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Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
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Search - "dev feedback"
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Hey everyone,
We have a few pieces of news we're very excited to share with everyone today. Apologies for the long post, but there's a lot to cover!
First, as some of you might have already seen, we just launched the "subscribed" tab in the devRant app on iOS and Android. This feature shows you a feed of the most recent rant posts, likes, and comments from all of the people you subscribe to. This activity feed is updated in real-time (although you have to manually refresh it right now), so you can quickly see the latest activity. Additionally, the feed also shows recommended users (based on your tastes) that you might want to subscribe to. We think both of these aspects of the feed will greatly improve the devRant content discovery experience.
This new feature leads directly into this next announcement. Tim (@trogus) and I just launched a public SaaS API service that powers the features above (and can power many more use-cases across recommendations and activity feeds, with more to come). The service is called Pipeless (https://pipeless.io) and it is currently live (beta), and we encourage everyone to check it out. All feedback is greatly appreciated. It is called Pipeless because it removes the need to create complicated pipelines to power features/algorithms, by instead utilizing the flexibility of graph databases.
Pipeless was born out of the years of experience Tim and I have had working on devRant and from the desire we've seen from the community to have more insight into our technology. One of my favorite (and earliest) devRant memories is from around when we launched, and we instantly had many questions from the community about what tech stack we were using. That interest is what encouraged us to create the "about" page in the app that gives an overview of what technologies we use for devRant.
Since launch, the biggest technology powering devRant has always been our graph database. It's been fun discussing that technology with many of you. Now, we're excited to bring this technology to everyone in the form of a very simple REST API that you can use to quickly build projects that include real-time recommendations and activity feeds. Tim and I are really looking forward to hopefully seeing members of the community make really cool and unique things with the API.
Pipeless has a free plan where you get 75,000 API calls/month and 75,000 items stored. We think this is a solid amount of calls/storage to test out and even build cool projects/features with the API. Additionally, as a thanks for continued support, for devRant++ subscribers who were subscribed before this announcement was posted, we will give some bonus calls/data storage. If you'd like that special bonus, you can just let me know in the comments (as long as your devRant email is the same as Pipeless account email) or feel free to email me (david@hexicallabs.com).
Lastly, and also related, we think Pipeless is going to help us fulfill one of the biggest pieces of feedback we’ve heard from the community. Now, it is going to be our goal to open source the various components of devRant. Although there’s been a few reasons stated in the past for why we haven’t done that, one of the biggest reasons was always the highly proprietary and complicated nature of our backend storage systems. But now, with Pipeless, it will allow us to start moving data there, and then everyone has access to the same system/technology that is powering the devRant backend. The first step for this transition was building the new “subscribed” feed completely on top of Pipeless. We will be following up with more details about this open sourcing effort soon, and we’re very excited for it and we think the community will be too.
Anyway, thank you for reading this and we are really looking forward to everyone’s feedback and seeing what members of the community create with the service. If you’re looking for a very simple way to get started, we have a full sample dataset (1 click to import!) with a tutorial that Tim put together (https://docs.pipeless.io/docs/...) and a full dev portal/documentation (https://docs.pipeless.io).
Let us know if you have any questions and thanks everyone!
- David & Tim (@dfox & @trogus)53 -
Dev: What do you think of the new version of the app?
Client: It’s great! We just have a couple notes of feedback we are working on compiling. We should have those to you by next week.
*Next week*
Client: We need another week to compile all of this feed back we are generating
*Another week goes by*
Client: Still working on it, it’s going to be a really thorough review when you get it though. No stone will be left unturned!
*2 weeks later*
Client: Here it is!
Attached: A word document with a single line of text “can’t nobody log in” next to a picture of the login screen with a red circle drawn around the login button
Client: Can you hurry up and action our feedback? We want to go live next week
Dev: …9 -
Being told I’m not experienced enough to get a senior dev job I interviewed for.
Even though I aced the first 4 interview rounds, the tech test feedback was “the best solution they had ever seen”, and I’ve been a senior dev for 25 years.
Time wasting assholes.3 -
Once upon a time in Devland, there were two best friends @Alice and @Michelle and they worked together at The DevCo company as developers.
After a tough day handling an @-ANGRY-CLIENT-, they thought that they had to go and @RantSomewhere and so they went to a café. At the café, they ranted about some stupid clients, and @theItalianGuy at the third floor of their office building who never picked up calls, and @thatJavaGuy from the second floor who, they thought, was @notarealDev, and the usual stuff about their work. Somewhere in between, @Alice thought it would be @funvengeance to @hack @theNSA; “@karma is coming to get them”, said @Michelle.
To do this, they knew they’d have to take help from none other than @Gandalf who lived in a nearby @cave. So, the next day, taking a leave from work, @Alice and @Michelle embarked on journey to meet @Gandalf. After about an hour’s drive, they reached @Gandalf’s @cave. @Michelle went ahead to knock on @Gandalf’s rusty cave door. Being a lazy @necromancer, he magically opened his door 2 minutes later. “Who is't dares to disturb me in mine own catch but a wink?” shouted a voice from the back; “We’re two developers from DevCo and we need your help in our mission to @hack @theNSA”, shouted @Michelle. After a few seconds, he replied, ”Hmm… N'rmally I wouldst sendeth thee to mine own cousin @Hagrid, but in thy case, I sayeth thee shouldst visiteth the detective who is't goeth by the nameth @S-Holmes”. @Alice replied back, “Thank you, Sir @Gandalf, we’ll get help from this @S-Holmes, I’ve heard that he’s an @exceptionalGuy”; “Mine own pleasure, Farewell!” said @Gandalf, and the door closed shut.
So, @Alice and @Michelle went back to their car, and that time @Alice raised a question, “How are we gonna find this @S-Holmes? We don’t have a phone number or anything so we could contact this guy.”
“We should call @thatJavaGuy from work, I’ve heard he is a man of resources, he must know how to contact @S-Holmes”, said @Michelle.
And it was true, after a call with @thatJavaGuy, they were able to obtain @S-Holmes’s phone number.
“Howdy, this is @S-Holmes, what can I diddily ding dong do you for?”
“Hi, I’m @Alice, I’m from DevCo and I was hoping that I could get your help in our mission.”
“What kind of mission?”, asked @S-Holmes.
“We want to @hack @theNSA.”, replied @Alice.
“Okay… I think I might be able to hel-diddly-elp you! There’s an old and abandoned laberino noodly-near @stacked Street. It was made in @1989 and since then, it houses a magical computeroo that can hel-diddly-elp you in your mission. So, you just have to connect the computeroo to the Internet and you can diddily ding dong do your programmeroo thing and then you'll have access to the the noodly-nsa diddily ding dong database!”, answered @S-Holmes.
S-Holmes continued, “But I shall warn you, there's a riddly-rumorino that the laberino was abandoned because of an @electric-ghost that lurks there, but I bel-diddly-elieve it is just a computeroo program that was diddily ding dong designed to try to @stop hackers from accessing the top secret stuff!".
“Okay, thanks for your help! I bet we can handle whatever this @electric-ghost thing is, so… Goodbye!”, replied @Alice.
“Goodbye!”, said @S-Holmes and that ended their conversation.
Luckily, the @stacked Street was just a couple of miles away from them, so they reached the lab quickly.
As they got close to the lab they saw something that really surprised them…
--------
To be continued in part two...
(Do you want a part two? :/)
My first ever story is a little special because it is kind of dev related at it has "cameos" by various devranters, as you might have noticed.
How many did you count?
More in Part Two.
Thank you for reading and please, any feedback is welcome. Did you like it?
I haven't really revised it once, it is straight out of the keyboard.
Should I drop the "@" ?
But then it would impossible to spot some of the devRanters .
Let me know.
PS
What should be the title?
1)Alice in DevLand?
2)Adventures of Alice and Friends: Hacking the NSA?
You decide..(or maybe I'll pick the second one :D)21 -
Ahhhhh devrant... long time no see.
I just need to get something off my heart. The past two years, I worked for the same ISP in Germany, but now as a devops engineer. Well, popo hit the fan really quick lately..
First a good friend, team lead for one of five areas in Germany, quit his job. He was one of the nicest persons I knew, and he believed that all that five areas should work together and share dev resources. Thats why I work mostly in other areas as developer.
Shortly after, his deputy quit as well. I heard that this specific area, the management were a bunch of dicks, but wow!
A short while later, I learnd the hard truth, why those two good friends quit, and that brings me to this story. In a meeting I readied myself up to present my new plattform - a social room - to management. I got a lot of positive feedback from others and we thaught managment would approve of the project. But nope. "We can buy from external, we dont need to program ourselfs. In fact lets stop spending money on internal programming, we should outsource everything!"
I was baffeld... Wtf did i just witness? My team lead didn't say anything, and afterwards I didn't dare to question it, but I told most of my close dev friends and we all realizied, that the rumors were true... We will be shifting into project managment.
At this point, I realized that I wasnt having it, and made a linkedIn account, not because I wanted to switch jobs, but because, meh you never know.
One week ago, one of my bestest buddies said he will quit and join his team lead that left eariler this year, I was heartbroken. Me and our other buddy are devestated, because now we have to do everything he had done. Management didn't listen as we told them that nobody can maintain his code. I have so many projects, I can bearly keep up with them. Now I got a lead role for creating the server infrastucture for a huge project my buddy was working on. Only as specialist and not PM, but his Team Lead thinks I am replacing him!
Last week I got a message on LinkedIn, a consulting firm reached out to me to aquire me as a new consultant or devops engineer. They look great, only less vacation (26 instead of 30 days), 40h shifts instead of 38h and only slightly more base payment. I currently receive about 53.000€ a year, the new firm only grants up to 60.000€ a year for anyone. Otherwise, they look great.
With all my buddies quitting around me, work getting more while time developing decreasing, I don't know what the right thing to do is... There is no way I can get a payment increase in my current position. I always say "my workplace is save, but my work isnt". I don't want to do project managment.
Today I have a meeting with my team lead, she is really nice btw. This is an annual meeting where we discuss my future in the company etc. Shortly after, I have a meeting with the new firm to discuss a bunch of questions I have.
I dont know what to do...
Edit: I missed you, devrant6 -
Yesterday I had my performance review discussion with my manager after about 6 months into the job, which is my first dev job. Before this, I had spent about 2 years in a support role after graduation, but always yearned to build something cool and be a full time developer. Hence I had made the lunge in spite of a pay cut into a development role.
For the past 6 months I was asked to develop a bunch of features on top of legacy code which is ~15 years old. I did my best and brought in the best ideas and practices onto the table and delivered on time. The features turned out great. I enjoyed working with the team and the team loved me back!
But at the back of my mind, I was hoping that I would get to work on something new and relevant. To quench this thirst, I used to spend my personal time on side projects.
The managers and the leads who have been observing me all along, told me yesterday that my manager got AMAZINGLY positive feedback from the leads and my teammates (who are like 10 years senior to me). Going forward, I get to work on any CRAZY idea and pick up any technology I like with the goal of revamping our product. Essentially I get to work on my side projects full time as long as it adds value to the company.
Ohhhhhh YEAH!
Wish me luck. 😎1 -
Once I had to do a 'hands on' pair programming session for a position I applied for... Together with the lead dev we would switch coding every 15 minutes It was somewhat of a horror story...
The assignment was to implement an password reset flow, connecting it to the api and then handling the entire password reset flow, in Angular becahs ye know has to be Angular...
After drafting the ui and setting up the click events, I wanted to hookup the api calls, but then it was time to switch around...
The fucktard dev first started to adjust my classmappings to be more in line with his preference, without touching the css classnames... Ok... Micro managing ... Check...
So after breaking the styles, he wrote the fetches to the api endpoints and that was his 15 minutes of shame...
I continued only to find out the endpoints we were using had errors in them and would not return anything workable...
The dev said he'd tested the endpoint before and it worked, but clearly it didn't...
After about an hour of going back and forth trying to get this to work he got a call from a client because server was down (surprise), he excused himself and had to prioritize on this, running out and leaving me there for the remaining morning ...
I just sat there waiting for the HR checkout talk, only to lean towards rejecting the position...
Fucking waste of time, and in the end the feedback was they doubted MY TECHNICAL SKILLS ... And wouldn't make me an offer 😂👍 nice story bro...
K THX BAI!7 -
TL;DR
Management eats shit for breakfast
Context:
I am the sole Dev on a project.
Stack: Postgresql, redis, nginx,Java with Spring Boot, Neo4j.
I am the only one nearly familiar with : Redis, Neo4j and anything Java.
I'm gonna be on vacation for the next 15 days since they have told me that we where gonna be on a "testing/feedback" period.
My vacation was approved.
Today's meeting: we have a URGENT deadline to meet some criteria that might be the difference between have further investment or not.
Urgent deadline: last day of my vacation.
My face: poker
My thoughts: attached image5 -
Part 1: https://devrant.com/rants/4210605
So let's talk about these tasks we were assigned. Ms Reliable and Mr DDTW's friend who I just realized I haven't named yet were in charge of programming communications. Ms Enabler and Mr DDTW were in charge of creating the vehicle subclasses for the new variants we were instructed to build. Each one had to handle one variant, and we estimated that both of these would be about the same difficulty (Ms Enabler's one turned out to be a little harder).
I like Ms Enabler, and she's a good friend, although she isn't the best at problem solving and her strengths as a dev lie in her work ethic and the sheer amount of theory she knows and can apply. These just so happened to be the exact opposites of my strengths and weaknesses. Within a few days of having assigned the tasks, she came up to me asking for help, and I agreed. Over the following couple of weeks I'd put in quite a lot of hours reviewing the design with her, and we'd often end up pair programming. It was more work for me, but it was enjoyable and overall we were very efficient.
The other two girls in the group were also absolutely fine this sprint. They simply did the work they had to and let us know on time. Outside of some feedback, requests, bugfixes, and mediating disagreements, I didn't have to do anything with their tasks.
A week and half into the sprint and everybody else has their part almost in an MVP state. As Mr DDTW hadn't said or shown anything yet, I asked if he could push his stuff to the repo (he got stuck with this and needed help btw), and what does he have?
A piece of shit "go to this location" algorithm that did not work and was, once again, 150 lines of if statements. This would not have been such a massive deal if THE ENTIRE PREVIOUS SPRINT HAD BEEN DEDICATED TO MAKING THE CODE DO THIS IN A SENSIBLE WAY. Every single thing that this guy had written was already done. EVERY SINGLE THING. A single function call with the coordinates would let the vehicle do what he wrote but in a way THAT ACTUALLY WORKED AND MADE THE TINIEST BIT OF FUCKING SENSE. He had literally given so few shits about this entire goddamn project that he had absolutely zero clue about what we'd even done last sprint.
After letting this man civilly know through our group chat about his failures, giving him pointers on what's wrong and what he can use and telling him that he should fix it by the end of the week, his response?
"I'll try"
That was it. Fuckass was starting to block us now, and this was the first sign of activity he's given since the sprint started. Ms Enabler had finished her work a fucking week ago, and she actually ASKED when she ran into trouble or thought that something could be improved. Mr DDTW? He never asked for shit, any clarification, any help, and I had let everybody know that I'm open. At least the other two who didn't ask for shit ACTUALLY DID SOMETHING. He'd been an useless sack of shit for half a semester in three separate projects and the one time he's been assigned something half important that would impact our grades he does this. I would not stand for it.
I let him know all this, still civil (so no insults) but much less kind, capped with "Stop fooling around. Finish this by the of the week." which probably came off as a threat but his shithead kinda had it coming.
He was actually mad. Dropped a huge faux-apologetic spiel in the chat. Why couldn't I just trust him (his code was garbage and he was constantly late without explanation), his work was almost done (it wasn't and if he'd started he'd understand the scope of what he was assigned), that the problem was that I'm a condescending piece of shit (bruh), and was suddenly very interested in doing work. Literally everybody ignored him. What was funny was seeing the first questions and requests for help after that spiel. I obliged and actually answered what he asked.
The end of the week came and went he'd just uploaded more garbage that didn't work. I had foreseen this and, on top of everything else, had been preparing his section of the work done by myself and properly. Thus came a single commit from me with a working version of the entire module, unblocking the entire team. I cannot imagine the sheer hatred for this man at that moment for the commit message to simply be:
"judgement"
And with that, all I got was a threat to report me to the professor for sabotaging his work. The following day our group got an email from the professor, with no explanation, asking for an almost-immediate video conference. Group chat was a shitshow of panic, as nobody knew what was going on. Least of all Mr DDTW.
Once again, I'm approaching the word limit so to be continued in part 3 (hopefully of 3)7 -
Some time ago I quit my job at a big corporation. Getting treated like a resource, a production line robot, just isn't for me.
My current job is way better. Small company, lots of freedom, getting to work on multiple projects, the result counts. But, as a small company, we also collaborate with big corporations. So I joined a team at one.
Watching my coworkers there, I'm reminded of robots again. Lunch break? 15 minutes tops. Just shovel some edibles into your face hole and back to work. Five minutes break between meetings? Open laptop, work work work. The concept of "needing rest" seems entirely foreign to them.
Yesterday our product owner "relayed some criticism" from other team members to me. Apparently, me going to the toilet in breaks is "suddenly disappearing". Or me not replying within 15 minutes in the chat is outrageous. And then he tried to berate me how I'm "his developer" and his team's tasks have top priority. So, according to the PO the problem is me and I should "get used to their mode of operation".
How about "no". I quit a fucking job because that "mode" is simply inhuman. After that feedback, you bet I'm taking my legally protected 30 minutes lunch break and any other break I can. Because fuck yourself, you're not going to burn me out. The best part, that team has smokers who "suddenly disappear" twice as much as I do, but apparently that's somehow a-ok.
I had to remind him that his project is just one of several I'm working on, so no, not "his dev". While that wasn't exactly a powerful comeback, it did shut him up. Still going to talk to my boss on Monday, at least to ensure that the PO can't talk shit about me behind my back.4 -
!dev
That moment that your favourite YouTube channel (I only use YouTube from google and mostly through hooktube.com) announces closing soon.
I’m genuinely very sad. This channel was awesome because it allowed for beginning raw producers to get feedback from raw fans and even get in touch with the top raw labels!
Some top producers which are around now got into the game because of this channel and I was hoping that that’d be me one day as well.
I’ll miss you, RawstyleNation 😥❤️15 -
So i just wanted to say thank you. Everyone on devrant.
It became a safe place for me to rant about stuff, getting feedback from awesome people and so much more. Also i learned some things on dR that making my (dev)life better!
Most important devrant is making me feel way better, when you read about people having the same struggles.
But not only the rants are making this awesome. Its every single one of you.
Thank you, stay awesome!2 -
!dev
I'm a dumbass and caught the falling bowl of boiling cheddar broccoli soup with my residual limb, which means that my elbow is burnt and makes typing a major pain in the ass because of the damage.
I also have to grade 5 assignment groups of roughly 30 submissions and leave feedback.
Typing hurts and I regret life at the moment.
And I'm still on call for my primary job.
Please send jokes to make me feel better.42 -
I don't have a ton of friends, but I do have a few. None of them can code (one has tried HTML/CSS and didn't get past the fundamentals). When I make something cool, and show it off to my friends they just don't understand the struggles and triumphs that were involved in that project. As a beginner/intermediate dev, feedback is huge and no one I know in person can give it to me. There are a couple people I chat with online that help me with my projects, but that's nothing like sitting down with someone and listening to their feedback, suggestions, ect.
Why do my friends have to be so non-techy?17 -
About 2 years ago, our management decided to "try outsourcing". I was in charge for coordinating dev tasks and ensuring code quality. So management came up with 3 potential candidates in India and I had to assess them based on Skype calls and little test tasks. Their CVs looked great and have been full of "I'm a fancy experienced senior developer." ....After first 2 calls I already dismissed two candidates because they had obviously zero experience and the CV must have been fake. ..After talking to the third candidate, I again got sceptical. The management, however, started to think that I'm just an ass trying to protect my own position against outside devs. They forced me to give him a chance by testing him with a small dev task. The task included the following statement
"Search on the filesystem recursively, for folders named 'container'. For example '/some_root_folder/path_segments/container' " The term 'container' was additionally highlighted in red!
We also gave him access to a git repo to do at least daily push. My intention was to look at his progressions, not only the result.
I tried the task on my own and it took me two days, just to have a baseline for comparison. I, however, told him to take as much time as he needs. (We wanted to be fair and also payed him.)
..... 3 weeks went by. 3 weeks full of excuses why he isn't able to use git. All my attempts to help him, just made clear that he has never seen or heard of git before. ...... He sent me his code once a week as zip per email -.- ..... I ignored those mails because I made already my decision not wanting to waste my time. I mean come on?! Is this a joke? But since management wanted me to give him a chance .... I kept waiting for his "final" code version.
In week 5, he finally told me that it's finished and all requirements have been met. So I tried to run his code without looking at it ..... and suprise ... It immediately crashed.
Then I started to look through the code .... and I was ..... mind-blown. But not in a good way. .....
The following is what I remember most:
Do you remember the requirement from above? .... His code implementing it looked something like this:
Go through all folders in root path and return folders where folderName == "/some_root_folder/path_segments/container".
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
Alone this little peace of code was on sooooooo many levels wrong!!!!! Let me name a few.
- It's just sooooo wrong :(
- He literally compared the folderName with the string "/some_root_folder/path_segments/container"...... Wtf?!?
- He did not understand the requirement at all.
- He implemented something without thinking a microsecond about it.
- No recursive traversal
- It was Java. And he used == instead of equals().
- He compares a folderName with a whole path?!? Wtf.
- How the hell did he made this code return actual results on his computer?!?
Ok ...now it was time to confront management with my findings and give feedback to the developer. ..... They believed me but asked me to keep it civilized and give him constructive feedback. ...... So I skyped him and told him that this code doesn't meet the requirements. ......... He instantly defended himself . He told me that I he did 'exactly what was written in the requirements document" and that there is nothing wrong. .......He had no understanding at all that the code also needs to have an actual business purpose.
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
After that he tried to sell us a few more weeks of development work to implement our "new changed requirements" ......
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
Footnote: I know a lot of great Indian Devs. ..... But this is definitely not one of them. -.-
tl;dr
Management wants to outsource to India and gets scammed.9 -
You know what i hate? Applying to jobs and never getting feedback--if a polite "we didn't hire you because x and y" is too damn hard, i would still rather a royal refusal over not hearing anything back at all. It's happened to me 3-4 times in a row now, probably going to be 5 - 6 soon enough. Seriously though, what is this shortage of devs everyone talks about? Because here i am with both hands and a leg in the air high as i could manage and you're not even acknowledging me? I even made a small React SPA once to satisfy a company's questions and show a bit of my competence--you think i ever got a reply from them? Shit, i didnt even get an auto reply. And from what ive read here on others' rants, im far from being alone. At least i could understand why they dont look at me (Bahamian, no degree, never had a dev job, etc.), but for proven programmers to go unnoticed the way they do is ridiculous.7
-
I heard scary thing.
A tester found an issue yesterday. He came to the dev and reported about it. Apparently the only feedback message was "something went wrong". They spend almost an hour hunting down the cause for that. It turned out the error message was from one of the try-catch. I do not know much details apart from that. At the end, the dev lead said this (which he had said before).
"That's why I don't like to catch exception."10 -
So a few days ago I shared about the conflict with my colleague on learning React. Today I was let go. Obviously I asked why they would do that and they said they feel the problem isn't even my React knowledge but the fact I don't grasp the fundamentals of OO programming.
Thing is in these 3 months there has not been a single code review. They are either going of what my lying colleague told them (they claimed he was excluded from giving feedback), or the consultants who were hired to help us. And yes, I got feedback I should improve but at the same time the assurance so long as I show improvement it'd be fine. And I was told they could see improvement. So I'm not sure what changed but suddenly there is no budget to keep me on. In any case it feels like shitty corporate bullshit.
But I can't say they are wrong. I struggle to explain simple concepts I know in words. I've worked a series of bad jobs where nobody cared how you did stuff as long as it got done. I feel I'm so behind now and so affected by bad knowledge it's even harder to fix than to learn the first time. So I'm wondering how to fix this.
I'm really gutted too because I loved this company. I was finally getting a fair wage instead of being underpaid. The people were excellent. I felt I could finally relax and feel safe at work. And now I feel betrayed. Which for someone with self esteem issues is very hard. Can't trust in myself and can't trust in others.
I'm gonna try and pick myself up in the morning, but today I feel totally shit. This wasn't how I'd expected things to go. I thought my manager had intended to talk conflicts over but instead I get the boot. And the advice to stop overselling myself. Real useful that. Like it is on me that they hired me despite my subpar interview because my CV looked good. It's a shitty excuse. In any case they're now stuck with a dev that walks out of work, throws false accusations about colleagues, and another person warned me about to not engage because nothing good ever came from it. He's gonna keep over engineering everything and make up for all the time he wastes outside of work creating a dysfunctional environment for everyone. But yeah, easier to fire the new person who does her best despite the odds. And who cautioned against over engineering because we kept missing deadlines. And who believes in refactoring when it is needed because that's how agile works. Yeah better keep someone who has no sense of work life balance and makes others miserable then claiming he's being driven out by your ignorance. And of course the consultants who throw your own people under the bus. Can't get rid of those now.7 -
I will be pitching my startup idea for the first time in my life to potential investors one on one after qualifying for a second round in a business competition.
I am nervous 😬, desperately need to get the fund, and haven't been a good presenter.
Background: the business is still on prototype stage.
I stutter by default if I am slightly nervous.
From feedback my prototype is great- but my pitching might not be too great.
Damn I just have less than 6 hours to pitch.
Fuck this nervous mess.
Dev wish me good luck😶13 -
Situation: My lead dev (read as in, my employee that has the lead developer position, not my superior) is complaining about certain decisions being made in regards to a rather large project that has been stagnated by executive political bullshit.
Me: let them fuck themselves over, it is their decision to have a voice on this and we are not the ones developing it, merely managing the resources.
Him: Well they do not know what they are asking! everyone is wanting to have an opinion! a voice!!!
Me: and by their own volition they will fuck themselves over and I have the proper documentation to show everyone that if the project is delayed, it will be by popular vote. I have already spoke to our VP to let him know that we are not taking part in their decision planning process, that we provide the necessary feedback, they get to do with it what they want regarding their decisions.
Him: they are being really stupid and inconsiderate
Me: they are indeed, but as long as I show that you, me, and the rest of the team provided input, they disregarded it and went with their decision, then then the fault is on them, not you or our team. Let them fuck themselves over, I have the documentation needed to secure our asses, I record every conversation and I have every email saved. Really, if they don't want to listen to you they will not be able to point the issues that will inevitably rise back to you or us.
Him: .... you are evil
Me: fuck with me team see what happens. Their face and reaction is what makes me get a hard on after the fact.
Ain't no one touching my team.10 -
My last job before going freelance. It started as great startup, but as time passed and the company grew, it all went down the drain and turned into a pretty crappy culture.
Once one of the local "darling" startups, it's now widely known in the local community for low salaries and crazy employee churn.
Management sells this great "startup culture", but reality is wildly different. Not sure if the management believes in what the are selling, or if they know they are selling BS.
- The recurring motto of "Work smarter, not harder" is the biggest BS of them all. Recurring pressure to work unpaid overtime. Not overt, because that's illegal, but you face judgement if you don't comply, and you'll eventually see consequences like lack of raises, or being passed for promotions in favour of less competent people that are willing to comply.
- Expectation management is worse than non-existent. Worse, because they actually feed expectations they have no intention of delivering on. (I.e, career progression, salary bumps and so on)
- Management is (rightfully) proud of hiring talented people, but then treat almost everyone like they're stupid.
- Feedback is consistently ignored.
- Senior people leave. Replace them with cheap juniors. Promote the few juniors that stay for more than 12 months to middle-management positions and wonder where things went wrong.
- People who rock the boat about the bad culture or the shitty stunts that management occasionally pulls get pushed out.
- Get everyone working overtime for a week to setup a venue for a large event, abroad, while you have everyone in bunk rooms at the cheapest hostel you could find and you don't even cover all meal expenses. No staff hired to setup the venue, so this includes heavy lifting of all sorts. Fly them on the cheapest fares, ensuring nobody gets a direct flight and has a good few hours of layover. Fly them on the weekend, to make sure nobody is "wasting time" travelling during work hours. Then call this a team building.
This is a tech recruitment company that makes a big fuss about how tech recruitment is broken and toxic...
Also a company that wants to use ML and AI to match candidates to jobs and build a sophisticated product, and wanted a stronger "Engineering culture" not so long ago. Meanwhile:
- Engineering is shoved into the back seat. Major company and product decisions made without input from anyone on the engineering side of things, including the product roadmaps.
- Product lead is an inexperienced kid with zero tech background -> Promote him to also manage the developers as part of the product team while getting rid of your tech lead.
- Dev team is essentially seen by management as an assembly line for features. Dev salaries are now well below market average, and they wonder why it's hard to recruit good devs. (Again, this is a tech recruitment company)1 -
RETARD MASTER: So how did you feel about this sprint DEV?
*nothing is planned, new tickets added each day and old ones removed - inconsistent sprint*
DEV: Well, it’s a bit chaotic, but it’s understandable. I’m used to it. Nothing’s to blame here. Client can’t produce their end of the bargain on time.
*3 week later*
DEV MANAGER: So RETARD MASTER gave a feedback. He told me you insulted him.
DEV: Can I please die now? Not funny.12 -
Fml... you keep getting the weekly discussions right on point.
I started with the last guys right out of university... just out of Hospital.
With a brand new degree and a Crohn’s diagnosis I stepped into the first place I found hiring. They were good guys, after a junior dev... to get stuck in their muck.
I did! I nailed project after project, tricky development after tricky development. I spent 5 years with them and over those years things changed.
They had a mass cull... the original idea was to get rid of the useless middle managers, the ones managing other managers being managed by another manager for no real reason.... the ones that do fuck all with their day.
But the fucking idiots upstairs put the job of working out the cull in the shitty middle managers hands.
So, instead, they cut the titles senior, junior and everything in between. Everyone was just a thing, no senior things, no junior things. Just things.
Once they’d done that they said “we’ll we have this many things, they’re all the same, let’s get rid of the things with the highest pay checks because the other things can do it just as well for less money”...
And that’s how they cut 50% of their senior techs.
I was one of the ones left behind but the damage became obvious quick. The middle managers barked out orders at people who couldn’t complete them, and everything went to shit.
My team was rebranded twice in as many years... an obvious ploy for funding, but the cost of the team fluctuated like hell because contractors had to fill the senior positions at 3 times the cost.
Then the managers started barking out Self contradictory orders. Do this, but this way...
This would work, but not that way... try explaining that to a group of non-technical, useless as fuck middle managers. It took months, and shit flows downstream so we got the bulk of the hassle for it.
Then my boy Morpheus, got a warning... they threatened his contract for saying “this will work, but not that way”.
He kept the contract, and the manager giving him the warning said he didn’t think he should... but he, and all the middle fuckwits don’t have the balls to stand up against nonsense.
That was the breaking point for me, I handed in my notice and told them a month was what they could have.
I didn’t have a position or an idea of where to go, a few long-standing offers as back up in a pinch but not the perfect job.
On the Thursday I decided I was done, I let my manager know. Then I boshed the fuck out of my CV and updated my profiles.
My phone started ringing off the hook, a senior NG2/MEAN/Ionic dev on the market is like candy to recruiters. They’re lovely too.
I went to a few interviews that were okay but not great. Then a company got in touch... one that I immediately recognised as an IT book publisher. They said they were looking for NG/NG2 devs, senior. winner! Set up the interview.
So I’d spent the weekend with the missus, about an hour away from mine and 2 from the interview. I hadn’t planned on staying there but at 6ish she looked over at me and said “do you have to go” <- imagine that with puppy dog eyes from a gorgeous Slovenian lass.
I folded quicker than a shitty pancake toss.
We spent the night together but that meant I had to be up at 6, to go back to mine, iron my interview clothes and make it to the train to manage the interview. Fuck. I did it, but I was at the interview wired on caffeine and struggling to be awake and coherent. I still managed, that’s what I do, I make do and try to do well regardless of the situation.
That comes from being ill btw, when you’re dealt a shitty hand you learn to play it well.
They were good guys, the heads all knew what they were on about, not the middle management bs I was used to.
They demoed me live with an ng1 test, which was awesome as hell to play with.
We chatted, friendly and cool guys! I loved the place.
The end of the week they got me in for second round. Ng2 and competence test, again I went for it!
Positive feedback and a “we’ll get back to you ASAP, should be by Tuesday”...
Tuesday was the Tuesday before the Friday I was due to leave the old company... I was cutting it close.
On the Monday the offers started rolling in, a few C# ASP MVC positions, cool but I was holding out for the guys I’d interviewed with.
Then Tuesday comes around, I’m nervous as fuck but it’s okay because I knew regardless I can pay the rent in December with one of the offers.
Then said yes!
The thing that seemed most important in the process was my ability to talk to any fucker. If you’re coming up to interview, talk to everyone, the grocer, your barista, the binmen, anyone. Practice that skill above all others.
I start tomorrow morning! I can’t wait.
Final thought: middle managers are taints.7 -
My worst devExperience since there are dev evperiences for me, was when I had to rewrite a pretty important tool to the new onlineshop we created.
See https://devrant.com/rants/1016596/...
My best devExperience in 2017 was going live with one of our biggest web projects I had to develop all alone and hearing only great feedback. My boss told me there were more than 30'000 visitors one day after going live.
It was and still is quite satisfying. 😎1 -
After a few weeks of being insanely busy, I decided to log onto Steam and maybe relax with a few people and play some games. I enjoy playing a few sandbox games and do freelance development for those games (Anywhere from a simple script to a full on server setup) on the side. It just so happened that I had an 'urgent' request from one of my old staff member from an old community I use to own. This staff member decided to run his own community after I sold mine off since I didn't have the passion anymore to deal with the community on a daily basis.
O: Owner (Former staff member/friend)
D: Other Dev
O: Hey, I need urgent help man! Got a few things developed for my server, and now the server won't stay stable and crashes randomly. I really need help, my developer can't figure it out.
Me: Uhm, sure. Just remember, if it's small I'll do it for free since you're an old friend, but if it's a bigger issue or needs a full recode or whatever, you're gonna have to pay. Another option is, I tell you what's wrong and you can have your developer fix it.
O: Sounds good, I'll give you owner access to everything so you can check it out.
Me: Sounds good
*An hour passes by*
O: Sorry it took so long, had to deal with some crap. *Insert credentials, etc*
Me: Ok, give me a few minutes to do some basic tests. What was that new feature or whatever you added?
O: *Explains long feature, and where it's located*
Me: *Begins to review the files* *Internal rage wondering what fucking developer could code such trash* *Tests a few methods, and watches CPU/RAM and an internal graph for usage*
Me: Who coded this module?
O: My developer.
Me: *Calm tone, with a mix of some anger* So, you know what, I'm just gonna do some simple math for ya. You're running 33 ticks a second for the server, with an average of about 40ish players. 33x60 = 1980 cycles a minute, now lets times that by the 40 players on average, you have 79,200 cycles per minute or nearly 4.8 fucking cycles an hour (If you maxed the server at 64 players, it's going to run an amazing fucking 7.6 million cycles an hour, like holy fuck). You're also running a MySQLite query every cycle while transferring useless data to the server, you're clusterfucking the server and overloading it for no fucking reason and that's why you're crashing it. Another question, who the fuck wrote the security of this? I can literally send commands to the server with this insecure method and delete all of your files... If you actually want your fucking server stable and secure, I'm gonna have to recode this entire module to reduce your developer's clusterfuck of 4.8 million cycles to about 400 every hour... it's gonna be $50.
D: *Angered* You're wrong, this is the best way to do it, I did stress testing! *Insert other defensive comments* You're just a shitty developer (This one got me)
Me: *Calm* You're calling me a shitty developer? You're the person that doesn't understand a timer, I get that you're new to this world, but reading the wiki or even using the game's forums would've ripped this code to shreds and you to shreds. You're not even a developer, cause most of this is so disorganized it looks like you copy and pasted it. *Get's angered here and starts some light screaming* You're wasting CPU usage, the game can't use more than 1 physical core, and after a quick test, you're stupid 'amazing' module is using about 40% of the CPU. You need to fucking realize the 40ish average players, use less than this... THEY SHOULD BE MORE INTENSIVE THAN YOUR CODE, NOT THE OPPOSITE.
O: Hey don't be rude to Venom, he's an amazing coder. You're still new, you don't know as much as him. Ok, I'll pay you the money to get it recoded.
Me: Sounds good. *Angered tone* Also you developer boy, learn to listen to feedback and maybe learn to improve your shitty code. Cause you'll never go anywhere if you don't even understand who bad this garbage is, and that you can't even use the fucking wiki for this game. The only fucking way you're gonna improve is to use some of my suggestions.
D: *Leaves call without saying anything*
TL;DR: Shitty developer ran some shitty XP system code for a game nearly 4.8 million times an hour (average) or just above 7.6 million times an hour (if maxed), plus running MySQLite when it could've been done within about like 400 an hour at max. Tried calling me a shitty developer, and got sorta yelled at while I was trying to keep calm.
Still pissed he tried calling me a shitty developer... -
Downside of being a developer without design skills & creativity.
--
Yesterday, i created a simple food ordering app for our office. I shared it to my dev colleagues and got a decent feedback (except for the new hire). But when shared it to people like writers and graphic designers. I feel a bit off.
Graphic D: "The app should not use a blue color scheme. because blue is an UNAPPETIZING COLOR", "The yellow color is too vibrant"
Writers: They are blabbing about the grammar and spellings :(
New Hired Dev: Can you share me the codes?
** I always trying to learn how to do webdesign but i think its not really for me :(8 -
So... Heard back from a recruiter today. Lovely lass.
I’d passed over a submission for her tech demo.
The brief was basically just to create a small simple module that calculates shit, nae effort.
But, when the recruiter had me on the phone she said “I know it’s a silly small module but try and run it up like you would a production ready app”.
The job spec and recruiter were keen on me demonstrating TDD, not specific on js version, final runtime, etc. The job was a senior spec at a higher salary range. So it warranted some effort, and demonstrating more than a simple module.
“Okay, cool, nae bother, let’s crack on.”
The feedback in the response from the dev today:
“He’s over-engineered tests, build...”
SUCK MY LEFT TESTICLE YOU FUCKWIT.
Talk to your recruiters, not me.
The feedback included a phrase I never hope to hear from a developer I work with:
“Tests are good but...” 😞
It was a standard 98% test suite from an RGR cycle, no more or less than I’d expect in prod.
The rest of the feedback was misguided or plain wrong. It was useful to see because I know now when they say they have “high standards” they mean: we listen to the dude who put the factory pattern in a JS brief.
Oh shit also: “someone’s done chmod 777” was in there as a sarcastic comment in the feedback. It was his fucking unarchive tool 😞
My response was brief and polite: “cheers for the consideration, all the best, James”
It’s honestly not worth warning them. Or, asking why they’d criticise something they’d asked me to do.
If you want a shitty js module, ask for a shitty js module and no more.4 -
A bit of backstory...
I have been the sole dev at my organization for awhile now (other two left for other jobs), so I have been maintaing and writing new code to support the business.
Our company was recently acquired by a larger entity and it has been very strange so far.
1. It has taken 5 weeks to acquire local admin rights on my own machine (I work remote) as well as a visual studio license.
2. We have known for a few weeks now we are getting a jr dev who will need the SAME procedures done on his machine/account and it has been two weeks now and nothing has been done. (Tickets have been put it - the issues have been escalated etc etc)
3. All of our code from our old company is in Azure Devops (which is connected to Azure AD) for some reason I haven't been able to add an external account (for my new account and org) to move the code elsewhere. I don't have the authority (I don't think) to place all of our code in a new location (GitHub,GitLab, self hosted solutions, etc)
4. All of our production VMs are billed through our old org located in Azure, so eventually that bill will stop being paid since we transitioned - I've brought this up to my manager (more non technical) who wasn't terribly worried about it.
5. I'm feeling slightly unfulfilled in this position. Earlier in my time here it was new and exciting, but there isn't much direction, not many goals, or interesting problems to solve.
Just wanted to express some issues that had been going on. Feel free to add ant feedback of suggestions 😄3 -
Welcome to Part III of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU?, a saga of competence, empathy and me being dick, even tho I didn't want to be one.
This is a follow-up to: https://devrant.com/rants/2363551. It's title is: "Mt 13:12".
We left off the story in the very moment I had received feedback from 3 companies that decided to interview me. A, B and C. We won't talk about A from now on, since I refused their offer to offer me unpaid internship.
It's December 20, 18:00. I am returning home. Earlier that day I emailed guys at C that I need some time with my decision, because I have another offer that suits me better. It was awaiting response from B, obviously. That day they called me and offered me... full-time job. As a fullstack. On a project for a big company, that they described by something like: "They may not be one of the famous X of the market, but they're probably X+1, yeah". Needless to say, that was some bad marketing. I googled them up later tho. Anyway, my response didn't change, altho thing seemed a little big better for me. Except that I was a little suspicious of them too. Were they *that* desperate for a worker?[1]
It is December 24th. 10 am. My phone rings. It's guy from B. He tells me "saito, the recruiter guy is still sick. Since I don't know if we can hire you for sure, it may be better for you to accept another offer, if you got any. I'll keep you updated." That was pretty cool of him. Remember the quote from part II? That's the empathy part. He called me, even tho he didn't really have to. If you read this, monsieur, you're the best. Back to the story now. I emailed guys at C that I am willing to start the job anytime. They told me that CEO is back January 7th, 2020.
It is January 4th 2020, 10 am. Unkonwn number calls. It's actually a guy from B, but the other one. The one that was sick previously. He tells me that he wants to talk about my employment. He talked with the senior dev and he just wants a talk and a small code test in typescript. He told me that it's no prob that I don't know typescript, since it will be entry level and I have time to learn the basics. And so I do. We decide to meet at January 7th. Later on that day guys from C email me that they want to sign the contract n January 7th.
And here we get to the culmination and the lesson of those posts. What should I do? On one side I have a job that isn't 100% comfirmed, but I'm pretty positive about it. The people at B are great, I love them. During my interview I learned some stuff about the project I would participate in, so I didn't go in blindly. It was my field of interest. I was hyped for the possibility itself to work with that senior dev. On the other hand guys at C had their contract ready. They finally were ready to start. I still didn't know for shit what would I do. I knew that I would need to learn basics of data science and stuff. Their interview and CEO left me with a quite bad impression. I didn't really like them. But it was a job.
What I did I consider the best thing I could do for myself. I told guys from C to meet someday later. I visited B yesterday, January 7th. I've done the test. It had some code refactoring and implementing some React elements. Basic shit indeed. I am almost positive I would do it even if I didn't visit typescript docs during the weekend. We then talked about it. The dev told me what he would change in the solution, but didn't consider it bad. Then they told me I'm hired. And I emailed C that I can't accept their offer. The guy was pretty pissed. I can understand it, they seemed to be ready to start with me and I pulled out last day, in the evening. I am truly sorry for that. But also I feel no regrets. I have chosen those whom I trusted more. I've chosen guys who took notes of my CV and talked about it in my interview over people who didn't even get that I applied for a frontend positin. That's competence for you. I've chosen guys who actually wanted to talk wih me about me making music over people who sat me down at a computer and told me: "code". That's empathy for you.
Dear recruiters. If you want to attract best candidates, show your competence and empathy.
Dear recruitees. If you're looking for a good job, it may take some time. Also, knowing people helps a lot.
1 – Actually, I wouldn't be surprised, if they really needed someone to help them out on their projects and they didn't get a lot of attention. Why? Well, their webpage was unfinished and kinda sucked, their interview sucked also. I still don't know whether they're a startup or what. I just can't help but feel bad seeing HR and Marketing that bad. Because the guys actually might do a lot of good stuff, and their potential employees didn't get to know that.5 -
!dev
In the name of my partner: GO FUCK YOURSELF YOU FILTHY MUSHROOM ADDICT SLAVER! DAMN SUN OF A BITCH!
My partner does her obligatory internship for university. Guess what, the place where she is working offers no payment, 40h a week and even work unrealted to her studies!
She went there with pure enthusiasm and power and this whole non-sense facility of fucktards broke her. She lost her bliss and is really depressed now - mainly because of this fucktard, cock-sucking boss that has no fucking fire anymore and is abusing everyone there mantaly. If not for me she'd get not a songle positive feedback from this whole piece of junk which really, REALLY PISSES ME OF. FUUUCK. How can someone be such a joy sucking prick?
And the university?! They just don't give a fuck because they don't have enough employees to tackle all problems while at the same time their whole organization is the biggest pile if stinky, sleazy shit you have ever seen!! Omg.
Just had to get that out. Fuck.1 -
It's rant time again. I was working on a project which exports data to a zipped csv and uploads it to s3. I asked colleagues to review it, I guess that was a mistake.
Well, two of my lesser known colleague reviewed it and one of the complaints they had is that it wasn't typescript. Well yes good thing you have EYES, i'm not comfortable with typescript yet so I made it in nodejs (which is absolutely fine)
The other guy said that I could stream to the zip file and which I didn't know was possible so I said that's impossible right? (I didn't know some zip algorithms work on streams). And he kept brushing over it and taking about why I should use streams and why. I obviously have used streams before and if had read my code he could see that my code streamed everything to the filesystem and afterwards to s3. He continued to behave like I was a literall child who just used nodejs for 2 seconds. (I'm probably half his age so fair enough). He also assumed that my code would store everything in memory which also isn't true if he had read my code...
Never got an answer out of him and had to google myself and research how zlib works while he was sending me obvious examples how streams work. Which annoyed me because I asked him a very simple question.
Now the worst part, we had a dev meeting and both colleagues started talking about how they want that solutions are checked and talked about beforehand while talking about my project as if it was a failure. But it literally wasn't lol, i use streams for everything except the zipping part myself because I didn't know that was possible.
I was super motivated for this project but fuck this shit, I'm not sure why it annoys me so much. I wanted good feedback not people assuming because I'm young I can't fucking read documentation and also hate that they brought it up specifically pointing to my project, could be a general thing. Fuck me.3 -
For the last week or so I've been writing a userbot for Telegram. Completely from scratch, plus Telethon to not reinvent the wheel entirely. I'm coming from the codebase of an existing userbot.
That userbot is written by a good friend of mine, who makes 6 figures, and whom I respect greatly. However the code is a steaming pile of shit. Now that is not his fault, he largely inherited that code too, tried to fix it, failed, gave up.
I am reimplementing it entirely. I'm only looking at the modules, trying to understand them, and copying over the necessary bits and changing them where necessary. But I've come across some nasty shit.
Userbots often edit existing messages from real Telegram clients. They're kind of like a login to your account, but with a program rather than a regular client. You send a message from a real client, it sees it and does whatever it needs to, and edits your message to give you feedback. Which is great.
However, there's no need to do simple string edits by importing "re". So why do you? Because you're an idiot, that's why. The old bot is based on Paperplane, which in turn is based on Telethon. Why do I see function calls to Telethon in some places and Paperplane in others? Because you're an idiot, that's why. Why does the dig module fail to even give correct answers? Because you know nothing about the DNS, that's why. And you didn't learn about RRs before implementing it.
And don't you tell me that this code is shit, and this bot is slow only when I run it on a fucking Pentium. I run this shit on an i7 and CPU isn't even the issue - memory, disk and such are. If you had any clue whatsoever about efficiency, you would've known because it's blatantly obvious. There's a reason why my machines rarely go past 5% CPU utilization. It's the fastest component in the entire fucking system.
When users come and say.. hmm this application of yours, it consumes a lot of memory. It takes a long time to do X and Y and I don't quite understand why, it seems illogical. Then maybe you should go look at your code, like you would look at yourself in the mirror. And then you fucking go fix it so that I don't have to. You're an engineer just like I am. And I am not even a dev proper - I'm a sysadmin by trade. Why should I have to fix your shit for you?1 -
tl;dr - My company makes me pass around code over email. Is this normal?
How we fix bugs at my company.
1. Simulate bug in dev env (ok, cool)
2. Get the required code from svn and make changes locally (so far, so good)
3. Deploy changes in dev env and test (yeah!)
4. Take screenshots of fix in action along with the files you've changed and mail it to the respective leads (really? send code via mail?)
5. Keep changing your fix based on feedback and keep repeating above steps (what!)
6. Once approval mail comes, check-in your code in the svn branch for deployment and testing in the test env (QA team)
My question to you fine folks is, is this normal? Is this how most companies work? Passing around code over e-mail? Where the different versions of your fix are just attachments in emails. Or have I committed a sin by being a part of this heinous act?9 -
Ok, time to eat some humble pie. I seem to remember ranting about the fact we were going to use an offshore dev house a while back, and I'd convinced myself they were going to be absolutely useless.
Far from it. It's certainly meant I've had something else to do in managing them, and I can't say everything has been completely rosy - but overall, they're a bunch of hard working, decent devs who write good, well-tested code, are receptive to feedback in code reviews and take the initiative and ask questions when they need to. Shame on me for initially thinking otherwise - I'll miss working with them when I leave this place.3 -
For those who had already followed my story here, a while ago I was in bad hands having several employers not professionally consistent (unfortunately).
Soon like any professional, I went in search of other jobs and looking for something better for me. I did several interviews with several recruiters around the world (massively trying to go to Europe).
Some never gave me feedback, they never wanted to at least respond to messages, emails or direct messages on LinkedIn.
Until one day a company whose owners are of the same nationality as mine opened the doors for me I came to Europe to work for a client of theirs and that client absorbed me in his company and today I am their CTO.
And magically all those recruiters from different nationalities appeared with the old man "hey, remember me ?! So about that interview, it really didn't work, right? But now I have another *** opportunity ***, how are you? Available for a conversation?"
I have already made several selection processes in my professional life, and I never failed to answer a candidate (that's right, everyone, even negative feedbacks) and I am proud of that. I am a dev and I still did the only job that HR should have done, it gives feedback.
With a lot of joy in my heart I say that the game has turned.4 -
So about 3 weeks ago I was laid off from my dream job due to corporate bullshit. From the feedback received since then it is clear that the company made a mistake hiring a brand new React dev while they really needed an experienced one. Because the consultants who were supposed to be weren't. And the other in-house front end dev was an elitist asshole. And I never received proper feedback until it was too late. Actually I still don't have proper feedback save for some vague stuff which really sounds like the kind of feedback you'd give someone in the middle of their learning process. They even said eventually given more time I could have made it. But alas they felt they had to make a call in the best interest of the company.
Things moved fast since then, I took a week to recover and then I spent time updating my resume before getting back in touch with the recruiter who got me my last job. Great guy and he was happy to help me again. Applied to some positions, got some replies, first in person interview I go to they are immediately willing to take me on.
So now I'm supposed to start tomorrow but somehow I'm having my doubts. The company isn't an IT company but rather a fashion company. They believe in developing in house tools because past attempts with external companies resulted in them trying to push their vision through. Knowing who they worked with I agree, they tried to oversell all the time. But after talking with their developers I noticed they are behind on their knowledge. But so am I. So there was no tech interview which means I am getting an easy way in. And if they honour their word I'll be signing tomorrow for around my old wages.
So you'd think that sounds good right? And yet I'm worried it's going to be another shit show working on software without proper analysis or best practices. I mean the devs aren't total idiots, they are mediors like me and I think their heart is in the right place. They want to develop a good project but it will be just us 3 making a modern .net wpf application with the same functionality of the old Access based system currently in use. I was urged by the boss to draw on my experience and I think he wants me to help teach them too. But I'm painfully aware for my decade since graduating I'm a less than average .net dev who struggles with theory and never worked a job where I had someone more experienced to teach me. I coasted most of the time in underpaid jobs due to various reasons. But I'd always get mad over shitty code and practices. Which I realize is hypocritical for someone who couldn't explain what a singleton class is or who still fails at separation of concerns.
So yeah my question for the hivemind is what advice would you give a dev like me? I honestly dislike how poor I perform but it often feels like an insurmountable climb, and being over 30 makes it even more depressing. On the other hand I know I should feel blessed to find a workplace who seems to genuinely believe that people grow and develop and wishes to support me in this. Part of me thinks I should just go in, relax, but also learn till I'm there where I want to be and see if these people are open to improving with me. But part of me also feels I'm rushing into this, picking the first best offer, and it sure feels like a step backwards somehow. And that then makes me feel like an ugly ungrateful person who deserves her bad luck because she expects of others what she can't even do herself :(4 -
Few years ago as a junior android dev with couple years of self taught experience of working in startups I submitted a simple android app assignment for a junior android dev role. Assignment had only like 8 requirements so I followed them to the letter. That didn't end well.
App was simple just 3 screens. Login screen with username and password input fields, login button.
Had to call a login endpoint after login button was clicked, redirecting to home screen, calling items endpoint, displaying a list of items and when an item was clicked passing item data and redirect to item details screen.
Needless to say big swinging dick senior was not impressed. UI was not perfect, I forgot to display a loading animation when fetching data, didnt handle back button properly.
I agreed with some points but other comments were clearly just nitpicking: his preferred variable naming conventions, his opinions on architecture that was not up to his standard (official google arch at the time was not up to his standard).
He also was mad that app wasn't prepared for release to googleplay (another out of the ass requirement). Like I would prepare a 3 screen app for prod release that he will forget ever existed after 20min of his review.
Lots more of nitpicking, encapsulation this encapsulation that, omg now hes shocked that there are a few warnings after the project is built.
Regardless my self confidence was destroyed at that point and after few more negative experiences I dropped android dev alltogether for a couple years and switched to game dev.
After game dev ran its course I went back to android dev and found a supportive place where I could grow.
Looking back, they were actually hiring atleast a mid level for a junior position but I was grilled as a senior. The guy literally didnt wrote any single positive thing in that review about my code even tho my senior peers said my project was decent back then, its just that I didnt handle a few edge cases and that's all.
I looked up the guy in linkedin, turns out hes a uni dropout who posts all books that he red about software dev in his education section of his linkedin profile. Found a bunch of other narcissistic stuff on his profile. Guy was a fucking idiot. Even if I worked under him it would have probably sucked.
Learned some important lessons I guess. Always get a second, 3rd and 4th opinion and dont take criticism too seriously. Always check what kind of person is providing feedback.4 -
what kind of dumb fuck you have to be to get the react js dev job in company that has agile processes if you hate the JS all the way along with refusing to invest your time to learn about shit you are supposed to do and let's add total lack of understanding how things work, specifically giving zero fucks about agile and mocking it on every occasion and asking stupid questions that are answered in first 5 minutes of reading any blog post about intro to agile processes? Is it to annoy the shit out of others?
On top of that trying to reinvent the wheels for every friggin task with some totally unrelated tech or stack that is not used in the company you work for?
and solution is always half-assed and I always find flaw in it by just looking at it as there are tons of battle-tested solutions or patterns that are better by 100 miles regarding ease of use, security and optimization.
classic php/mysql backend issues - "ooh, the java has garbage collector" - i don't give a fuck about java at this company, give me friggin php solution - 'ooh, that issue in python/haskel/C#/LUA/basically any other prog language is resolved totally different and it looks better!' - well it seems that he knows everything besides php!
Yeah we will change all the fucking tech we use in this huge ass app because your inability to learn to focus on the friggin problem in the friggin language you got the job for.
Guy works with react, asked about thoughts on react - 'i hope it cease to exists along with whole JS ecosystem as soon as possible, because JS is weird'. Great, why did you fucking applied for the job in the first place if it pushes all of your wrong buttons!
Fucking rockstar/ninja developers! (and I don't mean on actual 'rockstar' language devs).
Also constantly talks about game development and we are developing web-related suite of apps, so why the fuck did you even applied? why?
I just hate that attitude of mocking everything and everyone along with the 'god complex' without really contributing with any constructive feedback combined with half-assed doing something that someone before him already mastered and on top of that pretending that is on the same level, but mainly acting as at least 2 levels above, alas in reality just produces bolognese that everybody has to clean up later.
When someone gives constructive feedback with lenghty argument why and how that solution is wrong on so many levels, pulls the 'well, i'm still learning that' card.
If I as code monkey can learn something in 2 friggin days including good practices and most of crazy intricacies about that new thing, you as a programmer god should be able to learn it in 2 fucking hours!
Fucking arrogant pricks!8 -
Interviewed for a Mid/Senior developer role and finally got feedback. The company feels I'm not experience enough for the senior role but think I'm a good fit for the company. Bad thing is they don't have any entry level positions available. I honestly feel like I am ready for a mid level role and maybe even a senior role. They say to keep considering them while they try to get approval for entry level position, but this is a massive company and who knows how long that will take. Recruiter said it's not a no, just not a right now. /:
Oh and going off my last rant, I found out that the senior dev was wrong about set interception being '|' in python, I found out that it's actually a method called interception(set). So even the senior dev didn't know off the top of his head. /:
Have some projects in GitHub but my biggest one is a private repo I'm doing the entire backend and even frontend. Can't share that repo or share details because it's a project a friend (his idea) and I are planning on releasing. (:
Overall feeling pretty bummed because I was looking forward to steady work that'll improve my skills even further... I'm self taught so it's a bit tougher to land interviews because of the automated process most companies have with resume filtering. ):
Going to keep doing small contracted projects until I land another interview. In the meantime trying to keep my spirit up. (:1 -
So a few weeks back guy I used to work with contacts me for some dev work on a UK project he is working on, it's the Thursday and they need the thing the coming Monday. I tell him it's totally impossible, and it was so he asks what can done and how much, as well as how much for the entire project.
I stipulate exactly what can be done, with exclusions and say 7.5k and them mail over a detailed quote for 30k for everything.
I get told it's all fine, I must go ahead. I get through a bit more than expected by the Monday, but they still needed something to demo and I set I can get enough for demo in place by Thursday.
They demo to business and money and all that and everyone is happy and tell me to finish up along with some changes, and I don't even adjust the price as it was more work they wanted outside of the original spec.
Get to probably 80% done and they say we need to pause they need to look over other feedback.
Next thing, the PM come back, no they were never actually happy with the quote and they found some other guy willing to do the entire thing for 7.5k and they willing to only give me that for the code I have written so far. Cunts.
Anyway, he tries to take some blame for it, even though I know it's BS and says he will pay in another 7.5k from his share if I am willing and we call it quits.
This people, is why I don't freelance.
I feel sorry for this new kid, he clearly under quoted, and yes I am expensive, but with decades experience having worked on international projects for one of the largest digital asset management firms, my countries leading fintech dev house and now the lead developer for my countries largest insurance software dev house, you damn fucking strait my free time comes at a premium, as you are getting top fucking quality, 100% tested, high performing code.
They can go fuck an entire flock of ducks when they come back after this half ling fucks up the diamond I coded up for them.
Even funnier, they a UK based company, so for them this was a 1.5k project. Cheap cunts.3 -
Submitted my first proposal for a freelance gig and didn't win the bid but I don't feel bad about it. Asked for feedback and it turns out I lost because the dev who they chose had a recommendation from someone the CTO (decision maker) highly respected. He loved my proposal and appreciated my efforts on it and my bid was marginally lower than the dev they chose.
Overall it was a positive experience and I may have established a good report with the CTO in the process. -
I would say my biggest insecurity is not getting (enough) useful straightforward feedback from my boss about how I work.
I have a tendency to take a bit longer than others, but deliver code that rarely has to be fixed.
Some of it may appear overengineered but it really isn't... I just like it clean and not hacky.
There are times my boss seems like telling me subconciously that I take too long for my stuff, but then again, he is really happy when we deliver a big thing to a customer and it just works, without any bugs or negative feedback.
It sometimes drives me nuts. 😅2 -
Here's an idea.
I wonder if a politician who work as a dev can belong here...
=======================
Content Boundaries and Use of devRant
Rule 2.
Politics: You may not post rants regarding politics unless they are directly related to a current event directly impacting development/tech. We've gathered lots of user feedback on this rule, and it is widely appreciated as devRant is a platform to have fun and somewhat of an escape for developers, who want to keep real-world issues and controversies off the app.3 -
Not really a rant (?)
I started my first programming job in January this year. I went there staight after Highschool, so i had no real experience, knew only the basics of software development and my written code was quite a mess. So one of my first real tasks (after 2 months) was to write a business logic for batch handling (for a warehouse management system). I invested quite some time to develop a suitable architecture, talked with some other developers and wanted to cover the whole thing with unit tests (which really nobody at the company uses). So I spent about 3 weeks to write the whole thing, test it and improve it many times. It worked perfectly and I got pretty good feedback from the code-review.
1 month ago - the code worked perfectly and was multiple times testet (also by the client) - the client came with some totally new requirements for the batch handling. I tried to impelemt them, but soon found out, that the architecture doesn't supported them, it was not build for the required handling and would soon become a totally mess, if i tried to make it work.
So I was pretty mad, because I had to change the whole fucking thing, but I also wanted to make it better. I hab gained some experience and decided (with some help of a senior dev) to make a completely new try with a different architecture, that can be easily expanded, if needed. I build my concept, wrote and tested the whole new code in 3 days. Fucking 3 days compared to the initial 3 weeks, and it worked, better and even faster.
I was quite pissed to delete the old code, and especially that i had wasted 3 weeks for it and had to struggle with many different things. But I lerarned so much from it and also in the months between, that I was also really glad that I had the opportiunity to write it again.
This whole thing made me now realize that this is, what I really like to do and what I'm good in. I really enjoy learning new things and for me, programming is the best and easiest way to do it. Despite alle the cons and annoying side effects of it, I really found my dream job here.1 -
!rant
today at work i (frontend dev) had an argument about some scss mixins issues, with my boss (senior dev). Not going into detail, I really thought that my method was a lot more efficient and defended my argument strongly until the end. In the end of discussion I saw/accepted that boss' method was better and he said he's nevertheless proud of me for defending what I believed was right. (it's been 2 years since I moved into this country and its language is my 5th one, so I'm only level B2, most of the time I back up from having a deep discussion knowing that my language skill won't take me that far) I really appreciated that feedback from him and it truly made my day. Thank you boss! You're cool! -
Dev sent out a code review request.
I take about an hour, ask questions, make suggestions, general feedback, etc.
Today I noticed none of my questions were answered, developer closed the review, and the code merged into the production branch.
So I email him, asking him why the review was closed and why none of my concerns were addressed before merging to production.
Dev: "No one responded or left feedback, so I thought it was OK to merge up."
Me: "I reviewed and left feedback within the hour you sent the request."
Dev: "Oh yea...you did. Sorry. The code is already in production, but if you still want to leave feedback, create a work item, and I'll take a look."
No you won't.
An example of the code...The dev added an async method to a test harness *console app*. Why? .. check in comment was "Improves performance and enhances the developer experience.."
NO IT DOESN'T!
OK..that's off my chest. No one is getting punched in the face today.6 -
1. Applied to a company as a senior dev and sent them my prefered rate
2. Got rejected
3. Contacted recruiter and asked why. The rate seems to be not within their budget
4. Knocked down my rate by 15 percent, did their intro and technical interviews
5. Received an email with feedback that on some topics during technical interview I displayed senior knowledge and on others a very strong mid knowledge. Basically they are trying to gaslight me and presented me a final offer with a knocked down rate by another 30 percent this time. Bitch thinks if I reduced my rate I will do it that for second time.
And they are supposed to be US based company. Offering me a rate that I could get 10km away from my home lol.
Gonna ghost them for a couple days and respons them on Monday that I would like to proceed with the original rate that was quoted by them.
Fucking idiots expect a senior to know everything. If there was a person like that he would be charging at least double of what they are offering.3 -
This year I could join the "Game Graphics" for my elective classes. After seeing that we are split almost exactly in half (graphics design and programmers) our tutor (graphic with 20+ exp in the field, worked on few Call of Duty titles and more) decided that instead of forcing everyone to draw something, we will be making games in groups.
So me, and my friend were grouped with two girls from graphic. I have to say, working close with them was an eyes-opening experience. They don't think like me, they don't see like me and they interpret everything different.
Anyway, as most experienced Unity dev (... Yeaaaah, one game self made and published) I was chosen to get rest of the programmers up to speed. Luckily no one objected and they did what I wanted them to do, so it wasn't bad.
Today was supposedly the last day to present finished prototype. After three weeks staying up till 1 am, working on this project, two other, and nornal job, it was supposed to end. But, no one was really ready. So tutor decided that we will only do this project, an 2D platformer, instead of two, this and 3D game.
While walking around and checking the progress he stayed with us at least two times, watching what we were doing. Since last two weeks were really hectic, we were finishing up animations, adding some polish and such. When he came to us for the second time, he played our prototype. He's a bit older guy, somewhere around his 60, and one could see he wasn't prepared for hard gameplay I presented him with my first level design ever.
He told us his feedback, about how hard it is and not really intuitive, but in the end, he was satisfied. We have made really great progress and brought him something he could play and finish. Which was more than most of other groups had at today. And, as a cherry on the top, he complimented me as a group chief. I don't remember the last time someone complimented my work. The feeling was... Incredible. Touching even.
So, yeah. My hard work wasn't in vain, even though we now have time till the end of the semester. Everyone in my team has given their all and now we can rest for a bit, while others are catching up. Right now I only have to polish some mechanics, rework a bit of level design and add tutorial, while girls from graphic design will be working on better background and sprites.
All in all, it was a pretty good day.6 -
I made my passion my job, programming servers & web dev. Although it has been productive economically it has sucked the fun out of programming servers for me...so as a way to rediscover my passion I'm giving game dev a try. After a couple of weekends playing with a game engine this is what I've got, a monkey dev with a suit that jumps from project cabinet to project cabinet avoiding hazards, drinking coffee and trying to make some money (someone told me I should express myself and I took that personally).
I'm pretty much done but the hazard placeholders (a box and an arrow) don't convince me so I wanted to see if my fellow disenfranchised developers had some ideas of what my developer should be avoiding/being hit by, preferably something I could draw easily since as you can see I'm not much of an artist although I've also though of just words falling like "deadline" or something.
Anyway any feedback is welcome, take it ez I've never drawn anything more than a stickman and this is my first attempt at something playable. Small Rant plus question. Happy Monday.13 -
For the last 2.5 weeks I have been working on a application for a client that essentially amounts up to a glorified asset management tool. This project had a crazy deadline and I was tasked to solo dev. Because I could choose what to build the application with I thought I would try out Bun and Elysia. Loved it. Thats not the point of the story. I spent about 130 hours in 2.5 weeks on the project, slept 3 hours last night delivered the project after multiple QA rounds. Clients response on slack: This is unusable. We can not test. Client shares screenshot of design and my implementation. I went off script with a silly input field that they designed that never got used in any other place in the app but in this one model, so I decided to rather reuse a working component than creating a stray one. Oh and obviously the panel that the comments live in is full hight and not 80% like the designs. So the app is unusable. FML. How does that make the app unusable? Can you post comments. Yes tard, can you upload assets, yes tard. So what about constructive feedback. *constructive feedback left the building* THE APP IS UNUASABLE. FIX NOW.4
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Tough one.
One of my biggest weaknesses is that I'm having trouble with positive feedback.
It's kinda self defense because positive feedback usually means that a negative thing will happen.
One of the moments where I feel like a dev hero is when I can just accept the positive feedback.4 -
So I got in contact with a recruiter who said they have a possible job for me. The catch is it's in c# (I am a python java dev) and that there is a assessment test for the language to test for competency. I told the recruiter that's fine but I would need a week to highlight the main differences between the two languages and at least do a couple of educational programs for my learning sake. All was fine and that was the plan.
The next day the recruiter notifies me that the test is being called off on account of the company being swarmed. So the recruiter then proposes another similar test (in c#) the recruiter will use to measure my skills and that the recruiter will send the test via email that same day. Later that day I check my email and don't see the test. So I message the recruiter and never get a response. Next day comes and I decide to give the recruiter a call; no response. I then wait until the next day and message him on linkedin that I still needed the test. Linkedin was showing he read the message, but of course didn't respond.
I told my brother about this and he said to send a message saying: "Hi [recruiters name] because of the lack of further feedback I decided to go with another opportunity. Best regards, Lane"
After I send it I get a message the next day from the recruiter saying: "Hey, sorry I haven't gotten back to you. We had to install a new phone system yesterday so it was a busy day."
"I'm going to send it to you today so that you can look at it over the weekend. "
I can't help but think the recruiter is full of shit, but I may be jumping to conclusion. I know they can have a busy schedule, but if you have time to look at a message on linkedin how long would it take to type a short message explaining what's going on? I would like to know any opinions or insights on this.10 -
Dev: Sends weekly update email on Friday, as drudgingly required by management, outlining that stress level is high recently in the past two weeks and constant polling for feedback and updates is stressing him out, needs to slow down the pace
Management: (ON A FUCKING SATURDAY): "Received your email @fullStackChris"
WOW! THANKS FOR THAT INSIGHTFUL UPDATE! I BET YOU DID! I HAVE NO DOUBT GOOGLE'S SMTP SERVERS ARE RUNNING PROPERLY. AND AFTER READING IT, YOU HAVE THE AUDACITY TO @ ME IN A WHATSAPP MESSAGE. ON A FUCKING SATURDAY. I DON'T WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU, I DON'T WANT TO THINK ABOUT THE COMPANY OR ITS TASKS UNTIL MONDAY. PLEASE STOP.
I mean they must be fucking with me at this point, right guys? Maybe I should start writing stuff like "I need more tasks and more messages throughout the day" then I would probably receive less, I mean wtf is actually going on.7 -
Junior dev here. Finishing a boot camp, actively going through a few job application processes.
One of the companies has given me a tech assignment (for a Graduate Junior position, mind you) that was titled Full Stack Mid Level Challenge. It took me a week to build an app they asked and do analitycs and refactoring of the second part of the task (I only had late evenings free to dedicate to that), it was my first time doing back-end in Node (my boot camp teaches PHP) so I basically learned to do it while doing this challenge.
They asked testing and clean architecture.
I submitted the assignment (I thought I would die while doing it, exhausted, I think I was brain dead for a short perio of time, but I submitted it on time).
They got back to me and we had already have a tech interview with the Leads that had live coding at the end. Don't have feedback yet, really won't be surprised for whatever comes, it was literarly my first interview, treating it like a valuable learning experience.
But. This rant is not about this. Thsi is just to put you in my mood.
This is the !rant:
My classmate from the bootcamp is probably already hired, or will be one of these days. As a tech challenge she was asked to do FizzBuzz kata. I repeat, FizzBuzz bloody kata!
Now, I am very happy for this person, the situation is complicated and this job is extremely needed.
But, please, explain to me, HOW??? How is it possible that selection criterias vary that much?
End of rant. Thank you very much.4 -
So i started an (8 month) internship in January. Team of 4 (2 senior/mid level devs + boss) plus 6 or so other people in our other office overseas. Everything was going really well IMHO. Boss's feedback for halfway through the internship was good too.
First 4/5 months were great: loved the team, got feedback and help when i needed it, wasn't stuck doing support too much, etc.
This all changed when both the devs moved to our other office. My boss works from home a lot and has frequent meetings, so i hardly see him. I have a 1 hour window first thing in the morning if i need help from the devs overseas. After that im on my own.
If i get stuck, even on something very small that a more senior dev could explain in 2 minutes, I'm stuck either unable to work or figuring it out (wasting hours of time) for the rest of the day.
On top of this, since I'm the only one around in our office, im stuck on support every week which takes hours of my time usually. Last week support ate up most of my week, which put me way behind schedule on my other work. (That was an unusually busy week of support.)
Feeling incredibly frustrated right now, just wanted to get this off my chest.12 -
WTF!!!! I come back from a 1 week vacation and nothing has been done and some things seem to have gone to shit...
I transferred the responsibility of running and supporting a report thats supposed to go live to someone else. I show up today and check and well none of the reports for the last 2 weeks were run (first report was already late).
I sent out a few emails asking for feedback on a new JSON log I wanted to add so it can be used by ELK. The people I was asking (a senior dev on a sister team that shares ownership) never replied like he said he would.1 -
TL;DR: working too fast is as worse as working too slow
3 months ago the team leader left.
Sincee then, me and another dev are sharing his responsibillities.
Me and him used to do a lot of testing.
(In our team, the devs test and CR each other)
Now that he left, I often find myself sitting without anything to do - because I did all the available tasks and no one tested them or gave feedback.
Sitting with nothing to do feels aweful.
My manager sits behind me, so i cant sit on devRant or Twitter without feeling bad about it.4 -
My boss is being a stupid cunt. To give you a background we were facing issues with our Collections system. First week December 2019, I and a colleague of mine came up with a new efficient collections architecture. My colleague and I started to Code and create automation scripts mid December and completed it in First week of Jan 2020. This PoC version was supposed to be just between the Dev team(App Dev and Back end, also one from the Ops side to verify the data). I did not receive any feedback on the actual collections system and the data integrity but during this time all they’ve done is take meetings with no real outcome. I raised this and the only email I got is data is looking fine when I know it is not.Now in First week of Feb, he is stressing us to go ahead and deploy the architecture in Production and we have not done any Code Review, Static Code analysis, any real tests on Code and deployment scripts. Have not discussed any metrics for our dashboard and alerting. I have no idea how to handle this cunt. I have even asked for resources to atleast productionalize the code and move ahead the deployment and still no out come. I’ll go in a meeting with him in an hour, I will be very blunt and tell him that whatever he is doing is a foolish way and maybe resign in couple of weeks6
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We often give access to a product owner from the customer on our Jira to keep up a good communication and everyone stays up to date as everything is on the board and not hidden in emails or paper notes on the desk of the guy that is on vacation.
So far, so good
Our customers really like this as they can comment on tickets and they are integrated in the workflow because they can push into the backlog and can review finished tasks.
It is just getting better for everyone so where is the rant?
One project is just a dump of shitty mixed content tickets. But how? They look really neat. There are tickets like "fixes from meeting 20th of may" which are initially well structured with approximately 4 subtle changes to the UI and some explanation and screenshots.
PM says: Good ticket. There you go ticket, into the customer review loop of doom.
20 comments and 13 status changes later. Point 43 from comment 17 is referenced in comment 20 to keep on hold as a third party needs to give feedback, point 7 is still not solved correctly as dev 2 was not aware that it was already discussed and changed in the ticket "Call from 25th of may" where in addition the resolution of points 5-12 were requested with an additional excel file to import.
By now we have the 8th of august and literally 17 of these kind of tickets.
I guess we need to improve the workflow and request a new product owner. But this far I just table flip everytime I get one of these tickets assigned.2 -
Have a question about raises.
Working in europe as a junior dev (had 2.5 year experience prior) but lowballed myself (because I had a 1.5 year gap from development) and started working here for 2.5k euro/month salary.
After my 3 months probation I noticed that Im doing better than 60% of my team and as soon as my probation ended I messaged my manager and asked for a raise to bump me up to 3.5k/month.
I am waiting for a raise for the past 7 weeks already. My manager keeps telling me that decision is greenlighted because I got very strong and positive feedback. However CTO is on vacation, once he comes back manager will be on vacation and so on. Basically a corporate clusterfuck.
So basically I will have my raise request approved what? 8 weeks after my original request? Also add a couple more weeks because I guess new contract will be signed from the beginning of next month, not retrospectively. So when I will actually get that increased salary? What the hell.
Since my original request havent even reached CTO yet Im thinking of amending my original request and asking for a bump up to 4k or quit the company and go contracting for the same 4k and pay 17 percent for taxes instead being employed fulltime while paying around 43% for taxes.
I am just pissed off that its taking 2 months to just get the 'okay' and I guess will take 3 more weeks to sign the new contract. It shouldnt be like that, I lost money while waiting so I think it would be fair enough to ask for a bigger bump.4 -
@dev-rant @dfox @trogus
Feature+bug
I think it would be better for the development of of the app to include a feedback/bug option.
Bug-> I changed my password on a different phone but the current phone didn't ask for the updated password, and logged in.7 -
Welcome to post 2 of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU?, a saga of competence, empathy and me being dick, even tho I didn't want to be one.
This is a follow-up to: https://devrant.com/rants/2363374 It's title is: "Oh, you can post only every 2h. Didn't know that". I also didn't know that the rest of my rant would be put into a comment. For consistency tho, this time I am still splitting the story.
A wise person once wrote in their book: "People judge other people by two things: Empathy and competence." This may not be an accurate quote, but it carries the same message. Also, I don't really remember who was the author. I only know they were probably quite wise. Anyway, I just wanted to share that sentence. Have a moment and think about it. Or don't. Here's my story:
A was a software house that looked pretty promising. They were elegant, their page and offer looked nice. Well, unless you consider the fact that they offered me internship. Unpaid. But I decided to meet with them anyway, since I had hope that I could negotiate some sort of paid internship or a job contract even. I did my homework after all, and I was confident I am able to keep up with their requirements. I arrived a little bit... no, way to early. One damn hour. Whatever, I waited. I was greeted by a woman. We had a cultural conversation, she had a list of 12 questions I needed to answer, as a form of a test. We begun. First question: How do you change a value in Oracle Database? "Wait a minute", I thought, "What kind of question is that?". Why in seven hells would you want your frontend developer to know how to handle oracle db? Well, I gave my answer, I did lick some of that SQL in my life. Next question: Java stuff. The bloody gal didn't even care to check what position I am applying to before the interview! At this point I didn't really have very high hopes. A shame on them forever.
The story of B and C is connected and a little bit more complicated. More on that in part 2. B stands for Bank. A big corporation then, by definition. A person I know decided called me that day and told me they're hiring, that he referred me and that they would like to arrange a meeting. And so we did. It was couple of days before Christmas. C was a software house again. Or a startup. Idk really. Their website wasn't finished so I couldn't read anything useful up on them. They didn't tell me much about themselves either. They also started with "unpaid internship".
In C, they would greet me and instantly sit me down next to a mac laptop and told me, "hey, do this stuff in python". What the fuck, not again... I told them that I am frontend dev, they guy said "it's no problem, you said you know python, it's a simple task". And yeah, I did host some apps in Flask and I did use psycopg2. It was in my CV. But never, ever, have I mentioned knowing heuristics nor statistics. I'm no data scientist, monsieur. Whatever, I tried, I failed a little bit, I told them that maybe if I did want to spend half of my day there I would finish this task, but back then I was way too nervous to focus and code. I told them what should be done in code and that I just was unable to code this at the very moment. They nodded, we said goodbye and I was sure not to hear from them ever again.
In B, I was greeted by a senior frontend dev. He told me the recruiter is sick and he couldn't come, so we're talking alone. I can buy it. We sat down in said meeting room, and he asked me if I wanted a drink. No thx, I had digested so much caffeine during last 24h, next dose could be an overdose. And then, he took out my resume printed in paper. With notes on it. With some stuff encircled. That bloody bastard did his homework. We spent over an hour, just talking in friendly atmosphere. It was an interview, but it was a conversation also. We shared our experiences, opinions and it went just perfect.
On December 20, I was heading home for Christmas. My situation looked like this: A called me they could offer me only unpaid internship. I was getting kinda bored of rice and debts, tbh. I gracefully rejected their generous offer. B didn't give me feedback yet(it was a most recent interview, so I didn't expect any message until after Christmas anyway). C told me that they could give me internship, but I managed to convince them to make it paid internship. After three months of very bad times, things were starting to get better.
On part III we will explore further events of my very recent past. That post will be same amount of storytelling and possibly a lesson for those who seek an employer and for those who seek an employee.6 -
Serverless and death of Programming?!
_TL;DR_
I hate serverless at work, love it at home, what's your advice?
- Is this the way things be from now on, suck it up.
- This will mature soon and Code will be king again.
- Look for legacy code work on big Java monolith or something.
- Do front-end which is not yet ruined.
- Start my own stuff.
_Long Rant_
Once one mechanic told me "I become mechanic to escape electrical engineering, but with modern cars...". I'm having similar feelings about programming now.
_Serverless Won_
All of the sudden everyone is doing Serverless, so I looked into it too, accidentally joined the company that does enterprise scale Serverless mostly.
First of all, I like serverless (AWS Lambda in specific) and what it enables - it makes 100% sense and 100% business sense for 80% of time.
So all is great? Not so much... I love it as independent developer, as it enables me to quickly launch products I would have been hesitant due to effort required before. However I hate it in my work - to be continued bellow...
_I'm fake engineer_
I love programming! I love writing code. I'm not really an engineer in the sense that I don't like hustle with tools and spending days fixing obscure environment issues, I rather strive for clean environment where there's nothing between me and code. Of course world is not perfect and I had to tolerate some amounts of hustle like Java and it's application servers, JVM issues, tools, environments... JS tools (although pain is not even close to Java), then it was Docker-ization abuse everywhere, but along the way it was more or less programming at the center. Code was the king, devOps and business skills become very important to developers but still second to code. Distinction here is not that I can't or don't do engineering, its that it requires effort, while coding is just natural thing that I can do with zero motivation.
_Programming is Dead?!_
Why I hate Serverless at work? Because it's a mess - I had a glimpse of this mess with microservices, but this is way worse...
On business/social level:
- First of all developers will be operations now and it's uphill battle to push for separation on business level and also infrastructure specifics are harder to isolate. I liked previous dev-devops collaboration before - everyone doing the thing that are better at.
- Devs now have to be good at code, devOps and business in many organisations.
- Shift of power balance - Code is no longer the king among developers and I'm seeing it now. Code quality drops, junior devs have too hard of the time to learn proper coding practices while AWS/Terraform/... is the main productivity factors. E.g. same code guru on code reviews in old days - respectable performer and source of Truth, now - rambling looser who couldn't get his lambda configured properly.
On not enjoying work:
- Lets start with fact - Code, Terraform, AWS, Business mess - you have to deal with all of it and with close to equal % amount of time now, I want to code mostly, at least 50% of time.
- Everything is in the air ("cloud computing" after all) - gone are the days of starting application and seeing results. Everything holds on assumptions that will only be tested in actual environment. Zero feedback loop - I assume I get this request/SQS message/..., I assume I have configured all the things correctly in sea of Terraform configs and modules from other repos - SQS queues, environment variables... I assume I taken in consideration tens of different terraform configurations of other lambdas/things that might be affected...
It's a such a pleasure now, after the work to open my code editor and work on my personal React.js app...2 -
!dev
Please enjoy this customer review I intercepted. Guess the company type and name that requested the feedback.
"______ drivers liberally show how bad it is to work for these companies.
Three quarters of all packages arrive damaged.
They park wherever they want.
No regard for traffic, people, property nor parcels.
Redefining rock bottom.
Not this delivery. Always. Everywhere. For a strong decade now."10 -
!rant
TL;DR: New(-ish) dev looking for advice to improve workflow and new languages. Hopefully worth a read though :)
Newbie developer here, I took a web applications development class this year since I could take that at another campus rather than do general education courses at my home school, and I have learned and earned a CIW Certification for HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, though I know the certificates do squat if I can't apply myself to them, and I have learned PHP and MySQL.
I want to learn more, technically-applicable languages.
My setup is barebones (to a Linux diehard's eyes), with a gaming laptop that I do a lot of workstation stuff on, an RPi 3 B that I do some Linux-y stuff on, and a less-powerful Development Laptop (that I call a devtop) that I occasionally do work away from home on.
I'm sure most will cringe and weep at my workflow, as I use Windows 10 on both systems and the standard NOOBS software on the pi, and I use Brackets as my text editor, as well as the XAMPP AMP stack for testing.
My biggest questions are what could I do to improve my workflow, and what languages should I learn/apply myself to for real-world application (such as Node.js for live-updating server-side applications or C# for Windows applications)?
Thank you for taking the time to read this, any feedback is helpful! I'm just a high school student with a lot of enthusiasm for development!6 -
I thought that Windows Insider was for Developers or Quality Engineering but based on feedback post in the Feedback App either normies are getting involved or when Dev/QE get off work they forget how to write a proper bug report.3
-
Got my first Dev job nearly two months ago at a small start up (only 2 devs atm)
Yesterday during meeting boss says
"We're now much stronger than we were before (about development)"
First positive feedback and it felt godly. -
It was in May and I had a recruiter call be up about an interview for a dev position. I went to the interview, thought it went all right and awaited feedback.
Nothing came... I called the agency a few days later and he said he'd get me something back by end of the week.
Still nothing. I called again and he was all "oh sorry, I forgot, and I'll get it tomorrow".
You can probably guess; nothing. A couple weeks pass so by now I'm pretty confident I don't have the job, so I continue looking.
Then early afternoon on a Friday in November that agency calls back:
Agency: "Hi, how are you?"
Me: "Hey, I'm fine"
Agency: "Excellent, remember that interview in May for that company?"
Me: "Yeah, why have they go another position available?"
Agency: "Better, you start work with them on Monday"
It took the guy 6 months to get back, nothing from him or the company. Then he calls up out of the blue. No idea what he would be done had I already got a job.
I actually did accept, still work there now 4 years later, for now. -
This is more of an advice seeking rant. I've recently been promoted to Team Leader of my team but mostly because of circumstances. The previous team leader left for a start-up and I've been somehow the acting Scrum Master of the team for the past months (although our company sucks at Scrum generally speaking) and also having the most time in the company. However I'm still the youngest I'm my team so managing the actual team feels a bit weird and also I do not consider myself experienced enough to be a Technical lead but we don't have a different position for that.
Below actions happen in the course of 2-3 months.
With all the things above considered I find myself in a dire situation, a couple of months ago there were several Blocker bugs opened from the Clients side / production env related to one feature, however after spending about a month or so on trying to investigate the issues we've come to the conclusion that it needs to be refactorised as it's way too bad and it can't be solved (as a side note this issue has also been raised by a former dev who left the company). Although it was not part of the initial upcoming version release it was "forcefully" introduced in the plan and we took out of the scope other things but was still flagged as a potential risk. But wait..there's more, this feature was part of a Java microservice (the whole microservice basically) and our team is mostly made of JS, just one guy who actually works as a Java dev (I've only done one Java course during uni but never felt attracted to it). I've not been involved in the initial planning of this EPIC, my former TL was an the Java guy. Now during this the company decides that me and my TL were needed for a side project, so both of us got "pulled out" of the team and move there but we've also had to "manage" the team at the same time. In the end it's decided that since my TL will leave and I will take leadership of the team, I get "released" from the side project to manage the team. I'm left with about 3 weeks to slam dunk the feature.. but, I'm not a great leader for my team nor do I have the knowledge to help me teammate into fixing this Java MS, I do go about the normal schedule about asking him in the daily what is he working on and if he needs any help, but I don't really get into much details as I'm neither too much in sync with the feature nor with the technical part of Java. And here we are now in the last week, I've had several calls with PSO from the clients trying to push me into giving them a deadline on when will it be fixed that it's very important for the client to get this working in the next release and so on, however I do not hold an answer to that. I've been trying to explain to them that this was flagged as a risk and I can't guarantee them anything but that didn't seem to make them any happier. On the other side I feel like this team member has been slacking it a lot, his work this week would barely sum up a couple of hours from my point of view as I've asked him to push the branch he's been working on and checked his code changes. I'm a bit anxious to confront him however as I feel I haven't been on top of his situation either, not saying I was uninvolved but I definetly could have been a better manager for him and go into more details about his daily work and so on.
All in all there has been mistakes on all levels(maybe not on PSO as they can't really be held accountable for R&D inability to deliver stuff, but they should be a little more understandable at the very least) and it got us into a shitty situation which stresses me out and makes me feel like I've started my new position with a wrong step.
I'm just wondering if anyone has been in similar situations and has any tips or words of wisdom to share. Or how do you guys feel about the whole situation, am I just over stressing it? Did I get a good analysis, was there anything I could have done better? I'm open for any kind of feedback.2 -
Need some dev feedback here, went to twitter and got nothing and thought here is probably the best place...
I'm working on a dev terminal for my game engine and I'm building a basic app development for it (CLI and CLGUI) but not sure if I should allow for full RGB via Hex or should I just stick with the standard CGA 16 colour pallet...
And I'm thinking of building a basic scripting language that will transpile into an obfuscated JSON structure (Mostly because I have a lot of experience at building systems that use JSON as a scripting language) but just want to know if anyone could recommend things to try2 -
Story of my first successful project
Being part of a great team, I've shared in a lot of successes, one I am particularly proud of is my first attempt to use agile methodologies in a deeply waterfall-managment culture.
Time was June/July-ish and we applied for a national quality award where one key element in the application stated how well we handled customer complaint resolution.
While somewhat true (our customer service is the top-shelf good stuff), we did not have a systematic process in resolving customer complaints. Long story short,
the VP lied on her section of the application. Then came the 'emergency', borderline panic meeting (several VPs, managers, etc) to develop a process to better manage
complaints before the in-house inspection in December.
As most top priority projects go, the dev manager allocated 3 developers, 2 DBAs, and any/all network admins we would need (plus all the bureaucratic management that wanted their thumb in the pie).
Fast forward to August, after many, many planning meetings, lost interest, new shiny bouncing balls, I was the only one left on the project. The VP runs into the dev manager in the hallway and asks "Is my program done yet? If its not ready before December with report-able data, we will not win the award."
The <bleep> hit the fan...dev manager comes by...
Frank: "How the application coming along? Almost done?"
Me:"No, haven't really started coding. You moved Jake and Tom over to James's team, Tina quit, and you've had me sidetracked helping other teams because the DBAs are too busy."
Frank: "So, it's excuses. You really think the national quality award auditors care about your excuses? The specification design document has been done for months. This is unacceptable."
Me: "The VP finished up her section yesterday and according to the process, we can't start coding until the document is signed off."
Frank: "Holy f<bleep>ing sh<bleep>t! No one told you *you* couldn't start. You know how to create tables and write code."
Me: "There is no specification to write to. The design document is all about how they plan on reporting the data, not how call agents will be using the application to serve customers."
Frank: "The f<bleep> it isn't. F<bleep>ing monkeys could code against that specification, I helped write it! NO MORE F<bleep>ING EXCUSES! This is your top priority from now on!"
I was 'cleared' to work directly with the call center manager and the VP to develop a fully integrated customer complaint management system before December (by-passing any of the waterfall processes that would get in the way).
I had heard about this 'agile' stuff, attended a few conference tracks on the subject, read the manifesto, and thought "I could do this.".
Over the next month, I had my own 'sprints' and 'scrums' with the manager (at the time, 'agile' was a dirty word so I had to be careful of my words and what info I shared) and by the 2nd iteration had a working prototype.
Feature here, feature there (documenting the 'whys' and 'whats' along the way), and by October, had a full deployed application.
Not thinking I would get a parade or anything, the dev manager came back from a meeting where the VP was showing off the new app to the other VPs (and how she didn't really 'lie' on the application)
Frank: "Everyone is pleased how well the project turned out, except one thing. Erin said you bothered him too much with too many questions."
Me: "Bothered? Did he really say that?"
Frank: "No, not directly, but he said you would stop by his office every day to show him your progress and if he needed you to change anything. You shouldn't have done that."
Me: "Erin really seemed to like the continuous feedback. What we have now is very different than what we started with."
Frank: "Yes, probably because you kept bothering him and not following the specification document. That is why we spend so much time up front in design is so we don't waste management's time, which is exactly what you did."
Me: "We beat the deadline by two months, so I don't think I wasted anyone's time. In fact, this is kind of a big win for us, right?"
Frank: "Not really. There was breakdown in the process. We need better focus on the process, not in these one-hit-wonders."
End the end, the company won the award (mgmt team got to meet the vice president, yes the #2 guy). I know I played a very small, somewhat insignificant role in that victory, I was extremely proud to be part of the team. -
age++;
Normally, I'd leave it there like most other people. But this is devRant, not Facebook [citation needed], so let me take the opportunity to talk about a dev-related project I'm mulling over.
A number of years ago, I dropped my music hobby in exchange for focusing on my computer science/programming skills. I'm now at a point where I'm working professionally as a developer, and I've wanted to get back into music for quite some time. Specifically, I want to make music, not just perform it.
Thing is, I've had difficulty trying to find a good platform for uploading WIPs to get feedback from. I'm hesitant to post them on social media platforms for a variety of reasons (though I'm open to budge), so I've been considering alternatives.
So here's my idea: A personal blog made from the ground up that details my journey rediscovering music, including tracking the resources I've used for others to refer to, music samples, etc. I think it would be a great opportunity to not only get feedback on music I've made, but to also incorporate my programming skills with my music hobby.
I'd appreciate any feedback on the idea, as well as any advice/recommended tools for taking on a project like this.4 -
That's a good one!
Sadly, in real life, I'm overly polite (working on fixing that dammit!!) and always trying to stay professional. I have a couple of coworkers who not only need a scolding, they need someone to beat their idiocy out of their little brains.
I have on occasions told some coworkers off when they were way out of place. A recent one: idiot PO trying to micromanage the dev team and thinking he's manager of the devs, came to me personally (sudden Slack call, no calendar invite) with some bullshit feedback about ̶c̶o̶m̶m̶u̶n̶i̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ CUMmNnicaTioN (I had to). Told him it's not his place to give me feedback and it's not his place to manage my time for me and ended the call aggressively which I don't prefer (it's always better to keep your cool and control your thoughts and words). My cholesterol level went up writing this.
Thank you and have a nice Monday!4 -
How to handle a company in which I work as a junior android dev for the past 7 weeks where there is zero mentoring?
I have 2.5 year experience in android dev and then I had a 1.5 year gap. I was looking for a company where I can get back on track, fill my knowledge gaps and get back in shape. So I accepted lower starting salary because of this gap that I had. Me and manager agreed that I will get a 'buddy' assigned and will get some mentoring but nope..
70% of my scrum team with teamlead are overseas in USA and I have just 2 senior colleagues from my scrumteam that visit office only once a week. Ofcourse there are other scrum teams visiting office daily but I personally dread even going to office.
Nobody is waiting for me in there. What's the point if when I need to ask something I have to always call someone? I can do it from home, no need to go to the office.
My manager dropped the ball and basically disappeared after first 2 days of helping me setting up, we had just two biweekly half-assed 1on1’s where he basically rants about some stuff but doesn’t track my progress at all. I bet he doesn’t even know what I’m working on. Everything he seems to be concerned about is that I come to work into office atleast 3 days a week and then I can work remaining 2 days from home.
I feel like they are treating me as a mid level dev where I have to figure out everything by myself and actual feedback is given only in code reviews. I have no idea what is the expectation of me and wether Im doing good or well. Only my team business analyst praised me once saying that I had a strong onboarding start and I am moving baldly forward… What onboarding? It was just me and documentation and calling everybody asking questions…
My teammates didn't even bother accepting me into a team or giving me a basic code overview, we interact mainly in fucking code review comments or when I awkwardly call them when I already wasted days on something and feel like I'm missing some knowledge and I am to the point where I don't cere if they are awkward, I just ask what I need to know.
Seriously when my probation is done (after 6 weeks) I'm thinking of asking for a 43% raise because I am even sacrificing weekends to catch up with this fucked up broken phone communication style where I have to figure out everything by myself. I will have MR's to prove that I was able to contribute from week 1 so my ass is covered.
I even heard that a fresh uni graduate with 0 android experience was hired just for 15% les salary then me. I compared our output, I am doing much better so I definetly feel that Im worthy of a raise. Also I am getting a hang of codebase and expected codestyle, so either these fuckers will pay for it or I will go somewhere else to work for even less salary as long as I get some decent mentoring and have a decent team with decent culture. A place where I could close my laptop and go home instead of wasting time catching up and always feel behind. I want to see people around me who have some emotional intelligene, not some robots who care only about their own work and never interact.6 -
While I haven't been officially hired for any UI dev jobs, there was one front-end position I was going for where the hiring manager viewed my programming test for the application process and just sort of gave me a "sorry, we're choosing not to move forward with you" email even though my code was simple and refractored. When I thanked him for the opportunity and asked for feedback he just kinda disappeared without a trace.
I understand that time is money and maybe they just didn't want to spend the time responding, but is this kinda thing normal?1 -
First time linux user feedback
Linux lovers are probably gonna eat me alive but I don't give a flying fuck
Maybe its a little lenghty or boring, tell me what you think
Backstory:
I work for game extension company. We work with WinAPI and such. I've been using Windows since forever and I'm happy with it. But I thought to myself "hey, if I wanna be a good dev, I should give Linux and OS X a try, too"
I downloaded Linux Mint couple of months ago to start with. I was unable to boot it from live CD no matter what I tried, even in recovery mode. Apparently, Mint 18.3 was based on Ubuntu 16.04 which doesnt support UEFI
Wait, what the fuck, all modern PCs have UEFI so what, do all Mint users have 10 y/o laptops and PCs???
Anyway, when I heard about Mint 19 being released I thought to give it another try and I did. What a surprise, it booted successfully from Live CD. I saw the Linux desktop for the first time in my life, yay! I then installed it, GRUB appeared, my Windows was still there and wasn't broken so I was happy SOMETHING was working. I configured timeshift and applied dvorak layout system-wide. Realised dvorak layout is fucked up big time and applied normal layout for just desktop environment. Everything was really nice until couple reboots later Cinnamon stopped launching (kept returning to login screen). Okay, lets use timeshift
First big what-the-fuck was when I found out system restore can only be done using GUI??? This is absolutely retarded and I couldn't believe it is true. Login screen has a reachable console but I can't login there since I can't type the password. Fuck, fuck, fucking drovak layout was there.
Recovery mode - I've spent 20 minutes trying to type "timeshift --restore" having to press all keyboard buttons just to progress with one button. I've had another what-the-fuck when I saw "error: can't restore timeshift - partition already mounted"
Okay, this is too much. Why the fuck would you bundle a recovery mode if you can't restore a snapshot from there.
I have spent 3 hours now googling and trying to remove this fucking keyboard layout. No dice. I am making another copy of the live CD now. I'm gonna reinstall the whole shit now. I have the desire to create a custom Mint version without this abomination of a keyboard layout.
It's okay. Windows has taught me to be patient.
Fuck Dvorak, I dont know who the guy is but his keyboard layout can eat my dick7 -
First rant! I'm currently on my first actual dev job and I've been learning a ton, doing extra studying/side projects in my free time and office environment is decent with good colleagues!
BUT
1) I'm getting paid about half as much as someone on my level (education and experience considered) - partly my fault, but thought experience would outweight the shit pay, now I'm really starting to question this bullshit
2) I'm away from all my friends, and by the end of my contract, 90% of them would have graduated... Have no friends outside of work where I live, and any social life I had, died when I moved
3) My work project is fucking tedious and could be flipped upside down to be of actual use, but no, company can't change how they've done things for the past 1000 years. But who gives a flying fuck about junior's suggestions, I haven't got decades of experience to back my ideas, plain logic and industry feedback isn't enough
4) Programming 24/7 for months is doing no favours to my hobbies, as I'm either too tired to do anything, or I don't have the time
5) The piece of shit library that I HAVE to use (because alternative has no support, lacks basic documention, the usual...) is built so that any automation that my project is meant to provide, is next to impossible to achieve, so day-to-day I'm just spitting in the wind as I'm slowly falling behind schedule
Quitting isn't really an option, as I'd have to find a job with significantly higher pay, really quickly to benefit from leaving... which is next to impossible
So here I am, stuck between frustration with aspects of my life and being contempt with other half (the learning and programming as a career)...
Is this something that will stay with me throughout my career/life? Or is it simply a shitty-entry-level situation out of which I'll grow out of?5 -
!dev
There are no right answers in parenting, but there are sure as hell wrong ones and if the fucking backfire effect is too much to keep you from realizing that half of your stupid fucking decisions are delusional at best then you should probably start rethinking some things. I fucking hate dealing with other people fucking up and being stupid and I know I'm going to have to keep dealing with it in one form or another but god why I'm so done with this I just fucking don't want to deal with anyone anymore I don't want to deal with myself anymore
I dunno I don't have anyone to rant to so I can't like be specific here because it's public af but you know typing this makes me feel a little better but I still just don't want to deal with this shit anymore I don't even know what I do want to do there's like nothing the positive feedback is going away and I don't know what to fucking do with myself and I don't know how to change anything I can't fucking fix anything I mean I can fix my shitty code but I'm never getting anywhere with that and whenever I want to fix anything that's actually important I just fuck up regardless of how hard I try I just don't want to fucking try anymore I don't know if I'll actually hit post but I have to put this somewhere so probably but ugh I don't even fucking ugh literally all of my problems are so fucking dumb and small and elementary but I CAN'T FUCKING DO ANYTHING I keep ranting about these fucked up people I have to deal with and yeah they fucking suck and sometimes I wish they didn't exist but I know I'm just as if not more of an idiot and everyone would probably be better off if I didn't exist but wait no that would have happened but you guys don't get to know about that because it's specific and putting that here would fuck shit up but someone else could so that so much better and I don't know everyone who interacts with me is just hurting themselves like fuck why do some friends like blades better than me maybe because I'm even less caring and even more damaging than a stupid fucking inanimate sharp piece of metal god fucking ugh okay I can't focus on anything why is this even okay side rant why are atheists so fucking hated like yes maybe some can't understand their motives for like doing things but nobody can really understand each other's like religious people all use god or gods in their own way why do you have to think of people who have zero gods as opposed to your nonzero as less human than you there's so much wrong with that okay that side rant is over but this whole thing is a side rant so cool fuck my life lol uuh I don't know I don't want to stop typing I don't know why though I guess I just actually I have no fucking idea I'm just here doing this I should be like fucking asleep I'm passing the fuck out after this ugh okay okay okay okay okay okay okay umm I really want to quote a certain person that I really hate right now and dissect them and prove every single fucking stupid argument they make wrong but I feel like that would not be good since this is so public but I swear I hate this and you know what if you're thinking that yes I AM A FUCKING WHINY BITCH DEAL WITH IT I'M WHINING YOU DENSE FUCKER YOU DON'T HAVE TO POINT IT OUT AND FEEL SMUG IT'S BETTER TO VENT HERE THAN A LOT OF OTHER WAYS SO JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP OKAY ACTUALLY FUCK IT CALL ME OUT ON IT I NEED SOMETHING TO TAKE THIS OUT ON GOD AAAAAAH okay uuh yeah that's fun I'm a fuck up okay okay so you ask "how can you be a fuck up you're so young her der" okay being young generally is a disadvantage because you haven't had opportunity but boy have I and I sure fucked every single one of those up so yeah fun stuff you know woo haha mmkay I wish I had friends online this late because then I could like rant to a person and shit I mean this community is people but not people I know and it's not really back and forth as much and ugh okay right uuh yeah good um ugh I used to be able to get this shit out by doing something I'm good at but now I'm shit at everything and I can't motivate myself and it's all just bottled up and there's so much shit and nothing works and fuck there's probably a simple solution to everything I'm facing but I'm such a dense piece of shit that I can't find any of those stupid fucking ugh okay now I'm looking at my stupid hands typing ugh I hate the things right back up here uuh uuh I have 500 charas left lets fucking go I don't want to stop I mean I do want to stop but like by that I mean I just want to not exist I do want to keep typing here because it's the only thing distracting me but yeah uuh right um some people were like wtf happened with your stalking thing and this isn't where I should put it but fuck it whatever some weird guy just logged on for 10 mins to take a screenshot of the time being 2:22:22 and logged off and boom the school year ended uuh yeah kay right fuck I have to end it now
Aaaah okay uuh right bye I'm really sorry if you actually read that whole thing4 -
Is it normal for US based companies to lowball EU based remote senior hires that much?
Just had this weird experience:
Applied to a US based company as a remote senior android dev.
Told them my rate was 55usd/hour.
Their internal recruiter who is based in Poland told me that their budget is max 45 usd/hour max for a senior role.
I was like ok maybe its worth a shot.
Passed the initial interview, did the technical interview, seemed like I did really great.
Today I receive an offer from that recruiter of 30 usd/hour. Feedback was that Im senior in some areas but in most of them Im a "really strong mid level" so they cant offer senior rate for me. Right now Im thinking of how to respond to that.
What is this? Seniors are expected to know everything 100 percent? Every senior I worked with usually specializes in 2-3 areas and looks up others as he goes. I guess shes trying to lowball me or something.
To be honest this is hilarious for me. If I wanted I could land a contracting gig with same 30usd/hour in my city 5 miles away from my home (Im based in Latvia, capital city Riga). But this is US based company so what the heck? Am I being gaslighted? Or is this rate the new normal?
Maybe Im being delusional here, should I manage my expectations or something?
Can you share your experiences with negotiating hourly rates as a senior dev and what rates you guys charge for EU/US B2B contracts?22 -
Hi dev buddies, need some help, need some feedback... What’s you’re feelings on Drupal? I’ve never used it but have been asked to look for a CMS for the company I work for. It’s a newspaper company looking to get its first CMS and ‘managed’, templated websites. There’s more expensive CMS options on the market, but feel Drupal might be a good place to start?12
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Hey DevRant Fam, hope everyone is doing very very well of course, once again id like to apologize for my lack of activity, but i'd love to get some great advice from you guys!
Im nearly going into my last semester in which i will be going into my internship!, and recently id love to be open with everyone i got some harsh feedback, which is the first time ever someone opened up to me on this level... i was told that unfortuneately if i wanted to work in such a space as HFT or trading software i really need to up my game in problem solving.. i was told i do struggle to solve problems and personally i do understand how he got to that conclusion because it is the truth that it does take me longer to learn some concepts and its fine :-).
But i'll never give up learning something!, so my internship will be in either Web Development or Front end development, i have not touched base on web dev or front end development because i been heavily working on C# and Java (Android), i'd very much appreciate if someone could give me some great tips of getting back into web dev or front end, im very excited but nervous!.
also guys sorry i do ramble a lot.... but that's just my nature!
Also any advice on internships?, because this is my actual first ever real job in terms of development... :D
Kind Regards,
Milo <32 -
Hi. I'm a recent senior dev and for a long time, even before reaching senior, I'm always being overloaded with questions and meets everytime. People asking why are the services returning error (when they could at least make the first analysis and give it to me), asking me to join meets for whatever the reason, people asking how to configure environments, interns asking for help, HR asking for interns feedback. So much workload I can't even focus on the actual developments. Is this the real meaning of a senior dev? Or is this just bad management and bad company culture?7
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ScalaJs React compiles Scala to React.js.
There's some cool typing involved but I haven't done web front-end since nested tables were meta, so there's lots to learn.
There's exactly one senior dev at my company who is fluent in this ScalaReact, so I tag him in the PR for my project. Every day at 10:00 am, slack publicly posts a reminder with @mention that he hasn't reviewed my PR.
Three days later I haven't heard anything so I send a DM over slack asking for feedback... No response.
Four days after the PR I beg for 10 minutes of pairing time, because something in my component hierarchy smells funny. He doesn't have time for me until 5:00 .
I've now built almost a weeks worth of work on the original PR and the feedback I get is 'this works, is performant, and has no obvious bugs, but you can't merge it until you restructure the underlying component hierarchy'
It takes me and another senior dev an entire day of pairing to implement the changes without breaking anything. But, I asked for the feedback because I wanted to learn and write good clean code so I'm irritated but willing to move on.
Yesterday I posted in slack that I was having a hard time following my callback chains to find where the color was assigned to a <td (because I had to add a coloring rule). I wanted to know if I could change the type signature of a component from Tagmod (one or more HTML tags) to VdomTagOf[TableCell] so that it would be clear where the color was assigned.
Instead of just telling me 'no' and giving some context, the react dev gives me:
"Why would a dev need to know about the type unless they’re actually trying to use the thing ? Those are all great questions, but id suggest trying not to prematurely optimize for those until they actually come up"
I flipped my shit. After you couldn't make time for me for a WEEK I had to justify to the CEO why I was spending a day on PURE refactors to accommodate your PREFERENCES. Meanwhile when I'm being VULNERABLE and exposing that I am confused and struggling to complete my task you DISMISS my concerns and attack my motivations.
Unfortunately, this is all happening in the public slack channels and I start defending readability and my premise while triggered. Now I'm riding the shame train for fighting in public slack and trying to pretend none of this ever happened.1 -
I have an idea of starting my own business and I need your feedback guys. Literally appreciate any kind of feedback.
So Im an android dev who has 3 years experience under his belt. I am working fulltime and I think its time to scale. I want to open my own agency where I would take on big clients and build apps for them. I personally am able to manage/see through the whole project, handle all communication and also work on the android side if necessary. I would start from smaller projects worth of 30-40k for startups, basically create MVP for them and charge for support after that.
Problem is that as far as I understand if you want to "open your own kitchen" you need to be well connected. I dont know any big clients who would trust and purchase my services, because after all who I am? Im nobody just a dev at this moment. So I need a strategy to build some relationships with businesses.
So Im thinking long game. What if I would first open a recruitment/hiring agency? I would focus in specifically mobile dev recruitment. I have the soft skills and I already participated in dozens of recruitment processes. I also have the tech skills, I would be a competent recruiter. Maybe I could do that for a year, just communicate between devs and clients and place devs. My thinking is that in around one year I would be able to build a massive network of clients and devs.
And then, I could try opening my own dev agency. Using my gathered contacts hopefully I could land some decent projects for start and build my team or outsource from that point on.
Ofcourse Im not sure if I could pull this off alone, I would need a detailed strategy and some mentoring. But what do you think is this a viable plan?2 -
I love being a consultant, and I love my job. However, I’ve been working with this client for the past few months and the past few weeks have been so draining. 90% of the people at the client’s side are super nice people, and then there’s this one person that just barks orders at us whenever a tiny thing is broken. Everything is urgent, everything is top priority, and we need to drop whatever we’re doing to fix what they deem urgent. I am currently pretty much the only dev doing both support and feature development at the same time and I am getting mentally very tired.
Whenever something is broken we get shit feedback, but for all our efforts there’s never any positive feedback. Mind you, the project isn’t even publicly accessible yet, it’s in a “alpha” phase where there are only a handful of users testing the program.
How do you guys deal with people like this?3 -
I can't wait until I feel like Dr. Frankenstein when I build my PC this week. My first real computing rig!!
Some backstory: My main dev machine is my old Lenovo laptop running Ubuntu (my baby). I took Windows off of it when I got a Surface through a job and have been using that for Windows specific work. I'm going to be giving that to my little sister next time I travel home. In short, this is the first computer that will be able to cut through anything I throw at it and play games that aren't at least 6 years old.
The build is centered around an i5-8400 and gtx 1060 6GB, and I'll be running Windows as a primary OS for gaming. However, I fell in love with programming on Linux and there is no way Linux won't be on my machine. I understand the differences between dual-booting and virtualization, but I want to hear how you guys run Linux on your Windows gaming machines or if you go about it another way. I also have heard horror stories about drivers for Linux, and wonder if my graphics card being certified by Ubuntu LTS actually means that it will operate correctly. I have also only ran VMs on crappy computers so I haven't had any experiences where that performed better than dual-booting. I'd love some feedback or to hear about all of your setups, as hardware has never been my strong suit.
I'll post a pic of my setup when it's done too.4 -
Any devs here from Canada or who have worked there?... know any?
I'm strongly considering immigrating to Canada to give my future family a better chance at life (My current country has a highly unstable political climate).
Just wondering how the dev lifestyle is living there (for the average dev) i.e.
- Quality of life - I know I can't buy a house, but what can I rent? A house/ flat/ box?
- Hows the dev scene / culture?
- Work life balance / Work environment frustrations (I hear they are very politically correct and this may be a conflict with my blunt nature)
- Income Tax vs Government service delivery, I expect tax will be high due to free health care/ education but are they worth it? nb; any service delivery beats what I get...
Any feedback is welcome and will be appreciated.10 -
Why is it that when you try to run a project and have ample dev but none of them wants to raise a PR because they are too scared to get feedback.
Oh you have done that can I see it on our pipeline or Git.....
Blank Face No.
Why?!
Because it won't run on pipeline.
Really3 -
So this month I had to do two major features which required unexpected refactors and I had to handle unexpected edge cases all over the place. Since I work in another timezone and time was of essence, I was kinda working around the clock to complete refactors as fast as possible because it was "important and critical". I have 7 other devs in my team but only half of the team are actually competent and even less are motivated to push through. Most of the team prefer to sit on low hanging fruit tasks and cant even get that fucking right.
So that resulted in me doing at least 100 hours of overtime this month. Best part all I got for pulling it off was a thank you slack message from teamlead and got assigned even more work: to lead a new initiative which seems to be even bigger clusterfuck...
So today I had a sitdown with my manager and I asked for 3 paid days off and told him that I did 50-60 hours of overtime. He okayed it as long as my teamlead was happy.
So I created a chat, adder manager and teamlead to it and explained my situation. That Im feeling burned out, I need 3 days off and combined with the weekend that should allow me to finally relax.
My fucking teamlead told me that these days are mine and he cant take them away from me. But then he started guilt tripping me that no one else will be working on the new initiative these days so we will have a very tight timeframe to deliver this (only until August).
Instead of having at least a drop of empathy that fucker tried to guilt trip me for taking days off for fucking unpaid overtime. What a motherfucker. Best part is Ive talked with manager and we actually have until end of August to deliver the new initiative, so fucker teamlead is gashlighting me with false sense of urgency.
I guess a hard lesson learnt here. Waiting for my fucking raise to be approved for the past 6 weeks (asked for a 43% bump which is on the way since I got very strong positive feedback).
So Im done. I proved myself, will get the salary of which I only dreamed about few months ago. Not putting any overtime anymore. If something is very urgent, borrow fucking decent devs from another team. Or replace half of our useless team with just one new decent dev. I bet our producticity would increase at least by 50%.
Its not my fuckint fault that 2-3 people are pulling the weight of 8 people team. Its not my responsibility to mentor retards while crunching under immense pressure just because current processes are dysfunctional. Fuck it. Hard lesson learned. If you want overtime, compensate with extra days off or pay. Putting my 7-8 hours in daily and Im not responding to your bullshit slack messages or emails after work. I dont give a fuck that you work in another timezone and my late responses might result in stuff getting done postponed by a few days or a week. Figure it out.2 -
So last week there was a meeting at my workplace. In short the meeting concluded that me and 3 other devs gonna develop a fairly complicated system. I was happy to test my skills after 2 years of bug fixing in already working systems. Yesterday I found out that other people gonna do it with an other technology and I'm stuck with bug fixing for God knows how long...
Ps: feedback shows I'm not a bad dev.7 -
Hello, my first time here. I got to know this website/app from my PM because I need to vent it somewhere other than him according to my PM.
So, here goes my first rant. The date is today (Monday). The rant subject is our new tester. Some context on the guy. He started in our office 8 weeks ago and his title is senior tester with some years in testing. Me and my team with the exception of our PM are new hires and for me, this is my first job after graduation.
After a grueling month of pushing for new modules and bug fixes from our monthly UAT from the client (yes, this will be a future rant one day), about 2/3 of the team is on vacation paired with a long weekend. So, a very few ppl in the team including me and my PM came for today.
I usually came quite early, around 8 am as I commute with public transportation. As soon as I have my breakfast and just getting ready to open my dev laptop, he came to me with a bug. This is like under an hour I came to office. I'm ok with anything related to the project as today was deployment day to test server for our monthly UAT. So, I check the bug and it wasn't my module but the PIC is not there and I familiar with the code thus I fixing the module.
Then, not even 15 mins later, while fixing this module, he came to me with another bug. I'm still the only one who in office that can fix it thus have to do it too. Finished the both bugs, pushed and je retested it. Fortunately, my PM and another colleague came. But, for some reason, he only comes to me for the bug fixes.
The annoying thing for me is that he comes to me every time he found an obstacle, bug or glitch. At this rate, by hourly. Thus, this cycle of impromptu going around fixing-on-the-go for the project begins, for me. Then, my PM asks him abt our past issue log given by the client UAT. Another annoying part is he never checks the clients feedback to see if the result can be produced again. The time he checks it is when ppl ask abt it and test it 1 by 1. Then he came to me again with why x person marked it as done. Like hell I know why they marked it done, you the one who need to check with them. Thus, I called/messaged the PIC for x modules abt the issue and then they explain it. I have to explain it again to him abt it and then he makes the summary report for the feedback. This goes until lunch.
I thought the bug fixes is over and I can deploy it after lunch. I thought wrong and I kinda regret coming back early from lunch which I thought I can rest for a while with the debacle over morning. Nope, straight he comes to me after I sit down for 10 mins and until almost work hour is done, he came to me with small bugs and issues like previously, hourly. By then I think I crushed like ~10 bugs/issues and I'm knackered. I complained to the PM many times and the PM also said to him many times but he still does it again and again. Even the PM also ranted to me abt his behavior. The attitude of not compiling an issue log for the day and not testing the system to verify what the client feedbacks are valid or not is grinding my gears more and more. Not hating the guy even though his personality is quite unique but this is totally grinding ppl's gears atm. As of now, it's midnight and I finally deployed the system to the testing server. This totally drains my mental health and it's just Monday. May god have mercy on me.
Owh, the other colleague that come today? He was doing pretty much the same thing but he was resolving a major issue which is why the tester came to me.2 -
What do you guys think is the best method to teach juniors web dev? What are some things that would make you love a uni class and learn it?
I am teaching web dev and I find it very hard to engage all the students as almost half of them are not interested and I think they see the class too difficult(web basics?!). This is my first class teaching and I want to gather some feedback here and implement it in my class.
So, basically let me know of anything that makes you love and hate abclass because of the teacher's methodology. Thanks a lot3 -
Question...
Bout a month back went for an interview, went well, assessment and all that, but the company was busy moving so feedback was slow.
Last week got contacted by a client of a former company who is now also looking for a dev.
Company 1 just came back wanting to discuss offer, and company 2 will probably get back to me tomorrow.
Question is, there like any reason to disclose the info to them. The second guy I know, he was client for about a year.1 -
Started freelancing via agency as android dev for this client. The product is a kyc mobile sdk with a flow of around 20 steps for identification. My job is to maintain the sdk/fix bugs/add features and so on.
Communication seems to be so fucking terrible.
For example the product owner is not technical and sucks at defining issues.
QA sucks at testing and providing feedback. Backend sucks at documentation and seems to live in a parallel universe, swagger docs are outdated. Previous android dev whom I replaced gave me 2 hours of his time during his last month in the company, answered some questions and then left today (which was release day) with around 6 bugs hanging. Now because we are behind schedule the PO is grilling my ass so I would provide hourly estimates, while I dont even know the codebase yet since I spent maybe 30 hours on it in the last month.
What a clusterfuck. I feel like Im in a kindergaden where people are either lazy or incompetent. It seems that sweet gig of 40 hours a month will become much more hours or my output will be low :)2 -
A lot of you here rant about devs being arogant or expecting you to think for a little bit with own head and then write a proper string that will help dev answer straightforward without guessing what the author smoked or so for which there's even a tutorial made (wasn't there always). But I don't see any rants about the other side of the coin.
Let's say you are a random dude, not even that arogant type. You see a question, no answers, everyone piss on that question because it's just a mess. Yet you find yourself in a good mood, so let's help the poor soul with th trouble. Answer like from a book for kids, fully explained example and...
No points, no accepted answer, but not even any feedback! Was my answer wrong? Did I miss something? How can I improve it? Was the example too complicated?
This is exactly the type of idiot that deserves a kick in the ass. It's no site, for hanging spam! Why the hell does that kind of idiot think there's even an option for own answer? People will come back to the question eventually and what will they found? An answer, which probably isn't even correct!
(not really talking about a specific answer/question, so no need to search) -
Hey DevRant,
I know there is a range of devs here from novice to expert. So I wanted to get feedback on a platform I was building.
Essentially it's a web platform where Devs can authenticate with their Github profiles and all their repos (non-forked) and pulled to the website to quickly create a portfolio for the users. I currently have two templates users can switch between I plan on adding more if it begins to catch on.
Besides that users will be able to message and find each based on their skills to possibly connect with one another to work on projects together.
I have a lot of features I want to implement, but it wouldn't make sense to do those things now, I would have to wait for the user base to reach a certain milestone.
So I just wanted to share it and get everyone's feedback and possibly if you see value in it to share it with their own companions
Link: http://dev-chain.herokuapp.com -
My vision is to work part time as a dev and part time as a writer about mobile app development! I only started recently to write one article each week about interesting topics or my current side projects. Previously I never thought that it would be so much fun to write about what I am doing, but I really enjoy planing and writing these articles 🥳 Maybe some day I will try my luck and apply as an iOS author at raywenderlich.
PS: I would be very glad, if you could give me feedback to my new article! 😁 Help me to achieve my vision 😜 Here is my new article about music and sound effects in a SpriteKit game for iOS:
https://medium.com/@HeyDaveTheDev/... -
I have a new dev tool I'd like feedback on. Specifically for mobile developers. My tool is called PixelPrep. It's a tool to help stream line the resizing of App Store images to fit all of the diff App Store requirements. Goole, Apple, Windows, Amazon, ect. So, I would love it if you could test it out and give me feed back, thanks! Right now, I only have Google working. Thanks!
https://www.pixelprep.io2 -
Hey guys, I'm looking for some feedback for a new website I launched socialfeedapi.com. It provides quick and easy API access to any Instagram media feed (for any public username or hashtag). Is this something that you guys think will be useful in the dev world? Is it just me, or has anyone here tried to gain access to an Instagram feed and was frustrated in doing so? Thanks in advance!7
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This is about a Videogame Dev Position, so it‘s not as terrible as other Story‘s.
I am currently helping in a German GMod Community as a Dev. I am currently developing stuff for one of their servers and not community wide. After they made the announcement that they search for more developers to be helping community wide, i wrote a little Summary of the stuff I had done and my experience, posted that on the forum as a little application.
That all was on the first of June. Thru the weeks I haven’t gotten any response other then feedback from others, not even a little “we received your application”. For a Community with the size that it has, i expected a little more, but i thought nothing bad of it and waited.
Today, June twelfth, I got the idea to ask some other people that applied as well if they also got no answer. I was pretty surprised that they had been in one talk with the Lead Dev and already did a example work.
Now i am sitting here with no answer or acknowledgement that they saw mine. It is really frustrating me and i feel walked over a little.
Phew, now i feel a little better. I will continue my wait and see what will happen.3 -
I'm a senior dev and on my new project, I am really working my a** off and enabling the other developers to concentrate on the work, while I'm handling all of the processes in the background for the client.
I couldn't really write code for a month now, but I'm okay with it because I can protect the team from dealing with all of these bs.
We have feedback discussions right now and I received something like: You are doing your job very well, but you are nagging too much about the client and the processes. Tbh I'm only complaining about this stuff behind the scenes and never in front of the client and compared to the past I reduced it by a lot.
Situations like that are so frustrating for me. I really had a good feeling that I'm on the right track and still people complain about characteristic aspects that are not happening on purpose.
I don't really invest much time into thinking if the voice/tone could have been improved.
Just needed to get this stuff out. Also, I am thinking about starting a rant book, so that I don't share any bad thoughts anymore with my colleagues /superiors3 -
Hey guys, I built a dead simple and minimal chrome extension which will give you your web page's PageSpeed Insights score in an instant. I hope this will be a real productivity booster for web dev friends.
You can get it on Chrome web store: goo.gl/vW6tRZ
Any kind of feedback is much appreciated ^_^2 -
!rant - dev prompt
What tools do you use for project file generation & similar automation?
Things like CRUD generation, for both front/backend?
Are there any open-sourced or enterprise tools, or do you have in house developed generators?
Any feedback appreciated!2 -
Here's the story of how we ended up creating our own programming language.
https://medium.com/@samir_majhi/...
I'd love to get feedback from the excellent dev community on what we did.15 -
Hey guys I need an interview tip here.
I applied to this payment processing company as an android dev. I completed almost all of the stages, they gave very positive feedback and tomorrow is the last stage (30min talk with their CTO from USA, who's been in his company for 18 years).
They told me that he wont ask many questions and he will just try to scan me and figure out the vibe. Mind that the main company is in USA and company where I'm applying is in Europe. So I guess this is a final test to see how good I'm in english in terms of speaking? Jokes on them I worked in 3 startups in Europe and I can speak better than most of my peers who never left my country lol.
What kind of questions should I ask HIM? I am able to leave a good impression, but I would also appreciate any tips on how to deal with this better. Apparently I will need to communicate with this guy from time to time in the future, as he is the head of our project.7 -
I can work productively and for very long hours with a lot of stuff which many dev considers productivity hurdles:
- single small monitor? No problem (in fact in one occasion in which my roommate accidentally broke my laptop charghing port and I couldn't get a spare I worked on an iPad connected trough SSH to a Linux machine completing one of the hardest tasks I ever did without significant loss of productivity)
- old machine? That's ok as long as I can run a minimal Linux and not struggle with Windows
- noise and chatter around me? A 10€ pair of earbuds are enough for me, no noise cancelling needed
- "legacy" stack/programming language? I'd rather spend my days coding in Swift or Rust but in the end I believe which is the dev and its skill which gets the job done not fancy language features so Java 8 will be fine
- no JetBrains or other fancy IDE? Altough some refactoring and code generation stuff is amazing Neovim or VS Code, maybe with the help of some UNIX CLI tools here and there are more than enough
despite this I found out there is a single thing which is like kryptonite for my productivity bringing it from above average* to dangerously low and it's the lack of a quick feedback loop.
For programming tasks that's not a problem because it doesn't matter the language there's always a compiler/interpreter I can use to quickly check what I did and this helps to get quickly in a good work flow but since I went to work with a customer which wants everything deployed on a lazily put together "private cloud" which needs configurations in non-standard and badly documented file formats, has a lot of stuff which instead of being automated gets done trough slowly processed tickets, sometimes things breaks and may take MONTHS to see them fixed... my productivity took a big hit since while I'm still quick at the dev stuff (if I'm able to put together a decent local environment and I don't depend on the cloud of nightmares, something which isn't always warranted) my productivity plummets when I have to integrate what I did or what someone else did in this "cloud" since lacking decent documentation everything has do be done trough a lot of manual tasks and most importantly slow iterations of trial and error. When I have to do that kind stuff (sadly quite often) my brain feels like stuck on "1st gear": I get slow, quickly tired and often I procrastinate a lot even if I force myself out of non work related internet stuff.
*I don't want this to sound braggy but being a passionate developer which breathes computers since childhood and dedicating part of my freetime on continuously improving my skill I have an edge over who do this without much passion or even reluctantly and I say this without wanting to be an èlitist gatekeeper, everyone has to work and tot everybody as the privilege of being passionate in a skill which nowadays has so much market2 -
Need advice about switching to contracting.
TL;DR;
So I had 2 years of exp as an android dev, then I had a 1.5 year gap from doing android and now for the past 6 months Ive been doing android again fulltime. Im thinking of switching to contracting due to my debts and boring project and life crushing slow corporate processes in my current fulltime job, so I need tips and advices as to where should I start looking for new contracting gigs and in general what should I pay attention to. If it helps, I am based in EU, but am open to any EU/US gigs.
Now the full story:
Initially when I joined my current fulltime job after a break I had zero confidence, lowered my and employers expectations, joined as a junior but quickly picked up the latest standards and crushed it. Im doing better than half devs in my scrum team right now and would consider myself to be a mid level right now.
Asked for a 50% bump, manager kinda okayed it but the HQ overseas is taking a very long time to give me the actual bump. I have been waiting for 10 weeks already (lots of people in the decision chain were on and off vacations due to summer, also I guess manager sent this request to HQ too late, go figure). Anyways its becoming unnaceptable and I feel like its time for a change.
Now since I have mortgage and bills to pay, even with the bump that I requested that would leave me with like maximum 700-800 bucks a month after all expenses. I have debts of around 20k and paying them back at this rate would take 3 years at least and sounds like a not viable plan at all.
Also it does not help that the project Im working on is full of legacy and Im not learning anything new here. Corporate life seems to be very slow, lots of red tape kills creativity and so on. I remember in startups I was cooking features left and right each sprint, in here deploying a simple popup feature sometimes takes weeks due to incompetence in the chain. I miss the times where I worked in startups, did my job learned nre skills and after 6 months could jump on another exciting gig. Im not growing here anymore.
So because my ADD brain seems to be suited much better for working in startups, and also I need to make more money quick and I dont see a future in current company, I am thinking of going back to contracting. All I need right now is to build a few side apps, get them reviewed by seniors and fill my knowledge gaps. Then I plan of starting interviewing as a mid level or even a senior for that matter, since I worked with actual seniors and to be honest I dont think getting up to their level would be rocket science.
Only difference between mid and senior devs that I see atleast in my current company is that seniors are taking on responsibility more often, and they also take care of our tools, such as CD/CI, pipeline scripts, linters and etc. Usually seniors are the ones who do the research/investigations and then come up with actual tasks/stories for mids/juniors. Also seniors introduce new dependencies and update our stack, solve some performance issues and address bottlenecks and technical debt. I dont think its rocket science, also Ive been the sole dev responsible for apps in the past and always did decent work. Turns out all I needed was to test myself in an environment full of other devs, thats it. My only bottleneck was the imposter syndrome because I was a self taught dev who worked most of my career alone.
Anyways I posted here asking for some tips and advices on how to begin my search for new contract opportunities. I am living in EU, can you give me some decent sites where I could just start applying? Also I would appreciate any other tips opinions and feedback. Thanks!3 -
This is a repost of an original rant posted on a request for "Community Feedback" from Atlassian. You know, Atlassian? Those beloved people behind such products as :
• Thing I Love™
• Other Thing You Used One Time™
• Platform Often Mentioned in Suicide Notes, Probably™*
Now this rant was written in early 2022 while I was working in an Azure Cloud Engineer role that transformed into me being the company's main Sysadmin/Project Manager/Hiring Manager/Network Admin/Graphic Designer.
While trying to simultaneously put out over 9000 fires with one hand, and jangling keys in the face of the Owner/Arsonist with the other, I was also desperately implementing Jira Service Desk. Normally this wouldn't have been as much of a priority as it was, but the software our support team was using had gone past 15 years old, then past extended support, then the lone developer died, then it didn't work on Windows 10, then only functioned thanks to a dev cohort long past creating a keygen....which was now broken. So we needed a solution *now*.
The previous solution was shit of a different tier. The sight of it would make a walking talking anthropomorphised sentient puddle of dogshit (who both eats and produces further dookie derivatives) blush with embarrassment. The CD-ROM/Cereal Box this software came in probably listed features like "Stores Your Customer's First AND (or) Last Name!" or "Windows ME Downgrade Disk Included!" and "NEW: Less(-ish) Genocide(s)"!
Despite this, our brain/fearless leader decided this would be a great time to have me test, implement, deploy, and train everyone up on a new solution that would suck your toes, sound your shaft, and that he hadn't reminded me that I was a lazy sack enough lately.
One day, during preliminary user testing I received an email letting me know that the support team was having issues with a Customer's profile on our new support desk. Thanks to our Owner/Firestarter/Real World Micheal Scott being deep in his latest project (fixing our "All 5 devs quit in the last 12 months and I can't seem to hire any new ones" issue (by buying a ping pong table)), I had a bit of fortuitous time on my hands to investigate this issue. I had spent many hours of overtime working on this project, writing custom integrations and automations, so what I found out was crushing.
Below is the (digitally) physical manifestation of my rage after realising I would have to create / find / deal with a whole new method for support to manage customer contacts.
I'm linking to the original forum thread because you kind of need to have the pictures embedded in said reply to get really inhale the "Jira-Rant" ambiance. The part where I use several consecutive words as anchor links to tickets with other people screaming into the void gets a bit sweet n' savoury too - having those hyperlinks does improve the je ne say what of it all.
bit.ly/JIRANT (Case Sensitive)
--------------------------
There is some good news at the end of this brown n' squirty rainbow though!
Nice try silly little Jira button, you can't ruin *my* 2022!
• I was able to forget all about Jira a month later when I received a surprise vacation home! (To be there while my Mom passed away).
• Eventually work stress did catch up to me - but my boss thoughtfully gave me a nice long vacation! (By assaulting *while* firing me (for emailing in a vacation request while he was a having a bad (see:normal) day))5 -
Are there any .NET devs here who use MacBooks as their main dev machine who can share some feedback? I really like the design of the Mac but I'm not sure whether I will be very productive on it. Other laptops I'm considering are the Razer Blade, Dell XPS or HP Spectre x3603
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been wanting to make a landing page where students in universities sign up, and they can see a leaderboard score of sign-ups per universities on the page as well. What is the best way to do this? Appreciate any feedback on this question, I am a new dev!2