HR: We have received complain that you have been sexually harassing an intern.
Me: No, I wasn’t. Me and the new intern all we talk about is Coding, Apps, and TV-Series
HR: You are lying. I have the words that you said to the intern. Do you want me to read it out.
Me: I have no clue what I said to the intern so please read it out.
HR: You said, “Always pull before you push”. Do you remember saying this?
Me: Yes, I was teaching the intern how to use GIT.
HR: Okay, let me call the intern and let see if he says the same.

** Intern **
HR: Was he sexually harassing you today at any time.
Intern: No
HR: Did he said, “Pull before you push” to you?
Intern: Yes
HR: What does that mean, sounds like a slang for something sexual.
Intern: haha, no it means that I should pull the changes made to the files before I can push the changes I did to the code from my computer.
HR: But he said something else like he was teaching you how to use GIT
Intern: Yes, that’s what GIT is.
HR: Okay both of you can go and don’t use this type of terms in the future it doesn’t make good working culture.

Well here's how I see things going:

Intel and AMD ditch their assembly architectures for Scratch, because drag and drop is very popular lately.

The Boolean is renamed to the biggot by SJW leaders for only supporting binary views.

You must first ask consent to add an item to a linked list, because forcing two items together promotes rape culture.

Apple removes the "h" and "7" keys on all laptop models and gives no reason for their actions.

Linus Torvalds grows an extra middle finger, and it still isn't enough.

Nintendo makes Mario gay and Luigi black to be more inclusive.

LG makes a curved monitor that curves away from you rather than towards you. People buy it in confusion.

Everyone makes the same ad revenue on YouTube, and it is rebranded to OurTube. Luckily, they were able to keep the color scheme.

People finally realize that machine learning is just math, and stop using it everywhere. (Just kidding lol)

AMD and Gucci merge. Nobody understands why.

My company just blocked devRant ip...

Well, now I need to use my own mobile data to procrastinate

Coworker wrote a nice package and put it on Github, to share with other departments.

I link his package on our company Slack, mentioning a team, with text "What do you think of this one? Is it usable for you guys?"

Next thing I know I have to explain to an executive why I'm "posting pictures of seductive cartoon girls in company chat with disrespectful commentary"

It linked the Github profile picture of the developer in Slack. A fully clothed anime girl, nothing particularly lewd about it.

But I like stabbing back a bit, and confusing the fuck out of people in suits:

"Hate to say it, but a good majority of all the code the company runs on, is written by people known as weebs, who use their so called waifus as their GitHub profile picture. It is very common for open source Javascript packages, but since we recruited 50 extra devs it now also happens internally. It's not my thing either sir, but I'm afraid we have to embrace it... "

"But what about our female devs? What about Joanna, she's in your team? We have to think of diversity! Our investors are really in to diversity, we can't have a bro culture!"

"Sir, with all due respect, we have super diverse teams without even trying. The problem is... they're all millennials. They grew up on weird memes... and are probably ten steps further in embracing diversity compared to the rest of the company."

"Also, Joanna is the one who drew this particular picture. She's charging a €15 commission for profile pictures... Do you want one of your fursona, sir?"

"What is that?"

"Uh... nevermind. Let's... let's not go there"

Tech Industry: “We need more developers!”

NewDev: “Hire me”

Tech Industry: “only experienced developers please! We don’t have time to train juniors ”

Older Dev: “Hire me”

Tech Industry: “no, you want too much money and too much time off“

Mid dev: “Hire me”

Tech Industry: “only experienced devs who are a culture fit!”

Robot dev: “Hire me”

Tech Industry: “You are Hired”

Before an interview prepare a list of questions for them, they expect it!
My list to give inspiration:

Describe your company culture? - if the response is buzzword heavy, avoid.

What’s the oldest technology still in use? - all companies have legacy systems but some are worse than others

Describe your agile process? - a few companies I’ve interviewed with said they are agile but it’s actually kanban

Are developers involved with customers?- if they trust you to talk to customers you can infer trust to do your job ( I’m sure others will disagree)

Describe your development environment?- do they have such a thing as dev, test and prod?

These are the only ones I can remember but should give others a bit of inspiration I hope 😄

!rant

Today i got a job offer for 20k more than i'm making right now and a better company and culture.

I can't wait to see my managers face when i tell him. He has being an asshole since i started.

Just a regular software engineer...

Starting to feel that devRant is a really nice place to hang out.

Even though we have differences in languages (C#, PHP, JavaScript, JAVA), culture (semi brackets, tabs and spaces) and tools (Sublime, vim, nano, Atom) but we strive to be a better coder by encouraging one another or ranting to blow some steam.

Like seriously guys, you guys are awesome! It feels that I am becoming more human by visiting devRant (or maybe I'm turning into AI).

Rough analysis of LinkedIn inmail’s I get:

Hi <5% of time, not my name>,

I was looking at your profile <97% a lie>. I was very impressed with your <10% something I’ve never done> experience working for <5% a company I’ve never heard of>. Would you be interested in hearing more about <60% a job I’m not suited for>, they offer amazing benefits and have a great culture!

... no

Manager: Why is no one innovating?

Me: You hired all of us based on culture fit so you have optimized only in that direction. Everyone is same ... like you

Manager: You are right.

I've got new job offer with different company. New technologies and better culture, 30% pay raise. And my current manager counter offer is "You will hate it there and you will leave in 3 months".

employee: I want growth in my role

company: *installs ping pong table*

employee: autonomy?

company: *creates fully-stocked snack room*

employee: fulfilment.

company: *employs a live DJ in the office*

employee: *quits*

company: some people just aren't a good culture fit.

Summing up many ridiculous meetings I've been in.

Many years ago we hired someone for HR that came from a large fortune 500 company, really big deal at the time.

Over the next 6 months, she scheduled weekly to bi-weekly, 1 to 2 hour meetings with *everyone* throughout the day. Meeting topics included 'How to better yourself', 'Trust the winner inside you'...you get the idea.

One 2-hour meeting involved taking a personality test. Her big plan was to force everyone to take the test, and weed out anyone who didn't fit the 'company culture'. Whatever that meant.

Knowing the game being played, several of us answered in the most introverted, border-line sociopath, 'leave me the frack alone!' way we could.

When she got the test results back, she called an 'emergency' meeting with all the devs and the VP of IS, deeply concerned about our fit in the company.

HR: "These tests results were very disturbing, but don't worry, none of you are being fired today. Together, we can work as team to bring you up to our standards. Any questions before we begin?"
Me: "Not a question, just a comment about the ABC personality test you used."
<she was a bit shocked I knew the name of the test because it was anonymized on the site and written portion>
Me: "That test was discredited 5 years ago and a few company's sued because the test could be used to discriminate against a certain demographic. It is still used in psychology, but along with other personality tests. The test is not a one-size-fits-all."

VP, in the front row, looked back at me, then at her.
HR: "Well....um...uh...um...We're not using the test that way. No one is getting fired."
DevA: "Then why are we here?"
DevB:"What was the point of the test? I don't understand?"
HR: "No, no...you don't understand...that wasn't the point at all, I'm sorry, this is getting blown out of proportion."
VP: "What is getting blown out of proportion? Now I'm confused. I think we all need some cooling off. Guys, head back to the office and let me figure out the next course of action."

She was fired about two weeks later. Any/all documentation relating to the tests were deleted from the server.

This is why I love working where I work. I worked extra hours until 9pm to get an ITest environment ready for one of my customer teams. I came in this morning to a little prezzie and a thank you card signed by the entire customer team. This is what awesome culture looks like.

It was great to see Gitlab not only being transparent, but also being so empathetic towards the employee and not bashing them at all. Instead they said the more things you do the more mistakes you make. And the system/process should have contingency so that human mistakes have some tolerance margins.

That is a great workplace!

At one of my former jobs, I had a four-day-week. I remember once being called on my free Friday by an agitated colleague of mine arguing that I crashed the entire application on the staging environment and I shall fix it that very day.

I refused. It was my free day after all and I had made plans. Yet I told him: OK, I take a look at it in Sunday and see what all the fuzz is all about. Because I honestly could fathom what big issue I could have caused.

On that Sunday, I realized that the feature I implemented worked as expected. And it took me two minutes to realize the problem: It was a minor thing, as it so often is: If the user was not logged in, instead of a user object, null got passed somewhere and boom -- 500 error screen. Some older feature broke due to some of my changes and I never noticed it as while I was developing I was always in a logged in state and I never bothered to test that feature as I assumed it working. Only my boss was not logged in when testing on the stage environment, and so he ran into it.

So what really pushed my buttons was:

It was not a bug. It was a regression.

Why is that distinction important?

My boss tried to guilt me into admitting that I did not deliver quality software. Yet he was the one explicitly forbidding me to write tests for that software. Well, this is what you get then! You pay in the long run by strange bugs, hotfixes, and annoyed developers. I salute you! :/

Yet I did not fix the bug right away. I could have. It would have just taken me just another two minutes again. Yet for once, instead of doing it quickly, I did it right: I, albeit unfamiliar with writing tests, searched for a way to write a test for that case. It came not easy for me as I was not accustomed to writing tests, and the solution I came up with a functional test not that ideal, as it required certain content to be in the database. But in the end, it worked good enough: I had a failing test. And then I made it pass again. That made the whole ordeal worthwhile to me. (Also the realization that that very Sunday, alone in that office, was one of the most productive since a long while really made me reflect my job choice.)

At the following Monday I just entered the office for the stand-up to declare that I fixed the regression and that I won't take responsibility for that crash on the staging environment. If you don't let me write test, don't expect me to test the entire application again and again. I don't want to ensure that the existing software doesn't break. That's what tests are for. Don't try to blame me for not having tests on critical infrastructure. And that's all I did on Monday. I have a policy to not do long hours, and when I do due to an "emergency", I will get my free time back another day. And so I went home that Monday right after the stand-up.

Do I even need to spell it out that I made a requirement for my next job to have a culture that requires testing? I did, and never looked back and I grew a lot as a developer.

I have familiarized myself with both the wonderful world of unit and acceptance testing. And deploying suddenly becomes cheap and easy. Sure, there sometimes are problems. But almost always they are related to infrastructure and not the underlying code base. (And yeah, sometimes you have randomly failing tests, but that's for another rant.)

People who browse the devRant feed with 'Recent' filter
"Ahh! I see you are a man of culture as well"

Job offer:

"There is no hierarchy within this company."

Bullshit.

Given a group of people, a hierarchy will emerge. In any company, a hierarchy will emerge. Even within a team a hierarchy will emerge.

Some people like to butt heads, some people like to go with the flow. It's how you deal with these personalities that matters.

You can try to be as fancy you want and declare your hierarchy to be as flat as a pancake, yet the reality is: there will be one.

Certain people will be trusted more by other people. Certain people will have more power in the decision making process.

Can we please stop deluding ourselves that this is not the case?

And that is not necessarily a bad thing. It only becomes bad if the company culture sucks. Instead of platitudes in regards to the assumed absence of hierarchy, I would be more interested to know how a company deals with its hierarchy.

How is feedback handled? How do people argue? How are decisions made, challenged and implemented?

That's what I would find much more interesting.

Advising a person about a code that he has created and you don't know shit about. In dev culture it is considered a dick move.😑

🤔 accurate?

Worst experience with higher ups:

The Office team at Microsoft suddenly woke up to the possibility of innovation from the grounds up. We were asked to come up with ideas. The best ideas were to be shortlisted by management.

That's what i had a problem with. People are generally bad at dertermining what will work. So instead of managenst shortlisting, everyone should have run cheap experiments with their ideas and we could then double down on the ones that showed promise. That's what is done at all internet companies. But the Office team's culture hadn't changed from the boxed software days.

I was asked to have faith in the judgement of management.

Well, Ballamer didn't let Office develop mobile apps for Android and Apple. When Nadella took over, he fixed that mistake. But because competitors had already gotten ahead, the Office team had to work on Saturdays for almost a year to ship it quickly. Meaning employees having to unnecessarily sacrifice their family time because of a strategic blunder by the highest management.

So excuse me if I don't have faith in the judgement of management.

Stop it with the Linux shilling already.

I'm 27 years old and I love Linux and git and vim just as much as the next guy (yeah fuck you emacs!). I have discovered this place as a room for discussion, advise, humor and rants of course, and I had my good share of giggles.

But lately it seems that every other Post is "look at me I installed Linux" or "hurr durr he doesn't use git" or "windows omfg kill it with fire". And to some degree, those rants have a good point and are absolutely right. However, most of them are not.

This is why you're part of the problem. Constantly shaming and ridiculing any technology that's not hip in nerd culture, regardless of the circumstances. This makes you look just as bad as the peoples you look down upon for writing their code in notepad++ on windows xp with McAfee installed. Even worse, from a professional point of view, it absolutely voids your credibility.

How am I to take you seriously and presume a fair amount of experience and out of the box thinking if all you do is repeat catchphrases and ride the fucking hype train. And yes, I know there are a lot of minors or peoples who are just getting started in the industry. But I have seen enough self-righteous hateful spews from peoples who claim not to be.

Anyway, this is getting long and I think I have made my point. Maybe I am just too old to be joking around that shit all the time anymore. But from what I have seen, I wouldn't hire the biggest part of you. Not because you are bad at what you're doing, but because what you say makes you look absolutely unprofessional.

But then again, this is devrant and I love you all. Have a great week everyone!

Today I felt sorry for my boss.

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

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

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

So in my culture when u have hiccups it is believed that someone is mentioning/talking about you, that means that hiccups are one of the first versions of push notifications 😅

Let's get something straight people, the trend to change terms in programming languages for PC approved ones is NOT for "making the workplace a better place".

If you are one of those who say "oh it's just terms, if it makes them feel better why not?", "I don't care so should everybody else", "the outrage proves we need to change the terms!".

No sir, first of all, since when has programming been about ditching standards to make people "feeel" better? Since when has engineering been about that?! We are engineers, we don't change shit and waste effort trying to fix things that are working.

Second, this word cleansing does NOT come from a well intentioned one, it's not about making the workplace a better place, it's not about minorities, it's about sanitizing language from an ideological and political standpoint to please an agenda pushing minority who doesn't give a shit about any real social issues.

They have done it to movies, videogames, news, political speech, magazines, books and now programming. It doesn't stop and they will never be satisfied, it's not about changing the terms, no one gives a shit about the terms, it's about pandering to ideological crybabies who want to control what you say because it "offends" them or some supposedly oppressed group from which we just hear anecdotal evidence.

Personally I wouldn't give a shit if it was for technical reasons, but it's not and I've seen what this shit does to communities I love and I won't stand it happening to the dev community just because some weak ass, no balls coders decided to pander to the retards on the far left to score virtue points instead of standing their ground.

Are you worried about oppressed groups? Donate money to third world children, speak out about women in Siria, travel to actual shitty 3rd world countries so you realize changing words on a GitHub repo on your expensive ass MacBook, sipping your soy based coffee on an office with air conditioning is not making the world a better place you delusional prick.

You want to ignore the facts be my guest, be willfully ignorant, but I will not police myself and my ideas for your ideological beliefs, not in gaming, not here. Fuck off.

Being one of the top devs (and a good student admired by most lecturers) at college, my most humbling experience was when I joined my first job. I thought I knew SQL, I thought I knew C#. I realized in the first week, the thing I didn't know was "I don't know jack".
Thanks to a couple of great mentors (it took a few of them to bring me up to speed :P), I learned that the more I learn something, the more I will realize how much more there is to learn. I used tools to create storyboard animations in WPF, and my mentor would write it all in XAML! I'd write messy SQL and the other mentor just reduces it to a couple of elegant lines. They were like tech gods to my college self, all while being humble and friendly.
They also imbibed in me a sense of responsibility to carry on the culture of mentoring my juniors, which taught me much more than just the technical side of our profession.

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.

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!

Old rant : I was fired for complaning about the non-paid extra hours everyone was doing. The excuse : I was against "the culture" of the company.

I hate game companies...

The startup i work in has such a dynamic environment that their monthly milestones get changed every hour!

#firstRant

DevRant feels a lot like home. Not because I'm a pro developer - I'll probably never be one. But because I get to spend time with "my people". It's like when I went to Dreamhack for work and after 30+ years of being weird there were suddenly over four thousand people just like me.

There is no shortage of online IT culture but devRant is unique. It could have become the usual cesspool of hate, misogony, trolling but hasn't. Somehow it gives me hope to se a place meant for blowing of steam turning out to be one of the more respectful communities. So - thanks people! Your rants actually make my days a little better.

Back after a long time!

Generic-IT
--------------
Client:"So we would like to found a new company and offer IT and network consulting. Would you be able to build our website?"

Me:"Absolutely. What will be the name of your company?"

Client:"The name is going to be 'Generic-IT'. The website is going to be 'generic-IT.com' . We checked that with google."

Me:"I am sorry to tell you that generic.com is already taken by another company. Incidentally that company offers the same services, that you intend to offer. They also seem to be quite big an have businesses in 5 different countries.
Because of this I advise you to pick a different name that does not get you into trouble and makes positioning your own brand easier."

Client:"We want to neglect that problem for now."

Me:"0.0 ..... -_-""""
"Well, listen. Apart from the possible branding and copyright problems imagine how people will find you on the web. ...What will happen if you google 'generic IT'?"

Client:"Yeah well, we want to neglect that. And with SEO you can do something about that."

Me:"..........Welllll, you that SEO is not a cure all, right? The older an bigger company will come up first. Why not avoid that missunderstanding and come up with a unique name?"

Client:"......"

Me:"Please tell me. Doesn't any part of my argument make sense to you?"

Client:"..."

Me:"Well, ok. I will send you the estimate on monday."

___________

Then over a back channel I hear that the client is ...bewildered, why I would not stick to my area of expertise.

There I was now. Left bewildered myself, being the one with the webagency that does frontend design and branding.

Some companies be like-

.. In job posting - We are the next big thing. We are going to change the industry. We are like Google / Facebook etc...

..in Introduction - We are the next big thing. We are going to change the industry. We are like Google / Facebook etc...

.. in Interviews - We are the next big thing. We are already changing the industry. Think of us like Google / Facebook etc...

.. during Interviews - Our interview process is rigorous because we are the next big thing. We are going to change the industry. We are like Google / Facebook etc...

.. questions in interviews - Since we are Google / Facebook, please answer questions on Java, C/C++, JS, react, angular, data structure, html, css, C#, algorithms, rdbms, nosql, python, golang, pascal, shell, perl...
.. english, french, japanese, arabic, farsi, Sinhalese..
.. analytics, BigData, Hadoop, Spark,
.. HTTP(s), tcp, smpp, networking,.

..

..

..

.. starwars, dark-knight, scarface, someShitMovie..

You must be willing to work anytime. You must have 'no-excuses' attitude

.........................................

Now in Salary - Oh... well... yeah... see.... that actually depends on your previous package. Stocks will be given after 24 re-births. Joining bonus will be given once you lease your kidneys.

But hey, look... We got free food.

Well, SHOVE THAT FOOD UPTO YOUR ASS.

FUCK YOU...
FUCK YOUR 'COOL aka STUPID PIZZA BEER - CULTURE'.
FUCK YOUR 'FLAT- HIERARCHY'.
FUCK YOUR REVOLUTIONARY-PRODUCT.

FUCK YOU!

So proud of my human.

He's been stranded in a province on another island for a while now and made friends with the locals. One of the locals broke her bike and he gave her a ride to the bike shop in town. When it was time to pay, she asked him for money. He simply asked, "Why didn't you bring money when you knew we were gonna buy parts for your bike?" She got mad and ignored him since.

I just love the sweet smell of entitlement right before sunset. Makes me feel sane and less alone for all the times I ranted about the same thing over and over again. Reminds me of the good old memories when a developer threatened to escalate me for not doing his job and I shut him down in front of the same crowd he's been flaunting his incompetence to. Oh yeah, when I was called greedy for spending my money on my own needs and refusing to give it to leeches anymore.

My human came to me, of all people, for advice on how to decipher this event since I would be more familiar with the culture. Others would have told him he's insensitive or rude for even asking her that question, that him being white should always just give the money and avoid confrontation.

He asked me what he should have done and I said, "Nothing. I would have told her to go fuck herself but you're a lot nicer than me."

Well, I made a choice in life.

I'm going to stay and work in America after I graduate. In spite of all the shit talking I've done about its work ethics, benefits, politics, and culture.

This place is still home.

After trying out a trip to Europe for a few weeks I can't handle the idea of being 4,500 miles away from family and what few friends I have. I figured out what was true the whole time: I wanted to run away from my past. Breakups, a failed marriage proposal, a dead end job that I put up with only because I need to graduate. I've been angry and depressed over these things, but running away won't fix it.

I need to face reality and own up to it. I'll get a job as a developer in the states through hell or high-water.

Fuck those who cover their incompetence with complexity. Fuck those who fall for their shitty tricks. Fuck you for depriving me of any sense of accomplishment with overcomplicating everything to show how smart you are when you are not. Fuck you for creating a culture of overthinking egoism instead of shipping and finding out who was right. FUCK YOU IN THE ASS YOU BIKESHEDDING, MOTHERFUCKING CUNTS!

After working for about 3 years of my life I've established the following;

Work is mostly stupid people praising other stupid people about their stupid work, while clever people remain in the shadows. Will this be true for the rest of my career or am I just working at a company with a bad culture?

Best part about IT culture is how you send someone an e-mail & then you have to go and tell them that you've sent an email.

It happens to me often!!! 🤣🤣

I did it! I FUCKING DID IT! I got the new job, where I am paid better and won't get abused! The culture is better, pay is better!

My struggle now! Do I do finger guns to my current boss after telling him? I hate that asshole.

Hi Dev Ranter,

My name is John Smith and I came accross to your resume on Linked In and I was very impressed. Would you be interested in a 5 min call?

Job Details:
Required skills (all expert levels): C#, JAVA, Clojure, C, PHP, Frontend, Backend, Agile, MVP, Baking, Redis, Apache, IIS, RoR, Angular, React, Vue, MySQL, MSSIS, MSSQL, ORACLE, PostgreSQL, Access, Python, Machine Learning, HTML, CSS, Fortran, C++, Game design, Book writing, PCI - Compliance
Salary: $15/Hours no benefits
Duration: 2 Months (possible extension, plus we can fire you at will)
Place: Remote (with work tracking software)
Hours: 5am - 1pm, 6pm - 11pm
Expect to work on weekends

You will be managing people as well as building applications that had to be running as of yesterday. Team culture is very toxic and no one cares about you.

We care about you though (as long as you deliver)

Looking forward to talk to you.

John Smith
Founder, CEO, Director of Staffing, Entrepeneur
Tech Staffers LLC ( link to a PNG posted on facebook)
Est. 2020

My start at one of the Big Four (accounting firms).

The first two days of each month they organise "onboarding days" for the new starters of that month. (I so hate upper management buzzwords!) They sent me a formal invitation that looked like I was being invited to a ball with the royals, and they included the following super-smarty-pants line: "Dress code: would you wear jeans and t-shirt when you meet a client?"

And I thought: "I'm an effing hardware and software engineer for internal services. I will never meet a client." But I dressed formally nonetheless, and I went to the onboarding, and I hated every second I spent in those effing high heels, and don't get me started on how I managed to get a run on my stockings in the first hour.

The first day of the onboarding we sat through eight hours of general talks from senior employees who wanted to explain the "culture" and "values" of our company, but the worst of all was the three-hour introduction to IT services where they "helped us set up our new laptops" and taught us how to send e-mails and how to use the Company Portal.

On the second day, they divided us into groups depending on our speciality (assurance, taxes, legal, etc) and exposed us to further 8 hours of boredom related to our speciality. However, since the "digital services" thing was still new to them, we didn't have a category of our own, and we had to attend the introduction to one of the other categories, and I didn't understand one word of what was being said.

On the third day I finally went to my office and they provided me with a second laptop. It turns out that we engineers got different laptops and were allowed to manage it ourselves instead of letting central IT manage it for us. So I simply returned the laptop they had given me the first day and started working. However, for some reason, the laptop I returned was not registered, and two weeks later they started pestering me with emails asking where was the laptop "I had stolen". It took me 3 weeks of emails and calls to make them understand that I had returned the laptop immediately.

Also, on the two onboarding days we had to sign attendance, and since I forgot to sign the paper list on the second day, they invited me to the event the next month again. I explained to them that I had already attended the onboarding and didn't go, so they invited me again on the third month, and they threatened me with "disciplinary action" if I didn't go. After a week of lost time writing emails and calling people, I ended up going to the onboarding again just to sign the effing list.

In the end, I resigned during the probation time. That company was the worst experience of my life. It was an example of corporate culture so absurdly exaggerated that it sometimes reminded me of Kafka's Trial. I think they have more "HR representatives" than people who do actual work.

Okay, just because I'm the only one under 35, single, and only white/hispanic guy on this team doesn't give you the right to interrupt me mid sentence IN my meeting. No disrespect to the developers from India and this may just be a culture conflict where I am outnumbered in my company but I don't understand the how some of these guys can't just be polite or respect others opinions(this is just from my experience with 90 or so developers from India and I don't believe in blanketing all Indians as this way just these 90 plus I do love the food).

Don't hijack MY meeting and then completely derail where I was going and disregard my solution without listening to the whole thing for an idea that isn't even solution but adds more work for both parties involved. You may have been working here for 5 years, but I worked in the actual department where we're building the new process and solution to a problem I've worked on. I understand the user since I WAS ONCE THAT USER for a good 8 months. And on top of that you can barely code efficient, or complex SQL statements. You're nothing more than fucking script kiddies and this whole IT department is joke. I apologize if the rant isn't really that coherent, I'm not very good at typing rants with my adrenaline running hot.

Non IT people controling the IT departments and ruining the development culture.

No one (where i am from) anymore considers the software life cycles, initial r&d work, normalized relational db or using proper algorithms. All this stuff is critical for critical systems but people just want the softwares to work on the front end and make money, no matter if its all duct taped underneath. And I strongly believe this is happening because of non IT people and marketers sitting on top of IT departments.

Computer science people have kind of lost all respect. They are constantly yelled at by non IT people and asked to do year's job in months.

This makes me sad

I studied ancient languages, because of corruption in my home country, I couldn't find any place in academy although my scores were above 90%. Moved to another country and taught myself web development. Naturally in time I lost almost all my knowledge of Latin, Ancient Greek, the whole ancient literature, history, philosophy and culture (everything from historical evolution of tremmas in letter i in ancient Greek to honey fish recipe in ancient Rome cousine). I'm super happy with Webdev tho but I think that also counts as data loss.

I don't care about your goddamn expectations. If you expected a developer to work in two different teams, you should have made that clear during the interview and I would have declined the offer. I apologize that in my universe, it's common sense that a person is assigned to one team unless advised otherwise so I didn't ask that question during the interview. Guess I was so damn wrong. Lesson learned.

I'm not a plug and play developer. If any of your developers can do that, they can go ahead and do just that. Their slave "yes, sir" mentality does not set the bar for me. I do not have to level up to their degree of "excellency". Call me a failure but fuck you. This is why you fuckers should stop glorifying people who work overtime. They provide inaccurate statistics and burn out other developers who want to live their fucking lives.

If you want to do overtime, do it yourself. Your norm shouldn't be my norm. If you want to be the hero that the company is so afraid to lose, good for you. Been there, done that. It was absolute hell and I got nothing from it, not even slimy cafeteria handjobs.

Obviously, I do not fit into this "company culture" so let me be the black sheep that goes baa baa muddafucka.

Engineers in their natural habitat

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

First they came for the atheists, and I didn't speak out - because I'm not an atheist

Then they came for the university teachers, and I didn't speak out - because I don't like universities

Then they came for the gamers, and I didn't speak out - because I don't play videogames

Then they came for Open Source and I didn't speak out - because "anyone can fork it"

Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak out for me

I know I butchered the poem and I'm not comparing our social situation to the Holocaust (obviously), but I think it kind of illustrates that silence and gradually giving up ideals like justice and meritocracy can end up badly.

I also encourage you to read the actual poem it's pretty nice and food for thought.

Always remeber:
The interview goes both ways. Ask the interviewer how he likes to solve problems, and how he works with ppl. This will give you the information to decide if you want to work with him or the company.
This is especially effective on HR: ask about thier corporate culture and how they deal with promotions/good people and how they deal with bad people.
And make sure you visit glassdoor.com before the interviews begin.

Recruiters are fucking unbelievable sometimes.

With about one year experience I applied to company A and company B. Kinda competitors in what dev skillset they're looking for.

Company A reviewed my CV and decided I don't have enough experience without giving me a chance to present my actual knowledge.

Company B tells me screw your CV come along show us what you got. I rocked the interview with an offer the next day which I accepted, absolutely thrilled.

Fast forward 7 months I get an email from company A, same recruiter, inviting me to an interview as they're "impressed with my profile and feel like I've gone a long way" (definitely just because company B hired me and I passed my probation)

Ah the joy responding to them that as I value honour and honesty quite highly I don't think I would be a culture match for company B where it is a norm to reject candidates and come back pouch them after they pass probation at competitors.

Eek.. instant apologies email and of course explaining it's not poaching but "exploring opportunities".

Screw company A, honestly.

A few years ago I had a startup. I invited 2 friends to join and we split the ownership equally. I did most the work but didn't mind. I had fun. Anyway, the story is not about me. I was in a startup incubator.
There was this stereotypical rich kid in the incubator too.
For the first few months he refused to even share what his idea was.
Finally he was forced to do it. It was an app for storing gift cards. Literally, there were startups for some high tech phd genious types. But the guy with the idea of a gift card app didn't want to share in fear that we would steal his mediocre idea.
His idea was to digitalize physical gift cards without the consent of the companies and make a market for selling, buying and trading (and taking a fee). When asked what if the companies refuse to accept the unofficial digital gift card, he said he had talked to a lawyer that they should accept it or he would sue them. Wow.
There was a guy who had attempted at doing an app like that 2 years before too apparently.
So here comes the part about the work culture.
He convinced 3 or 4 computer science students to develop the app for him. He offered them 1%, no pay. Talking about how rich they would get and how big it would be.
Luckily, one of the developers came to his senses after a few weeks and convinced the others that they were worth much more.
The guy was furious and even threatened to sue them.
He even got like 2-3k USD from some of his parents rich friends to develop the app. He could afford to pay them.
Anyway, the app was never completed.

I have many stories like that from other startups. A lot of students getting ripped off to work for free. I know people who have startups going for years thanks to free labor.

!dev
!!politics (kinda)

Here’s a gem from our recent harassment and diversity training at work:

Speaker: “All of these things are protected from discrimination in California! Wow! It’s a huge list, isn’t it? Now let me ask you a question: is a single white male under 40 protected?”

Everyone: *crickets*

Fucking really?
After immediately jumping on all of the other speaker’s questions, you can’t answer this one?

And later, here’s another gem:

Speaker: “If you witness an employee harassing another employee outside of work and work hours, completely unrelated to work, should you report it? What if you ask the person being harassed and she says no?”

Speaker: “Always report it! While it’s not *technically* required by law, you must report it! Why? Because you have the same protections she would! And maybe it’s easier for you to say something than for her.” (Surprise gendering was her own addition)

Fair on that last point, but against the person’s wishes? Totally not cool. Maybe it wasn’t harassment, or you don’t know the situation. Heads up: you probably don’t. Or maybe it wasn’t a big deal at all, but you think it’s earth-shattering. But all that reporting it against someone’s wishes does is create drama and possibly legal trouble. And if it wasn’t harassment or the case goes poorly, you just created enemies for yourself, or for one or both of them if you’re reporting it anonymously, and possibly even ruined one or both of their jobs/careers by doing so. Good fucking job, asshole.

Snitches get stitches.

Just started my new job.

Poorly defined requirements ✅
Expecting things to be done yesterday ✅
Poorly managed teams ✅
Terrible legacy code ✅
Half the development team is offshore ✅

Maybe I’m just selfish, but I need to work in an environment that has the following

A good technology stack.
A competent manager/team leader.
Competent colleagues.
Clearly defined documentation.
A proper onboarding process.

Why is this so difficult to find in organisations?

The worst work culture I've experienced was at a local security company.
There was a reason why over 15 people come and go within 6 months (just 30 people work there):
The boss is a fucking psychopath and should be (mis)treated in a high-security mental health institution.
There has not been one sane day during the 90 days I had to work there.
A friend of mine still has to work there because he can't find anything else in his current situation...

So this just happened... not to me, but at my friend's company.

The devs are being congratulated and spurred on for working late! I don't know about you, but this is not the kind of culture that should be encouraged.

Wanted to live outside the US. Was dating a Korean girl who moved back to Korea and was like why the hell not, let's go.

Worked at an American company that had a Korean office, so i thought it'd be easy mode. Took a working vacation to that office and interviewed. Brain froze on basic algorithms stuff - binary search. Failed to understand a logic question. But oddly enough, did well communicating with Korean developers with limited English knowledge.
Director talks to me at the end of the day, tells me they're looking for someone more senior. I bombed it, not mad.

...

Then he tells me he has a friend at one of the largest companies in Korea and that he'll be there to talk to me in two hours.
Dafuq

Chat with the dude. Supposedly, the larger company culture blows, but he has a little haven of badass developers and is known throughout the company for being an effective team builder. We talk for 90 minutes, and he days he'll hire me. Take a short online test to make sure I'm not a derp. Four months later, living in Korea and working, alas, sans girlfriend.

Been a year now. Ends up the company culture eventually crushed my boss. He was moved off the project, and then the project was scrapped. Yet they're starting a new project with the same group plus more because logic.

Today accepted an offer at a smaller company for a salary equal to my current salary plus bonus. Also, vidya gaems yayy.

I have got to have the silliest luck

I hate the reason why I don't mind people thinking I'm in my late 20s.
See, I've known quite a few people who will happily work with me, only to find out I'm 20. After that, they'll turn their nose up at me, and not bother with my input.
Sure, it might not be an age thing, and instead is a "I'm working with a junior level person", but even so, if someone has valid points to make, you listen to them or you'll get screwed over.
I didn't get to where I am now by acting like an inexperienced graduate.

And that's another thing. I didn't go to Uni/College. I self taught myself everything I know. I'm glad that the culture for smaller businesses has moved on from "you must have a degree to even talk to us".

It still stands though. If people lose respect for someone who didn't take exactly the same path as them, then screw them. I'm not a violent guy, but you'll still end up with a black eye if you push your luck.

it's kinda cool when u recognize devRant users by their avatar after using devRant a while.. it's like "Oh, him/her again..." 🙃

(possibly political, but not really)

I think there's an under-reaction culture around covid19. People are mitigating it to be "just a bad flu" and keep bringing up the 2-3% death rate.

I see that people may have good intentions but spreading lies just to make it seem like the virus isn't bad is worse than the media overreacting.

I'm tired of people just repeating the same "ugh, calm down, it's just the flu!" Just because they don't want people to worry. While panic isn't good, disregard is worse.

The "bad flu" stage is only the second of three stages. Stage one is minor symptoms (so nobody cares if they are sick at this stage) coupled with patients being highly infectious (you can imagine, this is a bad combo)

Stage two is of course the famous "bad flu".

Stage three is fucking respiratory issues including pneumonia, AFTER you have already gone through stage two, which can be rough on its own.

The CDC (not any media) has issued warnings to those at high risk to stock up on supplies and medication they may need. As usual for this sort of stuff, the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions are in the high risk groups.

2% death rate (low end) is one in 50 people. That could be someone you know. 4% (high end) is one in just 25 people. That's the average high school class size where I live. That's a lot, that's pretty deadly.

Stop calling it a bad flu. Stop listening to people on Facebook, CNN, and devRant. Please visit the CDC, they are constantly giving updates.

Stay smart

Worst work culture: You had to formally request post-its

Hopefully seeing the app that I've been working on for months officially released and on both the App store and google play store.

I say this because I've been waiting months and months for my boss and some other people at this company to be done with the privacy policy + terms of use for the app (which is needed due to how the app works) and I want to resign soon due to minimum wage + 2 hour commute twice daily + want a proper development culture (get treated as the IT guy at work)

The startup life culture is probably killing a lot of talent and taking away peace of mind.

Everything is needed
- too fast
- to work well

Forcing people to compromise on personal life and health.

It also takes away the interest to work on something as an interesting problem and makes it feel like "just another job to get finished".

So this post is going to target an irritating aspect of a specific culture based on observational evidence over the last 20 years, and has reared its hideous face yet again. If you're triggered by that, stop reading here.

I'm flatly fed up with two-faced onshore Desi coworkers. They make up 95% of my colleagues and the following sequence of events has played out repeatedly over the course of my career, consistently, though it's slightly more pronounced in other women for whatever reason :

1. Work with them for years, good relationship, teach them all sorts of skills (which I will do freely for anyone, for any reasons as I view it to be a moral imperative), general lifting up and solid teamwork.
2. They move up in the hierarchy, generally to management, usually project
3. The second they view themselves as higher in the pecking order they start treating me like shit as if we have no history. Rude, commanding, unwilling to share details, obligatory exasperated thank yous if any at all, not interested in anything I have to say even if I'm the noted expert on the subject.

I understand a lot of their etiquette culture, specifically the level of "directness" or politeness they employ is based on the estimated risk of loss in the interaction. I find that disgusting, but I understand that academically. I just can't get my mind around how universal this shiftiness is, as it happens over and over again. It's like human decency and respect go out the window the second they don't feel like they have anything to gain from you. In *my* culture that is the lowest form of behavior a human can exhibit, and it causes me to rage because I can't imagine being so utterly devoid of altruism.

Fuck. It's just so sickening. It's fucking debased, and selfish and greedy and fuck. I can't even, this is one of those things that so irrational my mind can't accept it and I just go around and around on it.

Tl;dr you want to get throat punched? Because that's how you get throat punched. It's definitely getting this person doxxed to USCIS

In gang culture, if you graffiti over an existing rival gang's gang symbol it's considered taboo and you could potentially get killed or get your ass beaten...

In the world of CSS, this act is performed by using !Important...

Got reminded of this job search bullshit they say after interviews, when they say you're not "fit for the culture" but they want you to be "challenging the status-quo".
Like, take a fucking pick. Either you want someone who follows and fits in, or you want someone who innovates and stands out. 😒

A fucking rant to me from myself.
I want to take control of my life. I want to fucking change my life. Want to move my lazyass and want to work on myself. Want to build awesome stuff want to help others want to change something for good. Want to learn new stuffs want to learn new skills want to travel want to go see new place want to know about other countries and learn about their culture and want to tell them "we are fucking humans stop finding stupid reason to hate each other for literally any fucking small reasons. Stop fighting yes there are bad guys, really fucking bad guys who deserves to die. Then kill them and finish the matter stop fucking keep making complicated and keep involving more and more. There are little kids who keep dying and need our helps it's feel so helpless sometimes and we sitting on sofa eating popcorn and complying about government there are kids in every country who don't even fortunate enough to have basic human needs and there are people who fucking throw food over there mood. A fucking Mood. Gosh I hate people sometimes so much.
Don't know why fucking writing all this on a Devrant supposed to talk about our devshit but couldn't control more.
A introvert don't got many friends to talk this shit and most of them worrying about there Instagram followers fuck this shit .
And here I am fucking trying really hard to pass on fucking useless boring exams for fucking degree which doesn't speck about your skills or show to the world anything besides you are good at memorizing shit.

If you are sick...

STAY THE FUCK HOME!

It has nothing to do with how YOU are feeling. It’s about RESPECT for those around you.

Especially if you work in an open office. Coming into an open office when sick is like coughing right on someone’s face repeatedly, it shows that same level of (lack of) respect.

Almost every company I have seen fucks this up so bad. It’s the same shit every year....

People are afraid to take days and stay home. They go in and make everyone sick, then everyone is taking days off and we are “short” on people. Then the incompetent CEO is scratching his head as to why this toxic work environment could produce such a toxic result.

And one more fucking thing.

If you got a cold/flu on Monday and your in the office on Wednesday because you are “feeling a bit better” then your a fucking idiot. At day 3 you are just starting to expel germs while still being highly contagious.

If you come into an open office while sick then I would say...

“Smarten the fuck up! And start showing some respect for the people you work with!”

If you have created (or are creating) a culture that encourages this then I would say...

“Fuck you! You should be fucking smarter than that.”

————

If your still sitting there thinking something like...

“Well I have to attend the meeting” or some other shit. Then let me add this to the pile.

Not everyone has had a rosy fucking life.

You may be working next to someone who has a lowered immune system due to past medical problems. What may be a week of sickness for you could end up being a month in the hospital for them.

You may be working next to a person who has a family member dying of cancer. If you make them sick then they can’t visit that family member (colds can kill cancer patients) and you may be stopping that person from seeing their loved ones one last time before they die.

Don’t be a fucking asshole.

STAY THE FUCK HOME!

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

If you would start your own company what would be the core values of its culture?

I think the worst work culture you can experience is nepotism and corruption in hierarchy. What do I mean? Well, this happened (and I think is still happening) in my last job. It was a huge logistic/delivery company. I was an intern, working as assistant developer of the only developer of the site. There was also a guy that was the technician, his assistant, a DBA and that's it.

Well, my partner and I were working on a system that managed almost all the operations of the company in this city.

Well, I supplied the dev two weeks when he was on vacation. I knew almost all the system. what happened? the manager from other city came with another Dev, and I'm not saying that I was an expert or something like that, but that dev from the other city was an incompetent. He couldn't even make a small GUI change without messing it all...

Guess what? The company paid him weekly round tickets to come and go from his city to ours (two hours of flight).

I was too disappointed I started searching another job. A week after getting my degree, I left my job and started in the one I am now. Before leaving, I asked my boss if there was a realistic chance to grow up. He answered no. To be honest, that didn't surprised me :/

The thing that makes me angry about this is that a lot of companies give chances to people that come from other cities, even if they don't know anything >:v

Oh, I almost forgot it: The last five months I was working there, they quit our office and send us to trailer-offices :/

I've been using microsoft dev stack for as long as i remember. Since I picked up C#/.NET in 2002 I haven't looked back. I got spoiled by things like type safety, generics, LINQ and its functional twist on C#, await/async, and Visual Studio, the best IDE one could ask for.

Over the past few years though, I've seen the rise of many competing open source stacks that get many things right, e.g. command line tooling, package management, CI, CD, containerization, and Linux friendliness. In general many of those frameworks are more Mac friendly than Windows. Microsoft started sobering up to this fact and started open sourcing its frameworks and tools, and generally being more Mac/Linux friendly, but I think that, first, it's a bit too late, and second, it's not mature yet; not even comparable to what you get on VS + Windows.

More recently I switched jobs and I'm mainly using Mac, Python, and some Java. I've also used node in a couple of small projects. My feeling: even though I may be resisting change, I genuinely feel that C# is a better designed language than Java, and I feel that static type languages are far superior to dynamic ones, especially on large projects with large number of developers. I get that dynamic languages gives you a productivity boost, and they make you feel liberated, but most of the time I feel that this productivity is lost when you have to compensate for type safety with more unit tests that would not be necessary in a static type language, also you tend to get subtle bugs that are only manifested at runtime.

So I'm really torn: enjoy world class development platform and language, but sacrifice large ecosystem of open source tools and practices that get the devops culture; or be content with less polished frameworks/languages but much larger community that gets how apps should be built, deployed, monitored, etc.

Damn you Microsoft for coming late to the open source party.

Lets do this guys, for the culture..

Which would you recommend?

1. Suicide
2. Programming

It's not always true that degree holders hate self-taught developers. Sometimes, it's the other way around. When somebody mentions he gained a cs degree, he sometimes gets hate, too, hearing "degrees are useless! yadayada..." like it's a sin to have one. We should never stop learning whether we have a degree or not, and we should stop this hate and divided culture.

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.

Highschool culture...

Here in Italy we run a few exam simulation in order to prepare for finals in June.
One of the two categories of simulations, one of which revolves around the core subjects of our technical course which in my case is CompSci and Networking.

"Sounds good!" one would say.
And I'd agree, if only our CompSci professor graded solutions in a sensate manner.
If one does not exactly copy and paste the solutions we repated in class 100 times (which, by the way, are all EXACTLY the same solution but with different data in diagrams and other sections), the grade WILL be insufficient: no but's or why's.

This is only one of the prime examples of what school revolves around. Sometimes it just feels like we are trained to be sheeps in a world of wolves. Rinse and repeat over and over. No technical competency is (almost) ever valued or allowed to be expressed and is often looked down upon by old school professors who literally care about everything but their subject, students and school in general.

I'm glad this is almost over, and that greener pastures are ahead :)

My week at glance:
Monday: Sunday night hangover
Tuesday:Prepare report for progress meeting.
Wednesday: Progress meeting
Thursday:work little bit for next week progress meeting.
Friday: weekend fever and hence not in mood to work.
#big #company #work #culture

I sent all the required documents, all you have to do is sign. Why do you have to hit me with an email asking if the "male" staying with me is actually a friend or a boyfriend when it didn't bother you at all when you didn't know whether he's a penis-wielder or a sinkhole-bearer?

Then goes the declaration of your concern for my safety (safety from the dangers of the male kind?) because I'm like your own child. You ask me if my parents would get mad about a man staying with me. I'm already in my 20's. I'm not an extra virgin coconut oil. Oh boy, if you only knew, you'd get a heart attack. Sometimes I feel like my physical appearance or general image doesn't match the foul-mouthed, disgusting, psychotic little fuck that I really am inside.

I'm just frustrated and need to let it out. People showing me they care embarrasses me (hard to explain) and I also find it hard to believe them. In my experience, people do that so they can extract private information from you and then later use it to exploit or humiliate you. It doesn't only happen in the tech world.

I don't hate my landlord, she's nice. I just really hate the "too close" relationships culture here. I know it's her place and she has the right to know who's staying here, the rest of the questions are just a little too extreme for me no matter how good the intention is. I honestly don't know what she's expecting.

That's the random rant. Now if you will excuse me, I'm gonna rip someone's stomach open, shove my head in, and motorboat his intestines. I want to see if he giggles. Why is my face red? Definitely not from embarrassment!

Good night.

> Worst work culture you've experienced?

It's a tie between my first to employers.

First: A career's dead end.
Bosses hardly ever said the truth, suger-coated everything and told you just about anything to get what they wanted. E.g. a coworker of mine was sent on a business trip to another company. They had told him this is his big chance! He'd attend a project kick-off meeting, maybe become its lead permanently. When he got there, the other company was like "So you're the temporary first-level supporter? Great! Here's your headset".

And well, devs were worth nothing anyway. For every dev there were 2-3 "consultants" that wrote detailed specifications, including SQL statements and pseudocode. The dev's job was just to translate that to working code. Except for the two highest senior devs, who had perfect job security. They had cooked up a custom Ant-based build system, had forked several high-profile Java projects (e.g. Hibernate) and their code was purposely cryptic and convoluted.
You had no chance to make changes to their projects without involuntarily breaking half of it. And then you'd have to beg for a bit of their time. And doing something they didn't like? Forget it. After I suggested to introduce automated testing I was treated like a heretic. Well of course, that would have threatened their job security. Even managers had no power against them. If these two would quit half a dozen projects would simply be dead.

And finally, the pecking order. Juniors, like me back then, didn't get taught shit. We were just there for the work the seniors didn't want to do. When one of the senior devs had implemented a patch on the master branch, it was the junior's job to apply it to the other branches.

Second: A massive sweatshop, almost like a real-life caricature.
It was a big corporation. Managers acted like kings, always taking the best for themselves while leaving crumbs for the plebs (=devs, operators, etc). They had the spacious single offices, we had the open plan (so awesome for communication and teamwork! synergy effects!). When they got bored, they left meetings just like that. We... well don't even think about being late.
And of course most managers followed the "kiss up, kick down" principle. Boy, was I getting kicked because I dared to question a decision of my boss. He made my life so hard I got sick for a month, being close to burnout. The best part? I gave notice a month later, and _he_still_was_surprised_!
Plebs weren't allowed anything below perfection, bosses on the other hand... so, I got yelled at by some manager. Twice. For essentially nothing, things just bruised his fragile ego. My bosses response? "Oh he's just human". No, the plebs was expected to obey the powers that be. Something you didn't like? That just means your attitude needs adjustment. Like with the open plan offices: I criticized the noise and distraction. Well that's just my _opinion_, right? Anyone else is happily enjoying it! Why can't I just be like the others? And most people really had given up, working like on a production line.

The company itself, while big, was a big ball of small, isolated groups, sticking together by office politics. In your software you'd need to call a service made by a different team, sooner or later. Not documented, noone was ever willing to help. To actually get help, you needed to get your boss to talk to their boss. Then you'd have a chance at all.

Oh, and the red tape. Say you needed a simple cable. You know, like those for $2 on Amazon. You'd open a support ticket and a week later everyone involved had signed it off. Probably. Like your boss, the support's boss, the internal IT services' boss, and maybe some other poor sap who felt important. Or maybe not, because the justification for needing that cable wasn't specific enough. I mean, just imagine the potential damage if our employees owned a cable they shouldn't!

You know, after these two employers I actually needed therapy. Looking back now, hooooly shit... that's why I can't repeat often enough that we devs put up with way too much bullshit.

No crazy prep, ever.

I always go in with a 'this is me, these are my skills, that's all you're going to get' mindset.

I of course do some research (about the company, their culture, technologies and stuff like that) but I find it kinda weird to spend a big amount of time on interview prep when there is a chance of rejection. (personal opinion)

Ok, so I'm one of the new folks here, and spent some time looking around.

And I've read so many of you write about levels of insanity at work that just baffles me.

Why do people do that to themselves? And no, I don't mean you sales-manager, or your boss who hired the wrong kind of dev, I mean YOU.

You are a developer, currently the market for devs is so large you can literally pick your jobs. And if you don't know how to find a new job, just Google (easy mode, search on LinkedIn) a company which specializes in recruiting, there are tons of them, and they will gladly search an employer for you.

Don't get stuck in a job that sucks - you will kill your motivation, and you deserve better.

Relationship of company employee

Funny how on Facebook (which I left years ago) I used to never get any likes for anything I wrote, even if it was meaningful.
Then I would look at the feeds of my friends and they would get ++'s for mainly useless and uninspired pop-culture reposts or posts of high narcissim.
It's ironic how they praised garbage rather than value.

I'm glad that on Devrant I at least get ++'s, indicating that people can relate to me. On Facebook, people faux-relate based on narcissim and faux-culture.

Shrug.

To anyone new to the corporate world I have this advice: there's a game no one tells you about in school or university. It's a game of politics. The good news is that you can choose not to play the game. The bad news is that others who do can change that decision for you, if you give them a reason to. So here's my tips to keep yourself from common bad situations:

* Some people will say they'd "prefer that people were honest". This is an outright lie.
* Be guarded - if a scenario could be taken out of context assume it will be.
* Mimic the office culture, don't try to rock the boat.
* Be polite, but always stay neutral between colleagues, picking a side means you're playing the game. Unless that side is your company vs another company in which case-- you are 100% on the company side and everyone else is stupid and incompetent.

"I’ve noticed lately that the paranoid fear of computers becoming intelligent and taking over the world has almost entirely disappeared from the common culture. Near as I can tell, this coincides with the release of MS-DOS." - Larry DeLuca

VoIP meeting today lasted 7 minutes.
I have kept the board down to ~5 ticket average for the last 3 months.

Co-worker(jokingly): I guess we don't need you anymore.
CEO: Quite the contrary. @chenb0x may need a promotion.
Me: *smirks*

This is why I like working for this company. Love the culture....no matter how much I may bitch about the clients.

'How did I get here?' a young dev may ask.

1. Delegate where proper
2. Script whatever can be scripted
3. When the board is low in tickets, it becomes a recursive responsibility to keep it low.

Back story
-----------------
When I was hired, the VoIP board was sitting at a ~30-40 ticket average.

My last job before going freelance. It started as great startup, but as time passed and the company grew, it all went down the drain and turned into a pretty crappy culture.

Once one of the local "darling" startups, it's now widely known in the local community for low salaries and crazy employee churn.

Management sells this great "startup culture", but reality is wildly different. Not sure if the management believes in what the are selling, or if they know they are selling BS.

- The recurring motto of "Work smarter, not harder" is the biggest BS of them all. Recurring pressure to work unpaid overtime. Not overt, because that's illegal, but you face judgement if you don't comply, and you'll eventually see consequences like lack of raises, or being passed for promotions in favour of less competent people that are willing to comply.

- Expectation management is worse than non-existent. Worse, because they actually feed expectations they have no intention of delivering on. (I.e, career progression, salary bumps and so on)

- Management is (rightfully) proud of hiring talented people, but then treat almost everyone like they're stupid.

- Feedback is consistently ignored.

- Senior people leave. Replace them with cheap juniors. Promote the few juniors that stay for more than 12 months to middle-management positions and wonder where things went wrong.

- People who rock the boat about the bad culture or the shitty stunts that management occasionally pulls get pushed out.

- Get everyone working overtime for a week to setup a venue for a large event, abroad, while you have everyone in bunk rooms at the cheapest hostel you could find and you don't even cover all meal expenses. No staff hired to setup the venue, so this includes heavy lifting of all sorts. Fly them on the cheapest fares, ensuring nobody gets a direct flight and has a good few hours of layover. Fly them on the weekend, to make sure nobody is "wasting time" travelling during work hours. Then call this a team building.

This is a tech recruitment company that makes a big fuss about how tech recruitment is broken and toxic...
Also a company that wants to use ML and AI to match candidates to jobs and build a sophisticated product, and wanted a stronger "Engineering culture" not so long ago. Meanwhile:

- Engineering is shoved into the back seat. Major company and product decisions made without input from anyone on the engineering side of things, including the product roadmaps.

- Product lead is an inexperienced kid with zero tech background -> Promote him to also manage the developers as part of the product team while getting rid of your tech lead.

- Dev team is essentially seen by management as an assembly line for features. Dev salaries are now well below market average, and they wonder why it's hard to recruit good devs. (Again, this is a tech recruitment company)

Slack culture.

Yes, the chat application.

Fuck it, fuck mattermost, HipChat, Skype, and whatever other digital text medium for team communication.

These are great applications, but used for great evil. They feed cliques and passive aggressive "side" conversations. Every team I've been on has something like this, and it allows people to cultivate hate for one another even though they're sitting in the same room.

Texting allows you to complain about a coworker to your clique. Each clique can have it's own thread. This empowers people to silently rip into other team members. It prevents rational adult conversations and builds stupid little secret societies.

Part 3: today has become a blog post.

WARNING: this is loooooooooooong

Background is my boss and I were talking about hiring the right people, also generalists vs specialists.

Essentially John and I are the specialists. When something goes wrong it ends up escalating to either him or me. But this is not sustainable as I can't handle the stress and most likely he eventually won't either.

And this goes back to general hiring standards.

All the good people leave and the remaining ones are stuck with all the problems and eventually for one reason or another they leave as well... or the code keeps getting worse... until someone decides to scrap everything and build a new one... But now the only people left to lead teams are monkeys.

Now current problem is the only person that can replace me is John and the only person that can replace John, at least in handling issues, is me...

It's a certain type of person, people that have a growth mindset and can pick things up.

Google and strong tech companies are full of these types of people where if needed there's always someone that can step in and help. They have the background and the ability to quickly learn. This also lets them innovate and identify and solve new problems.

I think that's what the technical interviews are for, to find these types of people.

And you really can't train this. I'm not sure how effective our "new" training program on high quality development is but I'm guessing it's not. Excellence has to be in the culture and it's not something that can be built overnight or by randomly hiring people.

So in a sense, tech companies aren't really paying well, they're paying cost to what their hires are really worth, after they've verified it, and enough to keep them from leaving.

Corporate Culture™: when those seniors who spend half of their time gossiping with each other pretend to be too busy to answer a junior's question.

I have been in Netherlands for just two days and I am already in love with this country...
Too bad I'll leave in two weeks 😱😢

If you can get a chat with the CEO I would ask this question.

“From your vantage point, what do you see as your job as CEO?”

Anything less than a list of 10-50 different job responsibilities is a total pass. It shows the the CEO thinks he knows it all. Everyone can and should grow and it has to come from the top down.

If you don’t hear anything about building culture then this is a problem. If you do, then probe further.

If the CEO seems to give the impression that he is above answering this question for “someone in your position” then this is a big red flag.

In my view everything in a startup come from the top down, and shit runs up hill. Therefore the CEO has to not only perform every conceivable task but must have a desire to learn and grow. A CEO who doesn’t learn builds companies that don’t learn. Companies that don’t learn, fail.

Applied to a Jr. Dev job and was hired as a Digital Marketer — I can deal with this, I’m AdWords & Analytics certified. What I can’t abide is that I spent the last year working my ass off learning to code and the person next to me with the Jr. Dev position only uses DIVI and has zero inclination to study, learn or write basic HTML & CSS—much less PHP. I’m not an expert by any means but I love programming, I love the problem solving, the challenges and the culture of it all. So far, and these are only two examples, I’ve shown him how to use the target attribute to open a page as a new tab, and how to register a nav in the functions.php file to create a menu but he is unwilling to even attempt it. Rather, he told me that I was too technical and that no one would be using code in this day and age.

For the record, I think DIVI is a cool platform, it’s clear that my boss knows nothing about code to be fair and I love my job— this is my only issue so far😂 I just needed to rant.

A coworker asked me to give him a hand on a project last thursday at around 8:00pm, by Friday noon I had most of it complete. Then turn the code back to him. Then somehow , it got placed on me during the weekend....20 mins before leaving to San antonio to be with my sister while my niece was born. Yeah...no..sorry...guess who enjoyed SA this weekend? This guy. Past experiences have shown me that one should not sacrifice personal time for company bs. Specially here in south texas where the majority of employers are from Mexico. In Mexico, there is no worker appreciation culture, going above and beyond the line of duty to accomplish tasks is not met with any sort of consideration. So nope nope nope nope.

What do you think about ageism in the tech industry? I see articles where Facebook/Google pride themselves that their employee median age is not over 30. Why is that of any importance? Is it hard for seasoned developers to find a job or adapt to the "youth culture" in tech companies? Any of you felt bullied by your younger colleagues? Finally, will this change in the next 10 years since developers in their 20s will be approaching their 40s, or once they reach that age they will go to the special developer graveyard and commit harikiri?

Damn! I never thought resigning from first company is not easy.
The team was amazing, overall culture was great. But after working for 2 years and making product stable enough, the learning curve started to flatten.
Decided to move on, last day was most painful. Sitting on the chair, wondering whether I did the right thing. All the memories flash black on that day. Nervous but little bit excited. Kinda mixed feelings

But turned out that job switch was even better. Good pay + one hell of learning to build product from scratch.

DevRant MeetUp in Nijmegen 4th Jan'20:

I'm goin' scouting this Sunday.

Got six locations to check for compability.
Lots of coffee, tea, beer, wine and such to evaluate. Btw : what's our price level? Medium?
Anyone in for culture, arts or even partying?! =)

Cheers!

My company sends out this Culture Assessment survey so employees "voices can be heard".
"Completely confidential."
I keep reading the email:
"Please *do not* forward this email to other individuals. The survey link is unique to your Business Group, project, and certain demographics, and therefore should be completed with only your responses."

....*face palm*

This business philosophy is relevant no matter which industry, culture or century you're in. In software development a user- or customer-centered design approach is particularly important👌

Via Instagram @alphaimplement 🚀

Was an aspiring 2nd grade student then, still a newbie in databases and stuff.

Managed to work with bossy motherfucker who didn't give a flying fuck about proper management, team culture, job roles and everything and treated people like shit.

The big boss wanted me to develop the ecommerce website that integrates with 1c (complete and utterly garbage buggy ass dbms with RUSSIAN SYNTAX, nuff said) and with its own crm to track every employee and even real time chat. He also wanted it to be a kind of online medical wikipedia. And he wanted me to take a professional photo of each and every fucking item for this website, somewhere around 5 thousand photos.

He offered me around 800 bucks for all that job. No, not monthly. He wanted me to do all that shit alone, for 800 bucks and expected it to be up and running in less than two months.

Gently told him to fuck off. Quit that job the same day.

!devRelated

I personally think that one of the worst things a person can be is a bad driver.

I really hate the driving culture in my city.

This ain't some third world country with no roads and no traffic signs or regulations. We have very very nice roads. Good traffic systems in place. Decent driving speeds and people STILL manage to fuck shit up.

Not one fucking day do I get in my truck without wanting to murdee someone.

I flipped off about 3 people today. One of them started to scream at me. I told the bitch ass motherfucker to do something about it. I was really hoping a motherfucker would.

I really hate these fucking people.

My fucking city is the reason why Trump supporters get off on hating mexicans. How the fuck can I blame them if when driving through such fucking city damn near every fucker on a vehicle drives with 0 regard for others.

Fuck this bullshit man. This is fucking Texas. I have yet to see nicer fucking roads, no fucking excuse really.

I am going to kill someone one of these days. And I will aim poorly...see if that shit hurts more.

Qin Chen, a 38 year old facebook employee, recently committed suicide and facebook is trying really hard to hide this.

Apparently he was too stressed out at work and was trying hard to steer things his way, he almost succeeded, but then his manager backstabbed him and left him helpless.

Instead of promoting a better work culture and taking steps against such malpractices at workplace, facebook is trying to hide this incident.

Facebook has to realize that them behaving this way not only insults the departed and his family, but also raises a question that is the life of any of their current employees of any value to facebook, or do they just look at them like workforce and not humans?

Let us not be silent. It was Chen yesterday, it could be any one of us tomorrow.

Sticker game:

A friend finds me coding and busy on my code then asks.

Her:Can I have a minute.
Me:Sure,how can I be of help

Her:What's up with all this devrant cartoons on your machine.
Me:Sounding excited,you like my sticker game can ship some for you?

Her:Nah sticker game since when is there such one looks childish and why ship stickers.
Me:It's our techy culture respect it let me finalize on my work.

She messed up my evening human bug.

The best part of being dev is the community, its also the most unique one IMHO. I mean what other profession in the Whole Wide World has such great and ingrained culture of helping eachother and sharing knowledge ?

How many languages do you speak?

Subscribed to CBS all access just for Picard and Lower Decks. Made the mistake of clicking on the Comedy Central icon by accident.

Two minutes later: email ad in my inbox advertising the Daily Show and Comedy Central.

Fuck you CBS. Double fuck you Viacom.

So I just recently found out there's a local idol group named MNL48 in here.

Basically bringing the seiyuu/J-Pop culture in the Philippines.

...

Maybe I should've became an idol instead of a senior high school programmer :/

Project manager ending argument with "it's because we have a shit culture"

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

Who else hates hackerrank coding challenges?

Sadly no VSCode icon theme for Chuck Norris fans yet

Let's schedule our weekly sprint planning meeting for 10AM on Fridays. And let's chastise those who happen to be 5 minutes late (literally). It's the perfect plan, since everyone is normally expected to come to work between 10AM and 11AM. Makes. Total. Fucking. Sense.

Super depressed rn and nobody to talk to about it. Stupid life problems. Can’t seem to learn new tech so if I lost my job I’d have to switch to landscaping or something. Can’t talk normal with people without someone taking offense at something I never dreamed could be offensive (stupid cancel culture) or trying to shut me down. Friends ending friendships and family cutting me out of their lives without communication as to why. My kids just don’t seem to care about anything I have to try to teach or share with them anymore. Nothing I do seems to matter to anyone or make a difference even when I’m trying to do good things for people. I don’t want to take my life but tbh if COVID got me I wouldn’t even be mad. I’d embrace it as my get out of jail free card.

Worst recruiter experience wasn't mine, but it was one I overheard:

Buddy of mine who, like me, was older does a couple rounds of interviews at a nice place and gets a call back from the company recruiter. He puts the recruiter on speaker phone so I can hear too.

They are very nice and tell him they selected another candidate, bummer but no big deal.

Hey I the age of ghosting at least they called right?

He is still upbeat and asks if there was anything he could do better interview or technical stuff.

She tells him "We weren't sure you would fit into the culture."

This is a bit odd as this guy is outgoing and one of those folks that everyone loves being around and working with, just a naturally likeable guy.

He asks what she meant about culture fit and she responds "Well you're older..."

He thinks he misheard her and asks again "Your older and we don't think you will fit in that way."

As a person from low-paying country, how do I reconcile with the fact that for the same work, and the same 8 hours, I get 1/3 of what a person in Germany does? In my previous team (same company), one of my teammates was from Germany. The same team, the same work, but he happened to earn a lot more.

This bothers me a lot sometimes. I have seen people requesting to be transferred to another country, and being denied, presumably because of the salary difference. Then, the person leaves, and someone in Australia gets hired. So, rather than moving a veteran person of whom you know fits your company culture to a higher-paying country, you let him go and hire a newbie in an equally-expensive country? What the fuckity fuck?

And to my friends from high-paying countries, especially managers: you don't have to feel bad, but have some common decency. If you come to my country, do not say "oh gosh, everything here is so cheap," or "the dinner for the whole team costs less than buying my family of four a dinner back home." That's offensive as fuck. If that's the case, fucking give me a raise you cheap fuck!

I need help understanding GitHub culture. How many stars do you say is equal to 1000 Instagram likes?

Recently shifted from startup culture to an established organization as a Javascript developer. It has been 3 weeks haven't written a single line of code here or any other related work. Employees pick a suitable source of entertainment (mobiles,netflix) and stick with it whole day and go home. Coming from a fast paced startup environment, I get creeps due to such an eased out approach towards work, can't believe I am getting paid for this 😂, as I was working my ass off during my last employments.

When applying for your first ever job, which of the following is/are/can be acceptable?
- Bad company culture
- Slavery pay
- Bad location
- No benefits (health care, etc.)
- No coffee/free snacks
- Long working hours/Lot of overtime work
- (Other)

🙄😐

Why some folks get offended by anything? The PC culture is getting out of control!

I'm so confused with this app right now. I've seen very few rants and mostly just photos making fun of various issues that occur in software development work culture.

The place I currently work at has got this culture of ignoring developers.

Deadlines get made by 3rd parties and project managers who don't have the technical nounce or experience of our system to make a call on deadlines.

Demos of products are arranged without a discussion with developers as to whether said component will be ready on that date.

3rd parties make decisions about future architecture, offer to assist, then disappear for days on end, to only come back and make out as though they've not been holding us up.

Upper management take no interest, don't listen to the people they pay to do a job.

Currently just moved a PHP web app into a multi tenant scalable EBS environment, but apparently it's not worth asking our view on technical aspects of the business before the shit hits the fan.

Lies to clients about documentation and policies, for example, claims from Sales we have a DR and BCP plan, client called is out, they sent a 2 paragraph A4 document to the client claiming it was our DR and BCP plan without talking to anyone technical, including myself who has years of DR experience. Embarrassing.

Could go on, but rant over.

Just finished Microsoft's newest CEO, Satya Nadella's book "Hit Refresh." It was actually really great. He talks about changing Microsofts culture and global impact, inspiring makers, as well as what the needs are going forward in technology.
Highly recommend.

Company with CULTURE
Company who doesnt allow tech team to WFH but editorial team is fine (or sales)

Sonos playing ALL DAY, and sales team talking all day, next to tech team desk

Dont u love open space offices?

Fuck this
FML

You may know I love to hate tests. Well not the tests actually, what I hate is the TDD culture.

DBMS schema in my app dictates a key can either have a value, or be omitted - it can't be null, and all queries are written with that in mind (also they're checked compile-time against schema). But tester failed to mock schema validation, inserted a bunch of null keys with mock data, actually wrote assertions to check those keys are null (even though they never should be), and wanted me to add "or null" to my "exists" queries.

No, we don't need more tests, and you're not smart with your "edge cases" argument. DBMS and compiler ensure those null values can never exists in our DB, and they're already well tested by their developers. We need you to stop relying on TDD so much you forget about the practical purpose of the code, and to occasionally break from the whole theoretical independent tests to make sure your testing actually aligns with third-party services some code uses.

And no, we don't need more tests to test your mocks, and tests to test those test, and yo dawg, I heard ...

Didn't get to the next interview stage because of "culture fit" 😔
What does that even mean?

"Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture. " - Anthony Burgess

I have been growing this creepy stache for a month now. I am hoping the "not fitting company culture"-ness of it will steadily attain me work-from-home privileges.

If it does fit the company culture, I am fucked in more ways than one.

Can anyone tell me what’s that “cultural appropriation” bullshit is all about? What does it mean to appropriate some foreign culture?

When you're told you are a great culture fit, and have great experience - but not ENOUGH experience.

Feels bad man.

I used to love mozilla as a community. The mozilla foundation loved the community and always listened to their voice. Of recent, they've started to turn a deaf ear to the community's voices and have started moving the agenda for a corporate culture. They slowly killed many amazing projects that was mostly run by the community (RIP Firefox OS) and started focusing on more corporate-oriented lobbying and agenda (*cough* Pocket *cough*). I feel that the company is slowly moving toward becoming less of a (community-oriented) foundation and more of a corporation. That path is dangerous and not one that I expected mozilla to take.

Another company worth mentioning was OwnCloud which got forked into Nextcloud because they didn't care about the community enough and put the enterprise customers and their needs ahead of the community's. The disappointed founder of the OwnCloud quit and forked it into NextCloud with the right controls for the community and the users to always be put in the first position.

TL;DR: my boss is a dick and I don't know what to do.

Been working at the company for a month now, I enjoy the atmosphere and the culture (startup btw) but I really cannot stand my superior - there's only two of us in the team. Any screw up he blames it on me without a second thought. First week in he assigned their new website project to me and honestly they have quite unrealistic deadlines. I mean they didn't even have the infrastructure for it nor the manpower to build one yet it needs to be finished by the end of this month. On top of that the spec keeps changing literally every 2-3 hours.

Also since I've forgotten to mention the guy I'm working under is one of the founders so I can't really go and talk to someone about it. I feel pretty screwed over, anyone has any advice or been in a situation like this? Is it too early to quit?

Joined a big corporate for the first time in my life a few months ago, after years and years in small companies and startups.

Went from designing new creative solutions and finding challenging problems to working on small stupid tasks and obeying a fucking idiotic company culture, that is nothing but words that are not applied in reality. Creativity and enthusiasm are discouraged for the sake of maintaining the status quo.

Probably the worst decision in my life. I don't think I can do this for long.

Frustration at its peak !!

So the CTO of the company I recently joined, whom I considered to be cool personality of all the open culture in the office and open communication, seems to be all wrong.

Few days back he suddenly dropped a mail to all the tech team members mentioning that we need more streamlined process in the company and many more blah blah stuffs... to which all of us agreed.

But. But. But. The last line(small font size) mentioning that from now onwards we need to come on Saturdays too until further notice. I mean WTF !!? Seriously.

But today in stand-up when one of the guy asked the agenda, he just tossed the question saying that we need to be more active attending "client tickets". Goddammit. We are devs, not tech support.
To this one of the other dev, said the exact same thing that was going in everyone's mind. Call the team that are required on Saturdays. To which his reply was, " Come on Saturday, we will speak then".

I was like 👏👏👏

P.S. Not that we are not ready to come on Saturdays, but at least take consent of all the members in the team, if you all babble so much about open culture and shit. We have friends and family too to have fun with, and need to take little rest on weekends.
And most importantly, tell us some firm reasons to be there on weekends, not just "You have to come, because we said so!"
Period.

Recently installed SonarQube and its been amazing to see the level of code quality (or lack thereof)

Some projects have 30 to 60 days of technical debt and I found a few files with a cyclomatic complexity over 100. I’m still learning what the “good” numbers should be.

Yesterday, couple of devs were very proud they were going to start reducing the numbers, they started with one of my solutions that had 5 minutes of technical debt. Yes, 5 minutes.

DevA: “OMG…look at this…it has a cyclomatic complexity of 11…that’s terrible. I thought we were supposed to be professional developers.”
DevB: “And take a look at this, he used the double-slash instead of a triple slash for comments. How does any of code even compile?!”
Me: “Maybe we should tweak some of those SonarQube rules so they make more sense to our code base. We’re never going to use unicode, so all those string culture warnings should go away and code comment formatting? Who cares? Be happy we have comments. I think we should also focus on the bigger fish in that pond. The CRM project is one of the biggest and has a lot of improvement opportunities.”
DevB: “There you go again, don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions..ha ha”
DevA: “Yea, no kidding …hey…did you see the logger? OMG…the whole class is over 25 lines…we gotta split that up into smaller projects so it’s more manageable.”

It’s a good thing our revenue stream isn’t dependent on people getting work done.

Pranks aren't part of the culture here, and I'm happy about that.

18 year ago today the earth stood still... and everything that was never was again ..it truly was the day that changed the world for the future.

I remember where I was when it happened... My aunt and uncle, worked In the pentagon on that day... they remember but they have never talked about that day

Every year its suppose to get easier to cope with that day, but I feel like each year gets harder and harder as the more I realize the things that changed or the other things that also happened around that time... or was popular prior and slowly died out afterward... each year that goes on just reminds me how long ago it was and it’s only getting longer, for the days of “old” ... days and culture of what I remember growing up to never return.

I see stackoverflow are trying to deal with the shitty culture issue

"The era of self-regulation for online companies is over." UK Culture Secretary Jeremy Wright.

Look for governments, especially those without strong free speech protections, to move to control the means of communication for the masses, and control what people see and hear.

Do you have this culture at the office where your employer (management) try to shame you if you leave at the normal hour? How do you deal with it?

If you work in France I would like to know what's your work schedule, because I'm in a startup and everyone stay there until 18pm.

Joined small scale-up months ago. I literally want to punch one of my coworker. Constant mental harassement, self-declared lead, rude and impolite. That coworker is socially awkward in the baddest and meanest way.

Oh boi.

Founders seems to not give a crap even if they told me they want a flat hierarchy. They let that coworker off the hook.

Not even mentioning that culture of oppression and repression.

If you're late you must bring chocolate and they'll remind you 256 times a day. Oh boy, I'm not late... I just don't want to come in the office.

Also, the code is atrocious.

What seemed like a dream job at first turned out to be a nightmare. Never been bullied since I started working. Now, I have a bully and a nemesis.

Ooooh boy.

My kick-ass merch from JapanCon Brussels (Nov 2018): a Yoda doormat, TallGeese Gundam Wing model, Pulp fiction displate, AND in front of it A 3D-PRINTED PICKLE RICK OMG CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT!!! xD

What is it with this bullshit culture about installing something syncs it with all machines
First chrome/chromium, You can't install a plugin or extension on 1 machine unless you're logged out. what is this bullshit

Next windows 10, I fucking installed a Japanese language pack on 1 machine, by the end of the day all my fucking machines and even my windows tablet got it installed and applied in a fucking bugged way that made it that my UI is English and my fucking metro apps are Japanese.

This is starting to get annoying as fuck

How is it security, a function of IT, does not understand developers? I mean, they work in IT, should not at least pick-up on the culture?

So after 7 months of soul crushing searching I was able to land an awesome job I never thought I'd get! I didn't really get hired for my projects, I think I was more of a culture fit that knew enough of what they were talking about. My colleagues are awesome, helpful people but they are also clearly way ahead of me as devs. I know that many new hires have similar feelings and it's more a matter of drive + time. I understand that and I'm ready for the marathon ahead of me but I have one HUGE concern... I don't understand unit testing. I've never written unit tests in JavaScript or Java (just on paper I wrote random assert statements for a college exam question that somehow turned out correct). More importantly, I don't understand when to write unit tests and what my main objectives should be when writing them. At work they talk about unit testing like it's just as basic as understanding version control or design patterns, both of which I have had no problems asking questions about because I at least understood them generally. I come here looking for resources, mainly things I can go through over the weekend. I understand that I'm going to have to ask my colleagues for help at some point but I DON'T want to ask for help without any solid base knowledge on unit testing. I would feel much more comfortable if I could understand the concepts of unit testing generally, and then ask my team members for help on how to best apply that knowledge. I'm sorry for begging, I'll definitely be looking for resources on my own too. But if anyone could point me to resources they found to be helpful & comprehensive, or resources that they'd want their co-workers to use if they were in my position I would be very grateful!!!!

"The culture here is one of success based upon academic excellence, studying, learning, practising and having a good job and a great life. For upper India, not the lower. I see two Indias. That's a lot like Singapore study, study, work hard and you get an MBA, you will have a Mercedes but where is the creativity? The creativity gets left out when your behaviour is too predictable and structured, everyone is similar."
Steve Wozniak on Indian Talent.

As an Indian, I agree with him. In this day and age, where education is so easy to come by, We live in a country where from the beginning we're told that education is about getting marks and writing stuff down 10 times. We live in a country where we're asked to cram up answers to questions which start with "what are your thoughts on..". How can we expect to be creative?
Can marks be a metric for good candidate in a country where the thought is, "first complete your engineering with good marks, then think what you wanna do in life".
Should academic excellence really be about the amount of shit a guy could cram up?

Sure it's easier to filter out people on the basis of marks in a country with 1.3 billion people, but is it justified?
Can we justify "success" as a good job for a guy who's life's only achievement has been getting into a good engineering college?
Can we really consider a guy successful, if his only "effort" has been reading and rereading books twice, thrice, a million times. Is this person, who has literally crammed his way into life, and has no practical experience, really successful?

This is the very reason Woz giving such a statement is justified. As long as we as a country gives up the stupid thought that patriotism is all about abusing the guy who says something negative about the country, and we actually start taking an action and change our thoughts on education, we won't succeed.

doomsday out 🤟

I miss psychological safety. I'll define it as the willingness to be vulnerable to criticism and the belief that contrary opinions are embraced and judged on their merit.

When I first entered the startup scene my manager had exceptional candor. He had no qualms talking about how kids and personal projects caused his investment in his work to wax and wane.

He always made time to talk to me when I was frustrated and made me feel like he truly listened to what I had to say, even if he didn't act on it.

At the time, I attributed the safety to the company culture created by the CTO. The startup failed and eventually, I found my way to that CTO's next startup.

Completely different experience. I find myself in despair as I hear "I'm more senior and therefore am right and don't have time or interest in your ideas" blatantly stated.

When I disagree with people, I try to ask clarifying questions to identify where the divergence occurs. Sometimes I'm surprised and learn something new, sometimes my questions prompt reconsideration.

With the CTO (now CEO), we go in circles where he squirms, deflects, and outright refuses to respond to my questions. He cancels 75% of 1:1's and when we do talk he suggests that if I disagree I "should introspect which of my beliefs is holding me back from embracing his superior way of doing things"

Multi-hour slack wars suck the life out of anyone trying to ask questions. It's so exhausting to ask questions it's often cheaper and faster to wallow in despair for an hour and hack something together than descend into people shouting preferences at each other and shaming me for not already knowing the answer.

Perks, pay, and tech-stack are all cool. It feels selfish to be unhappy because I can't innovate or challenge the status quo. Having tasted that safety though, I'm left with an unquenched thirst that grows stronger with every conflict.

Just turned down an offer to become eCommerce Lead @IKEA Austria.

They got those messed up systems controlled by the headquarters in sweden and no clue of or sense for online or digitalisation...how I'm supposed to fix their organization culture... I'd only had freaked everybody out trying to disrupt their 'used' way of doing business :(

Wondering if that's gonna haunt me...

Our company hired a "Human resource consulting" to help with our internal processes and policies. Yesterday they showed us an Excel that we should fill when we travel to attend meetings, events, courses, etc.

This spreadsheet... OH, THIS SPREADSHEET... you should've seen that.

Most of the "labels" of the "fields" were writen with terms that we do not use in our daily basis. The fields were ambiguous. You shout put a number on the Transportation quantity (ex.: 5) but have no space to describe which transport you will use (bus, metro, uber... so... 5 what?). When we asked which name shoud go on the field "superior" (director, pm, scrum master...) the woman from this consulting said "oh, I don't believe you're asking about this" (and since then, she became more rude by the end of the meeting).

We care for quality in our apps, and UI/UX is a big thing in our company. The last thing we want is need to read a f*#1n manual to fill a spreadsheet. Make it intuitive and you will not need an hour and a half to explain how to fill this obsolete form.

It's sad to think that this person was hired to improve our company, but did not bother to understand the company's culture (and values, and terms) first.

In recent years there has been a massive shift in dev positions and their responsibilities. At least in all the companies, I've worked with.

Interns are now treated like Juniors.
Juniors are now treated like Mids.
Mids are now treated like Seniors.
Seniors are now treated like Architects.

I think some devs(now seniors) forgot how much easier it was to get into this field years ago and how little they had to know to start.

Sad reality.

SHOCK CONTENT PROCEED WITH CAUTION

Star tattoos on knees means "I'll never be on my knees for cops", "I'll never do what cops say" in russian criminal culture. However, these tattoos are dangerous. Russian cops don't like them. If you're just arrived to a russian prison and they see the tattoos (and they see it), they tie your legs the way that makes you knees face the ground, then two cops hold you and drag you around the huge asphalt prison yard until there is no stars on your knees, only the naked kneecap bones or lack thereof.

I have to leave but it's psychologically hard because russia is the country that gaslighted and threatened me into becoming a slave. It's a stockholm syndrome and I want to break it.

I can't come to terms with people's terrible reasonings.

You read a news about something. Let's assume it has to do with a sensitive topic, like race, gender, culture, religion, something polarizing, that makes you pick 1 of 2 sides.

So what do some people do? They ask themselves "ok what group do I adhere? How do I label myself?".

Then they ask "what do other people in said group/label think about the matter?", sometimes it's people in the media, friends,

sometimes people even create a mental construct of a stereotypical person of said group, a hypothetical one, and use the opinion of said construct as representative.

And final step is a knee jerk reaction of "I believe that too!!!!!!".

Obviously, all of this can't bring no one closer to the theorical truth or the least flawed conclusion.

What does? Case by case basis.

You judge every case as if every case was its own thing.

But why does some people have a hard time doing that? Just general ignorance maybe?

Maybe this tends to occur in families where parents don't teach their kids to challenge their beliefs, or teach them that doing so could result in lack of parental acceptance.

People also have peer pressure, the need to belong and feel accepted. That means sharing the same points of view with close people and considering the opposite taboo.

There's also the very ignorant people that have conspiracies for lunch.

In any case, I feel some people don't even fucking try to be neutral.

recently i prided myself in my high ability to google stuff but i just blank at this problem:

i have 4 HDDs with my photos on it. They are more or less backups of each other, but not quite. The folder structure is convoluted and i am dreading this task since years. I now want to move to a better backup culture and save the data i really care about.

Problem: i may or may not inserted new photos in some versions of the hdds and not in others. So they are like [Photo1], [Photo2], [Photo3] and [Photo4] but [Photo1] contains a,b and d content, [Photo2] contains a and b but not d, [Photo3] contains c.

Now i would like a program that just takes hashes of all files present and compares them and finds differences among those 4 folders so i can combine them in each other. Additional problem points for a being in a different subfolder on [Photo1] as in [Photo2]

Its probably some backup software that can that, but i dont know which one.

Whelp?

Recruiter called me to present me a job in fintech.

Arguing about how work standards are important and that task oriented work culture is great.

....

Recruiter (can’t find any argument): All people work in office. It’s financial institution they need to protect privacy.

Me: AWS on last summit presented show case of whole bank from EU in their cloud infrastructure.

....

And we argued for at least 10 minutes where me was talking about losing time and task oriented workplace with specified goals and listening about how brilliant people are there and how much they believe in opensource.

I started believing they want me to go to work to indoctrinate me and make me corporate pig.

Hell no I am to old for that.

Has anyone else worked in business environments and found... em.. "wannabe-tech decisions?"

For example, naming stuff with shortened words and underscores instead of spaces.... for no real reason? Or maybe using the word "database" a little too often, just to use the word? (similar to the way you might call someone by name, only to confirm to them that you have learned their name?)

It doesn't actually bother me, rather, I think it's a bit cute that these people are interested in our culture and want to be a part of it, even if it's in sort of silly ways like this.

Culture.

Everybody seems to fuck it up. (Most ignore it entirely)

Everybody seems to undervalue it’s importance. (Its value cannot be overstated)

Everybody seems to think it is a luxury for successful companies. (Instead of being a major part of what got them their success)

Everybody seems to think having beer in the fridge is culture, or some other perk. (I like beer and shit, but that’s not culture unless your company makes fucking beer!)

Everybody seems to think that a value statement is culture. (Your employees don’t give a fuck if you want to “provide value to X industry)

And guess, fucking, what...

Everyone is wrong. That’s why 9/10 startups fail, because the founders and CEO are dumbasses.

Here’s some pretty simple advice for life...

“Don’t be a fucking dumbass”

- Me

It's called culture

I had my second interview today with the director .. He seems to be nice at first.. when he asked me do you read books I honestly said I don’t...he then asked me if I had like programming books with me.. I said no since all the lectures are all in ppt ... and I believe that is enough during colllege.. and they didn’t require us to have books.. I just felt that .. he did not like me just because of that..I like the company but I guess being honest also kills the opportunity..the second interview mainly focuses on fitting with the company culture...I just thought the interview went really fast.. It just seemed that they had this “ahh next!!” Kind of attitude when I left the room

This is sort of a boring story. I always have been interested in making games but actual coding always made me very uncomfortable and never tried it until I got to college. I met some really cool guys there and got into an association that was based on pop culture and videogames. Me and the president of that association started on our spare time to code for a videogame. He made his and I made mine. The software I used was gamemaker studio and I made like 7 games. I wanted to make a website for the games so I learned HTML, CSS and JavaScript. At that first year I was studying criminal justice and was slowly being taken away by programming. I changed my concentration to computer information system thinking that I wanted to do a more general approach but programming kept gaining ground. I had depresion on middle School all through highschool and early college. I'm safe to say that after I decided to code seriously my depression has seize to exist and life feels very good. Coding for me is very rewarding and challenging. I'm soon going to pursue a bachelor degree in computer science and hope I don't change concentration again.

Started a new job as a dev. First days revealed no local admin rights, no right to use Linux locally and a very limited set of Software. Negotiated compromise to get a remote VM with Linux and a user who is part of sudo. VM turned out to be isolated by proxy, so I can not install anything new. At least Docker is pre-installed and I hoped it could work out. But guess what no access to dockerhub and I can not pull any images. Admin told me to copy manually the images with scp.

I'd never thought that there could be any companies out there who treats devs like that. What puzzles me most, there're lot of devs staying with that company for years, even decades already and they're good guys, please don't get me wrong.

Did you encounter anything like that? Could you make any difference there, where you met anything like it.

I reached the point after 3 weeks where I do not think I can make any difference and when it'll take ages to move people and company policy.
I do not want to give up, but I fear it is pointless to fight for change there. I am out of options and about to leave asap. Can you recommend me anything else?

Thanks in advance and for your time :)
Felt good to write it down.

Them: Maintaing code quality is a vital part of our team culture!
Me: Really, how important? Can a feature slip to facilitate necessary refactoring?
Them: Well no. We've made a commitment to the client.
Me: So, code quality is not very important then is it...

To have a professional job that lets you work remotely from the comfort of your home in your own office; which pays you well enough but doesn't pressurize you into unachievable deadlines. One that gives you ample time to relax and do some part-time projects for yourself. One that lets you spend time and contribute to the communities you're part of and help you grow both professionally and within the community.

Oh, and best of all, work in the open - open source, open culture and transparency.

Coworker (junior engineer): "He's a principal engineer, and damn good at his job because he works all night long. You're still lead engineer because you don't work late at night."

Flak I get for *not* being able to stay up after 10:30pm. 😥