*CTO in panic, as always, invites everyone to the war room*

CTO: We have a MAJOR problem where 0.0001% of our customers are not receiving SMS confirmations.

Me: Cool. But, 0.0001% is very less compared to the other problems we are solving.

CTO: You don't understand, this is critical issue that needs to be addressed immediately.

Me: But even those.0.0001% customers are receiving e-mail confirmations, so this is not even blocker as we have other channels working.

CTO: I am emotional at this point. You need to prioritise this now.

Me: Okay, do we know the root cause of this problem?

Engineering head: we have blacklisted those numbers in past as our system detected them abusing our platform.

Me: Cool. Let's whitelist them, nothing much to worry here.

CTO: Floyd, you need to understand that 0.0001% of the customers are not receiving the SMS and the solution you are proposing is incorrect.

Me: Okay, what do you suggest?

CTO: We stop sending the SMS to all the customers.

Everyone on the call: 😨

In retrospect, being open about autism in the workplace was a very bad decision.

My manager and CTO got to know about it and since that moment, every single thing I do has a different meaning to them.
All my technical decisions have to be validated by someone else, and my critique about how certain things are done is dismissed as if I were some kind of alien.

I really wonder when they're gonna ask me about their future or something.

I'm officially CTC.

Chief Technical Clown 🤡

How do I know? I've yet to write a single line of productive code today. I've spent the day purely as an administrative cog: writing emails, giving data to consultants, supporting juniors, and cleaning up the absolute hellscape that is also known as our Jira project.

I've become exactly what I hate.

I informed the CTO that one of the beta features from our Cloud Provider (that we used for free) was released to the public and now we're supposed to pay US$ 0.65 for each 1 million requests.

In our case, this means we would pay ~US$ 6.50 to support a businesses that receives literally millions in Advertising each month.

Then I was hit with "How can we reduce that cost? It's out of our budget!"

Oh, looks like we have a really small budget, so... Let me help them by announcing that I'll leave by the end of the week because I'm moving to another country \o/

I'm a tech lead for a digital agency.

Digital agencies are universally known for being shite. Why? Because they typically push through sub-optimal code with very little testing over tiny deadlines for maximum profit. Maybe I've just had bad experiences but this is the 5th digital agency that I've worked at that does this bollocks.

I am currently sitting on a Teams call at 8:39pm because the fuckwit project/account managers are unable to face up to the big scary client and ask them terrifying questions like "Is this bug a blocker for the deployment?" or "We don't have enough time to fix/change these things, can we delay another day?". They just assume that A - We will work into the evening, and B - that all the issues are P1 and that we should all 'pull together' as 'team players' to get this done in time.

No, Me and my team have to work into the evening for seemingly free because these pricks can't do their jobs properly.

The funniest thing of all? When I speak to the CTO about overtime payment he tries to make me feel bad about "we don't typically pay for overtime..."

Fuck Everyone.

Time to find a new contract.

Story of onboarding in the age of Corona!

Monday:
Office is big but almost empty, people are working from home. Guy welcoming me says he is not the one supposed to help me(he is sick I'm told) and the rest of the team is not there. The man I'm talking to is this other guys boss. It's OK I think it will work out.

Turns out this guy helping me is actually the CTO so he does not have that much time on his hands. He shows me were to get my computer and desk and hands me documentation to setup some software.

I spend the time before lunch installing linux, setting up git and some other software. CTO checks up on me once.

Then after lunch nothing...I look for him but he is in some meeting. I find some videos by myself labled "onboarding" on the company website. They are OK. I ask my deskmate if he heard what team I will be in. He doesn't know. I sneak out a little early since I have nothing left to do.

Tuesday:
The CTO is now also sick I see in an email when I arrive at the office. Still don't know what team I am in.

I spend the morning reading coding blogs and websites. After lunch I have a meeting. The only one in my calendar. It's about the product software architecture for all new employees. It's good but still no news about what team. I aimlessly read up on some software architecture untill I go home.

Wednesday:
I arrive at the office first, only the receptionist is there. I listen to podcasts until a few more people show up. I ask another guy if he knows what team I'm supposed to be in. He doesn't but laughs and says it was the same when he started last year.

I send out messages on slack looking for anyone that knows...still no one knows. I guess Im in limbo now. Perhaps i should just start making coffee for people or something...

I’m fucking done….
I don’t even know what to tell.
I’m a CTO in a startu. We have pretty good traction, my salary is about average senior dev salary (plus 10%).
I’m good financially.
But I have no more pleasure in work. Like at all.
“This API call performance is bad”
Yeah I know, maybe you shpuldn’t try to call it for 1000 objects at the time ?
“We need to reduce Azure cost”
Yeah I know, but are you ready to live with performances downgrade it will generate ?
“I don’t understand on what thing you worked past week, where is a devops card ?
Fuck you, I’m in extenuating fire mode, I don’t have time for a fucking devops card
“We should migrate whole stack to modern technology, like JavaScript”
Thank you for your imput, Blazor WAS created to avoid JabaScript
“The client has only 1.000.000 records and API doesn’t return them all”
Use fucking paging moron. And BTW, I’m adding “number of authorized requests” shortly.
I can go on and on and on for hours. But the idea is : I completely lost the will or motivation to do anything. I’m considering just to quit and go back to be Junior dev for a random company.

My CTO prefers to hire very expensive consultants than to trust on staff. It's funny, because he also decided that all technical teams should run on the absolute minimal amount of resources.

You can't imagine how shitty it felt this morning when he sent an email talking about a security consultant that we should hire, just because he thinks the guy could "take our expertise to the next level".
They will charge us 450/hour to run assessments, to find the exact same things my team discovered a year ago.

CTO: Research, problem analysis, customer need validations, and data based prioritisation is stupid.

Me: So, then why should we solve this problem?

CTO: Because my team invests a lot of time in here (read "because we build a shitty system in past without thinking and we are doing it again").

Me: I don't see this as a good idea.

CTO: I become emotional when I request product to align and they don't. We must solve this problem and not what customers want.

Me: I am not participating here.

CTO: And I want you to work on weekends to support my team.

Me: *disconnects*

Kinda rant, kinda not.

At the start of this year all of my colleagues left company beacause of low raise. This process took like 3 months. After that I automatically became most senior in our team with 8 months of experience in my current company and 3 years total. It was rough days and still is. One downside is some days I can't even touch my own development tasks. Sometimes I ask for other developers help and assign them tasks. I'm evolving into team lead I guess. Yeah, more like junior team lead. But after few weeks I got a call from our cto and he told me they are raising my salary even I had a raise just 3 months ago. And he told me it will be raised again soon. Even my workload increased I'm still kinda having fun. I think its a bit early for me to be good at this role but I'm learning how to manage people :) Well, at least I got a raise

I left my previous company because my tech leadership was insensitive and agressive.

However, I am in a start-up right now and CTO is a nut job.

He creates random Slack threads and keeps messaging me like crazy. The co-founders have shut him down multiple times and yet his only success metric is "number of deliveries".

The other day something broke in production and teams were discussing about resolving the bug in one of the Slack channels.

CTO literally wrote this and I wish I was making this up, "let us not look at the logs and trust our code to work fine."

I was baffled and confused. I realised me leaving my previous organisation because of such tech leadership was a stupid decision.

Crows are black everywhere.

Monday morning: The last straw.

After talking about in a previous rant about how my client wants to fix bugs that keeps popping out after bug fix.

Today I discovered, that all C-levels, worked all Saturday to "fix my code" because it "didn't work" and we "needed bug fixes not pretty things".

The app version I was working on for the last week is gone. Without mentioning that their "CTO" wrote a fucking crappy code to disable features that I added, breaking the build step.

This shit is enough for me, I'm done!

My boss has zero emotions and empathy. How ironic for someone into product management!

He is 100% logical, maybe more. He is smart that way and yes, that is a skill to learn from him. He has good product management hard skills.

But, he is an emotional void. Zero humane feelings. He treats everyone like a machine. He is overly obsessed with documentation and wants every single word to be his way.

My writing and communication skills are his pet peeve.

Last Monday, our CTO was in office and he wanted to meet me. I was working remotely, so leads notified me. Even though our CTO runs a monkey business, I was eager and excited to meet him.

This week, my boss will be in office. He texted me to catch-up on coming Monday. I am anxious and worried even though my boss has great skills in our work function.

Furthermore, I find my boss overly critical about everything I do. Maybe it's not me and he does it with everyone, because I haven't been part of a group connect, so no idea. But dude.. give me a break.. give me some room to breathe..

What I heard from another junior, who joined us last month, is that one of the folks who resigned in past was because of my boss.

Feel like that I will move on from my dream organisation as soon as I complete little more than one year.

And apart from that, I scratched my eye glasses, Reddit permanently banned my account for no fault of mine, wanted to catch-up with a cousin, who is going through a rough phase, to cheer up the lad, but he won't answer our calls.

What a shitty weekend.

And yes, my boss is a hipster in the way he dresses and thinks.

He literally keeps saying that we need to use dark patterns like click baits, incite FoMo in our app users, add feedback loops, etc.

A story about burnout you say? Well, here it goes.

In 2019, I worked in a now-defunct startup. Back then, I was deep in "treatment" with wrong medications that almost ended up turning me into a vegetable. When I was hired, my mind was already deteriorating quickly, and I was caught in a downward spiral of losing intelligence.

Prior to working there, there was never ever ever a situation in my career when I was given a problem to solve and failed to do it.

But right then, with already double-digit IQ and constant, pumping anxiety, I was seeing task descriptions that looked familiar and doable, yet I absolutely could not do them. I couldn't comprehend. It was an absolutely screeching, crippling panic about me losing my intelligence forever, being fired and ending up unhireable, dying alone on the streets.

Apart from my depression I recovered from, this very experience was a trauma that haunts me to this day, every day. You know, my experience being raped as an adolescent doesn't, but this, it's something else. Now, my intelligence is back, I design architecture, I'm a CTO, and my solutions are objectively cleaner and better in every way than what I did pre-depression. Yet, I still feel a sharp, sudden rush of anxiety, and my heart skips a beat, when I think about writing code or even opening the IDE.

I don't know how does one recover from this. I'm now slowly transitioning into "architecting CTO" role that is just being a devrel, assessing ethics, working with business to realize their need, designing solutions and leaving the implementation for the team to do. You know, the stuff I was taught in the uni.

Maybe doing open source and launching small pet projects will help. But at this stage of my life I have no emotional resource to care.

Yes, I’m a CTO:
C — C is
T — totally
O — Overrated

I decided to go freelance/contracting. Headhunters keep pitching me permament roles (and I love watching them run out of pitch lines :D )

Headhunter: This job can't do your asking salary, but can offer career development.

Me: Already did that. was Engineer, then Architect, then CTO. I'm actually stepping back to be an Engineer.

Headhunter: Ok well, in this job you can do things start to finish, see them through to the end.

Me: I actually get bored after a while. Prefer change.

Headhunter: Well this place has a great culture and fun atmosphere!

Me: It's an insurance company mate...

How can I make my manager understand that performance should not be measured by how many tickets we have resolved?

If the ticket is an easy one then sure 1-2 days is enough, but for some complicated shit or dealing with models that I have never touched before, I am gonna need several days just to understand the requirement.

For some fucked up reason, our story point is in hours, instead of days. So when we say 24 hours, then it's only 3 days.

Another fucked up reason is that my colleagues doesn't seem to mind. I am the most vocal one objecting when got assigned too many tickets. They just joke around and seem to accept it.

FYI, I am just 6 months in and bouncing between 3 projects.
Am I just too lazy or slow?
In my previous company, the devs seemed to be pretty chill, and the project manager only complained when an issue has been dragging on for weeks.

Because of high gas price, the government decided to lower our tax.
For me it translates to additional EUR 11/month ☹.
This is after deductions of thousands of euros each months (tax and social contribution) from my hard-earned salary. How come nobody is complaining about this?

During my yearly review, I told my manager that I expect to see significant salary increase next year (the inflation is 9% duh!).
She told me that I can expect to get 20% increase after 3-4 years. ☹
Now I know why a lot of people are leaving. How can you expect your employer to stay put if you're constantly paying them under market rate?! I have to keep switching jobs every 4-5 years to get a decent pay, right? Yet society expect me to settle down and have a stable job.

And then, how come a PM earn significantly more than a regular dev? Even the job interview is much easier. But I like the technical part too much to switch to people management.

By no means, I am starving right now working as a dev. I am happy that I even have a job, but somehow I felt like what I do is pointless just being a wage slave, and felt demotivated in a lot of ways.

P.S.: I am writing this now in front of my work computer. I have to catch up some work to do otherwise I won't have time to do it during the weekdays 😔
Pray for me guys I can get better job within next year.

I heard Google has prepared an AI for solving competitive programming questions by training models based on problems and solutions from GitHub.
*devil smile*...on my way to flood GitHub with wrong solutions. Ciao!

**Sees a different error after hours of debugging the previous one**

ME (crying inside) - What type of sorcery is this?

Tech management and leadership are the most toxic and cancerous folks of any organisation.

In all my past experience, I have encountered nut jobs.

If it were just me, then entire product or design org won't be suffering. What helps me confirm this hypothesis is every engineer who work for such retards is suffering and fighting for their existence.

We have monkey business going on with our CTO and his ass licking engineering head.

In several occasions I run rm -rf * in the wrong folder (or wrong server!!).
No big deal so far, but I had to spent more time to redo my work since Linux has no fucking recycle bin like Win!
So I created this helper function to give my brain a few seconds to think before my finger hit Enter.

delete_all_files()
{
echo "WARNING:Delete all files? Type fluffycat to proceed"
read x
if [ "$x" = "fluffycat" ]
then
echo "Deleting all files..."
rm -rf *
fi
}
alias myrm=delete_all_files

Hehehe... I am a genius 😎

Ernest Hemingway and @bittersweet once competed in whose shortest story is the saddest. Ernest wasn't original, boasting his old "baby shoes" charade. But @bittersweet, proving the culture is changed, and new talent beats the old, won, with this story of his:

"CTO is wanted by YC unicorn. Requirements: PHP 5.4".

Worst: forced to work for 9 months on a shitty wp theme:
- colleague with no clue trying to make me do their work… check
- incompetent manager doing shit about it… check
- idiotic pipeline requiring to redeploy for every asset update… check
- micromanaging cto which for some fucking reason didn’t want to allow access to the writers, forcing the role of content editor on the devs… ducking check! Quack!!

Best: automated lots of processes in my free time, all stuff which I can reuse!

My org (of which i'm basically CTO) has this administrative tool that a team uses to combat spam and scams, which is quite the problem for us.. the tool was written like 9 years ago, by my predecessor, very quick & dirty and unaesthetic and without input from those who would use it as far as interface or UX... it got modded a little a few years later by a kind of amateur coder who was at the time on the spam control team, and now there's this new maybe slightly less amateur coder guy on the team who has written this amateur tool that scrapes data off our site and massages it and stores it on his own server and then provides a better interface, or so they say.... this is all because for a couple of years people didnt want to "bother me" with a request to improve our internal tool, they thought I was "too busy" doing other things... so instead this outsider has built this stupid thing that lives on his own personal server and so now we have these problems to do with performance, security, privacy for user info, etc etc... someone please shoot me....

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

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

I was sad this morning, because my thesis supervisor being an asshole that I seriously considering to just drop out..
Then I checked my bank statement and salary of 2 months has been deposited today.

Who needs that fucking degree when I earn more than you?
Who's the joke now?! 🤜🤡🤡

I am going to give them a middle finger tomorrow.😉

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.

!dev

So my company says they are paying the market rate, and I should be grateful about it. When I went for interviews at "some big companies", I got offers from 2 different companies with the annual pay x2.5 of what I am getting here.

My current company mentality is so shitty that they only want to hire undergrads or people from oversea so they can pay less.

I do not even know what my fucking role is at this point, I do DevOps, I fucking do infra, I also do SRE shit, then I also write fucking code for servers. Yet my pay is slightly less than just "dev" working at good companies. Fuck my company, I am leaving soon.

I am not the only one in the shit show here, our PM also has to write code because most of our developers left. Most of the time, CTO is not even in the office, the company is basically run by some managements below CTO.

Tru-lyfe CTO (CTC) stories:

I spelled a juniors name wrong in a commit message...

Am I an asshole?

P.S.: it was 100% fully NOT on purpose, it's just an alternate spelling of the name, i.e. Jakob instead of Jacob (not the name of course, for privacy purposes, just an example)

Do you want to know why all the popular open source projects have less-than-optimal, sometimes really dirty code?

It's because their developers ditched all the unnecessary stuff to just get the damn thing done. When I choose an open source dependency, I don't need unfinished stuff. I need a stuff that works and has all the features I need from the very start. If it works, I don't care about code quality in my deps.

This is the reason why dirty, rushed stuff with a great idea behind it gains popularity. PHP, Git, jQuery, the list is quite large.

While you've been busy polishing your files hierarchy, these guys already shipped their product, gained adoption, and their userbase doesn't need your product anymore.

This is applicable only for true open source, not "it's developed by a full-time team of principal developers and the CTO is fucking Kent Beck, it costs $1m per month but yea we have it on github".

New office stories during the emotional turmoil...

Story 1: The creepy fuck

So being unaware of the fact that I was connected with this guy on LinkedIn already.

Ron walks upto my desk and greets me on my first day on floor. Weird, but whatever.

I politely interact, because gotta make friends and create my following to get shit done.

The next day, randomly comes asking for a laptop sticker and I am like WTF! He is like sticker was an excuse, I just wanted to say Hi!

👀

Day 3: same random creep shit. Talks about personal topics and invades personal space uninvited.

Day 4: Keeps starring at me while I ignore and judges me evidently with stupid suggestions on how to exist without being asked for.

Fuck this guy.

Story 2: The classic case of Dunning Kruger effect

So I get introduced to my tech team today and everyone start piling on me to guide them on decision making. The CTO creates a Slack thread with me and Co-founder asking me to get things moving on priority.

The co-founder shut him out right away. Fucking hilarious.

But, a retard starts schooling me on how to use Slack. Lmfao.

Me being polite, said I'll follow.. dude starts bragging on how he wrote company policy to get everyone on Slack yada yada..

To be honest, the Slack experience is beyond broken based on what these idiot has setup.

He literally opened my Slack and responded to the CTO thread.

That's where I got pissed. I upfront told him that hey! Calm your tiddies down. I know how to use Slack. I have used it since it was in the beta.

I have been in much much mucy bigger orgs and places more well structured than what you have here.

I told him on his face what the flaws where and how I felt a downgrade from where I am coming from.

The look on his face was priceless and he started sweating. Lol

Never again he'll school anyone.

I mean I understand if you are humble and genuinely guiding a new hire. But being cocky unnecessarily and shoving things down my throat without yourself knowing shit or know about the other person is purely asshole move.

Anyway, I am still upset about the scam. Fuck this world.

Hey guys I need an interview tip here.

I applied to this payment processing company as an android dev. I completed almost all of the stages, they gave very positive feedback and tomorrow is the last stage (30min talk with their CTO from USA, who's been in his company for 18 years).

They told me that he wont ask many questions and he will just try to scan me and figure out the vibe. Mind that the main company is in USA and company where I'm applying is in Europe. So I guess this is a final test to see how good I'm in english in terms of speaking? Jokes on them I worked in 3 startups in Europe and I can speak better than most of my peers who never left my country lol.

What kind of questions should I ask HIM? I am able to leave a good impression, but I would also appreciate any tips on how to deal with this better. Apparently I will need to communicate with this guy from time to time in the future, as he is the head of our project.

Who has the final say or is in charge hierarchically in your company, product ppl/head/department or the cto/vp r&d?

Pls mention company size small/medium/large

Just want to know what's more accepted in the industry.

To clearify, for example, do most projects ideas get created by the managment and brought to RnD director who then assigns the product team to create the full specifications.
Or, is the idea first reaches product departmnet and then RnD department just gets the specifications and starts work.

Can a React.JS expert help me to understand something?

In short, I would like to know what are the main differences between react version 15.6 and 17, in terms of browser issues, and component compatibility?

We have a legacy code base that is in version 15.6 and the team wants to upgrade it and I am attempting to argue with my dumb CTO to upgrade to version 17. However, I’m not versed in react, I'm just a PO and the CTO doesn't know anything but for some odd reason is adamant about staying on an older version. The developers gave me their opinion but I'm interested in an outside opinion.