Sit down before you read this.

So I interviewed a guy for a "Support Engineer" internship position.

Me and the team lead sit down and are waiting for him to enter, but apparently he's actually making a coffee in the kitchen.

This isn't exactly a strike since the receptionist told him that he can go get a drink, and we did too. It's just always expected for him to get a glass of water, not waste 3 minutes brewing a coffee.

In any case he comes in, puts the coffee on the table, then his phone, then his wallet, then his keys and then sits on our side of the table.
I ask him to sit in front of us so we can see him. He takes a minute to pack and tranfer himself to the other side of the table. He again places all of the objects on the table.

We begin, team lead tells him about the company. Then I ask him whether he got any questions regarding the job, the team or the company . For the next 15 minutes he bombards us with mostly irrelevant and sometimes inappropriate questions, like:
0: Can I choose my own nickname when getting an email address?
1: Does the entire department get same salaries?
2: Are there yoga classes on Sundays only or every morning?
3: Will I get a car?
4: Does the firm support workspace equality? How many chicks are in the team?
5: I want the newest grey Mac.

And then.. Then the questions turn into demands:
6: I need a high salary (asks for 2.5 more than the job pays. Which is still a lot).
I ask him why would he get that at his first job in the industry (remind you, this is an internship and we are a relatively high paying company).
He says he's getting paid more at his current job.
His CV lists no current job and only indicates that he just finished studying.
He says that he's working at his parent's business...
Next he says that he is very talented and has to be promoted very quickly and that we need to teach him a lot and finance his courses.

At this point me and the team lead were barely holding our laughs.

The team lead asks him about his English (English is not our native language).
He replies "It's good, trust me".
Team lead invites him for an English conversation. Team lead acts like a customer with a broken internet and the guy is there to troubleshoot. (btw that's not job related, just a simple scenario)
TL: "Hello, my name is Andrew, I'm calli..."
Guy: *interrupts* "Yes, yes, hi! Hi! What do you want?"
TL: "Well, if you let me fi..."
Guy: "Ok! Talk!"
TL: "...inish... My internet is not working."
Guy: "Ok, *mimics tuning a V engine or cooking a soup* I fixed! *points at TL* now you say 'yes you fixed'".

Important to note that his English was horrible. Disregarding the accent he just genuinely does not know the language well.

Then he continiues with "See? Good English. Told you no need to check!".

After about half a minute of choking on out silent laughter I ask him how much Python experience he has (job lists a requirement of at least 1 year).
He replies "I'm very good at object oriented functional programming".
I ask again "But what is your experience? Did you ever take any courses? Do you have a git repository to show? Any side.."
*he interrupts again* "I only use Matlab!".

Team lead stands up and proceeds to shake his hand while saying "we will get back to you".

At last the guy says with a stupid smile on his face "You better hire me! Call me back tomorrow." Leaves TL hanging and walks away after packing his stuff into the pockets.

I was so shocked that I wasn't even angry.
We both laughed for the rest of the day though. It was probably the weirdest interview I took part at.

So i've been a dev manager for a little while now. Thought i'd take some time to disambiguate some job titles to let everyone know what they might be in for when joining / moving around a big org.

Title: Senior Software Engineer

Background:
- Technical
- Clever
- Typically has years experience building what management are trying to build

Responsibilities:
- Building new features
- Writing code
- Code review
- Offering advice to product manag......OH NO YOU DON'T CODE MONKEY, BACK TO WORK!

Title: Dev Manager

Background:
- Technical
- Former/current programmer
- knows his/her way around a codebase.

Responsibilities:
- Recruiting / interviewing new staff
- Keeping the team focused and delivering tasks
- Architecture decisions
- Lying about complexity of architecture decisions to ensure team gets the actual time they need
- Lying about feature estimations to ensure team gets to work on critical technical improvements that were cancelled / de-prioritised
- Explaining to hire-ups why we can't "Just do it quicker"
- Explaining to senior engineers why the product manager declined their meeting request

Title: Product / Product Manager

Background:
- Nothing relevant to the industry or product line what so ever
- Found the correct building on the day of the interview
- Has once opened an Excel spreadsheet and successfully saved it to a desktop

Responsibilities:
- Making every key decision about every feature available in the app
- Learning to ignore that inner voice we like to call "Common sense"
- Making sure to not accidentally take some advice from technical staff
- Raising the blood pressure of everyone below them / working with them

Title: Program Lead / Product Owner

Background:
- Capable of speech
- Aware of what a computer is (optional)

Responsibilities:
- Sitting down
- Talking
- Clicking random buttons on Jira
- Making bullet point lists

Title: Director of Software Engineering

Background:
- Allegedly attended college/university to study computer science
- Similar to a technical product manager (technical optional)

Responsibilities:
- Reports directly to VP
- Fixes problems by creating a different problem somewhere else as a distraction
- Claiming to understand and green light technical decisions, while having already agreed with product that it will never happen

Today was different at work. It felt as if something was missing. The circle of fun at work that was developed over last two months among few of us was gone overnight..

Two months ago, we ( 7, including our PM ) were shifted from our cabin space to this special room by boss in hopes to keep our ass under fire and increase our productivity. Everyone in the office saw this room like a concentration camp as it was next to boss 's office. Nobody liked the idea of working in that room. We were seen as prisoners as we walked into our work cage.

In the cage, there is a fixed table. We had to adjust our workspace around that table. Everyone was just an arm length away from each other. It didn't take that long to form a bond among us. Some of us would bring snacks and we all shared it and ate it there. We had fights and discussions. The girl in my team and other team would have silly fights about their legspace boundary. The guy who is on a quest to find his life partner would seek for our opinions about his matrimony findings. That time the girls roasted guy about his patriarchal attitude. Instant discussions on current events. Movie reviews and sharing about various life experiences. Lots of such memories were formed and shared over last two months while we worked in there.

For me, it felt like living "The Office" in real life. It was amazing. I was starting to forget my dreams of self employment and plans to resign career because this human connection was addictive. We all learned a little more about each other which otherwise would not have been happened outside the cage.

We didn't realize the bubble and dynamics we had formed in that room until it was gone today when we were shifted back to our cabin space.

It was obvious we were little sad inside having to say bye to our bubble.

😅

1. Humans perform best if they have ownership over a slice of responsibility. Find roles and positions within the company which give you energy. Being "just another intern/junior" is unacceptable, you must strive to be head of photography, chief of data security, master of updating packages, whatever makes you want to jump out of bed in the morning. Management has only one metric to perform on, only one right to exist: Coaching people to find their optimal role. Productivity and growth will inevitably emerge if you do what you love. — Boss at current company

2. Don't jump to the newest technology just because it's popular or shiny. Don't cling to old technology just because it's proven. — Team lead at the Arianespace contractor I worked for.

4. "Developing a product you wouldn't like to use as an end user, is unsustainable. You can try to convince yourself and others that cancer is great for weight loss, but you're still gonna die if you don't try to cure it. You can keep ignoring the disease here to fill your wallet for a while, but it's worse for your health than smoking a pack of cigs a day." — my team supervisor, heavy smoker, and possibly the only sane person at Microsoft.

5. Never trust documentation, never trust comments, never trust untested code, never trust tests, never trust commit messages, never trust bug reports, never trust numbered lists or graphs without clearly labeled axes. You never know what is missing from them, what was redacted away. — Coworker at current company.

My boss isn't really a developer. He isn't part of the development team and doesn't know any technical details about the product. He doesn't want to code, "too much effort", he just wants to boss. But he wrote some php in the early 2000's and is really, really proud of his codecademy html/css badge...

And that makes him dangerous.

Today I hear him talk from behind his laptop: "Right, we have this page for creating management groups, but we can't edit them yet. I can fix that!"

This task is literally on the current sprint, but he doesn't know that because he doesn't attend scrum meetings and ignores everything people say to him.

Me: This smells like probable cause, let's look with suspicion over his shoulder.

Boss:
"OK, right-click create.blade.php -> copy.
then right-click directory -> paste.
now just rename file to edit.blade.php!"

I start walking to the office kitchen.

Boss mumbling in the background:
"Now all I need to do is just copy the whole method in the controller, change the post url in the form, and modify the <h4> at the top, so it says edit instead of create."

Boss, looking at me now:
"This is so easy... creating and editing is almost the same thing, you can just copy paste all the code from one template to the other! I don't understand what you developers are always complaining about!"

Me: *Hands him a roll of paper towels*

Boss: "What is that for?"

Me: *points at code*

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail!

This was something which my tech lead used to tell me when I was so obsessed with nosql databases a few years back. I would try to find problems to solve that has a use case for nosql databases or even try to convince me(I didn’t realise it back then) that I need to use nosql db for this new idea that I have, without really thinking deep enough whether the data in question is better represented using an sql schema or not.

Now, leading a team of young developers, I come across similar suggestions from few of my team members who just discovered this new and shiny tech and want to use it in production projects.

While I am not against new and shiny, it’s not a good practice to jump right in to it without exploring it deep enough or considering all the shortcomings. The most important question to ask is, whether some of the problems you are trying to solve can be solved with the current stack.

Modifying your stack requires more than just a week’s experience of playing around with the getting started guide and stack overflow replies. This is something which need to be carefully considered after taking inputs from the people who would be supporting it, that include operations, sysadmins and teams that are gonna interface with your stack indirectly.

I am not talking about delaying adoption by waiting for long list of approvals to get some thing that would bring immediate value, but a carefully orchestrated plan for why and how to migrate to a new stack.

Just because one of the tech giants made a move to a new stack and wrote about it in their engineering blog doesn’t mean that you need to make a switch in the same direction. Take a moment to analyse the possible reasons that motivated them to do it, ask yourself if your organisation is struggling with the exact same problems, observe how others facing the same issue are addressing it, and then make an informed decision.
Collect enough data to support your proposal.
Ask yourself again if you are the one holding the hammer.
If the answer is no, forge ahead!

Manager: So great news, we will also be building a new app this year!!

Dev: We only have 2 devs and we already struggling to maintain/build our current portfolio of applications. I don’t think we have the resources to support another.

Manager: Nonsense, this is a very small project management app that was requested by the CEO himself!

Dev: …We already have MS project, why can’t they just use that?

Manager: The executive team isn’t interested in learning MS Project, it’s way too complicated. They want us to build an internal version of MS Project one feature at a time so they can pick it up over time instead of getting overwhelmed with learning MS Project all at once. It also needs to have loads of customizable automation features so leadership doesn’t ever have to get “in the weeds” having to work with it. It needs to basically run itself!

Dev: …What about this is small?

Manager: Well that is the requirement.

Dev: …

Requirements vs Delivery - Guide to Programming
This one is a killer and I've received it in multiple forwards in office email, and we always have a good laugh seeing this joke.

Client: “Our next requirement, and this is something big you know, we need an elephant”
IT Team: But why don’t you adjust with a buffalo, even it is big…. and black?”

Client: No, we need an elephant only, let me explain our current process……” (client explains for an hour)
IT Team: Fine, I understand your requirement. But our system supports only a buffalo…

Client:We need only an elephant!
IT Team: Ok, let me see if I can customize it for you”

Requirements are taken as follows:
Client wants a big black four legged animal, long tail, less hair. Having trunk is mandatory. The same was documented, signed off and sent to offshore for development!

At the Offshore Development Centre,

Design/Development – Based on requirement all features are supported in base product (as buffalo), for trunk alone a separate customization is done.

Finally the customization is shown to client:

They announce the results and that was where the fucking plot twist was.

I was *not* on the list. I was devastated, to the point of depression. I refused to get over it, sulked at home, fell sick, skipped college for next two weeks straight. It took a few more days for me to recover.

After several visits from my friends and a lot of convincing, I decided to go back to college. I felt hopeless and had pretty much resigned to my fate. Being the idiot that I am, I missed several other interview opportunities during that interim when I was despairing-away.

Semester exams were about to start and I get a call from my staff saying I had cleared the coding exam for one of the companies that was coming for recruitment the next day. I had written this exam like several months ago and didn’t even remember having written it. It was such a short notice and I had zero time to prepare and my psyche didn’t want to(remember how I had resigned to my fate?).

I did manage to make it to the interview. I was expecting a tough interview (this company had a reputation for having tough interview rounds) but all I got was a bunch of tree and linked list and search algorithm related questions (internship interview). I had two rounds. It did really go well but I had learnt to not get my hopes up. Then I noticed other interviewees being called for a third round and they asked me to go home. I was like “meh”. I was used to it at that point in time.

Very unexpected to me, (but i’m pretty sure y’all have guessed at this point) I get a call saying, they have recruited me as an intern! 6 months later, I was working as an employee!

When I look back today, I realize that my current job, in every way, is waay better than the one I had so desperately wanted! The pay, the timing, the location, my actual job description, all of it! As a bonus I have an awesome manager who trusts me! I work with remotely with a team with such high standards and I learn something new everyday.

In my two years here, I have built a couple automation systems from scratch, I have mentored an intern and got him a full time offer, I have had two free two-week trips to the US and I have been promoted once! I’m so glad I was rejected that day (:

Thank you for reading!

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 2: Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand

This is a particularly special episode for me, as these problems are taking up so much of my time with non-sensical bullshit, that i'm delayed with everything else. Some badly require tooling or new products. Some are just unnecessary processes or annoyances that should not need to be handled by another human. So lets jump right in, in no particular order:

- Jira ... nuff said? not quite because somehow some blue moon, planets aligning, act of god style set of circumstances lined up to allow this team to somehow make Jira worse. On one hand we have a gigantic Jira project containing 7 separate sub teams, a million different labels / epics and 4.2 million possible assignees, all making sure the loading page takes as long as possible to open. But the new country we've added support for in the app gets a separate project. So we have product, backend, mobile, design, management etc on one, and mobile-country2 on another. This delightfully means a lot of duplication and copy pasting from one to the other, for literally no reason what so ever.

- Everything on Jira is found through a label. Every time something happens, a new one is created. So I need to check for "iOS", "Android", "iOS-country2", "Android-country2", "mobile-<feature>", "mobile-<feature>-issues", "mobile-<feature>-prod-issues", "mobile-<feature>-existing-issues" and "<project>-July31" ... why July31? Because some fucking moron decided to do a round of testing, and tag all the issues with the current date (despite the fact Jira does that anyway), which somehow still gets used from time to time because nobody pays attention to what they are doing. This means creating and modifying filters on a daily basis ... after spending time trying to figure out what its not in the first one.

- One of my favourite morning rituals I like to call "Jira dumpster diving". This involves me removing all the filters and reading all the tickets. Why would I do such a thing? oh remember the 9000 labels I mentioned earlier? right well its very likely that they actually won't use any of them ... or the wrong ones ... or assign to the wrong person, so I have to go find them and fix them. If I don't, i'll get yelled at, because clearly it's my fault.

- Moving on from Jira. As some of you might have seen in your companies, if you use things like TestFlight, HockeyApp, AppCenter, BuddyBuild etc. that when you release a new app version for testing, each version comes with an automated change-log, listing ticket numbers addressed ...... yeah we don't do that. No we use this shitty service, which is effectively an FTP server and a webpage, that only allows you to host the new versions. Sending out those emails is all manual ... distribution groups?? ... whats that?

- Moving back to Jira. Can't even automate the changelog with a script, because I can't even make sense of the tickets, in order to translate that to a script.

- Moving on from Jira. Me and one of the remote testers play this great game I like to call "tag team ticketing". It's so much fun. Right heres how to play, you'll need a QA and a PM.

*QA creates a ticket, and puts nothing of any use inside it, and assigns to the PM.
*PM fires it back asking for clarification.
*QA adds in what he feels is clarification (hes wrong) and assigns it back to the PM.
*PM sends detailed instructions, with examples as to what is needed and assigns it back.
*QA adds 1 of the 3 things required and assigns it back.
*PM assigns it back saying the one thing added is from the wrong day, and reminds him about the other 2 items.
*QA adds some random piece of unrelated info to the ticket instead, forgetting about the 3 things and assigns it back.

and you just continue doing this for the whole dev / release cycle hahaha. Oh you guys have no idea how much fun it is, seriously give it a go, you'll thank me later ... or kill yourselves, each to their own.

- Moving back to Jira. I decided to take an action of creating a new project for my team (the mobile team) and set it up the way we want and just ignore everything going on around us. Use proper automation, and a kanban board. Maybe only give product a slack bot interface that won't allow them to create a ticket without what we need etc. Spent 25 minutes looking for the "create new project" button before finding the link which says I need to open a ticket with support and wait ... 5 ... fucking ... long ... painful ... unnecessary ... business days.

... Heres hoping my head continues to not have a bullet hole in it by then.

Id love to talk more, but those filters ain't gonna fix themselves. So we'll have to leave it here for today. Tune in again for another episode soon.

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

Why are job postings so bad?
Like, really. Why?

Here's four I found today, plus an interview with a trainwreck from last week.
(And these aren't even the worst I've found lately!)

------

Ridiculous job posting #1:
* 5 years React and React Native experience -- the initial release of React Native was in May 2013, apparently. ~5.7 years ago.
* Masters degree in computer science.
* Write clean, maintainable code with tests.
* Be social and outgoing.

So: you must have either worked at Facebook or adopted and committed to both React and React Native basically immediately after release. You must also be in academia (with a masters!), and write clean and maintainable code, which... basically doesn't happen in academia. And on top of (and really: despite) all of this, you must also be a social butterfly! Good luck ~

------

Ridiculous job posting #2:
* "We use Ruby on Rails"
* A few sentences later... "we love functional programming and write only functional code!"

Cue Inigo Montoya.

------

Ridiculous job posting #3:
* 100% remote! Work from anywhere, any time zone!
* and following that: You must have at least 4 work hours overlap with your coworkers per day.
* two company-wide meetups per quarter! In fancy places like Peru and Tibet! ... TWO PER QUARTER!?

Let me paraphrase: "We like the entire team being remote, together."

------

Ridiculous job posting #4:
* Actual title: "Developer (noun): Superhero poised to change the world (apply within)"
* Actual excerpt: "We know that headhunters are already beating down your door. All we want is the opportunity to earn our right to keep you every single day."
* Actual excerpt: "But alas. A dark and evil power is upon us. And this… ...is where you enter the story. You will be the Superman who is called upon to hammer the villains back into the abyss from whence they came."

I already applied to this company some time before (...surprisingly...) and found that the founder/boss is both an ex cowboy dev and... more than a bit of a loon. If that last part isn't obvious already? Sheesh. He should go write bad fantasy metal lyrics instead.

------

Ridiculous interview:
* Service offered for free to customers
* PHP fanboy angrily asking only PHP questions despite the stack (Node+Vue) not even freaking including PHP! To be fair, he didn't know anything but PHP... so why (and how) is he working there?
* Actual admission: No testing suite, CI, or QA in place
* Actual admission: Testing sometimes happens in production due to tight deadlines
* Actual admission: Company serves ads and sells personally-identifiable customer information (with affiliate royalties!) to cover expenses
* Actual admission: Not looking for other monetization strategies; simply trying to scale their current break-even approach.

------

I find more of these every time I look. It's insane.
Why can't people be sane and at least semi-intelligent?

Team meeting, discussing current project task, dude just slammed his hand on the ground and screaming like a child that he needs help and his taks is more important than others

Fucker got fired 7 months later, took long enough

!rant

So my employer just offered me a 57% raise out of the blue!
Last Friday, I got a meeting invite from the CEO (its a small 15 person company, so he looks after most of the management stuff) titled "{{myname}} - Salary Review". No agenda there. I was fuckin scared that maybe my salary will be chopped short due to the virus and shit. They recently let go of one guy in my team, and are about to hire two new guys. Also, my last raise was this January. So I didn't think any good could come out of this meeting.

I joined the zoom and he asked if I was happy with the current salary. I said "yes" like an idiot, but added that the prices in my country are rising a lot. He made smalltalk on costs of groceries and Corona and my family, and that was it. 57%.

I was smiling like a dumbass at the end of the meeting. This guy is like the Hyman Roth of this business.

So what does everyone think about unit tests, do you do it?

My own experience is I've seen people on my current team disable failing tests...

My team are the best coworkers I've had. Admittedly I'm only 4 years into my professional career, but my team makes me stay with my current job.

My team do a lot of silly things to keep everyone in a good mood, and stress free. This week we've had a game where in a quote moment you just yell the name of a primitive type (like BOOL). Why? No idea, but we're enjoying it.

We also have a chicken hat that we named Barry. He sits with people on their desk to do code reviews and such. When people leave they get their own Barry to take with them to their new job. We introduce people to him as a regular member of the team.

Sometimes work sucks. Being a developer can be hard, and can be stressful. Working with this team makes it worth it.

We've got a team of around 20 developers and the most junior of them all is a interesting specimen.

The kind of person who thinks they a 'expert' in anything and everything and is constantly trying to school our senior developers who have 20+ years experience behind them.

The sort of person that spends 15 seconds googling something he has never heard of before, but now that he has skimmed 1 page on Google would classify himself as a 'expert' in said topic.

He comes into my office yesterday and proclaims that it has been decided by himself that he no longer wants to be a developer anymore and wants to do Ops/Infrastructure, then starts rambling on about how he is a Kubernetes expert.

I asked what experience he had with Kubernetes and his response was "I watched a webinar they did last night" to which I asked if he had ever actually used anything to do with Kubernetes in his life.

"No, but I'll watch a few YouTube videos and will then be more than qualified" he says

Followed by him telling me that we'll be moving all of our current Docker Swarm clusters into Kubernetes.

This was news to me (I'm head of infrastructure and operations)

I needed a good giggle, so I asked why we would get rid of our exisiting Docker infrastructure that's got a 100% uptime over the past 2 years and has worked without failure. It's truely been a dream.

He says "Because it's shiny and cool and better"

The nest afternoon he comes to me and says "When I move everything into Kubernetes I am going to convert everything into micro services"

He says that he watched a YouTube video the night before on microservices and has decided that it's what we need to use for a particular project.

(It's a simple php website that gets 100 hits per day)

Hopefully his boss will notice that he is producing no output soon. Don't want to tell the manager that the guy he hired delivers no work and lives in a fantasy land.

"your not touching the infrastructure. Ever"

Ahhhhh devrant... long time no see.

I just need to get something off my heart. The past two years, I worked for the same ISP in Germany, but now as a devops engineer. Well, popo hit the fan really quick lately..

First a good friend, team lead for one of five areas in Germany, quit his job. He was one of the nicest persons I knew, and he believed that all that five areas should work together and share dev resources. Thats why I work mostly in other areas as developer.

Shortly after, his deputy quit as well. I heard that this specific area, the management were a bunch of dicks, but wow!

A short while later, I learnd the hard truth, why those two good friends quit, and that brings me to this story. In a meeting I readied myself up to present my new plattform - a social room - to management. I got a lot of positive feedback from others and we thaught managment would approve of the project. But nope. "We can buy from external, we dont need to program ourselfs. In fact lets stop spending money on internal programming, we should outsource everything!"

I was baffeld... Wtf did i just witness? My team lead didn't say anything, and afterwards I didn't dare to question it, but I told most of my close dev friends and we all realizied, that the rumors were true... We will be shifting into project managment.

At this point, I realized that I wasnt having it, and made a linkedIn account, not because I wanted to switch jobs, but because, meh you never know.

One week ago, one of my bestest buddies said he will quit and join his team lead that left eariler this year, I was heartbroken. Me and our other buddy are devestated, because now we have to do everything he had done. Management didn't listen as we told them that nobody can maintain his code. I have so many projects, I can bearly keep up with them. Now I got a lead role for creating the server infrastucture for a huge project my buddy was working on. Only as specialist and not PM, but his Team Lead thinks I am replacing him!

Last week I got a message on LinkedIn, a consulting firm reached out to me to aquire me as a new consultant or devops engineer. They look great, only less vacation (26 instead of 30 days), 40h shifts instead of 38h and only slightly more base payment. I currently receive about 53.000€ a year, the new firm only grants up to 60.000€ a year for anyone. Otherwise, they look great.

With all my buddies quitting around me, work getting more while time developing decreasing, I don't know what the right thing to do is... There is no way I can get a payment increase in my current position. I always say "my workplace is save, but my work isnt". I don't want to do project managment.

Today I have a meeting with my team lead, she is really nice btw. This is an annual meeting where we discuss my future in the company etc. Shortly after, I have a meeting with the new firm to discuss a bunch of questions I have.

I dont know what to do...

Edit: I missed you, devrant

Week 278: Most rage-inducing work experience — I’ve got a list saved! At least from the current circle of hell. I might post a few more under this tag later…

TicketA: Do this in locations a-e.
TicketB: Do this in locations e-h.
TicketC: Do this in locations i-k.
Root: There’s actually a-x, but okay. They’re all done.
Product: You didn’t address location e in ticket B! We can’t trust you to do your tickets right. Did you even test this?
Root: Did you check TicketA? It’s in TicketA.
Product guy: It was called out in TicketB! How did you miss it?!
Product guy: (Refuses to respond or speak to me, quite literally ever again.)
Product guy to everyone in private: Don’t trust Root. Don’t give her any tickets.
Product manager to boss: Root doesn’t complete her tickets! We can’t trust her. Don’t give her our tickets.
Product manager to TC: We can’t trust Root. Don’t give her our tickets.
TC: Nobody can trust you! Not even the execs! You need to rebuild your reputation.

Root: Asks coworker a simple question.
Root: Asks again.
Root: nudges them.
Root: Asks again.
Coworker: I’ll respond before tomorrow. (And doesn’t.)
Root: Asks again.
Root: Fine. I’ll figure it out in my own.
TC: Stop making it sound like you don’t have any support from the team!

Root: Asks four people about <feature> they all built.
Everyone: idk
Root: Okay, I’ll figure it out on my own.
TC: Stop making it sound like you don’t have any support from the team!

Root: Mentions multiple meetings to discuss ticket with <Person>.
TC: You called <Person> stupid and useless in front of the whole team! Go apologize!

Root: Tells TC something. Asks a simple question.
Root: Tells TC the same thing. Asks again.
TC: (No response for days.)
TC: Tells me the exact same thing publicly like it’s a revelation and I’m stupid for not knowing.
TC: You don’t communicate well!

Root: Asks who the end user of my ticket is.
Root: Asks Boss.
Root: Asks TC.
Root: Fine, I’ll build it for both.
Root: Asks again in PR.
TC: Derides; doesn’t answer.
Root: Asks again, clearly, with explanation.
TC: Copypastes the derision, still doesn’t answer.
Root: Asks boss.
Boss: Doesn’t answer.
Boss: You need to work on your communication skills.

Root: Mentions asking question about blocker to <Person> and not hearing back. Mentions following up later.
<Person>: Gets offended. Refuses to respond for weeks thereafter.

Root: Hey boss, there’s a ticket for a minor prod issue. Is that higher priority than my current ticket?
Root: Hey, should I switch tickets?
Root: Hey?
Root: … Okay, I’ll just keep on my current one.
Boss: You need to work on your priorities.

Everyone: (Endless circlejerking and drama and tattling)

Refactored a legacy source file and reduced it from 2.8k lines to 300 lines.
Mixed feelings: happy that it is much simpler now and sad that my current project team members never go back to delete unused code.

Testing pending though 😜

A few years ago I started a profile on a social media app to share programming endeavors and humor.

After a year or so I became somewhat close with the ~20 subscribers out of my ~1000 that would always comment on my posts. We started a programming group chat and all hung out there, sharing stories, posting random pics, etc.

When I was interviewing with my current company, I shared all the details with the group and kept them up to date while they cheered me on and wished me luck. Once I got my offer everyone was ecstatic.

One friend in the chat remembered my company has an office in NYC, where they live, and asked if I could arrange a tour. I asked around and it seemed like it wouldn't work out, but just a few weeks later I was sent to the NYC office to collaborate with another team for a few weeks.
I let my friend know I would be in town, and when the time came - we met up, toured the NYC office, ate really good tacos, and enjoyed the city.

10/10 would friend again.

My teams current process is:

1) Asked by product to create “T-Shirt size” estimates, also known as a WAG (wild ass guess). The process is the mental equivalent of throwing darts while blindfolded, after being spun around in a circle and pointed in the wrong direction.

2) Product make firm commitments to upper management based off these. Ensuring them that all these features will make it out in Q2.

3) 4 days before Q2 starts, product ask engineering to figure out the real estimates based off no concrete information what so ever.

4) 4 Weeks into Q2, product provide the missing information.

5) Engineering inform product that the estimates are out by a factor of 1.5 - 3 times the original estimates.

6) Product sends angry email to upper management that through not fault of product, engineering are unable to meet the deadlines.

7) Everyone shout and complain until 1 week before Q3, then see point 1.

Following this process, you and your team can be just as delightful as me.

That’s the practiseSafeHex guarantee!

Yes, senior developers get stuck just as much as junior developers do, the difference is that they get stuck in places that junior developers can’t even access. That is partially because senior developers are expected to do so much more than just simple coding, they need to also grasp and untangle client requirements, communicate clearly and thoughtfully with the team, be some sort of guiding/mentoring/leading figure, make sweeping architectural decisions, and so on and so forth.

A junior developer is struggling with making relevant columns of a table a nice shade of purple. A senior developer is struggling with making sure that implementing new client requirements will not have a destructive impact on the current infrastructure, there will be no regressions elsewhere in the system, tries to pinpoint what prior assumptions the new stuff breaks (it inevitably does), and how to reconcile everything.

So I spent 4-5 weeks explaining how shit the current code base was, implemented gulp tasks to lint js, CSS etc, written shed loads of coding standards and best practices to follow. At this point everyone was onboard with the changes and thought brilliant were going to start getting some good code coming out of this team.

I go on holiday for a week, come back and fucker has ignored the documentation disabled the linters in the gulp tasks and the code is back to square one SHIT!!

Plus everyone still committing to master!!!!

Why do I bother!!

!rant

At my last job, my boss would constantly tear my work apart, belittle me and patronise me. He didn't really understand web development and just wanted to hire someone to do it for him. I ended up burning out and he persuaded me to quit because of it cause he didn't want to go through the whole disciplinary process (because he had no real reason).

A year later, and I've had my first review with my current boss, who's also a developer. He said he's learned a lot from me, I've helped the business and the junior devs grow; and that he struck gold in hiring me. I've got no feelings of burnout and I actually enjoy going to work now.

I'll be the first person to say that I'm not the best developer on my team and my new boss was probably exaggerating with me a little bit, but it goes to show that the people you work with are some of the most important people in your life.

*team convo*

Dev: We will create another branch for the changes and merge them when required.

Director: Can we not do the changes in the current branch and comment them out until required? I think that’s cleaner and not confusing in my opinion.

Beautiful mf!

!rant

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

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

PS: They both are friends with each other.

So I quit my job and am currently serving my notice period. I do the hiring for my team (lead dev). Today I got an email from a recruiter trying to recruit me for my current role ....

Typically my low motivation stems from some form of management dickhead-itis, too much red tape or restrictive processes (current place took 3.5 months + 2 forms to order a webcam our client had paid for as part of the project ... it was €45).

How I deal with it? I try to give a go changing it, talking with managers, explaining the issues, suggesting alternatives. Such as removing your head from your ass, when done, it can have a wonderful impact to the team.

When that fails (not if) ... I quit. Which I actually just have. Got a job offer last week, although I really wasn't a fan of how things were going on this team, I was working on some cool projects and wasn't sure what was right for me, career-wise.

Then I had a argument with a new manager as he doesn't remember agreeing to allow the developers to estimate their own tasks. He was annoyed I told him we can't do X in 2 weeks, we previously asked for 2 months.

That was enough to knock me over the edge, so I handed in my notice, took the job with much more management style responsibility and hoping for a fresh start.

What the fuck!!!!!

Never thought I'd have to rant so soon joining my new org.

Guess the honeymoon phase is over earlier than I anticipated.

1. This company is awesome and employee friendly. They made me kickass deal which I couldn't refuse. However, upon checking glassdoor, I realised they still managed to low ball me. Lol.

But I have no complaints and I am pretty happy with whatever they are offering as of now. My next point is the primary reason I disabled my app blocker to rant out.

2. A junior is leaving and so is my lead. Damn! Fuckkkkkk!!! My lead is super awesome. There's so much dependent on her.

Entire organisation is watching the product line she and I am working on. It's the heart of the entire product.

It's just been a month I joined and so much responsibility on me already. Well, I am not fearing that.

What I am afraid of and rather uncomfortable with is that they are going to hire someone else in a different time zone who'll lead this entire thing and they might map me under that new person who'll be a senior level executive.

Fuck that shit. I don't want to leave my current manager for she is awesome too. With departure of my lead, it's just me and my manager that are left in the team.

I am not sure what the future will be but I know that there are lot of learnings coming my way.

One thing I wish for is that they relocate me for short or mid term to UK or EU. Then a lot of things will be solved for me.

For now, I am just keeping my head low and doing what best I can, which is focusing on work.

Hope they promote me with an amazing salary hike.

Before I took on my current position (internal transfer), I stated that for what my boss asked for I would need a small team.
He agreed to that and promised I would get 2-3 developers.
6 months after (with countless reminders) he told me I could train some people at one of our providers.
Turns out those guys were Java developers, even though I asked for C# (since our codebase is .net)
After a few training sessions, where concepts as source control were a big topic ("why not just copy the code to a new folder with _good_ naming?"), I gave them a test assignment.
After reviewing their code I just gave up. They cannot program. They don't understand concepts like scoping of variables. Concepts of separation of responsibility.

I told my boss this but I had to make it work with them.

I went to my bosses boss (Head of IT) with my resignation in hand, since I felt my boss didn't want to support me actually getting a team. After a few talks I was asked to "keep it cool" and wait until he presented his new organization.

Now my boss asked me for which skills new developers should have. To which I could just laugh at him and forward countless mails from the last 6-8 months asking for developers.

<Irony>I love my boss</Irony>

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

Some time ago I quit my job at a big corporation. Getting treated like a resource, a production line robot, just isn't for me.

My current job is way better. Small company, lots of freedom, getting to work on multiple projects, the result counts. But, as a small company, we also collaborate with big corporations. So I joined a team at one.

Watching my coworkers there, I'm reminded of robots again. Lunch break? 15 minutes tops. Just shovel some edibles into your face hole and back to work. Five minutes break between meetings? Open laptop, work work work. The concept of "needing rest" seems entirely foreign to them.

Yesterday our product owner "relayed some criticism" from other team members to me. Apparently, me going to the toilet in breaks is "suddenly disappearing". Or me not replying within 15 minutes in the chat is outrageous. And then he tried to berate me how I'm "his developer" and his team's tasks have top priority. So, according to the PO the problem is me and I should "get used to their mode of operation".

How about "no". I quit a fucking job because that "mode" is simply inhuman. After that feedback, you bet I'm taking my legally protected 30 minutes lunch break and any other break I can. Because fuck yourself, you're not going to burn me out. The best part, that team has smokers who "suddenly disappear" twice as much as I do, but apparently that's somehow a-ok.

I had to remind him that his project is just one of several I'm working on, so no, not "his dev". While that wasn't exactly a powerful comeback, it did shut him up. Still going to talk to my boss on Monday, at least to ensure that the PO can't talk shit about me behind my back.

I was contacted by a college senior guy (he was part of the core team of the club that I recently joined in my college).

Him: Do you want to launch your own startup?

Me: Yeah, I would love to.

Him: Nice, Listen. Even I want to start my own company. If you don't know, the current trend is ML and AI . So, I would like to base my startup on an AI application.( He was in his final year )

Me: I haven't tried any ML or AI stuff before.Sorry.

Him: Take 2 months time to study the AI concepts and do the app.

Me: But first, tell me what the AI app is supposed to do?

Him: It can be anything I have to think, you take the AI part and the UI and integration; with your skills and my idea let's build a startup and I will appoint you as the head of Application Development in my company.

*wtf, seriously dude? you want me to build the whole app for you and all you will do is put your fucking startup's name on it. I am building an application all by myself why the f would I ask you to publish it for me*

Me: Okay, I am getting late, I have to leave..

Made sure I didn't meet him again

and I have also came out of that stupid club..

I'm disappointed with my boss.

I've always felt that the company I work for was different, I'm a web dev in a foreign country, finding a job as a fresh graduate wasn't easy at all.

before joining this company, all the employers I've met expected so many skills from foreigners like me, while they sat the bar so low for local fresh grad candidates.

Except my current boss, after the second interview he said that he believes in my potential and he wants to take this risk, the risk of hiring a foreign fresh graduate.

After I joined I worked my ass off and after 9 months I became a team lead.

And my boss said to me that the risk he took was completely worth it and I exceeded expectations.

Now I'm involved in assessing candidates applying for web development role at this company, we have 3 candidates 2 local and 1 foreigner.

Ironically the foreigner proved great potential and understanding of web technologies that exceeds a fresh entry role.

The other 2 local were alright, need training but they pass the criteria for an entry level role.

I reviewed this objectively and urged the same man that hired me to consider hiring the foriegner.

He said no, because of Visa costs and because of the lengthy legal process employers need to go through to hire a foreigner, and asked me to move forward with the 2 locals and not lose them to another company.

I felt that, if i were in the foriegner candidate's shoes I would've felt that there's something wrong with me for that no one wants to hire me for my skills and what I've worked hard to achieve was all not enough, it would make me feel like an outcast.

I know that I should do what I'm told, after all he's the employer, but still.. this feeling is bothering me, in a way I feel like I've cheated or I was just lucky and I didn't really earn this job.

Continued from pervious Rant.

The Drone sends out a signal to the Headquarters. A "Rare Entity Found" alert shows up on the screen. "Quick, load the map", says the General. Map shows the current location of the Drone. "Dispatch the Team", signals the General while his forehead show signs of tension.

Further down the room, a man quickly types on his phone and hides it.

Far from all this, in a quite city where the street lights have faded away. Old buildings which look like they are about to fall and crumble. The sound of wind can be heard for miles as there is silence all around. A light from one of building's room is turned on and quickly turned off. A man, checks his phone in sleep. Awakens and pours a glass of water to drink. Quenching his thirst, he opens his laptop. Laptop's light is the only light illuminating his room. He again gives a second look at his phone. The message is still there.
"It has been found"

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

Like most people I needed some extra cash during uni, so I proceeded to learn CSS + Photoshop (yeah, I know). Followed by PHP and WordPress.

It can be a very shitty platform until you realize that you can stop combining plug-ins from all over the place with dubious code quality and roll your own.

Anyhow I kept at it until I was able to join a niche company doing a quite popular caching plug-in for WP (yeah, W3 Total) when I suddenly became *very* interested in anything and everything performance.

This landed me a very cozy consulting gig in the Nordics - they were using WP for an elephant-traffic website and had run into a myriad of perf issues.

Fixing them and breaking the monolith awarded me with skills in nodejs, linux, asynchronous caching among others.

I was soon in charge with managing the dev boxes for the entire team, and when the main operations dude left, I was promoted to owning the entire platform. (!) Tinkering with Linux for most of my life really came in handy here. (remember Debian potato?)

Used saltstack + aws cloudformation to achieve full parity between all environments. Learned myself some python and all various tips and tricks which in the end amounted to 90% reduction in time-to-first-byte and considerable cost savings.

By the end of the 2yr contract I had turned myself into a fullstack systems engineer and never looked back.

Lawyers not getting along resulted in us having to abandon NewRelic, so I got to learn and deploy the ELK stack as a homegrown replacement, which was super-fun.

Now I work in the engineering effectiveness department of a Swedish fintech unicorn where all languages under the Sun are an option (tho we prefer Python), so the tech stack is unlimited. Infinite tools and technologies, but with strong governing principles and with performance always in mind so as to pick the right tool for the job.

It's like that childhood feeling when you've just dumped a ton of Lego on the floor and are about to build something massive.

I guess the morale here is however disappointed you feel by your current stack - don't. Always strive to make things better, faster, more decoupled, easier to test, etc. and always challenge yourself to go outside the comfort zone.

<Email thread>

Manager: Hey @iiii, please, create stories for {things that shall be done}. You will be responsible for that implementation next sprint.

Me: *procrastinating like a bitch*

**several hours later**

Dev from another team: Actually, we discussed that with {upper management guy} and it seems like those things are unapplicable for current project, so we'll send a letter to {client} to remove those requirements.

Manager: @iiii, don't create stories.

</Email thread>

Me: *welp, good thing I did exactly nothing so far*

Let me tell you how shit flies in Aerospace&Defense companies in certain place in on earth

1. Your dev. PC is isolated from the internet. You can not download any software/library etc directly. "Legal" way takes literally days and you must all effort for it to work. I will not discuss the details of legal way but it is not asking IT team to download it for you, you do it yourself.

2. You use an archaic requirement standard that is somehow used by all other similar companies too. These companies f*ck each other in the arse when they are working on projects together(hiding details from each other which is necessary most of the times etc.) but they were kind to each other when it came to share shitty req. standard.

3. When you try to switch to new requirement standard, you waste weeks only to amend the old one, because everyone is using old one for all projects, so changing it would upset old guards in the company(which are people works in same project for 10 years, no personal development)
4. You came 1 minutes late, you fill the "minutely permission" form.

5. You already work long hours per day and they remove your small breaks during day, because developers use those breaks longer than intended(I wonder what might be the reason...)

6. A technology can not be adopted into current projects even it has objective advantages proven many times in the outer world, because old guards(developers), IT team and configuration management guys(poor man's dev ops role sometimes) can not change their ways.

I hate this shit...

I work for "a" company. This company has completely broken my desire to improve user experiences.

For instance, they have fetishized reducing the amount of clicks users have to go through to improve user productivity. Normally this is good, in their grossly mutated views, not so much.

They want ALL the data on a single page, and want people to use ctrl+f to find whatever they want on these pages instead of, ya know, a site-wide search(which fucking exists).

So this makes page times and UX horrible, some pages will take upwards of 2 minutes to completely load. 2 fucking minutes! My team and I had reduced these down to 15 seconds by reducing the data displayed and paginating it using some awesome JS lazy load functions. Not great by any real metric, but still a huge improvement.

You know who uses it out of 400 employees? Me. You know who still constantly gets complaints that the pages load really fuckin slowly? Still me!

Fuck these dumb asses and their retarded ideologies. They are stuck so far up 1990s ass they can practically TASTE Clintons' taint.

The culture is so toxic for developers it's absolutely abhorrent and depressing.

There is no freedom to do what you need to do because you're too busy doing the things they ask you to do. Follow that up with quarterly performance reports that bring up questions like, "What do you do for us?".

The only positive to working in this shithole is that they wouldn't dare fire you because they would never find anyone that would stay long enough to become an expert on this pile of shit. Over the last year we have gone through an entire 16 dev team, twice. That's 36 developers that just straight up quit in 12 months, and it's not like any of them worked together either. I would say 3-4 out of the first group met the second group, and 1-2 stuck around for the current group.

I don't normally rant like this, but I've been holding this shit in for a very long time and I can't hold it in.

My bosses...

Honestly, I give them shit over here for their errors, their actions and the fact that they don't know what's going on. But as they've been my first programming job, they've taught me a hell of a lot.

I started my internship about a year ago at my current job, and it would last for 4 months.
I was timid, did as I was told and didn't discuss orders.

Within a week, I started voicing my opinion whenever it was asked, and I was heard, and if it gave insight, the bosses would listen to me and we'd change the product.

After two weeks, one of the bosses wanted to show me a comparable website on my pc so I could get some idea of what the bosses meant when trying to explain their idea, and after five minutes of typing on the shitty keyboard I had (shittiest in the whole office), he asked me why I didn't complain earlier. Truth was, I was afraid, he was the boss and I was just merely an employee at his company. Who was I to criticize his office materials??

He told me to follow him, we got into his car and drove off to a shopping mall, went into the tech store and he literally told me to pick whatever keyboard suited me best.

A few weeks ago, we got active noise canceling headphones, these things cost a hell of a lot of money!

My senior and my bosses have taught me that I am still an individual, still a part of the team, of the company, and of the machine, if I can't do my work, the rest will suffer.

They taught me that I am valuable, that I am not just another employee and that I need to speak up for my needs, wants and opinions.

Don't forget how valuable you are guys and gals :)

Encouraged a friend to quit his current job. He is mentally unstable now because of his employer. His jerk employer harasses him and blames him stuff he didn't do. Blames him pre-existing bugs/bad features/bad codes from three years ago! He just got employed by that jerk employer two months ago. I know how my friend works because he was once my team leader for 19 months. He works harder and is one of the best devs I've ever met. He doesn't deserve a dickhead employer and that dickhead employer DOES NOT deserve a talented(skillful) software engineer like my friend. If anything happens to my friend, a lot of people will be hunting him down.

Fuuuccckkkk! I just realised I made 120 commits over the past 100 hours.
It's a big thing for me as a developer and open source enthusiast because I finally understood how to work on open source projects with a team and also I've been able to give equal time to all my current projects.
Also, GitHub going green is a beautiful feeling xD

So proud of myself lol

So... GDPR.
And the deadline.
And I have no idea what to do.

What does it mean for one-man indie projects? Data protection officers? Companies? Controllers? Processors? EU employees? Argh.

Look, please, EU. Not everyone can afford to hire an entire team for this, when their current team is literally one person.

Yes, the GDPR is probably a step in the right direction, but I think I'll just stop collecting the data altogether.

(All data I collect is just user settings stored in a database, nothing more.)

Can someone point me in the right direction?

I spent 5 years as sole programmer on a Doom 3 total conversion. Joined the team as a shitty C programmer that didn't know C++, and just hit the books and got rid of the social life. The successful part is that we actually finished it.

It's just a game mod and my fist foray onto a new language, and current project will hopefully soon replace it as my biggest & best show of skill, but I'm still proud of it.

Just need to get this off my chest. Started a new job 3 weeks ago at a company that has been around ~18 years, it is only recently that they have started to grow more rapidly. I was brought in under the guise that they wanted to embrace change and better practices and so said I was up for the challenge.

In my 2nd week I was asked to produce a document on tackling the technical debt and an approach to software development in the future for 3 consultants who were coming in to review the development practices of the company on behalf of the private equity firm who has taken a major stake in the company. I wrote the document trying to be factual about the current state and where I wanted to go, key points being:

Currently a tightly coupled monolith with little separation of concerns (73 projects in one solution but you have to build two other solutions to get it to build because there are direct references.).

Little to no adherence to SOLID principles.

No automated testing whatsoever.

Libraries all directly referenced using the file system rather than Nuget.

I set out a plan which said we needed to introduce TDD, breaking dependencies, splitting libraries into separate projects with nuget packages. Start adhering to SOLID principles, looking at breaking the project down into smaller services using the strangler pattern etc. After submitting what I had written to be part of a larger document I was told that it had been tweaked as they felt it was too negative. I asked to see the master document and it turns out they had completely excluded it.

I’ve had open and frank discussions with the dev team who to me have espoused that previously they have tried to do better, tackle technical debt etc but have struggled to get management to allow them. All in all a fairly poor culture. They seem almost resigned to their fate.

In my first 2 weeks I was told to get myself acquainted and to settle myself in. I started looking at the code and was quite shocked at how poorly written a lot of it was and in discussions with my manager have been critical of the code base and quite passionate and opinionated about the changes I want to see.

Then on Friday, the end of my third week, I was invited to a meeting for a catch up. The first thing I was told was that they felt I was being too openly critical in the office and whether I was a good fit for the company, essentially a stay or go ultimatum. I’ve asked for the weekend to think about it.

I’ve been a little rocked by it being so quickly asked if I was a good fit for the company and it got my back up. I told them that I was a good fit but for me to stay I want to see a commitment to changes, they told me that they had commitments to deliver new features and that we might be able to do it at some point in the future but for now I just needed to crack on.

Ordinarily I would just walk but I’ve recently started the process to adopt kids and changing jobs right now would blow that out the water. At the same time I’m passionate about what I do and having a high standards, I’m not going to be silenced for being critical but maybe I will try and tackle it in a different way. I think my biggest issue is that my boss who was previously a Senior Developer (my current position) has worked at the company for 12 years and it is his only job, so when I’m being critical it’s most likely criticising code he wrote. I find it hard to have the respect of a boss who I had to teach what a unit test was and how to write one. It makes it hard to preach good standards when by all accounts they don’t see the problems.

Just wondering if anyone has suggestions or experience that might help me tackle this situation?

So here's the deal. I am a team lead of a small company and I have a junior who is an idiot. I mean literally, idiot. We code in Python mostly and as Python is not structured as a default Java or C# project, the developer needs to be very careful so that the structure (or tiers) is maintained properly.

Now this girl, always messes up the tiers. Say one enhancement can be easily implemented in the UI tier, she would do the implementation in the core Db access layer, which may complete this particular enhancement, but breaks all the other functions (sometimes the whole project) connected to that particular module of the Db layer. She doesn't do any integration testing after updating the code, she only checks the current enhancement she is working on. When the enhancement goes to the testing phase, the testers find those broken functions and that results a re-work (most of the times done by me).

I have warned her. Even our manager has warned her. She always tells that she is working to improve herself. But I know, she isn't. She mostly chats with her boyfriends (yes, with an 's') when she has no work to do. She never upgrades herself or works on her skills.

I can easily report about her, and they will fire her without any warning (they did it already with a guy earlier). I don't want to do that again. What should I do? Any suggestions?

Oh, she has a great ego. She thinks that knows and understands everything. She will listen to your suggestions carefully, but will never follow those.

back to devrant, yay!

closed my account when i entered a really nice company, but after a year it was taken over by another one that was not-so-good at all, started working for another startup and, BOY, i really didn't miss ranting about work, but now i NEED a place to let this all up, little by little, somewhere, before my brain melts

current startup is one of those founded by rich dudes who had an "amazing" idea that, as time passed, turned into a monster that not only eroded the team from inside, but also made us see how spoiled the bosses are

So I fucked up.. I assigned a small wordpress/woocommerce project to myself to avoid my team members from wasting their time on it. I had a two month deadline, which was insane, so I kept postponing it until I forgot about it. Today my client contacted me by email to ask if she could preview the site before our meeting in two weeks..
QUE BULLSHIT EXCUSE:

- “I had to migrate to another server because of some access/permission issues with my current host. They gave me their word that they would be done with the migration thursday or friday, then I have to correct some permissions and database settings, and the DNS update may take up to 24 hours to finish. I will personally make sure that you know as soon as the migration has finished.”

- “Thank you so much! I feel so safe having assigned your company the job! I am really looking forward to our meeting and seeing the site!”

Oh and did I mention that deadline was around 65 days ago? And that I haven’t even started yet? I know what I’ll be doing for the next 6 days..

In my current project my team lead created a revolutionary framework, which is capable to automate any manual work..

Here is its source code..

public class AutomateFW {

public Object automate(Object manualWork) {

// Call jr developers and assign them work :)
callFreshers(manualWork);

}

Kinda rant, kinda not.

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

Dev: Hey I need something from Team B

Manager: Ok I’ll get it from them now

Dev: Unfortunately they have the current time blocked off as uninterrupted coding time for the next two hours.

Manager: Yeah that means they’re not occupied by anybody else. It’s the best time to get a hold of them!

Dev: …

Fun day, lots of relief and catharsis!

Client I was wanting to fire has apparently decided that the long term support contract I knew was bullshit from go will instead be handled by IBM India and it's my job to train them in the "application." Having worked with this team (the majority of whom have been out of university for less than a year), I can say categorically that the best of them can barely manage to copy and paste jQuery examples from SO, so best of fucking luck.

I said, "great!," since I'd been planning on quitting anyways. I even handed them an SOW stating I would train them for 2 days on the application's design and structure, and included a rider they dutifully signed that stated, "design and structure will cover what is needed to maintain the application long term in terms of its basic routing, layout and any 'pages' that we have written for this application. The client acknowledges that 3rd party (non-[us]) documentation is available for the technologies used, but not written by [us], effective support of those platforms will devolve to their respective vendors on expiry of the current support contract."

Contract in hand, and client being too dumb to realize that their severing of the maintenance agreement voids their support contract, I can safely share what's not contractually covered:

- ReactiveX
- Stream based programming
- Angular 9
- Any of the APIs
- Dotnet core
- Purescript
- Kafka
- Spark
- Scala
- Redis
- K8s
- Postgres
- Mongo
- RabbitMQ
- Cassandra
- Cake
- pretty much anything not in a commit

I'm a little giddy just thinking about the massive world of hurt they've created for themselves. Couldn't have happened to nicer assholes.

The exit interview with an ex boss.

While working there, we had regular meetings every other week. Discussing current work, equipment requests, technology, sometimes office politics. At some point we discussed that our team was moved to an open-plan office and how I regarded this as detrimental to our productivity and satisfaction. Of course we sometimes had different opinions, but it was an amicable atmosphere. My boss also always carried a personal organizer and sometimes wrote notes during these meetings.

Later I resigned. Him becoming more and more abusive was a major reason, and I think he knew he had crossed a line. So the day of the exit interview came...

In a professional setting, you'd thank each other for the good collaboration. Maybe laugh about one or two points from the past. And then wish each other success for the future and say farewell.

Not there. Not with him in the exit interview.

Instead, he apparently went through a list in his personal organizer. A list of every single thing we ever disagreed at. And roasted me for each. single. item. "Back when you said x... you can't really say it like that". Or "remember that time when you were against open-plan offices? Let me tell you, that's just your opinion. There are no actual arguments against them, it's just a matter of taste". And that went on and on and on. Like a final reckoning. Like he needed to get revenge. I hope that carnage made him happy, because it made *me* happy to have had resigned.

And it was fucking unprofessinal, because this is the management equivalent of stomping your foot in rage and anger, shouting "no no nooo I'm right! I! am! Riiiiiiight! *stomp*".

Those weeks when you get calls from recruiters offering you up to four times your current salary.

I enjoy my job, love the atmosphere, team spirit, freedom (although sometimes there's a bit too much of this!), but I have a family and am saving to extend our house.

I don't want to let my team down, I'm the only programmer dev in a team of 3 (others do front end web design but not much JS), but sometimes I wonder if I should pursue one of these better offers...

Story Time.

TL;DR - Because of Corporate PTSD, I replace the word "everyone/folks/guys" with "Team" when I'm addressing my colleagues, whether it be an e-mail or verbally (F2F/Zoom/GMeet).

In 2019, An office job I worked at, a new Vice President joined the company (the same one who told me he saw me in his dream).

We were required, on a daily basis, to form a circle and one-by-one everyone would out-loud say their yesterday's and current day's tasks updates.

So before the VP joined, everyone was free to initiate their turn however they wanted. Phrases like "Hey Everyone", "Good morning all" or "Hi All" was all around acceptable.

But the moment he started joining the stand-ups, he felt the need to change this phrase to a standard "Good morning Team". No other variations of this. Only and ONLY these three words.

Why you ask? Because saying Good morning is good manners and using the word "Team" strengthens the bond between co-workers and increases collaboration and creativity.

Some colleagues were bound to forget this and they did, which resulted in the VP blasting at everyone for doing so. He would show genuine rage over this, almost as if the company would go out of business because of us, not complying to do so.

Now imagine, you get up at 8 AM, get ready, commute, and get ready to speak for the standup and you get yelled at in front of everyone, FIRST THING before you start working.

Needless to say, it would kill everyone's spirit for getting their day started but nobody could speak up against him because obviously, he was the VP of the company then.

And oh yes, our CEO fired him 5 months after that because he (the VP) got slammed with a pedophilia-related lawsuit, by the parents of a 5-year old.

Took me looooong looooong time to understand that the primary work in a managerial role involves meetings and calls as the *main* thing, not something you do sparsely to stay aligned with the team, so them calling 3 hour long meetings might feel like a waste to me but for the manager it is what they would consider proper work.

At least that's my current hypothesis in trying to justify the time that's 90% wasted.

I'm a backend (Java, Kotlin) developer and I mainly design & develop services and Android apps which consume these services.

My team in my current organization (I've been working here since past 2 years) just got merged with another team.

And now the new boss wants me to fix some fuck ups in their project which is written in C#, with some WCF and other stuff.

As this stuff is completely new for me, I asked for some time to get familiar with the environment. But the answer was a big NO.

As a result, "I've started looking out for a new job"
😡😠

Fuckin management screws up everything!

I am participating in a project i called "Game of Thrones"

We pretend that we are a team, but in reality everyone hate one another.
It took only 3 weeks for Team Leader to turn everyone against him.
He is constantly fighting for power with Architect who is terrible at his job, and doesn't listen to his advice even if they are good.
We hate Team Leader because he is an tyrant, who is ruling from high tower his peasants. His favorite task is to create various rules that everyone has to accept. You have to write "I accept" in a chat but this is the only choice. You cannot disagree.

Moreover there are developers from client side. They "committed" current project which is full of bugs and generally doesn't work. I don't know why they are still working there, but I presume every of them is working for 5+ years, so they are the only ones able to dig thru the spaghetti they made.
They constantly fight with us about the how code should be written, they commits are garbage but they are very peaky when it comes to ours PR.
They always drag our PR as long as they can. Even sometimes pointing they mistakes as ours.

Rant!

Been working on 'MVP' features of a new product for the past 14 months. Customer has no f**king clue on how to design for performance. An uncomfortable amount of faith was placed on the ORM (ORMs are not bad as long as you know what you are doing) and the magic that the current framework provides. (Again, magic is good so long as you understand what happens behind the smoke and mirrors - but f**k all that... coz hey, productivity, right?). Customer was so focussed on features that no one ever thought of giving any attention to subtler things like 'hey, my transaction is doing a gazillion joins across trizillion tables while making a million calls to the db - maybe I should put more f**king thought into my design.' We foresaw performance and concurrency issues and raised them way ahead of the release. How did the customer respond? By hiring a performance tester. Fair enough - but what did that translate into? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Hiring a perf tester doesn't automagically fix issues. The perf tester did not have a stable environment, a stable build or anything that is required to do a test with meaningful results. As the release date approached, the customer launched a pilot and things started failing spectacularly with the system not able to support more than 15 concurrent users. WTF! (My 'I told you so' moment) Emails started flying in all directions and the hunt for the scapegoat was on (I'm a sucker for CYA so I was covered). People started pointing in all directions but no one bothered to take a step back and understand what was causing the issues. Numero uno reason for transaction failure was deadlocks. We were using a proprietary DB with kickass tooling. No one bothered to use the tooling to understand what was the resource in contention let alone how to fix the contention. Absolute panic - its like they just froze. Debugging shit and doing the same thing again and again just so that management knew they were upto something. Most of the indexes had a fragmentation of 99.8% - I shit you not. Anywho, we now have a 'war room' where the perf tester needs to script the entire project by tonight and come up with some numbers that will amount to nothing while we stay up and keep profiling the shit out of the application under load.

Lessons learnt - When you foresee a problem make a LOT of noise to get people to act upon it and not wait till it comes back and bites you in the ass. Better yet, try not to get into a team where people can't understand the implications of shitty design choices. War room my ass!

Spent a lot of time designing a proper HTTP (dare I even say RESTful) API for our - what is until now a closed system, using a little-known/badly-supported message-over-websocket protocol to do RPC-style communications - supposedly enterprise-grade product.

I make the API spec go through several rounds of review with the rest of the dev team and customers/partners alike. After a few iterations, everybody agrees that the spec will meet the necessary requirements.

I start implementing according to spec. Because this is the first time we're actually building proper HTTP handling into the product, but we of course have to make it work at least somewhat with the RPC-style codebase, it's mostly foundational work. But still, I manage to get some initial endpoints fully implemented and working as per the spec we agreed. The first PR is created, reviews are positive, the direction is clear and what's there already works.

At this point in time, I leave on my honeymoon for two weeks. Naturally, I assume that the remaining endpoints will be completed following the outlines/example of the endpoints which I built. When I come back, the team mentions that the implementation is completed and I believe all is well.

The feature is deployed selectively to some alpha customers to start validation testing before the big rollout. It's been like that for a good month, until a few days ago when I get a question related to a PoC integration which they can't seem to get to work.

I start investigating and notice that the API hasn't been implemented according to the previously agreed upon spec at all. Not only did the team manage to implement the missing functionality in strange and some even broken ways, they also managed to refactor my previously working endpoints into being non-compliant.

Now, I'm a flexible guy. It's not because something isn't done exactly as I've imagined it that it's automatically bad. However, I know from experience that designing a good/clear/future-proof API is a tricky exercise. I've put a lot of time and effort into deliberate design decisions that made up the spec that we all reviewed repeatedly and agreed upon. The current implementation might also be fine, but I now have to go over each endpoint again and reason about whether the implementation still fulfills the requirements (both soft and hard) that we set out to meet.

I'm met with resistance, pushback and disbelief from product management and dev co-workers alike when I raise the concern that the API might actually not be production-ready (while I'm frantically rewriting my integration tests and figuring out how the actual implementation works in comparison to what was spec'ed).

Oh, and did I mention that product management wants to release this by end-of-week?!

Former boss taught me to care about the place where you work and how to think always as a team and not just to improve my skill.

Current boss taught me that you can be excellent designing and writing code, bur if you don't know how to transmit your ideas to others in a way that they understand, you're pretty much stuck.

Great bosses so far...

Soooo it's Monday........ 🤯

@C0D4 started the day fixing current projects defects (4 tickets smashed before coffee 💪)

Then after coffee, run a test coverage report and see a significant decline over the past few months, so spends a couple hours adding more tests to get some areas filled in - meh, nothing like 50+ lines per test... to test a if() statement but whatever - complex scenarios will be complex to get too, but no my tests break and I'm missing data I didn't know about🤦‍♂️
So let's comment all that out, and go to lunch ... mmmm lunch.

Get back, start working on those again, and then get handed a new issue, so comment that all back out again, ( ok I know what you're thinking, but I'm working in an environment that does not use git for deployments - don't ask, real pain in the ass I haven't had time to invest into yet - but as code versioning only) anywho, starts to workout this new issue but don't figure it out, enter a 30 minute meeting.................. yea that was 2 hours later but was a very practical whiteboard session only to work out I have something like 16-20 weeks of work over 4-5 projects to get out in like 6 weeks... hahahahahahaha fml..... oh and that's excluding another project which had a 6 weeks of work in the pipeline to get to somehow.... I'm not seeing this one happening, and probably conflicting projects needed on top of that down the track... but we'll leave those out for now!

Whoot is fucking home time!!!

🤷‍♂️I'm starting to think I'm like a team of 5-10 devs right now, maybe I should start asking for 5-10x more 😏

#letsBringOnTuesday!!!!

Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Here is another.

Early into our eCommerce venture, we experienced the normal growing pains.

Part of the learning process was realizing in web development, you should only access data resources on an as-needed basis.

One business object on it's creation would populate db lookups, initialize business rule engines (calling the db), etc.

Initially, this design was fine, no one noticed anything until business started to grow and started to cause problems in other systems (classic scaling problems)

VP wanted a review of the code and recommendations before throwing hardware at the problem (which they already started to do).

Over a month, I started making some aggressive changes by streamlining SQL, moving initialization, and refactoring like a mad man.

Over all page loads were not really affected, but the back-end resources were almost back to pre-eCommerce levels.

The main web developer at the time was not amused and fought my changes as much as she could.

Couple months later the CEO was speaking to everyone about his experience at a trade show when another CEO was complementing him on the changes to our web site.
The site was must faster, pages loaded without any glitches, checkout actually worked the first time, etc.
CEO wanted to thank everyone involved etc..and so on.

About a week later the VP handed out 'Thank You' certificates for the entire web team (only 4 at the time, I was on another team). I was noticeably excluded (not that I cared about a stupid piece of paper, but they also got a pizza lunch...I was much more pissed about that). My boss went to find out what was going on.

MyBoss: "Well, turned out 'Sally' did make all the web site performance improvements."
Me: "Where have you been the past 3 months? 'Sally' is the one who fought all my improvements. All my improvements are still in the production code."
MyBoss: "I'm just the messenger. What would you like me to do? I can buy you a pizza if you want. The team already reviewed the code and they are the ones who gave her the credit."
Me: "That's crap. My comments are all over that code base. I put my initials, date, what I did, why, and what was improved. I put the actual performance improvement numbers in the code!"
MyBoss: "Yea? Weird. That is what 'Tom' said why 'Sally' was put in for a promotion. For her due diligence for documenting the improvements."
Me:"What!? No. Look...lets look at the code"

Open up the file...there it was...*her* initials...the date, what changed, performance improvement numbers, etc.

WTF!

I opened version control and saw that she made one change, the day *after* the CEO thanked everyone and replaced my initials with hers.

She knew the other devs would only look at the current code to see who made the improvements (not bother to look at the code-differences)

MyBoss: "Wow...that's dirty. Best to move on and forget about it. Let them have their little party. Let us grown ups keeping doing the important things."

My very first rant here was about the mess of ticket submission and ticket tracking applications we use, and about how we were moving to a single unified system some day.

Well, that day is today. And, predictably, it went horribly wrong.

So the way it's supposed to work is people login to the portal, search for what they want to request, then fill in details and submit. It creates a request ticket assigned to the appropriate team. (The old way involved a bunch of nonsense that you can see in my first rant).

The thing is, I found out about this today, when I got a company-wide email saying the new system was live as of this morning. None of us knew it would happen today. Not that I could've foreseen any issues just by getting the announcement early, but still, usually people find out about these things beforehand.

So, ecstatic to finally be rid of the old ticket tracking system, I log into the new system and look for our request form, which is, of course, not there. I check the old system and see that they combined every single "general request" into a single request where you pick which team the request goes to.

So I finally find the right request, pick the right department from the drop-down, and see that the request looks much better than it did on the old system. Out of curiosity, I look at the list of people who are part of that department.

I am not on the list.

My ENTIRE TEAM is not on the list.

Because they migrated the team data to the new system a year ago, when the issue tracking/reporting portion of it went live. My current team was hired approximately six months after that and apparently updating the team data in the new system isn't part of our Onboarding process yet.

So... Bright side is I guess I will have a lot of free time soon since nobody can submit new project work to my team?

tl;dr: they took a great software product and implemented it so poorly that our team can't use it.

I used to have imposter syndrome when I first started at my current job. But then I discovered that one of my coworkers was an actual imposter. He didn't lie on his resume or anything but he was basically incapable of thinking for himself. If there was no step-by-step process to follow, he'd spin his wheels for weeks before doing it in the worst possible way, refusing all offers of assistance from the rest of our team.

After he quit and the true extent of his incompetence came to light, I no longer felt like an imposter.

*me and my manager, during my appraisal meeting

me: *talks about work done in previous project, and the current one under him

manager: but your JIRA throughput is very less.

me: the tickets which I pick are more research oriented and almost always take more time than the other config- fix type ones, and due to me being shifted from another team, there has been an increasing learning curve, I realize that, but...

manager: look at Jack, his throughput has been consistently high.

*me, after realizing my appraisal has obviously gotten affected and this discussion will lead nowhere

me: I would like to have a chat with HR before I sign the form with the percentage increment you are offering.

*me, with hr the next day
hr: your manager tells me that your throughput has been less than satisfactory.

me: *goes on to explain about the type of tickets I have been working on, along with other enhancements done to make people's lives easier

hr: but the throughput...

me: where the f**k do I sign?

Ok here's the story,
There is this girl older than me by 5-7years and I worked with her for 2 years in the past...
She's fun to be around, and lights the mood in the workplace...
However one day I found her CV in my machine so I went through it. (It's no crime and it was there in my machine idk y)
And as I went through the list of projects, I was surprised and taken back to see she listed one of my solo project which I managed and developed from scratch as if she contributed to it. 🤯
The management specifically handed me the whole project and I singlehandedly carried it out and finished it and that was one of the projects I was super proud of and elaborated in my interviews.😎
But since she was sitting beside me and she knew basic requirement and the solutions I developed she had the knowledge on the project.
I was bewildered to see she has mentioned that project in her CV which she had zero contribution. I didn't feel like confronting her thinking when someone asks full details on the projects she would have to lie in the interviews cz she wouldn't know much details on it. And hey not everyone has my ethics and lets see how far she goes with hers.(may be this was stupid but I just thought hey we go our own ways lets see how far you go with lies and I forgot about it completly)

But now she's trying to apply to my current workplace where I dreamed of joining and finally succeeded and happy, here they value trustworthyness and quality work ethics above anything else... and without even telling me she has added me as a reference person to get more points to get an internal recommendation.
I certainly don't want to put a good word on her work ethics. Her team spirit and everything is fine but I just CANNOT with correct conscience ignore her bad ethics and recommend her.
What should I do? I don't want to loose her as a friend but I will not and do not want to recommend her to any place knowing she cannot be trusted with work related stuff. I know if I just tell the truth to the company when they ask she will definitely will not be chosen and I might feel guilty knowing I stopped it from happening.... but I don't want to recommend her truly knowing her bad qualities which in my openion cannot be overlooked also.
Should I just overlook it and help, or should I just tell the truth to the company... errgggh

!rant

Had a meeting with the head of my department concerning the status of many of our current projects. Them projects are huge and it is 2 dedicated devs(me and the lead) working on them whilst training our CMS admin in development to help out(dude is talented af and really digs programming) and my manager was so worried about what he was gonna say.

The thing is, she doesn't know how to take a break, she never pushes us, but she does push herself and it pains the team to see her take so much heat. She really is a bomb manager, and we want her to be more at ease.

Well a couple of days ago the vips of the board decided to bombard her with shit since out dptmnt head was on sick leave. The stress they put on her was some military grade bs and even then she never...EVER took it out on anyone.

The head of our department walked in to talk to us about it. Dude is a tall older gentleman, suits up every day(Texas style meaning cowboy boots and everything) and is quite imposing. Has a stern look man, one of them 1000 mile stares and a huge mustache that more than surpasses mine(which mind you, my mustache is fucking outstanding)

Our boss walked into the meeting room, sat down and heard what she had to say, she was not excusing herself. As bomb as this gorgeous woman is she was all about telling him what we were going to show the board on next week's meeting.

He sat there quietly listening to her as well as the presentation that me and my boys had to do.

What happened next blew me the fuck out of this world.

He said that he was sorry that so much stress had come down to her and us whilst he was gone and that he was happy with the leadership showcased by her and the initiative that the team took to put forward a presentation for him and the board. He also said that he was going to make said presentation for us since the vips had no business stressing us out, he asked for our assistance for any of the technical stats since even though he was a programmer he is not aware of all the inner details of our apps. He said that it is commendable that such a small team can hold 2 campus(college level) and that he was aware of the technical proficiency of me and the lead and that he knows that our shit is not something that gets done overnight.

He then said that at any given time that we get antagonized by matters such as timeframes or shit like that that we can direct everyone to him, regardless of what.

.He was also really amazed at the progress we showed him on the current projects(most are on their respective testing phases).
He then reiterated on how proud he is of all of us before biding us a good weekend and leaving to his office

As i sat there watching how the world was lifted from my manager and happy that he enjoyed the progress of my work I could not help but feel a deep sense of admiration and respect for this mysterious man.

I would damn skippy take a bullet for him....just in case my draw gets sloppy that is, ain't no one taking aim at the boss.

At work, my closest relation is with the DBA. Dude is a genius when it comes to proper database management as well as having a very high level of understanding concerning server administration, how he got that good at that I have no clue, he just says that he likes to fuck around with servers, Linux in particular although he also knows a lot about Windows servers.

Thing is, the dude used to work as a dev way back when VB pre VB.NET was all the rage and has been generating different small tools for his team of analysts(I used to be a part of his team) to use with only him maintaining them. He mentioned how he did not like how Microsoft just said fk u to VB6 developers, but that he was happy as long as he could use VB. He relearned how to do most of the GUI stuff he was used to do with VB6 into VB.NEt and all was good with the world. I have seen his code, proper OOP practices and architectural decisions, etc etc. Nothing to complain about his code, seems easy enough to extend, properly documented as well.

Then he got with me in order to figure out how to breach the gap between building GUI applications into web form, so that we could just host those apps in one of our servers and his users go from there, boy was he not prepared to see the amount of fuckery that we do in the web development world. Last time my dude touched web development there was still Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript(we actually had the same employer at one point in the past in which I had to deal with said technology, not bad, but definitely not something I recommend for the current state of web development) and decided that the closest thing to what he was used was either PHP(which he did not enjoy, no problem with that really, he just didn't click with the language) and WebForms using VB.NET, which he also did not like on account of them basically being on support mode since Microsoft is really pushing for people to adopt dotnet core.

After came ASP.NET with MVC, now, he did like it, but still had that lil bug in his head that told him that sticking to core was probably a better idea since he was just starting, why not start with the newest and greatest? Then in hit(both of us actually) that to this day Microsoft still not has command line templates for building web applications in .net core using VB.NET. I thought it was weird, so I decided to look into. Turns out, that without using Razor, you can actually build Web APIs with VB.NET just fine if you just convert a C# template into VB.NET, the process was...err....tricky, and not something we would want to do for other projects, with that in we decided to look into Microsoft's reasons to not have VB.NET. We discovered how Microsoft is not keeping the same language features between both languages, having crown C# as the language of choice for everything Microsoft, to this point, it seems that Microsoft was much more focused in developing features for the excellent F# way more than it ever had for VB.NET at this point and that it was not a major strategy for them to adapt most of the .net core functionality inside of VB, we found articles when the very same Microsoft team stated of how they will be slowly adding the required support for VB and that on version 5 we would definitely have proper support for VB.NET ALTHOUGH they will not be adding any new development into the language.

Past experience with Microsoft seems to point at them getting more and more ready to completely drop the language, it does not matter how many people use it, they would still kill it :P I personally would rather keep it, or open source the language's features so that people can keep adding support to it(if they can of course) because of its historical significance rather than them just completely dropping the language. I prefer using C#, and most of my .net core applications use C#, its very similar to Java on a lot of things(although very much different in others) and I am fine with it being the main language. I just think that it sucks to leave such a large developer pool in the shadows with their preferred tool of choice and force them to use something else just like that.

My boy is currently looking at how I developed a sample api with validation, user management, mediatR and a custom project structure as well as a client side application using React and typescript swappable with another one built using Angular(i wanted to test the differences to see which one I prefer, React with Typescript is beautiful, would not want to use it without it) and he is hating every minute of it on account of how complex frontend development has become :V

Just wanted to vent a little about a non bothersome situation.

Sometime this year(what is left of it) or the next I will be promoted to the senior developer in charge of two schools.....

I already thought that the level of work that me and the current senior do is way too fucking much for two people. Can't really fathom all of it just being me without seeing a substantial increase in salary(there is one in place for it...but shit man I know myself and even then I am going to bitch about it repeatedly)

What sucks the most is that I can't wing it or just not give a fuck(my preferred technique) since I really like my department, my coworkers and specially my manager.

Its her fault. It really is. She is just so likeable and I really can't imagine not giving her anything other than my 100 .

And before everyone states that it should be 100 from the get go. I am not particularly fond of giving my all for a company/institution. Never.

The reason is that I have been fucked with way more times than I can count and normally feel that regardless of how much of a total badass I can be I will never see the full compensation of it. It has happened on every other job. So instead of working for the company I work for my team. If I don't like my team I don't give a fuck.

I am a good worker, was an excellent soldier and I am an even better engineer. But there is always this feeling that I am being taken advantage of that I just can't shake off everywhere that I am working at.

Even now, the reason why the lead is leaving is because of how he was fucked over during the reclassification process. It was a slap to him in the face. Now this glorious institution will lose someone that is really amazing all because they take shit for granted.

Everyone is a number, an id. As irreplaceable as we are they treated him as someone that would just take shit and be fine with it.

And trust me, where I am at, we ARE irreplaceable, this ain't cali where you flip a stone and you get 100 node/php devs. This is 0 man ground where devs are fucking wizards that no one knows exist.

Oh well.

I never thought clean architecture concepts and low complicity, maintainable, readable, robust style of software was going to be such a difficult concept to get across seasoned engineers on my team... You’d think they would understand how their current style isn’t portable, nor reusable, and a pain in the ass to maintain. Compared to what I was proposing.

I even walked them thru one of projects I rewrote.. and the biggest complaint was too many files to maintain.. coming from the guy who literally puts everything in main.c and almost the entire application in the main function....

Arguing with me telling me “main is the application... it’s where all the application code goes... if you don’t put your entire application in main.. then you are doing it wrong.. wtf else would main be for then..”....

Dude ... main is just the default entry point from the linker/startup assembly file... fucken name it bananas it will still work.. it’s just a god damn entry point.

Trying to reiterate to him to stop arrow head programming / enormous nested ifs is unacceptable...

Also trying to explain to him, his code is a good “get it working” first draft system.... but for production it should be refactored for maintainability.

Uggghhhh these “veteran” engineers think because nobody has challenged their ways their style is they proper style.... and don’t understand how their code doesn’t meet certain audit-able standards .

You’d also think the resent software audit would have shed some light..... noooo to them the auditor “doesn’t know what he’s talking about” ... BULLSHIT!

One of my ex-trainees, mid-level dev at the time of the story, from the previous job asked me and insisted to work with me and if it's possible to open a position for him at my new employer (i was a team lead). We were also somehow friends, spending a lot of time together - including our girlfriends - outside of work.

He went to the interview, passed it and he received an approx. 1500 euros salary, jumping from around 1k euros. He was very happy with it and accepted the offer.

One week before starting his new job, my manager came to me and asked: "hey what happened with X?". I was like: "what happened?". "Don't you know? He sent an SMS this morning to announce us that he doesn't want the job anymore."

I had absolutely no idea about that. The second thing that I did was to give him a call and ask him about his decision. His argue was that "my current employer made my another offer: 1550 euros". I said something like "ok, have fun".

I got back to the manager to tell him about that. He offered to make another offer of almost 2000 euros to the guy, but I refused.

"Microsoft team foundation" is my current motivation for keeping me wake up in the morning. This is just a small part in their header menu. You can do better than this!

When there’s a glaring user-facing issue in your company’s app that can cause the user to spend mobile data after specifically choosing a setting that’s supposed to prevent that.

And your boss says your fix is “out of scope for the current sprint.” And the product team agrees with him.

I ALREADY DID THE WORK AND HAD IT VERIFIED BY QA.

Sometimes I Hate agile. Then again, I don’t think we’re doing it quite right anyway.

My current new boss is pretty awesome. When he arrived, we were a lot of juniors dev crumbling under pressure. He directly went to product team and to sales team and totally reduced our workload to something acceptable.
He values sane work environment a lot, and I think that's what make a good boss

My designer just had an user interview where the user is a developer and my designer showed him the mock-ups of a no code tool that we are building, asking the dev for his input.

She literally had a session with a guy announcing him that we are building a tool that will put him out of work and moreover asked him for inputs so that we miss no use case.

And in another story, one of my dev lead decided to decommission an entire feature and replace it will a hacky solution because the devs in her team were not comfortable using the current design in their development stage. Hence, without user research, any strong use case, or considering business implications, she went ahead and drafted the entire approach on how to fuck everyone.

I am out of my honeymoon phase at my new org and I am scared. Shit scared.

The company I work at sends their developers out to other companies to help them work on projects and help them in other ways (advice when communicating to customers of on demand software for example).

While not on a project you are working in house training trainees and interns. Part of that is teaching them to show initiative and treating them as full developers. The 30 interns all discussed a git flow and code format.
During the third sprint (two weeks sprints) a team messaged me if I wanted to check their merge request for the sprint.

It took me a glance at the first file to know they didnt do any review themselves. I used my flywheel to check all their changes and without being able to read the code I saw indentation was all over the place, inconsistent bracket placements etc. I let them know I wouldnt check their code until it was according to their own standards.
Two days later I got the message to check it again. At first glance the indentation was fine so I started reading the code. Every single thing was hardcoded, not made to support mobile (or any resolution other than 1920×1080).
A week later they improved it and still not good. Gave them a few pointers like I would for any colleague and off they went to fix things. The code became worse and indentation was all over the place.

I told them the next time it shouldnt be a quick glance to be able to reject it again. By this time other teams came to me asking why it wasnt merged yet and I explained it to them. One of the teams couldnt do anything u til this was merged so I told them to implement it themselves. I was surprised that 4 teams came to me asking about a merge request, that was every team except the team whose pull request it was.

4 weeks after the intitial sprint the other team made a merge request and I had three small comments and then an hour later it was merged.

The other team messaged me why their merge request did went through (still havent seen any of their team in person, Im sitting 10 meters away from them behind a wall)
They also said that it was easier for them because they started from scratch. Thats when I called them in to discuss it all and if they were not interns but full time developers they would have been fired. I told them communication is key and that if you dont understand something you come in person to ask about it. They all knew I like teaching and have the patience to explain a single thing ten times, but the initiative should be theirs.

One of the team members is my current coworker and he learned his lesson by that. The others stopped with their study and started doing something completely else.

TL;DR
Merge request is open for 4 weeks, in the end another team started from scratch and finished it within a week. The original team didnt ask me questions or come to me in person, where other teams did.

DISCLAIMER: some of you might find it harsh, but in our experience it works the best for teaching and we know when people don't dare to ask questions and we help them in that too. It's all about the soft skills at our company.

My current dream project is sailing a 21st Century Message in a Bottle across the Atlantic Ocean from US to Europe, satellite tracking it in apps and desktop environment and more importantly inspiring school children everywhere that anything you can imagine is possible. Fortunately, the project is rapidly becoming a reality - here's how:
- teamed with a few amazing devs virtually
- team created an effective infrastructure for communication and knowledge sharing
- researched oceanic patterns, satellite communications, sensors, material design, recovery logistics...
- developed budget and received funding sign off
- created realistic, yet aggressive project plan with deliverable dates
- built relationships with two Universities for Oceanic knowledge assistance
- developed a partnership with NOAA and will share info

Oh yeah, we did all that and are having fun in only 25 days so far! More challenges to come but we embrace the challenges!

How do you deal with massively poorly-performing and unknowledgeable teams?

For background, I've been in my current position for ~7 months now.

A new manager joined recently and he's just floored at the reality of the team.

I mean, a large portion of my interview (and his) was the existing manager explicitly warning about how much of a dumpster fire everything is.

But still, nothing prepares you for it.

We're talking things like:
- Sequential integer user ids that are passable as query string args to anonymous endpoints, thus enabling you to view the data read by that view *for any* user.
- God-like lookup tables that all manner of pieces of data are shoved into as a catch-all
- A continued focus on unnecessary stored procedures despite us being a Linq shop
- Complete lack of awareness of SOLID principles
- Actual FUD around the simplest of things like interfaces, inversion of control, dependency injection (and the list goes on).

I've been elevated into this sort of quasi-senior position (in all but title - and salary), and I find myself having to navigate a daily struggle of trying to not have an absolute shit fit every time I have to dive into the depths of some of the code.

Compounded onto that is the knowledge that most of the team are on comparable salaries (within a couple thousand) of mine, purely owing to length of service.

We're talking salaries for mid-senior level devs, for people that at market rates would command no more (if even close) than a junior rate.

The problem is that I'm aware of how bad things are, but then somehow I'm constantly surprised and confronted with ever more insane levels of shitfuckery, and... I'm getting tired.

It's been 7 months, I love the job, I'm working in the charity sector and I love the fact that the things I'm working on are directly improving people's lives, rather than lining some fintech fatcat's pockets.

I guess this was more a rant than a question, and also long time no see...

So my question is this:

- How do you deal with this?
- How do you go on without just dying inside every single day?

How bad it feels when it work in a place where Agile and DevOps are mostly abused buzzwords.

Forced doing "scrum" with:
- half of the team providing endless daily reports instead of focusing on the 3 questions
- a scrum master that is barely reachable
- a product owner that would not even make a decision
- a sponsor that pushes us to go faster regardless of current technical debt (it's important to look good to other sponsors!)
- doing all possible scrum ceremonies with no value added
- not even estimating stories
- not even having accurate description in stories. Most of the time not even a description.
- half of the team not understanding agile and DevOps at all

Feels so good (not). Am I the one in that boat?? ⁉️

What's the point of doing scrum if implemented that badly?? 😠

.net 1.1 had the best documentation ever written. Microsoft spent an enormous amount of money and a dedicated team of skilled engineers just to write them. It was kind of a great time to be a developer, even though the technology is much better now. The current reliance on community docs doesn't hold up as well.

"We need this project done by friday"

When:

Requirements changing on a daily basis.

No standards whatsoever, anywhere.

5 different people commiting changes with no code review.

Original team leader quit a month ago.

Current team leader doesn't know our own deadlines.

QA looking at layout through a microscope at every single possible resolution. (please move this 2 pixels to the left between 934px and 936px range)

QA being too vague some times (this looks weird some times)

Same thing being changed back and forth because no-one could agree on how exactly should it look.

PM implying at every chance that I did nothing and what little I did broke everything all the time.

My current job at the release & deploy mgmt team:

Basically this is the "theoretically sound flow":

* devs shit code and build stuff => if all tests in pipeline are green, it's eligible for promotion
* devs fill in desired version number build inside an excel sheet, we take this version number and deploy said version into a higher environment
* we deploy all the thingies and we just do ONE spec run for the entire environment
* we validate, and then go home

In the real world however:

* devs build shit and the tests are failed/unstable ===> disable test in the pipeline
* devs write down a version umber but since they disabled the tests they realize it's not working because they forgot thing XYZ, and want us to deploy another version of said application after code-freeze deadline
* deployments fail because said developers don't know jack shit about flyway database migrations, they always fail, we have to point them out where they'd go wrong, we even gave them the tooling to use to check such schema's, but they never use it
* a deploy fails, we send feedback, they request a NEW version, with the same bug still in it, because working with git is waaaaay too progressive
* We enable all the tests again (we basically regenerate all the pipeline jobs) And it turns out some devs have manually modified the pipelines, causing the build/deploy process to fail. We urged Mgmt to seal off the jenkins for devs since we're dealing with this fucking nonsense the whole time, but noooooo , devs are "smart persons that are supposed to have sense of responsibility"...yeah FUCK THAT
* Even after new versions received after deadline, the application still ain't green... What happens is basically doing it all over again the next day...

This is basically what happens when you:=
* have nos tandards and rules inr egards to conventions
* have very poor solution-ed work flow processes that have "grown organically"
* have management that is way too permissive in allowing breaking stuff and pleasing other "team leader" asscracks...
* have a very bad user/rights mgmt on LDAP side (which unfortunately we cannot do anything about it, because that is in the ownership of some dinosaur fossil that strangely enough is alive and walks around in here... If you ask/propose solutions that person goes into sulking mode. He (correctly) fears his only reason for existence (LDAP) will be gone if someone dares to touch it...

This is a government agency mind you!

More and more thinking daily that i really don't want to go to office and make a ton of money.
So the only motivation right now is..the money, which i find abhorrent.

And also more stuff, but now that i am writing this down makes me really really sad. I don't want to feel sad, so i stop being sad and feel awesome instead.

Well today is my last day at my current job. I have enjoyed the last 4 and a half years here and learned a lot.

This last week of my notice period has been surreal though and quiet a stark contrast to how things have been.

Before I was the "go to" person for pretty much the entire dev team even though I am hired as a front end dev (so my remit was the companies website). This included the backend devs who worked on the internal business software.

The last few days have felt like I was a "persona non-grata". Conversations that would end up being held at my desk are now held elsewhere and what few tickets I do have have been given over to others.

I knew on some level this would happen but living through it is a different story.

Anyhow, I am looking forward to the new role I am starting Monday but will certainly miss the old team very much!

My first dev job is my current job, but I'm leaving it tomorrow to go on on an internship overseas, then return my focus to completing my Computer Science bachelor's degree and getting into a Master's program.

Before this job, I was an office assistant at a small company that sold cosmetics products and fragrances. I had just returned to college after a 1.5 year hiatus and was tired of that job. I wanted to get into the field, even though my experience was limited to freelance web design and a few personal programming projects of which I no longer had any proof, and I still didn't have a degree, but I wasn't confident that someone would contact me. Yet I decided to update my resume and upload it to Indeed.com. I was already getting interviewed at a call center when this local tech startup called, and 2 weeks later, I had the job. We were 3 employees and I was, not only the first woman in the team, but also the first person to ever get hired by the directors without a college degree. Today​, I still hold those two titles and the team is 3 times bigger.

It was a very bumpy ride, and tomorrow I move on to other adventures, but I'll always be grateful for the opportunity, all the lessons, and the best team mates I could ever have. Without their wisdom and guidance, I wouldn't have half the blessings I have today. I will miss them dearly, but I know we'll stay friends.

Here's to better things and to a college degree! <3

Last week: Resigned from my current job as a front end dev, mostly due to incompetence in upper middle management.

Yesterday: knowledge transfer to backend dev who aspires to become full stack.
"
- So how does the designer deliver the CSS to the code ?
- He doesn't, he just sends the prototype, we make it work...
- The manager told me that the front end team did not touch CSS.
*fuzzy find ". styles"*
- So these are the 40 some files that appeared here magically.'
"

Today:
New git flow policy's in place. Pull requests are now outside the flow and are entirely optional.

This is gonna be the tits...

Last year, my current manager promised me a significant salary increase if I transferred to his team. He said that's because his department has bigger budget. So I did.

Today I received a notification for a 5% salary increase. 😂

I am a dummy for trusting him. 🤡
There's a reason why a lot of my former colleagues are no longer in the company.

Never fully trust your company folks!

I am stuck with another Postman.

Attrition in my current org is way to high in product teams and we have only one designer shared between ~100 people (10 product lines).

My ex-lead (a genius) and my skip level manager (very smart chap), both keep saying that my manager is a very good manager.

However, in reality, I don't find so.

- Only responds to my questions
- Ignores any other form of communication
- No help on any front
- No support or validation on my tasks (hence, I have to actively keep asking for feedback)
- Regularly cancels 1:1
- Involves other team members in 1:1 and cancels theirs as well
- Says I am doing well but keeps nitpicking in my work
- Hardly reviews anything

My company is amazing, pay is good, perks and opportunities are wonderful, kickass learning but my direct manager isn't making me feel comfortable working here.

Maybe she is too cramped with responsibilities but again, I have never seen her deliver anything and all she does is a postman job of taking inputs from her manager and pass on to me and coordinates until me and her manager decide to jump on a call and figure things out ourselves.

It's just been 3 months and I feel more annoyed than worried about being here.

!Rant

TLDR: What's your favorite REST API Documentation tool?

I'm about to start developing a really large REST API. I have never really had need to document my previous API's since they were small, self explanatory and had only me using them. Aside from this one being too large for me to keep track of there is also a remote team that will need to integrate with it.

Basically I need write exceptional documentation while using as little time as possible. I love postman and am planning to use it for documentation since I currently use it to test during development anyway but I have seen some really neat looking tools like swagger and apiary so I figured I would check for some other suggestions.

What is your current / preferred REST API documentation method?

In my current company (200+ employees) we have 3 guys who deals with everything related to service desk (format computers, fix network issues, help non-tech people...)

The same team is responsible for the AWS accounts and permissions, Jenkins, self hosted Gitlab... anyway, DevOps stuff.

Thing is: only one of them have enough DevOps background to handle the requests from the engineering team (~15 people). Also, he usually do anything "by hand" clicking trough the AWS interface on each account, never using tools like Infrastructure as Code to help (that's why I started to refer to his role only as Ops, because there's no Dev being done there).

Anyway... I asked my manager why that team is responsible for both jobs, despite the engineering guys having far more experience with those tools. He answered with a shamed smile, as he probably questioned the same to his manager:

- Because they are responsible for everything related to our Infrastructure.

Does it make sense for anyone? Am I missing something here? In what universe this kind of organization is a healthy choice?

Impossible deadline experience?
A few, but this one is more recent (and not mine, yet)

Company has plans to build a x hundred thousand square feet facility (x = 300, 500, 800 depending on the day and the VP telling the story)

1. Land is purchased, but no infrastructure exists (its in a somewhat rural area, no water or sewage capable of supporting such a large facility)
2. No direct architectural plans (just a few random ideas about layout, floor plans, parking etc)
3. Already having software dev meetings in attempt to 'fix' all the current logistical software issues we have in the current warehouse and not knowing any of the details of the new facility.

One morning in our stand-up, the mgr says

Mgr: "Plans for the new warehouse are moving along. We hope to be in the new building by September."
Me: "September of 2022?"
<very puzzled look>
Mgr: "Um, no. Next year, 2021"
Me: "That's not going to happen."
Mgr: "I was just in a meeting with VP-Jack yesterday. He said everything is on schedule."
Me: "On schedule for what?"
<I lay out some of the known roadblocks from above, and new ones like the political mess we will very likely get into when the local zoning big shots get involved>
Mgr: "Oh, yea, those could be problems."
Me: "Swiiiiishhhhh"
Mgr: "What's that?"
Me: "That's the sound of a September 2021 date flying by."
Mgr: "Funny. Guess what? We've been tasked with designing the security system. Overhead RFID readers, tracking, badge scans, etc. Normally Dan's team takes care of facility security, but they are going to be busy for a few weeks for an audit. Better start reaching out to RFID vendors for quotes. Have a proposal ready in a couple of weeks."
Me: "Sure, why not."

Fuck the managers !! Fucking Fuck Fuck !!!
I am in manual testing for 3 years. Wanted to move in to automation since 2016 January !
They kept delaying.
While waiting I kept autating stuffs and making utilities to use for everyone.
Recently automated a 5 yr old manual process.
Made an utility that can perform a 5 hours manual activity in 5 mins.
Our automation team had a vacancy.
The managers were asked to nominate names who could fill the spot from the current manual team.
They didn't suggested my name.
I am not bragging but I am the only person in the team who nows Selenium , UFT , Java , Python even though being in the manual testers.
The team is going to hire someone from the outside.
I just got to know it all this today.

These bastards should die in hell !!!!
I hate these bastards !!!!

I did a project once and it came back to haunt me - this is how I got the job I have now:

I was already working for the company, in the second year of my vocational training as an electronics technician when I got a assigned The Project.
In brief, The Project was a kind of measurement automation implemented with some arduinos. I was tinkering with them at the time in my free time so they must've thought 'Hey, great, she can do that, so she can also do The Project!'

Just that I couldn't - after investing nearly a year, getting frustrated because of the lack of time, support, knowledge etc. The Project died quite unceremoniously and I resumed my training normally.

I just wish devRant already existed back then, it'd have made up for some spectacular rants - The Project was fucking nerve-wrecking due to incoherent behaviour by some hardware and I had to battle the whole big, ugly thing more or less alone as an apprentice.
If it hadn't died at the time it did I feel like I would've brutally murdered it with a shovel - that is, if someone actually would've cared enough to buy me a shovel.

But it ended and I let it go.

In the last year of completing this vocational training, my feeling of "This is not enough" and growing boredom with the routines of my future job had manifested. I wanted to go back to university but also continue working at the same time.

I wasn't ready to do freelancing nor did I want to quit at that time - most people there are amazing and I'm still learning much from them - so I asked early for a student position and got one.

And to get some continuity in my work, it wasn't just any student project I was assigned to but The Project. It came back alive, laughing at me, leaving bodies of dead electronics in its wake, after all these years.*

And that's how I got my current job.

*(They asked me if I was OK with it and they dropped the Arduinos and other hardware in exchange for a bit more software. Also I have a team of great engineers which I can ask for help anytime should I get stuck, so I got that going for me which is nice.)

I'm quitting my current job. I don't like my lead, and he doesn't like me either. Our team consists of two people. Me as a Junior Developer, and a dude as my senior.

Our company used 3 different organization chat in Lark.
1 for global developer team, 1 for local developer team, and the other for the operational team.

Countdown 3 weeks before my resignation, I got removed from the global chat room. 1 week later suspended from the operational chat room. The interesting thing is that, my senior teammate who resigned the same date as me does not receive the same treatment.

I still have tasks to do and it is hard to work with teammates who are not in the same organization chat. I also need to work on my benefits which require chats with the operational team.

I already asked HR and they took their sweet time to respond. Approximately 2 weeks after I privately messaged them. How responsive 😧 Even then their answer was vague and I didn't get the what I questioned for.

I'm kinda annoyed by this. No communication, no announcement. This company is just straight up shitty.

So the group announced a merge of several systems into my platform. Growing it from 5000 sites to 75000. Lead time of a year, time enough to build it properly, finish the split of the current monolith into microservices, make it fast.

Suddenly, they reduced the time to three months, no explanation given. Solution is to keep the current PHP shit pile, but "scale" it using magic hardware or something. Oh and add 258 features, including things like "intuitive navigation" and "progressive web app" which some junior PM wannabe got off wikipedia or something.

And my boss has bent over to these morons and basically said yes, instead of informing them that this is a fool's errand.

Fuck em. I've said that they're nuts, and if they force the issue, I will resign. And my team probably will too.

But first I will take an inconveniently timed holiday.

I am beyond fucking frustrated at this point. I feel pretty confident that I was just blocked from getting a position at work because they believe the current team I am on will fall a part without me. I’ve asked for a backup for years but they never got one for me. I have great folks on my team but despite knowledge transfers, they just don’t get it. I am ready to grow within the company, develop better soft skills, learn more about the other groups etc. but I don’t have the opportunity to. Also, I was passed up for someone outside of our group to manage our team a few years back despite being the lead since day 1. That’s two promotions I’ve been denied despite getting exceeds on every review I’ve ever had. I am so pissed that they would do that to me.

Okay. I’m upset. So the recent .NET update Microsoft put out fried SharePoint which I am currently the main point of contact for at our company. In addition, my only current projects are creating workflows.

I was publishing a workflow and got an error. I googled the error and found that it was the .NET update that caused it. Internet says to edit the web.config file for your web apps and it will be good to go. I go to our networks guy (only available supervisor) and explain what happened and ask about the recent patch and whether this could be the cause. He says that his team doesn’t actually handle the patches so I should speak with the HelpDesk lead (don’t ask).

I go to the HelpDesk lead and explain the situation, explain the solution and ask for what to do next. Keep in mind that this whole thing takes two hours because it’s Friday and everyone is out and I can’t do any of my work while I’m waiting on this. HelpDesk lead says “you have an admin account, I trust you. Go fix it” so I think uh okay.... I’m a junior and not even technically an IT person but sure. I know how to do it - but got nervous about fucking it up because our entire organization uses Sharepoint.

Nevertheless I go to my desk and look for the root directories and find that they’re on a server somewhere that I have no access to. I message the Helpdesk guy and tell him this and he says to talk to the developer supervisor. Great! He’s super nice and helpful and will totally understand! Only he’s not in. Neither is half of his team.

I go to his team and look around and find nobody but realize I may be able to catch one of the guys I know and work with in the break room. I start leaving and am stopped by a developer who is generally nice and funny. I explain the situation and he says “you... YOU need to edit a config file?” And scoffs. He demands to see what I’m talking about.

I walk him to my machine and show him what’s going on and all the research I did. I start to realize he thinks I’m overstepping and I begin to apologize and explain the details to why I was asked to do it and then I say “I really shouldn’t even be the one doing this” he says “no you should not. This isn’t getting done today. Put in a request, include your research and we will see what we can do when the supervisor gets back next week”

His tone was like I was in trouble and I know that I’m not, but it’s my goal to end up on that team and I just feel like shit about this whole situation. To top it off my boss pulled me off of two projects because of unrelated issues (and nothing to do with me) so I have basically nothing to do and I just feel very discouraged. I feel dumb and like I should have gone to the developers first. I just wanted to make it easy on everyone and do my research. I feel like I keep being put in situations above my level (I’m one of two juniors in a 16 person shop, the other one is an intern) and then “getting in trouble” for working beyond my scope.

Anyways.... fuck Microsoft

!coding

I used to be a sysadmin, which meant I was in charge of quarterly server patching. My team managed about 2500 servers, running various flavors of linux and legacy unix. The vast majority(95% or more) ran Linux(SLES). Our maintenance window was always in the overnight-- 10pm to 6am --so the stroke of 10pm would be a massive cascade of patching commands sent to hundreds of servers.

Before I was brought into the process, it made use of the automation product we were tasked by mgmt to use: Bigfix. It's a real piece of shit. Though we had 2500 or so servers, this environment was dominated by windows. All our vcenter servers ran it, and more importantly, our bigfix nodes were all windows machines. That meant that while we're trying to patch, the bigfix servers would get patched by the windows team. This would cause lots of failed and timed out patching, because the windows admins never quite understood that taking down the automation infrastructure would cause problems.

As such, I got tired of depending on a bunch of button-pushing checkbox-clickers who didn't know shit about shit, so I started writing an ssh-wrapped patching system. By the time I left for my current job, patching had been reduced to a single command to initiate each group's patching and reboots, and an easy check to see when servers come back up. So usually, the way it worked out was that I would send patching orders to 750 machines or so, and within about 5 minutes, they would all be done patching, and within another 20 minutes all the ones that required rebooting but about 5 would be done rebooting.

The "all-nighter" which happened every time was waiting for oracle servers to run timed fscks against a dozen or so large filesystems per server, because they were all on ext3/4, which eats complete shit. Then, several hours later, as they finished, I would have to call the DBAs to tell them to validate their shitty servers.

So at the beginning of the year I took a new job at a large, stable company. Leaving a failing startup, toxic leadership, and an absolutely stellar development team in the process. Given what's happened in the world since then, I'm overall pretty happy with the decision to have some more stability for me and my family.

That being said, I'm super bummed out (and weirdly burned out) now because I feel like I'm becoming a worse engineer.

I've worked for large organizations before (single digit thousands of employees), but never have I experienced a personification of enterprise memes like this. Leadership too out of touch, lots of bullshit work just to make worthless reports look good, horrific legacy codebases and infrastructure, you name it.

My biggest problem are the expectations are shockingly low. I went from a hyper demanding work environment where the fate of the entire company seemed to hang in the balance each and every week, to an environment where we literally invent arbitrary, bullshit deadlines and requirements so we have something to feel some stress about. And even still, most of the deadlines are laughably far away. The pace of work that's not only accepted, but praised is so slow that I find myself procrastinating more and more. I spend so little time doing any work, and even less time doing things that would pass as "interesting", that I feel like the engineering and problem solving part of my brain is starting to rot.

To make matters worse, the culture is weirdly confrontational despite the pace being so slow. The people here are _incredibly_ pedantic and will launch into 15 minute arguments over the tiniest incorrect details in a story title. Interrupting someone just so you can say what they were going to say is a daily trial. And most ridiculous of all, _repeating_ word for word what someone _just_ finished saying like it was your thought and you didn't even hear them. I don't even know what the motivation for this could be because it makes them look like total clowns.

I've tried to bring up some of the things I find ridiculous, but most everyone has just accepted them at this point and there's virtually no effort to try and make things better. I only get stupid non-answers like "obviously you've never worked at a large enterprise before". Yes I have. Twice. We didn't partake in half the bullshit that happens here.

Honestly this was all just a passing frustration for the first month or two, but 7 months in I'm starting to see myself become complacent. My current output would be absolutely _shameful_ to myself from a year ago, and even my personality has started to shift to the point that I just go with the flow and don't challenge anything.

I've stopped keeping up with tech trends. I've stopped experimenting with new things. I've tried to do more work on personal projects, but the burnout is starting to affect my life outside of work. In general I've just completely stopped trying, and I absolutely fucking hate it.

I also feel like a total tool for complaining about having a cushy, stable job where I barely have to do anything given the current world climate. But I'm more miserable now than I think I've every been in my career. Has anyone else experienced this and found ways to combat it? How do you get your motivation back once it's lost and there isn't even any pressure to regain it?

I totally blame myself for becoming part of this joke. That's totally on me for not continuing to push myself, but I never realized how much of my "drive" from the last job was coming from the high stakes we were operating under. I really just want to get back to being proud of my work and pushing to be better.

Anyway, sorry for the lengthy post. This turned out to be a weirder rant/self-roast than I intended. But I'm hoping this will be the first step to kicking my own ass back into shape.

I usually crib about how stupid people are and how I struggle to stay afloat.

Let's switch some gears now. A post about some good people, product, and processes.

You know what the common theme here is?

The goodness here cannot be measured. Your first interaction with them makes you feel so comfortable that you start feeling butterflies.

These people just keep on giving. They are selfless. They are pure. They actually care.

And when you think it's done, then they give you some more.

What blows me away is, they don't expect or accept anything in return. Absolutely nothing. Not even a simple thank you.

And they are like a wizard. They walk into your life when you least expect them but need them the most. And when the task is done, they'll be gone before you even know.

No lingering, no drama, no bullshit. Just pure goodness.

Like my ex-lead in current company, I have a very senior guy in neighbouring team (for which they were gonna hire me initially), who also happened to interview me, is a gem.

He takes care of me like his own younger brother. Supports me and always answers my queries no matter how occupied he is.

And same is with good products and processes. They feel effortless. So smooth and add exceptional value to your existence. They give rise to wonderful companies.

You'd never experience a single negative aspect about them. No matter how much you try, things will just keep getting better until they don't need to.

And then they'll be long gone. Never to be seen again and never to be forgotten.

You cherish them only in your memory and wish they lasted longer. But they didn't because the purpose was served.

Such people and experiences inspire me. They push me to become a better human.

No matter how the world is or how it treats me, I must always live with high values and be a better version of past self.

The other evening, I was conversing with my mother where we spoke about some family friends who are insanely wealthy but humble and kind.

Mom and I mutually agreed that they don't have such good traits because they are wealthy, but they are wealthy because they live with humility, kindness, and pure intentions.

World is surely a beautiful place because of such people and I aspire to be one. May lord guide me well :)

So this post by @Cyanide had me wondering, what does it take to be a senior developer, and what makes one more senior than the other?

You see, I started at my current company about three or four years ago. It was my first job, and I got it before even having started any real programming education. I'd say that at this point I was beyond doubt a junior. The thing is that the team I joined consisted of me and my colleague, who was only working 50%. Together we built a brand new system which today is the basis on which the company stands on.

Today I'm responsible for a bunch of consultants, handle contact during partnerships with other companies, and lead a lot of development work. I'm basically doing the exact same things as my colleague, and also security and server management. So except for the fact that he's significantly older than me the only things that I can think of that differentiates the seniority in the team are experience and code quality.

In terms of experience a longer life obviously means more opportunities to gather experiences. The thing is that my colleague seems to be very experienced in 10 year old technologies, but the current stuff is not his strong side. That leaves code quality, and if you've ever read my previous rants I think you know what I'm thinking...

So what in the world makes a person senior? If we hired a new colleague now I'm not sure it'd be instantly clear who should guide and teach them.

User A: We need to do some check on our data. So you need to add in a new function for this, we can't use your system otherwise.
Me: Ok then.
Spends 2 days or so to get it working
Me: So this is the function we'll add. Can you confirm that its ok?
User A: Ohh...but now I'm not too sure about this. Let me confirm with my team lead on this.
User A: I just checked. Good news,we don't really need that function now. I think we can use it with the current one anyway haha. And I just confirmed this so no worries.
So I just wasted my time then. Great.

This is long rant/story:

My manager conducts sync-up meetings regularly. The idea is to sync up all developers on current state of work. He does’t conduct stand-ups. He doesn't have time for it. He rather discusses on individual basis if we are blocked. The rule of the sync-up meeting is NOT to discuss any blockers or problems but simply explain each other what we are doing and how we plan next.

Sometime ago, the manager brought up and explained a new way of working in the sync-up meeting. At this point, a new developer in the team was absent due to sickness.

Today, there was a sync-up meeting and the manager started to question the new member about the newly introduced way of working. He was unaware of it and the manager never communicated this important information via email or any mode of communication available.

So, the conversation goes on as follows:

"Manager": — "Why didn’t you complete your task as per the new way of working?"
"Employee": — "Well, I've no idea. Am I supposed to do? I’ve been working as usual like any other"

"Manager": — "We have a new process and you have failed to follow it, so we’re late in delivering your work"
"Employee": — "I’ve already finished my work on time. I've raised a pull-request this morning"

"Manager": — "It doesn’t matter, it is not merged to main branch and so we can’t include your work in the release"
"Employee": — "I’ve no idea about the new process"

"Manager": — "Haven’t you asked around about what happened from previous meeting"
"Employee": — "Yes, I have. I was told which tasks were handled, but nothing about a new process"

"Manager": — "Aren’t you interested to learn it?"
"Employee": — "Why won’t I be interested? I was on a sick leave and I have no clue what happened here"

"Manager": — "What’s happened is past now, let’s not focus on it"
"Employee": — <Dumbfounded>
The Employee felt ashamed in front of everyone. He did his job but it didn’t pay off.

…. After an hour … the Employee had a talk with the Manager

"Employee": — "You shouldn’t have pointed me out in front of everyone. It made me feel real bad. You should have emailed this information if its important for the team."
"Manager": — "I have no idea what you’re talking about. When did I say so? I think you’ve a bright future in the team. You should be focusing on doing better things."

Employee goes back to work. A minute later, the Manager sends a PowerPoint screenshot of the process in the group chat.

**The Process**
It's about delivering release packages based on priorities defined by client. Each release package is a set of work items or requirements. Individual developers are assigned to work items. They are expected to deliver on planned delivery timelines in order to consider a work item into a release package.

Figured I'd post for some advice here and see if anybody has had previous experience or success with a situation like this.

My team is generally comprised of full-stack developers completing front-end custom work on sites, writing back-end tools, and fixing broken sites. We are a rapid-response DEV team, and we typically turn around any custom requests in less than 5 days and fix any broken sites on the same day as they were reported. We manage almost 15,000 sites across multiple countries, and deal with very large corporations that many of you interact with every day (I'm trying to be cryptic here hahaha.) There are 16 of us on our team, and we are the only DEV team within our department of 500+ people. We are also the only DEV team taking requests from these 500+ people. The way the department works, we are the final say on whether a specific piece of custom work will get completed or not, and we are the go-to people when anybody has a question about our system infrastructure or if our system can accommodate a request, along with how to fix any broken pieces of our platform. We typically get about 150 requests per day. Lately, the entire team has become unhappy with our compensation for the work we do. We're quite underpaid, and they keep giving us more responsibilities without any sort of extra compensation. We've discovered that there are a large amount of non-developers below us that are getting paid more than we are. We've found that we get paid about $15,000 less than a comparable DEV team in a different department (let's call that team DEV_2,) just because of which department our team exists within, and how our department defined our job back when this position was created a few years ago. Ever since the position was created, our team's responsibilities have exponentially increased. We believe that there is absolutely no reason that an entry-level position below us should get paid just as much, or even more in some cases, than a developer. Of course, we're not asking to pay them less. Instead, we've decided that we're going to bring this up with our manager and schedule a meeting with him, our Department Director, and Human Resources, and voice that we believe that we should be on the same payscale as the comparable DEV_2 in the other department.

To be a good developer on our team, you need to not only have coding expertise, but also an encyclopedic knowledge of what you can do within our platform without any coding. You need this knowledge so you can pass it along to any people in positions below you, in case they didn't know that something could be done without custom code.

We're going to argue that if it weren't for our team, the company would be losing millions of dollars in clients, because people wouldn't have anybody to go to for platform infrastructure questions, broken websites, or custom work. Instead, they would need to send these requests to the DEV_2 team, which currently take about 6 months to turnaround requests. Like I said, we are a rapid-response DEV team, and these particular clients think that a 5 day turnaround time is ridiculous. If they had to wait 6 months for their request to be completed, they would cancel their contracts.

Not to mention the general loss of knowledge if the members of our team went to a different department, which would be catastrophic for our current department. Believe me, this department could not function without this DEV team. If we all went on vacation for a week, the place would be on fire by the time we got back, and many clients would be lost.

Do any of you have any experience with a situation like this, and if so, how did it turn out? Thank you!

Don't forget to give the developers the opportunity to innovate. Nobody wants to sit and type out the same structures day after day. That's not why we got into this job. We like solving problems. In my current team we set aside some time every sprint to spend on individual innovation. Super useful as it gives us the chance to break out from the standard chugging of the backlog and spend some time trying to solve some of the trickier problems and bringing improvements back to the product that we discovered by messing around with stuff. If you are reading this and you are in charge of a development team, try this out for a sprint or 2.

Few months ago I was working on something rhat wasn't mission critical for the current sprint. Near the end of the month I was asked to help the BD team (which usually do the testing) with testing the webapp as well as the mobile versions. First day of me testing ever, found more bugs by myself than the 5 BD people did in the entire week. Really felt like a boss. Next month they asked me to help again. And again. And again.
This is how my desk looks nowdays (the 3 phones are behind the laptop charging)

Aaron, seriously. Stop wading into our team uninvited, coming in with your "superior experience", mouthing off about how we need to be doing everything differently because our current code makes no sense, making a few PRs that break everything, then complaining we're just incompetent and don't understand when everyone rejects them.

If there's one thing that hacks me off the most, it's people like this wading in uninvited, pretending they're being really helpful in coaching us in the "one true way" to do development, screwing everything up, then buggering off again while boasting to upper management that "thank goodness I got there when I did, or that team would be royally screwed."

Well... I can think of several bugs that I found on a previous project, but one of the worst (if not the worst, because the damage scope) it's one bug that only appears for a couple of days at the end of every month.

What happens is the following: this bug occurs in a submodule designed (heh) to control the monthly production according the client requirements (client says "I want 1000 thoot picks", that submodule calculates the daily production requirements in order to full fill the order).

Ideally, that programming need to be done once a week (for the current month), because the quantities are updated by client on the same schedule, and one of the edge cases is that when the current date is >= 16th of the month, the user can start programming the production of the following month.

So, according to this specific case, there's an unidentified, elusive, and nasty bug that only shows up on the two last days of every month, when it doesn't allow to modify/create anything for the following month. I mean, normally, whenever you try to edit/create new data, the application shows either an estimated of the quantities to produce, or the previous saved data. But on those specific days it doesn't show any information at all, disregarding of there's something saved or not.

The worst thing is that such process involves both a very overcomplicated stored procedure, and an overcomplicated functionality on the client side (did I mentioned that it dynamically generates a pseudo-spreadsheet with the procedure dataset? Cell by cell), that absolutely no one really fully understands, and the dude that made those artifacts is no longer available (and by now, I'm not so sure that he even remember what he done there).

One of the worst thing is that at this point, it's easier to handle with that error rather to redesign all of that (not because technical limitations, but for bureaucratic and management issues).

The another worst thing (the most important none) is that this specific bug can create a HUGE mess as it prevents the programming of the production to be done the next day (you know, people tends to procrastinate and start doing things at the very end of the day/week/month)... And considering that the company could lose a huge amount of money by every minute without production, you can guess the damage scope of this single bug.

Anyway, this bug has existed since, I don't know, 2015 (Q4?) and we have tried so many things trying to solve it, but that spaghettis refuse to be understood (specially the stored procedure, as it has dynamically generated queries). During my tenure (that ended last year) I spent a good amount of time (considering what I mentioned on the last rant, about the toxic environment) trying to solve that, just giving up after the first couple of weeks.

Anyway... I'm guessing that this particular bug will survive another 4-ish years, or even outlive the current full development team... But, who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ?

Working on a team to take functionality from the latest version of an old executable and put it into a new web-based app.

Coworker: I can't get the results to match so I'll just change the options I'm using in the original program until they match.

Me: That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works. Same options on both source and new app, and you should get identical results. Otherwise, there is a defect.

I walk over to look at what CW set up.

M: "Why do you have this box ticked? That option doesn't even exist in the new version."

CW: I don't know. It was there?

M: (trying not to lose my cool, sets up options the way they are supposed to be) This is actually a pretty simple program. It just queries the DB, so we have to make sure the queries and results are the same.

CW: (runs it) Still doesn't match.

M: What version of the source app are you using? Make sure it's the latest.

CW: I can't tell. There is no help/about menu.

At this point, I kinda want to quit and live in a cave.

M: You don't need that. Check the executable in Windows Explorer.

CW: What do you mean?

At this point, I'm sure I look like Anger from Inside Out. I show them how to do it (right click file, properties, etc), wondering how they got this far in their career without knowing how to do the simplest things.

M: (surprised and irritated) This... isn't the current version. It's two versions old.

CW: Well, I couldn't get the newest version to return the results that matched the test cases, so I used the version that did...

M: You can't do th... Why wou... How is that acc... (turns around and walks out to tell the manager he hired a moron)

High paying unstable job at a startup vs. Low paying stable job at a huge company.

I'm currently at the latter and I'm expecting a job offer (hopefully!) from the other one today.

Low paying job:

Pros:
1) big name. (their stock has recently gone down tho)
2) insurance and stuff.
3) quite stable.
4) can re-skill and move to another team.
5) work from home.

Cons:
1) shit technologies.
2) lots of fake "we are a family" kinda crap.
3) shit pay for a huge company.
4) boring. I feel very unmotivated.
5) obsolete systems and management processes.
6) it would take years to save for a car even with my upcoming promotion pay raise.

High paying job:

Pros:
1) awesome salary. Like 6x my current.
2) up-to-date technologies. Something I'm passionate about.
3) team lead position.
4) I can buy a car in a couple of months.
5) might get a visa sponsorship in the future.
6) small team, my voice will be heard.

Cons:
1) it's a startup so it can go down anytime.
2) no insurance or any kinda benefits.
3) no work laptop.

I'm kinda in the beginning of my career, so my gut is telling me to risk it and go for the unstable job.
It will be my first time to be an "official" team lead and honestly idk how I'll go about it yet.

Which one would you go for?
And wish me luck! The interview went pretty well but I'm dreading for some reason.

In my current team, when someone else's code breaks, I fix it. When my code breaks, I also fix it. I feel like there's something wrong here...

One of our projects migrated their file-repository to another one during a major release.

Instead of giving this task to an experienced programmer, they gave it to the head of the respective dev department due to the usual release panic.

Soo.... He wrote the migration tool. It was executed during the release. Everything seemed fine so far.

A few days later. Someone from the above project came to my team due to some "strange behaviour on the production database".
They reported that they couldn't download some of the user's documents due to unknown reasons.

After quickly analyzing the current state of the new file-repository, we concluded that the affected documents did not exist in the new repository.

Then we took a look at the so called migration tool...
Well.. After nearly 30 min. we knew the root cause for that.
They only migrated the first 4 levels of the folder structure. Due to the assumption that "we don't use deeper nesting". (Facepalm)

As the head of their department wrote it, no one seems to questioned it either. Nor did they made a code review and ended up with a tool with hard coded urls to the production db, no version control, no build tool, no ci, nothing. Breaking nearly every possible company standard.

However.. That's not it. When analyzing their migration tool we noticed another even more dangerous thing.
They mixed up the id generation of the migrated documents resulting in a random assignment between customers and documents. Which is quite bad as this contains sensitive information. E.g. passports

They offered us quite a nice amount of money to fix this until EOB. We declinded as it was simply not possible in that time, but agreed to support them with the new tool.

After some time I heard that they migrated production again. And they fucked it up again. They never talked to us after we offered them support...

The third and final migration was written by us. Not only migrated it correctly. It was also way faster. By factor 20.

In the end we haven't gained anything from this rushed project as the penalties were piling up due to this fucked up migration.
After all this time I'm not sure who is to blame. In my opinion, partly all of them.
Head of department who can't and shouldn't code.
Seniors who didn't review the code and didn't ask for help.
Release mgmt who put way too much pressure on the devs.

Question about burnout here!

I've been a developer for a year and a half now and I've reached a point of burnout. Experiencing a lot of external stress as well as internal (handled well with a fantastic and supportive team)

I'm taking some time away from work and having a much needed break but I'm worried that for now, I can't code! I've got no drive at all to learn anything new, I'm just sat here waiting for a production push.

I'm by no means thinking of changing careers or leaving my current role and the lack of concentration is likely as a result of stress, I just wanted to hear some of your stories so I feel a little less alienated!

Being new to this is pretty overwhelming at times!

What are the chances that you get busted by your manager and 3 team leaders you personally know when you are going to a job interview?

We have poor men’s silicon valley near universities. Our company’s one office moves to another university. By the one in a million luck, interview takes at the same building where our next office of my current company will be. Managers and team leaders are there to inspect the new office. I enter the building, see them near elevator. One of them see me, with panic i wave my hand to him. There is a distance of ten meters, I hide behind a column. The team leader who sees me waving thinks I am with them to inspect new office. He asks others why am I not coming with them as I learn later. I can not pretend to play along and catch up with them, due to panic and time of interview is soon already. They get into elevator and finally I dont have to hide anymore 😂.

I got into interview and c++ exam with that physcology. Little did they knew that I just completed CPP PRIMER book. I both rock interview and exam but lets see if they will return with a job offer. What a rollercoaster of emotions.
Note: I am on mobile now so can not give more juicy details for now, fingers are tired.

First dev job is my current one.

I'm a software engineer in test, writing automated UI tests for web and mobile apps.

Its pretty great. I work from home with flexible hours. I have a boss but he doesnt manage my dev team, he just checks in to make sure I'm getting support, training and have all my questions answered. My dev team is myself and 2 other people, both of which are cool, and all the work is dev-driven.

Might just stay here until retirement, that sounds easy.

It's been a while DevRant!

Straight back into it with a rant that no doubt many of us have experienced.

I've been in my current job for a year and a half & accepted the role on lower pay than I normally would as it's in my home town, and jobs in development are scarce.

My background is in Full Stack Development & have a wealth of AWS experience, secure SaaS stacks etc.

My current role is a PHP Systems Developer, a step down from a senior role I was in, but a much bigger company, closer to home, with seemingly a lot more career progression.

My job role/descriptions states the following as desired:

PHP, T-SQL, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Jquery, XML

I am also well versed in various JS frameworks, PHP Frameworks, JAVA, C# as well as other things such as:

Xamarin, Unity3D, Vue, React, Ionic, S3, Cognito, ECS, EBS, EC2, RDS, DynamoDB etc etc.

A couple of months in, I took on all of the external web sites/apps, which historically sit with our Marketing department.

This was all over the place, and I brought it into some sort of control. The previous marketing developer hadn't left and AWS access key, so our GitLabs instance was buggered... that's one example of many many many that I had to work out and piece together, above and beyond my job role.

Done with a smile.

Did a handover to the new Marketing Dev, who still avoid certain work, meaning it gets put onto me. I have had a many a conversation with my line manager about how this is above and beyond what I was hired for and he agrees.

For the last 9 months, I have been working on a JAVA application with ML on the back end, completely separate from what the colleagues in my team do daily (tickets, reports, BI, MI etc.) and in a multi-threaded languages doing much more complicated work.

This is a prototype, been in development for 2 years before I go my hands on it. I needed to redo the entire UI, as well as add in soo many new features it was untrue (in 2 years there was no proper requirements gathering).

I was tasked initially with optimising the original code which utilised a single model & controller :o then after the first discussion with the product owner, it was clear they wanted a lot more features adding in, and that no requirement gathering had every been done effectively.

Throughout the last 9 month, arbitrary deadlines have been set, and I have pulled out all the stops, often doing work in my own time without compensation to meet deadlines set by our director (who is under the C-Suite, CEO, CTO etc.)

During this time, it became apparent that they want to take this product to market, and make it as a SaaS solution, so, given my experience, I was excited for this, and have developed quite a robust but high level view of the infrastructure we need, the Lambda / serverless functions/services we would want to set up, how we would use an API gateway and Cognito with custom claims etc etc etc.

Tomorrow, I go to London to speak with a major cloud company (one of the big ones) to discuss potential approaches & ways to stream the data we require etc.

I love this type of work, however, it is 100% so far above my current job role, and the current level (junior/mid level PHP dev at best) of pay we are given is no where near suitable for what I am doing, and have been doing for all this time, proven, consistent work.

Every conversation I have had with my line manager he tells me how I'm his best employee and how he doesn't want to lose me, and how I am worth the pay rise, (carrot dangling maybe?).

Generally I do believe him, as I too have lived in the culture of this company and there is ALOT of technical debt. Especially so with our Director who has no technical background at all.

Appraisal/review time comes around, I put in a request for a pay rise, along with market rates, lots of details, rates sources from multiple places.

As well that, I also had a job offer, and I rejected it despite it being on a lot more money for the same role as my job description (I rejected due to certain things that didn't sit well with me during the interview).

I used this in my review, and stated I had already rejected it as this is where I want to be, but wanted to use this offer as part of my research for market rates for the role I am employed to do, not the one I am doing.

My pay rise, which was only a small one really (5k, we bring in millions) to bring me in line with what is more suitable for my skills in the job I was employed to do alone.

This was rejected due to a period of sickness, despite, having made up ALL that time without compensation as mentioned.

I'm now unsure what to do, as this was rejected by my director, after my line manager agreed it, before it got to the COO etc.

Even though he sits behind me, sees all the work I put in, creates the arbitrary deadlines that I do work without compensation for, because I was sick, I'm not allowed a pay rise (doctors notes etc supplied).

What would you do in this situation?

Oh god where do I start!?

In my current role I've had horrific experiences with management and higher ups.

The first time I knew it would be a problem: I was on a Java project that was due to go live within the month. The devs and PM on the project were all due to move on at the end. I was sitting next to the PM, and overheard him saying "we'll implement [important key feature] in hypercare"... I blew my top at him, then had my managers come and see if I was OK.

That particular project overran with me and the permanent devs having to implement the core features of the app for 6mo after everyone else had left.

I've had to be the bearer of bad news a lot.

I work now and then with the CTO, my worst with her:
We had implemented a prototype for the CEO of a sister company, he was chuffed with it. She said something like "why is it not on brand" - there was no brand, so I winged it and used a common design pattern that the CEO had suggested he would like with the sister company's colours and logo. The CTO said something like "the problem is we have wilful amateurs designing..." wilful amateurs. Having worked in web design since I was 12 I'm better than a wilful amateur, that one cut deep.

I've had loads with PMs recently, they basically go:

PM: we need this obscure set up.
Me & team: why not use common sense set up.
PM: I don't care, just do obscure set up.

The most recent was they wanted £250k infrastructure for something that was being done on an AWS TC2.small.

Also recently, and in another direction:

PM: we want this mobile app deploying to our internal MDM.
Us: we don't know what the hell it is, what is it!?
PM: it's [megacorp]'s survey filler app that adds survey results into their core cloud platform
Us: fair enough, we don't like writing form fillers, let us have a look at it.

*queue MITM plain text login, private company data being stored in plain text at /sdcard/ on android.

Us: really sorry guys, this is in no way secure.
Pm: *in a huff now because I took a dump on his doorstep*

I'll think of more when I can.

I am surrounded by incompetent fucking idiots, from the team lead that does a half arsed job at coding and then wonders why nothing further down the chain works to whole component teams that seem to be lagging so far behind they don't even know what the current code base looks like.

And who's in the middle of it all running around fixing all the problems these fucktards create, why yes it's me.

I would leave to let it implode and see what they'd do but I already know, they'd leave it till I got back so I could fix it all for them.

Feel like going around with a rolled up news paper and whacking each of them on the back of the head while screaming "no, bad code monkey, bad, fix your own bugs"

I hate being the go to fix it guy sometimes.

Guys need your opinion. How bad of a thing is it if I change my job in just a year. Stuck in a toxic team. I’m a Class of 2020 undergrad, joined my current firm for the’brand’ but my experience and expectations have been polar opposites. I’m not able to put myself 100% behind to look for other jobs as I keep worrying that switching this early would hurt my profile long term.

Just wanted to hear what yall think.

More emarassing than frustrating..But I was applying to a couple internal positions recently and decided to bring in a sample package to demonstrate some of what I had been working on in my current team. They seemed to like the example and the interview seemed to go well...A couple hours later one of the managers came by my cubicle and asked "is that the real password?" and pointed to a line in the code. Sure enough, I had left a plain text password in the script I had just handed out to 10 panelists at 2 interviews..proceeded to collect the packets back. In the future I'll be paying closer attention to what I include lol.

Still frustrated we keep the passwords in the script though >.> any suggestions for better storage of passwords and the like in Perl scripts?

My GOTOs are:

- Check if focus on teamwork is emphasized. Does the company state themselves? Spend a day with the team if possible, see how they work together.

- What tools do they use? Sometimes this will hint you towards whether or not you will encounter a good environment or a jumbled mess.

- Is there organized communication? I know, sometimes there are too many meetings, but that is better than too vew. How often does the team meet, even if just for 10mins? How does management communicate with the team? What ways are provided to give feedback? Are suggestions to improve practices welcome?

I left my last company and joined my current one, where these things work out the way they should. While I liked both projects with respect to development, my mental state has improved dramatically in the new environment. Stress is down, productivity is up. I love my job.

...What a day ,
"CTO new priority need this project started and completed ASAP."
Me: "What about my current project you wanted me to work on that was a high priority which took over Another project I was supposed to be working on?"
CTO: "This one is a higher priority than both of them"
Me: "ok sure shall get onto it".
PM: "A client has come in with an issue on another project I need this fixed now".
Team leader assigns me a bunch of tasks that need to get done which is ok but 5 people need me to get it done so they can do the bulk of their work.

Later for a side project CTO asks me to get a list together of things that are missing for this side project, about 60 seconds later he asks me to send him the email now - bare in mind nearly 300 assets I need to go through which are not organised so what the heck I just send him it mid sentence.

End of day get told that CTO wants me on yet another different project...

Each of these projects takes 4 months to get done. But arggggg... oh and then I hear that our new PM has decided to cut all project deadlines by half....

I am but a single person,
I just want to sit back and watch everything burn around me... But the company has a history of Scape goating people on failed project deadlines... Never a dull day in the office but tbh kinda like it.

Back in college, we were assigned a group of 3 other students to complete a duplicate of a current popular site. My team received Kijiji, a Canadian ad listing platform similar to Craigslist/eBay. This was to be done with JSP and JavaEE. We had to create a 30 minute presentation to go along with it.

Fairly simply, except we had one week. As I worked 2 jobs at the time, I typically left my college work to the last minute. Initially, we split up the work, myself taking 50% of the code and splitting the rest between the other 3. I was perfectly okay with this, until the night of the last day, they messaged me saying they had done nothing.

Extremely annoyed, I told them to just do the fucking presentation and that I would now finish the other 50% of the code myself. I coded 16 hours straight, went to bed, woke up and coded for another 8 hours. It wasn't exactly what I wanted, but it covered all the points.

The day of, they showed me their presentation. It was complete trash. When we ended up presenting, I improvised the entire thing. The others didn't even speak. Not once. At the end of it, we received 65%. The professor said that if the project had been completed by one person, it would've received a perfect grade, but because there were 4 of us, he expected more. They all looked at me in fear of saying something. I just thanked the professor for his time and left.

The professor knew I did the entire thing myself. My code was by far the most consistent in his class, constantly receiving perfect marks and him asking me to assist other students.

When I graduated, I didn't have 100%, but I did have a 90%. Considering that project was worth 25% of our final marks, he definitely bumped my grade.

-- Best --
> Submitted my notice of termination for my current job
> Found a new job starting next year
> Can switch from Windows to Linux/MacOS in new job
> Got more time to work on personal projects due to the pandemic

-- Worst --
> Huge amount of software restrictions (current job) almost got several projects at work canceled. Maybe its important to say that the core business of my current workplace is auditing so there are a lot of law regulations which then apply in the softwaredevelopment process.
> New managers that do not have the slightest clue of what they're doing
> Online Teambuilding events
> Absurd amount of segmentation of tools and also different coding guidelines that are used at work. E.g. one team uses jira, another trello, another github issue tracker and so on.

I think I've reached some kind of job nirvana. My coworkers and I all complain about our work. We're overworked, underappreciated, underpaid, and and have to deal with all sorts of bullshit all the time. Pretty much everyone who has been on the team longer than a year is talking about quitting.

But I started at this company as a level 1 tech support phone technician before I transferred into the DevOps side of things, and that tech support job was SO much worse. Way more stressful, way less pay, mandatory overtime, horrible scheduling, being forced to remain calm while people hurl insults at you over the phone, and it was a dead-end job with a high turnover rate and almost no opportunities for advancement of any kind.

And every time I think back on that job, I realize that what I have now is actually pretty great. I'm paid well (still underpaid for the job I do, but catching up really fast due to my current boss giving me several big raises to keep me from quitting lol). I deal only with other tech people like developers and data scientists so no more listening to salesmen insult me on the phone. I'm not in any sort of customer service role so I can call people on their bullshit as long as I'm professional about it. I'm salaried so they can't make me work horrible shifts. 99% of my days are a normal 9-5 workday. I actually have a reliable schedule to plan around.

People treat me like the adult that I am.

I'd get a similar experience at other, better-paying companies, for sure, but what I have now is still pretty great.

I'm sure I'll be back in a few days to rant about more nonsensical bullshit and stress, but for now I'm feeling the zen.

Hey! This is a followup to my last story.

TL;DR: I thinking of quitting my old job, got an offer at a startup, about the same pay, but much better working conditions.

First of all, the meeting with my lead. It was a performance report on her side to me, and I got 100 to 110% in performance in all points. My lead said "this team without you wouldn't be this team anymore" - which makes me feel a little bit bad for her if I decide to quit. She is a great team lead, but I don't belive the old company is worth my time anymore.

Now to the new company. Shortly after that performance report meeting, I had a call with the ceo, and what do I have to say besides: What a cool dude. He listened to me, asked me questions about my previous jobs (not just as programmer) and so on. But because first looks are deceiving, I went to their office last thursday. And wow. Their are exactly what I imagined them to be. Cool, young folks, 100% tech enthusiasts, and open minded.

One of the new hires in the new company wanted a 6 months internship between his studies. Instead they offered him a full time job - for the 6 months. They even offered me to pay back my scholarship that I will own my old company for leaving early. This is awesome.

The only things that will be worse than my old job are, that I have to negotiate payment instead of yearly increases, 4 days less paid vacation, so only 26 days, and 40h weeks. And they have no workers council, which isn't good, but it's not the worst either.

I got them fixed on 57.000€, not including an up to 10.000€ annual bonus. The way you achieve your bonus seems good to. It's split in two parts, internal and external bonus. Internal bonus is when you engage with internal events like tech calls, sharing your knowledge on your main IT topics, etc. External Bonus is a bit more complicated, but also straight forward. You work on projects for customers, and if you have less than 3 weeks a year that you dont participate in an project, you get the full bonus.

Last friday, I filed a request for a certificate of employment from my current team lead, this is odd for her because I have never done it before, and she asked why I requested it. I said to her that we can talk about it, and she agreed but didn't call me, yet.

Lastly, another good friend of mine will be employed by my team soon, but for a fraction of the payment that I currently receive! He is doing the exact same work, and even worse, he is doing project managment for his main developer project too! And is getting less paid... I just cant...

Yesterday we needed to update a few cloud instances, the only other person who knows about setting up CICD and our OpenShift Containers than me is only in part time and works two days a week, his trainee didn't know anything, so it's up to me. This isn't hard or anything, but it shows that this system our mangement maintains will fail soon, maybe even with me going? I sure hope so tbh.

One of you guys said, I should go to my team lead and negotiate a higher pay, but the truth is, that because we are a big ISP we have an collective agreement for payment and are grouped by tasks (which is bull shit btw, because I'm doing tasks much higher paid than currently). This also means that I cannot simply jump in another group, and can only increase my current pay to about 115%, which is done automatically every year by 5% up to 115%. Anything above is considered extra, but I don't think they will go with it.

I will decide this week about my future at the old company, but I really don't know what to do...

You know when you work with an incompetent team or organization? No one
knows what they are doing and there is no competent leadership to set high standards and
people are making their own bullshit up? Yeah? That's my current workplace.

I had mentioned before I got offered a new role, with 50% increase.

I wasn’t expecting my current employer to counter, but they suddenly shat themselves and basically matched the salary, and offered promotion to software developer (sans junior). They acknowledge my role within the company is only increasing in responsibility and so far I have exceeded expectations. Its a nice response to have from them, although I do wonder how long it might have taken without the panic.

The new company have counter-countered, promising to raise salary by a further 20% of total, within the first 6 months, provided I learn React reasonably quickly (about a month), integrate with the team and start to take on my roles within the Agile set relatively independently (3-6 months). They also don’t bother with the junior role title at these pay bandings.

I currently get about half an hour a week with my lead dev on sticking issues. In this new team, I would be one of ten javascripters, working towards best practices, TDD etc. This is absolutely the realm I want to specialise in, at the first stage of my career.

I said I would stay with my current employer, before the counter counter move. Now I am full of doubt.

Has anyone landed in teams like this, only to find they didn’t offer increased learning at all? If that was a high risk for me, I wouldnt take it, despite the offer of more cash. I’d sooner get more skilled in the stuff I have been working in at my current role.

Pretty amazing how much amazing life experiences can cause anxiety. Never been in the middle of a bidding war before...

I'm part of a robotics team in my highschool. We work on autonomous robots, which are driven with microcontrollers like the Arduino and "bare" Atmel chips.

Last year we were using a protocol called CAN. CAN is a bus which runs at 1Mbps and it is quite easy to connect devices together. (It's a bus ofc it is). BUT... it needs a terminator at the end, mostly 120 ohm.

Every year we are on a deadline and something broke on our current board and we needed to solder up a new one, but we couldn't find the 120 ohm terminator... ANYWHERE!

At end after searching for it in the workshop for 4h straight (12am- 4am) we finally found it, and soldered up the new board and guess what... it wasn't what we thought, the code was the problem.

After realizing the problem my teammate and I, in silence just stood up, packed our things and went home. Argh!

Almost everyone here has shared a story about their boss whether bad or good at some point in their time on devRant. Here's mine.

I started out in my current company around mid third year in college. I have been doing freelance for about six years which is why I think my boss hired me.

I couldn't be more thankful for these last 10 months in this company, every experience has been epic. Since my boss knows my future plans and how I hope to build my own company some day, my boss has been mentoring me ever since I've knew him.

Last week he even offered to take me along with him and certain other members of our team to the US to meet with a client of ours. (I have nothing to do with the client, he just offered the trip for the heck of it.)

I can't wait to see where my time with this company will lead me.

I am working for one of the FAANGs. I will soon be completing 4 years in industry. For me I should be an level 2 developer or at least working for level 2.
In my current company I don't think I will get promoted this soon and also, switching internally might now benefit as if I will switch my work at the company won't give me enough feedback to get promoted soon in the new team.
I am thinking of switching to some other company with a level 2 position and work at that level.
Should I continue working at FAANG as it has a nice name and all or switch to some other company with a promotion to grow my skills.

Even at my current company I am. learning a lot but the promotion is an issue.

I just fucked up!

So I was invited to an afterwork beer because some guy out of our project team left...
I was there early and run into the lead of HR for my current department... (I am still in apprenticeship, last year, so she is not <yet> responsible but if I want to stay she is the one who decides)
I said Hi, and she asks me to sit down.
After a while she asks me (out of the blue) If I want to stay!
I was surprised!!! I am considering multiple options atm .... I was not able to formulate a proper sentence all I could say was a simple "yes"...
... and with all the things going on in my head at this moment it might not have been the most convincing one....
I am screwed! Fuck I worked hard the past three years

We are researching enhancing our current alerting system (we use Splunk) to be 'smarter' about who is emailed/texted/whatever when there are problems in our applications.

Currently, if there are over 50 errors logged within a 15 minute period, a email/phone/text blast to nearly 100 individuals ranging from developers, network admins, DBAs, and vice presidents.

Our plan is to group errors by team and let each team manage their own applications. Alert on 1 error, 5, 500...we don't care, let the team work out the particulars.

The trick was interfacing with Splunk's API (that's a long rant by itself)

In about a day or so I was able to use Splunk's WebHook feature to notify a WebAPI service I threw together to send myself an email with details about the underlying data (simulating the kind of alert we would send to the team)

I thought ...cool... it worked. Show it off to the team, most thought it was a good start, except one:

Dev: "The errors are not grouped by team."
Me: "No, I threw the webapi service together to demonstrate how we can extract the splunk bits to get access to the teams"
Dev: "Well...this won't work at all."
Me: "Um..what?"
Dev: "The specification c l e a r l y states the email will be team based. This email was only sent to you and has all the teams and their applications"
Me: "Um...uh...the service can, if we want to go using a service route. Grouping by team name is easy using a LINQ query. I just through this service together yesterday."
Dev: "I don't know. Sounds like I need to schedule a meeting to discuss what you are proposing. I don't think emailing all that to everyone is a good idea."

WTF! Did you not listen to what I said?!!!

Oh well..the dev's proposal is to use splunk's email notification and custom Exchange rules with callbacks into splunk that resend...oh good lord ...a fracking rube goldberg of a config nightmare ...

I suspect we'll go the service route once I finish the service before the meeting.

Last week my PM scheduled a meeting for the whole team of 14 devs to talk about our tasks, how we can improve our workflow, so he's up to date on daily stuff nad sprint progress. After an hour and a half of lots of brainstorming i just asked
- what exactly do you want to achieve with all these changes?
- basically i would like on overview of current progress on each task

And he proposed couple of different meetings during the sprint, which would waste dev time. He proposed to apoint one person reaponsible to keeping him informed during each sprint. He proposed we change our meetings, our process, all of it.
So I just sat with my laptop during the same meeting and I prepared a jira board with swimlanes, filters, etc. Where you can sort by priority, size, what is blocked, what is, waiting in queue, what is being currently developed, what is being tested, what's ready for deployment, etc. Easy. 5-10mins of work.

- does this solve your problem?
-....
- you have everything here
-... What if someone doesn't update the ticket status?
- we check everything during our dailies, so, worst case scenario is the status is not update for 24h
-... Umm.. Yeah.. I think thats it. Thank you.

So, we basically wasted 20+ man-hours on another bullshit meeting because the guy thats supposed to be using these tools doesn't know them at all. After working here for 6 months.

I need guidance about my current situation.
I am perfectionist believing in OOP, preventing memory leak in advance, following clean code, best practices, constantly learning about new libraries to reduce custom implementation & improve efficiency.
So even a single bad variable name can trigger my nerves.

I am currently working in a half billion $ IT service company on a maintenance project of 8 year old Android app of security domain product of 1 of the top enterprise company of the world, which sold it to the many leading companies in the world in Govt service, banking, insurance sectors.

It's code quality is such a bad that I get panic attacks & nightmares daily.

Issues are like
- No apk obfuscation, source's everything is openbook, anybody can just unzip apk & open it in Android Studio to see the source.
- logs everywhere about method name invoked,
- static IV & salt for encryption.
- thousands of line code in God classes.
- Irrelevant method names compared to it's functionality.
- Even single item having list takes 2-3 seconds to load
- Lag in navigation between different features' screens.
- For even single thing like different dimension values for different density whole 100+ lines separate layout files for 6 types of densities are written.
- No modularized packages, every class is in single package & there are around 100+ classes.

Owner of the code, my team lead, is too terrified to change even single thing as he don't have coding maturity & no understanding of memory leak, clean code, OOP, in short typical IT 'service' company mentality.

Client is ill-informed or cost-cutting centric so no code review done by them in 8 years.

Feeling much frustrated as I can see it's like a bomb is waiting to blast anytime when some blackhat cracker will take advantage of this.

Need suggestions about this to tackle the situation.

Holy shit sometimes I hate my job. Current assignment: translate a C++ COM class to C#. Requirement: interface should not change. I ask the other team using this interface to ask me any questions so I can address their concerns. First FUCKING thing they ask for: a diagram explaining how to access the interface. For. Fuck. Sake. The goddamn thing is not changing. At all. I have said that to every stakeholder every time. It's a changed reference and a tweak to some calls to make them .Net calls. Why am I redocumenting something that was documented years ago?

A tale of silos, pivots, and mismanagement.

Background: Our consultancy has been working with this client for over a year now. It started with some of our back-end devs working on the API.

We are in Canada. The client is located in the US. There are two other teams in Canada. The client has an overseas company contracted to do the front-end of the app. And at the time we started, there was a 'UX consultancy' also in the US.

I joined the project several months in to replace the then-defunct UX company. I was the only UX consultant on the project at that time. I was also to build out a functional front-end 'prototype' (Vue/Scss) ahead of the other teams so that we could begin tying the fractured arms of the product together.

At this point there was a partial spec for the back-end, a somewhat architected API, a loose idea of a basic front-end, and a smattering of ideas, concepts, sketches, and horrific wireframes scattered about various places online.

At this point we had:
One back-end
One front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
No task-management for UX

You might get where this is going...

None of the teams had shared meetings. None of the team leads spoke to each other. Each team had their own terms, their own trajectory, and their own goals.

Just as our team started pushing for more alignment, and we began having shared meetings, the client decided to pivot the product in another direction.

Now we had:
One back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
Two functional prototypes
One front-end Jira board
One back-end Jira board

No worries. We're professionals. We do this all the time. We rolled with it and we shifted focus to a new direction, with the same goals in mind internally to keep things aligned and moving along.

Slowly, the client hired managers to start leading everything in the same direction. Things started to look up. The back-end team and the product and UX teams started aligning goals and working toward the same objectives.

Then the client shifted directions again. This time bigger. More 'verticals'. I was to leave the previous 'prototypes' behind, and feature-freeze them to work on the new direction.

One back-end
One conceptual 'new' back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
One product Jira board
One UX Jira board

Meanwhile, the back-end team, the front-end team overseas, all kept moving in the previously agreed-upon direction.

At this stage, probably 6 months in, the 'prototypes' were much less proper 'prototypes' but actually just full apps (with a stubbed back-end since I was never given permission or support to access the actual back-end).

The state of things today:
Back to one back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One 'working' front-end
One 'QA' front-end
One 'demo' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
Two front-end Jira boards
One current product Jira board
One future product Jira board
One current UX Jira board
One future UX Jira board
One QA Jira board

I report to approximately 4 people remotely (depending on the task or the week).

There are three representatives from 'product' who dictate features and priorities (they often do not align).

I still maintain the 'prototype' to this day. The front-end team does not have access to the code of this 'prototype' (the clients' request). The client's QA team does not test against the 'prototype'.

The demos of the front-end version of the product include peanut-gallery design-by-committee 'bug call-outs', feature requests, and scope creep by attendees in the dozens from all manner of teams and directors.

Hi guys! I need your help.

I'm currently facing a big decision.
I've got a job offer a couple of days ago. The new job would involve an 80% raise to my current salary, and I would make another step on the hierarchy ladder.
BUT
The new place is not a software development company. They have a small team working on internal stuff, but they are basically maintaining a 12 years old garbage.
My job would be, to design the new system from the ground up. At the moment, the new system has to do the same things as the old one, just faster and better. Then they'd like to extend it further.
The first part is not challenging, but the things that they planned in the future sound interesting.

The problem is, that my current company just got a new contract and I'm supposed to conduct the deploy (speaking with their managers, prepare their sites for installation, and install). And since it is a small startup, the deploy depends highly on me.
If I take the new job, then I have to start in February which ultimately means that I screw my current company real bad. They'll probably survive, but they might lose this contract and/or lose money.

If I do what makes economic sense, then I take the job. (fuck it's almost 2x as much!!) But I have mixed feelings about it.
I've got 48 hours to decide.

What do you guys think?

This literally happened in my current team, and I'm not even an experienced dev yet.
Incident happened like this :
Our team is working on a RCP based on eclipse plugins, which has a headless mode and a GUI mode. Now, in the GUI mode, my manager cum architect thought there are no need of user log files (long story) because the user can see the info on screen, whereas in the headless mode, she wanted me to print the logs onto the console and a log file as well.
Now it just so happened that our team had got a recent addition as a replacement to our lead developer (she left the company) who claimed she had 3 years of expertise and a masters degree, and she was assigned a task. The task was to format a custom file we were generating out of the product (basically dumping info in a file) in a human-readable format. Miss new-addition-masters-degree decided it would be a very good idea to redirect the standard java output stream to a file output stream ( which she used for generating the formatted file ) but somehow never realized that she needed to reset the output stream back to standard output.
Consequences were devastating. I wrote the logic for the logger ( yes, apparently any available logging mechanism won't do it, again, long story ) and had it printing to a file in tmp directory. The logs seemed to be working fine initially but after a few logs, specifically from the point where the formatter started working, all the logs got printed in the formatted file. And this file was supposed to be used by our clients to develop something on top of it. Naturally, I got the heat of it and then naturally, worried and nervous and curious and in a frenzied state of mind, I started debugging.
When I got to the actual fault, I seriously could not decide whether to cry or laugh or call up miss masters and scream at her. I decided to ask her about what the hell she had written and her answer was most of it was written by the developer she replaced, so she didn't know it would cause this much problem. Anyway, I fixed the leak after that and averted the catastrophe.
And that, fellow devs, is the story of how I solved a crisis in my first year at corporate.

This started as an update to my cover story for my Linked In profile, but as I got into a groove writing it, it turned into something more, but I’m not really sure what exactly. It maybe gets a little preachy towards the end so I’m not sure if I want to use it on LI but I figure it might be appreciated here:

In my IT career of nearly 20 years, I have worked on a very wide range of projects. I have worked on everything from mobile apps (both Adroid and iOS) to eCommerce to document management to CMS. I have such a broad technical background that if I am unfamiliar with any technology, there is a very good chance I can pick it up and run with it in a very short timespan.

If you think of the value that team members add to the team as a whole in mathematical terms, you have adders and you have subtractors. I am neither. I am a multiplier. I enjoy coaching, leading and architecture, but I don’t ever want to get out of the code entirely.

For the last 9 years, I have functioned as a technical team lead on a variety of highly successful and highly productive teams. As far as team leads go, I tend to be a bit more hands on. Generally, I manage to actively develop code about 25% of the time to keep my skills sharp and have a clear understanding of my team’s codebase.

Beyond that I also like to review as much of the code coming into the codebase as practical. I do this for 3 reasons. I do this because as a team lead, I am ultimately the one responsible for the quality and stability of the codebase. This also allows me to keep a finger on the pulse of the team, so that I have a better idea of who is struggling and who is outperforming. Finally, I recognize that my way may not necessarily be the best way to do something and I am perfectly willing to admit the same. I have learned just as much if not more by reviewing the work of others than having someone else review my own.

It has been said that if you find a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. This describes my relationship with software development perfectly. I have known that I would be writing software in some capacity for a living since I wrote my first “hello world” program in BASIC in the third grade.

I don’t like the term programmer because it has a sense of impersonality to it. I tolerate the title Software Developer, because it’s the industry standard. Personally, I prefer Software Craftsman to any other current vernacular for those that sling code for a living.

All too often is our work compiled into binary form, both literally and figuratively. Our users take for granted the fact that an app “just works”, without thinking about the proper use of layers of abstraction and separation of concerns, Gang of Four design patterns or why an abstract class was used instead of an interface. Take a look at any mediocre app’s review distribution in the App Store. You will inevitably see an inverse bell curve. Lot’s of 4’s and 5’s and lots of (but hopefully not as many) 1’s and not much in the middle. This leads one to believe that even given the subjective nature of a 5 star scale, users still look at things in terms of either “this app works for me” or “this one doesn’t”. It’s all still 1’s and 0’s.

Even as a contributor to many open source projects myself, I’ll be the first to admit that have never sat down and cracked open the Spring Framework to truly appreciate the work that has been poured into it. Yet, when I’m in backend mode, I’m working with Spring nearly every single day.

The moniker Software Craftsman helps to convey the fact that I put my heart and soul into every line of code that I or a member of my team write. An API contract isn’t just well designed or not. Some are better designed than others. Some are better documented than others. Despite the fact that the end result of our work is literally just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, computer science is not an exact science at all. Anyone who has ever taken 200 lines of Java code and reduced it to less than 50 lines of reactive Kotlin, anyone who has ever hit that Utopia of 100% unit test coverage in a class, or anyone who can actually read that 2-line Perl implementation of the RSA algorithm understands this simple truth. Software development is an art form. I am a Software Craftsman.

#wk171

No no no. That's it. Less than 2 years experience supposed to be leading a team of 12 soon to be 17 most of which have more experience than me! Been given sever admin responsibilities, training and managing 2 large frame works in addition to everything else I was doing before.

With the current set of projects we were given half the amount of time to do over twice the amount of work. Management seems to expect constant over time. And I keep being nagged by management to finish x,y,z. Every thing is high piority and I keep being asked to switch between tasks every hour or so nothing gets completed when this happens every time I make them aware this happens. The worse thing is that the CEO has a way of naming and shaming people who fall behind work infront of the entire company.

I have only been surviving thanks to a few saints in the team who just get on with the work without argument but now found out a bunch of these are moving to better companies!!!

I like helping people but with everything that is going on I can't find time to and I know at times I end up coming across inpatient with them that they don't deserve. But if you are part of a team please try and solve your issue yourself before asking others every half an hour there are too many of you and I need to get things done too.

And why is it so damn hot sitting at the desk sweating.

Ok I am prob on my meriod and being over the top grumpy. I want to find a new job but so tired in the evenings that I just want to collapse on my bed and do nothing. At end of writing this and feel a little better.

I’m seriously considering leaving my current team or even resigning from the organization altogether. I don’t blame anyone— I understand that managers have their own deadlines to meet and have to answer to their superiors when things go south. I have indeed developed a thick skin by getting used to all this shouting/blaming the last 3 months. But yes, I seriously don’t think there is any point in taking this anymore. It’s not good for my mental health.

My question to all of you is, is working at smaller companies better in regards to this? (I’m working at a big corporation now). And are they more unstable than bigger companies? (especially in times of COVID)

Biggest interview of my entire life is coming up on Thursday. I really need this to go well - it's more than double my current salary, at a time where I'm really starting to struggle to make ends meet. There's an actual "team", and from my interactions with them over the last four interviews, I think they're cool people. It's still a little unusual, because although there's a team or cohort of seniors that I'd be joining, every senior developer is still somewhat siloed, leading their own juniors. I'd also get to be remote 75% of the time, which I think I've realized is a "must have" benefit.

I don't know if it's coincidental or just bad timing then that I've been having episodes of pretty intense vertigo and panic attacks far more frequently than normal lately - even before I had this interview lined up. I realized recently that I must have some kind of anxiety disorder. I don't know if that's from the military, or just from being fucked up via my own missteps. But I can't keep having these attacks.

Anyone who's willing to share - I don't really have anyone to ask. How do you deal with this type of thing? I went to see a shrink last year, but he just gave me pills that replaced these issues with others.

Every day I try to show something new or cool to the people in my team. Not with the purpose of using it, more like to show them the current state of options and cool things to study. Yesterday it was clojure and clojurescript as well as regent. Which even tho I am not a master or even proficient at either....well I just wanted to show them. Lisp is very whiteboard friendly, so after I finished writing shit on the board this was the lead developer's reaction:

Lol this is fun.

And another weekend full of work, because I don‘t get shit done in the office.

Being kind if the lead dev in my team, everyone is coming to me for nearly everything and I rarely have time to work on my current ‚fulltime‘ project.

It‘s really frustrating. I just want to code .__. FML

(Maybe I should learn other programming languages and switch jobs? I always wanted to learn Haskell)

I got assigned to work on a new project a couple of weeks ago. We got the POC code handed off from senior management, since he came up with the idea over the weekend. The project concept is hella exciting, but the dev manager and PO I have to deal with make life unbearable to say the least.

We have only 2 devs (including me) and 1 QA on this supposedly very important project. Of course, management announced the project to the clients already, so now we have to deliver ASAP cause it adds “sizzle”.

The MVP deadline is... no one knows when, either July 30th or September 1st. The MVP requirements are... unknown. I swear if someone saw the list of tasks and issues attached to “MVP” Epic, they would call us nuts trying to fit it all in.

To make things better, each PR requires 2 reviewers, so we end up adding manager as a reviewer just cause we need him to hit that “approve” button. So in attempt to make life easier, we requested to have a third developer. We are getting another developer, but that guy doesn’t know how to unit test a pure function...

Current priorities are... unit testing with coverage of 95% and if we want to refactor code, we have to add area to the list in a Google Doc. As a result, we are not tackling big things like risk of SQL injections not to mention big features like i18n (5-6 languages to support by the way and yes, it’s part of MVP as well as SSR no one knows why). Currently, I spend 2-3 hours a week in calls with the team just to figure out what the hell MVP is, what we have to do and why we have to do it. Last time we spent an hour refining 1 spike and breaking down one story into 3.

Oh, we also don’t have a deployment plan, not even to test environments since DevOps team was not aware of this project at all. Thus, QA cannot create any test suites and have to test everything manually which eats a lot of their time.

This whole project is a big hot mess and I’m considering leaving it all together especially since I’m working on two squads at the same time. I love the project, I love the idea, but management makes it unbearable, so I’m not even motivated to work on that.

I wanted to talk about the right job.
In my previous job I did not feel happy, the management was weird, the salary was low.

For a time I was thinking, I need to get better and do more and I will have a better salary and management will be more lenient towards me.

After a few years, I got an offer to join a much bigger company with a bigger salary and better benefits.

I joined them of course. And it turns out in some places you just do not fit in or the company just wants something that is not realistic and always will be unhappy with you.

In my current company, I have never felt better working, the team is awesome and tasks are challenging but doable, and they appreciate my skills and speed of work.

TL;DR:
If you do not feel good in your company, leave for some other company, most likely it's not you, but its the job that sucks.