Fuck the memes.

Fuck the framework battles.

Fuck the language battles.

Fuck the titles.

Anybody who has been in this field long enough knows that it doesn't matter if your linus fucking torvalds, there is no human who has lived or ever will live that simultaneously understands, knows, and remembers how to implement, in multiple languages, the following:

- jest mocks for complex React components (partial mocks, full mocks, no mocks at all!)
- token cancellation for asynchronous Tasks in C#
- fullstack CRUD, REST, and websocket communication (throw in gRPC for bonus points)
- database query optimization, seeding, and design
- nginx routing, https redirection
- build automation with full test coverage and environment consideration
- docker container versioning, restoration, and cleanup
- internationalization on both the front AND backends
- secret storage, security audits
- package management, maintenence, and deprecation reviews
- integrating with dozens of APIs
- fucking how to center a div

and that's a _comically_ incomplete list; barely scratches the surface of the full range of what a dev can encounter in a given day of writing software

have many of us probably done one or even all of these at different times? surely.

but does that mean we are supposed to draw that up at a moment's notice some cookie-cutter solution like a fucking robot and spit out an answer on a fax sheet?

recruiters, if you read this site (perhaps only the good ones do anyway so its wasted oxygen), just know that whoever you hire its literally the luck of the draw of how well they perform during the interview. sure, perhaps some perform better, but you can never know how good someone is until they literally start working at your org, so... have fun with that.

Oh and I almost forgot, again for you recruiters, on top of that list which you probably won't ever understand for the entirety of your lives, you can also add writing documentation, backup scripts, and orchestrating / administrating fucking JIRA or actually any somewhat technical dashboard like a CMS or website, because once again, the devs are the only truly competent ones - and i don't even mean in a technical sense, i mean in a HUMAN sense of GETTING SHIT DONE IN GENERAL.

There's literally 2 types of people in the world: those who sit around drawing flow charts and talking on the phone all day, and those WHO LITERALLY FUCKING BUILD THE WORLD

why don't i just run the whole fucking company at this point? you guys are "celebrating" that you made literally $5 dollars from a single customer and i'm just sitting here coding 12 hours a day like all is fine and well

i'm so ANGRY its always the same no matter where i go, non-technical people have just no clue, even when you implore them how long things take, they just nod and smile and say "we'll do it the MVP way". sure, fine, you can do that like 2 or 3 times, but not for 6 fucking months until you have a stack of "MVPs" that come toppling down like the garbage they are.

How do expect to keep the "momentum" of your customers and sales (I hope you can hear the hatred of each of these market words as I type them) if the entire system is glued together with ducktape because YOU wanted to expedite the feature by doing it the EASY way instead of the RIGHT way. god, just forget it, nobody is going to listen anyway, its like the 5th time a row in my life

we NEED tests!
we NEED to know our code coverage!
we NEED to design our system to handle large amounts of traffic!
we NEED detailed logging!
we NEED to start building an exception database!

BILBO BAGGINS! I'm not trying to hurt you! I'm trying to help you!

Don't really know what this rant was, I'm just raging and all over the place at the universe. I'm going to bed.

I quit and my last day is next week.

Apparently management has decided that I should spend my last day implementing a new feature for a customer where I have been the only developer, and release it to production (without first implementing it in test) the same day. A feature that potentially could cripple a whole workflow if done wrong.

Of course I advised not to release untested code to production on a friday, just before the only person that knows how it works leaves the company. But no, “the customer reaaaaaally wants it before summer, so just be careful not to write any bugs”.

I’m not saying that I’m intentionally gonna write bad code - but if I do, I’m not gonna pick up the phone when it calls.

Writing customer passwords fulltext into the prod database because "it's easier to associate them with the user"

Boy do I hate office politics...

A client asked our company to fix perf issues on their product. Our coleagues had been picked for the job [being led by another 3rd-party, as per client's request]. Aaand they dropped the ball. The deadline is in 2 weeks, nothing is working.

Mgmt engaged us to put out the fire, but strictly at the scope the other guys were working in.

On the first day of testing we've revealed an elephant-sized perf issue that's as easy to fix as brainlessly changing 4 values in config. And that elephant is masking all the other perf issues.

We got a firm NO for config changes as that is out of the defined scope. And we're asked to continue testing.

I mean, the elephant is THAT huge that any further testing is moot - all other bottlenecks are hidden behind it. And just changing those 4 values would reduce the resources required by a magnitude of ~10.

But that's out of scope...

Client is desperate, lost and honestly asking us, pros in the field, for help.. We know how to help.. It takes 10 seconds to apply the fix..

But our mgmt forbids us to step out of the scope :/

as a result we have to pretend to be dummies hardly knowing what to do and hide the truth from the customer they so desperately want.

This is frustrating. And wrong. And imo unprofessional

I’d heard rumblings from my friends in other parts of the organization that there were going to be layoffs coming, so I’d warned my little engineering team. One of my team was vacationing abroad.

When he came back, one of my teammates told him it was all over and we were going to get fired.

He told me that he’d been told that and I said that it probably wouldn’t affect us and that I wouldn’t worry about it (I was under the impression that the layoffs would only really hit customer-facing roles).

The member of my team who just got back from vacation, the one who I reassured, was the only member of my team who was part of the group laid off.

Goddamn it.

Telling the customer that they are breaching guidelines.

"This cannot be against the guidelines. We always did it that way"
...
Ehm. You did what?

Worst hack/attack I had to deal with?

Worst, or funniest. A partnership with a Canadian company got turned upside down and our company decided to 'part ways' by simply not returning his phone calls/emails, etc. A big 'jerk move' IMO, but all I was responsible for was a web portal into our system (submitting orders, inventory, etc).

After the separation, I removed the login permissions, but the ex-partner system was set up to 'ping' our site for various updates and we were logging the failed login attempts, maybe 5 a day or so. Our network admin got tired of seeing that error in his logs and reached out to the VP (responsible for the 'break up') and requested he tell the partner their system is still trying to login and stop it. Couple of days later, we were getting random 300, 500, 1000 failed login attempts (causing automated emails to notify that there was a problem). The partner knew that we were likely getting alerted, and kept up the barage. When alerts get high enough, they are sent to the IT-VP, which gets a whole bunch of people involved.
VP-Marketing: "Why are you allowing them into our system?! Cut them off, NOW!"
Me: "I'm not letting them in, I'm stopping them, hence the login error."
VP-Marketing: "That jackass said he will keep trying to get into our system unless we pay him $10,000. Just turn those machines off!"
VP-IT : "We can't. They serve our other international partners."
<slams hand on table>
VP-Marketing: "I don't fucking believe this! How the fuck did you let this happen!?"
VP-IT: "Yes, you shouldn't have allowed the partner into our system to begin with. What are you going to do to fix this situation?"
Me: "Um, we've been testing for months already went live some time ago. I didn't know you defaulted on the contract until last week. 'Jake' is likely running a script. He'll get bored of doing that and in a couple of weeks, he'll stop. I say lets ignore him. This really a network problem, not a coding problem."
IT-MGR: "Now..now...lets not make excuses and point fingers. It's time to fix your code."
IT-VP: "I agree. We're not going to let anyone blackmail us. Make it happen."

So I figure out the partner's IP address, and hard-code the value in my service so it doesn't log the login failure (if IP = '10.50.etc and so on' major hack job). That worked for a couple of days, then (I suspect) the ISP re-assigned a new IP and the errors started up again.

After a few angry emails from the 'powers-that-be', our network admin stops by my desk.
D: "Dude, I'm sorry, I've been so busy. I just heard and I wished they had told me what was going on. I'm going to block his entire domain and send a request to the ISP to shut him down. This was my problem to fix, you should have never been involved."

After 'D' worked his mojo, the errors stopped.

Month later, 'D' gave me an update. He was still logging the traffic from the partner's system (the ISP wanted extensive logs to prove the customer was abusing their service) and like magic one day, it all stopped. ~2 weeks after the 'break up'.

I applaud my coworker who titled the business analytics dashboard showing end user feedback and CES values projected onto the 6 meter high wall of the office lobby.

"International Normalized Customer Effort Score Tracker"

Shoutout to my recent client who not only referred a friend of theirs to me for an additional project but is first making them define their project with process models before the customer interview to ensure no one’s time is wasted.

I always recommend to my customers that they define their project before taking it to me because otherwise it becomes billable consultation hours if I sit down with them and talk about the project and create the process models on my end.

This is a good customer experience and what I like to see when working 😁

customer: "hey, feature X is broken!"

me: *asks for details

customer, one week later: "feature X contains information about Y, that *must not* be"

me: *looks at code, at git-history, at related tickets

customer, one year ago: "hey, feature X *must* contain information about Y"

me, all the time: :-|

I was working with this "friend" in a supposedly "partnership" way. He was handling the customer getting all the info for the product and doing all the communication.

fRiEnD: So I talked with the customer, the website will be delivered on 10th of June.

Me: yOu &%@!ing WhAt?!

*he didn't ask before if it would have been possible

I was pressued to shift the blame.

We received an angry email from a customer that some of their data had disappeared. The boss assigns me to this task. This feature is relatively new and we've found some bugs in the past in here. I go through request logs, search the database, run some diagnostics, etc. for about 5 hours and I cannot find the problem. I focus on the bugs that we've had before but they don't seem to be the problem.

I tell the boss "sorry but I checked XYZ and I can't find the problem. I'm out of ideas." But the boss wanted answers by the end of the day. They did not want to admit to the client that we couldn't figure out what's wrong.

By now I was more pressured to find an answer, find something or someone to blame it on, not exactly to find the real solution. So I made up some BS:

"Sometimes, in HTML forms, the number inputs allow you to change the number by scrolling. We have some long forms where the user has to scroll. Perhaps the focus remained on the number input, so when they scrolled down they accidentally changed the number they meant to input."

The boss was happy with that. We explained this to the customer, and there's now a ticket to change type="number" to type="text" in our HTML forms and to validate it in th backend.

A week later another customer shows us a different error. This one is more clear because it had a stack trace, but I realise that this error is what caused our last error. It was pretty obscure, mind you, the unit tests didn't detect it.

I didn't tell the boss that they were connected tho.

With two angry clients in two weeks, I finally convinced the boss to give us more time to write more unit tests with full coverage.

Useless feature I've built?

Too many to mention. Here's #25.

Modified an existing "Are you sure..?" dialog pop-up (Yes/No buttons) to Yes/No/Cancel. Why? Managers claimed users were "accidentally" clicking 'Yes' when they should have clicked 'No' and causing all kinds of chaos, costing the company money, etc. Managers believed giving the user two chances instead of one would make it easier to avoid the problems they caused.

The meeting:
Me: "Users can click 'No', hit the 'Esc' key, or click the close 'X' button on the window, how will an extra button make it more foolproof?"
Mgr1: "It just will. Andy accidentally deleted inventory and when I asked him if an extra button would have saved them a days worth of re-counts, he said yes."
Mgr2: "Barb accidentally credited a customer $1,500. She promised me she clicked 'No', but the system credited the account anyway. An extra button would have saved us thousands of dollars!"
Me: "Um...these sound like training issues, not an extra button issue."
MyMgr: "PaperTrail, how hard is it to add an extra button?"
Dev1: "Oh yea, adding buttons is easy."
Dev2: "I can do it 5 minutes"
Dev3: "We'll save the company thousands and thousands of dollars!"
<lots of head-knodding and smiles>
MyMgr: "That settles it. PaperTrail, add the extra button!"

Users still screwed things up, but at least they couldn't blame it on not having an extra button.

Customer call.

Customer: what's the status of the software?
Me: it's a bit of wood work.
Customer: wood work?!
Me: yes, I think it would work.
Customer: ...
Me: ...

DEAR CTOs, PLEASE ASK THE DEVELOPER OF THE SOFTWARE WHICH YOU ARE PLANNING TO BUY IN WHAT LANGUAGE AND WHAT VERSION THEY ARE WRITTEN IN.

Background: I worked a LONG time for a software company which developed a BIG crm software suite for a very niche sector. The softwary company was quite successfull and got many customers, even big companies bought our software. The thing is: The software is written in Ruby 1.8.7 and Rails 2. Even some customer servers are running debian squeeze... Yes, this setup is still in production use in 2022. (Rails 7 is the current version). I really don't get it why no one asked for the specific setup, they just bought it. We always told our boss, that we need time to upgrade. But he told every time, no one pays for an tech upgrade... So there it is, many TBs of customer data are in systems which are totally old, not updated and with possibly security issues.

We were in a meeting today and it came my turn to talk.

me: "I am working on something not fun. I am tracking down a bug in X software that a customer has issues with."
boss: "It is like an easter egg hunt."
me: "Yes, but instead of eggs I am going to find a pile of crap."
boss: "Laughs..."
me: "Its not chocolate..."
boss: "next..."

The original code I am wading through is very likely my boss' code.

Being me. Fresh out of UNI with a three year bachelor in CS, no work experience. Starts in a big tech company with a lot promise of exciting project etc. Starts in 3 projects with one lead dev and two senior devs.

First month begins. I start by setting up my local environment and read documentations, which is fairly irrelevant and old. One of the senior devs quits.

Second month begins. Lead dev quits as well and the other senior dev having sick leave for the rest of the month. Basically I'm on my own, but thankfully not responsible for the projects.

Third month begins. The other senior dev is still sick. Nobody to help. Now I'm forced to talk to customer with a lacking knowledge of projects. Nobody knows what is going on. Hopefully my other senior dev will come back.

Fourth month begins. My senior have quit as well. I've been assigned as responsible of all three projects now. FML.

Fifth month begins. I begged my manager for help. Got a junior dev to help me with one of the projects. He and I still have no clue what we should do.

What a shitty start to a career as a developer.

Anybody having a similar experience?

Worst collaboration experience story?

I was not directly involved, it was a Delphi -> C# conversion of our customer returns application.

The dev manager was out to prove waterfall was the only development methodology that could make convert the monolith app to a lean, multi-tier, enterprise-worthy application.

Starting out with a team of 7 (3 devs, 2 dbas, team mgr, and the dev department mgr), they spent around 3 months designing, meetings, and more meetings. Armed with 50+ page specification Word document (not counting the countless Visio workflow diagrams and Microsoft Project timeline/ghantt charts), the team was ready to start coding.
The database design, workflow, and UI design (using Visio), was well done/thought out, but problems started on day one.
- Team mgr and Dev mgr split up the 3 devs, 1 dev wrote the database access library tier, 1 wrote the service tier, the other dev wrote the UI (I'll add this was the dev's first experience with WPF).
- Per the specification, all the layers wouldn't be integrated until all of them met the standards (unit tested, free from errors from VS's code analyzer, etc)
- By the time the devs where ready to code, the DBAs were already tasked with other projects, so the Returns app was prioritized to "when we get around to it"

Fast forward 6 months later, all the devs were 'done' coding, having very little/no communication with one another, then the integration. The service and database layers assumed different design patterns and different database relationships and the UI layer required functionality neither layers anticipated (ex. multi-users and the service maintaining some sort of state between them).

Those issues took about a month to work out, then the app began beta testing with real end users. App didn't make it 10 minutes before users gave up. Numerous UI logic errors, runtime errors, and overall app stability. Because the UI was so bad, the dev mgr brought in one of the web developers (she was pretty good at UI design). You might guess how useful someone is being dropped in on complex project , months after-the-fact and being told "Fix it!".

Couple of months of UI re-design and many other changes, the app was ready for beta testing.

In the mean time, the company hired a new customer service manager. When he saw the application, he rejected the app because he re-designed the entire returns process to be more efficient. The application UI was written to the exact step-by-step old returns process with little/no deviation.

With a tremendous amount of push-back (TL;DR), the dev mgr promised to change the app, but only after it was deployed into production (using "we can fix it later" excuse).

Still plagued with numerous bugs, the app was finally deployed. In attempts to save face, there was a company-wide party to celebrate the 'death' of the "old Delphi returns app" and the birth of the new. Cake, drinks, certificates of achievements for the devs, etc.

By the end of the project, the devs hated each other. Finger pointing, petty squabbles, out-right "FU!"s across the cube walls, etc. All the team members were re-assigned to other teams to separate them, leaving a single new hire to fix all the issues.

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

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

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

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

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

Me: I am not participating here.

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

Me: *disconnects*

my colleague was ordered to the site of a customer who had claimed that our software was a total bunch of crap and nothing was working. they had created a list with something 100 bullet points of the bugs they had found in our software that made it impossible to work with. since their production was relying on it they were really pissed off. after a very uncomfortable meeting where they angrily disclosed the situation, finally he got access to the system they were working with. after a few minutes he found that the system's GPU and hard disk drivers were totally outdated and devices weren't even working correctly. after he had updated all drivers, our software worked perfectly fine. at least the customers were kind of embarrassed afterwards... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I get really defiant when i repeatedly get micromanaged with bullshit instructions, such as asking me to have my just started c++ library poc which also involves a lot of learning and will earliest be usable in a few months, "ready for our customer devs" in 2 weeks from now.

just no, you fucking retard.

also, the lib alone wouldn't make any sense, since the code parts working with it don't yet exist at all.
and then getting instructed to ask customers if they can provide you with c++ code that solves the task for them in their own software, which of course will somehow magically fit in my existing codebase. even if it existed (which it fortunately doesn't because they do everything in C#), i don't think i'm going to be faster trying to somehow solder in their code into my library, of which i'm still brainstorming about the general architecture.

if you have so fucking unrealistic expectations, maybe stop sniffing glue all day and don't make this my fucking problem.

The joys of using overpriced enterprise software...

Me: Hey, I tried connect to the server, but I'm getting a "connection refused" error. Is it really running.
Other: hmm, I'll check
Other: The host restarted, but I'll get the software up again, no problemo
Other: I started the server again, but there's, but it's throwing errors while initializing. Time to write customer support

And then you get that premium customer support that think we don't know how to use their software at times. And once they realize we do, they don't know much better either. And once they realize we know how to use it there are 3 possibilities:
* They need our help to debug stuff before knowing what is going on
* They need to release a new version and accidentally break backwards compatibility and create enough work for us to burn through the clients contact hours
* They provide helpful advice (secret ending)

These fuck don't even release a proper changelog for their software nor their manuals.

This rings true even if the customer is internal. Built a feature and provided documentation on how to use it and one of the end users still used it wrong.

It was a simple validation process too. Input the member ID then click validate, the app then checks if the person is in the system and fills in some other fields and does some other backend stuff. How could you get that wrong?! 🤔

Worked for a friend of mine in the early 2000s. Had to implement a booking system into PHP for some private customer. This was PHP 4.something, the CMS was some alpha release of an open source project that my friend was sure was the future (it wasn't), and the specs were one A4 page of pencil scribbles that he took while talking to the customer.
Deadline was insane, nothing worked. I worked from getting up to laying down to get shit done, not being able to sleep, feeling stressed all the time. One week before roll-out I actually managed to get it running and we showed it to the customer. He was like "nope, that's not what I meant" and demanded lots of changes but accepted only one or two weeks of roll-out delay.
I did finish the job, made some good money, but then quit as soon as it was done.
This experience broke me so much that I worked in a workshop for 2 years to get away from programming as far as I possibly could.

!rant
tl;dr; quit my job last monday. going to grow my side hustle into full time freelancing.
I am so exited.

---
Story time:
I am working full time as a jack of all trades and also have a side business where I coach people on an ERP for doors/fenestration and also write custom software in c#.
I was able to manage both over ~4 years, with customer amount slowly growing (only doing B2B).

Last month I opened an account at a freelancer website just for the lulz and damn after a short amount of time the orders exploded. I had to shut it down again because I cannot manage the amount of work. But did manage to win a fair amount of customers that will keep me busy for the next year or two.

Spoke to my employer and told them about the situation (they know about my side business and it's all mentioned in the contracts). Said that I would need half the amount of hours with my business to reach the same amount of money and that working as an employee makes no sense for me in terms of money. I would however like to work 1 to 2 days in a week for them because working there is fun, even when its financially uninteresting.

they took one week to prepare a position and then invited me to a meeting. "we offer you 32 hours a week. if you want more, you have to make a descision. As a self employed person you have risk and we as an employer do not want to carry that risk for you and we do not want to finance your self employment" (etc.)

Thought I am in the wrong movie. I took that into the weekend and thought a lot about what has been said.

And last monday I invited to a follow up and told them

"sorry, I think I was not clear enough. Working for you is of no interest in terms of money. You do not finance me, it's the other way around. Sadly we do not come to an agreement, as 8 hours less does not fit the need. You said I need to make a descision. I do not want to do this but I'm quitting".

They responded with "Oh that is sad to hear. Is there anything that we can make so you do not leave?"

"Either pay me the same I would make as a self employed or follow my conditions"
Did not get a response on that.

I now have three months to prepare myself for self employment.
Currently working 40h + growing side business + getting the whole german bureaucracy shit together.

Tough time but hell this feels so damn good.

Just wanted to share this :)

C++ application running on Linux. If customer makes a mistake, I log CustomerIsDumb to kernel message buffer.

it is really frustrating not to be able to actually maintain and improve the code you're working with. i'd be happy to completely dig in and live in the code and get it all - not so much fucked up - , or, totally spitballing here, do some research on how we could improve the functionality and performance in general (which is not "nice to have", but rather ongoing customer pain points), but I'm not allowed to, because management hates having maintainable code or even an adequate number of devs. it rather has me doing hippity hoppity between different projects to make sure nothing gets my full attention. -.-

the only thing i can do is to clean it up a bit during bug fixes, but even heavy polishing won't fix this giant pile of garbage that is called our code base.

Our boss did always the same thing. When there was a BIG potential customer who indicates a small interest in our software, then he lied constantly about features. After the customer bought our software we got a deadline and should develop the missing features. I could remember two features: The first one was a quote tool for a car transport company. The tool should estimate a price for a transportation from an email with no structure and the other one was an API which should be possible to write dynamicly to MySQL, MariaDB, Postgres, MSSQL, DB2, Mongo or better said any possible dbms. The API should guess the structure of the dbs and offer CRUD actions. The funny thing is must write the api with go. Yeah dynamic and GO.

At some time, we told him we wont make any overtime and if the deadline is not possible we told that immediatly the customers, so that they call him. Thank god I don't work anymore in this company.

You know what fkn sucks? I was so fkn excited to join the company. It was a dream job for me. I loved everything about it. The stack, the concept, the core values, everything.
Fast forward 3 years and I no longer recognize the company I joined. Went from customer first to revenue first. No other vision than increase sales. Heart fkn breaking...

Dear customer, disregarding the bullshit your agency has dumped into Figma, I hereby deliver a clean, minimalist, and usable website without carousel sliders, chatbots, call-to-action teasers for newsletter signup, and muted auto-play videos consuming your end users' bandwidth.

One day you will understand and be grateful, too!

I used to work for a company that had a main website and a lightweight app. LW app was distributed to partners and added to other sites using an iframe.

Someone decided a requirement was to retain the shopping cart for anonymous users. Some dev thought the best way to do that was to issue auth cookies to anonymous users.

The auth cookie issued by the LW app was actually for the main site. A few users for LW app decided to just come to main site to make a purchase. Since they already had an auth cookie (issued from LW app), they were never prompted to log in, create an account, or use guest checkout on the main site. They were still able to complete their order and we had their shipping address, but we didn’t have their email address so we couldn’t contact them about their order.

Customer service had no way to email customers if something went out of stock or if there was a product recall. CS would have to call these customers and ask for email addresses. Good luck getting anyone to answer or return a call nowadays. Customers were asking where their confirmation email was. The admin website was polluted with “users” that had the placeholder email for non-logged in users.

This happened because of a combination of an understaffed and overextended engineering department. Of course when something goes bad it’s going to be bad.

Devs: Hey, what should we do?

A:
provide our SDKs for download as easily as possible so that any potential customer can try it out and see how much better we are compared to our competitors?

Or…
B:
Should we lock our SDKs behind a login where the customer needs to create an account and enter the most amount of private information possible, just in case, then also require to create some security access tokens that he needs to configure in his app to have access to our service via the sdk and also hide all of the documentation behind a login which requires some permission based roles to access and also make the sdks closed source so that it’s a pain in the ass to debug and understand?

Marketing people:
B! Definitely B! Make sure to piss off and annoy our customers as much as humanly possible!

Why the fuck do managers think beacuse a component has been build by another developer a shit ton of time ago, we can still reuse that fucking code.

For fucks sake, I had to rebuild a whole fucking map component that needed contextual filter and the fuckers just add extra functionality without consulting me. And gave me a tight schedule bc the customer, who btw disappeared for 6 months, will be mad for wasting his precious fucking time.

Fuck these clients.

daily.
me: i looked into the customer dev's project and even though it's C#, i can use it as a source of inspiration for my own C++ library.
PM: okay, maybe we can even still use it, so that you use a C# dll with your C++ code.
me: ...
other colleague: that's a bad idea. it can already be a challenge to use unmanaged c++ in dotnet, but the other way round it's even more difficult. C# and C++ are languages that behave quite differently and it will be hard to implement a correctly working interface.
PM: okay. well... then please analyze this project's complexity in terms of LOC and create a class diagram, so we get an idea of how complex it is.
me: sure.
PM: hmm... maybe we should split this topic. since dev x will also rely on your library, analyze this project together with him, each of you look at another part of the classes.
me: that's.... i think that's a bad idea. implementing this functionality in this library is my job, not of dev X. he won't be involved in implementing any of the funcionalities and for him, it shouldn't matter how this works.
PM: yeah, but since we are prototyping, maybe we should just violate the "separation of concerns" rule.
me (internally): (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

in the end i could convince him to do it my way, but for fuck's sake... when was the last time he actually succesfully implemented something? 🤦‍♀️

I know folks do their best, but come on Apple, this can't be that hard. Bought an IPhone at an estate sale (elderly individual died suddenly, so no one had knowledge of the apple id, passwords, etc) and I've been trying to convince apple to clear the activation lock. (AS = Apple Support)

<after explaining the situation>
AS: "Have you tried putting the phone in recovery mode? That should clear the lock"
Me: "I've already done that. It prompts for the apple id and password, which I don't have"
AS: "You need to talk to the owner and get the information"
Me: "As I explained, I purchased the phone at an estate sale of someone who died. I have the bill of sale, serial number, the box, obituary. What else do you need?"
AS: "Have you tried contacting a family member? They might have have that information."
Me: "The family members at the sale told us this is all they had. This kind of thing has to happen. I can't believe Apple can't clear the activation lock."
AS: "Yes, we can, but I'm very sorry we take security seriously."
Me: "I understand, what do I do now?"
AS: "Did you log out of the phone? Go to settings ..."
Me: "Yes, I tried all those steps before calling. It prompts for the AppleID and password."
AS: "Did you try entering the password?"
Me: "No, I don't have it. I already explained there is no way to know"
AS: "Yes..yes...sorry...I'm just reading the information in front of me. I found something, have you tried submitting a activation lock removal request?"
Me: "Yes, it was denied, didn't tell me why, which is why I'm calling. What about taking this phone to an Apple store? I have all the paperwork."
AS: "Sure, you can try. You might need the death certificate. The family or the coroner will have a copy."
Me: "What!? Apple requires a death certificate to unlock a phone!? I'm pretty sure not even the family is going to give a total stranger a death certificate"
AS: "Sorry sir, I'm just reading what is in front of me. Without that certificate, there is no way to prove the person died. You can try the Apple store, but they will likely require it."
Me: "That's a lot of drama for unlocking a phone. A *phone*"
AS: "Yes sir, I understand. If there anything else we can do let us know and thank you for being an a apple customer."

Next stop, the Apple Store.

How fucking hard is it to remain consistent with naming, holy shit! Is it register, sign up, create user and is it user, client, customer, account.. then you have the API to contend with, with it's own terminology! This is such crap.

Google Business Profile is probably not meant for developers. "Help customers find your business by industry." Dev: set primary category to "Web Developer". Google: We didn't understand your category. Please select from the suggestions that appear when typing. Dev, typing: "Web D"... Google suggests: "Web Designer, Web hosting company, Well drilling contractor, Waterbed shop". Okay, Google, nevermind.
Google: "Update your customers. Keep your customers up to date about your business!" Dev clicks "add update", adds info about that customer should use different phone number temporarily due to broken phone. Google: "Your post has been removed from your Business Profile on Google because it violates one or more of our post content policies." Okay Google, at least you let me add an additional phone number on my profile without requiring to verify my primary number that I currently have not access to. Anything else?
Google: "Claim your €400 free advertising credit" Dev: clicks "claim credit" Google: "To access this Google Ads account, enable 2-Step Verification in your Google account." How to combine idiocy and deceptive patterns in a single UI: Google knows! Apart from their search engine, their unique business advantage is simple that they suck a little less than Apple and Microsoft. Sorry, not a day to be proud of our profession, once again.

The people who are developing the Hostbill billing platform: please stop. Quit your jobs, and go do something else because you fucking SUCK at your JOBS!

I've had it with your shitty API! You ever heard of scalar types beyond string? "1", "0", "false".. Learn to use TYPES even though it's PHP! THERE'S TYPE SUPPORT THERE NOW YOU FUCKING IMBECILES! Some are typed, some or not, you never know! Guess and win!

And don't get me started on the documentation, OR THE LACK OF! Having to contact customer support to figure out HOW IM SUPPOSED TO DISPATCH DATA TO THE API BECAUSE YOU CAN'T BE BOTHERED TO WRITE THE INTERFACES OR EXAMPLES! FUCK YOU!

I don't know how managers are planning deadlines and counting December as a full working month!

Most companies that I worked with, count either half a month or push the deadline until the end of January when the workforce is back but not here.

Our division manager has promised the customer that the production environment will be ready on the first week of January, without even consulting the team or checking the schedule like WTF!
The person responsible for setting the infrastructure was on vacation for 2 weeks and he didn't hand over the access to production or share the progress done.
Fast forward, the manager went to slack and pinged the whole company with full caps message that the production should be done today.

Fun times :/

This would be my first official post.

Been a IT Technician for a managed service provider for the past 9 years up until last year August. Managing director pulls me in with a movement to App Development after coming across some personal hobby projects I have done in the past.

Started in the new position in November as Junior Developer and workloads get dumped on me and left to figure it out. 4 weeks of running through code without documentation and the solutions started to make sense.

Started a new solution for a Large remote customer with documentation and timelines in December and I get pulled in again for a second time in front of the MD.

Good News:With effect in January I have been promoted to Head of Application development.

Bad News: The existing department head is leaving end of the month and I am to go 900km from home to hand over all responsibilities for the next 3 weeks.

Better News: Department has started shifting to DevOps and it is up to me to set the policies and work flows to how I see fit.

Worse news: it starts by expanding the team asap as 10 projects accounting to 4000 man hours with deadlines in Q3.

Wish me luck. It's going to be twisted Rollercoaster ride...

Customer Service: “I apologize for the delay in entering your warranty info. My system is a bit slow.”

Me: “That’s ok.”

Also me: *What is this, 1986?! Upgrade from DOS already!!*

A long long time ago ( 2007 I think ) I worked for a company that made landing sites, so basically an email campaign would go out, users would be sent to a 1 page website with a form to capture their data, ready to be spammed even more. You know how it was back then.

So I worked with a guy who we had just hired, I didn't do the hiring but his CV checked out, so I gave him one of my tasks. Now most pages were made with js and html, with a PHP backend ( called with Ajax). Now this guy didn't know PHP so I was like all good, ASP works too at the end of the day we don't judge, we do like 2 or 3 of these a day and never look at them again. So he goes of and does is thing.

3 weeks later, the customer calls up to me they still haven't received their landing page. Ok so he probably forgot to email the customer np, I tell him to double check he has emailed the customer. Another week goes by end the customer calls back, same problem. At this point I'm getting worried, because we're days away from the deadline and it was originally my task.

So I go back to the guy and I tell him I want that landing page so I can send it myself, half thinking to myself that we had a freeloader, that guy that comes in to companies for 3 weeks, doesn't work, but still cashes his pay. But no, this was much worse.

So he tells me he has finished yet. I ask him why, what's the blocker ? You had 4 weeks to tell me you were blocked and couldn't progress. And his answer was simply, because I wasn't blocked I have been working on it this whole time. So I tell him to zip his project up and email it to me. We didn't do SVN or git back then, simply wasn't worth it. So he comes back to me and says the email server is telling him attachments can't be bigger then 50mb. At this point I'm thinking he didn't properly sized the art or something, so I give him a flash drive to put it on.

When I then open the flash drive, the archive is 300mb, thinking to myself, the images weren't even that big to begin with.
So I open it up, and I don't even find any images, just a single asp page. About 500mb. When I opened that up and it finally loaded, I saw the most horrendous things ever.

The first 500 lines was just initializing empty vars. Then there was some code that created an empty form with an onChange event that submits the form. After that.. it was just non stop nested if's. No loops, no while, for, foreach, NO elseif's, just nested if's, for every possible combination of the state the form could be in. Abou 5000 of them, in a single file. To make matters worse, all the form ( and page ) layout was hardcoded in the if's. Includes inline css, base64 encoded images, nothing but as dynamic, based on the length of the form he changes the layout, added more background etc. He cut the images up for every possible size of the page and included them in the code.

I showed it to my boss, he fired the guy on the spot. I redid the work from scratch, in under 4 hours. Send it to the client. they had no ammends to make, happy as Larry. Whish I kept the code somewhere.

Morale of the story, allways do a coding test on interviews, even if small things just to sanity check.

Just wasted 2 hours of my life looking through my colleagues code because he decided to build it at the last moment, install it at customer, and then take the day off.

If he had just started the project he would have seen it crash.

I hate people who don't test their own shit

Holy retarded internet company. The fiber cable that comes from the power pole lost its connection to the building I live in. So the fiber was laying on the ground in the parking lot. The upside is it is still working. The problem is people are going to run over the fiber and break it. So I sent an email to the ISP on Thursday. They didn't create a ticket all day on Friday. By the time I got home they were not open. I called their tech support number and pressed 0 until I got a real person. I explained they need to fix this soon or it will get broken. They said "I understand" and then proceeded to create a ticket for fucking wednesday next week! I told them it will damaged by then. They said "I understand". Then I get a text saying they will do this wednesday. No you stupid fuckers, you do not understand!

Queue the McGuiver music:
I got out some steel wire I use to fix stupid shit like this. I made a hook to connect the steel cable holding the fiber. This hook will go around some exposed electrical conduit. Then I got a board to lift it up high (no ladder and 5 inches thick of ice on ground). I cannot balance wire hook on board and get it to slip down. So I got a steel pole I have and attached another hook with electrical tape. As I passed the hook over the conduit I used other pole to grab bottom of hook and pull it down to keep a hold of the conduit. Now the fiber is up in the air again above the parking lot. I hope this stupid hack works until wednesday. My right arm hurts like hell cause the strain of holding the fiber taut while I pulled the hook down. It strained my right hand.

Worst customer service on the planet with Century Stink. They fucking make it harder than hell to get help and it seems they take almost a week to fix shit.

An entire slick customer facing statistics dashboard... in a product that was discontinued a week after the dashboard was finished.

Longest I've worked without rest + why?

Over 24 hours. Why?

In our old system, the database had fields, for example, a customer like Total97, Total98, etc. to store values by year (or some date-specific value).

Every January 1, we had to add fields to accommodate the upcoming year and make the appropriate code changes to handle the new fields.

One year the UPS shipping rates changed and users didn't want to 'lose' the old rates, so they wanted new fields added (Rate98, Rate99, etc) so they could compare old vs. new. That required a complete re-write of most of the underlying applications because users wanted to see the difference on any/all applications that displayed a shipping rate. I'll throw in asking 'why?' was often answered with "because we pay you to do what we say". Luckily, we had already gotten to work on a lot of this before January 1st, so we were, for the most part, ready.

January 1st rolls around (we had to be in the office at 3:00AM), work thru changes, spend some time testing, and be done before noon. That didn't happen. The accounting system was a system that wasn't in (and had never been) in scope, and when we flipped the switch, one of the accountants comes into the office:
E: "Guys? None of our Excel spreadsheets are working. They are critical to integration with the accounting software"
Us: "What? Why would you be using Excel to integrate with the software instead of their portal?"
E: "We could never figure it out, so we had a consultant write VBA scripts to do the work."
Us: "OK, a lot of fields changed, but shouldn't be a big deal. How many spreadsheets are we talking about?"
E: "Hundreds. We have a separate spreadsheet for every integration point. The consulting company said it scalable, whatever that means."
Us: "What?! Why we just know hearing about this!?"
E: "Don't worry, the consultant said making changes would be easy, let me show you, just open the spreadsheet..click here..<click><click><click>...ignore that error, it always happens...click that <click><click><click>.."
Us: "Oh good lord, this is going to take hours"
E: "Ha! Probably. All this computer stuff is your job and I've got a family to get to. Later"
Us: "Hey 'VP of IS', can we go home and fix these spreadsheets as-needed this week?"
VP-IS: "Let me check with 'VP-FS'"
<few minutes later>
VP-IS: "No, he said Excel is critical to running their department. We stay until Excel is fixed."
Us: "No, no...its these spreadsheets. I doubt FS needs all of them tomorrow morning."
VP-IS: "That's what I said. Spreadsheets, Excel, same thing. I'll order the pizza. Who likes pepperoni!?"

At least he didn't cheap out on the pizza (only 4 of us and he ordered 6 large, extra pepperoni from one of the best pizza places in town)

One problem after another and we didn't get done until almost 6:00AM. Then...

VP-IS: "Great job guys. I've scheduled a meeting at 8:00AM to review what we did so we can document the process for next year. You've got a couple of hours. Feel free to get some breakfast and come back, or eat the left over pizza in the breakroom fridge. There is a lot left"
Us: "Um...sorry...we're going home."
VP-IS: "WHAT!!...OK...fine. I'll schedule the meeting for 12"
Us: "No...we're going home. We'll see you tomorrow."

I got a contract with this schools to build a student portal,

I do all the needful and the project whatever guy insists that I use their current shared hosting to host this MERN stack application.

first of all, cPanel is my least favorite place when it comes to deploying, I actually dont do deploying I just hand it over to whoever is the IT guy there.

I discovered there's no provision for nodejs in their current plan, I go through all the stress of contacting the shitty customer support and the process of squeezing out useful information from them.

I'm only doing this because the project whatever has refused to pay me until their site is deployed. throughout the process of creating this project I had setup continous deployment on heroku and netlify and I had to beg this guy to look at the changes and review them.

well, today I asked the former guy that built the current site for the login details to the schools dashboard on the hosting providers site and he says he used his personal details for it, according to him projects from other organizations are there too.

I swear I'm going to loose my shit, freelancing sucks

After a rough exit from one company, I was diverted into Ops just to continue to have food on the table and keeping the lights on. This, over time, unfortunately made me more or less unemployable as a dev again. Got stuck in that place 13 years doing almost no professional coding.

During the last 5 years I took courses, got side jobs writing articles and tutorials, went to interviews and generally worked hard to get the fuck out of ops and into development again.

After getting to choose between level 1 customer support and quitting in a re-org, I quit without having a new gig. I got a lucky break through someone I'd worked with earlier to start a junior position working on some legacy systems with legacy tech.

After all that work late nights churning away using up my passion for coding, I now can't make my self pick up even Advent of code or Hacktoberfest... My passion is dead... I hope I get it back, but for now I fill my spare time with my guitar...

This is the strangest thing that has happened to me:

I once worked as a intern at a consultancy company. Me and another junior got a brand new customer project assigned to us (bad idea I know) we spent 2 months working on that project, building a website from scratch. The customer paid 10 000€ for it. The website sucked and didn't work properly in the end.

I ended up leaving the company for unrelated reasons and left the project. A couple of months later I asked the other junior whatever happened to that project and he said that the customer seemed to have forgotten about the project and no one was working on it anymore

Like what? How do you just forget about something you paid 10 000€ for? I mean I'm happy they did as it was the worst project I've built

My current job makes me want to question my life choices.
Its a complete burnout.
I do 9 to 6 never 6 though its always 7 or 730 come home exhausted, and still on almost all days need to attend to customers after hours. Customer meeting at 8.30pm are quite consistent occuring. Being a developer, debugging meetings I can understand to a certain extent, but why the f i am preparing quotes and pitching products.
Want to prep for new job boom no time left to do so other than weekends.

Fucking customer industrial machine doesn't work properly because the dumbass who designed the control algo failed to consider basic physics how this shit is even supposed to work. Just to be sure, he also included some race condition in the measurement part of the software.

Today a client opened a ticket saying that all the content for a customer returns 404. Turns out it's kinda important to end a prefix on a separator if you plan to recursively delete all data /user/<user_id> or you might end up deleting a bit of extra data

So...

Started 3d printing custom orders for whoever wants them, and I get a request for a giraffe.

Silly me, nearly forgot the most important thing.

Needs to be 5ft tall.

Think she's having a giraffe...

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.

I sometimes forget windows is absolute shit. Then I get to work with one and remember. Specially since microshit has actually banned my email (because I didn't give it my mew phone number it's sulking like a creepy stalker) and so I can't even properly log the fuck in into a machine I was using a few years back. 😐

If someone makes a windows rip off that could properly deal with .exe files, count me a customer. (in future tho. I haven't got money for shit rn)

Well here it goes,

I started out in customer support (A lot of stuff to tell here).

1.
One of my colleagues would come to work drunk, like every day he would smell of boze (the hard stuff 80%+). When a customer got on his nerves he endet the call and threw his Keyboard across the room. He worked in the company 3+ Years after I left.

2. Another colleague would connect to his Personal Computer at his home and play WoW while at work ( Allthough the man was a genius with a lot of free time, until a new task was assigned to him)

3. My Boss at the time did some really shitty things. I worked 17 hour days (while I was 18) for a week, and at the end of the week he shredded the accrued overtime with some Bullshit Explanation. (I did not stay long after this shitshow happened).

4. A dispatcher who sent our technicians out scheduled their tasks so that they were on the road for weeks and did not see their families. This led to a very strong turnover among technicians.

And yes, this company still operates today.

The customer wanted a calendar view that somehow contained data about fucking everything.

Ended up looking like a bunch of trash icons on a calendar

A customer specialising in identification and security solutions called today, claiming "they" found malware on their website. Then they provided a weird link to some shady malware scanner, and the "malware" turned to be a <noscript> tag which adds ?noscript to the page url, so we can serve no-JS optimised content. As a bonus, the scanner only detected it on two URLs, even though every single page on the site contains that same line of code.

Joke's on them, have fun paying for priority support outside of the business hours for nothing.

😤

When you make a simple call to customer service but you end up rambling to the poor rep on the other end for nearly an hour...

By the end couldn't tell if she wanted to laugh, cry, or just drink a pint of bleach.

48 hours.
We had 3 weeks of "manual data collection": pencil, paper and a dozen of people around all the offices of the company with the task to collect serial numbers of every piece of equipment used.
Then we had 3 weeks of data entry, a dozen of people copying all handwritten data to a custom made VB form.

And then there was me, the guy that was in charge of verifying, zipping and sending the data to the client. I spent 48h non stop to go through everything, finding, fixing or delete unusable data.
I had to delete at least 25% of the data because incomplete or completely unusable (serial numbers too short or too long, for example).
48h in the office.

The data was then delivered to the customer. 2 days after, when I finally woke up, everyone was in panic because:
- serial numbers were not matching
- addresses were wrong
- the number of delivered records was smaller than expected

What did I learn from this experience?
When your deadline is tomorrow, and you need 4 weeks to complete your work, ignore the deadline and inform everyone at any level that you are ignoring the deadline. And then resign and find a better job.

Ah, yes, pencils and paper are powerful tools, but rat poison too. You just need to use them in the right place. The only data collection that can be trusted when done with a pencil is the one involving checkboxes.

I currently work on a legacy system for a company. The system is really old - and although I was hired as a programmer, my job is pretty much glorified data entry. To summarise, I get a bunch of requirements, which is literally just lots of data for each month on spreadsheets and I have to configure the system to make it work, which is basically just writing a whole bunch of SQL scripts.

It’s not quite as simple as that, because whoever wrote the system originally really wrote it backwards, and in fact, the analysts who create the spreadsheets actually spend a fair bit of time verifying my work because the process is so tedious that it’s easy to make a mistake.

As you can guess, it is pretty much the most boring job ever. However, it’s a full time job with decent pay, and I work remotely so I can stay home with my son.

So I’ve been doing it for about 18 months and in that time, I’ve basically figured out all the traps to the point where I’ve actually written a program which for the past 6 months has been just doing the whole thing for me. So what used to take the last guy like a month, now takes maybe 10 minutes to clean the spreadsheet and run it through the program.

Now the problem is, do I tell them? If I tell them, they will probably just take the program and get rid of me. This isn’t like a company with tons of IT work - they have a legacy system where they keep all their customer data since forever, and they just need someone to maintain it. At the same time, it doesn’t feel like I’m doing the right thing. I mean, right now, once I get the specs, I run it through my program - then every week or so, I tell them I’ve completed some part of it and get them to test it. I even insert a few bugs here and there to make it look like it’s been generated by a human.

There might be amendments to the spec and corresponding though email etc, but overall, I spend probably 1-2 hours per week on my job for which I am getting a full time wage.

I really enjoy the free time but would it be unethical to continue with this arrangement without mentioning anything? It’s not like I’m cheating the company. The company has never indicated they’re dissatisfied with my performance and in fact, are getting exactly what they want from employing me.

So I'm working on something and I get a message from the business owner saying that something is missing in production, we need to fix this quickly. Turns out it's some missing images. We have a placeholder in place, so no harm done, users just see a placeholder image there and it's a minor thing. (These images cannot be uploaded by the user, because no one had the time to complete a feature for it. So business people bother developers.)

Anyway, the business owner escalates this into a request to add those images quickly to the repo and push it to production asap. I said that it can be done, because it is very low risk, but as I've seen this kind of "going straight to the developer with my problems" behavior before, I wanted to bring the issue to a broader audience. Then the product owner (PO) steps in and asks why wasn't he involved in this. Then other PO's step into the conversation as well, because they manage the process to prioritize and handle bug reports. Then someone posts the bug and error prioritization assessment and what do you know, judging the issue from that scale, it ranks as being "low".

"But what do we tell the customers?!". Oh, fuck you! It's one customer! Not everything can be prioritized as critical! If we stop work to fix every single thing we get feedback on without doing a proper assessment and prioritization, that's all we will be doing.

This is why PO's exist. They will push the breaks and assess the situation, then prioritize the work accordingly.

Debbuging options that no customer uses since it makes the logs unreadable.

Formatted the logs and in 3 Years Not one customer used the feature or asked for it.

---------

An automatic tool (like smartgit) for our internal use. Not one uses it, instead they still complain about git

I did some online shopping on the weekend. And oh man, this retailer’s checkout had so many problems.

I placed an order for a 2022 edition of their magazine. My confirmation page lists the 2020 edition. I didn’t get a confirmation email and I’m sure my email was right.

I chat with customer service and they said my order was for their car buying guide. You bet my my response was what the fuck.

Thanks google for creating the illusion of an option to change the shipping address for a repair order. You even mention the new address in your notification email, but when I click on UPS tracking, I can see that you sent the shipment to the old address, which is in a different city where I can't quickly go to pick up my repaired phone. After charging an extra 95,- Euros for additional damage supposedly not covered by my warranty. Lucky you that my old phone had connection problems with the shitty Vodafone station wi-fi router, which is one of the few reasons that I still even want to use a google hardware product. Thanks google for just being slightly less wretched and mediocre than your competitors, that might grant you some more years before you will be buried in history forever. Pixel phones are just like Macbooks: high quality product and good marketing, good enough to make your customer accept everything else being bullshit. Google search is even worse, but based on the same concept: just suck a little less than your competitors but don't waste any effort trying to actually be really good at anything.

The it manager said that the site on my private vps where we are using a small tool as reference, is a security issue and what if it may be hacked... Well, from this point of perspective all the websites shall be switched off. The tool lovered the problem resolution from 30 to 2 minutes.. I have asked for on premise server before but noone gave a shit so I hosted on my private vps. I wont give it back for free, its a sure thing. Soon they will start to get the complains that its offline because the customer is using it for debugging too. I feel like IT and dev is really moving appart. They act as bunch of pathetic jelous guys who couldn't learn programming and ended up in installing windows on machines...

Dear Customer,
Your account no XXXXXXXX is credited with INR XXXXX on XX-XXX-XXXX.
Info XXX Salary for XXXX.
Your Net balance is INR XXXXXX

This is a monthly message that brings smile on everybody face.

I don’t know if I hate HR more than annoying customers, hard to tell…

Somebody: (whinwy) we need something to log into nonprivileged technical accounts without our rootssh proxy. We want this pammodule pam_X.so
me: this stuff is old (-2013) and i can't find any source for it. How about using SSSD with libsss_sudo? Its an modern solution which would allow this with an advantage of using the existing infrastructure.
somebody: NO I WANT THIS MODULE.
me: ok i have it packaged under this name. Could you please test it by manipulating the pam config?
Somebody: WHAT WHY DO I NEED TO MANIPULATE THE PAMCONFIG?
me: because another package on our servers already manipulates the config and i don't want to create trouble by manipulate it.
Somebody: why are we discussing this. I said clearly what we need and we need it NOW.

we have an package that changes the pam config to our needs, we are starting to roll out the config via ansible, but we still use configuration packages on many servers
For authentication as root we use cyberark for logging the ssh sessions.
The older solution allowed additionally the login into non-rootaccounts, but it is shut down in the next few weeks after over half an year of both systems active and over half an year with the information that the login into non-privileged accounts will be no more.

MySpace 😂 lol but no for real back when I was a Psych major people started asking me to make them a site after seeing some random sites I dinked with in my spare time for personal endeavors. I then realized it could be a career, so I switched schools and majors. I enjoy getting lost in the code and doing solitary work. I don't like talking to clients or providing customer support so, yeah lol 😂🤓

At old e-commerce job, some orders were coming through with most of the shipping info missing. The only info filled out was the State. When we looked at Heap, we could see the user was filling in those fields. There was both frontend and backend validation for required form data, so the user shouldn’t have been able to checkout without an address.

When I looked at the BE logic, I saw addresses were retrieved from our database by using a method called GetOrCreateDefaultAddress. When the website couldn’t find the address in the db, it created a new one where the only address field that was filled in was the state.

Unfortunately, this default address creation was happening after the submit button had been hit. There was no logic to validate the address this late in the checkout because the earlier form validation in the process should have caught this.

The orders did have email addresses, so customer service did have a way to contact the customer. I have no idea what happened to the user’s address. Was it never saved? Did it get caught up in a cron job to delete old users and addresses from the db??

New strategy to combat managers:

If you claim we can't afford the additional time for the tests that come with the feature, I won't build the feature.

If you claim we can't afford the additional time for the proper API versioning that comes with the feature, I won't build the feature.

And finally, if the internationalized texts, designs, and image assets are not complete when it comes time for development, I won't build the feature.

It's time to rise and stand against the "You're an engineer! do it all!" notions. I'm not a designer. I'm not a translator. I'm not a by-hand manual customer tester. And I'm certainly not going to take any more of your shit.

Any advice on how to find proper customer as a freelancer? Should I go on fiverrr and pay for coldcalling and an assistant?

Because honestly I'm sick of corporations employing me (my company) for the sake of not paying taxes but still expecting a 9 to 5 and all the corporate bullshit.

I just want to get customer, do UX, pay a designer, get figmas, implement, invoice, repeat. Not have 3 hours spring grooming calls stuck between a team meeting with management, a demo and a mid-spring alignment review. Is that too much to ask?

Fucking finally! Took the business years to understand that the time gated development framework known as SAFe is not the greatest when you want to respond to customer needs faster, and bring more efficiency into the entire value stream. Not really an 'agile' framework when you have to tell customers to wait at least three months for this product increment to be over so we can take your items under development because we're committed to completing these goals during this time and don't want to risk jeopardizing them. Fuck SAFe!

I guess I just try to make a features list for "my next thing (now 3% smaller!)", instantly become a customer, demand way too many features, then get lost in the to-do list aand I'm writing another devRant. Nice.

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

Just curious

I work on a telecom sales line but most of our calls are customer care or technical that end up pressing the wrong buttoon because they use a super strange phrasing so people get confused and we are obligated to try to sell them things. So most of the job is just transfer call to other lines.

So this lady calls

Lady: "I want to know how many MB I have on my plan"

Me: "well, you apparently have 16 GB"

L:"But in my contract it says I have 500MB"

M:"Yes, but when you subscribed you must have gotten some special deal, but don't worry 16GB is a lot better than 500MB"

The lady then gets really upset screaming if she pays for 500MB that's what she wants to have. I ask her to wait till I transfer, I talk to my colleague in customer care before transfer just to tell her that this is what the customer wants and to her not even bother to explain that 16GB is better than 500MB.

Out of curiosity I took a look at her data usage and most of their cellphones expend somewhere between 2 to 4 GB, so she will pay at least 20 or 30 Euros in extras from now on.

In the previous company I've worked, we've had about one customer every 1-2 months that had his WorstPress website hacked.
It's a horrible CMS and there is no argument that could convince me otherwise, not even bribery.

Luckily enough for WP, it's not the worst CMS I've encountered... that award goes by far to "The CMS Of Doom™" (name changed to not dox the incompetent company that created it). Fucking bastards.

Agile ways of working has us do more customer collaboration, but I just despise talking to business owners who are so stuck in their ways of thinking and working. Their opinion is that they're reached such a high level of efficiency, that learning new things and changing their way of thinking now is useless. Especially if they come from an industrial background. Often it takes a lot in me to not just explode in their face when I hear them claim how they know what's best for the product, while we developers try to advocate that we need user feedback to know what the outcome of something is.

FX [ Tries to pay online bill using PayPal.. ]

"Payment failed" said their website. ( When I say, said, I mean, flashed on the screen for 1/50th of a second.. )

Only "PayPal" had other ideas and gave them money anyhow..

No problem, I'll just message the customer service folk and get it sorted in a jiffy..

4 weeks later..

First they said Payments take up to 7 working days to action..

Yet previously when I've paid not via Paypal, it took half an hour to show up in my account, not 7 days..

Anyhow, we wait 7 days..

Still nothing, so another message ( They don't appear to have an email address, so you have to use an online form, which limits how much you can type into its little box.. )

During these exchanges I include all the data on my PayPal payment, and each time they seem to ignore that..

First they say they can't find such a payment.

Then they say they are looking more closely and their "PayPal" department will be looking into it.

They still can't find it..

Could I provide a screenshoot of my PayPal payment, sure, but since its hard to send them attachments, I had to stick it on a website and give them a URL instead. ( Hopefully that is not too technical for them.. )

Now waiting to see if they can find it..

If not, I guess one can ask PayPal to get the money back, right ?

I've not had to do that before..

How difficult is that going to be ! ?

Just bitched out the same customer service woman telling her I wish her and everyone like her would just die so I wouldn't have to waste another day recovering my own goddamn property i keep double paying for.

I'm sick of having to buy the same movies and games just so some butt sniffing pederast can have a pay check.

speaking of pederasts, table 2 just showed up. more assholes with potential copies in the same places. while two creepers i could also photograph sit behind me for some reason.

so sick of repetition.
and you fucking cunts wouldn't even need to be bothered with this if you hadnt stolen soooo much of my time without adequate recompense.

not that i'd of course agreed to this insanity.
but these people should have to suffer AND pay us.

Prolific, just because their product gets pirated, make all their old devices incompatible with Winodows 10! So you have to use a windows 7 driver! What a bunch of wankers! How the fuck dare you invalidate hardware YOU sold only recently, fucking over your customer, because YOU cant prosecute knock off coming from the far east, you cunts!

Hello everyone! Can anyone please give any tips on creating a feed with customer feedback from my Google business account? I need a clickable feed that can redirect users to my profile on Google.

all amazon customer service agents should be dragged to the edge of a pit, shot, dropped in and have raw sewage used to bury their bodies.

that about sums up a portion of what they deserve prior to their departure to hell.