My dumb CEO just hired an even dumber CTO. The new CTO asked me the following questions...

1. What is GitHub?

2. What is JSON?

3. What’s an array?

4. What is Get and what is Post?

5. When an iPhone is offline, can it call an API on our server to tell us it’s offline?

6. I know you’ve spent 11 month the writing this backend in PHP but can you change it to Java now?
Me: Why?
Dumb CTO: Because it’s better.
Me: How?
Dumb CTO: because it is.

7. I know you’ve started to rewrite this codebase I Java but can you convert it to Node.JS now?
Me: Why?
Dumb CTO: Because Facebook uses it.

8. What is MySQL? Why aren’t you using a database instead?

9. What does NULL mean?

Somehow, I doubt that asshole is remotely qualified for the job.

Fakin shyt for brains.

Our CTO has been told, this morning by management, that our development department is "too quiet" and that it's spoiling "the atmosphere" of the office space.

So we've ordered mechanical keyboards.

The programmer and the interns part 2.

We will discuss numerous events that happened over the past week or so.

Case 0:
We had our weekly engineering meeting. The interns were invited as well.
We hold meetings in the generic, big, corporate meeting rooms with a huge table in the middle.
There were more than enough chairs for everyone yet the most motivated and awkward intern (let's call him Simon) chose to stand, cause "it's cool man, I always stand". At this point we all know that he probably read about Agile stand up meetings and is confusing it with this one. Otherwise he's simply trying to stand out from the rest. (See what I did there?)
Anyway the meeting has started way later than planned (what a surprise) and took much longer than Simon expected. Everybody is sitting and listening to the CTO while occasionally glancing at the weird looking intern standing awkwardly and refusing to sit because it would make his original intentions pointless. He even tried to nod whith a serious face and his hands crossed when the CTO said something and looked at his general direction. The meeting was about a hour and a half long but with the delay it was at least 2.5 hours.
At the end Simon was so exhausted that he fell asleep on the office puff, was forgotten and locked inside. 3 hours later when I was home I received a call from him with his sleepy-trying-to-sound-awake voice telling the news. Lucky there's a 24/7 Noc team that could rescue him.

Case 1:
An intern who was late on his Linux test connected to every test VM (should I remind you that each one has a personal VM but they share passwords for their roots?) and tried to reset it with "sleep 10s; shutdown -h now".
He took down all 13 of those so I had to turn them on and switch passwords again.

Case 2:
One of the interns didn't do any of his training chores. Apparently he forgot what he was told to use, ignored all online documentation and used Windows CMD with Linux commands for almost a week already.

Case 3:
Simon uses Vim to write all text possible. Even mails, he then selects all and copies into the mail body. He spent half a day on a homework task I gave them. He wrote everything inside one text file using Vim. When he was done he saved the file and quit the editor. He then said "Oh shit! I've forgot to sign my name!". I explicitly told him that theres absolutely no need for that because I see which mail the file was sent from. He said "I don't even need a program for that!" and gave a couple of strokes on the keyboard.
Later I received an email from him with a .txt attachment. When I opened it the only text that was inside was "by Simon ;)".
I logged to his machine and checked the last command ran on the file:
echo "by Simon ;)" > linuxtasks.txt

Case 4:
The girl here uses a MacBook. She keeps getting confused with the terminal windows and rebooting her own machine instead of the remote VM.

Case 5:
Haven't checked yet how this happened but one of the interns deleted the gui from his local Centos.

Internship number two.

*walks downstairs to get a coffee*
*CTO (my guider) walks in*
CTO: (dead serious face) "linuxxx (not using my first name :P), come with me please"
*walks along to his office, starting to get reallly fucking nervous*
*CTO and me walk into his office, he sits down and looks at me very serious*
*I'm slightly shaking, nervous, sweating*
CTO: "So."
*oh yes here it is its gonna come I did something wrong fuck fml 😫😥😨😩*
CTO: "So you know quite some stiff around security/privacy. Could you tell me some stuff about why I'd want to use VPN and recommend me some good providers? 😀"
😅
*nearly falls onto the ground from relief*

I explained him some stuff and sent him a list of good providers 😀

wk87 is a dangerous topic for me, i've been through a lot. I apologise for what I am about to inflict on this network over the coming week.

Most incompetent co-worker, candidate 1, "T".

T was an embedded C developer who talked openly about how he's been writing code since he was 14, knew all the C system libraries and functions like the back of his hand. For the most part, he did ... but not how to actually use them, as (based on his shocking ... well everything) he was inflicted by some sort of brain disorder not yet fully understood by medical science. Some highlights:

- Myself and the CTO spent 4 days teaching him what a circle buffer was and how to build one.
- His final circle buffer implementation had about 3 times as much code as he actually needed.
- When the code was running too slowly on the device, we didn't try find any performance improvements, or debug anything to see if there was anything taking too long. No not with T, T immediately blamed TCP for being inefficient.
- After he left we found a file called "TCP-Light" in his projects folder.
- He accused the CTO of having "violent tendencies" because he was playing with a marker tossing it up in the air and catching it.
- He once managed to leave his bank statements, jumper and TROUSERS in the bathroom and didn't realise until a building wide email went out.
- He once .... no hang on, seriously his fucking trousers, how?
- He accused us all of being fascists because we gave out to him for not driving with his glasses, despite the fact his license says he needs to (blind as a bat).

... why were his trousers off in the first place? and how do you forget ... or miss the pile of clothes and letters in a small bathroom.

Moving on, eventually he was fired, but the most depressing thing of all about T, is that he might not even be top of my list.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

I came early today to the office

Found the office locked

Need fingerprint of Project Manager/CTO

With my mouth saying ah.. i blew hot air into the finger print sensor, 5 to 6 times

There u go.office door opened with welcome message

just hacked the system

Genius me

CEO: "What if we invest in our devs (i.e. trainings, certifications) and they leave?"

CTO: "What if we don't and they stay?"

"It's just money"

Our CTO, the first time I broke something on production.

My boss is technically restricted shall we say.

As the cto I have also been designated office IT guy. Which means apparently fixing the printer. Which is ok I guess. I mean it's bullsh*t but hey.

Anyway, about 6 months ago he said he needed a new laptop. He lives his life in excel and outlook, and even though the whole company uses google docs for everything he still exports everything to excel, makes a copy, then saves it back to drive so everything gets out of sync.

It's a fun problem that I have banned everyone from doing obviously but he continues.

Anyway, anyway, he wanted a new windows laptop naturally. I said to spend about £700 on a decent machine rather than buying something cheap that will frustrate and not last long.

He doesn't listen and gets some old windows 7 machine for £300. It's an alright spec for 2009; he must not have got the memo about it being 2017.

4 months go by and he says he needs a new laptop because this one is too slow (not least because he opens 400 chrome tabs and never reboots his machine). Anyway, I fix the problem of uninstalling all his bloatware and it runs quicker but he has his heart set on a new machine.

He insists.

I suggest he spend the money this time so he literally doesn't buy a new one in 4 months. I suggest the surface book that's £1200. A little overpriced but he will love the touch screen, it's powerful enough and it's windows. Ticks all the boxes for him.

He suddenly decides he wants a Mac.

I tell him it will be a nightmare for everyone if he does that.

He insists.

I suggest the Mac book pro as I've had mine for 6 years now and it's still going strong. It's a little more expensive than the surface but it will last.

He then says he wants the air.

I say they haven't updated them in ages and they aren't actually that powerful.

He insists.

That night he just buys an air from the Apple Store.

WHY THE FU*k ARE YOU ASKING ME FOR ADVICE IF YOURE NOT GOING TO LISTEN YOU MOTHERFUC*er. WASTING MY TIME AND YOURS.

Was very close to rage quitting when he wanted me to back up his old machine but didn't bring in his hard drive and didn't want to put it in the cloud. #whatDoYouWantMeToDoWithYourOldPornCollection

To top it all off I ran some benchmarks and my 6 year old Mac book pro is more powerful than his "brand new" air.

So true ! I've literally seen this happen so many times 😂

So basically there's this guy, that work with us that relocated from a small village south of Italy to the city where we have the HQ.

So after a while this guy has found a girlfriend here and after few days we discovered that he never had sex in his life. you may ask, how did you discover it? Yes, basically he disappeared for a week, his phone was off, no slack, no Facebook, nothing. We couldn't contact him in any way. After a week he gave a call to our cto saying sorry about what happened and explaining that he spent the whole week having sex with his girl, day and night. This story has also a good end because he still has his job.

CTO: I heard about this great architecture of microservices. What is it exactly?
Me: it's building many servers with one responsbility each.
CTO: That sound good. But let keep it simple and build only one big microservice.
Me: 😲
(True story from a comapny a worked for)

The 1st of July, it'll be a year ago since my father passed away.

I made him a promise as he explicitly told me; "Please grow our company, I wouldn't have put you in the CTO position if you sucked at what you do" - so I said I would keep pushing the boundaries.

As per now we've officially broken our set target. Our revenue thus far in 6 months of time has reached to last years total revenue. I take great comfort in knowing that he would have been god dang proud.

July the 1st will be a day with both a smile and a tear. Had to get this off my chest!

Welcome back from vaccation....

Never got the chance to meet my company's CTO... So I started meeting other company's CTO.

Got into the monday tech meeting, CTO be like: we lost 10% of users due to last version, terrible I know, but that's really valuable data, I want you to find out why they left.

I just witnessed this interaction between my CTO and an intern. CTO was a good 30 feet away, so everyone heard:

CTO: *talking about some notepad or something* "I HAVE ONE IN MY DESK!"
Intern: **froze - afraid to go through his desk**
CTO: "TOP DRAWER!"
Intern: ..........
CTO: "GET IT, FUCKER!"
Intern: **blushing - gently opens drawer**
CTO: "KEEP GOING! PAST THE CANDY!"
Intern: "I ..."
CTO: "PAST THE WHISKEY!"
Intern: **softly** "I found it..."
CTO: "THAT WAS HARD!"
Intern: *starts walking back*
(player 3 enters the game) Director of Software: "BRING THE WHISKEY!"

Note: The intern was laughing, he is just a bit timid.

I truly love my job.

I just solved a problem that the CTO and senior devs couldn't get!!! I'm on top of the world!!

My CTO everyone:

"You don't have to assert proper permissions in the backend for this user role, they won't guess the URL anyway. just hide the links"

Yikes.. fml.

CTO: "You must write good tests with high coverage, ideally use TDD. We need confidence in our releases."
Also CTO: *Secretly commits code changes directly to master at 3am, breaks tests, skips CI, publishes, tells no-one*

Learning soft skills.

I'm about as direct with coworkers and managers as I am on devRant. And I still think being painfully direct is often better than playing the heavily politicized office game of thrones.

But sometimes it's better to say:

"CTO, I think we need your skills to build bridges to other departments and manage recruitment. You're the only one who understands both technology and people, so drop your developer role and become our ambassador"

Instead of:

"Dear CTO, your code makes my eyes bleed. Your CS degree was a fucking waste of tax money, and it's quite clear that cheap college beer washed out all of your reasoning skills. We should fill the space you're taking up with a beanbag chair, because you're providing negative value to the company. How many investor cocks did you have to deep throat to get where you are?"

Now, I just pick option one, smile politely, and tell him we need to increase department budget as indemnification for having to work with a retard like him. Uh I mean... "to get developer salaries up to a competitive level so we can retain knowledge"

Our CTO is fucking amazing. I've never worked with someone who is as technical as their title implies, experienced, and sharp. Usually, they are experts but aren't sharp anymore or their skills deterioated as they focus more on management.

But this man, wow, he looks like an Egyptian pharaoh and he's incredibly smart. I can really feel my lack of experience when I talk to him.

Not to mention that he's extremely busy and worked more maybe 12 hours every day including weekends. He's often in a call with some other people with different issues. I just can't imagine how he got to that point. He's very calm and stoic and all that shit that I'm not.

I'm a fan boi, I can't believe it. You're awesome, dude. Give me your genes.

Inspired by @h3ll, this is a combination of current and former coworkers:

Awkward Wizard:
This guy has the social skills of a microwaved dog turd. He is a genius, but working with him is about as uncomfortable as sticking a grill skewer in your eye and twisting it repeatedly until close of business. He laughs at inappropriate times, and every time he does, an unborn child tears its own ears off. He explains things in a way that only himself and Satan understand, then talks to you like you're a child when you don't follow his logic. He is the guy you hide when the CEO is around. His code is immaculate.

Backstab McGillacutty:
This bowl of bile is the son of a bitch that takes credit for everybody else's work. When you do something good, he was miraculously involved, but when you mess up, this twat is the dicknose that brings it up in retrospective and calls you out by name to the boss. You can usually find these guys talking shit about the CTO, until the boss quits. Then they buddy up with the CTO and become a Joel Osteen-esque evangelist for everything the CTO wants in a shitty, underhanded attempt to climb the ladder. Fuck this guy.

Professor Fuckwaffle:
This coworker used to teach Computer Science classes. Their resume is amazing, and they can speak to the most complex of design principles. This is the shitstain that you hire because of their skill and knowledge only to find out that ol' fuckwaffle can't apply the shit they spout to save their wretched lives. You'll spend more time listening to fuckwaffle lecture than you will reviewing their code (because they cant fucking write any!) You know the saying, those who can, do, and those who can't, teach? Yeah, that shit was written for Fuckwaffle.

Last but not least:
Scrumdumb:
This guy isn't even a coder. This guy is worse than the the scum you pour out of the bottom of a slow-cooker that you forgot to wash last time you made chicken. He's a non-technical PM. You know the type, right? He usually says "cloud infrastructure," "paradigm," "algorithm," "SDLC," etc but has no grasp of any of them. He often opens his dumpster to spout off something like "You can just create a new class for that" while talking about HTML. I won't waste any more breath on Scrumdumb, he already creates enough work for me.

Real Story:

Manager: You have to add an extra section in the app to show more details.

Me: We are already showing so many unnecessary details. These changes are not required.

Manager: No !! You have to do it.

Me : Ok !!! So why can't we show it in the section where we are showing the other details. Why make a separate section for it.

Manager : No !! It won't be clearly visible to the user. Just do it.

So I added another section to show useless information that we are already showing it f**king everywhere else in the app.

So I released a new apk next day with the added features.

In meeting, our CTO goes through the app and ask manager....

" Why we have added an extra section for showing same details that we are showing everywhere else ???

Who approved this ?? This is nonsense !!! "

Here comes the fun part.

Manager : I don't know. I didn't ask for it. These changes were not there earlier.

And ask me.

"Who told you to make these changes ? "

I am like... F***k man you a***ole told me to do it even when i told you it will be nonsense.

Ill join in - Our CEO and CTO insist that we can make an AI that can recognize emotions and feelings through Python, R, and some MySQL... mind you, with a team of unpaid interns....

Im sorry, but Id love some of whatever the fuck they are smoking.

Friend asked me, "How does it feel being the CTO of a startup?"

Me: "I feel like the main character in one of those cartoons where train, going full speed, is running out of rail road, so he takes rails from behind the train and puts them in front. And the entire thing is on fire. And everyone you hire is trying to put it out with gasoline."

Friend: "Doesn't your CEO help?"

Me: "Well... He had never seen a train before, and he thought they operate on magic and wishful thinking. And he never realized they need rail track to even run. So... not really"

Friend: "So, it's pretty bad, ha?"

Me: "It's great actually. We just closed our seed round. We're about to launch beta. I might even get 5-6 hours of sleep this weekend 😅"

I had a friend whom I met in an open-source community. We hadn't been in touch for a while because of the distances of where we were. Coincidentally, we happened to be working in the same city. When we knew that we were in the same city, we decided to meet and catch up. We met over dinner and this person went on and on about his company and how cool the culture was there.

Towards the end, I jokingly said, "If your company is so cool, why don't you get me a job there?"

2 weeks later, he sends me an email address and asks me to send my resume to it.
1 more week later, HR from the company calls and asks whether I can come to office to chat.
I agree and head over there over lunch break. I _speak_ to the person who was going to be my manager and later to the CTO. The CTO asks me a few technological questions and sends me off.
1 week later, I call up HR just to know how I fared in the interview. They say that they'll give me an update within the week.
Next week I get a call from HR asking when I can join. Could I join with 2 weeks of notice period? I could try, the pay was almost double that I was already earning.
I speak to my existing boss about the offer and they offer me an immediate hike of 30%. That gives me a notion that I was already under-paid. I wouldn't want to continue working with an employer who knowingly paid me low (even though I was content with what I was getting already). I make my decision to quit. Puts in my 2-week notice period and join the new company on the said date.

Never have I been so furious whilst at work as yesterday, I am still super pissed about going back today but knowing it's only for another few weeks makes it baerable.

I have been the lead developer on a project for the last 3~ months and our CTO is the product owner. So every now and then he decides to just work on a feature he is interested in- fair enough I guess. But everything I have to go and clean up his horrendous code. Everything he writes is an absolute joke, it's like he is constantly in Hackathon mode "let's just copy and paste some code here, hardcoded shit there and forgot about separation of code- it all goes in 1 file".

So yesterday he added a application to the project and instead of reusing a shared data access layer he added an entirely new ORM, which is near identical to the existing ORM in use, for this one application.

Being anal about these things, the first thing I did was delete his shit and simply reference the shared library then refactor a little code to make it compatible.

WELL!! I certainly hit a nerve, he went crazy spamming messages on Slack demanding I revert as it broke ONE SINGLE QUERY that he hadn't checked in (he does 1 huge commit for 10 of everyone else's). I stuck to my principals and explained both ORM's are similar and that we only needed one, the second would cause a fragmented codebase for no benefit whatsoever.

The lead Dev was then forced to come and convince me to revert, again I refused and called out the shit quality of their code. The battle raged on via the public slack group and I could hear colleagues enjoying the heated debate, new users even started joining the group just to get in on mine and the cto's difference of opinion.

I even offered to fix his code for him if he were to commit it, obviously that was not taken well ;).

Once I finally got a luck at the cluster fuck of shit he had written it took me around 5 minutes to fix and I ever improved performance. Regardless he was having none of it. Still the demands to revert continued.

I left the office steaming after long discussions with the lead Dev caught in the middle.

Fortunately my day was salvages with a positive technical discussion that evening at a company with whome I had a job offer from.

I really hate burning bridges and have never left a company under bad terms but this dictator is making me look forward to breaking the news today I will be gone in 4 weeks.

*at front end job interview*
Me: so what kind of version control do you use?

CTO: well, one of the guys here developed our own system.. bla bla bla *turns around laptop*

Me: *sees internet explorer* NO THANKS 😬

Not a rant, just awesomeness:
At my company our CTO organizes a meeting every month that gives us devs a chance to present new technologies to each other, offer advice about workflows and give feedback about current situations. This allows us to constantly improve.
Thanks boss!

I applied for a job and they sent me a test to build a simple web app using the MERN stack (mongo, express,react, node), I passed the test, after a few days they call me for interviews, I passed the interviews and got accepted to work as a full stack developer.
Day one they send me the code base with thousands of lines of code and no documentation, I look through the codebase it uses Angular fucking JS, they tested me in React yet they give me Angular WTF?, I don't know Angular!. I look through the code again the app uses 4 different kinds of databases, MongoDB, MySQL, Redis & Dynamodb, I'm like WTF is this?
I ask the CTO why there is no documentation, why all these databases & why the fuck it is in Angular, he tells me to talk to the devs that previously worked on the codebase who live in India, I talk to them on skype, I get some information still not enough to get started, no proper documentation no database diagrams or any kind of diagrams.
So with no angular experience, I decided to just man up and learn Angular 7 first then sort out everything later, learning Angular 7 goes well. So I try to look at the code again, WTF? this does not look like the Angular I'm learning!, I check again and, lo and behold the fucking codebase uses the oldest version of Angular version 1.6 which is completely different from version 7! I'm like fuck this shit.

!!pointless story

Bug report comes in from a coworker. "Cloudinary uploads aren't working. I can't sign up new customers."

"I'll look into it" I say.

I go to one of our sites, and lo! No Cloudinary image loads. Well that can't be good.

I check out mobile app -- our only customer-facing platform. None of the images load! Multiple "Oops!" snackbars from 500 errors on every screen / after every action.

"None of our Cloudinary images load, even in the mobile app," I report.

Nobody seems to notice, but they're probably busy.

I go to log into the Cloudinary site, and realize I don't have the credentials.

"What are the Cloudinary credentials, @ceo?" I ask.

I'm met with more silence. I use this opportunity to look through the logs, try different URLs/transforms directly. Oddly, everything seems fine except on our site.

I check Slack again, and see nothing's changed, so I set about trying to guess the credentials.

Let's see... the ceo is basically illiterate when it come to tech, so it's probably not his email. It's a startup, and custom emails for things cost money, and haven't been a thing here forever, so it's probably oen of the CTO's email aliases. he likes dots and full names so that narrows it down. Now for the password.... his are always crappy (so they're "easy to remember") and usually have the abbreviated company name in them. He also likes adding numbers, generally two-digit numbers, and has a thing for 7s and 9s. Mix in some caps, spaces, order...

Took me a few minutes, but I managed to figured it out.

"Nevermind, I guessed them." I reported.

After getting into Cloudinary, I couldn't find anything amiss. Everything looked great. No outage warnings, metrics looked fine, images all loaded. Ex-cto didn't revoke payment or cancel the account.

I checked our app; everything started loading -- albeit slowly.

I checked the aforementioned site; after a few minutes, everything loaded there, too.

Not sure what else to do, and with everything appearing to work, I said "Fixed!" and closed the issue.

About 20 minutes later, the original person said "thanks" -- never did hear anything from the ceo. I've heard him chatting away in the other room the entire time.

Regardless, good thing for crappy passwords, eh?

So, as the lead UX/UI designer, I was working with the marketing officer on the new e-mail template of the company. It took us at least one week to get a good settle – 'cause, you know, she's so skilled on that – doing back and forth and arguing on every detail.

Then she sent me a PPT file with the content and wording for each kind of e-mail.
After 3 days of work, I finished implementing the template and pushed the project in production.

~3 months later
MO: How's your work going on the template?
Me: Erm, sorry? You mean, the e-mails?
MO: Yes! Can you show me the result?
Me: Well, the result is online for...like...3 months?
*Surprised* MO: Hum, yeah? But I didn't validate it!
*Wince* Me: Well, yes, you did, we worked together on it and we finally found a nice settle.
MO: Yes, but the content? Can you send me one of each kind so I can double-check?
Me: ...
*to the rescue* CEO (and husband of MO): It's OK, I've already validate them.
MO: Oh, ok. But I want to double-check. I'll do it later, ok.

~3 weeks later
MO: Can you tell me how I can receive the registration e-mail?
Me: ...
*to the rescue, joking* CTO: Well, did you try to turn your computer off and on again?
MO: Oh, you really think this will work? Let me save my work first!
Me: *BOOOOM*

TL;DR: The marketing officer of my company does nothing productive and is making the company losing a lot of money, but she also make me lose my time for bullshits.
At least I can laugh about it on devRant.

I'm the sole developer at work.

Literally the entire company, save myself, is sales people. (We have one remote mobile contractor as well, but he only does mobile; I'm responsible for everything else.)

I inherited a gigantic pile of nightmare from the previous "senior-level intern" solitary dev/CTO, and I'm still trying to figure out the bulk of it, meaning everything takes longer.

Anyway, we have a meeting roughly once a week, and during each of these -- and several times throughout each week -- the salespeople say things like "We should address this" or "This should be our top focus" or "We really need ___ so I can sell more merchants" or "___ doesn't work right; we should fix it." All of these "we"'s and "our"'s, of course, mean me.

So, today, I decided I'd make a list of everything I have to do, and their general size. Assuming large projects will take one month, medium projects will take one week, and small projects will take one day... I have four months, two weeks, and four days of work ahead of me. (yet I know one of those large projects will take at least two months...)

Make it stop ;;

I dont trust people who have LinkedIn tagline with any of these combinations.

Blockchain
Machine learning
Artificial Intelligence
Expert
Mentor
Advisor
CTO
Startup

Me: Hey let's do A to help the website.
PO: Yeah that sounds good. but let's do some research about it.
6 months later.
PO: Hay let's do A to help the website.
CTO/CEO/PO's boss: amazing idea. Here's an award and some money for that.
Me: What. The. F...

The riskiest dev choice...

How about "The riskiest thing you've done as a dev"? I have a great entry for that. and I suppose it was my choice to build the feature afterall.

I was working on an instance of a small MMO at a game company I worked for. The MMO boasted multiple servers, each of them a vastly different take on the base game. We could use, extend, or outright replace anything we wanted to, leading to everything from Zelda to pokemon to an RP haven to a top-down futuristic counterstrike. The server in this particular instance was a fantasy RPG, and I was building it a new leveling and experience system with most of the trimmings. (Talents, feats/perks, etc. were in a future update.)

A bit of background, first: the game's dev setup did not have the now-standard dev/staging/prod servers; everything ran on prod, devs worked on prod, players connected and played on prod, etc. Worse yet, there was no backup system implemented -- or not really. The CTO was really the only person with sufficient access. The techy CEO did as well, but he rarely dealt with anything technical except server hardware, occasionally. And usually just to troll/punish us devs (as in "Oops ! I pulled the cat5 ! ;)"). Neither of them were the most reliable of people, either. The CTO would occasionally remote in and make backups of each server -- we assumed whenever he happened to think of it -- and would also occasionally do it when asked, but it could take him a week, sometimes even up to a month to get around to it. So the backups were only really useful for retreiving lost code and assets, not so much for player data.

The lack of reliable backups and the lack of proper testing grounds (among the plethora of other issues at the company) made for an absolutely terrible dev setup, but that's just how it was, and that's what we dealt with. We were game devs, afterall. Terrible or not, we got to make games! What more could you ask for!? It was amazing and terrible and wonderful and the worst thing ever, all at the same time. (and no, I'm not sharing the company name, but it isn't EA or Nexon, surprisingly 😅)

Anyway, back to the story! My new leveling system also needed to migrate players' existing data, so... you can see where this is going.

I did as much testing and inspection of my code as I could, copied it from a personal dev script to the server's xp system, ... and debated if I really wanted to click [Apply]. Every time I considered it, I went back to check another part or do yet more testing. I ended up taking like 40 minutes to finally click it.

And when I did... that was the scariest button press of my life. And the scariest three seconds' wait afterwards. That one click could have ruined every single player's account, permanently lost us players ...

After applying it, I immediately checked my character to see if she was broken, checked the account data for corruption or botched flags, checked for broken interactions with the other systems....

Everything ended up working out perfectly, and the players loved all of the new features. They had no idea what went into building them, and certainly had no idea of what went into applying them, or what could have gone wrong -- which is probably a good thing.

Looking back, that entire environment was so fragile, it's a wonder things didn't go horribly wrong all the time. Really, they almost never did. Apocalypses did happen, but were exceedingly rare, and were ususally fixed quickly. I guess we were all super careful simply because everything was so fragile? or the decent devs were, at least. We never trusted the lessers with access 😅 at least on the main servers where it mattered. Some of the smaller servers... well, we never really cared about those.

But I'm honestly more surprised to realize I've never had nightmares of that button click. It was certainly terrifying enough.

But yay! Complete system overhaul and migration of stored and realtime player data! on prod! With no issues! And lots of happy players! Woooooo!

Thinking back on it makes me happy 😊

CTO wants all variables in file to be same length. You cant have "start" and "stop". You must have "start" and "cease".

I'm a bad influence.

It's been a tradition for me to keep a bottle of 'desk whiskey' buried in a drawer at work. A couple weeks ago, I started inviting cube mates over for a drink on Fridays as five pm rolled around.

Soon one of them brought in a bottle of scotch. Then another.
Started observing the afternoon drink on days other than Friday, more folks got involved...

Now the CTO talks about "Whiskey O' Clock" daily.

🍺

Last Friday company-wide call consisted of the sales CEO bossman, the remote contractor dev, and myself. The only topic of discussion was CTO-bashing (bossman's favorite). Neither person had much of anything to say about their week, and they didn't want to hear my rather-lengthy summary either (I did a lot). All they wanted to do was bash the CTO (API Guy).

The CEO asked how many hours I had worked, and seemed annoyed when I said less than 40. Well screw you. Monday was Christmas, and Sunday was Encroaching Estranged Asshole Day. (Earlier rant)

I've been spending most of my time trying to learn the steaming mountain of rancid hippo shit that API Guy squeezed out, since he's leaving forever in 10 days. Sure, CEO bossman says he'll still be around to answer questions, but even with him right next to me in the office he's less than useful. After he's gone and finally feeling free of this farce? It'll be worth fuck-all.

So bossman is mad at me for both not working enough over Christmas, and not pumping out features at a frantic pace despite multiple explanations of why this is a bad idea. And he didn't care about what work I actually did do.

My every interaction with him makes me angry. Whenever I -- or anyone else -- does something he doesn't approve of, seemingly no matter the reasoning, he makes it out to be a failure on their part, and like he can't trust them as much now.

Well I'm sorry we're trying to make sure our websocket works perfectly before putting it in the hands of our customers who rely on it for cash processing.

I'm sorry I'm trying to recall printers that aren't configured properly, which also prevent customers from using our goddamn service they're paying for.

I'm sorry I'm trying to learn how everything works while I still have someone to talk to and ask questions of.

I'm sorry I'm preparing for the day I have to take over and have you breathing down my neck. Once API Guy's gone I'll be responsible for everything, and you'll be yelling at me and having a @Root bashing session instead if I don't know how to fix everything right away.

But no. All you care about is that I talk to you about what's going in so you can micromanage development despite having zero fucking understanding of goddamn anything. All you ever fucking want is the next shiny feature you can push to make more sales / keep your current contacts happy. Doesn't fking matter if it makes development awful later; that's tomorrow's problem. And yet you have the gall to bash API Guy over and over and over again for the codebase being a mess? Sure he's a terrible programmer, but been putting up with this exact same shit for five years. No wonder it's a mountain of rancid hippo shit. That's as much your fault as his, asshole.

I'm so sorry you "have serious concerns" about me. I don't want to put up with your shit either.

Fuck off and die.

I had been a "hobby" programmer for well over a decade, with my primary career being in repair or a "technician". I had taught myself dozens of languages because it was fun, but never really accomplished much.

I was laid off from my job as a technician and I found myself listless and without purpose. I started doing development again on random things to pass the time and I ended up volunteering as a developer for a game I had played for years.

At the same time I had an uncle who encouraged me to consider software as a career. These two things gave me the confidence to apply for a local software job I saw on Indeed.

They called me pretty quickly, and I was brutally honest. "No, I don't have a degree. I'm self-taught. I have no professional experience really."

I got a proficiency exam anyway and I took it - apparently doing well enough on it that the CTO called me a week later. We had a long talk and I finally asked him why he called me.

He told me that while a degree means something, the passion to learn this job means more to him. It was a month before I was offered the position, and I graciously accepted it.

We had a call about my compensation before starting. It was rather low, but we both agreed that my skill level was quite an unknown.

A year later and my pay was bumped up a sizable amount. My skills are defined now and growing rapidly as new challenges are sent my way. I went from a naive hobbyist to a professional in a short period of time.

I realized that I was always a professional. I had a desire to learn and a desire to do things the right way. I may not have known what to call things. I didn't know some of the design patterns I had used over the years were standards that had names and meaning.

I basically work two jobs now. My full-time job and also on the game that helped propel my career forward and gave me the confidence to reach for it.

As for my hobby? I turned to electronics and the maker community. It's a nice marriage with my programming skill set, and I never knew how rewarding a blinking LED would be. :)

I joined a company 6 months ago.
No CTO.
No development process.
Spagetti code.
Takes loads of new requirements on top.

Later
I advised the software head and managing director on how to improve our software development process.
New tools
Less requirement good quality software
New products and micro services.

Both of them agreed but they said they are waiting for new CTO to confim as an authority and responsibility.

Well I cant do much just to do my work.

1 month ago new CTO joined
Revised whatever I advised and implementing it right. I like it.

Got my confirmation after 6 months instead of 3 months.

CTO called me in for review and gave me 2/5. And said you need to improve more.

I asked him, in what do I need to improve.
He replies in technologies and development process.
And he takes credit for all changes and implementation.

I argued about it. I already suggested what you did but was ignore because we didnt have CTO.
Hes like ignored me.
Fucking you CTO.

CTO joined us to interview a web fullstack today.

Amongst many battle analogies, he said "Fuck the corrupt and the weak. We keep only the best here"

If he watches 300 a couple more times, I think he will start wearing leather underwear and a red cape to work.

I'm the leader of a team developing a project at my company. Recently I had an accident which required me to have a surgery, and I was out for the last month.

Since it's an important project, our CTO reassigned a Xamarin dev to help my team (in JEE) while I'm out, you know, cause "C# looks like Java". The guy had to write a file stream handler, and - though the guy does a really good job - it's funny to see how desperately he's trying to understand how Java works with streams. Censored because of reasons.

I met with the CTO of a local tech company today for a beer, at the recommendation of a friend who currently works at the company. They're looking for Software Engineers and wanted to see if I'd be a good fit.

I'm not actively looking to leave my current job, as I love it there. I was just curious to see what other opportunities were out there.

After the beer, he pretty much offered me the job on the spot for $30,000 to $40,000 more than my current salary, along with benefits. When I asked if there was any sort of technical interview, he said that this meeting was actually the technical interview, and that by the time he had finished his first beer, he could already tell that I would be a good fit. He wants me to meet with his Lead Architect and CEO soon just to see if we all click and then we'll go from there.

The only problem is that I really love my current company. I love the work, the atmosphere, the autonomy, and my coworkers. But an extra $30k to $40k per year is a lot of money.

If everything works out and they give me an official written offer, I'm going to see if my current job will counteroffer. I know my boss would happily counteroffer if he's given authorization from the higher-ups, it's just a matter of exactly how much they're able to counteroffer.

!!office drama

I haven't been around much in recent weeks. Due to family illness, christmas shopping, dealing with estranged parents, and brooding over the foregoing, I haven't had a lot of time or energy left to myself.

tl;dr: The CTO ("API Guy") is ostensibly getting fired, and I might be taking over his job. I don't know if I should accept, try to stave this off, or simply flee.

------

Anyone who has been following my recent rants knows that API Guy is my boss, and he often writes terrible code. It's solid and unbreakable, but reading it is a *nightmare.* One of our applications is half the length of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, and it's difficult to tell what code is live and what amounts to ancient, still-active landmines. This is one application; we have several, most of which I've never even looked at.

Ostensibly the code is so terrible because the company grew extremely quickly, and API Guy needed to cram in lots of unexpected / planned-against features. From what I can see, that seems about right, but I haven't checked timeframes [because that's a lot of work!].

Here's a brief rundown of the situation.
- API Guy co-founded the company with the CEO.
- CEO and API Guy have been friends for a long time.
- CEO belives the company will fail with API Guy as head of tech.
- They could just be testing me; I have zero way of knowing. API Guy seems totally oblivious, and CEO seems sincere, so this feels pretty doubtful.
- CEO likes pushing people around. CEO believes he can push me around. API Guy doesn't budge. (I probably won't, either, except to change task priorities.)
- API Guy's code is huge and awful, but functional.
- API Guy is trying to clean up the mess; CEO doesn't understand (maybe doesn't care).
- Literally nobody else knows how the code works.
- Apart from API Guy and myself, the entire company is extroverted sales people.
- None of these sales people particularly like me.
- Sales people sell and sell and sell without asking development if they can pull enough magic features out of their hat to meet the arbitrary saleslines. (because the answer is usually no)
- If I accept, I would be the sole developer (at first) and responsible for someone else's mountain of nightmarish code, and still responsible for layering on new features at the same pace as he. Pay raise likely, but not guaranteed.
- My getting the position is contingent upon the CEO and the investors, meaning it's by no means guaranteed.
- If I don't accept, likely API Guy will be replaced with someone else of unknown ability, who doesn't know the code, and whom I must answer to regardless. Potentially OK, potentially a monumental disaster.

Honestly, it feels like I'm going to be screwed no matter what course I choose.

Perhaps accepting is slightly better?

The best would be to assume the position of CTO and keep API Guy around -- but that would feel like an insult to him. I doubt he'd be okay with it. But maybe. Who knows? I doubt the CEO would seriously consider that anyway.

I feel like a lamb between a dim, angry rhino, and an oblivious one.

!rant

So I have been recently hired at my current job for leading a product team. We're a small team working in a big company which have other teams working on other projects. I like my work and I have been appreciated for my work which I did since my stay here.
So I and my manager were discussing about how more can we automate our workflow to reduce the time to get the final builds. It was late in night. Suddenly someone asked, 'did I hear automation?'. We turned to see our CTO listening to our conversation. He told us that he's having trouble with automation in his project. I was new, so I didn't know what did he work on, so I asked.
Me: So what did you guys work on?
CTO: well, we work on automating stuff for clients and save them money. We earn 100x revenue than your product (In a more humble tone). I am currently looking for someone who can lead a team of developers for handling the automation scripting part. *Provides description of the candidate* Do you guys know someone like that?
Manager: (pointing towards me) It looks like his description.
CTO: I want him in my team then.
Manager: That can't happen, he's required in very important stuff and you're not allowed to poach.
CTO: I think I have the right to poach 😉
Me: OK, so how much raise am I going to get to switch teams (to the manager) and how much am I going to get to stay? Whoever gives me more I am theirs.
CTO: I like this guy

It's day three, I am still awaiting for one of them to tell me who won 🙁

PS: They both are friends with each other.

I was laid off right before Christmas because my manager would not give me any work (bully.. possibly discrimination). I asked for work to do for 2 weeks, even coming up with things to contribute on my own. My contributions were rejected and the lead developer agreed with me that it was fucked up but did nothing. The little work that I was given was always completed above standard and the lead dev had made comments praising my self tasked contributions but each rejection I was told it would be shelved for version 1.2.

Finally fed up, feeling as though I was being completely ignored, I told the lead dev I was going home half day early if there was nothing for me to do. The next day the CTO fired me and even lied to my recruiter telling him that I had not shown up for work for 3 days (easily disproven).

It's now the first of the year, probably not the best time to be looking for a new job, and my current outlook is that I am not going to be able to pay my rent at the end of the month.

My motivation has diminished, my confidence is gone. Job prospects are few. I don't know how to proceed.

Previous job:
- Every dev needs to connect to a remote server, and do the coding there because the bosses are afraid that we will "steal" their legacy spaghetti written by the CTO in 2006 (the current year was 2016-2017).
- There are no QAs, because "why do you devs need mommy to look after your codes?"
- Bosses think it's our duty to stay extra hours without overtime payment while talking bullshit about a culture that promotes work life balance. You receive no bonus for staying late, but if you leave work 15 minutes early, HR will have a serious talk with you the next day.
- Bosses require "evidence" when you submit a leave request. For example, you tell them you're taking a vacation, they'll ask you for a copy of airline tickets, hotel bookings, etc.
- Bosses spend a ton on hosting parties for the customers while we're using 6-7 year-old laptops
- The CEO loves firing people for ridiculous reasons. Once he considered firing a guy because the way he walks is funny

Once, at my first job, the CEO of the company sent a group email in which he essentially lambasted my ability to do my job.

I wasn't even hired as a programmer, I was a data entry guy who learned how to code on the job, and at this point I was literally the only person writing code for the company. I regularly worked 12+ hours every day, and even though I had to learn practically everything on my own I was still getting things done -- at least, I would have gotten things done if the CEO didn't keep pulling me off of my projects to work on whatever his latest ultra-important-idea-of-the-week was. I was even working for an 8 hr/day, 5 day/week salary, putting in extra hours for free.

But no, my sacrifices and hard work weren't good enough in the CEO's eyes, and he chose to say that to multiple people in an email, including investors in our startup. I don't remember exactly what was said, but whatever it was made me so livid I couldn't do any work; every time I sat down to code, I thought about that email and it so infuriated me that I couldn't concentrate. It took me twelve hours just to calm down enough to get back to coding.

After that, I refused to communicate with the CEO except through my boss, the CTO.

worst interview was about 2 years ago. I found this job as on a famous website, I applied for a desktop dev. position...the job seemed really easy, after 10 minutes the so-called CTO asked me:" how much do you know C hash?" me:"what?" him:"C hash...the Microsoft programming language" I thanked him for his time and went home crying ( he meant c# )...after a month I found out the company had gone bankrupt...I think I know why..

I spent an hour arguing with the CTO, pushing for having all our new products' data in the database (wow) with an API I could hit to fetch said data (wow) prior to displaying it on our order page.

He never actually agreed with me, but he finally acquiesced and wrote the migrations, API, and entered my (rather contrived) placeholder data. (I've been waiting on the boss for details and copy for three days.)

Anyway, it's now live on QA. but. I don't know where QA is for this app, and it's been long enough that i'm kind of afraid to ask.

Does that sound strange?
well.

We have seven (nine?) live applications (three of which share a database), and none of their repos match their URLs, nor even their Heroku app names. (In some of these Heroku names, "db" is short for the app's namesake, while in the rest it's short for "database").

So, I honestly have no idea where "dbappdev" points to, and I don't have access to the DNS records to check. -.-

What's more: I opened "dbappdev" on Heroku and tested out his new API -- lo and behold! it returns nada. Not a single byte. (Given his history I expected a 500, so this is an improvement, I think. Still totally useless, however.)

And furthermore: he didn't push the code to github, so I cannot test (or fix) it locally.

just. UGH.

every day with this guy, i swear.

I started this new freelance project where I am building some android libraries for the client. Anyways, during meeting I was about to present my results and suddenly backend seemed to be down. I looked into the round "are your servers down?"
Team Lead: "Yeah our cto, also our only backend dev, is developing a new feature."
Me: "Okay but why is production down?",
Team Lead: "Ah dont worry we always test on production. We have a pretty solid hardware, we will even upgrade it soon!"
Me:"... How about you just separate your stage environments and have a develop environment?"
Client: "see, this is where our strength is. We dont need a develop stage we have very strong hardware and our backend is fully in PHP"

Thanks God I'm a freelancer

When you read a CV and it states "I am an entrepreneur and have run various startup websites". Experience "Junior Developer... Developer... CTO... Developer" WTF!

No. No. No. You have had personal projects/a blog which is not a startup and does not make you an entrepreneur.

CV goes to trash pile.

Our PM is on vacation. And our CTO/CEO takes control of the PM role.

So today he decided it was time to just start a customer change request. Regardless of the customer not having approved the actual solution and estimate.

He just said that he did not want to waste any more time talking to the customer. Now they are gonna get what ever he thinks they want.

I predict this to backfire in a fabulous way. What could possible go wrong🤔

Beginning of a Hackaton and the CTO calls everyone up and tries to instigate everyone with this gem:

"Challenge yourself and what we have. For example, instead of AWS use Swagger."

🤨
Nobody says anything but has the same WTF expression ... How do these person become tech lead?

Feeling like I've gone back in time about 15 years!

Just told my CTO about various improvements we could make to the development process. Things like git, continuous delivery, agile project management apps such as Jira, task management such as Gulp, etc.

His response - "never heard of them. I bet they'll pass in a few months. Just another round of fads".

!rant
Observed a full deployment the other day and discovered it's extremely inefficient. I proposed an idea to fix it, and was shot down by a senior dev on the team. I was ranting about how asinine the process was and how my process could reduce the amount of time and training required to do deployments with out any additional cost or overhead. A senior dev from another department over heard me, found my workspace and told me (in a nutshell), "write up a document about why the current process is garbage and how yours is better, and how it works, I'll review it and we'll get it worded and formatted right. When we finish the document, I'll forward it to the CTO of your department with your name on it and my recommendation for review." Fuck yeah. 😈😎

I was on call with a colleague. A very quiet guy that always made the weirdest commentaries.

Anyhow, I received a message about a datacenter issue. Checked everything and it seemed a load balancer failure, so one of us should go to the datacenter (it was Saturday).

My colleague volunteered and after 4 hours I still could not see the changes. He wasn't replying the messages or anything.

I ran to the office, saw his phone on the table and went to the datacenter.

I open the door and the crazy dude is banging 2 chicks (paid version) on the room, bottle of vodka around... he gets scared and threatens to throw water and vodka on the blades if I fire him. I am so speechless that he calms down, I fix the balancer and we go home...

I was so pissed and impressed... I had to fire him. He didn't show up on monday and resigned. I still told the CTO and we could see the videos of his experience on the cctv... funny dude...

I am UI developer. The fucking domain model which we have in our project changes very frequently (once in a week (f**k)).

There is one person who is backend developer in this project. I call him TATTI because code he wrotes is "maha tatti".

Now real story,
Whene ever he makes any chnages to, so called, very complex domain model, he even doesn't inform me to reflect changes in UI. So whenever it goes on production, our boss abuse me for not updating UI.

Fucking tatti, just message me what should be changed or not and I really don't understand why they need changes in domain model every week.

F**g cto, decide domain structure first and then tell your team to start implementing it.

Other thing, when ever I ask tatti any doubt about any field is needed to display in UI or not because it is removed or added in domain model, he fucking chutiya starts explaining me whole project instead of just telling yes or no.

I don't care what your fucking backend does. Just tell me what is needed or not. And also he is not sure whether to keep that field or not even he had made that change.

He tells, "ha ye field chahie (after 5 seconds) , nahi wese to hum kahi use nahi kr rhe, ye sirf furture ke liye rkha tha use hta do (after 5 seconds), ek kam kro Mr xyz(another back end developer) se puch lo"

Fuck you maha tatti. And due to this i left that project and switched to other.

Salesperson makes commission on sales, CTO gets bonus for going to out of office meetings, designer gets bonus for every design finished. What does the web developer get?

Answer: "we can't afford to give out bonuses just for doing your job."

There are 10 websites to build in the next 6 months, 3 brand new offices in different states that need it equipment ordered and installed by me, and the other 160 clients who all think their edits are most important.

And to top it all off, every time I give an estimate for the work, boss says "just give it to them." Gee, maybe you could afford to pay me a living wage or incentivize me to keep working 6+ hours a night at home if you stopped giving away everything I build for free.

You lower the value of my work and every other web developer out there when you tell clients that the website I built them isn't worth paying for. If every one of the free sites on my list was just charged the minimum $10k, I'm looking at $200k on this board that could have been used to hire me some help or increase my pay to make me feel appreciated.

I love my job and the people I work with, but when you aren't making enough to pay the bills and you work 70+ hours a week something has to change.

I don't go to the doctor and tell him what tools to use. I was just told to delete the .scss files because they were taking up too much room and to put all partials and images at root instead of in descriptive folders.

Today the CEO asked us to create KPIs to follow a junior tasks, daily.
The problem it's he wants KPIs to foretell problems or delays in his tasks.

The junior is analyzing 14 years old C++ code, made by an electrical engineer who had all worsts practices possible when coding.

We explained that we couldn't make real, true KPI that would foretell the advancement due to complexity of the legacy and the fact that the junior had NEVER USED C++.

SO.... He asked to know how many code lines he made daily and an estimate of how many lines he'll have to do to complete the task.... So he could foretell advancement.

....
....

It was the 5th time in less than 60 days, that the CEO bypass totally the CTO to ask some stupid useless shit. So now all developpers have resign, complaining about the CEO actions/stupidity.

Well, fuck. The CTO of our startup decided to migrate data of our hundred thousand customers from a stable functioning platform to an in-house unstable platform with severe performance issues, to "save" costs, despite our repeated requests. He made us not have any contingency plans because he wanted to "motivate" us to complete the migration.

Result- we have a thousand customers reporting major issues daily, which is causing loss of revenue to both us and them. The company ran out of funding. Most of the team members were fired. And he's expecting the rest of us to magically fix everything. Dunno what kind of office politics is this, in which you're sabotaging Your Own company.

Looking for a new job now to get out of this hellhole. I really used to love this company. Feels sad to see it ruined like this.

Released my first desktop application to the users (developers). Good luck to me. The CTO and the other developers I work with are so nice. Before it was released, something wasn't working. I was so nervous and we thought it was a big thing that requires a few hours to fix. Instead of yelling at me, they simply gave me a few hours to fix it.

It turns out I just forgot to replace an index name where it's fetching the data and correcting it took a few seconds. I told the CTO and the developers immediately and apologized for missing it out. They all just responded "hey, no problem" and was happy it was working.

Seems like a simple conversation but god, that "no problem" response mean a lot to me. I haven't heard it for a very long time. I'm used to minor shit exploding to my face. It makes me wanna wank while crying tears of joy.

Roses are red, violets are blue, most code sucks, and the CTO does too.

My CTO in the 'good old times', when he still talked to me and shared his wisdom, once told me what I should know about oop and explained me the world of programming and what really matters:

CTO about oop and C#:
"I think this object orientated stuff is overrated and useless. You don't get finished. I write everything in one file. You should do that too. The fastest way is always the best one."

So, dear readers, you might think, he maybe understood, what oop means. I have to disappoint you. He is as FUCKING STUPID as he sounds.
He didn't understand the whole concept of the language C# or oop.
He doesn't use properties, every single method is static void and there is nothing like an object.

Since there is more from where that came from, this will be continued...

Tl;dr porn is ruining my life.

Today I had a meeting with the project leader and the CTO. They had bad news, which did not come as a surprise.

In short, they said I did not pass the expectations they had, and unfortunately need to find somewhere else to work.

This is my third time being told to find somewhere else to work, and I really can't describe how it feels. I was even told that I maybe I should reconsider my future as a developer, and kids can do programming better than I can do.

It's really difficult when all you've done in the last year is to learn and improve your current skills.

I have good grades, a unique experience, built lots of unique projects, and a GitHub portfolio with high activity. The apps I've built are used by many customers today. I also have a blog with 600 k views where I share dev tips.

The thing with this work if I'm going, to be honest, is that they expected someone with senior experience, and unfortunately, I don't have that thus it takes many years to build it. So I started here with almost scratch experience of the things they needed.

On the other hand, it feels like a relief in that I can finally focus on my personal business. And maybe this wasn't the right place to work, maybe it requires a couple of jobs until I find the right place.

Despite the bumpy ride, and what such people tell you, I'm not going to give up.

10 years ago, my school teacher told me I was going to be a carpenter (nothing against that) but I manage to get an MSc degree in the engineering field.

There's a lot of shit going into your head when you receive such message like "What if they are true, what if I can't handle programming, what if I'll never be anything etc".

I'm not giving up, this is just a great story every successful person has.

What my number one problem is, and I will f*** win is porn addiction. Get rid of that, and the future is bright.

Sorry for mixing so many things here.

Our CTO thinks that front end development is just “a bunch of html tags”

CTO: I told you to be careful with the live bucket and now it's completely exposed to the public. I don't think I can trust you with this can you please generate your files somewhere else. This is unacceptable.
*Me frantically trying to figure out what's going on*
*5mins later*
CTO: ?? Any ideas?
Me: A theory
Workers were executing function X which called save on a model that dint have a path name but instead it called function Y which generated a path for the object to be saved in. This has overridden all the original objects with newly generated ones.

I created my versions out of the newly generated ones. Here's the command and the functions mentioned above.
*Hands over code/links etc*

CTO: Oh I guess I just panicked hahah

All of the functions and commands were written by him and executed... By him.

CTO: Trigger email to everyone when internet goes down. Do this by EOD.
Me: OK
Later
How could I send email without internet.
Confused....

Me (front dev): We should use nodejs for this project...
CTO (back): Nah... Fu*k Node! Php ftw
Now: we have a php framework with a nodejs server for the front end

Applied for a company and received a contract today. I can't believe what I'm looking at. (Graduate software engineer)

- £30k starting salary
- 28 days annual holiday
- no benefits whatsoever
- no work schemes
- reserve the right to tell you to work overtime without extra pay
- reserve the right to work you from home on weekends in emergencies
- you will only work on what they tell you to and nothing else

This company has awful reviews all over the internet which I didn't see until after applying.

Going into their offices for interviews, all I saw was a bunch of slaves on their screens, no one talking, no one smiling.

Spoke to the CTO whose words were, quote: "we only care about making money, we don't care what people are saying about us as long as they are using our service and paying us."

What the actual fuck?

My previous CTO and I had a one-on-one session at the end of his first month. He wanted to have these to ensure everything was going smoothly. We never had another one after this.

Anyway, I'm a very open and honest person, so during this session, I told him some information in confidence. I told him I was looking for another career in an industry I cared more about. This seemed to set off a red flag for him. Originally, he had said this conversation would have stayed between the two of us. To my surprise, the following week, the CEO calls me in for a meeting and offers me a raise in hopes it would make me stick around longer.

I want to clarify that I am very grateful for the increased salary, but also slightly disturbed by the lack of trust. I'm sure someone else who knows they would be leaving the company soon might feel pressured by this situation.

I accepted the raise and met with the founders of my new company that same afternoon to sign a contract. Obviously, my red flag was justified.

Heh, so I was working in tech doing the physical side of the department (going and moving computers or hardware fixes etc.)

Anyways since I got that job I noticed some of our recurring systems tickets are time consuming so I wrote some scripts to speed up the parts that I could.
(Like getting us all the useful information for hunting down missing machines or machines that haven't been able to be backed up in a while)

So yeah, made the scripts and some higher ups were like great you should submit them to our repo so they don't just disappear. Do it and get told by one of the like cto kinda guys that, "instead of doing a script to do what the original script should do, maybe go in and fix our original one."

So I told him, I don't get paid enough to fix your guys scripts, I don't know perl(which is what those ones are in) and honestly it's not my department for fixing those scripts, it's yours.

I had made a big post about what my scripts did and gave access to them and what they could have fixed in an hour they argued with me for months about just fixing their originals instead.

So now I've just actually gotten promoted out of that dept and into another where I will finally get paid to do more code, so I was closing my last tickets and the "trying to add my scripts to their repo" was one. The guy had denied my PReq Esso I closed the ticket thinking meh.

This guy re opens and again says just fix the scripts. Luckily I had done a personal repo for the scripts so others in my (now old) dept can keep using them. So I said I'm not in that department anymore, I made them available to the others and I still don't know perl. Not sure what your wanting me to do...

Got a laugh when he replied "oh yeah, just heard about the promotion... Congrats.. Where's the repo?"

I feel like I won finally

I switched my job about 2 months ago. This was my first switch after college (in 7 years). I was at a senior position and was not learning anything new for few months and got really bored.
I had asked for a 100% hike in new company, they gave me over 150%. Apart from this, they offer free food and snacks (or reimburse if you order your food from outside). Unlimited leaves and work from home option. No fixed working hours (I see people working for only 5-6 hours some days). No sign of politics yet. People are very humble and help you out even on silly queries. Company is growing at a very fast pace, it was named in fastest x growing companies about a month ago in some report with growth rate of about 1000%.
I see people around me with so less experience than me but so much knowledge. Feels like I am fresher again and learning so much from them. FYI, I had worked in same field (tech) for initial 3 years of my career. Looking at seniors I am finally able to set goals. 
This one time I saw CTO awake at 3 am collaborating actively in resolution of a production issue.
Having seen so much positive, I went over 100 reviews on Glassdoor to find out the only 2 negatives points ever written, one of them was slow Lift in building. The other a

We are building this big-data engine for a client's product for which we were using a cluster on GCP and they were billed ~1100$ for the last month's usage.
The CTO - the CHIEFFUCKING TECHNOLOGY OFFICER told us to hook up 5-6 laptops in our server room and create our own cluster because they cannot afford so much bill.

I rant a lot about my old job and learned a lot about horrible management. Honestly, it was just one disappointment after another.

Let's observe the fact that the CEO, COO, and the newly hired CTO are all friends. Nepotism at its finest.

When re-designing the Front-End and planning new features with a hired agency, should we include the developers familiar with the current stack in the sprint?

I guess not.

When having "secret meetings" about rebranding the company, should the Marketing Manager be informed?

I guess not.

Now, I know there are mixed feelings about this, but the truth is, we have three unqualified individuals in management positions who clearly did not have the best interests and personal growth of their employees in this 14-person start-up at heart.

All of the employees have skills and experience which could easily be applicable to larger companies with better pay and benefits. But we chose to work for a small start-up because we wanted to have our voices heard and make a difference in the growth of company. When you take that liberty away, then what's the point of even working there anymore?

During my 7-months there, 9 people had resigned, including myself and the marketing manager. Should this be a red flag?

I hope so.

Job Interview for a CTO role for a premium employer, a big law firm.

All is going well, I am telling them about my years of experience doing complex software integrations in business environments. Talking CRM/ERP, project management and development with external service providers. I tell them I want a salary of 100k and they nod in silence.

Then out of the blue one of the three stakeholders/managers leans over for a final question:
"Soo, we have this really big IT problem and if you would happen to know a solution to it, you would really prove your worth: I have these 10k+ E-Mails in my Outlook folder which doubles as an archive and Outlook keeps getting slower all the time. What can we do?"

That moment when the CTO fucks up your code

The FCC Chairman is going ahead with his plan to repeal net neutrality despite objections from fellow commissioners, the CTO, more than a hundred members of Congress, senators and of course, the people.

What the fuck is wrong with this guy? How far up your own fucking ass does your head have to be to ignore basically everyone's vote against you? What the fuck. This guy is a really piece of fucking work. I hope this bounces back to bite him in the ass real hard.

The first time I caused a massive error on production.

The good news was the site didn't go completely down. The bad news, however, was that it went down for 60% of our users, and because it's only partial, it got detected only after about two hours.

Everyone halted what they were doing to help investigate the issue. When it turned out that my latest commit caused the error, I was told to fix it... with the CTO and senior software architects watching.

It all happened because I deleted one too many line, an if statement, making the accompanying else statement a complete nonsense. It was a corner case code unforeseen by the QA guy.

The attached meme perfectly describes my feeling for the rest of the month following that accident.

I just gave a successful demo to the CEO and CTO of a company I'm doing some contract work for. The questions they were asking led to me going off script, luckily it all worked!

My CTO want me to use Github for Microsoft Excel, coz he liked the idea that we can find out who wrote what.

Are CTOs so dumb, or I have bad luck ?

When I was a graduate I often had to do proof of concepts and one had to be done by the weekend, I'd only been given it on the Wednesday. After a few sleepless nights I had it working or so I thought. On the Friday afternoon the CTO had a look at it and spotted a bug, he told me about it and I stayed in the office until about 10 when I finally managed to get some kind of fix in place. I emailed him told him I thought but was working and shouldn't happen again.

A few hours later no response I get a phone call from him screaming, shouting and swearing calling me useless and a waste of space etc. Etc. To the point I logged in desperately trying to fix the issue in a very hastily written integration and ended up having quite a major panic attack woke up on the floor and immediately went back to work. On the Saturday morning one of the senior Devs logged in and managed to fix it in the database and everything went fine in the end.

I went into work on Monday fully expecting to be fired from the way the CTO was speaking to me, I went to my line manager at the time and he just said don't worry. I left it in his
hands and things went back to normal. That call put a pretty serious dent in my confidence for years, but I learned a few valuable lessons which I stick to today.

Never work on serious shit after 6, use a second mobile for work which is turned off at 5 o'clock, properly test all fixes and always ALWAYS have someone in between graduates and senior management because honestly they can't handle the shit that's flung from above.

Had a talk with my mentor and the CTO today.
They made very clear that they'd want to keep me employed after I finished my bachelor and briefly asked about my plans.
I am happy and this kind of gave me some more peace of mind concerning job security.

Thing is though, I don't know yet what I want to do in two years from now. There are some possibilities and of course I don't know how my private life will develop.

If I stay there, I could finish my bachelor and then do a master halftime, like I do now with my bachelor - or I could stop at my bachelor and start working full-time again.
I rather want to stay there - though I strongly dislike the 9 to 5 job model, the work would be in a field I'm interested in. My colleagues are a nice bunch of people and I respect them a lot, especially the team I work with.

On the other hand, I always thought about freelancing and was researching possibilities during the last year. My skills are not so easy to translate into a freelancing job, though, if I don't want to do at least 50% software development.

Or I could get a job somewhere else which would have the charms of starting from scratch. Many new experience, much new things, wow.
Maybe also a better salary though if I'd be doing the job for the money only, I'd probably have worked elsewhere.

...

I'm usually quite relaxed about my future plans but some of these things were on my mind for some time now, also, I'm not sure whether I can "define" my future just yet.

Also, I'm overthinking it, yes.

I will have another talk in about a month.
No pressure, right?

Back then, whatever finished tasks I have done, our CTO always contradicts my idea and finds a way to humiliate me. I don't get the point why he did that. Probably, he didn't want me to excel at something or he really does have crab mentality. I already reported this issue to our CEO because I was being harassed and submitted my resignation letter.
And boom! Guess what? It looks like our CTO just stepped a chicken manure and treats me nicely like a princess.

P.S. To be honest, it took him like a couple of months to step down and act normal like nothing happened. Really appreaciated the A-ffort, though!

Me - "I need to find the children"
CTO- "Okay. How many?"

It takes about 10 minutes to realize the conversation you just had

I managed to get a new dell XPS 15 with uhd display, 16GB RAM and a nice i7 for work.

My boss previously asked for advice from me for which laptop to get, he ignored my advice which was for him to get a nice surface book pro for his excel activities

Instead he got a shitty Mac book air (who are these people who like the airs?). As his cto I was upset he didn’t trust his tech guy to choose him a powerful laptop that was useful.

Anyway, he saw my new laptop this week and a contractor was admiring it. My boss then said why didn’t you tell me to get this one? (The surface pro is the same spec but with tablet and pen ability).

What a dick. I’m still mad he didn’t listen to me. And now he is saying I never told him.

Macs are shit btw. This dell is great and I don’t know how we lived without uhd screens before.

So my office manager decided to ban kitchen utensils in the office. Part of the reason was that there was too much stealing. Apparently too many mugs, knives, plates & spoons have gone missing for it to be just through loss.

I tried to reason with this office manager. I asked if we really want to create a culture of mistrust where we ban basic utilities like we’re children.

I appealed to the business logic do we really want freelancers going out to grab a coffee 10 minutes a day over a period of a year.

I tried to appeal to the digital nature of the office can we “source the solution from the office”

The other office have to bring in their own utensils but the other office has a canteen.

Essentially I feel like this was a power issue a decision was made I’m not allowed to question it.

Apparently my “behaviour” has been flagged with the CTO. 🤣🤨

I have to stir my tea with a knife unless I put stuff in my desk.

As a solution I decided to reach out to several green companies that provide disposable cutlery and kitchen where they agreed to send a sample which I put in the kitchen. I have a feeling this will be taken as hostile move in of what is: a solution.

Seriously W T actual F.

Please allow me to share my thoughts since I can't totally outrage my frustration because we have this so-called fasting to control our anger towards a person we currently disagree with.

A letter from your loving, sincere, pretty and gorgeous working partner to my young, chubby, smart and clever colleague:

Please do cooperate in times of live editing from the FTP since CTO is not and will never be going to appreciate version control since CTO is too tired for giving a shit and just want deliverables be delivered as fuck perfectly regardless of the resources that we have.

As you know, I tolerated you for not getting the freedom of live editing as what you've experienced from your previous team lead. All I ask of you is to get fresh file from FTP whenever we touch the same file because firstly, God knows how frustrating it is how your hard work is going to be replaced and be gone as much as I do. Secondly, I don't want you to experience how pain in the ass could this be in the long run, and lastly, I don't want any hard feelings to be wasted just because of this.

P.S. I'm too shy to send this to you because I don't want to hurt your feelings and don't want to sound too seriouz and feel old. I also hope we share the same telepathic understanding so we can agree with each other.

Your loving, sincere, pretty and gorgeous working partner,
xoxo ❤️

(thinking of stating my first name) 😂

I've been working in a company for two tears, builsing it from ground up as a CTO with a CEO and COO. Two years in, with 60 people on board I was managing a project which was bringing serious profit into the company, and they decided to cut me off. Reason: they don't trust me anymore, real reason: CEO wanted more money for himself and less money control from me and the other guy.

Turned out fine as it made me start my own business.

Previous company: The feeling when you spend three weeks on a feature just to have it "rewritten and optimized" by your CTO only to find several major features missing and a litter of bugs.

Thanks buddy.

Today I looked at some code from our CTO. He used plain SQL Statements with huge selects and no prepared statements.

I asked him:
1. why dont you build some helpers or even use some frameworks?
2. why are there no prepared statements?

His answer (to both questions)
We do not need that. That just uses too much ressources and time. It's more cleaner and simpler this way.

My Face: 😵

I started at a company to develop an "uber" clone. Hired by the company's cto. I was happy initially as i had been unemployed for a while but that's because i didn't see the shitstorm coming. The task was build this using php, well 2 weeks later and db locking issues because mysql only allows 100 connections and the website takes over 200mb per request, i tried using the meteor framework, a lil better but the orphaned process would require me to reboot every 2 days. So enter erlang, built in 3 weeks works amazing problems none here... Well in comes the cto (which came in once a week). Apparently he had been reviewing my code and didn't understand it. He couldn't understand no for loops etc and demanded that it be made understandable to a normal dev. Did normal devs write uber no. Anyhow i spent the next 6 Weeks refactoring trying to make elixir looks like imperative programming, he finally gave up, so now I'm deep committed writing an API, finish in a week cto comes in and "why aren't you using patch" i don't need it, well another day implanting a patch api that will never be used. Ok done. Now we have a meeting with the investors who i worked in the same building with and they want a frontend built. I explained i was a backend dev and they needed a uiux expert. Next week cto comes back with this jquery fire pit and stolen bootstrap theme and take me with implementing it. This time we scrap the api change some of the backend logic and implement rest from the 90s one static page per request. After 3 months working with jquery I'm let go because of finical issues. I told them i was a backend dev but they didn't listen if the cto would've gotten a frontend expert things would be different but what to expect from a cto who's coding legacy is creating WordPress plugins.

Hopefully things will be better soon I'm tired of living on the streets.

So my CTO comes to me and asks me to checkout the APIs provided by a particular service and see if we can use them.

After two days of research I go to him and tell him that it cannot be done and it doesn’t fit our use case. He tells me research more although I have researched everything required.

So I take two days doing absolutely nothing, send a mail to the developer of the apis and they tell me that it can’t be done.

Now imagine this kind of scenario occurring every three months. RESEARCH MORE.

Why do super senior members of our company don’t trust me. It’s just so random and anger evoking

That awkward moment when you made some changes in your code and hope that it will fail so that you can confirm your theory/suspicion.

Otherwise you'll have no idea what's going on.

: /

At the beginning of April there were 9 of us in Ops, come May there will only be 3 of us left. :/

They've left because they disagreed with some the CTO was trying to do and he fired them, or just because they hate him. Every week it's a new game of "Who's going this time?".

Hope you all are surviving well

Few changes here and there in my life and staying away from lots of things including DR. Not technically a rant but kinda a summary of my current life story.

- broke up with gf (to be precise, I dumped her because I don't wanna have a RS anymore). Pretty bad thing for her and she is still having a hard time accepting it.
- took a second job, part-time.
- trying to get few more part-time/consultant kind of jobs.
- step down from CEO/CTO position at my business and trying to focus just to be a better CTO.
- 80% of sale teams resigned or asked them to resign.
- found a new investor but no cash received yet.
- have to touch nodejs (at the part-time job).
- left side eyelid is twitching pretty frequently lately.

Not much. That's about it. Now let me check what the heck are you all up to lately.

Tuesday.
Director: we need to add our partner's project to our ci pipeline
CTO: we need to add ci to this repo, it should work via this tool (not the one we use now)
PM: we need to use this new tool, figure it out until Friday
TL: we need to move all our projects to this new ci tool, don't ask, the task is given by CTO
Me: okay

Friday.
Me: everything is ready except for this one old project
TL: we couldn't use it for one of our projects
PM: we had difficulties with the new tool
CTO: we couldn't add our partner's project to the pipeline
Director: *gives me a warning for being incompetent*

Happened to me - an experienced dev with most of the experience on the web.

I apply to this company that I had no idea what they do (big mistake on my part). I ace the technical interview, and they follow up with a request for a presentation on a topic, to see how well I can prove a point or understand a technology. So I do that. Everybody is listening carefully. Most people at the office didn't know the basics of what I was talking about, but there was a guy who knew more and asked the tough questions, but I didn't let down.

So we talk again, and again, and all is going well, we're out for a coffee, talk about the future of my career and the company, in a more casual setting. Got to know the CTO, etc. Everything was going stellar.

I was waiting for the offer, but instead I got a generic "We can't continue with your application" together with a notification that I was being blocked by the contact person.

Weirdest interview ever. And this thing really put me down and struck at my self-esteem. I mean was it really hard to mention whether you didn't like my expectations, or my skills, or my "fit for the team"? Or at least not block me like that, it's not like I'm gonna stalk you or anything. I still get birthday notifications on Skype from people I've interviewed with before, and I haven't written them since because they have other stuff to take care about, as do I.

Anyway. I got up and started again. New company. High expectations. High salary expectations. Rejection. Fuck.

Ok, start again. 2 companies this time. Both at the same time. Both make me an offer. Have to turn one down. Harder than I had imagined. The choice that I made literally changed my life for the better. I'm glad I didn't end up at any of the other 2 companies that rejected me.

Even experienced people get bad bitter rejections. Don't have high expectations, and that will help you keep your emotions in check, and fight on.

Previously, I rant in twitter but none of my followers understand them.
So now I am gonna switch here.

Please bear with me. (^.^)d

Imagine yourself being a CTO back then.

Brand new Acura NSX. No MacBooks, ThinkPads are hot. Your company has its own skyscraper. CASE tools are just introduced and they’re hotter than blockchain now. You do software architecture in IBM Rational Rose, typing on your Model M and thinking really hard about Java OOP which is very hot right now.

You have Erlang servers at your own data center. You laugh at people writing in COBOL. You excited about aspect-oriented programming.

What a wonderful time.

Had to talk to another team to change 1 value in a database I didn't have access to. It should have taken 2 minutes but instead took them two hours. This was before they went on a public rant in front of the CTO and CEO telling my team how we need to re-architect everything we've done in the past 8 months because it didn't meet their personal standards.

I have never even met these people prior and all I needed was 1 fucking value changed. Somehow my company thinks this is culturally acceptable.

Why dont people trust you?

I was hired to be an SQL developer, I don't actually get to do much development, normally doing something involving copying and pasting in Excel.

Some of our databases were running slow and we noticed some (a few hundred) indexes were in shit state.

I knocked up a couple of scripts, one to reorganise indexes that were up to a certain amount of fragmentation and one to rebuild the indexes

My boss wants them tested (they were several times in dev) we've had these for over 3 weeks, but she doesn't want to run them.

Instead of fixing hundred of indexes she decided I should contrate on fixing some historic data issues that are preventing 10 indexes from being rebuilt.

Now there are serious issues and the CTO is asking why the indexes haven't been fixed.

I could have done this nearly a month ago, but now it's turned into a huge fucki g deal, and no doubt they'll try and push it back on me

Wooaaah job offer as cto and shareholer in startup... or senior developer in established business.

How can i even make that choice.

10 PM (after a very busy working day), CTO calls me and tells me: "We decided to hand in the new version to [random client] one week earlier, so they can test it."
Me: "I don't think is a good idea, the app is still unstable, we started working in it yesterday, it *will* crash"
CTO: "Don't you worry, at least they know we are working on it"
20 minutes later
CTO: "WTF why did you make my app crash?! I can't send this to a client!"

Told you. That is why that code is on develop and not on master.

It’s a pretty good feeling when you’ve been sweating deadlines, stay in late, worrying about users, testing, maintaining a list of projects as long as your arm but your boss comes to you and low key asks you to be CTO of the company. It’s a small company so we don’t officially have that title but that’s the role I’ll be filling!

This occurred on a company wide chat

Developer: Getting an error insufficient space on disk when uploading to server, any clues?

CTO: Let me Google the error a second.

Not sure if he was joking...

Skills required for ML :
Math skills:
|====================|
Programming skills :
|===|

Skills required for ML with GPU:
Math skills:
|====================|
Programming skills :
|====================|

/*contemplating career choice*/
: /

Currently balancing my full time job. A Rails bigass project and certain php contracts.

The rails one is unpaid, and I am doing it on my free time since my "payment" would be a portion of the company and a CTO position once it is done. I am building it with one of my best friends and he got the contract from this one dude he has who is loaded and will be selling this to the dptmnt of education of certain country.

The thing is, we all know how it works with those projects. The CEO had contracted this project to some people. He paid them handsomely and as is the case with certain situations the project was abandonded, the devs took the money and ran. So that is why he decided that instead of paying people like he should he would instead try and see if he could get someone interested. He told my friend to get himself an "American developer" since he was fed up with the devs of said country and that is how I am here now.

But the thing is, he is somewhat desperate to see something and even tho I show advancements on a weekly basis I hate the wordings of his group text messages:
"All right guys. I need to see some advancements, show me what you got now"

Motherfucker. You sit your ass and WAIT for me to want to show you something, but don't demand shit like if you are paying me. As far as I know my priorities lie in my current day job or the other people that ARE paying me.

>i need to see some advancements

Fuck off.

* Sending "less" data
* Number of ads won't change

Intern at Microsoft: Should I rephrase the messages so that it becomes a little bit subtle?
CTO(or whoever the fuck is in charge of rolling out windows update): Let it be direct and on the nose. Fuck this shit.

(Edit): Always forget to attach the image.

Have u ever had the perfect job opportunity and u screwed up? This idiot just did!! 😓😭 It's a 100% remote c# role. I literally had the job, all I needed to to was be patient and wait. But, noooooo I had to go and turn down the offer because it was "taking to long". He was getting the proposal ready and I was growing impatient. It's been almost a month since I started talking to the CTO and we were/are on the same level of understanding. He told me today just hours after I consulted with someone who's a business owner and he helped me write an apology to him. Man do I feel like an idiot. He didn't ask for a resume or references. Just seen my GitHub and a few game I did and let me talk to the lead Dev and I was in. The lead Dev even told me "welcome aboard, can't wait to work with you." AND I still screwed this op up!! Now he's telling me he will talk to the CEO and see what he says cause it maybe out of his hands.😞😞😞😞😞😭😭😭😓😓😓 What fool I am, eh??? P.S. which makes it even worst is that he reached out to me via LinkedIn without me sending him my resume or applying for any job that had posted.

We were running an obfuscator as part of our build pipeline, but also were not. I discovered we had disabled every rule, and after asking around it turns out that the obfuscator broke the app (because of reflection and things I won't go into).

So I turned it off.

An hour later the CTO came to me and said to put it back. "We have to obfuscate, put it back."

"But... it wasn't doing anything, other than slowing the build down."

"I don't care, we HAVE to run obfuscation. It's in our contract with the client."

...

Inherited a simple marketplace website that matches job seekers and hospitals in healthcare. Typically, all you need for this sort of thing is a web server, a database with search

But the precious devs decided to go micro-services in a container and db per service fashion. They ended up with over 50 docker containers with 50ish databases. It was a nightmare to scale or maintain!

With 50 database for for a simple web application that clearly needs to share data, integration testing was impossible, data loss became common, very hard to pin down, debugging was a nightmare, and also dangerous to change a service’s schema as dependencies were all tangled up.

The obvious thing was to scale down the infrastructure, so we could scale up properly, in a resource driven manner, rather than following the trend.

We made plans, but the CTO seemed worried about yet another architectural changes, so he invested in more infrastructure services, kubernetes, zipkin, prometheus etc without any idea what problems those infra services would solve.

I have a new Job as a full stack developer, so Im here to tell my story, you see,I told my boss today that im quitting,
Which he replies by telling me to wait, to see if he can get the CTO to pay me more,
now the CTO sais, "HE IS ONLY A BACK END DEVELOPER, HE'S NOT THAT IMPORTANT, I THING WE ARE PAYING HIM MORE THAN ENOUGH" So I said fuck him and left :D

Our company is restructuring and our CTO offered me the lead architect role. I'm currently the dev manager for about 40 guys and girls. I was delighted.

So, because I believe people make shit up in the absence of information, I called my seniors in to explain the possible restructure. To my surprise (and shock), they dropped the following pearl on me...

If they had to report to anyone else, they're going to leave the company.

I tried to convince them that one of them can apply for my role, also no.

Don't get me wrong, I love my team and do feel flattered about their response. But I also feel a bit trapped/confused now. I've spent the last 6 years building and protecting the team from 5 guys. And frankly, I'm tired and just get back to focusing on coding.

Any sage advice?

Me and the unofficial CTO (3rd party's CTO) are interviewing an ios dev. (I'm an android dev, btw)

CTO: In your view, would you find developing an ios app would be faster or at the same speed as an android dev?

Me: *shock*

Canidate: I've never developed on Android before, but I'd think it would be the same speed. We both need to make screens, views, and type code.

Is it weird that I avoid forced socializing in my office? On mondays in the mornings we have a breakfast where essentially people gather (its a small gathering with 3 founders 1 cto and 3 employees), they have some pastries and juice.

And then they are talking about some bullshit for one hour.

For me personally monday mornings are for coffee and contemplation. I dont want to listen how boring their weekend was and try to impress them with my boring weekend. All that interaction feels so fake shallow and politically correct.

Dont get me wrong I care about my colleagues and what goes on in their life, but this forced monday morning and forced friday afternoon 1 hour gatherings are sooo draining and useless for me. I feel that only couple people are actually open during them and others are never sharing about their life, so esentially that gathering becomes an interrogation of 2-3ppl and topic revolves about them.

Gosh its draining. Gonna “be late” tomorrow again bcs I dont care. I would rather come in and go straight to work.

Having a beer after working means 100 times for me than that shallow and pretentious forced socializing that these guys are pushing so hard. Almost feels like micromanagement on personal level.

Being called into a meeting where you get fired for an argument you had with your CTO. But the CTO left 6 months ago and the sales department are suspiciously low on deals in the pipeline...

Shame really, I loved that job and the Dev team was great, shame the directors were bastards.

Kinda all other devs translate incompetent with a lack of knowledge

i would go with not able to recognize his lack of knowledge

Story 1:
once we had a developer, whom was given the task to try out a REST/Json API using Java

after a week he presented his solution,
2 Classes with actual code and a micro-framework for parsing and generating JSON

so i asked him, why he didn't use a framework like jackson or gson, while this presentation he felt pretty offended by this question

a couple of weeks later i met him and he was full of thanks for me, because i showed him, that there are frameworks like that, and even said sorry for feeling offended

- no incompentence here -

Story 2:
once i had a lead dev, who was so self-confident, he refactored (for no reason but refactoring itself) half the app and commited without trying to compile/run test

but not only once, but on a regular basis

as you may imagine, he broke the application multiple times and blamed the other devs

- incompentence warning-

Story 3:

once i had a dev, which wanted to stay up with the latest versions of his libraries

npm update && commit without trying to compile/testing multiple times

- incompentence warning-

Story 4:

once i had a cto

* thought email-marketing is cutting edge
* removed test-systems completely to reduce costs
* liked wordpress
* sets vm to sleep without letting anyone know

- i guess incompetent alert -

I could write 20 pages ranting but it can be summarized in a few words that describe the situation pretty well:

My 'CTO' doesn't understand basic OO principles (say, inheritance) nor functional programming.

If this isn't the worst thing.

I was asked to develop a WordPress plugin as an intern developer and I've been on it since last week. I got stuck when i finally had the loops running but couldn't find a way to format the output without overwriting the existing values on each iteration.

For the last one week I've been showing the progress on my code to the CTO and this is how it has been.

Me: Hello. Everything is coming along fine, I have most of the functions running properly, do you mind looking into the algorithm?

CTO: Oh not at all, let's see what you got. Omg great code for an intern. I think you should add a new variable there and maybe clean up that function over there because it's deprecated now and yeah HaHa, Great work.

Me: Thanks xD I'll have it finished latest next week.

CTO: Oh great. I can't wait to see what you'd have by next week so we can install it on our WordPress.

*Next finally week comes and I'm done with the code.

Me: Hello, I'm done with the entire code! Want to take a look? The plugin works just exactly as described.

*CTO takes a look

CTO: Omg?

Me: Omg?

CTO: This is completely bad programming practice, so you are running 4 nested loops that all send queries to our data base and make changes to data. This would have a very drastic effect on the server considering the traffic we get.

Me: But you saw this exact code last week and said it was okay, I only changed some CSS since the last time.

CTO: Omg, we can't accept this, you have to develop it again from the scratch without using those loops and queries.

Me: What? Okay, fine. Any hints?

CTO: Yes.

Me: What?

CTO: Just start. That's the greatest hint I could ever give. And also, always have a plan before you begin.

Me: Yeah, thanks for those. It's the first time I'm hearing them and they would totally be applicable to building this thing.

Sorry for the long rant, sorry if I'm a mess writing, but I need to let this out somehow.

I'm currently working as a freelance developer for a company here. I was hired to work as a front-end developer, mostly React stuff.

Suddenly, the back end developers left the project because they were offered better opportunities, and this meant chaos, as we're currently migrating an old project and building an MVP of what we're going to offer.

I sensed more danger coming, so I was preparing to leave the boat too, as it felt like a LOT of stress would come if I stood here.

Well, just when I was preparing myself, CEO looks into my LinkedIn page and sees I worked as a back end developer before, and using PHP too, which is the language our project's built in.

He organizes a quick meeting and throws my name as a developer for our project, telling me that I could work on it, and everyone agreed.

Everyone, except me, because I didn't know he looked into it and had this "emergency" meeting (mostly WhatsApp message exchange).

The case is, now that they spread this news, my name is on it and I HAVE to work on our project acting as, somehow, a developer and makeshift CTO.

It feels like a fucking leash, like "now you do this or else...".

Under other circumstances, I'd be jumping and throwing fireworks in my room right now.

Although I did build the f*cking project alone (which is quite a feature for my resumé), it's a mammoth of a project, I'm borderline crazy AND there's still data to migrate from the old model to the new.

The problem is: the people who recorded that data (which includes adresses, locations, user information) did it like they wipe their asses, there's no standards, some important data are missing and I have to validate more than 6k addresses.

I just don't know what to do. I would hire people too, but I joined this because I needed the money, so I can't.

It's hard, I'm lost, it's crazy, I'm crazy.

Sometimes my brain just stops, and I can't do anything code-related. And it makes me mad, because I LOVE to code!

This piece of crap is taking away one of the things I love the most, with a piece of my sanity and health too.

How I wish I could just send'em all to hell.

The company may be small right now. But the higher ups, they're kinda "big", and that would make my life hell if I just throw the towel now.

I don't know nothing anymore.

Yeah i applied for a job once without much js experience. I got invited for an interview and a couple of tests. The interview went well. I think the cognitive test wasn’t bad either.

However they wanted to see funky js shit i hadn’t ever done or see before and also was totally useless skill wise.

I asked if i could google answers (who doesn’t in their daily script job?) but i wasn’t.

I tried for like 5 or 10 minutes and then blurted out to the major CTO super tech savy master degree microsoft-o-worthy, that my js skills weren’t up for the task.

He gave me a couple of links to pdf’s with programming basics teached at a high school. Totally cool and understanding.

I walked away ashamed and probably red as a tomato. Excused myself for wasting his time and left as quickly as possible.

Treat your servers like cattle, not as pets

First it was the "set up WampServer so the client can use our database", to which I told her we should use an embedded database, to which she told me to do.

Then the "Just give the client a .jar file and install the JRE in his laptop" to wich I told her we can make a native installer, to which she fucking assigned to me.

Then the whole fucked up management thing with no design whatsoever and the "we don't need version control".

To just a few hours earlier, when she got mad because I set up a Slack for us to exchange information easily, she told me she was already mad because I shared the project by Google Drive and that she worked in security and knows the risk... AND AT THE SAME TIME, she uses Gmail to share the project.. BRILLIANT !

When the CTO asks if you could do a "quick deploy" at 4.50 on a Friday

so I left uni after my PhD and joined a start up where the boss is a Cambridge grad who does coding and is like 50 years old (he never told us the true value), the CTO is very talented and another dev who quickly became my best friend and me doing data science. the 4 of us worked together like friends and the efficiency was fantastic, there's no bureaucracy bullshit or shit boss talks. We built the whole thing from scratch (okay I admit they did most of the building) and to this day, we work just has we have been.

I was in the last stage of a 12 hour interview process (over 3 days), meeting with the CEO/founder of the company. His final conclusion was (and he said this directly to me) that he felt I would do really well, and that my skill set was perfect and all the feedback from the interviewers was top notch...but he asked if I was published or had any patents. I said “no”. So, he paused and then said “well, without a full 4 year degree or either having been published or having any patents, I think we would be taking too great a risk. I mean, there’s a chance you would work out. I have taken that chance before, and he’s now our CTO. But I’m just not sure about this”.
I was not offered the position.

I want to be the CTO in ten years. I'm 25 now, and think it's possible. My former boss was the CTO and he inspired the hell out of me to work hard and invest in myself. I have a lot to learn but I'm eager to figure it out.

Going to a tech entrepreneurship meetup only to strike a conversation with a guy who looks for a CTO and mind rapes you for the entire mingling time. FMDL <-- this is me coining a “Fuck my dev life“ expression. Remember this day ;)

CTO s shouldn't write software once there are more than 50 devs in the company. They shouldn't make tech decisions. It is time for you to back off and help with more important things. We really need you to get process nailed down. We really need you to help us understand business better. Not writing code.

my CTO is on 2 week vacation, guess what he did on his last day...
installed a camera with a microphone in our office. coincidentally right near the devs...

i'm afraid to talk with my colleagues...

Again I ended working for a company where people love to pride themselves because they're 'agile'.
Basically they bought A JIRA license, that's all.

The CTO decides the estimates privately.
He assign the stories.
No idea what's a retrospective.
The sprint ends whenever he wants.
No CI.
New stories continuosly added to the active sprint.

That's the risk of agile, unchecked power.

Hi everyone

I'm currently an intern in a startup
I started 3 months ago and I will finish in 1-2 months

From the beginning, all the team is very nice with me and say that I do a really great job
I could learn many many things and I can say my ideas during the project

This is a message to CEO/CEO, you see, if you offer a really good internship with interesting tasks and technologies, student like me are really motivated, want to learn, want to really participe to the project even if I do more hours than I have to do
Because we, students, are like you : interested in new technologies and great ideas

Offer good internship and you will be happy to have good and motivate intern in your Company

Thank you!

My CTO strongly discourages working from home because he insists that "leaning over to the next cube to ask a question" is far better than sending a message, email or making a phone call. He went as far as saying it takes too much effort to do the latter... How is interesting someone while they're working more efficient???

When i interviewed, my employer told me that they were fine with me using linux at work. "No problem" they said. Today, the CTO called me into his office and told me not to bring my computer back to the office again, we're a Mac shop.

Guess I'll have to comply, but what the fucking hell?

I hate Macs so, so much.

The most obnoxious company process I've encountered so far is the nonexistent one.

This is what happened at my first professional job. PM and CTO quit after about a year, yet the top honchos were insistent of salvaging what was left of their "enterprise" software suite and putting us through a death march to try and continue development.

No plan, despite having a JIRA board filled with month-old backlog stories. No direction, because the CEO was now head of the project and wasn't in the office about 50% of the time, and our lead dev wasn't willing to take the reigns.

I wouldn't have minded trying a bunch of different things and having them fail. At least then we'd be doing something, you know? But instead we sat around, trying to squeeze any kind of goal from the higher ups, until I finally had enough and found a much better job.

It wasn't enough to convince me to give up software development. But boy, did it sure come close.

When your coworker quits and the CTO (in an attempt to smooth things over) tells you (an engineer) "Don't sweat it, Engineers are replaceable."

Intend to help a friend to find out what's wrong with a software installation in his laptop today...
But forgot that his Windows installed in Chinese version... how am I supposed to help.... (; _ ;)
I can't read Chinese... can't even find how to open Control Panel...
_________________________________
My native language is not English, but I always have all my techies set up in English.

When you find out the CTO of the org you work for doesn't allow Excel macros "because they can bring viruses".

The look I give to my friends when they asked dumb questions in class.

Dear CTO who approved his own code changes without testing or review,

Why do you hate my master branch? What has my master branch done to you? Did you have to break it?

Every project ever :
Initial plan :
||===================|| 100 %
Actual submission
||==|| 13%

- Not enough money!
- Not enough people!
- Not enough time!
- Not enough resources!
- Hardware not supported
- Software not supported
- My team are useless
- God didn't like it. :/

I started my actual gig as CTO of construction group (Innovation Hub) a year ago. And it was a hell of a ride, implementing kind of a scrum-ban for project management, XP, peer-reviews, a git-flow, git commit message formats, linters, unit testing, integration tests, etc...
And it's the fun part because with the CIO we had to drive the board to do A LOT of changes in their IT/Innovation drive.

But in one year there is a lot of KPI that went up :
* Deployment: When I arrived it took three stressful days to deploy a new version of one application, once a month. Today we do it every week, and it takes three annoying hours.
* We had no test. NOTHING! Today we have 85% code coverage for the unit test, and automatic integration tests run by our CI server every day.
* We had almost no documentation. Today our code is our documentation (it automatically extracted and versioned).
* We had 0 add value in the use of git. With commit messages as "dev", "asked task", inside jokes and a lot of "fix" and "changes". Today we have a useful git, and we even use it to create our deploy changelogs (and it's only mildly annoying!).
* More important, the team is happy! They get their purpose, see betterment in their tech mastery. They started doing conception, applicative architecture, presentations, having fun.

There is still a LOT of bad things we are still working on, and trying to solve (support workflow and betterment). But seeing what they already did, I'm so proud of my TEAM! I'm a fucking asshole, workaholic, "just do it" kind of guy. But they managed to achieve so much. Fucking PROUD!!

"Yes, the work could have finished way earlier. But it's easy, and I would have probably been bored of it and left earlier"

Finally got the reason why our fucking CTO couldn't create a fucking stable Backend for almost a year while the frontend team got all the slack because certain things are still not functioning well and while the marketing team every fucking time got their face red while showing the demo because the fucking api is not stable. Seriously, we wasted a whole year just because you could write something more interesting and enjoyable. Fuck you. Never been this willing to murder someone.

Context: A simple booking platform. No need for creating a complex distributed system while our userbase may not even be in million even on a peak season.

And he laughily commented maintaining it would be a headache.

I could seriously kill someone right now.

Company is about to get certified to ISO 9001:

Kick-off meeting with consultant announced weeks ago, mandatory for all employees.
Everyone is kind of joking about it, but also looking forward to certain workflows maybe changing to the better.

Two hours before meeting, told by CTO not to attend.

Some code I hadn't touched for half a year needs urgent patching to make the equipment pass EMC test (doing so within a few hours would help us save the lab cost for another day of testing).

When they applied RF noise to the bus lines, the CAN peripheral would glitch and need reset, this should happen covertly the first few times without raising any error to the user, so they could just finish the testing without being disturbed by the error - and the EMC lab will not test the functionality of the device after all.

The irony when you were actually supposed to learn about quality that day...

!rant.

Most QAs are dumb beasts, unable to think clearly or rationally, lazy parasites that suck the lifeblood out of a project.

Except this one guy I work with. He blackmailed the CTO to move, and landed himself a junior dev job.

He joined my team a few months ago.
"Right" says I "forget the crap you've learned so far. Here's a list of algorithm books from Amazon. Order them and read them. There'll be a test at the end."

He did. He is now reviewing lead dev work and merrily trolling their poorly performing work. Speaking to them in Big O (and so confusing the crap out of them) and earning stars at every turn.

I'd like to think I had a hand but all the effort was his.

Friends were having great and fun time last night partying after (also) last week partying.
And now someone's having friends over for dinner in the shared kitchen.
While here I am hours staring at my screen trying to break the algorithm.
: /
______________________________
Me : Enough with coding! I need social life!
5 min later :
*Checking devrant and reddit/programminghumor

When you go out for lunch and interns from other companies dress better than you do #ctoproblems

What the fuck is wrong with these kind of people?!
So I recently appeared for an android dev job interview in a start-up; the whole time the interviewer (he was the CTO) looked super excited and into my work. I am a fresh graduate with 0 experience in a professional working environment but have a history of a couple of successful apps on the play store since 3 years. The entire time we discussed future plans for the startup and how I was going to contribute towards it. He seemed very interested in my deep learning projects for android and wanted to have similar projects for his products. In the end, he asked me to develop some 'test' projects that can be integrated into his start-up products and told me he'll hire me if he finds it to be as per his need. So I worked on these 'projects' for a month and submitted it to him. He replied that he's impressed with them and will contact me shortly to confirm my job.
That fucker has been ignoring me ever since. He's not responding to any of my e-mails or messages. I feel like a shit right now. How to deal with these assholes?

CTO just cited having to "know the language JSON" as a problem with doing web dev.

Seeing how cool the community's work stories here, and how they know a lot and how they work in organized companies makes me feel like an absolute piece of shit who's lacking a lot of industry skills.

Remotely working for a startup that lacks any sense of organization, CTO is a volunteering web developer who never shows up. A lone wolf I am. I never signed to be a lone wolf. A product that is based on an absolute garbage product that is in turn based on another utter garbage product. It feels so much pain every time I have to deal with that garbage that I end up watching some stupid anime instead. Decent salary for a junior, very friendly people, and a very empowering non-profit cause but still... technical side is just shit and I don't think I can keep with this.

Sigh :(

So i heard from my friend that CTO had asked Android team to make the app be able to root the phone upon installation.

Dude wtf are you smoking?!

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!

I was mentoring a group of students and helping them with their graduation project. I taught them NodeJS, MongoDB & few other things.

One time, one of them came to show me her code, and it has the weirdest and most bizarre structure ever!

I asked her, “who told you to structure your code like that? This is wrong! I didn’t teach you this way!”.

She replies: “<<a local shitty tech startup name>>’s CTO”

When I searched about him, he’s a civil engineer who founded a startup and assigned himself as CTO with no technical background or knowledge whatsoever! FFS students believe that he’s a real CTO and started learning from him 😑 His code was so bad in every way that a fresh would write a better code!

Some years ago but it's funny.
The company give to me a new laptop with windows Home Edition,
After few months I have installed Pro Version.
1 month later the laptop didn't work anymore, nothing on display, no beeps, zero.
Tried to replace ram and check but nothing works.
The CTO asked the supplier and they asked about SO, and they said it's not turning ON because i have installed Windows Pro.
Than the CTO had a brilliant idea: try put the hard disk in another laptop and install Windows Home, and put back in the defective one. I refused to to that, it's stupid and he insisted, then I put the laptop in his desk and I said: if you want do this you can do, im not stupid enough to do this.
He got really mad, 1 week later i got a brand new one 😅

Submitting my changes for review and my CTO catches the line:
```js
console.log("It fucking works")
```

so our CTO wants to tell us a inspirational story but starts like "You developers create bugs...." wanted to shoot myself of his great self in the head

My CTO uses an array instead of objectto keep list of items with random numerical keys. I told him you’re creating multiple unintended undefined members in between, he said: yeah that’s how silly JavaScript is :-|

!Rant

CTO: "We have a project that is the top most priority get it done"
CTO: "We have some tickets logged for another project get them fixed this is of the highest priority"
CTO: "I want a new feature in another project I want this done now It is top priority!"
Next day, Client comes in CTO shows him around
CTO: "You are still working on this!"

... Arg, its as if the guy thinks giving something a top priority gets it done instantly

Not sure if this should be a proper rant about the reasons behind this, or a simple 'so much win' situation..
CTO asked how I'm doing with task xy.. my answer: mostly should be fixed, but I'm trying to figure out this zz thing.. It is so fucked up, I can't make sense of it.. before I could really finish the sentence CTO was like: shut up, don't tell me about it, we know, just please fix it..can you fix it? Please say yes..and don't talk about this anymore.. 😂😂😂

CTO/CEO (previous place) - we're not production engineers, so we're going to fork your code base and move way faster than all of you and then you can maintain it. Doesn't that sound inspiring?

25% of the company: ha... Here's our 2 week notice.