Just called Asus for a problem with my router, went to send them my systemlog.txt for analysis

"Oh we don't have an email you can send that to"

Me: "(me calling bullshit) let me talk to the tech team.."

*Get transferred*

"Hello this is the supervisor"

Me: "fml"

"Ya we don't have an email you can send that to, but we can use a different departments verification services to get a file from you, has to be a picture though"

Me: "What? I got a .txt file here, I just want to get it to you, does it really have to be a picture?"

"Has to be a picture or a PDF, we can't take txt files"

Me: "fkin.. srsly? Fine"

I can't believe Asus's system srsly. I think it's for virus protection, but viruses can be embedded in both picture formats and PDF, but not in txt. So wtf is going on lol

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What is that?"

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

We have a new switch in one of our departments.

I am an indie game developer and I lead a team of 5 trusted individuals. After our latest release, we bought a larger office and decided to expand our team so that we could implement more features in our games and release it in a desirable time period. So I asked everyone to look for individuals that they would like to hire for their respective departments. When the whole list was prepared, I sent out a bunch of job offers for a "training trial period". The idea was that everyone would teach the newbies in their department about how we do stuff and then after a month select those who seem to be the best. Our original team was
-Two coders
-One sound guy(because musician is too mainstream)
-Two artists
I did coding, concept art(and character drawings) and story design, So, I decided to be a "coding mentor"(?).
We planned to recruit
-Two coders
-One sound guy
-One artist (two if we encountered a great artstyle)
When the day finally arrived I decided to hide the fact that I am the founder and decided that there would be a phantom boss so that they wouldn't get stressed or try flattery.
So out of 7, 5 people people came for the "coding trial session". There were 3 guys and 2 girls. My teammate and I started by giving them a brief introduction to the working of our engine and then gave them a few exercises to help them understand it better. Fast forward a few days, and we were teaching them about how we implement multiple languages in our games using Excel. The original text in English is written in the first column and we then send it to translators so that they can easily compare and translate the content side by side such that a column is reserved for each language. We then break it down and convert the whole thing into an engine friendly CSV kind of format. When we concluded, we asked them if they had any questions. So there was this smartass, who could not get over the fact that we were using Excel. The conversation went like this:(almost word to word)

Smartass: "Why would you even use that primitive software? How stupid is that? Why don't you get some skills before teaching us about your shit logic?"
Me:*triggered* "Oh yeah? Well that's how we do stuff here. If you don't like it, you can simply leave."
Smartass: "You don't know who I am, do you? I am friends with the boss of this company. If I wanted I could have all of you fired at whim."
Me:"Oh, is that right?"
Smartass:"Damn right it is. Now that you know who I am, you better treat me with some respect."
Me: "What if I told you that I am not just a coder?"
Smartass:"Considering your lack of skills, I assume that you are also a janitor? What was he thinking? Hiring people like you, he must have been desperate."
Me:"What if I told you that I am the boss?"
Smartass:"Hah! You wish you were."*looks towards my teammate while pointing a thumb at me* "Calling himself the boss, who does he think he is?"
Teammate:*looks away*.
Smartass:*glances back and forth between me and my teammate while looking confused* *realizes* *starts sweating profusely* *looks at me with horror*
Me:"Ha ha ha hah, get out"
Smartass:*stands dumbfounded*
Me:"I said, get out"
Smartass:*gathers his stuff and leaves the room*
Me: "Alright, any questions?"*Smiling angrily*
Newcomers: *shake heads furiously*
Me:"Good"

For the rest of the day nobody tried to bother me. I decided to stop posing as an employee and teaching the newcomers so that I could secretly observe all sessions that took place from now on for events like these. That guy never came back. The good news however, is that the art and music training was going pretty well.

What really intrigues me though is that why do I keep getting caught with these annoying people? It's like I am working in customer support or something.

Fuck open office spaces.

A few months ago I landed a super sweet job as a senior full stack developer, mainly going to work with their Python microarchitecture. The company pays well, has a sweet balance between freedom and responsibility, 30 days vacation etc.

During the recruiting process they walked me around the office that was super cozy with 14 devs in on large room and 10 people from marketing in another. They also mentioned that they would move and merge office with operations and customer service (around 100 more people) in a few months.

Life was good in the old office, I thought that this is the company where I will work for a looooong time.

Now we are in the new office and its fucking shit. No walls or FUCKING CEILINGS between departments. Right above my head there is balcony with customer service talking loud as fuck 24/7. Everyone that is not a developer is just so fucking loud.

I have to use earplugs AND earmuffs to get silence, or blast my ears with way to loud music. Every day around lunch I'm completely done mentally.

I know I'm extra sensitive to noise because of my ADHD, but seriously who the fuck thought this was a good idea?

All the devs have told our boss what needs to be done. If they listen i don't know. In the meantime I will start looking for a new job....

Every day.

I am a PHP developer.

Yeah, "another PHP is awful" rant... no, not really.

It's just unsuitable for some ambitious projects, just like Ruby and Python are.

First of all, DO NOT EVER use Laravel for large enterprise applications. The same goes for RoR, Django, and other ActiveRecord MVCs.

They are all neat frameworks for writing a todo app, as a better-than-wordpress flexible blogging solution, even as a custom webshop.

Beyond 50k daily users, Active Record becomes hell due to it's lazy fat querying habits. At more than a million users... *depressed sigh*.

PHP is also completely unsuitable for projects beyond 5M lines of code in my opinion. At more than 25M lines... *another depressed sigh*.

You can let your devs read Clean Code and books about architecture patterns, you can teach them about SOLID & DRY, you can write thousands of tests... it doesn't matter.

PHP is scaffolding, it's made of bamboo and rope. It's not brick or concrete. You can build quickly, but it only scales up to a certain point before it breaks in multiple places.

Eventually you run into patterns where even 100% test coverage still doesn't guarantee shit, because the real-life edge cases are just too complex and numerous.

When you're working on a multi-party invoicing system with adapters for various tax codes, or an availability/planning system working across timezones, or systems which implement geographical routefinding coupled to traffic, event & weather prediction...

PHP, Python, Ruby, etc are just missing types.

Every day I run into bugs which could have been prevented if you could use ADTs in a generic way in PHP. PHP7 has pretty good typehints, and they prevent a lot of messy behavior, but they aren't composable. There is no way to tell PHP "this method accepts a Collection of Users", or "this methods returns maybe either an Apple or a Pear, and I want to force the caller to handle both Apple/Pear and null".

Well, you could do that, but it requires a lot of custom classes and trickery, and you have to rewrite the same logic if you want to typehint a "Collection of Departments" instead of "Collection of Users" -- i.e., it's not composable.

Probably the biggest issue is that languages with a (mostly) structural type system (Haskell, Rust, even C#/JVM languages to some degree, etc) are much slower to develop in for the "startup" era of a project, so you grab a weak, quick prototyping language to get started.

Then, when you reach a more grown up phase, you wish you had a better type system at your disposal...

One week, and it turned out to be worse than that.

I was put on a project for a COVID-19 program in America (The CARES Act). The financial team came to us on Monday morning and said they need to give away a couple thousand dollars.

No big deal. All they wanted was a single form that people could submit with some critical info. Didn't need a login/ registration flow or anything. You could have basically used Google Forms for this project.

The project landed in my lap just before lunch on Monday morning. I was a junior in a team with a senior and another junior on standby. It was going to go live the next Monday.

The scope of the project made it seem like the one week deadline wasn't too awful. We just had to send some high priority emails to get some prod servers and app keys and we were fine.

Now is the time where I pause the rant to express to you just how fine we were decidedly **not**: we were not fine.

Tuesday rolls around and what a bad Tuesday it was. It was the first of many requirement changes. There was going to need to be a review process. Instead of the team just reading submissions from the site, they needed accept and reject buttons. They needed a way to deny people for specific reasons. Meaning the employee dashboard just got a little more complicated.

Wednesday came around and yeah, we need a registration and login flow. Yikes.

Thursday came and the couple-thousand dollars turned into a tens of millions. The amount of users we expected just blew up.

Friday, and they needed a way for users to edit their submissions and re-submit if they were rejected. And we needed to send out emails for the status of their applications.

Every day, a new meeting. Every meeting, new requirements that were devastating given our timeframe.

We put in overtime. Came in on the weekend. And by Monday, we had a form that users could submit and a registration/ login flow. No reviewer dashboard. We figured we could take in user input on time and then finish the dashboard later.

Well, financial team has some qualms. They wanted a more complicated review process. They wanted roles; managers assign to assistants. Assistants review assigned items.

The deadline that we worked so hard on whizzed by without so much as a thought, much less the funeral it deserved.

Then, they wanted multiple people to review an application before it was final. Then, they needed different landing pages for a few more departments to be able to review different steps of the applications.

Ended up going live on Friday, close to a month after that faithful Monday which disrupted everything else I was working on, effective immediately.

I don't know why, but we always go live on a Friday for some reason. It must be some sort of conspiracy to force overtime out of our managers. I'm baffled.

But I worked support after the launch.

And there's a funny story about support too: we were asked to create a "submit an issue" form. Me and the other junior worked on it on a wednesday three weeks into the project. Finished it. And the next day it was scrapped and moved to another service we already had running. Poor management like that plagued the project and worked in tandem with the dynamic and ridiculous requirements to make this project hell.

Back to support.

Phone calls give me bad anxiety. But Friday, just before lunch, I was put on the support team. Sure, we have a department that makes calls and deal with users. But they can't be trained on this program: it didn't exist just a month ago, and three days ago it worked differently (the slippery requirements never stopped).

So all of Friday and then all of Saturday and all of Monday (...) I had extended panic attacks calling hundreds of people. And the team that was calling people was only two people. We had over 400 tickets in the first two days.

And fuck me, stupid me, for doing a good job. Because I was put on the call team for **another** COVID project afterwards. I knew nothing about this project. I have hated my job recently. But I'm a junior. What am I gonna say, no?

Learning soft skills.

I'm about as direct with coworkers and managers as I am on devRant. And I still think being painfully direct is often better than playing the heavily politicized office game of thrones.

But sometimes it's better to say:

"CTO, I think we need your skills to build bridges to other departments and manage recruitment. You're the only one who understands both technology and people, so drop your developer role and become our ambassador"

Instead of:

"Dear CTO, your code makes my eyes bleed. Your CS degree was a fucking waste of tax money, and it's quite clear that cheap college beer washed out all of your reasoning skills. We should fill the space you're taking up with a beanbag chair, because you're providing negative value to the company. How many investor cocks did you have to deep throat to get where you are?"

Now, I just pick option one, smile politely, and tell him we need to increase department budget as indemnification for having to work with a retard like him. Uh I mean... "to get developer salaries up to a competitive level so we can retain knowledge"

The past 2 years where I work:

Me: hey let's use git instead of ftp!
Boss: should we?
Some time later: he is loving it...

Me: hey let's use trello instead of excell!!??!
Boss: huumm.. Dunno... Should we?
After much convincing: whole departments are using and loving it....

Me: hey let's move from rackspace to DO!
Boss: huumm... Convince me...
Year latter: everything smooth and muuuch lower prices... Managing 6 servers instead of one...

Me: UNIT TESTS!!!
Boss: nah, this but a waste of time...

For real? Get a grip man, I only encourage solutions tested ( no pun intended, or is it ) by me for a long time...

I hate it when people from other "cool" departments come in to our office and call us "too quiet", "unsociable" ,"not fun"..

They need to stop for a second and realize how we got to being programmers...

Personally, I went through all the possible professions and asked myself.." which job requires the least amount of human interaction?"

SO SHUT THE FUCK UP AND GET YOUR HIPSTER FACE THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!

German gov contractor interview.
1 interview went fine, test project went fine, then they told me all looks good and they'll fly me in so I can meet HR in person.

Flew up to Germany and there are solution architects and project managers in the room questioning me about C++ although it was about a java position.

Then told me that I'm no fit for them as their java devs need to be rock solid in C++ to make communication between departments easier. What the...

So...
I'm penetrationtesting a network and the servers on said network
The network administrator and IT security officer knows this, because they hired me..

TL;DR a scan caused the network to crash.

Today I received a very angry email going "Stop scanning NOW!" from one of the IT departments.

Apparently I crashed their login server and thus their entire network...
It happened d the first time I scanned the network from the outside and they had spend an entire day figuring out how and repairing the service they thought was the problem, but then it crashed again, when I scanned from within the network.

Now they want to send me a list of IP's that I'm not allowed to scan and want to know exactly what and when I'm scanning...

How crap can they be at their job, if they weren't able to spot a scan... The only reason they found out it was me was because the NA had whitelistet my IP, so that I could scan in peace...

My school stores everyone's username and passwords (including admins) in plain text on a Windows 2007 server that they remote desktop into.

Having a non technical boss is such a pain. He thinks all the features should be a piece of cake. There should be a course in business departments where people will be taught how programming works.

Insecure... My laptop disk is encrypted, but I'm using a fairly weak password. 🤔

Oh, you mean psychological.

Working at a startup in crisis time. Might lose my job if the company goes under.

I'm a Tech lead, Senior Backender, DB admin, Debugger, Solutions Architect, PR reviewer.

In practice, that means zero portfolio. Truth be told, I can sniff out issues with your code, but can't code features for shit. I really just don't have the patience to actually BUILD things.

I'm pretty much the town fool who angrily yells at managers for being dumb, rolls his eyes when he finds hacky code, then disappears into his cave to repair and refactor the mess other people made.

I totally suck at interviews, unless the interviewer really loves comparing Haskell's & Rust's type systems, or something equally useless.

I'm grumpy, hedonistic and brutally straight forward. Some coworkers call me "refreshing" and "direct but reasonable", others "barely tolerable" or even "fundamentally unlikable".

I'm not sure if they actually mean it, or are just messing with me, but by noon I'm either too deep into code, or too much under influence of cognac & LSD, wearing too little clothing, having interesting conversations WITH instead of AT the coffee machine, to still care about what other humans think.

There have been moments where I coded for 72 hours straight to fix a severe issue, and I would take a bullet to save this company from going under... But there have also been days where I called my boss a "A malicious tumor, slowly infecting all departments and draining the life out of the company with his cancerous ideas" — to his face.

I count myself lucky to still have a very well paying job, where many others are struggling to pay bills or have lost their income completely.

But I realize I'm really not that easy to work with... Over time, I've recruited a team of compatible psychopaths and misfits, from a Ukranian ex-military explosives expert & brilliant DB admin to a Nigerian crossfitting gay autist devops weeb, to a tiny alcoholic French machine learning fanatic, to the paranoid "how much keef is there in my beard" architecture lead who is convinced covid-19 is linked to the disappearance of MH370 and looks like he bathes in pig manure.

So... I would really hate to ever have to look for a new employer.

I would really hate to ever lose my protective human meat shield... I mean, my "team".

I feel like, despite having worked to get my Karma deep into the red by calling people all kinds of rude things, things are really quite sweet for me.

I'm fucking terrified that this peak could be temporary, that there's a giant ravine waiting for me, to remind me that life is a ruthless bitch and that all the good things were totally undeserved.

Ah well, might as well stay in character...

*taunts fate with a raised middlefinger*

A room full of mostly old male stressed out engineers sat in chairs, and the presenter said:

"So who watched Judging Amy last night?"

The presenter went on to express her surprise that nobody in the room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.... and wasn't going to drop the topic.

The meeting, if it ever had any, now had no chance of going anywhere good.

By the end of the meeting someone would walk out and "retire" shortly there after, and it certainly wasn't going to be the presenter....

Backstory:

The company built on the IBM model of sell pricey custom hardware (granted it worked really well) and sell expensive support contracts wasn't doing as well as it had hoped. Granted it was still doing better than most of its neighboring companies, but it was clear that with the .com bust the days of catered lunches every day were over.

The company had grown fat and everyone knew that while the company had a good enough product(s) to survive, there weren't enough lifeboats for everyone to survive.

In the midst of this an HR department that took up nearly 20% of the office space at HQ felt it needed to justify its existence / expenses.

They decided to do this in the same way they always had, by taking funding from other departments, this time not by simply demanding more direct budgets for themselves.... they decided to impose mandatory 'training' on other departments ... that they would then bill for this training.

When HR got wind that there were some stressed out engineers the solution was, as it always is for HR.... to do more HR stuff:

They decided to take these time starved engineers away from their jobs, and put them in a room with HR for 4 days. Meanwhile the engineer's tasks, deadlines and etc remained the same.

Support got roped into it too, and that's how I ended up there.

It would be difficult to describe the chasm between HR and everyone else at that company. This was an HR department that when they didn't have enough cubes (because of constant remodeling in the HR area under the guise of privacy) sat their extra HR employees next to engineering and were 'upset' that the engineers 'weren't very friendly and all they did was work'.

At one point a meeting to discuss this point of contention was called off for some made up reason or another by someone with a clue.

So there we all sat, our deadlines kept ticking away and this HR team (3 people) stood at the front of the room and were perplexed that none of these mostly older males in this room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.

From there the presentation was chaos, because almost the entire thing was based on your knowledge of what happened to poor stressed out Amy ... or something like that.

We were peppered with HR tales of being stressed out and taking a long lunch and feeling better, and this magical thing where the poor HR person went and had a good cry with her boss and her boss magically took more off her plate (a brutal story where the poor HR person was almost moved to tears again).

The lack of apparent sympathy (really nobody said much at all) and lack of seeming understanding from the crowd of engineers that all they should do is take a long lunch, or tell their boss to solve their problems ... seemed to bother the HR folks. They were on edge.

So then they finally asked "What are your stressers?" And they picked the worst possible person they could to ask, Ted.

Ted was old, he prickly, he was the only one who understood the worst ass hell of assembly that had been left behind.

Ted made a mistake, he was honest with folks who couldn't possibly understand what he was saying. "This mandatory class is stressing me out. I have work to do and less time because of this class."

The exchange that followed was kinda horrible and I recall sitting behind Ted trying to be as small as possible as to not be called on. Exactly what everyone said almost doesn't matter.

A pedantic debate between Ted and the HR staff about "mandatory" and "required" followed. I will just sum it up that they were both in the wrong for how they behaved for a good 20 minutes...

Ted walked out, and would later 'retire' that week.

Ted had a history and was no saint. I suspect an email campaign by various folks who recounted the events that day spared ted the 'fired' status and he walked with what eventually would become the severance package status quo.

HR never again held another 'training', most of them would all finally face the axe a few months later after the CEO finally decided that 'customer facing, and product producing' headcount had been reduced enough ... and it was other internal staff's time for that.

The result of the meeting was one less engineer, and everyone else had 4 days less of work done...

A client came to the startup I was working at, to discuss a potential schools/universities based project. Their requirements were as follows

1. Full control of every class's daily routine (based on teacher's availabilities).
2. Multiple-choice exam feature (Timed).
3. Individual dashboards for teachers, head of departments, the Headmaster for every school onboarded on the platform.
4. Scores analysis of every student in every class (Report card).
5. Attendance feature for every student.

And so on.

Guess their budget for the above.

200 USD. FUCKING 200 US Dollars !!!!

My stomach hurt that day from laughing.

I've been fairly lucky with my bosses of late since I've progressed in my programming career. But my absolute worst boss was when I first started working in an office environment doing data entry. My boss at the time was terrible, and she was always against innovation or process improvement. She also always tried to make herself look good and taking credit for the accomplishments of others. If she screwed up it was your fault, and she was "always buried in email" so she could never respond to you for pto requests, or escalation of issues between departments. My whole family pretty much worked in various roles in the department and she fired my brother after my mother left the company for no reason, saying he was "sleeping", but I worked right next to him and he's tall and had to slouch just to comfortable see his computer screen since the same manager refused to approve work station improvements for him.

Our workflow was to receive daily spreadsheets of health care claims that we had to manually process and enter into the system. So being the lazy innovator that I am, and trying to find ways I can efficiently work, I delved into studying visual basic and programmed a few functions and tools in excel to analyze, highlight, and process some of the data since the claims on the spreadsheets always had a specific pattern. This was all before I had any formal education in computer science so the program was very basic and clunky but it tripled my efficiency. When I brought it up to my boss to spread it among the rest of our team so they could use it after a short 20 minute training, she struck it down saying any training or use of it would be a waste of resources since it was too technical and complex to be used and if I were to keep improving it or use it I would be fired. It was literally copy and paste from one spreadsheet to the other en masse and clicking a button to sort and fill in the blanks. Eventually I showed it to the director of the department when working on a large data entry project with her, and I was later offered a job as a technical analyst where I was responsible for the codebase that generated the reports for the department and specifically all the reports my old boss used where I would occasionally mess with her to get back at all the crap she gave me and my brother. Since all the reports were blind carbon copied to everyone, I would send out her reports on a delay while everyone else got them on time. It eventually got her in so much crap she had to step down as a manager. She still works in the same company that I started working at again earlier this year, and like the many careers she's ruined she eventually ruined her own within the company 😂

Forgive me father, for I have sinned.  Alot actually, but I'm here for technical sins.  Okay, a particular series of technical sins.  Sit your ass back down padre, you signed up for this shit.  Where was I?  Right, it has been 11429 days since my last confession.  May this serve as equal parts rant, confession, and record for the poor SOB who comes after me.

Ended up in a job where everything was done manually or controlled by rickety Access "apps".  Many manhours were wasted on sitting and waiting for the main system to spit out a query download so it could be parsed by hand or loaded into one of the aforementioned apps that had a nasty habit of locking up the aged hardware that we were allowed.  Updates to the system were done through and awful utility that tended to cut out silently, fail loudly and randomly, or post data horrifically wrong.

Fuck that noise.  Floated the idea of automating downloads and uploads to bossman.  This is where I learned that the main system had no SQL socket by default, but the vendor managing the system could provide one for an obscene amount of money.  There was no buy in from above, not worth the price.

Automated it anyway.  Main system had a free form entry field, ostensibly for handwriting SELECT queries.  Using Python, AutoHotkey, and glorified copy-pasting, it worked after a fashion.  Showed the time saved by not having to do downloads manually.  Got us the buy in we needed, bigwigs get negotiating with the vendor, told to start developing something based on some docs from the vendor.  Keep the hacky solution running as team loves not having to waste time on downloads.

Found SQLi vulnerability in the above free form query system, brought it up to bossman to bring up the chain.  Vulnerability still there months later.  Test using it for automated updates.  Works and is magnitudes more stable than update utility.  Bring it up again and show the time we can save exploiting it.  Decision made to use it while it exists, saves more time.  Team happier, able to actual develop solutions uninterrupted now.  Using Python, AutoHotkey, glorified copy-pasting, and SQLi in the course of day to day business critical work.  Ugliest hacky thing I've ever caused to exist.

Flash forward 6 years.  Automation system now in heavy use acrossed two companies.  Handles all automatic downloads for several departments, 1 million+ discrete updates daily with alot of room for expansion, stuff runs 24/7 on schedule, most former Access apps now gone and written sanely and managed by the automation system.  Its on real hardware with real databases and security behind it.

It is still using AutoHotkey, copy-paste, and SQLi to interface with the main system.  There never was and never will be a SQL socket.  Keep this hellbeast I've spawned chugging along.

I've pointed out how many ways this can all go pearshaped.  I've pointed out that one day the vendor will get their shit together they'll come in post system update and nothing will work anymore.  I've pointed out the danger in continuing to use the system with such a glaring SQLi vulnerability.

Noone cares.  Won't be my problem soon enough.

In no particular order:
Fuck management for not fighting for a good system interface
Fuck the vendor for A) not having a SQL socket and B) leaving the SQLi vulnerability there this long
Fuck me for bringing this thing into existence

Drove 1.5 hrs for a interview at a company which was developing mgmt software for fire departments. They were very pleased with me, as i am with a volunteer FD and a perfect fit in their opinion. I declined after i found out they code base is mostly VB6 and they considered source control unnecessary.
Thanks, but no thanks.

So, I applied for a job lately and the first interview via Zoom went pretty good. Then I got an invitation for a second interview at the company.

I got there, was guided into a conference room and the two head of departments along with an HR woman joined. After a bit if chit-chat HR rep said I should tell them in the next couple of days if I'm still interested. HR left, the other two gave me a tour of the complex, lasting about an hour.

then we got back to the conference room, waited for HR rep and when she arrived she told me something along the lines of "Yeah, we got an impression of you now and you don't need to contact us anymore if your are interested...."

me to myself: "wait what? that sucks...."

HR: "We are impressed enough of you that we want to hire you immediately. Here is the contract!"

me (completely speechless): "oh... OH... THANKS, but... OHHHH" (having a stupid perplexed grin on my face)

I mean... I got the job and pay is good, but PLEASE don't trick me like that!!! I nearly got a heart attack!!!

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

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

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

This makes me sad

"We are from <Company Name> and wanted to reach out to you in regards to a management level software position, we liked bla bla bla about your resumee and would like to discuss some options with you"

Me: "oh interesting! I just worked with your company last week helping one of our departments implement one of your solutions into their area"

Recruiter: "We know :D"

I am kinda wondering if this is considered poaching

Worst meeting:
Boss: *calls everyone* URGENT MEETING. If you're on your lunch break, then stop and join the video call. Is it a weird time in your timezone? Wake up. But COME

Omg what happened? Is the server down? Are we getting a huge client? What is so urgent that it needs all of our attention right now?

Boss: I'm afraid that I won't be able to stay long in this meeting.

... then WHY the f did you call this meeting?

Boss: that's why we'll have a meeting next at *such hour*. In the meantime, talk to your respective departments about what you've been doing and what you need from each other. See you!

No comment

Dear people who think Microsoft buying GitHub is fine because Microsoft is more supportive of open source than before.

Here's the facts.

1) Microsoft is a large tech company investing in many things. That's a fact.

2) If Microsoft were to exploit GitHub, it would be a benefit to other departments in Microsoft. This is also a fact.

(For example, if tomorrow GitHub was tied to azure or some annoying shit like that.)

3) If such exploitation occurs, it will most likely be to the detriment of the free community of developers. This is a highly probable outcome.

4) The only question now is this.

"Does Microsoft care about open source enough to cut down on potential profit."

The answer of any sane, unbiased individual had to be no.

This is why people leave GitHub today. It is NOT because some childish hatred for Microsoft. In fact, I would've personally moved out of GitHub if "any" other large tech company had bought it, thereby compromising it's neutrality.

Edit: spelling

My manager is so cool at work that he doesn't care if I sleep during office hours or even skip working for a couple of days as long as I meet the deadlines. All he cares about is getting the work done and keeping his team happy.
I abso-frigging-lutely respect him very much and like him as a person.
Unlike my friends' managers in other departments, he wouldn't assign me more work if I finished a project before the deadline.
I wish all the managers in all the companies realise work-life balance is important and act like him.

Companies: “We believe diversity is our strength. We don’t discriminate on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, ……”

*departments hire 90% women and 10% men*

Companies: “See! Diversity solved!”

Most toxic work culture ?? oh boy where do I start.

Getting verbally abused and physical threats over bugs found in production.

All kinds of office politics going around where everyone openly admitted not liking others in other departments.

Your day's salary gets taken away if u are late by even 1 min. And no overtime pay and no you cannot say no to that either or end up getting laid off.

Company brags about giving their employees their salary on time.

Only the devs who have lasted more than 10 years in the company will be heard.

After so many job switches I managed to find one where I get to WFH and pretty much face no toxicity from others.

As a trainee in my very first company I was comparing myself to my mentor too much.

And I just couldn't compete.

He had deep knowledge, was more productive, had amazing skills in different departments and his side projects were astonishing.

Turned out: I wasn't expected to.
Turned out: Even among nerds, he was an extraordinary unicorn. Other developers in the company had huge respect and were humbled by his skills.

Yet nevertheless, I doubted my career choice when I was struggeling for 4 hours on a seemingly tiny problem, then when I approached him he would come in and write the code down in 15 minutes.

He made it look so god damn easy.

Little did I know that the main difference between him and I was: experience.

He had much more of it. I still had to make some mistakes and he greatly helped me avoid some of them.

It really helped me that one day he talked to me and set my head straight that I wasn't expected to perform on the same level as him. He was getting a salary, I merely some peanuts, after all.

Since the beginning of this year our IT department has a new boss. He has no idea about IT, but worked with the other departments and CEO + management on an new business strategy. The other department bosses recogniced that this guy is stupid and only talking hot air, but not the CEO and management.
The IT part of the strategy is abstract and bullshit. The IT Team (we) was not included in building this. We only got the "finished" presented.
So our Team should integrate 6 big new systems (ERP, CRM,...) within 1,5 years. No system is actually fixed and the IT boss is only saying: "Its easy, just some interfaces to connect".
Nice additional: CEO says: Either we go with the strategy or we can leave the company.

My decision is made.

TLDR: There’s truth in the motto “fake it till you make it”

Once upon a time in January 2018 I began work as a part time sysadmin intern for a small financial firm in the rural US. This company is family owned, and the family doesn’t understand or invest in the technology their business is built on. I’m hired on because of my minor background in Cisco networking and Mac repair/administration.

I was the only staff member with vendor certifications and any background in networking / systems administration / computer hardware. There is an overtaxed web developer doing sysadmin/desktop support work and hating it.

I quickly take that part of his job and become the “if it has electricity it’s his job to fix it” guy. I troubleshoot Exchange server and Active Directory problems, configure cloudhosted web servers and DNS records, change lightbulbs and reboot printers in the office.

After realizing that I’m not an intern but actually just a cheap sysadmin I began looking for work that pays appropriately and is full time. I also change my email signature to say “Company Name: Network Administrator”

A few weeks later the “HR” department (we have 30 employees, it’s more like “The accountant who checks hiring paperwork”) sends out an email saying that certain ‘key’ departments have no coverage at inappropriate times. I don’t connect the dots.

Two days later I receive a testy email from one of the owners telling me that she is unhappy with my lack of time spent in the office. That as the Network Administrator I have responsibilities, and I need to be available for her and others 8-5 when problems need troubleshooting. Her son is my “boss” who is rarely in the office and has almost no technical acumen. He neglected to inform her that I’m a part time employee.

I arrange a meeting in which I propose that I be hired on full time as the Network Administrator to alleviate their problems. They agree but wildly underpay me. I continue searching for work but now my resume says Network Administrator.

Two weeks ago I accepted a job offer for double my current salary at a local software development firm as a junior automation engineer. They said they hired me on with so little experience specifically because of my networking background, which their ops dept is weak in. I highlighted my 6 months experience as Network Administrator during my interviews.

My take away: Perception matters more than reality. If you start acting like something, people will treat you like that.

Hey fam, first post in devrant!

Possible client comes up to me and asks me what my mockup for his app looks like. I show it to him on running on my Android device.

Him: where are all the images and descriptions/info?

Me: you didn't give me any. I just made what it could look like if we had images and descriptions.

Him: well talk to some people in the departments and put it in.

Me: but that's not my job. You wanted me to make what it could look like if we actually went through with this project.

Him: okay. How hard would it be to make it for Apple?

Noooooooooo... I'm out.

A couple of months back we were discussing sh with a third party vendor for a very large ass fuck system that another department uses. I had been called into the meeting because the entire I.T department counts on me to at least act as an assessor to the many issues that other departments might have.

the department for which i was working with manages the databases that our institution uses, and in this particular question the DBA (my best friend mind you) was part of the meeting.

Mind you, issues that the third party vendor were having were all fixed by our DBA, and he had documented and mentioned these items to me as I provided assistance to him through the 3 weeks prior to this meetings. Once such case was that we needed a transitioning as well as intermediary system for some processes to happen from one DB to the other and a lot of other technical babble. Well, the DBA used to be an excellent (fuck you) VB developer who recently re-learned the language into .net. He had shown me many of his old programs and even by the limitations of the language they were elegant and fascinating. They really are and ya'll devrant fam know that I ain't one to hate on tech at all.

When the DBA explained how he went around some of the issues by generating programs that could assist him, he mentioned the tech stack, I had coached him into knowing that being descriptive about the tools he used would be beneficial to everyone else. While he mentioned VB.NET the vendor snickered and my boy got quiet.

Then I broke the silence, fuck you. "what was that?" and the dude said "nothing, sorry"
So I said "no no, I want to know, I am not going past this point until you, the dude getting paid over $100 an hour for something YOU couldn't fix explain to me the little hehe moment you had"

The mfker went silent. then explained how he was aware that people were moving past vb.net and shit like that, me "imagine that, someone used a tech stack that your ignorance thought obsolete to fix something you could not solve, even though we are paying you for it, were it me or in my hands, and mind you i have direct access to the VP so this foolishness might change, I would have cut you and your little sect loose months ago, I have no patience, or appreciation from leeches like you or the rest of the "professionals" that work for your company or other similar entities, much less, as you can see, my patience runs even less when you people snicker at the solutions that our staff has to take when you all slack"

The entire meeting was uncomfortable as high heaven.

Fuck you, if someone I know manages to run shit on fucking liberty basic then so fucking be it. I will slap you 10 fucking times over, and then fuck your girl, if you try to put someone else down for the tech stacks you use.

I hate neck beards, BUT I hate fake ass neckbeards ever more

*Colin Farrell in true detective mode: FUCK....YOU

I fucking hate ppl who transferred from business program into the CS program. They are all talk and no action. Literally this girl who claim to be “good at algorithm” doesn’t even know how to write a quick sort. In the past 2 months I have received more request from business program students to “help debug program” than all of the other departments (science, engineering) combined. Worse, some just straight ask for my code so they can copy off my implementation.

Seriously, it’s okay if you don’t know how to do stuff. But it’s not okay if you don’t want to learn AND feel so fucking entitled. I have a lot of homework as well, it’s not my responsibility to **help** you.

Week to make a decision my ass. Two workdays.

"Hi Agred,

Thanks again for the friday's meeting!

After a short consideration, of course we would like to start working with you :)

[...]

I hope you're still interested in working with us and that we will start working together soon!"

O
M
F
G

Wow. "[...] of course we would like to start working with you". Just wow. This "of course" part really got me.

So, I've only got a month left in my current company. Goodbye working alone! Goodbye being the only person in Java and C# "departments". Goodbye stagnation!

Goodbye, Moonmen

I finally fucking made it!

Or well, I had a thorough kick in my behind and things kinda fell into place in the end :-D

I dropped out of my non-tech education way too late and almost a decade ago. While I was busy nagging myself about shit, a friend of mine got me an interview for a tech support position and I nailed it, I've been messing with computers since '95 so it comes easy.

For a while I just went with it, started feeling better about myself, moved up from part time to semi to full time, started getting responsibilities. During my time I have had responsibility for every piece of hardware or software we had to deal with. I brushed up documentation, streamlined processes, handled big projects and then passed it on to 'juniors' - people pass through support departments fast I guess.

Anyway, I picked up rexx, PowerShell and brushed up on bash and windows shell scripting so when it felt like there wasn't much left I wanted to optimize that I could easily do with scripting I asked my boss for a programming course and free hands to use it to optimize workflows.

So after talking to programmer friends, you guys and doing some research I settled on C# for it's broad application spectrum and ease of entry.

Some years have passed since. A colleague and I built an application to act as portal for optimizations and went on to automate AD management, varius ssh/ftp jobs and backend jobs with high manual failure rate, hell, towards the end I turned in a hobby project that earned myself in 10 times in saved hours across the organization. I felt pretty good about my skills and decided I'd start looking for something with some more challenge.

A year passed with not much action, in part because I got comfy and didn't send out many applications. Then budget cuts happened half a year ago and our Branch's IT got cut bad - myself included.

I got an outplacement thing with some consultant firm as part of the goodbye package and that was just hold - got control of my CV, hit LinkedIn and got absolutely swarmed by recruiters and companies looking for developers!

So here I am today, working on an AspX webapp with C# backend, living the hell of a codebase left behind by someone with no wish to document or follow any kind of coding standards and you know what? I absolutely fucking love it!

So if you're out there and in doubt, do some competence mapping, find a nice CV template, update your LinkedIn - lots of sources for that available and go search, the truth is out there!

After 3 years of being the first in and last to leave, of getting other people's work reassigned to me - P can't complete it on time, G doesn't like the user, A refuses to work on that module, etc... I finally blew last Sept.
In the span of 2 days, my boss brought me into a project 1.5 years in (she doesn't trust P to do the coding) and expected me to be up to speed and coding in a couple of days, told the functional dept that I would cover for one of their guys on vaca for three weeks and assigned me to take over a HUGE project from one of the other functional guys who wasn't getting it done. So basically I'm now doing Ps job AND supporting another department AND taking control of a large project from another department. I'm the idiot working 14 hour days while they're all leaving on time or enjoying their 3 week vaca to India.
I lost it. It's bad enough filling in the gaps in my own department but when I'm now taking on work for other departments, that's where I draw the line. I sent my boss my resignation - just could not take the inequity in the work load.
I'm still working here - my boss ended up hiring a consultant to handle the functional project and told the functional group to find their own vacation coverage. She's also monitoring workloads much closer now. I still habe an ongoing issue with having to complete other peoples work for them but I'm not working OT to do it. So speaking up helps. So does quitting.

Red flags in your first week of your software engineering job 🚩

You do the first few days not speaking to anyone.
You can't get into the building and no one turns up until mid day.
The receptionist thinks you're too well dressed to work in this building, thinks you're a spy and calls security on you.
You are eating alone during lunch time in the cafeteria
You have bring your own material for making coffee for yourself

When you try to read the onboarding docs and there aren't any.
You have to write the onboarding docs.

You don't have team mates.
When you ask another team how things are going and they just laugh and cry.😂😭

There's no computer for you, and not even an "it's delayed" excuse. They weren't expecting you.
Your are given a TI PC, because "that's all we have", even though there's no software for it, and it's not quite IBM compatible.
You don't have local admin rights on your computer.💀
You have to buy a laptop yourself to be able to do your job.

It's the end of the week and you still don't have your environment set up and running.
You look at the codebase and there are no automated tests.
You have to request access every time you need to install something through a company tool that looks like it was made in 2001.

Various tasks can only be performed by one single person and they are either out sick or on vacation.
You have to keep track of your time in 6 minute increments, assigned to projects you don't know, by project numbers everyone has memorised (and therefore aren't written down).
You have to fill in timesheets and it takes you 30 minutes each day to fill them in because the system is so clunky.🤮

Your first email is a phishing test from the IT department in another country and timezone, but it has useful information in it, like how to login to the VPN.
Your second email is not a phishing test, but has similar information as the first one. (You ignore it.)
Your name is spelled wrong in every system, in a different way. 2 departments decide that it's too much trouble, and they never fix the spelling as long as you work there. One of them fixes it after you leave, and annoys you for a month because you haven't filled out the customer survey.

*The Fearless Leader*

I get a call to check up on a robot that has been exceeding weight limits at certain points of its movement (Crashing). As I get to the pendant (robo-game controller thingy I like to call it) and look over the alerts and warnings I notice some oil around the main power box of the Robot.... Nothing around this has oil.. so I start looking around and it turns out that the issue wasn’t a crash at all! It was an oily shorted out wire that kept sparking mad heavy when that servo was called on.. causing a large servo failure that required a full restart of the power box. I called our fearless leader and showed him only to find out that there was a motor leaking oil from the electrical end... My fearless leader runs both the Maintenance and Robotics department. When the motor was eventually fixed we overheard the technicians say that our fearless leader knew about this a week ago and decided to leave it that way.... with oil... coming out of an electrical cable..... *sigh* well Anyway after all the wires were fixed and motors changed. He comes up to me and says that he can’t believe that I didn’t call maintenance and fill a report on negligence of technicians for failing preventative maintenance....

I lost my cool a little, firstly that’s not my job, I’m literally one of the lowest ranking here. I called my next in command to figure out what I should do. Secondly the technicians told me that you told them to leave it like that! So if this place caught on fire this would have been on you!

Later I found out that he was trying to fire a technician and wanted me to do the dirty work.. I’m not going to be the reason another man loses the means for him to feed his family. The technician is a pretty cool and fair guy too!

Our fearless leader was a forklift driver and has no experience in robotics or maintenance... I don’t know how this happens or even why but all I know is this man is running both departments to the ground and management loves him.....

Devs: Can we please get adequate hardware to do our job correctly? Please, just a new set of larger monitors.
Lower management: Sure, this is going to be easy.
Upper management: Wait what? This will cost us around 500€ times 10? Any maybe in the end other departments will want that to, so make it times 100.

We're a 4+ billion company ... but yes, please, I love scroll bars and they make my work so much faster.

It really grinds my gears if colleagues from non-technical departments attempt to use technical terms but use them wrong. It might be gatekeeping but please, use a technical term if you are confident you are using it correctly. Otherwise use layman's words. Using technical terms incorrectly sends our brains down the wrong road and we have to make a mental U turn. And you sound like a masterhacker from a TV show or movie.

Fuck non-IT departments that use Microsoft Access and think database tables are like Excel spreadsheets.

TLDR So according to our managers, our company is not dead yet, but very close to the edge. And there's nothing I can do about it.

Basically, they are asking the software devs to twirl our thumbs while we wait for other departments to pull us out of the dirt. Meanwhile, those people who can actually do something to get everyone back on track are running for the hills, looking for greener pastures (you know, sinking ship, turns out rats can swim).

I was told that I shouldn't leave as I am a 'vital part of the team whatever and so on'. But that is difficult to believe when I'm looking at 2 years minimum, in which nothing I will develop or have worked on in the past will make any difference. Whether I keep my job is determined by people who love numbers and have little concern for me as a person (not that this is new, but at least I was contributing before).

Guess I will be spending all that extra time at work reading and programming personal projects, since aside from no new projects, there will be no budget for taking courses that were promised before. Oh, and polishing my resume so I'll be ready when this ship finally goes down.

I wish I can fucking clone myself.

We have been providing digital marketing services for like 5 years without having a proper QA team. Well because we cannot afford to hire one. Technically I am supposed to check and control the quality of our operation team. But I have been juggling so many balls and couldn't do that properly.

So this year we decided that we have to seriously take care of that. But we are providing all kinds of services and creating a QA team for all those services is gonna be costly. We wanna solve it, but also doesn't wanna hang ourselves with another rope. So we have decided to just found a QA team with leaders from various departments mainly Sales and Customer Services. They are the ones who have talked with clients. So they should be able to judge the quality of the services our operation made.

It is a fucking nightmare. It is like we have doubled the amount of clients. And that extra half of those newly popped up clients are sitting in our office.

Cheap computer, Broken AC, Fresh coat of off-white/grey paint, Torn chair with ciggy burns in it, non-adjustable cubicle desk that is wayyyy too high, people from unrelated departments popping by every 15mins to give me an update I didn’t ask for on their inconsequential lives or their opinion on whatever the fuck is the biggest trending hashtag right now.

May I never go back into the office again.

#thoughtsandprayers

I'm halfway in on a six-month disaster contract where I'm converting a massive site written over 7~8 years to a new system. Manager has had us restart about 4 times and there are other departments who want to take over. The deadline is so tight that I've stuck with the original plan and kept my code flexible to be changed if the manager wants to go with the other teams' ideas. ("Okay, manager: here's a clone, tell the other team to prove that works") The lead dev, to my horror, didn't write any code and was let go in November.

Manager hired a new dev part-time whose commitment is on something entirely separate that is required in order for the deadline to be pushed to Summer. (new thing for old thing)

New dev has an attitude, basically wants to start over, and is already acting like I'm his subordinate, very patronizing, very dodgy when asked to explain a strong opinion (THIS IS A SECURITY PROBLEM!!!1). I really have no idea what my manager promised to him. Also found out that manager hired an agency to create a roadmap of the project (WHY?!!! WHY NOW?!). I've been burned once already with the previous lead, and I'm not wild about working with yet another person who wants to burn the whole thing to the ground and start completely over, especially not someone who wants to engage in a dick-measuring contest.

Do you guys have any advice? I mean, other than quitting? I'm going to see this through, but I'm burned out.

(I'll give some context before the rant: I'm part if the IT department of a manufacturing company (actually I'm 1/2 of the department), and all the applications (old an new - except the ones used on production line) used in the company are my responsibility, that including most of databases too... Also, English isn't my native language so there will be some words or phrases that I'll probably write wrong... Sorry for that, if there are any corrections, I'll be glad to hear them)

So...

There will be an implementation of new "control point" on the "shipping department" which consists on a electromechanical equipment controlled by a PLC. And despite the original concept was a collaboration between 2 departments (we, IT, and Production Control), I was never taken in consideration about anything of the project... To be fair, I forget about its existence until two weeks ago.

So, a few days I learned that there are a huge delay regarding the original deadline (mainly because the supplier was delayed with the delivery of their system), and since two weeks (less, actually, because some holydays in between) I'm learning how to integrate that "P.o.S" into an existing application on a PC using a serial communication (not the main problem, as I've done that before... With another brand of PLC's) while avoiding buying any additional software (to get the communication done and in a easy way) and that sort of things... But discovering in the process that it will be necessary to acquire such additional SW in order to finish the job ASAP.

When suddenly I get the "news" that it's almost all my duty (and responsibility) to meet the original deadline, because it doesn't matter how the other departments screw all the schedule, it's the job of IT to get the shit done in time... And what is worst: they didn't said that in such straight manner, no, the implied it while making a quick test with the general manager.

I mean, WTF? Besides doing a "respectable" number of "user support" activities in a dialy basis, I also need to manage the activities of other departments? And also fix their screw ups on a schedule that I just learned days before?

And also there is a coworker (one of whom screwed up) that, almost every time she see me, is asking "how much until you'll finish?"

As I read on a meme years ago: "please, give patience, because if you give strength, I'll need bail money too..."

Damn... I don't know of the benefits of this work are worth all this nonsense

I have been drawing nothing but FUCKING CIRCLES on pieces of paper, and it has slowly piled up on my desk over the course of a week. I have been getting stares from people in other departments, and I am pretty sure they think I am starting to lose it.

FUCK.

I finally implemented something today tho, and all that doodling and spaghetti code was totally worth it to see it actually fucking work on the first run. Jesus Christ, I fucking love my job.

The whole company [cult]ure bullshit has really gotten out of hand. When management sets new deadlines that only put stress on the devs then decide to have some cringe AF company bonding soirée in the middle of the work day who benefits from this? The rebranded HR platoon thinks all employees want to participate in basically mandatory chum-it-up gatherings. Don’t get me wrong I love to party and enjoy myself, but I go to work to do just that. Work. And when other departments whose main responsibility is setting up events for the technical staff, they never seem to consider these work loads or what other people actually want. It might seem all fun and dandy on the surface but when you hear tales of people talking in the closed offices about so-and-so because they aren’t reflecting the cultural values, it starts to seem very fucking problematic. Like why would anyone ever say anything when you would probably just get the boot for just being too different, even though all this sits on top of some guise of, “a diverse work environment”. All in all I hope this [cult]ure shit summers down sooner than later. And I’m in a right to work state, so transparency be damned.

Customer: I want to be included in any and all design and development meeting in the future.

Me: OK, I mean, I'm just one person so there's not formal meetings as such...

Customer: Nevertheless, I wish to be included and ensure my needs are met.

Some time passes.

Me: So, I'm thinking of swapping out the old Beanshell interface, cos, really... Interpreted, scriptable Java isn't great and most users don't want to write Java just to run some jobs. Could you help me with creating an API that fits you and your departments needs?

Customer: No, I'm way to busy to deal with this right now!

Me: And when would be convenient for you?

Customer: I don't know, just not now.

To this day, despite successfully integrating the rhino js engine into the app, part of the software I develop has a bean shell interface rather than js, Python or lua.

-_- I hate bean shell...

At my last job, I created a Google Map for a client, where you could click on any department from France, and it would tell you about all the antennas (think "outpost") of his society. I used a Google Fusion Table where I registered everything: the datas to display, the coordinates for every departments and for every region.

I then wrote a 15-pages long document to tell how to maintain that, since I used my personal Google account to create the map. Anyone having a full access to the website should be able to recreate the map from nothing and witout writing a single line of code.

Then I switched project, the company kind of fucked me over, and I just received a mail saying that Google Fusion Table will be put down in a year.

I just hope they didn't receive the mail.

Hiring a third party to help us with something...
Third party: yeah okay, we know what we need. Can we get access to your git repo
Me: sure, I'll make sure you'll get it
(To the admins): hey can you get them access to our git server?
Admins: did they sign the personal data processing contract?
Me: oh they won't work with any personal data. It's a dev server and they only need access to the source code. And the usual contracts and NDAs are already done
Admins: well we still need the other one.

... Sure. Why not. Just delays the start of the process for... Like a week and a half until that useless bit of paper has passed through all the necessary departments. Not like time's an issue. Right?

Had annual appraisal meeting today. Been in this company for 2yrs now, after being hired outta college. It happens first after 2 years, then yearly.

I have long since known that my boss is a scumbag. My lucky college mates got assigned to great managers, leaders I must say, while I got the typical, know it all boss.

Now this racist, motherfucker, for reasons unknown to me, has mostly disliked me. But hey, the feelings mutual but I don't ever go busting his ass.

Previous employees eventually transferred locations or departments. But I stuck coz I respected some colleagues and learnt a lot from them.

Now this nutjob gave me a 2/5 rating. Says I need to improve my communication. I need to talk more. WTF you goatfucking cunt! I decide how much I wanna talk. I don't waste my time, and even if I did, I don't have any right to waste someone elses time. And talking about communication skills - BITCH! Everytime you speak something, I need like 2 mins to compile your jumbled fucking words in my mind to be able to comprehend what it is you wanted to convey. And you cunt! YOU are going to tell me I need to improve my communication. Dumbfuck I ain't no Shakespeare, but I can convey my message through.

Fucking peasant!

Hmm. The lemon tea sure is good today.

OK Mr CEO/President whatever self aggrandizing title you want to call yourself today, where the fuck is your spine! You want to have support help boost your sales but don't tell sales that you are letting support handle some sales and sales is mad. Now you are quivering under the thumb of the Lead of Sales. What the hell. You are the leader of this company.

Why did you not stand up for your decision to begin with? I'm not going to get into whether or not it was good, but if you are going to make a decision to experiment with new things fucking stand by it and let everyone in the company know.

You've exacerbated the division between departments and ton this company further apart. If you don't start standing up for things, you are going to destroy all that you've helped build! Furthermore, I will not simply be your loyal vassal and watch all the people doing support for my products get fucked over. I will leave you high and dry if needed. I really hope you don't make it needed. You gave me a great shot to be honest, I'd hate to have to turn my back on you in anger. But don't think for a second I won't do it.

Your entire programming department has also been put in the cross fire of a fight you just made so much worse. You are the only one who can clean this up. Are you going to stand up for us? Are you gonna stand up for your self? Or will you just break and show us where the real power lies? We will find out soon.

The amount of sass I give people from other departments at work that think that they can just walk all over my guys is something to write books about.

Someone already tried pulling some shit with me and the hod, so what did I do? I fuckd her app up and moved her dumbass down to the bottom of the queue, now she gets to do manual paperwork for here till I get tired of it. Again, that is what your dumbass gets for harrasing my guys ...

So I was assigned to improve an existing internal CMS application where they wanted the ability to add extra form applications and restricting them based on people from different departments. As well as include some other improvements like speed as they mentioned that it was slow in some instances.

What I found was the original developer decided to not use any kind of framework and decided to be creative by creating his own MVC framework. With about 300 users in this system and utilising no caching of queries, views, not even using PHP OpCache, even quite a few security holes, I was damn surprised at how this thing was running. I asked the original developer why he didn't use an open source framework and he said that he thought that he'd create something and be the next Facebook.

It was a mammoth task to "improve" this system but the main thing was that I took custody of this project and that I prevented him from trying to make a bigger mess of things for this project.

Fax machines connected to VoIP connections...
Had a nightmare recently, where my fathers machine that he really needs refused to work after he moved appartements.
Uncounted calls with different tech departments, a furious fathers and two weeks later they found out, that they forgot to activate the protocol.

Company has poor branding / little to no targeted marketing efforts

Builds marketing Dept

Team starts the process of rebranding

Complete website overhaul suggested and approved with a launchdate of January 1st 2019

Be me. The only web developer. Building essentially 3 complete sites in 3 ~ 4 months but the design hasn't been started nor content created. And you know the represented departments will want to nit pick at the design for like 2 weeks. I'm gonna have a stressful rest of the year.

so my job at this startup is more of a general manager over all departments, checking in making sure everything is going smooth (basically COO), but we just did a super private beta launch today as our devs went to sleep, i spent most of my night tonight bug fixing and doing some style fixes and man did it feel good to be back and doing that (especially since most of the heavy lifting has already been done 😂)

so i decided to check out the client departments jira project page, never have I had more respect for front end developers, don't think I could have the patience for aligning things at pixel accuracy, design qa are ruthless!

Just got an internship in a big company. Related to web development but they want me to use/maintain legacy jsp, servlet code. Should I take it? There are other departments too but I have been put in this shitty one.

When you are trying to gather project requirements from other departments, but nobody responds to email because they are afraid to put anything in writing :(

Is scope creep worse when the Client does it or when internal departments do it to you?

Right now I can't fucking tell. ( :/ )

Made an order for 3 bubble teas + 1 vacuum from Amazon. Somehow they came all in 1 tall box...

I thought they'd be in 2 packages since they were in different departments but I'm wondering what the layout of Amazon warehouses are and who/what decides that all these things can fit in one box...

Don't you just love it when a department buys a software for the company without consulting IT and Data Management departments? You know to discuss integration, flexibility, compatibility and all that?

Don't you love it even more when the users of this new software then complain about the different tools that have to learn and the workflow being completely scattered?

But hey, they work in administration, so I'm sure they know what they are doing. ⚡⚡⚡

Doing research at my school over summer. Talk to some other researchers from other departments (chem, english, bio, etc). Tell them all about the cool work I do in robotics (I program them, not build them). One by one they proceed to ask me to make them a website/app since I know how to code. *Faceplam*

Adobe labs released one new component, I played with it after two days. Went to an interview with huge company after two weeks for a developer position, the interviewers was from different departments, they asked about one technical challenge they have, then I suggest the new component as solution, they gave me small task to implement using the component, I delivered it next day... Then they hired me in R&D department. It was great days.

Open office layout with other departments who don't understand the word "quiet"

HR departments really really annoy me

Firstly, they take an age and a half to respond to job applications. Now I understand that there are multiple steps in choosing a candidate, gotta look through their cover letter, resume etc, maybe talk to a lead somewhere, but 4 FREAKING MONTHS? SERIOUSLY?

HOWEVER, if they DO ACTUALLY REPLY then that makes them better than most HR departments. If I've gone to the effort of filling all of your application forms with strange questions in, and I've written you a tailor-made cover letter, the LEAST I expect is a simple copy pasta email saying setting like "Sorry, but you don't match what we're looking for". That's all. Don't even need to include my name. 100% copy and paste. 10 extra seconds in the 4 months it took you to read half a page of text and some nicely formatted bullet points

So incredibly annoying

From your experience, what's the most inefficient (IT-wise) industry you encountered?

I'd vote for IT in hospitals (at least here in Germany), it is really a PAIN to watch. My wife and I needed to give our data to three different departments when signing in, because nothing is shared across the stations. And when they did a (fully digital) ultrasound of our little baby, they had to freaking PRINT the images and re-enter the results on a PC in another room, because there is no connection. What the heck?!

Crawling out of my shell and taking control of my own work. Colleagues were surprised because I'm a very quiet person.

Sales can promise all they want, I decide when we're done. Taking the time to train my peers and learning from them. Communicating with everyone in a way to get things done. Get involved with other departments to see if processes can be optimized. Manage the customer's expectations (under-promise, over-deliver) Taking over this damn company to be more efficient!

what is the point of having massive HR departments if something as expected and frequent as university hiring can't go smoothly?

i managed to reach the interview round for a big 4 firm only for the interviewer to not show up for 4 hours from my time slot (i waited the entire time - took periodic screenshots for proof), HR to say "we'll reschedule your interview, this happened because of internal miscommunication" more than THREE months ago, and dip. until december they'd repeat the same. now they've ghosted. thanks, virtual hiring.

how is it the candidate's fault? found out this isn't rare by speaking to a few others from my network who i knew were interviewing for the same firm. for students whose lives can change completely based on the outcome of an opportunity that they came across due to sheer luck and could definitely make use of because of their hard work - this is so heartbreaking and demotivating.

Every day I get more convinced, that companies are only hiring the mentally disabled to their marketing departments.

Gitlab now spams ads constantly in my Facebook feed, because "I have visited gitlab.com".

If I have visited it, I am clearly already using it, stop annoying me please.

I created a tool where you just click a button and it records your in time and keeps in the local storage of a browser.

It gives you remaining time in office plus when will be your half day or short day based on your in-time. Whenever you visit in a whole day.

For motivation, I mention the remaining time in office like. Ex. "10 minutes more in the office or 1 more hour".

I shared this with one or two of my colleagues and within in a week, I saw it open in every sales, HR and IT departments systems.

That day I get the taste of true entrepreneurship.

My C# class loves to come up with weird/unrealistic scenarios to teach a specific language feature... I feel like the more effective way to teach would be to mention a real life scenario where it makes more sense to use the feature and give it some context rather than coming up with some arbitrary series of classes to represent departments and employees and then say "write extension methods for them to write them out"

If you tell me that I'm going to go, ok this works, but is there a specific reason I should do this instead of using a for or foreach to do the exact same thing? Don't get me wrong I see the appeal of extension methods as well as LINQ but this class never gives any sort of context as to why we're doing stuff. This class could be good, I've had classes that focus on language specific features taught in ways that make sense... My Java prof did a great job...

Also all the slides are terribly written...

Like I attached an example of the description for extension methods... The slides then go on to explain how the syntax for them works and gives an example...

Like ok I guess technically you told me what they are and how to use them, but gave zero context...

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I go to MSDN for their definition of extension methods, and it is much more clearly written and gives context to where/why they're used... and this is supposed to be a 5th semester course...

When the anti-tech departments pretend that remote work don't exist and annoy people about things that really don't matter, specially when you are not in the office. Like massage chairs or birthday cakes for someone you never/hardly ever met.

(bullshit departments like celebrations, facilities, marketing, culture, I swear I'm not making those up)

“A system called COBOL...” got a shout out on CNN. 🙄 Blame the IT departments for cheap ass lawmakers providing funds... I hate IBM as much as the next breathing human but damn 😡😡

Any hospital manager can manage ten IT departments simultaneously, any IT manager can’t even manage his own emails, let alone one department. Change my mind.

I hate hate hate writing résumés for dev positions. Each posting requires that you guess wildly about their stack therefore write a totally new résumé. You don't get a job because you omitted the keyword "Newtonsoft" when mentioning your Dotnet Core experience. Hiring departments have one job and they universally suck at it for tech.

Got sent to a meeting to overlook the purchase of a new system for one of our departments at work.

The meeting in question was made to go over technical requirements, you know, making sure that everything was in order before a formal decision was made.

I get to the meeting, the vendor had consisted of your standard American sales reps before, standard Joes, Steves and such.

Had to reschedule the meeting because the technical spokesperson had the thickest accent in the world and I could not make sense of anything that he was saying. Neither could my coworkers. The tech person was 100% not from the U.S, and that is cool, but I could not make sense of what he was trying to say.

Oh well 🤡

This is more of a story than a rant, but it has some rant-ey elements, so whetever...

I work for a pretty big company. Several departments, teams, many different markets...so it's a big orchestration. The programming department (aprox. 5% of all employees) is the core of the whole company, because everybody else uses software we've written...(a bit off topic, the point is there are a lot of people)

So today, I got assigned with a side-project. The project spec arrives, and as I read through it, I start realizing that upper-management whats me to build an app to fire people instead for them. The app is supposed to track salary, connect with Trello (for departments that use it) to track finished tasks, track sick days, work attendence...a lot of stuff, and at the end, if the situation requires, spit out a person that is of least benefit to the company, to be fired...

Now from coding perspective, this will be very interesting and fun to build, but from a moral standpoint, I'm a bit woried...simply because, indirectly, I'm firing those people. Because, the way I tune the the app(specifically the algorithm that weighs the value of an employee to the company) will cause certain people to get fired...

So I'm woried I'm gonna have a small breakdown when the app goes live and I see someone saying goodbye to theie colegues of something similar...heck, the app might even spit out my name some day(I should probably add a tiny if statement somewhere in there :) )
What do you guys think about this, from a moral standpoint? Would you be okay with building something like this?

(Sorry for the long post :/ )

I really hate it when I work on a user story consisting only of a cryptic title: "Implement feature X".

Esp. when I missed planning during a holiday and can only wonder who in their right mind would have given it 3 points.

Why thank you.

Sometimes, just pulling the acceptance criteria out of somebody's nose takes days. It doesn't get better once I realize that not all external dependencies have been properly resolved. It's worse if there are other departments involved, as then you get into politics.

Me: "We are dependent on team X to deliver Y before we should have even planned this ticket. I'm amazed that our team was even able to estimate this ticket as I would have only raised a question mark during estimation meeting. We could have thrown dices during estimation as the number would have been as meaningful and I'd have more time to actually figure out what we should be doing."
Dev lead / PO: "I understand. But let's just do <crazy workaround that will be live until hell freezes over> temporarily."

It's borderline insane how much a chaotic work flow is branded as agile. Let's call it scrum but let's get rid of all the meaningful artefacts that make it scrum.

That’s it! I have had enough of business development, design and other non-technical departments of the business! STOP making us technical types sit through your demo meetings and circle-jerking each other on how great everything looks and “how exited you are for the future…”!

Look, I’m all for enthusiasm but taking it in turns to make over optimistic comments feels false and nauseating!!!!

I am so sick of this place. Production deployment shouldn't be such a massive cluster fuck of different departments and sometimes redundant configurations. Knowing who to talk to about a problem shouldn't change daily, and it shouldn't be hard to figure out.

My jvm doesn't appear to be running in production. I hunt down the fucker who is supposed to be handling this problem today...but he's out of office and no one knows who his stand in is...GODDAMNIT!

Randomly one day, out of the blue:

Echelons: You now have Workspace, and it’s a requirement you use it. Make it successful because we paid and are paying a large dollar amount for it, and our competitors have reported success with it. We want email communications companywide eliminated by 50% within the first 60 days.

Management: Ok, excellent! We want to do XYZ.

Echelons: Nope, can’t do any of that.

Management: Ok, how about a, b, and c?

Echelons: Nope, nope, nope.

Management: Alright, let’s try 1,2, and 3.

Echelons: Nope, not possible.

Management: What can we do then? We need further direction at this point.

Echelons: One group for all departments, posts, and attachments only. PDF, .jpeg, .png files only. Everyone in the company must be registered within seven days and using the platform. Only mobile devices allowed.

Management: We have almost 10,000 employees, and the SSO aspect alone could take weeks and months.

Echelons: Insignificant as Facebook said it should be easy to deploy. Also, every post not created by admin will need to be manually approved and done so within 5-10 minutes after its submission 24/7, 365.

Management: Ok, solved. A little shaky, but it’s working. Can we increase the number of admins and moderators?

Echelons: Only 1700 employees have registered; the app has been up 14 days now? What’s wrong? Where’s the engagement? Effective immediately, all members of management must be creating and starting 4 to 7 posts daily, including weekends.

Management: Our registration process with the SSO client isn’t smooth and clean across all devices. We had to implement training to overcome this. Can we increase the number of admins and moderators? Can we make all members of management either administrators or at least moderator? Can we at least turn on live streaming and video formats?

Echelons: No! 10 admin and mods max. Yes to streaming and video.

Echelons: Progress update, please. Include ROI timeline and impactful usage data. This must to pay for itself in the first six months and continue to pay for itself long term, along with showing XYZ company-wide growth quarterly.

Echelons: Hello?

Echelons: Hello?

Having Workplace shoved down your throat has been an interesting experience. Anyone have any exciting ideas or examples to share on what they have utilized with Workplace and increased employee engagement?

When updating the activities log:
- Working in the clients report feature 8:00 am - 9:30
- Improving slow query 9: 45 am 10: 45 am
- Filling this piece of shit because my boss cares what other departments say and wants to demonstrate that we are actually working since his a fucking square-minded dinasour who thinks more hours = more productivity FML 11:00 am - 11:15 am

How tell me apart from the other departments?

It's so cold inside my office it creates fucking WIND when you open my door

Started at a shit position (throwing truck) with a company to get my foot in the door. dev position opened up, so I applied. Only to find out employees have to wait 90 days before they can switch departments... 😑😑😑

Most of the faculty on my college's IT engineering department aren't exactly adept with Linux, despite the fact that 10/12 labs in our building run on Ubuntu.

Last week, a really great professor (who doesn't take any classes I can attend) from the Electronics and Communications department and I wrote some bash scripts to automate updates and so on, staying back after college until late evening to try to get the PCs updated.

We'll be trying to use SSH to update as many computers as we can remotely, and trying to learn to use Cron to automate the whole updating deal.
I'm learning this stuff on the side, since it's not on my syllabus at all, and the professor isn't even related to the departments that run the labs usually.

We're not getting anything for doing this, the head of my department (who has it in for me) has no idea about this, and nobody else is bothered enough to learn either.

When I first started down the path to becoming a developer, I was a "business analyst" where I managed our departments reports and ended up migrating all the reports from daily query run in MS Access with Task manager and emailed out to all the managers including the VP of the entire business unit, I created
Views in the database and sent out the same spreadsheet with the view in excel daily since management didn't want "change". Granted this was at a large health care company in the US and didn't want to invest in a real dashboard for their reports. The only thing that was changed in the email and file was the file name with the current date. I left the company a while ago and recently applied for a similar position for the shits and gigs. Interviewed with the It manager and they're still using the same excel macro I wrote 3 years later.

we want you to be
- full stack developer (you do everything front end, back end)
- dev ops/SRE (you can sort out the deployment CI/CD pipeline, cloud platform services AWS/GC/Azure whatever)
- architect (you can design the software as well)
all in 1, you gotta be multiple roles/departments
good luck getting this experience on the job (hell in a startup is not for everybody and certainly not for me)

also why the fuck companies who aren’t startups ask for this idk

not sure if i missed any roles/competencies so far , don’t forget you need like >=3 years of experience possibly in every field for entry roles and more for anything higher than that

My first gig was with an MSP doing tech support and eventually some proper infrastructure design and mangement.

Regularly myself and colleagues would find reasons why we should be doing things 'this way' and how we're doing wrong by our customers by not following best practices. (Things like firmware upgrades on routers, switches, servers)

We regularly got shutdown, just told 'no, it's not to be touched if it isn't breaking'. This obviously got us pretty worked up and kinda devided us.

The thing is, It wasn't until my next gig that I sorta realised they were kinda right to shut us down. There was clearly a risk to reward equation we weren't thinking about as employees with no financial stake in the company.

In an enterprise setting, sure doing those kinds of upgrades is necessary, and normally you have a team full of experts and tools to help you do those tasks whilst also mitigating as much risk as possible.

So at the time it felt like a bad experience, but looking back now I realise that from a business perspective it wasn't practical for us to constantly risk breaking things just because 'i read somewhere that we should do this'.

I think to be successful as a developer, IT tech, systems engineer, it's really important to get to know the other departments of the business and how the work you do affects them.

One of our departments works only on Thinclients and one of my colleagues made an loop. You can think what happened.

"If it's stupid, but it works, it ain't stupid".

The reverse is true for most IT departments.

My work product: Or why I learned to get twitchy around Java...

I maintain a Java based test system, that tests a raster image processor. The client is a Java swing project that contains CORBA bindings to the internal API of the raster image processor. It also has custom written UI elements and duplicated functionality that became available in later versions of Java, but because some of the third party tools we use don't work with later versions of Java for some reason, it's not possible to upgrade Java to gain things as simple as recursive directory deletion, yes the version of Java we have to use does not support something as simple as that and custom code had to be written to support it.

Because of the requirement to build the API bindings along with the client the whole application must be built with the raster image processor build chain, which is a heavily customised jam build system. So an ant task calls out to execute a jam task and jam does about 90% of the heavy lifting.

In addition to the Java code there's code for interpreting PostScript files, as these can be used to alter the behaviour of the raster image processor during testing.

As if that weren't enough, there's a beanshell interface to allow users to script the test system, but none of the users know Java well enough to feel confident writing interpreted Java scripts (and that's too close to JavaScript for my comfort). I once tried swapping this out for the Rhino JavaScript interpreter and got all the verbal support in the world but no developer time to design an API that'd work for all the departments.

The server isn't much better though. It's a tomcat based application that was written by someone who had never built a tomcat application before, or any web application for that matter and uses raw SQL strings instead of an orm, it doesn't use MVC in any way, and insane amount of functionality is dumped into the jsp files.

It too interacts with a raster image processor to create difference masks of the output, running PostScript as needed. It spawns off multiple threads and can spend days processing hundreds of gigabytes of image output (depending on the size of the tests).

We're stuck on Tomcat seven because we can't upgrade beyond Java 6, which brings a whole manner of security issues, but that eager little Java updated will break the tool chain if it gets its way.

Between these two components we have the Java RMI server (sometimes) working to help generate image data on the client side before all images are pulled across a UNC network path onto the server that processes test jobs (in PDF format), by reading into the xref table of said PDF, finding the embedded image data (for our server consumed test files are just flate encoded TIFF files wrapped around just enough PDF to make them valid) and uses a tool to create a difference mask of two images.

This tool is very error prone, it can't difference images of different sizes, colour spaces, orientations or pixel depths, but it's the best we have.

The tool is installed in both the client and server if the client can generate images it'll query from the server which ones it needs to and if it can't the server will use the tool itself.

Our shells have custom profiles for linking to a whole manner of third party tools and libraries, including a link to visual studio 2005 (more indirectly related build dependencies), the whole profile has to ensure that absolutely no operating system pollution gets into the shell, most of our apps are installed in our home directories and we have to ensure our paths are correct for every single application we add.

And... Fucking and!

Most of the tools are stored as source bundles in a version control system... Not got or mercurial, not perforce or svn, not even CVS... They use a custom built version control system that is built on top of RCS, it keeps a central database of locked files (using soft and hard locks along with write protecting the files in the file system) to ensure users can't get merge conflicts by preventing other users from writing to the files at all.

Branching is heavy weight and can take the best part of a day to create a new branch and populate the history.

Gathering the tools alone to build the Dev environment to build my project takes the best part of a week.

What should be a joy come hardware refresh year becomes a curse ("Well fuck, now I loose a week spending it setting up the Dev environment on ANOTHER machine").

Needless to say, I enjoy NOT working with Java. A lot of this isn't Javas fault, but there's a lot of things that Java (specifically the Java 6 version we're stuck on) does not make easy.

This is why I prefer to build my web apps in python or node, hell, I'd even take Lua... Just... Compiling web pages into executable Java classes, why? I mean I understand the implementation of how this happens, but why did my predecessor have to choose this? Why?

!dev

So I work at a monitoring station (yeah not a professional dev yet), so basically our entire day is spent on the phone. Yesterday morning, our phone system broke. Everyone is getting calls from all departments. Even departments they're not in.

As if my job isn't stressful enough as it is, now this fucking thing happens, and whattya know, shit still isn't working today...

You realize you just bought a dying technology when there is no on site support because all the departments in your country went bankrupt and closed ☺ #deadinside

Apparently marketing departments of Headspace are like us developers.

This is the final version. *bug*

I MEAN THIS IS THE FINAL VERSION. *bug*

Now this is truthfully validated tested final version!

<!rant>

With very little experience I have become head of software integration on a multimillion dollar state contract. (Whole other story on that part) had a meeting with the states mainframe and DB departments this last week after having worked in person with these guys for three months. They told me that I am by far their favorite employee of a vendor they have worked with. I have put a lot of work into understanding their workflows and making sure we have minimal impact on their systems. Evidently this is a rare occurrence for them. I am just so stoked that I am having such a positive impact on them while still getting my job done. Still have a long way to go, but it is awesome to hear I am at least making a good impression for my company!

</!rant>

"Hey - just get inspired by this code from _insertBigTechCompanyHere_ and you will be fine!"
-
"You mean the code for which x departments have worked x months and spent x million dollars?
Yeah.
Five minutes..."

Starting the day with Management complaining about budget and how R&D spends a lot. I start talking about the form to get a machine to a developer, that requires detailed information about the specs, proper justification, provide price comparison, fields of text which I know their departments will not check or fully comprehend BUT administration type departments always get the latest MacBook when their work literally involves little more than read emails, PDFs, write word documents and not high demanding software tools. R&D colleague suggests that a Raspberry pi would suffice for what administration personal needs out of a PC.
Management didn't comment.

So for the past month I've been working on a new website for my department, it looks beautiful has a custom CMS and is all around great (not to tout my own horn or anything). Now my boss has taken it to the marketing department to get a final approval and they responded saying that a lot of departments are complaining about not being able to maintain their pages and how terrible the current ones look. They want to create WP sites for all the department's and make us maintain them. I know why I hate WordPress but they can't understand what's so bad about it. How do I convince them my custom solution is better than the monstrosity of WordPress?

So I've been given a task to monitor a whole lot of logs of some servers (whole university ~ 10+ departments). The technologies are diverse so I'm cramming everything into elasticsearch via logstash (and filebeat), viewing it into kibana. Any recommendations for what should be the 'useful' stuff to be viewed into dashboard? I guess:
- Overall traffic wtih respect to previous days/weeks
- Most viewed domains
- 200
- 404
- 503
- Failed logins?
- Dropped connections?
- Critical-load of systems? 90%+

Oh DevRant community, I've come seeking for help and wisdom.
In my university the basic programming course uses Java and it's getting a bit outdated. The class has a lot of resources, like online videos and examples, but teachers from other departments say that the class doesn't teach students correctly.
I'm a student at that university, and I'm working in a group tasked to diagnose the class and seek for possible solutions. I need to know if some of you know about tools used to teach programming and algorithmic thinking in an interesting way at a university level. Something like Scratch or Karel, but for university students. If you have an example university I would love that!

Every single morning I despair. I can’t stand this job.
Why pay very highly and get very skilled people to have them working 4 to a support ticket. Doing the most mundane support tickets you have ever seen in your life (mainly updating client contact details)?
And why have such a rigorous recruitment process to get people’s in in the first place?

The company is pissing money away by working like this and all the new starters like me think it’s complete shit.
But the bosses and anyone who’s been here a while think it’s great. Company still is making loads of money so they don’t even care about it.

I’ve never met senior developers who have never worked on a greenfield project in their entire careers until I came here.

I can’t believe how I got suckered into this (was head hunted).

Does anyone have a feel for the UK contracting market right now?

I’m considering the jump but I think I’d have to be looking for remote only contracts because where I live has few opportunities ‘on-site’. Preferably c# / angular.

Is there much competition for roles or is there a shortage of skills in the contractors?

The thought of going into another permanent role that could be as bad as this genuinely keeps me awake at night.
I’m not sure I can go somewhere and then have it in the hands of managers to decide what projects I’m going to do and what tech it will be on.

At any big company there’s going to be tech debt as well as new work. So becoming perm now feels like it’s 50-50 whether or not a new job will just mean being put into legacy stuff for a couple of years or doing something that is actually good.

I’ve been talking various people about roles in government departments (multiple different departments are hiring) and because priorities change none the gov recruiters can guarantee what the work is that they’re recruiting for actually is.
Just that the the big recruitment push is to bring work previously done by consultancies back in house. Presumably because consultancies have been fleecing them.

Almost any internally tool developed by a non-dev who has read a book 'learning to program in 21 days' and now thinks he can code. Usually it is developer in excel and as years pass complete departments depend on it until the moment a consultant is hired to completely rewrite it without any specs.

My previous employer went bust.

As soon as it was announced, I got flooded by e-mails, messages and calls with job proposals. I went through a lot of interviews, half of which were interrupted by the potential employer, and half by me.

In the end, after a good recommendation and a short 1h interview, I got hired by my current employer, in a rush that made me quit the old company before my contract ran out due to it being bust.

Now if someone I worked with recognize this story, I say to you: Hiya! And probably congrats to reaching the same island as me :) all devs from all departments were absorbed into this company.

UX/design departments have process, review and do lots of work designing standard look and components for our front end. We use these.

Sometimes when they give us a mockups for new features they break their own rules/components.

Why are you handing me non-standard designs/components, when you made the standard ones and we could just reuse those.

Warn: long rant is long

So for the past couple of weeks I've been frustrated/confused over my thesis course with the kids gloves the professor gave us. This week I found out that in actuality this class isn't just for the IT majors, but a mix of Software Engineering majors, IT majors with minors in the SE department (me), and Information System majors who do product management but don't know much about coding anything.

As a result, we have this really strange set of discussions going on where on one hand we have the professor giving the okay to students making a website in !!Wix because they don't know much about HTML and CSS, to students like me busting ass to get a Java/MongoDB/Bootstrap web application off the ground from scratch.

I'm not as nearly upset as a I was, but it's still a really bizarre thing to lump these two departments together and getting it all coherent. The SE and IT majors is a much easier fit as there's so much overlap between the two that it's next to impossible to see any difference, it's the IS majors who are off in their own little world.

One thing is relieving to me from all this. I've realized I didn't need to major in Software Engineering to become a competent software engineer. It's amazing what one can self teach in 2 years to get the equivalent knowledge and skill sets. In the end this makes it all up for when I dropped out Computer Science in my mid 20's.

It's jaw dropping to me how much my perception of the education system for STEM has changed from when I was freshman to being a senior.

Also focus more on how to deal with the business side of product development, how to 'deal' with sales/operations in a professional environment.

During my education the focus was mainly on the pure software engineering side, not so much on the 'real world environments'.

Personally I have no problems dealing with other departments, but some of my colleagues do struggle with the daily 'confrontations' between product development and operations.

Hello all,

For the team leaders and head of departments out there.

What do you use to plan and organize the managerial side of things ?

Being a full stack developer within a company that has separated departments for each stack can be very frustrating, especially when it comes to just a development environment.

Although my main role is a backend PHP developer, there are times where I need to configure or install something in a development server. But I have to put in a request to the networking team every time I want something done. Personally I find this to be very inefficient and wasting my time and the networking teams' time as well.

An example would be I want to install Supervisor to have a process restart in the event that it dies, which I explained to the networking guy. But the networking guy says that they don't want to install it, can just make a systemd service instead. I said that is fine and asked if he could do that or can I do it myself. Then he wants to know why I want to have a systemd service installed even though I just explained it to him!

Though I guess I'm always going to have this kind of issue with networking teams.

Getting burn out right now. Filling in for departments with overpaid inadequate talent and poor management, it's driving me up the wall.

- coffee with friends from other departments discussing actual problem to solve
- play pool for a while to clean head
- music (mozart's requiem works well)

I had been working as an IT-consultant, for some year. Where I often had to educate about APM products, and a lot of them was over skype to outsourced IT departments in Asia.

I could use a hole dag teaching them about the product, and how to use specific part of them. Even though I asked them if they understood everything I have said. I never got any questions or had to immerse anything.

But almost every single time after, I got a ton of email asking about everything I said. Why just why, would you just sit, smile and nod. If you did not understand anything. So I had to use days, going over the same presentation over and over again, to each and every participant.

Now I am so happy I gave the company the finger, and became a full-time developer instead.

I went to an interview and they say they will call me within 2 week if I pass the first round of interview.

They don't call me so I assume I fail the interview and life went on.

I received the call today said I pass the first interview and if I wanted to come for second interview. My first thought is Fuck Off.

My acquaintance work for that company and we have a frank conversation. What is going on is that they are overwork and the other department complain that they don't have output from IT department.

When they ask IT department why don't produce output, head of IT department said they don't have enough people. HR department reluctantly allow them to hire more people and they phone me. My acquaintance apologize for the move that their company make. My acquaintance also said that he/she will also pass my decision to their department head.

I have meet everyone is that IT department whom I am going to work with and I like them. They are not only knowledgeable but also a nice person. More importantly they value the quality of work. They are the kind of person I like working with.

What I don't like is their HR department and they only call me when their departments work stale.

Here is my problem, I like the people I am going to work with but I don't like the company that they think I am kind of "backup". The company is the reputable company and it will be easier for me to find other job if I decided to quit and apply for other job.

I know the price range that they are willing to hire me due to first interview and the probing question I asked.

I was thinking of asking for salary outside their price range and think how it goes. If they are willing to hire me despite the ridiculous salary I asked , I may tolerant to work with them.

How do you think I should handle the situation?

Mu first two bosses were cool. Always defended us when top management come down. Will show with evidence that it is others (non-IT personnel in other departments) are clearly at fault and not us. But when they leave, will tear us a new one because lets face it, we were not that innocent 😅. Still, always kept us clean and out of trouble from the big guys.

There's been a fad in the company where the managers ask for the opinions of other departments to "get different perspectives".

On one hand, we get feedback by non-experts, which is obviously bad because they're not in their field. "Feature X is kinda complicated. We could simplify it by doing A." and the manager goes "that's a brilliant idea! Let's do that!" and the devs go "we did consider that, but it has drawback N. And perhaps you wanna do B, but that has drawback M..."

And then they were asking for us programmers for inputs on their designs for logos, etc. Naturally, as programmers, we wanted quick access to many functionalities. But marketing wants a simpler and more intuitive design, even if it involves more clicks. This wasn't in my job description! I just wanna code! Thinking is your job!

!rant

So, at this day I have two jobs as software engineer (I'm self thought). The first one with a friend from high school, a billing platform. The engineer he had flew to Canada and leave him with nothing, so I made one from scratch, I couldn't deliver on time and most of the clients he had moved to another services so the benefits of the deal I made with him ended being less than expected (there was a deadline set by our government as these clients are merchants and the Costa Rican IRS equivalent is moving everybody to electronic billing to mitigate tax evasion). The backend was done using Go, the front-end with React and MobX.

Then, the second job. I'm being staffed to a big outsourcing company for a North American business. The engineer team is small compared to the other departments and the people are really nice. Their stack is Python and React, I'm the only guy allowed to use a different editor than Neovim (Emacs in my case).

between the two I work 11 hours per day, and I'm satisfied with this.

This is way better than my old CS job at Amazon Spain where I couldn't use Emacs to have a decent text editing experience.

Thanks, Lord.

"Often design departments are viewed as little decoration groups… They’ll make everything look pretty. Well, I can tell you, that doesn’t work." - Peter Phillips

So, some data need to be prepared during the summer and the diverse departments' elected data processors got shared in a Google spreadsheet they will need to fill with some basic data IT needs. Simple, straightforward data entry, with nothing private nor confidential. Just another divide-and-conquer-style large amount of data to enter & organise, that's all.

Today, I received a new comment notification as the owner of the spreadsheet. You can imagine my surprise when I saw that, for some f*cked up reasons, one of the guys just wrote the super-admin username & pw for one of the main data systems we use in a freaking comment in the spreadsheet... WTF...
Oh, and also, juuust in case, he also wrote the pin code that is normally required to pass through the device-check when you log-in as a super-admin from an unknown device and/or location.

Fortunately I could catch it on time, but this just ruined half of my day.
I am supposedly on freaking annual leave. Ha Ha. Ha.

Hi,
Can I ask junior developers about their experience in web development when started.

I am learning web development and I came to know that normally when you start your web development career for small projects like creating software for departments,..etc you'll have to gather information yourself,...etc and implement but for larger projects you'll be given instructions by your manager on an email e.g. On how it should work.

As I experienced as well when learning you understand the concepts but when I come to practice and implement for different exercise / project I feel kind of difficult / different

Get ready for Xmas, where online store marketing departments come up with the most meaningful slogans in the whole year. NOT!

I was in EE Engineering dept. I got A1 from programming class despite failing at all other EE classes. Couple years later of failing EE classes, I switched departments without hesitation.

EY and ConsenSys announced the formation of the Baseline Protocol with Microsoft which is an open source initiative that combines cryptography, messaging and blockchain to deliver secure and private business processes at low cost via the public Ethereum Mainnet. The protocol will enable confidential and complex collaboration between enterprises without leaving any sensitive data on-chain. The work will be governed by the Ethereum-Oasis Project.

Past approaches to blockchain technology have had difficulty meeting the highest standards of privacy, security and performance required by corporate IT departments. Overcoming these issues is the goal of the Baseline Protocol.

John Wolpert, ConsenSys’ Group Executive for Enterprise Mainnet added, “A lot of people think of blockchains as the place to record transactions. But what if we thought of the Mainnet as middleware? This approach takes advantage of what the Mainnet is good at while avoiding what it’s not good at.”

Source : ConsenSys

We need an innovation center and more AI plus predictive analytics.

More agile too with agilists

Let’s create three new departments to combat bureaucracy!