feared of tomorrow (you say that in that Way? :P) When I think of tomorrow and that I don't know How to proceed and sitting there, I'm getting frustrated and Kind of sad. But I know that this will Make you even better some day, because you learn and gets better - day for day.
At least there was something good today. My stickers finally arrived! To Germany! That was fast! Thanks everyone, Thanks! And Thank you @dfox for building this great community!
What are you advices? And how you handle these situations? I hope tomorrow everything Works fine :/2 -
I thought of posting this as a comment to @12bit float' post, but then decided it better goes out as a post by itself.
https://devrant.com/rants/5291843/...
My second employer, where I am on my last week of notice currently, is building a no code/low code tool.
Since this was my first job switch, I was in a dreamy phase and was super excited about this whole space. I indeed got to learn like crazy.
Upon joining, I realised that an ideal user persona for this product was a developer. Wow! No code tool for developer. sO cOoL...
We started building it and as obvious as it could get, the initial goal was adoption because we were still at top of the funnel.
We launched an alpha release shortly followed by a beta.
Nobody used it. Tech XLT/LT kept pushing product and design team to run a feature factory so that their teams can use this tool.
The culture set by those two leaders was toxic as fuck.
Now, I decided to do some research and some more product discovery to understand why folks were not using it. Mind you, we were not allowed to do any research and were forced to build based on opinions of those two monkeys.
Turns out that the devs were really happy with their existing tools and our tool was another tool being forcefully added into their toolbox by the said XLT/LT.
Not only that, even if they decide to use our tool, out of pressure, they still cannot because the product was missing key capabilities like audit control and promotion from one environment to another.
Building those would essentially mean reinventing Github aka version control and Spinnaker aka CI/CD pipeline.
My new boss (I got 3 managers in 4 months because of high attrition across levels due to the toxic culture), thinks that tech XLT/LT are doing great and we all suck as a product and design team.
He started driving things his own way without even understanding or settling down for first 90 days.
Lol, I put in my resignation got out of that mess.
So agreeing to what our boy said here, no code tools are a complete waste, especially for a developer, and even as a non tech person, I prefer keyboard over mouse.2 -
Since it's 42 & I am fond of the number..
The 'most fun' I had was making a completely useless feature for our customers that we (our team) knew will be useless (&wrong) once finished and we will have to rewrite it. But we had to do it nevertheless till the end of the week, since the customer is the king. It turned out hilarious and fun because everyone was making jokes on the floor about what idiotic stuff we code and implement. Even the boss was like: yes, yes, I know but please do it, you can rewrite it later to not do anything, just leave the button on gui. It was crazy it was fun, a little bit of mindless coding to lighten up the atmosphere and it (coding & jokes) brought closer the whole colective reaponsible for that particular customer. -
I'm buried in projects that I never get time to work on. My boss took the week off, and I'm getting emails from users asking about adding more projects to the board. I'm a single dev at my company. Normally, I have enough patience to get through the day, but today my CIO decided it would be a good time tell my coworker to let me know that the company dumped a third party we used for tons of report automation, and that I need to get these reports hand rolled in house asap. When I sent him a message asking for any kind of details on what this would involve, I found out he left early for the day.
I'm already stressed and putting in extra hours (salaried, so no extra pay) and am having trouble meeting deadlines for projects as it is because I'm constantly pulled away from my dev work to do non-dev work.
I just landed this dev position six months ago and haven't had a chance to build my resume. I'm getting "OK" money considering this is my first full-time dev job. Should I be looking to get out? Suck it up and get the experience? I know we all have crazy expectations on us and frustrating PMs, but after chats with other devs, I get the feeling that my situation is beyond fucked.11 -
Here's how it usually goes:
1) I estimate the different aspects of the assignment to the best of my abillities, based on customer criteria and information. I come up with an realistic estimate for development and testing.
2) My PM runs the numbers through an algorithm. It adds time for other stuff, but its all still very fair and in tune.
Now to the fucked up part.
3) My ceo and cto looks at the estimate, and he will just turn on every possible button and twist the estimate into what he thinks he can get the customer to pay🤢🤮
This ends in the customer saying - no thank you.
He comes back to us and does not understand why they declined.
Idiot! -
!Dev
In Malaysia for some reason Chinese and Indians are considered as outsider. Some Malays are considering themselves are native (actually the Orang Asli are the native). Many politicians attempt to even startled a racial fight against the non- Malays. My country is operated by a closed system. Most Dutch , US companies are leaving Malaysia due to the unfairness.
Before this I worked in a Dutch company in Malaysia , where lately the company declare bankruptcy as my respectable boss told me what happened. Later I learnt, in order for a foreigner to start a company in Malaysia , a transaction of transfering have of the company assets and name under an assigned Malay man by the government.
The racism here is real and crazy. It is no surprise most Malaysian migrating to Taiwan, China Singapore , Thailand and some western countries.
I hate racism. Recently I heard news about western countries still have the hatred against Asians which I abort the idea of migrating there. But in my country Asians are hating other kind of Asians before for being different Asian.
May be I should just get my arse back to Mongolia (where my ancestors will be )6 -
My boss drives me crazy. He hired me for working on his SDK which is game related. So I am responsible for basically everything, including an ingame UI (menu etc.) and to predict the future path of a game object (unit, minion, ..) when a certain spell is casted on it. For that task I divided the prediction into firstly getting the predicted path of the unit without a spell being casted and then a class that would cast the spell on that path and estimate the units reaction to that cast. Simplified, but that way you get a pretty okayish result. Now he thinks that is too complicated. "Can we not put everything into one class, if someone wants to replace the prediction he needs to read documentation for hours". WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU EXPECT, THAT IT'S GONNA BE SOME ONE CLASS 3K LINES MAGIC??
Same for the GUI. We only have DirectX and don't want to use a framework. Guess what, it's more than one class if you want to seperate view, model, controller or whatever fucking "design pattern" thing you use.
And then Git... he seriously said let's not use branches till release, I feel like they slow down things.. before I was there they did every operation on master.
And if it was just that..
/rant
I put much work into this, time to leave?1 -
MENTORS - MY STORY (Part III)
The next mentor is my former boss in the previous company I worked.
3.- Manager DJ.
Soon after I joined the company, Manager E.A. left and it was crushing. The next in line joined as a temporal replacement; he was no good.
Like a year later, they hired Manager DJ, a bit older than EA, huge experience with international companies and a a very smart person.
His most valuable characteristic? His ability to listen. He would let you speak and explain everything and he would be there, listening and learning from you.
That humility was impressive for me, because this guy had a lot of experience, yes, but he understood that he was the new guy and he needed to learn what was the current scenario before he could twist anything. Impressive.
We bonded because I was technical lead of one of the dev teams, and he trusted me which I value a lot. He'd ask me my opinion from time to time regarding important decisions. Even if he wouldn't take my advice, he valued the opinion of the developers and that made me trust him a lot.
From him I learned that, no matter how much experience you have in one field, you can always learn from others and if you're new, the best you can do is sit silently and listen, waiting for your moment to step up when necessary, and that could take weeks or months.
The other thing I learned from him was courage.
See, we were a company A formed of the join of three other companies (a, b, c) and we were part of a major group of companies (P)
(a, b and c) used the enterprise system we developed, but internally the system was a bit chaotic, lots of bad practices and very unstable. But it was like that because those were the rules set by company P.
DJ talked to me
- DJ: Hey, what do you think we should do to fix all the problems we have?
- Me: Well, if it were up to me, we'd apply a complete refactoring of the system. Re-engineering the core and reconstruct all modules using a modular structure. It's A LOT of work, A LOT, but it'd be the way.
- DJ: ...
- DJ: What about the guidelines of P?
- Me: Those guidelines are obsolete, and we'd probably go against them. I know it's crazy but you asked me.
Some time later, we talked about it again, and again, and again until one day.
- DJ: Let's do it. Take these 4 developers with you, I rented other office away from here so nobody will bother you with anything else, this will be a semi-secret project. Present me a methodology plan, and a rough estimation. Let's work with weekly advances, and if in three months we have something good, we continue that road, tear everything apart and implement the solution you guys develop.
- Me: Really? That's impressive! What about P?
- DJ: I'll handle them.
The guy would battle to defend us and our work. And we were extremely motivated. We did revolutionize the development processes we had. We reconstructed the entire system and the results were excellent.
I left the company when we were in the last quarter of the development but I'm proud because they're still using our solution and even P took our approach.
Having the courage of going against everyone in order to do the right thing and to do things right was an impressive demonstration of self confidence, intelligence and balls.
DJ and I talk every now and then. I appreciate him a lot.
Thank you DJ for your lessons and your trust.
Part I:
https://devrant.com/rants/1483428/...
Part II:
https://devrant.com/rants/1483875/...1 -
Concerning my last post on the two Commodores, (https://devrant.com/rants/963917/...) here's the great story behind the boxed one.
So at the place where I interned over the summer, I helped the tech dept. (IT herein) move to a new bldg. We had to dismantle most of the network infrastructure stuff, so we were in the server room a lot. First day on the job, Boss shows me server room, I'm amazed and all because this is my first real server room lol.
We walk around, and there's a Commodore 64 box on a table, just kinda there. I ask, "Uh, is that actually a C64?" B: "Yeah, that's E's." Me: "E?" (name obfuscated) B: "Yeah, E's a little crazy." Me: "Is it actually in there?" B: "Absolutely, check it out!" *opens box and sees my jaw drop* Me: "Well, alrighty then!" So that lingers in my mind for a while until I meet E. He is a fuckin hilarious guy, personifying the C64, making obscure and professionally inappropriate references. Everyone loves him, until he pranks them. He always did.
We’re in the server room, wiping some Cisco switches or something, and we have some downtime, so I ask him about the 64, and he's like "Yeah, I haven't had time to diagnose her issues much. If you want her, go ahead, see if you can make it work!" Me: "You're kidding, right?" E: "Nah, not at all!"
That day I walked out with a server motherboard, 2 Xeon CPUs and some RAM for the server (all from an e-waste bin, approved for me to take home from boss) and a boxed C64. Did a multimeter test on the PSU pins, one of the 9vAC pins is effectively dead (1.25v fluctuating? No thanks.) but everything else is fine except for a loose heatsink and a blown fuse in each C64. Buying the parts tonight. I wanna see this thing work!1 -
GameDeving.. soon my boss asks us if we can use CI, we make unity fully function with jenkins, after a week, he asks us to use gitlab ci, we make it, 2 hours later he sees the results: "yeah.. forget about ci.. let's use the cloud build".
i'm crying.1 -
Fault of having a shit hiring process and stupid expectations, the company I am working at are turning themselves at hiring massively in India instead trying to work with the United States and Canadian market for embedded devs.
I proposed a few good candidates but got instantly refused because they apparently "lacked" experience. Did not even try to speak with them at all. Try finding a good and loyal senior at average market rate, I dare you. The tech we are working on is honestly not rocket science, anyone can be good with the appropriate training. They started hiring like crazy in India instead to teamwork with us, probably because it is cheaper, but I have been in a company that did the same and it is currently tanking like crazy.
So they will likely impose me, my colleagues and my boss to train these guys with a 10h jet lag difference and impose us work at the office even though it is not necessary. I am waiting to see what will be the final decision but I am honestly thinking of polishing my CV and look elsewhere.6 -
First job and first days, boss comes to me with an urgent matter she nor other people were able to solve per her own words, it was something I hadn't even used before, a bug on a migration from versions between SSDTS projects, so she asks if I knew the technology, I answer no, but I'll try, so I started watching some tutorials and got hands on the project to know what it tried to accomplish, then in a couple of hours I found the bug in a connector it had with some other tech through a driver. Team went semi crazy like woah how you found that so quick, Bla blah... It felt good
-
There are a couple:
A system that updates user accounts to connect them into our wifi system by parsing thousands of processing files written in Clojure. The project was short lived and mainly experimental, It has complete test cases and the jar generated from it is still purring silently on the main application. It was used to replace an $85k vendor application that made no fucking sense. The code has not been touched in 2 years and the jar is still there. The dba mentioned the solution to the vendor, the vendor tried buying it from me, but being that it belongs to the institution nothing was touched, still, it got the VP's attention that I can make programs that would be bought for that level, it caught his attention even more when I showed him the codebase and he recognized a Lisp variant (he is old, and was back in the day a Fortran and Cobol developer)
A small Python categorical ML program that determines certain attributes of user generated data and effectively places them on the proper categories on the main DB. The program generates estimates of the users and the predictions have a 95% correctness rate. The DBA still needs to double check the generated results before doing the db updates. I don't remember how I coded it because I was mostly drunk when I experiment on the scenario. It also got the attention of the VP and director since the web tech manager was apparently doing crazy ML shit that they were not expecting me to do, it made them paranoid that I would eventually leave for a ML role somewhere, still here, but I want more moneys!!
A program that generates PDF documentation from user data, written in Go, Python and Perl (yes Perl) I even got shit from the lead developer since I used languages outside of their current scope of work. Dude had no option but to follow along with it :P since I am his boss
Many more. I am normally proud of my work code. But my biggest moment is my current ntural language processing unit that I am trying to code for my home, but I don't have enough power to build it with my computers, currently, my AI is too stupid, but sometimes it does reply back to my commands and does the things I ask it to do (simple things, opening a browser, search for a song etc) but 7 times out of ten it wont work :P -
We have built an entire app that is very critical to our business on google sheets. My boss did this all by convincing people he is doing that to save time on admin panel development. But the business suffers with slowness and so many problems. And he loves google sheets for some crazy reason I don't know.6
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I'm so f*cking tired to have a lot of work rejected just because "I don't like it", because "today I like this thing, but tomorrow maybe"...
1. You are NOT even a designer
2. You have NOT a f*cking plan on what we are going to do in the next weeks
3. You are crazy AF because you pretend to have always what you ask without any kind of explanation, changes included..
YOU ARE NOT A LEADER.
YOU ARE JUST A bOSS.4 -
The other day the "big boss" came to us asking for a feature.
During he speaking to a colleague I saw this guy whitening in the face.
So after some time I asked him what happens..
"He just told me to deallocate some memory (to achieve this, and do that..)"
...
We are writing in Python. -
Doing like Penelope, adding crazy features commissioned by our boss and removing them the day after 'cause they're useless and "that's not what the client wants". Boss, let us finish this fucking shroud, so that we can bury you with it!!
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Update about my boss:
I was early too judge. Maybe still early to form an opinion.
But dude seems pretty level headed. Yes, he is agressive. Yes, he has weird way of complicating things.
But I got to learn things from him. I earned his trust, just like I did in the past with other managers. He is confident about my performance now. He gave me space to ramp up and pushed me to limits.
But now, Floyd is settled. Maybe with time, I might get occasional unpleasant interactions, but those are part of every job.
However, we as a society decided to be in agile mode. Fix a problem and the solution gives rise to another one.
The business head of my pod is going crazy over the deliverables.
They were surviving for years with a product manager. Everything was driven by tech without any research.
And now when I am in, they want everything to be done yesterday.
We spent some decent amount of time on strategy and it turned out to be good. Now they are questioning that why ain't I delivering?!
It's been a week we finalised the strategy, let me get some space and time to structure and plan the execution.
Business heads are pretty nice and level headed people. Just that I don't understand the sense of urgency. I get it that my pod often has to deal with fire fighting given the nature of the business, but holy fuck! Stop pressurising to deliver everything together on a war foot.
They are like, we'll ask for more resources. But whose gonna tell them that 9 women cannot deliver a baby in 1 month.
I need time for discovery and research. Without that, don't expect impact.
As the only PM space, leading the entire vertical, how can I even focus on multiple initiatives?
I really miss my previous life of my first company. It's exactly an year when I left them and I changed two companies since then.
My learning and earnings sky rocketed, but WLB took a toll.
I miss the time when I could finish my work in an hour and did whatever the fuck I want while at work like browsing new topics to learn, exploring places, attending events, connecting with people, making social posts to learn, finance as a hobby, yada yada..
These days, I feel too burned out. Not that I am worried about job stability, because I trust my skills.
But more due to the fact that I have to constantly focus on work for the time I am in office. No free space or time to collect myself together, process things, and focus.
This leads me to thinking about work (read processing office discussions), at home too.
I cannot enjoy music. Feels like a load.
I no longer attend events or meet people after work. No more wasting time on the internet.
And most importantly, I am not bored anymore. I miss being bored. I miss living a boring, mediocre lifestyle.
I miss doing my side projects and polishing my portfolio site ten times a day, because I got nothing better to do.
I used to spend time learning right grammar and why American and English words are different and which to use where.
I miss spending time of Google Maps exploring borders and remote regions.
Weekends fly by. No hobby to pursue. No free time.
I miss the days when I had nothing to do and I was bored and I could do anything.
I used to be always happy. Because no responsibilities. I used to be always up for a meetup. I used to be available for a phone call.
Now it's nothing but work which is surely exciting and some foundational learning with good enough money, but I miss my time when I used to get bored because I had nothing to do.5 -
For reasons I won't disclose, I am just switching off reality in a pretty hardcore way.
Hours, and I mean almost half the fucking day, spent soloing my own TTRPG. It's actually the most fun I've had in years, I think I'm becoming slightly addicted. Dude, I have an abyss of grimdark lore, it's fucking crazy. I'm just bending the space-time continuum with my sorcerous ways, turns out the piece of shit $2 mechanics I designed are so flexible the game simply takes no effort to enjoy.
Anyway, I don't feel bad for this specifically. I do my daily work hours so I'm at peace, and allow myself to just do what I want to do.
Everything else is what gets me down. Fucking shit, man. I'd be ashamed of complaning, as I have it very good. I like my job and I like my game too. No problems there.
But the fact that I cannot go anywhere beyond those two things does raise little bit of an alarm, buried somewhere deep beneath the hundred tomes of forbidden spells I'm collecting on the alcove, down by my quarters on the cursed tower.
Tomorrow night, I'm going on more mystical adventures together with my vampire homegirl. She's a total boss. I was at 1 HP with both my fucking legs broken and no mana, just sitting on the sidelines trying not to die, while she fended off an inquisitor two times her level, all by herself. I know she's a fictional character but I said thank you for real a couple times, just to be nice, as she totally saved my arcane ass.
Now, you get me, right? It's escapism, and I'm great at it, a little bit too much. Honestly, once I'm done with my responsibilities for the day, I just don't feel like doing much of anything else, and I'm not crazy enough (yet) to not notice the downside, that being, no fucking life outside of working and locking myself up inside dark fantasy wonderland.
I suppose this is my roundabout way to say this better than sex, but I don't know if you would understand the sentiment.
Anyway, shutting off reality again in twelve or so hours, can't fucking wait.3 -
Good Morning Folks!!!
I haven't been posting in a while, besides the fact that I went thru a crazy psychiatric crisis 6 weeks ago, there have not been much news to share here.
Now, recovering and working again luckily, I have to face again the stupid pointy haired boss.
So, this fucker asked me for an estimation to build a simple web app.
He: Hey, can you make an estimation for this app
Me: sure, here it is.
He: *to the client*, here's the estimation for the web app you requested
Client: Uhmm, can I haz desktop for winbug$??
He: Let me check with dev
Me: Sure why not, we can do F# using MVU which is basically the same as using modern web frameworks
He: Sure, I'll tell that to the client.
Client: Oooohhh, C#, we lovez C#, can I haz discount?
He: Client wants discount to make it in C#.
Me: Oh, you can give him a discount to make it in F#, I never said C#
He: But your cv says you used C# ten years ago.
Me: Sure, but is not keeping up with functional design patterns, which is what I do.
He: Ok, so I'm offering him the discount in F#
Me: Great.
He: So, project is approved, thanks for the discount, you have 3 weeks to present the product in C#.
Me: Sure, I'll start when I get the downpayment.
Me: I'm considering saying that I didn't understand that he wanted it in C#, and just do F# and not let him know until the project is done.
Thoughts??8 -
More of a moaning than ranting.
I feel like I care a bit too much.
I'm not a great programmer - I may be decent, but nothing more. I know Java and C# enough to write production code that works but as I gather more experience it's getting more and more annoying that I have no one to teach me in work. All I know is what I have learned by myself, from courses online, books and just writing code.
And what drives me crazy is how I'm being pushed from one project and technology to another! It's been a week since I've returned from my exams and I've already worked in C# (ASP.Net Core, MS Office AddIn, WPF, .Net console app), Java (Spring, some legacy project with JBoss, Android) and to top it all, I had to come back to the worst project I've ever been in, where I'm implementing some third party system to county administration, just to finish it off.
I'm happy to gather experience - invaluable with only two years of real, production experience, but I can't focus on one thing because I'm immediately forced to work on another. For some reason I'm seen as Jack-of-all-trades but I really don't feel like that. It makes me anxious as fuck. Not to mention that my personal development as a Dev is held off because of working all alone with no supervisor.
Post Scriptum
Fuck my boss. He won't let me refractor our biggest project yet (console, C#) because "he can listen to my moaning all day but when clients start complaining he has to act fast". Yeah, right. Wish me luck with fixing sluggish performance without reworking base of the app. -
!rant
My boss has influenced me the most at work. He was the first person to introduce me to software development. Though I'm self-taught since, I still owe him my career. Now I teach support techs and junior devs how to code, as well as oversee the architecture of major systems. It's crazy to think now that my computer building hobby would turn into something like this, and it's all because someone convinced me to try what I thought would be terribly boring. -
I took a few days off to move and when I came back, my manager had posted a message in chat about how horrible one of the naming conventions was (an implementation I made). One of my co-workers then defended it and defended something else I wrote that he was complaining about.
We had a 1:1 the day I got back and holy shit ... I did loose my cool and I'm not proud of it, but the guy went totally bat shit. He said I was the problem with them team, screaming about going off and writing rouge things, how he was my boss and I needed to do what he fucking told me to.
In my 20+ years in tech, I have never had to deal with a psycho. He served work release for assault and witness tampering last year and he told us a story that made it seem like it was his all his "crazy ex-girlfriend" who made trumped up charges. After that conversation, I doubt that's the case.
He's still under house arrest for something else until the end of May too. The entire team told me not to do any 1:1 calls with him and our project manager, who is really amazing, will probably be on any calls we need to do in the future.
I've also all confidence in him as a manager. Even when our PM tried to do a retro for the team, he still passively aggressively bitched about things that obviously related to my projects and the entire team could see it. -
As a senior dev I take care of stuff when my boss is on vacation and what always drives me crazy is dealing with his managers. It will start with asking if this and that was already done and that's cool, my job includes knowing who does what, but the follow-up drives me crazy.
So yesterday I got one of these mails and I replied that we hadn't started cause colleague A, who was in charge, had <insert list here> topics to do first. Instead of just asking colleague A about the details of these other topics, she proceeded to ask me. To give you an idea, the manager's office is 2m away from colleague A's office.
So here I am, wasting my time with forwarding emails between two people who could just talk to each other, but apparently this is not how management works. I wish this was the first time such things happen, but alas ...2 -
New guy on my team keeps on saying "oops" and acts like a newb...
He's an experienced dev tho... Like 10yrs...
FML... HOW THE FUCK DID MY BOSS DECIDE TO HIRE HIM...
And then this afternoon I decided to look at internal mobility... all the postings (there were only a few even though we're supposed to be hiring like crazy this year) had descriptions that required experience in everything
Do you want me to move or not ...
"Things here are so much better than before" ... my ass... -
I'm in middle of fucking moronic, most incomprehensible situation.
So primarily I work for a project which requires Node 6.11.5 precisely and now I've been assigned another developer's half asses'd work without any documentation about how to set up gulp, long story it took me a week to figure out it's an ant build with node dependencies oh and I nearly forgot this developer is using node 0.12.1, Can you fucking believe that?
Now when I'll need to compile/build for primary project i'll need to reinstall 6.11.5 and god knows what will happen when and if that half asses'd project comes back
This idiot has style.css / style.ie.css / style.min.css in .gitignore so every time I pull I'll need to re-build oh and the worst part I spend my weekend fixing this shit then sass compiled and shit is still crazy, CSS is written from SASS but not reflecting on server ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
While I'm writing this I'm waiting on my boss who is also trying to fix this. -
Don't even know how to start. I currently work as technician (fix broken shit devices like apple and manage our servers).
Before the rant, here's a note: I'm a newbie-ish something.. Like I do some Java and Android stuff but nothing amazing (yet).
Here's my rant:
Boss: Hey, you mentioned in your CV that you do some programming.
Me: Yep, but just starting. Already made few apps but nothing crazy big.
Boss: Well, doesn't really matter. But, can you make an app and a website for us? We'll decide on the budget later.
Me: *kinda suspicious* Ehm, yep? I'll just make a wireframe and show you what I came up with.
*few weeks later*
Boss: So how's the app doing?
Me: I told ya that I'm making only wireframe. If you want the app you can:
a) pay for it
b) don't do anything and I'll make it open-source
Boss: No don't do that. We want the source on our FTP server.
Me: Riiight... That's a big no-no for me. It's gonna be on VCS, otherwise you can forget about the app and web.
Boss: *staring silently at me*
Me: ...
To this day, not a single response from him. We had one meeting where I presented the Website and app design, everyone was ok with it but no answer when I asked about the budget. Should I just scrap these projects and continue making them on github ('cuz I kinda like to learn new shit this way)5 -
!rant
Agile devs— do you attend sprint planning?
I want to, but my boss told me not to go (waste of my time, he says). Only leads attend them, then they come back with tickets for the rest of the team. But a few other devs I’ve spoken to found that absurd, since attending lets you choose your tickets to a certain extent.
Do you attend yours? Is it crazy not to? Am I missing out? (I ask bc ours is happening right now— and it’s so empty in here!)4 -
Am I the only dev who works almost always for one boss as a Client but it seems to work with a 1000 different ones? So tired of continously change routes on my projects...
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Fuck! This shit is driving me crazy! I'm working day and night without any break just because my boss wants everything done yesterday. And even if I complete the project, there's always something more to do. It feels like I'm stuck in a hamster wheel that never stops spinning. Fuck this fucking fucked up situation! I need some goddamn sleep!3