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Search - "damn caffeine"
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That late coffee was a mistake... (For the millionth time)
Now I have to sit in bed for 2 hours contemplating my life choices...
Spoiler: not good!4 -
Welcome to post 2 of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU?, a saga of competence, empathy and me being dick, even tho I didn't want to be one.
This is a follow-up to: https://devrant.com/rants/2363374 It's title is: "Oh, you can post only every 2h. Didn't know that". I also didn't know that the rest of my rant would be put into a comment. For consistency tho, this time I am still splitting the story.
A wise person once wrote in their book: "People judge other people by two things: Empathy and competence." This may not be an accurate quote, but it carries the same message. Also, I don't really remember who was the author. I only know they were probably quite wise. Anyway, I just wanted to share that sentence. Have a moment and think about it. Or don't. Here's my story:
A was a software house that looked pretty promising. They were elegant, their page and offer looked nice. Well, unless you consider the fact that they offered me internship. Unpaid. But I decided to meet with them anyway, since I had hope that I could negotiate some sort of paid internship or a job contract even. I did my homework after all, and I was confident I am able to keep up with their requirements. I arrived a little bit... no, way to early. One damn hour. Whatever, I waited. I was greeted by a woman. We had a cultural conversation, she had a list of 12 questions I needed to answer, as a form of a test. We begun. First question: How do you change a value in Oracle Database? "Wait a minute", I thought, "What kind of question is that?". Why in seven hells would you want your frontend developer to know how to handle oracle db? Well, I gave my answer, I did lick some of that SQL in my life. Next question: Java stuff. The bloody gal didn't even care to check what position I am applying to before the interview! At this point I didn't really have very high hopes. A shame on them forever.
The story of B and C is connected and a little bit more complicated. More on that in part 2. B stands for Bank. A big corporation then, by definition. A person I know decided called me that day and told me they're hiring, that he referred me and that they would like to arrange a meeting. And so we did. It was couple of days before Christmas. C was a software house again. Or a startup. Idk really. Their website wasn't finished so I couldn't read anything useful up on them. They didn't tell me much about themselves either. They also started with "unpaid internship".
In C, they would greet me and instantly sit me down next to a mac laptop and told me, "hey, do this stuff in python". What the fuck, not again... I told them that I am frontend dev, they guy said "it's no problem, you said you know python, it's a simple task". And yeah, I did host some apps in Flask and I did use psycopg2. It was in my CV. But never, ever, have I mentioned knowing heuristics nor statistics. I'm no data scientist, monsieur. Whatever, I tried, I failed a little bit, I told them that maybe if I did want to spend half of my day there I would finish this task, but back then I was way too nervous to focus and code. I told them what should be done in code and that I just was unable to code this at the very moment. They nodded, we said goodbye and I was sure not to hear from them ever again.
In B, I was greeted by a senior frontend dev. He told me the recruiter is sick and he couldn't come, so we're talking alone. I can buy it. We sat down in said meeting room, and he asked me if I wanted a drink. No thx, I had digested so much caffeine during last 24h, next dose could be an overdose. And then, he took out my resume printed in paper. With notes on it. With some stuff encircled. That bloody bastard did his homework. We spent over an hour, just talking in friendly atmosphere. It was an interview, but it was a conversation also. We shared our experiences, opinions and it went just perfect.
On December 20, I was heading home for Christmas. My situation looked like this: A called me they could offer me only unpaid internship. I was getting kinda bored of rice and debts, tbh. I gracefully rejected their generous offer. B didn't give me feedback yet(it was a most recent interview, so I didn't expect any message until after Christmas anyway). C told me that they could give me internship, but I managed to convince them to make it paid internship. After three months of very bad times, things were starting to get better.
On part III we will explore further events of my very recent past. That post will be same amount of storytelling and possibly a lesson for those who seek an employer and for those who seek an employee.5 -
The ultimate rage-fueled, caffeine-deprived, sleep-deprived, absolutely done-with-this-shit PR review rant.
You know what? I’m done. I’m DONE. I submit a PR, I triple-check it, I run all the tests, I follow the damn coding standards. I hit submit thinking, ‘Ah yes, this is a good piece of code, I did well.’ And then? THEN??!
The floodgates of hell open.
"Hey, can you make this function name more descriptive? BRO IT’S CALLED getUserData(), WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT? retrieveUserDataFromTheDepthsOfTheDatabaseAndFormatItAccordingToTheSacredGuidelinesOfOurAncestors()?!Fuck grammarly #$%&*
Or the classic:
‘Hmm, this line could be optimized.’ OH REALLY, COULD IT? Could it really? Would shaving off 0.000001ms on a non-critical function really revolutionize our application? WILL IT SAVE THE WORLD? WILL IT END WORLD HUNGER?! NO? THEN LEAVE ME ALONE!
And of course, there’s always one smartass who wants to flex their ‘knowledge’ with a random suggestion:FUCK YOU GRAMMARLY &*(_+‘Have you considered rewriting this in Rust for better memory safety? SIR. THIS IS A FRONTEND BUTTON HANDLER. TAKE YOUR RUST AND GO.
THEN ohhhh THEN the moment you fix everything, push your changes, AND THEN the same reviewer who just tormented you for three hours goes, "LGTM 👍". THAT'S IT? THAT’S ALL YOU HAVE TO SAY AFTER MAKING ME REWRITE HALF MY CODE??
AND THEN, THE FINAL BOSS MOVE:
‘Can you squash your commits?’
SQUASH??? SQUASH?!?! BRO, I’M ABOUT TO SQUASH MY LAPTOP ON YOUR BALD STINKY HEAD.
At this point, I am convinced PR reviews exist purely for torture. They are not about improving the code. They are a psychological experiment to see how long it takes before a developer completely loses their mind and starts a new life as a goat farmer.
I swear, next PR, I’m just merging it straight into COMPANY'S ASS main and letting fate decide.1
