#3 Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?

A 20-something dev, 'A', back in the early days of twitter+facebook would post all his extracurricular activities (drinking, partying, normal young-buck stuff). The dev mgr, 'J', at the time took offense because he felt 'A' was making the company look bad, so 'A' had a target on his back. Nothing 'A' did was good enough and, for example, 'J' had the source control czars review 'A's code to 'review' (aka = find anything wrong). Not sorting the 'using' statements, and extra line after the closing }, petty things like that. For those curious, orders followed+carried out by+led by 'T' in my previous rant.

As time went on and 'T' finding more and more 'wrong' with A's code, 'J' put A on disciplinary probation. 'A' had 90 days to turn himself around, or else.

A bright spot was 'A' was working on a Delphi -> C# conversion, so a lot of the code would be green-field development and by simply following the "standards", 'A' would be fine...so he thought.

About 2 weeks into the probation, 'A' was called into the J's office and berated because the conversion project was behind schedule, and if he didn't get the project back on track, 'A' wouldn't make it 30 days. I sat behind 'A' and he unloaded on me.
<'A' slams his phone on his desk>
Me: "Whoa...whats up?"
A: "Dude, I fucking hate this place, did you hear what they did?"
<I said no, then I think we spent an hour talking about it>
Me: "That all sucks. Don't worry about the code. Nobody cares what T thinks. Its not even your fault the project is behind, the DBAs are tasked with upgrades and it's not like anyone is waiting on you. It'll get done when it's done. Sounds like a witch hunt, what did you do? Be honest."
A: "Well, um...I kinda called out J, T, and those other assholes on facebook. I was drunk, pissed, and ...well...here we are."
Me: "Geez, what a bunch of whiney snowflakes. Keep your head down and you'll get thru it, or don't. Its not like you couldn't find another job tomorrow."
A: "This is my first job out of college and I don't want to disappoint my dad by quitting. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing. All J told me was to get better. What the fuk does that even mean?"
Me: "He didn't give you any goals? Crap, for someone who is a stickler for the rules, that's low, even for J."

Fast forward 2 weeks, I was attending MS TechEd and I was with another dev mgr, R.

R: "Did you hear? We had to let 'A' go today."
Me: "What the hell? Why?"
R: "He couldn't cut it, so we had to let him go."
Me: "Cut what? What did he do, specifically?"
R: "I don't know, 'A' was on probation, I guess he didn't meet the goals."
Me: "You guess? We fire a developer working on a major upgrade and you guess? What were these so-called goals?"
R: "Whoa...you're getting a little fire up. I don't know, maybe not adhering to coding standards, not meeting deadlines?"
Me: "OMG...we fire people for not forming code? Are you serious!?"
R: "Oh...yea...that does sound odd when you put it that way. I wish I'd talk to you before we left on this trip"
Me: "What?! You knew they were firing him *before* we left? How long did you know this was happening?"
R: "Honestly, for a while. 'A' really wasn't a team player."
Me: "That's dirty, the whole thing is dirty. We've done some shitty things to people, but this is low, even for J. The probation process is meant to improve, not be used as a witch hunt. I don't like that you stood around and let it happen. You know better."
R: "Yea, you're right, but doesn't change anything. J wanted to do it while most of us were at the conference in case 'A' caused a scene."
Me: "THAT MAKES IT WORSE! 'A' was blindsided and you knew it. He had no one there that could defend him or anything."
R: "Crap, crap, crap...oh crap...jeez...J had this planned all along...crap....there is nothing I can do no...its too late."
Me: "Yes there is. If 'A' comes to you for a letter of recommendation, you write one. If someone calls for reference, you give him a good one."
R: "Yea..yea...crap...I feel like shit...I need to go back to the room and lie down."

As the sun sets, it rises again. Within a couple of weeks, 'A' had another job at a local university. Within a year, he was the department manager, and now he is a vice president (last time I checked) of a college in Kansas City, MO.

that one legendary guy who cranks out code and builds insane features. PMs (product management) love him because he builds features in several months which 10 devs together couldn't have built in the same time (so they say), features that are loved by customers as well, become their new standard and that have saved our company's asses in the past.
features are really awesome, performant and have very few bugs (compared to the rest of the software シ).
but this guy seems to live for this job. he also works at weekends, at unholy times of day and night and even in his holidays (he doesn't care that this is actually illegal, in terms of employee's rights, and he wouldn't listen to his superiors, no matter what they tell him)
so far, so good - except that he will probably die of some stroke or something very soon due to this lifestyle.
but it must be an absolute pain in the ass to work with him, as long as you're a developer (or his superior).
he lives in his own world and within the software, his features are also his own world. since the different modules interact with each other, sometimes you would be assigned a bug that might have its cause in some interaction of your and his module. talk with him about it? forget it. he wouldn't answer most devs who contacted him for some reason. ever. fix it in his module yourself? might happen that he just reverts your changes to his module without comments. so some bugs would lie on your desk forever because theoretically you know what would need to be done but if you cannot reach out into HIS world, there's no way to fix it. also - his code might be good in terms of performance and low bug numbers. but it seems to be hard to work on that code for everybody else but him.
furthermore, he is said to be really rude. he is no team player, but works on a software that is worked on by a huge team.
PMs think he's a genius, just a great dev, but they don't understand that other devs need to clean up the mess behind or around him.
everyone who's been his superior so far recommends to get him fired, but the company wouldn't fire him because they don't want to lose his talent. he can just do what he wants. he can even refuse to work on certain things because he thinks they are boring and he is not interested in them. devs seem to hate him, but my boss said, they are probably also a bit jealous because of his talent. i think, he's not wrong. :)
i haven't actually met him so far or was actually "forced" to deal with him, but i've never heard so many contrastive things about one person, the reputation of his, let's say vibrant personality really hurries ahead. he must be a real genius, after all i've heard so far, like he lives in the code. i must say i'm a bit curious but also somewhat afraid of meeting him one day.
do you also have such a guy at your company?

Just curious.

Has anyone ever had to face the wrath of the people they were ranting about here in devRant?

I introduced my reporting manager to this network, and I have done some amount of ranting about him.

I guess you could say 'danger' is my middle name.

to the guys saying "oop is dumb" / "i don't need oop" / "i've never worked with oop"...

i have some questions:
- which language are you working with
- which problems are you solving
- how big is your code base
- how do you maintain readability of your code?

don't get me wrong, i don't believe that oop is always the answer. i'm just curious which fields these statements are coming from. if they all come from a low level (assembler, C, ..) or functional languages or "scripty" languages (python, JS), or if there are also people working with languages like C++ where oop is pretty much established. and if the latter, i'm curious how people design their code and what problems they solve... tell me your story :D

I am genuinely curious, to those still building SOAP based APIs in 2022, why??

I was working as a software dev contractor at this company providing specific e-learning services for a specific industry X.

One day the CEO posts on Linkedin about an interview discussing the potential of gaining $100k per year working in industry X after getting specialized training for 6 months (using our e-learning platform of course) .

My gross income at the time was $65k. My experience was about 7-8 years. Now the thing is you might say "gee that's pretty low for a dev, especially a contractor", and yes I agree, but you have to understand a few facts:

1. I am from eastern Europe (cheapish labor - which btw for all of you out there from the West, including Germany and whatnot, it is xenophobic to consider easterners cheap and it personally insults me and my ability - but that's another story)

2. I was happy to accept the offer since it was the best I had up to that point :))

Now, by the time the LinkedIn post I was heavily invested in the product development. I personally had written 30% of the code (frontend and backend) compared to the whole development team (about 15 devs)... and yes you might argue that performance is not measured by number of lines of code... but trust me when I am saying I did the most on that product, and I am not saying this to brag, I actually care about the stuff that I work on.

When I saw that post on Linkedin I thought to myself "what kind of BS is this? I am a dev and devs are supposedly the best paid workers out there, and a guy from industry X that just got trained for 6 months would get more than me?! WTF?!"

So I messaged the CEO ...

Me: I noticed the post from linkedin about $100k by working in industry X, I am curious how does one get to that revenue per year? What is your advice?

CEO: The best way to obtain value is by creating value which you maximize continuously.

Me: and how does one maximize value?

CEO: it does not matter how hard your work but how large of an impact you make!

Me: ... and how do you measure impact? (me thinking about performance reviews for contract negotiations - and because performance reviews should be SMART -> meaning it should be measurable somehow)

CEO: Simon Sinek says ... << insert motivational quote here because I don't remember and don't care >>

I just lost if after reading the name "Simon Sinek" ...

So you see my dear friends ? It is all fairy dust, smoke and mirrors, in the end it is about maximizing profits, lowering costs and maintaining the illusion of opportunity... when there is none.

Lord is my witness... I hate hypocrisy and quackery ...

You can imagine that my contribution on that product immediately lowered, doing the bare minimum to meet the contract demands AND I FEEL NO REGRET.

%&#$ YOU SIMON SINEK.

Hi devs,

i am just curious, how often you use devrant.

to be honest,.. if my life is good.. no bugs. no miss management. I don't even remember devrant exist..

but as soon as I got frustrated from code,management, life.. Devrant is the first thing I type of my browser before starting any work :P

It's dangerous to be curious. And have time to spare.

This morning I was in THAT state and decided to spin up kubernetes inside an... Alpine docker container.

The day has almost passed and I think I'll have enough tinkering left for the night.

yay........... I guess...

After working with a bunch of people it occurred to me that almost anyone can work and learn for most IT positions. This is something that most people will realize, especially if they work with newbies that learn on the go. There are exceptions of course, but most companies are just making crud apps with their business logic.

What I wonder then is, why is it that the way hiring is done seems to be completely against this idea? Rather than whining about recruiters and bad interviews, I am curious about why this is so common. What is it that a lot of companies think or see that make their hiring process so bad or convoluted?

I was on Instagram and I saw a boy advertising to sell 5k followers and I was wondering, how do they do that? Can they programmically create and control those accounts? I know they can use the Instagram API to some degree but I feel like Instagram probably has security set up to detect that type of stuff (5k accounts following someone at the same time, etc). Does anybody know? I’m actually really curious

In my working floor there is a large bottle of water for waterstation. It usually ran out during the middle of the month. So I curious about the ran out situation, I got the answer from the housekeeper.

"The was not enough budget to allocate water bottle for our floor, we need to share all of them for the whole building. We only received 4 bottles for a half-month."

(It ran out 4 days from the beginning of the month)

...

EEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Has anyone ever had to explain to stakeholders that you're gonna have a major delay, because a team member DIED?

Didn't happen to me. I'm just curious because I want to kill myself after listening to this SAFe planning where stakeholders just bash on what they need and team members don't even have an opportunity to say anything. Confidence vote? 0.

well that's curious... Apparently, when uploading a csv file via bot, Slack now appends a .py suffix to it.

I wonder what's the logic behind it. Trick as many users as possible into executing potentially malicious code?

Curious how devRant's "Top" (weekly) feed works? How are the posts sorted? ++ count? ++ count + comments? ++ and comments each have different weightage?

The posts seem to be in a haphazard order

Does anyone even use AWS CDK?

I saw something about CDKv2 getting released and immediately made up my mind about it and just want to validate my opinion.

I'm having a hard time thinking of a case where I would need to use yet another layer of bullshit to deploy cloud infra.

It's bad enough with terraform(which I far prefer over cloud formation). But now you can use python or node? What's next, deploying with XSLT?

I'm partially ranting, because I know someone on my team is going to show this as the "new thing" and I'll be stuck maintaining my code...as code--and that really pisses me off.

I'm also legitimately curious on how many of you have run across this being used successfully and for what problem did it solve?

*Frustrated user noises* Whyyyy, Grafana, why don't you implement any actual query forgery checks?!

So long as a user has access to the Grafana frontend, they can happily forge the requests going off to the backend, and modify them to return *whatever* data they want from the datasource.

No matter that they're a read-only user. That only stops them from modifying the dashboard definitions on the frontend, but doesn't enforce any sort of immutability on the BE...

If anyone had any tips on how to further secure it, I'm curious...

Kind of a vague question but has anyone done the Google and Microsoft tech interviews ? I’m preparing for them at the moment and I’m curious how hard these would be

I have a colleague and I don’t know if they’re male or female. Not that it’s relevant, I’m just curious.

Note, I have only seen them in Zoom meetings. Never met them IRL.

This got me wondering...

Was shown a product today, doesn't matter what it was, because that part is irrelevant for question. Just out of unsubstantiated curiosity, I'm curious to hear other opinions .

How do you judge a product during first impressions period? Doesn't matter if it's a piece of software, gadget, food product, or all of the aforementioned at the same time.

As I just said - I was shown a product today, well, okay ... not in-person, and not actually shown, rather, made aware of a product. And after looking at it, I realized, that I can no longer look at a product and not focus on "red flags" or look for "where's the catch?". This product, that I'll just keep referring to as "the product" for the sake of keeping it neutral, was unfamiliar to me - I know nothing of it's manufacturer, so any trust to the brand is non-existant, the product brief on the website only made me question every marketing bulletpoint claim they had listed, aņd it didn't make me interested enough to go look up feedback from other users. This drew my attention to the realization that I do this with everything - I only look for whatever i'm looking for... I no longer pay any attention to discovery or suggestions. If I'm looking for HW, I'll focus on what it can and cannot do for the price and the actual first impression will form from using it, if it's SW - same deal, but actual first impression will form based on cross-platform compatibility, state/quality of documentation. Oppose to me, back in the day, where I'd just pick it up irregardless and "flubbed it" along somehow until it worked out.

I don't know how to do what I'm thinking, and I can feel the impulsive, curious part of my brain preparing to spend hours reading, testing, and researching things.

Guess it's gonna be another all nighter. And it's only Monday.

So doesn't matter that I already did this
Or that nodejs is a large steaming pile of shit
Noone else seems to be stepping up to finish this project so I'm stuck recreating it till the end of time apparently.

I am gonna finish this damn project. Maybe package up a few things I added as well.

There is some kind of mount command in windows right ? Other than creating shortcuts and hardlinks right ? just curious.

What are your coffee/tea drinking habits?
Do you prefer coffee, tea, or other beverages? ☕ 🍵
Do you use a coffee maker/machine or something else?

I'm wondering if I should invest in a coffee machine 🤔

Questions to other freelances out there.
I suppose it's a common occurrence to be involved in some project, asked to add some feature or modify something, and then looking at the source and find an unmanageable burning mess.
If upon such a discovery you decide you're not taking the job - for example, given the situation you need to charge quite a lot more and the customer cannot pay the appropriate amount - how do you go on explaining your reasons?
You just go out directly telling them about the dire situation of their codebase? Try to find a nice way of telling the truth? Make some excuse (cannot because personal reasons)?

Just curious

Should I just be a silly stupid evil selfish reckless bastard who is engages in wholesale rapine and doesn’t care about anything or make any rational or reasonable commentary on our system or any intelligent reasoning ?

Just remain curious
Seems to work for the garbage who should be getting punished and do everything to encourage their own punishment

Just saying
And wtf is that about ?
How can people who deserve it profit by this ?

Assholes

so, longshot since this a place to rant ... about dev

anyone career switch or know someone who has? (out of tech altogether)

ive read similar threads before, just...curious

Does anyone here work for an agency that's successfully adopted a 4 day working week? If yes then I'd be curious as to how you made it work

I am a Computer Science student which started work for a company 5 months ago being paid 20k. In the same time I am working on a project for somewhere over 17 pounds an hour. The guys on that project want to keep me for good to work with them on projects (they are a software company ran by a friend of my best friend) but the problem is they are in Europe and they can only offer me freelance work. This place I am working at is great but the salary increases are low. I have a colleague working there for 3 and a half years running a big chunk of their operations and he is making a petty 33k. I do not know what to do, should I job hop after 6 months and work with those amazing people for a bigger salary even if they are in Europe or should I keep hanging on this job on the current wage with maybe a 5k increase by the end of the year because it is more stable? I am curious to hear about similar experiences and how other people will perceive me by doing this step.

Finding myself with more and more time where I'm not engaged in conversation or listening to an actual person. What are the best dev-related podcasts to listen to whilst I work/code?

So, I feel wayyy behind the tech curve right now.

The SSD implementations you see online, they're still just a bunch of seperate sort of chaos machines that contain the standard perceptron-like model of a weight, cost, and bias right ? They just kind of inferred their values by training like any other neural network, in its sep-erate parts and just fed pieces of output data generated by other parts of the neural network to it right ?

I mean it implements with pytorch so its basically a really big array of tuples in a sense that are maniupulated in a specific way.

and then CNN's just feed data back into another trained piece of the model right ?

I'm curious because object classification is about the ONLY thing I've seen work even close to properly lol

there is just so much fraud these days. sigh.
and so many lamentable tech choices and attempts... like node lol