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Search - "dev on fire"
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Sometimes I feel frontend development is like ancient magic:
Backend Dev: Oh no, I can't align this DIV properly.
FE Dev: No worries!
* Casts Flexius Boxius on the DIV *
* Div aligns slightly better *
BE Dev: But it's not centered!
FE Dev: No worries!
* Casts Marginis Automaticus! *
* Rolls natural 1 *
* Everything collapses *
* Website is on fire *
* Product owner cries *
FE Dev: No worries!
* Casts Flexius Boxius level 5 on the parent div *
* Everything looks beautiful *
* People are in awe *
FE Dev: You are welcome!
* Adjusts his robe and leaves *8 -
!dev
!!personal
!!abuse
I'm a victim of rather severe child abuse, both physical and mental. I've cut my mother out of my life on several occasions, and disowned her husband on father's day a few years ago. Whenever they're in my life they make things slowly but significantly worse.
They'd been using my previous hard times to push their way into my life again, and are now trying to buy their way in -- this time not into my life, but into my 2yo son's life.
I've done everything I could to keep his existence from them. I hid pregnancy from them, dropped any mew mannerisms and cute vocabulary when speaking to them, never let them see toys or hear sounds if I needed to call them, hid the carseat, etc. I did a perfect job. Out of necessity I've been hiding my life from them since I was 13, and I've never done better than this.
But they knew his name, sex, and age. This means they went digging, and a bloody lot. There is literally no public info relating him to me, and nobody that knows us would tell them, either -- they all know and understand.
For years I've refused to tell these people where I lived, too. We've been here for over five years, and three years ago they just randomly showed up at our door. I never gave them an address, and the house isn't in my name. I never had any privacy when I lived with them, either -- literally not even in the bathroom -- but now we have our own house and they still randomly intrude? asldhflakshdf
But. This Christmas Eve, we got two large boxes (fruit flats) stacked full of presents from them. A third for me, a third for my girlfriend, and a third for my 2yo. Name tags and all.
Why can't they just leave us alone? On Christmas of all holidays? Why do they have to ruin everything? Why can't they just go away?
I've made things abundantly clear, and they just. won't. stop. I feel so angry and exasperated and helpless and trapped. I went from listening to "die in a fire" to crying helplessly on the stairs. All I want is to be left alone and not harassed and blackmailed and manipulated and guilted and given expired food as "gifts."
and before you ever even think to defend them, please re-read my first three sentences.
Just.
Merry fucking Christmas.rant merry fucking christmas all i want is to be left alone child abuse i'm just done. personal why is that so much to ask?42 -
I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.
The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.
Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.
There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.
I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.
I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.
If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.
pour another glass
Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.
When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.
Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.
The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)
Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.
Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.
The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.
If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.
I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.
We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.
sip
Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.
Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.
The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.
For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.
Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.
Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.
Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.
Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.
Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.37 -
Where do I even start?
Personal projects?
So many. Shouldn't count.
Unpaid game dev intern?
Unpaid game dev volunteer?
Both worthwhile, if stressful. Shouldn't count either.
Freelancing where clients refused to pay?
That's happened a few times. One of them paid me in product instead of cash (WonderSoil, a company that [apparently still] makes and sells some expanding super potting soil thing). The product turned out to be defective and killed all of the plants I used it on. I'd have preferred getting stiffed instead. Their "factory" (small, almost tiny) was quite cool. The owner was a bitch. Probably still is.
Companies that have screwed me out of pay?
So many. I still curse their names at least once a month. I've been screwed out of about $13k now, maybe more. I've lost track.
I have two stories in particular that really piss me off.
The first: I was working at a large robotics company, and mostly enjoyed my job, though the drive was awful. The pay wasn't high either, but I still enjoyed the work. Schedule was nice, too: 28 hours (four 7-hour days) per week. Regardless, I got a job offer for double my salary, same schedule, and the drive was 11 minutes instead of 40. I took it. My new boss ended up tricking me into being a contractor -- refused to give me a W2, no contracts, etc. Later, he also increased my hours to 40 with no pay increase. He also took forever to pay (weeks to months), and eventually refused to pay me to my face, in front of my cowokers. Asshole still owes me about $5k. Should owe me the the difference in taxes, too (w2 vs 1099) since he lied about it and forced me into it when it was too late to back out.
I talked to the BBB, the labor board, legal council, the IRS (because he was actively evading taxes), the fire inspector (because he installed doors taht locked if the power went out, installed the exit buttons on the fucking ceiling, and later disconnected all of said exit buttons). Nobody gave a single shit. Asshole completely got away with everything. Including several shady as hell things I can't list here because they're too easy to find.
The second one:
The economy was shit, and I was out of a job. I had been looking for quite awhile, and an ex-coworker (who had worked at google, interestingly) suggested I work for this new startup. It was a "reverse search engine," meaning it aggregated news and articles and whatnot, and used machine learning to figure out what its users are interested in, and provided them with exactly that. It would also help with scheduling, reminders of birthdays, mesh peoples' friends' travel plans and life events, etc. (You and a friend are going on vacation to the same place, and your mutual friend there is having a birthday! You should go to ___ special event that's going on while you're all there! Here's a coupon.) It was pretty cool. The owner was not. He delayed my payments a few times, and screwed me over on pay a few more times, despite promising me many times that he was "not one of those people." He ended up paying me less than fucking minimum wage. Fake, smiling, backstabbing asshole.
The first one still pisses me off more, though, because of all the shit I went through trying to get my missing back pay, and how he conned me every chance he got. And how he yelled at me and told me, to my face, that he wasn't ever going to pay me. Fucking goddamn hell I hate that guy.8 -
I recently joined the dark side - an agile consulting company (why and how is a long story). The first client I was assigned to was an international bank. The client wanted a web portal, that was at its core, just a massive web form for their users to perform data entry.
My company pitched and won the project even though they didn't have a single developer on their bench. The entire project team (including myself) was fast tracked through interviews and hired very rapidly so that they could staff the project (a fact I found out months later).
Although I had ~8 years of systems programming experience, my entire web development experience amounted to 12 weeks (a part time web dev course) just before I got hired.
I introduce to you, my team ...
Scrum Master. 12 years experience on paper.
Rote memorised the agile manifesto and scrum textbooks. He constantly went “We should do X instead of (practical thing) Y, because X is the agile way.” Easily pressured by the client to include ridiculous (real time chat in a form filling webpage), and sometimes near impossible features (undo at the keystroke level). He would just nag at the devs until someone mumbled ‘yes' just so that he would stfu and go away.
UX Designer. 3 years experience on paper ... as business analyst.
Zero professional experience in UX. Can’t use design tools like AI / photoshop. All he has is 10 weeks of UX bootcamp and a massive chip on his shoulder. The client wanted a web form, he designed a monstrosity that included several custom components that just HAD to be put in, because UX. When we asked for clarification the reply was a usually condescending “you guys don’t understand UX, just do <insert unhandled edge case>, this is intended."
Developer - PHD in his first job.
Invents programming puzzles to solve where there are none. The user story asked for a upload file button. He implemented a queue system that made use of custom metadata to detect file extensions, file size, and other attributes, so that he could determine which file to synchronously upload first.
Developer - Bootlicker. 5 years experience on paper.
He tried to ingratiate himself with the management from day 1. He also writes code I would fire interns and fail students for. His very first PR corrupted the database. The most recent one didn’t even compile.
Developer - Millennial fratboy with a business degree. 8 years experience on paper.
His entire knowledge of programming amounted to a single data structures class he took on Coursera. Claims that’s all he needs. His PRs was a single 4000+ line files, of which 3500+ failed the linter, had numerous bugs / console warnings / compile warnings, and implemented 60% of functionality requested in the user story. Also forget about getting his attention whenever one of the pretty secretaries walked by. He would leap out of his seat and waltz off to flirt.
Developer - Brooding loner. 6 years experience on paper.
His code works. It runs, in exponential time. Simply ignores you when you attempt to ask.
Developer - Agile fullstack developer extraordinaire. 8 years experience on paper.
Insists on doing the absolute minimum required in the user story, because more would be a waste. Does not believe in thinking ahead for edge conditions because it isn’t in the story. Every single PR is a hack around existing code. Sometimes he hacks a hack that was initially hacked by him. No one understands the components he maintains.
Developer - Team lead. 10 years of programming experience on paper.
Writes spaghetti code with if/else blocks nested 6 levels deep. When asked "how does this work ?”, the answer “I don’t know the details, but hey it works!”. Assigned as the team lead as he had the most experience on paper. Tries organise technical discussions during which he speaks absolute gibberish that either make no sense, or are complete misunderstandings of how our system actually works.
The last 2 guys are actually highly regarded by my company and are several pay grades above me. The rest were hired because my company was desperate to staff the project.
There are a 3 more guys I didn’t mention. The 4 of us literally carried the project. The codebase is ugly as hell because the others merge in each others crap. We have no unit tests, and It’s near impossible to start because of the quality of the code. But this junk works, and was deployed to production. Today is it actually hailed as a success story.
All these 3 guys have quit. 2 of them quit without a job. 1 found a new and better gig.
I’m still here because I need the money. There’s a tsunami of trash code waiting to fail in production, and I’m the only one left holding the fort.
Why am I surrounded by morons?
Why are these retards paid more than me?
Why are they so proud when all they produce is trash?
How on earth are they still hired?
And yeah, FML.8 -
#3 Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?
A 20-something dev, 'A', back in the early days of twitter+facebook would post all his extracurricular activities (drinking, partying, normal young-buck stuff). The dev mgr, 'J', at the time took offense because he felt 'A' was making the company look bad, so 'A' had a target on his back. Nothing 'A' did was good enough and, for example, 'J' had the source control czars review 'A's code to 'review' (aka = find anything wrong). Not sorting the 'using' statements, and extra line after the closing }, petty things like that. For those curious, orders followed+carried out by+led by 'T' in my previous rant.
As time went on and 'T' finding more and more 'wrong' with A's code, 'J' put A on disciplinary probation. 'A' had 90 days to turn himself around, or else.
A bright spot was 'A' was working on a Delphi -> C# conversion, so a lot of the code would be green-field development and by simply following the "standards", 'A' would be fine...so he thought.
About 2 weeks into the probation, 'A' was called into the J's office and berated because the conversion project was behind schedule, and if he didn't get the project back on track, 'A' wouldn't make it 30 days. I sat behind 'A' and he unloaded on me.
<'A' slams his phone on his desk>
Me: "Whoa...whats up?"
A: "Dude, I fucking hate this place, did you hear what they did?"
<I said no, then I think we spent an hour talking about it>
Me: "That all sucks. Don't worry about the code. Nobody cares what T thinks. Its not even your fault the project is behind, the DBAs are tasked with upgrades and it's not like anyone is waiting on you. It'll get done when it's done. Sounds like a witch hunt, what did you do? Be honest."
A: "Well, um...I kinda called out J, T, and those other assholes on facebook. I was drunk, pissed, and ...well...here we are."
Me: "Geez, what a bunch of whiney snowflakes. Keep your head down and you'll get thru it, or don't. Its not like you couldn't find another job tomorrow."
A: "This is my first job out of college and I don't want to disappoint my dad by quitting. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing. All J told me was to get better. What the fuk does that even mean?"
Me: "He didn't give you any goals? Crap, for someone who is a stickler for the rules, that's low, even for J."
Fast forward 2 weeks, I was attending MS TechEd and I was with another dev mgr, R.
R: "Did you hear? We had to let 'A' go today."
Me: "What the hell? Why?"
R: "He couldn't cut it, so we had to let him go."
Me: "Cut what? What did he do, specifically?"
R: "I don't know, 'A' was on probation, I guess he didn't meet the goals."
Me: "You guess? We fire a developer working on a major upgrade and you guess? What were these so-called goals?"
R: "Whoa...you're getting a little fire up. I don't know, maybe not adhering to coding standards, not meeting deadlines?"
Me: "OMG...we fire people for not forming code? Are you serious!?"
R: "Oh...yea...that does sound odd when you put it that way. I wish I'd talk to you before we left on this trip"
Me: "What?! You knew they were firing him *before* we left? How long did you know this was happening?"
R: "Honestly, for a while. 'A' really wasn't a team player."
Me: "That's dirty, the whole thing is dirty. We've done some shitty things to people, but this is low, even for J. The probation process is meant to improve, not be used as a witch hunt. I don't like that you stood around and let it happen. You know better."
R: "Yea, you're right, but doesn't change anything. J wanted to do it while most of us were at the conference in case 'A' caused a scene."
Me: "THAT MAKES IT WORSE! 'A' was blindsided and you knew it. He had no one there that could defend him or anything."
R: "Crap, crap, crap...oh crap...jeez...J had this planned all along...crap....there is nothing I can do no...its too late."
Me: "Yes there is. If 'A' comes to you for a letter of recommendation, you write one. If someone calls for reference, you give him a good one."
R: "Yea..yea...crap...I feel like shit...I need to go back to the room and lie down."
As the sun sets, it rises again. Within a couple of weeks, 'A' had another job at a local university. Within a year, he was the department manager, and now he is a vice president (last time I checked) of a college in Kansas City, MO.10 -
Worst dev team failure I've experienced?
One of several.
Around 2012, a team of devs were tasked to convert a ASPX service to WCF that had one responsibility, returning product data (description, price, availability, etc...simple stuff)
No complex searching, just pass the ID, you get the response.
I was the original developer of the ASPX service, which API was an XML request and returned an XML response. The 'powers-that-be' decided anything XML was evil and had to be purged from the planet. If this thought bubble popped up over your head "Wait a sec...doesn't WCF transmit everything via SOAP, which is XML?", yes, but in their minds SOAP wasn't XML. That's not the worst WTF of this story.
The team, 3 developers, 2 DBAs, network administrators, several web developers, worked on the conversion for about 9 months using the Waterfall method (3~5 months was mostly in meetings and very basic prototyping) and using a test-first approach (their own flavor of TDD). The 'go live' day was to occur at 3:00AM and mandatory that nearly the entire department be on-sight (including the department VP) and available to help troubleshoot any system issues.
3:00AM - Teams start their deployments
3:05AM - Thousands and thousands of errors from all kinds of sources (web exceptions, database exceptions, server exceptions, etc), site goes down, teams roll everything back.
3:30AM - The primary developer remembered he made a last minute change to a stored procedure parameter that hadn't been pushed to production, which caused a side-affect across several layers of their stack.
4:00AM - The developer found his bug, but the manager decided it would be better if everyone went home and get a fresh look at the problem at 8:00AM (yes, he expected everyone to be back in the office at 8:00AM).
About a month later, the team scheduled another 3:00AM deployment (VP was present again), confident that introducing mocking into their testing pipeline would fix any database related errors.
3:00AM - Team starts their deployments.
3:30AM - No major errors, things seem to be going well. High fives, cheers..manager tells everyone to head home.
3:35AM - Site crashes, like white page, no response from the servers kind of crash. Resetting IIS on the servers works, but only for around 10 minutes or so.
4:00AM - Team rolls back, manager is clearly pissed at this point, "Nobody is going fucking home until we figure this out!!"
6:00AM - Diagnostics found the WCF client was causing the server to run out of resources, with a mix of clogging up server bandwidth, and a sprinkle of N+1 scaling problem. Manager lets everyone go home, but be back in the office at 8:00AM to develop a plan so this *never* happens again.
About 2 months later, a 'real' development+integration environment (previously, any+all integration tests were on the developer's machine) and the team scheduled a 6:00AM deployment, but at a much, much smaller scale with just the 3 development team members.
Why? Because the manager 'froze' changes to the ASPX service, the web team still needed various enhancements, so they bypassed the service (not using the ASPX service at all) and wrote their own SQL scripts that hit the database directly and utilized AppFabric/Velocity caching to allow the site to scale. There were only a couple client application using the ASPX service that needed to be converted, so deploying at 6:00AM gave everyone a couple of hours before users got into the office. Service deployed, worked like a champ.
A week later the VP schedules a celebration for the successful migration to WCF. Pizza, cake, the works. The 3 team members received awards (and a envelope, which probably equaled some $$$) and the entire team received a custom Benchmade pocket knife to remember this project's success. Myself and several others just stared at each other, not knowing what to say.
Later, my manager pulls several of us into a conference room
Me: "What the hell? This is one of the biggest failures I've been apart of. We got rewarded for thousands and thousands of dollars of wasted time."
<others expressed the same and expletive sediments>
Mgr: "I know..I know...but that's the story we have to stick with. If the company realizes what a fucking mess this is, we could all be fired."
Me: "What?!! All of us?!"
Mgr: "Well, shit rolls downhill. Dept-Mgr-John is ready to fire anyone he felt could make him look bad, which is why I pulled you guys in here. The other sheep out there will go along with anything he says and more than happy to throw you under the bus. Keep your head down until this blows over. Say nothing."11 -
So I've mentioned that I work in a lingerie store. I'm not ashamed of it, as I make good enough money for a 19 year old living at home and it allows me to spend my free time learning dev technologies and practices while I try to decide on a career. Not to mention I have more bras and panties then I'll ever need, so there's that...
But sometimes when I sit here watching my customers, talking to them, measuring them for bras... I just want to set the store on fire. I never would, of course. I generally like helping these women and talking g to people. Yet sometimes I feel like I am wasting away. Like a little part of my soul dies when I sell some things to some girl while I have a Linux distro download at home waiting for me. Ugh.
Anyway, this is just some pointless venting from me. As you were.40 -
tl;dr I need ideas on how to warn the next dev(s) that the company is a dumpster fire.
------
For the past week (actual time: three days) I've been writing documentation for work, since there isn't any. It's been okay, I guess. Certainly more interesting than anything else I've done at work in months.
I'm up to 10k words / 67kb of markdown, and I think I'm done. I could easily write another 30k words on everything, but I just can't care enough.
However, what I do care about is warning the next dev(s) about how terrible the place is to work, so I want to add little references or hints or other such things to my writing. To complicate that, there's a contractor dev who said he will edit the document to strip out my commentary and make it "friendly" for the next person. (I can kind of see why: I've been quite honest about the situation of everything, and it's pretty dire. If they read it as-is, they might just walk out the door. I certainly would have.) I'm also going to commit it to the repo, and afaik he doesn't have push rights, so he can't force-push and remove it. (and a force-push by someone else, adding my documentation immediately after I leave... that would be pretty fishy, too.)
Anyway, at someone's suggestion, I added a "three envelopes" reference in the access phrase generator section. I also wrote "Promises made outside of ES6 will not resolve" -- in the warning section of a document almost entirely about Rails. (because the boss has broken every single promise he has ever made me.)
What other hints and subtle warnings could I add?
(And hurry: tomorrow is my last day! ;3)question warnings run run or you'll be well done! pocket full of mumbles documentation hint: gtfo three envelopes16 -
Story time! Promised this, so making good on the promise. Eh-hem.
Misunderstandings [A slice of life short play that actually happened]
Dramatis Personae (anonymized, bc of course):
Moi ........ me, myself and possibly some lint
Robert ..... co-architect
Daisy ...... line dev
Lisa ....... also line dev
Prologue: the beginninning
[A project is starting up, new devs are coming on, including the two individuals who drive this story.
Daisy, of Indian origin, an exceptional dev and lovely person. Mother, wife, very conservative by upbringing in her early 40s.
Lisa, also exceptional dev, lovely person. Mother, also wife, self-made immigrant with liberal views derived from personal pride and self-bootstrapping]
Enter the office, We introduce everyone, off to a nice start, everyone is happy and excited to be working on [large bank project].
Lisa and Daisy form a friendship of commonality, they have similar backgrounds by all appearances and similar concerns due to children the same age and shared employment. They seem to become fast friends and things proceed normally for some months. Smooth sailing, all is well.
The fuse is lit.
Scene: Lunchtime gossip
[Robert, middle 40s architect adjacent Moi, also architect, age is my own damn business [old, so very old].]
Robert: "So, it seems like Daisy and Lisa are getting along great."
Moi: *snerfs a little, almost chokes on enchilada* Yes, yes they are, It's nice to see...
Robert: *eyebrow, having learned to read my expressions* "Aaaaaaand..."
Moi: "I adore both of them, but they are primarily friends because they don't actually understand most of what the other says"
[Lisa has a thick Taiwanese accent, Daisy has a standard northern indian accent. Never the two shall meet]
Robert: "Are you sure, they seem to have a lot of conversations?"
Moi: "Positive, you weren't at lunch with the three of us. They're polar opposite in terms of values, it'll be fine so long as that never comes up"
Robert: "I'm not even digging into that"
Moi: *flan*
Sizzle.
Scene: This is bat country
[More months pass, everything is fine, project is humming along nicely, save a few blips of personality conflicts. Moi takes a vacation. A gas station, somewhere in the middle of Wyoming, a snowstorm, a sports car full of luggage]
*phone rings*
Moi: *looks down, sees it's Robert, eyebrow raises, answer* What's on fire?
Robert: "We had to let Lisa go"
Moi: "Ah, they finally understood each other."
Robert: "Yes..." *deep sigh*
[Fade to flashback]
Bang.
Scene: The office, Lisa's desk
[Daisy and Lisa are discussing non-descript conversation. Daisy broaches the subject of Lisa's past divorce and being a single mother]
Daisy: "It must have been hard, how did you manage?"
Lisa: "I had my daughter, she was my motivation. We made it here, I met my current partner"
Daisy: "That's good! It is so hard, coming to something new. I could never imagine leaving my husband."
Lisa: "He left us, we weren't important, I don't want to marry every again"
Daisy: "Surely you do though? Marriage is great for a woman, my parents found a great husband for me."
Lisa: "Haha, lucky you. Most indian marriage is like prostitution."
[At this moment, Daisy's demeanor takes a nose dive. Whatever was actually said, what she heard was, "Indian marriage is prostitution"]
Daisy: *tears begin pouring down her face, she flings herself back in her chair, head shaking violently she screams* "I AM AN HONORABLE WOMAN!"
[Daisy runs out of the room, straight to HR. Lisa sits there, stunned, not really understanding what just happened or the consequences]
Scene: Back in bat country
[Robert finishes the story, the emotions are a mixture of hilarity at the absurdity of the situation and frustration in the work void it has created]
Moi: "Satan, well. Fuck me. Fuck us. Fuck. Is Daisy alright, is she at least staying? We can't lose two devs at the same time."
Robert: "She got a few days off, she seems fine now, but she's... yeah, I never laughed so hard"
Moi: *double facepalm* "Yeah, the word choice was a bit outrageous. It's not like we didn't know it was coming. I'm going to get back on the road."
Robert: "Alright, enjoy yourself, I'll try and prevent any other forest fires."19 -
Worst thing you've seen another dev do? So many things. Here is one...
Lead web developer had in the root of their web application config.txt (ex. http://OurPublicSite/config.txt) that contained passwords because they felt the web.config was not secure enough. Any/all applications off of the root could access the file to retrieve their credentials (sql server logins, network share passwords, etc)
When I pointed out the security flaw, the developer accused me of 'hacking' the site.
I get called into the vice-president's office which he was 'deeply concerned' about my ethical behavior and if we needed to make any personnel adjustments (grown-up speak for "Do I need to fire you over this?")
Me:"I didn't hack anything. You can navigate directly to the text file using any browser."
Dev: "Directory browsing is denied on the root folder, so you hacked something to get there."
Me: "No, I knew the name of the file so I was able to access it just like any other file."
Dev: "That is only because you have admin permissions. Normal people wouldn't have access"
Me: "I could access it from my home computer"
Dev:"BECAUSE YOU HAVE ADMIN PERMISSIONS!"
Me: "On my personal laptop where I never had to login?"
VP: "What? You mean ...no....please tell me I heard that wrong."
Dev: "No..no...its secure....no one can access that file."
<click..click>
VP: "Hmmm...I can see the system administration password right here. This is unacceptable."
Dev: "Only because your an admin too."
VP: "I'll head home over lunch and try this out on my laptop...oh wait...I left it on...I can remote into it from here"
<click..click..click..click>
VP: "OMG...there it is. That account has access to everything."
<in an almost panic>
Dev: "Only because it's you...you are an admin...that's what I'm trying to say."
Me: "That is not how our public web site works."
VP: "Thank you, but Adam and I need to discuss the next course of action. You two may go."
<Adam is her boss>
Not even 5 minutes later a company wide email was sent from Adam..
"I would like to thank <Dev> for finding and fixing the security flaw that was exposed on our site. She did a great job in securing our customer data and a great asset to our team. If you see <Dev> in the hallway, be sure to give her a big thank you!"
The "fix"? She moved the text file from the root to the bin directory, where technically, the file was no longer publicly visible.
That 'pattern' was used heavily until she was promoted to upper management and the younger webdev bucks (and does) felt storing admin-level passwords was unethical and found more secure ways to authenticate.5 -
When I quit my previous job, they hired 3 guys to replace me. One of them was a swedish guy that was completely useless. He lived in another part of the country, and our manager and a senior dev flew him in and interviewed him at the airport. That was obviously not sufficient.
I got tasked with helping him get started. The code base seen in retrospect sucked really hard, but he got the simplest tasks at first. One time he needed to add a checkbox to a form, and do something different in the BL when that box was checked. I showed him where in the code he needed to do the change, and let him on his own. 1 hour later he asked again. He hadn't even been able to place the if-statement. Omg.
I told our manager that they really should get rid of this guy, since he isn't qualified to be a developer. They didn't listen.
In Norway we have a 6 month test period where it's easier to let someone go. After that, it's quite hard to fire someone.
After a while I talked to a old colleague of mine, and they had finally been able to get rid of him. That had taken months. When he was told that he had to improve, he went to the doctor and got a sick leave. You can't fire someone on sick leave.. Finally he got the option of resigning himself, or being fired. He chose the first option..
He should have been transferred to sales. If he could sell himself as a developer, he could sell anything to anyone... :D2 -
Hi Dev Ranter,
My name is John Smith and I came accross to your resume on Linked In and I was very impressed. Would you be interested in a 5 min call?
Job Details:
Required skills (all expert levels): C#, JAVA, Clojure, C, PHP, Frontend, Backend, Agile, MVP, Baking, Redis, Apache, IIS, RoR, Angular, React, Vue, MySQL, MSSIS, MSSQL, ORACLE, PostgreSQL, Access, Python, Machine Learning, HTML, CSS, Fortran, C++, Game design, Book writing, PCI - Compliance
Salary: $15/Hours no benefits
Duration: 2 Months (possible extension, plus we can fire you at will)
Place: Remote (with work tracking software)
Hours: 5am - 1pm, 6pm - 11pm
Expect to work on weekends
You will be managing people as well as building applications that had to be running as of yesterday. Team culture is very toxic and no one cares about you.
We care about you though (as long as you deliver)
Looking forward to talk to you.
John Smith
Founder, CEO, Director of Staffing, Entrepeneur
Tech Staffers LLC ( link to a PNG posted on facebook)
Est. 202020 -
This happend to me around 2 weeks ago. For some reason, I decied to post this now.
I won the lottery, yey! I mean, bot really, but I am <19yo student, "less than junior dev" in my office, but sonce I am the only one who is capable of working with hardware, I was working month back as a sysadmin for a few days. Our last sysadmin was really good working but really, really toxic guy, so he got fired on a spot after argument with some manager or whatever, no big deal, we could have another guy hired in a week. But, our backup server literally was on fire, all data probably dead because bad capacitor or whatever. This was our only backup of everything at the time. Everyone in full fucking panic mode, we had literally no other working HW we could use for backup, but then comes me, intern employed on his first dev job for 3 months. That day I bought some HW for my own personal server at home (Intel NUC with some Celeron, 4GB DDR4 RAM and two 240GB SSDs for RAID 1. My manager asked everyone in the office for sollution how to survive next 4 days before new server arrives. People there had no idea what tk do and no knowedgle about HW, I just came from a break and offered my components for a week, since there was noone else who can work with HW, servers and stuff like this, manager offered me $500+HW cost if I, random intern, can make it work. I installed Debian on that little PC, created RAID1 from both SSDs, installed MySQL server and mirrored GIT server from our last standing server (we had two before one of them went lit 🔥), made simple Python script to copy all data on that RAID, with some help of our database guy copied whole DB from production to this little computer and edited some PHP so every SQL request made on our server will run on that NUC too. Everything after ±2 hours worked perfectly. Untill a fucking PSU burned in our server and took RAID controller with him in sillicon heaven next night, so we could not access any data unltill we got a new one. Thanks to every god out there, I was able to create software RAID from survived HDDs on our production server and copy all data from that NUC on the servers software RAID and make it working at 3 AM in the night before an exam 😂. Without this, we would be next ±40 hours without aerver running and we might loose soke of our data and customers. So my little skill with Linux, Python, MySQL and most importantly my NUC hardware I got that day running as a backup server saved maybe whole company 😂.
Btw, guess who is now employee of the year with $2500 bonus? 😀
Sorry for bragging and log post, but I was so lucky an so happy when everything worked out, good luck to all sysadmins out there! 👍
TL:DR: Random intern saved company and made some money 😂7 -
!dev && feelsbadman
I don't know what to think.
All I know is that I just went reaaaaal close to a disaster.
Friday morning, my "scariest" manager (as in, if you have to meet with him, it's usally for something serious) told me that he needed to see me on monday (so today) with the lead dev, the project manager and the dude who recruited me.
The meeting was like an arena of 4 vs 1, where they all 4 had problem with the work I do, as in I make a lot of small but stupid mistakes that wastes everyone's time. As an excuse, I suffer from sleep apnea so I wake up as tired I am when I go to sleep, and I snore loud as fuck. I've heard some records, it's not even human. (I'm 1m85-ish for 125 kg, it's BIG but with my morphology it's not like I'm a ball of fat)
Anyway. And since it's not the first time they're reproaching me this kind of stuff, they were all... really angry. Because I'm a nice guy, competent and all but not productive enough and easily distracted.
So, when the manager asked me to meet me, it was to fire me. However, during the lunch break, the lead dev found a solution: I get out of the current project I was in until this morning, and I write all the functional tests for all the projects, because they all lack quality and we sometimes deliver regresses.
They proposed me this in a way I could refuse, and I'd get fired because they had no other options. Obviously, I said yes, I'm not stupid enough to decline a possibilty to avoid a monstruous shitstorm that would have cut me my studies, the money for taxes, and a lot of fun to find a job as fast as possible.
But what surprised me the most is that they were genuinely glad I accepted, like, even though I made my shit ton of mistakes, they weren't pleased at all to get rid of me.
And in a way, I'm the one who won in this story, since I don't have to work with Drupal anymore, excepted to parse the website to write my tests, but my nightmare fuel is finally gone *.*
I don't know where to finish with this rant, but I needed to vent this whole thing, to write it somewhere so I can move forward.
I wish y'all a nice week.3 -
Summary: Burnout, and everything's broken.
I don't feel like doing a damn thing today. I look at the code and cringe. I look at Slack and think "ugh. i can't." Mental capitals are even too much work.
(I've started reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" to try and combat burnout. I'll write a rant/story about it here if I find it helpful. but all I want to do today is drink tea and read.)
But onto the story:
Heroku is deprecating support for and will automatically upgrade any old verisons of Postgres running on its platform after August something (like five days from now).
I performed the upgrade to PG10 on Sunday (and late into the night), provisioning a new follower, blah blah blah.
However, the version of Rails we're using (4.2.x) doesn't support PG10 sequences, so I manually added in support via a monkeypatch. I did this on our QA servers first, obviously, and everything worked as expected. After half a day of no issues, I did the same on production, and again: everything worked as expected.
But today? I keep hearing about new things that are broken. One specific type of alert doesn't work for one specific person (wat). Can't send [redacted] at all. Can't update merchants! Yet there are magically no errors logged.
That last one (well, two) are just great; let me explain: when there's an error concerning merchants, the error gets caught, isn't logged or recorded anywhere so it just disappears, and the rescue block triggers a json response instead and happily exits. This is for an internal admin tool, so returning a user-friendly error is kinda stupid anyway, but masking what actually happened? fuck that dev with an obelisk made from spikes and solidified pain. That json response is also lovely: it's a 200 OK returning {status: 1, data: "[generic message containing incorrect IT jargon]"}. Doesn't even say "error" anywhere. Bloody everything about this pattern is absolutely wrong. Even the friggin' text.
Fucking hell. I want to pipe the entire codebase into shred and walk out the door.
But I digress. So many things are broken, my motivation is wanning to a sliver, and I have a conference call today where I'll undoubtedly be asked why everything is on smoking and/or on fire, and my huge and overly productive week last week will ofc mean nothing by contrast.
Ugh.
`shred ~/dev/work -zfu -n 32 &; ./brew tea --hot && wine ~/takeabreak.exe`rant zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance postgres heroku ship's sinking and the fixer's all fixed out burnout21 -
[Little perspective: For the last 7 months I'm working in a certain project.]
[The project is full of unimaginative, non-creative devs with 0 initiative and poor technical background.]
[And they're almost all from one country which you all can figure out.]
[But I'm not going to mention it here because I don't want to come up as a racist]
[So there's US (Europeans) and THEM. 3 of US and about 10 of THEM. And we're doing 90% of all the heavy lifting]
---
Yesterday
---
D (Dev from THEM): Hi S, I have a problem with my task
Me: (sighing) Ok let's have a call
* on the call with D we were checking some stuff loosely related to task *
* code wouldn't get invoked at all for some reason *
* suddenly I realize that even if the code would invoke, D's probably doing everything wrong in it anyway *
Me (thinking): I need to double check something.
Me: I can't help you now, I'll get back to you later.
* call ended *
---
Me: Hey J, I need your help, I need to clarify the work package in my mind, because I am no longer sure.
J (my European TL): Ok, fire away.
* call started *
Me: Is it true that [blahblahblah] and so D's task depends on me completing first my task, or am I losing my mind?
J: That is correct.
Me: Well she's trying to do this in [that] way, which is completely wrong.
J: You see, that's how it is in this project, you do refinements with them, split these work packages to tasks, mention specifically what depends on what and what order should things be taken in, and in some cases all tasks from given user stories should be done by one person entirely... But they do it their way anyway, assign different people to different interdependent tasks, and these people don't even understand the big picture and they try to do the things the way they think they understand them.
Me: It's a fire in a brothel.
J: Yup.
Me: I fucking love this project.
J: (smiling silently)
* call ended *
---
Me: Ok D, you can't do your task because it's dependant on my task.
D: Oh... so what do I do?
Me: I don't know, do something else until I do my task.
---
A (THEIR TL) (Oh, did I forget to mention that there are 2 TLs in this project? THEY have their own. And there are 2 PMs as well.)
A: Hey S, I need to talk
Me: (sighing, getting distracted from work again) Ok let's have a call
* call started *
A: S, we need this entire work package done by Friday EOD.
Me: I can't promise, especially since there are several people working on its several tasks.
A: D's working on hers for 3 days already, and she's stuck. We want you to take over.
Me: (sighing, thinking "great"): Ok.
* call ended *
---
Me: Hey D, A instructed me to take over your task. This is actually going to be easier since you'd have to wait for mine after all.
D: Oh, ok.
---
* I switched the Assigned Person on D's task to myself on Azure *
---
This morning, email from D.
"Hey, I completed my task and it's on [this] branch, what do I do now?"
........................................
Me, hesitating between 2 ways to reply:
(and take note there are people in CC: A, J, P - the last one is THEIR PM)
1) "Hi, Unfortunately you'd still have to wait for my changes because your task is dependent on my task - the column to be changed is in the table that I am introducing and it's not merged to develop branch yet. By the way I already did your task locally, as I was instructed to do it, I'm wrapping things up now."
(y'know: the response which is kind, professional, understanding; without a slight bit of impatience)
2) WHAT FUCKING PART OF "DON'T DO THIS I WILL FUCKING DO IT MYSELF GO HOME JUST GO HOME" YOU DON'T FUCKING UNDERSTAND4 -
Best : I moved on from Dev to SecOps and got a well paid job in a small company closer to my home. With three office dogs.
Really, the dogs are the main thing there. The money is just an additional benefit.
Worst : my Dev life keeps getting less and less relevant for me. In the last two years, I started volunteering a lot (local volunteer fire department and then some), investing into several side businesses that start paying off now, generally doing as much non-dev stuff as possible.
I wanted to do this since I was a kid, I'm good at it, but I keep finding other things to do, because they're more interesting and more of a challenge.
Honestly, the one thing that keeps me in IT is sunk cost fallacy.
Hell, I'm thinking about becoming a paramedic or something, at least I'll be helping people instead of entertaining managers.4 -
I work for "a" company. This company has completely broken my desire to improve user experiences.
For instance, they have fetishized reducing the amount of clicks users have to go through to improve user productivity. Normally this is good, in their grossly mutated views, not so much.
They want ALL the data on a single page, and want people to use ctrl+f to find whatever they want on these pages instead of, ya know, a site-wide search(which fucking exists).
So this makes page times and UX horrible, some pages will take upwards of 2 minutes to completely load. 2 fucking minutes! My team and I had reduced these down to 15 seconds by reducing the data displayed and paginating it using some awesome JS lazy load functions. Not great by any real metric, but still a huge improvement.
You know who uses it out of 400 employees? Me. You know who still constantly gets complaints that the pages load really fuckin slowly? Still me!
Fuck these dumb asses and their retarded ideologies. They are stuck so far up 1990s ass they can practically TASTE Clintons' taint.
The culture is so toxic for developers it's absolutely abhorrent and depressing.
There is no freedom to do what you need to do because you're too busy doing the things they ask you to do. Follow that up with quarterly performance reports that bring up questions like, "What do you do for us?".
The only positive to working in this shithole is that they wouldn't dare fire you because they would never find anyone that would stay long enough to become an expert on this pile of shit. Over the last year we have gone through an entire 16 dev team, twice. That's 36 developers that just straight up quit in 12 months, and it's not like any of them worked together either. I would say 3-4 out of the first group met the second group, and 1-2 stuck around for the current group.
I don't normally rant like this, but I've been holding this shit in for a very long time and I can't hold it in.3 -
I spent four hours just getting my dev environment working again today.
Whenever I switch branches on this project, I keep to run a script that does migrations, seed data, test db setup, static test info, etc. etc. etc. It takes 12-15 minutes to run.
Today, that script failed.
Apparently one of its steps requires running some of the project's code to produce valid objects. Makes sense. However, my ticket involves breaking a crapton of models (removing accessors) which I've already done, and then patching the behavior, which I haven't. Which means a lot of things are currently broken. Makes sense why the script fails.
However, I can't run the script on a different branch and then switch back because that simply doesn't work (for reasons), so I needed to find some workaround. I eventually did, but every attempt cost me 12 minutes.
Today was not fun, and certainly not productive.
I wonder when they're going to fire me 😅7 -
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’m fucking done….
I don’t even know what to tell.
I’m a CTO in a startu. We have pretty good traction, my salary is about average senior dev salary (plus 10%).
I’m good financially.
But I have no more pleasure in work. Like at all.
“This API call performance is bad”
Yeah I know, maybe you shpuldn’t try to call it for 1000 objects at the time ?
“We need to reduce Azure cost”
Yeah I know, but are you ready to live with performances downgrade it will generate ?
“I don’t understand on what thing you worked past week, where is a devops card ?
Fuck you, I’m in extenuating fire mode, I don’t have time for a fucking devops card
“We should migrate whole stack to modern technology, like JavaScript”
Thank you for your imput, Blazor WAS created to avoid JabaScript
“The client has only 1.000.000 records and API doesn’t return them all”
Use fucking paging moron. And BTW, I’m adding “number of authorized requests” shortly.
I can go on and on and on for hours. But the idea is : I completely lost the will or motivation to do anything. I’m considering just to quit and go back to be Junior dev for a random company.9 -
In the Ruhr area (Germany) we have some very old, very strange words with strange meanings. One of those words is ‚Prutscher‘.
A Prutscher refers to a person who does things but never gets a good result, due to lack of knowledge or simple carelessness. Most of the time, Prutschers are people who are interested in certain subjects and often work in the related jobs, but who lack the motivation to properly train themselves, learn what there is to learn and to always keep up with their technologies .
Here are a few examples I've stumbled upon so far in my career:
- Developers in their 60's who read a book about PHP 25 years ago and decided to become a software developer. Since then haven't read anything about it. Who then now build huge spaghetti monoliths for large companies, in which they prefix every function, every variable and constant with their initials and, of course, use Hungarian notation.
- People who read half a fucking tutorial about <insert any fancy js framework here> and start blogging/tweeting about it
- Senior web developers who need to be told what the fuck CORS is and who can't even recognize CORS related errors in their browser console.
- People who have done nothing else for 18 years than building websites for companies on Wordpress 1.x and writing few lines of PHP and Javascript from time to time. Those who are now applying as a frontend dev due to the difficult economic situation and are surprised that they are not accepted due to a lack of experience.
- Developers who are the only ones working on Windows in the team and ask their Linux colleagues for help when Windows starts bitchin.
- People who have been coding for 30 years, have worked with ~42 languages and don't know the difference between compiled and interpreted languages in the job interview.
- Chief developers at a large newsletter-publisher who think it's a good idea to build your own CMS (due to a lack of good existing ones, of course).
- Developers who have been writing PHP applications for multinational corporations for 25 years and cannot explain how PHP is executed. They don't even know what the fucking OPcache is, let alone fpm. FML
- People who call themselves professional developers but never ever heard of DRY, KISS, boy-scout rule, 12-Factor App, SOLID, Clean Code, Design Patterns, ...
- Senior developers wondering why the bash script won't run on their fucking Windows machine.
- Developers who consider Typescript to be a hindrance and see no value in it.
- Developers using ftp for deployments in 2022
- Senior Javascript Developer applying for a job and for whom Integer is a primitive data type in JS.
- Developers who prefer to code without frameworks and libraries because they are only an unnecessary burden/overhead and you can quickly code everything up yourself.
- Developers who think configuring their server(s) manually is a good idea.
You fucking Prutscher. What you have already cost me in terms of work and nerves. I can't even put it into words how deeply I despise you. I have more respect for the chewing gum that has been stuck in my damn trash can for the past 3 years than I do for you guys. You are the disgrace of our profession. I will haunt you in your dreams and prefix every fucking synapse of your brain with MY initials.
As a well-known german band once sang in a very fitting song: I wouldn't even piss on you if you were on fire.
If you recognized yourself in one of the examples here: FUCK YOU!29 -
Worst exp. on a collab/group project?
Had a few, here is one.
Worked with a dev team (of two devs) in Norway to begin collaboration on providing a portal into our system (placing orders, retrieving customer info, inventory control, etc)
They spoke very good English, but motivation was the problem. Start the day around 10:00AM...take a two hour lunch...ended the day at, if I was lucky, 4:00PM (relative to Norway time). Response time to questions took days, sometimes weeks. We used Skype, which helped, but everything was "Yea...I'll do that tomorrow...waiting on X....I have a wedding to go to, so I'll finish my part next week."
I didn't care so much, I had other projects to do, but the stakeholders pounded me almost everyday demanding a progress report (why aren't you done yet...etc..etc.)
The badgering got so bad I told the project owner (a VP) if he wanted this project done by the end of the year, the company would have to fly me to Norway so I personally push things along.
When real money was on the line, he decided patience was warranted.
A 3 month project turned into 9, and during a phone meeting with the CEO in December
O: "Thanks guys, this project is going great. We'll talk again in February. Bye."
PM: "Whoa...what! February!"
<sounding puzzled>
O: "Um..yes? It's Christmas time. Don't you Americans take off for Christmas?"
PM: "Yes, but not until Christmas. Its only December 12th. Your taking the whole month of December and January for Christmas?"
O:"Yes, of course. You Americans work too hard. You should come over here and see how we celebrate. Takes about a month so we can ease back into the flow of things."
<Jack is the VP>
PM: "Jack wanted this project completed by the end of the year, that is what everyone agreed to."
O:"Yes, I suppose, but my plane is waiting on me. Not to worry, everything will be fine."
<ceo hangs up>
PM: "Oh shit..oh shit..oh shit. What are you going to do!?"
Me: "Me!?..not a darn thing. Better go talk with Jeff."
<Jeff is the VP>
J: "This is unacceptable. You promised this project would only take a few months. I told you there would be consequences for not meeting the deadline."
PM:"But..but...its not our fault."
J: "I don't care about fault. I care about responsibility. I've never had to fire anyone for not meeting a deadline, but .."
Me: "Jeff, they are in Norway and no one is working this project for the next two months. You've known for months about them dragging their asses on this project. We're ready to go. Services have been tested and deployed. Accounting has all the payment routing ready. Only piece missing is theirs."
J: "Oh. OK. Great job guys. I guess we'll delay this project until February."
<leave the office>
PM: "Holy shit I'm glad you were there. I thought I was fired."
Me: "Yea, and that prick would have done it not giving a crap that it's Christmas."
<fast forward to Feb>
O: "Our service provider fell through, so I'm hosting with another company. You guys know PHP? Perl? I don't know what they called it, but it sounded so cool I bought the company."
PM: "You bought what? Are we still working with Z and B?"
O:"Yea, sort of. How's your German? New guy only speaks German."
PM: "Um, uh... no one here speaks German"
O:"Not to worry, I speak German, French, and Italian. I'll be your translator."
PM: "What? French and Italian?"
O: "On my trip to France I connected with a importer who then got me in touch with international shipper in Italy. I flew over there and met a couple really smart guys than can help us out. My new guy only speaks German, J only speaks French, and R speaks Italian, Russian, and a little English. Not to worry, I'm full time on this project. You have my full attention."
We believe the CEO has/had some serious mental issues, including some ADD. He bailed within the first month (took another vacation to Sweden to do some fishing) and left me using Google Translate to coordinate the project. Luckily, by the end, the Norwegian company hired a contractor from England who spoke German and hobbled together the final integration.3 -
So I work as a "Web Development Lead"
Which means I lead (frontend,backend and infrastructure teams)
Also I am in charge of infrastructure or devops or whatever you call it, which means I handle production issues, dev and staging environments,...etc
and I am a team of one, and today I asked for a day off because it's my wife's birthday
and suddenly everyone is blocked, everything is on fire, and the phone is not stopping ringing, I had to go out of the cinema theater to answer the non-stopping calls
I AM ASKING FOR A SINGLE DAY, A FUCKING DAY, EVEN IF SOMEONE IS BLOCKED SO WHAT IT'S NOT EVEN A DAY I ONLY NEED 6 HOURS
IS TO TOO MUCH FUCKING TO ASK4 -
I was working on a team with people with various employment statuses. Contractors, employees of the client, and me as a regular full time employee of the company that “owned” the contract. My HR manager gave us a presentation about our reporting structure. I had at least seven managers for different reasons across various projects.
I got a new position so needed to resign but I had no idea which managers were the ones I should notify. I looked at the org chart that the HR lady showed. I sent my resignation to five managers that would be affected by my leaving. Unknown to me my project manager was actually a contracting manager hired by the client. He let his employer, the client, know that the lead dev quit.
Apparently it destabilized the contract for my employer. If I hadn’t just issued resignation they would have fired me for telling a customer about a significant internal staffing change. They didn’t fire me because the optics would have been worse for them.2 -
!dev
I come from a small shitty valley where all that people want to achieve is getting approved for loans to buy more cows and shit.. My only friend comes from there as well but he’s different, more like me.. build a life, get out and pursuit something better and bigger..
We grew up smoking everything we could and drinking everything we got because what else are we gonna do, put shit on fire? Been there, done that.. it sucks growing up on the poop hole of the world.
We both left that shithole and started careers but he’s throwing it all out the window.. he’s getting caught with weed, DUI and shit. just a few years ago he got off of more serious drugs.. He built a career and shit for about 10 years but right now he’s just throwing it all away because drugs are in his comfort zone. But he has to go give Pias samples for a while now and if he doesn’t stop he is not getting his license back and the unemployment insurance won’t even pay him because (although he lost the job because of Covid) they said it’s because he smokes weed.
Without the license goes his career as he’s a service electrician.
So fucking hurtful to see, man.
And so hard to accept that he won’t listen and than I’m not his dad who can tell him what to do..
90% of the kids I grew up with who managed to leave that shit hole ended up as homeless junkies.. I guess I’m happy to have the mindset to not end up like them.. and that’s really all it is, the mindset is the only difference (which is complex in itself of course like parenting and stuff)5 -
I started at a company to develop an "uber" clone. Hired by the company's cto. I was happy initially as i had been unemployed for a while but that's because i didn't see the shitstorm coming. The task was build this using php, well 2 weeks later and db locking issues because mysql only allows 100 connections and the website takes over 200mb per request, i tried using the meteor framework, a lil better but the orphaned process would require me to reboot every 2 days. So enter erlang, built in 3 weeks works amazing problems none here... Well in comes the cto (which came in once a week). Apparently he had been reviewing my code and didn't understand it. He couldn't understand no for loops etc and demanded that it be made understandable to a normal dev. Did normal devs write uber no. Anyhow i spent the next 6 Weeks refactoring trying to make elixir looks like imperative programming, he finally gave up, so now I'm deep committed writing an API, finish in a week cto comes in and "why aren't you using patch" i don't need it, well another day implanting a patch api that will never be used. Ok done. Now we have a meeting with the investors who i worked in the same building with and they want a frontend built. I explained i was a backend dev and they needed a uiux expert. Next week cto comes back with this jquery fire pit and stolen bootstrap theme and take me with implementing it. This time we scrap the api change some of the backend logic and implement rest from the 90s one static page per request. After 3 months working with jquery I'm let go because of finical issues. I told them i was a backend dev but they didn't listen if the cto would've gotten a frontend expert things would be different but what to expect from a cto who's coding legacy is creating WordPress plugins.
Hopefully things will be better soon I'm tired of living on the streets.5 -
So... I've got a confession to make.
I'm no longer a Dev. After the disaster that was my last commercial gig, I went and got a sec Ops role... And I love it. It's just technical problem solving and explaining all the way.
Don't get me wrong, I still love to code. But that's exactly the thing. As a commercial developer employed by corporations, I spent close to 80 % of my time not coding, but in useless meetings, or trying to figure out just what my colleagues thought was "common sense", reverse engineering their work and documenting how to get it running, etc. Basically, fixing shit for braindead academics with next to no real world experience.
Now, when I code, I get to do it on my own terms, with my own stack and as much comments and docs as I want to have. I own my time, and the only ones that are allowed to interrupt me is the local fire department.
I can do what I'm fucking passionate about and leave the rest for the useless people.4 -
that one legendary guy who cranks out code and builds insane features. PMs (product management) love him because he builds features in several months which 10 devs together couldn't have built in the same time (so they say), features that are loved by customers as well, become their new standard and that have saved our company's asses in the past.
features are really awesome, performant and have very few bugs (compared to the rest of the software シ).
but this guy seems to live for this job. he also works at weekends, at unholy times of day and night and even in his holidays (he doesn't care that this is actually illegal, in terms of employee's rights, and he wouldn't listen to his superiors, no matter what they tell him)
so far, so good - except that he will probably die of some stroke or something very soon due to this lifestyle.
but it must be an absolute pain in the ass to work with him, as long as you're a developer (or his superior).
he lives in his own world and within the software, his features are also his own world. since the different modules interact with each other, sometimes you would be assigned a bug that might have its cause in some interaction of your and his module. talk with him about it? forget it. he wouldn't answer most devs who contacted him for some reason. ever. fix it in his module yourself? might happen that he just reverts your changes to his module without comments. so some bugs would lie on your desk forever because theoretically you know what would need to be done but if you cannot reach out into HIS world, there's no way to fix it. also - his code might be good in terms of performance and low bug numbers. but it seems to be hard to work on that code for everybody else but him.
furthermore, he is said to be really rude. he is no team player, but works on a software that is worked on by a huge team.
PMs think he's a genius, just a great dev, but they don't understand that other devs need to clean up the mess behind or around him.
everyone who's been his superior so far recommends to get him fired, but the company wouldn't fire him because they don't want to lose his talent. he can just do what he wants. he can even refuse to work on certain things because he thinks they are boring and he is not interested in them. devs seem to hate him, but my boss said, they are probably also a bit jealous because of his talent. i think, he's not wrong. :)
i haven't actually met him so far or was actually "forced" to deal with him, but i've never heard so many contrastive things about one person, the reputation of his, let's say vibrant personality really hurries ahead. he must be a real genius, after all i've heard so far, like he lives in the code. i must say i'm a bit curious but also somewhat afraid of meeting him one day.
do you also have such a guy at your company?11 -
iOS dev here
Just wanted to share my experience on updating Xcode and why I schedule 3 hours for this process.
So, updating Xcode via the AppStore has always been flaky at best and ofcouse Xcode needs to be closed first. You hit update, the button turns gray, half an hour in you still see no progress...
That's why I often just download it from the dev center. But since Xcode Ghost the app is also wrapped in a signed container.
So,
Downloading: 10 minutes
Expaning: 60 minutes!!!
After that I move the app in place and fire it up, always have to close my music player first grrr...
After that Gate Keeper verifies the app for another 60 minutes.
Finally Xcode comes to live.
Only need to install new command line tools for another few minutes and I can continue coding.
Wait. Half my day is over!
Why Apple? Why?
#wk242 -
Name a more iconic duo than web developers on help sites and having pissing contests over which modules they use instead of actually answering the question!
I've been a web dev/server admin for all of about a month now, and only known PHP for about a week of that, and the one thing really that grates on me isn't PHP's odd function naming inconsistencies or at times outright trash documentation, it's the other developers who, when asked a fairly straightforward question about why a mysqli function won't return something, demand you use PDO instead.
Please. I'm running a LEMP stack on a Raspberry Pi here, I'm trying to keep dependencies to an absolute minimum because the SD card is tiny, the Pi will catch on fire if it runs any hotter, and more dependencies are more potential points of failure. Just answer the damn question. I'm not going to install PDO for something I know I can do anyway just because it makes my code look slightly prettier.
Honourable mention to all you Node.js developers out there too, with your thousands of useless npm dependencies. I salute you.8 -
It began when I was tasked with creating a better and more engaging experience for our new Facebook page. This was in Facebook's early days, so there were not really any "best practices". We were making it up as we went along. I decided one way would be to game-ify things, since gaming, at the time, was a Big Deal on Facebook and people were starting to use it to build customer funnels.
Grasping for low-hanging fruit, I decided a Tetris variant around our topic would be fun. I had to hire a dev because at the time I was a static HTML web developer just getting into social media management. I knew nothing about game development or how to use Facebook's API for such things.
Long story short, we got about $10,000 (FB app devs came at a premium then) into the project when I came across a very recent article about the history of Tetris games. It said that even though Tetris had once been considered for all intents to be public domain due to it being created by a Russian coder during the Cold War, it had just been acquired by an IP protection entity that was charging royalties for any variant of Tetris created from a specific date onward and paying the original developer. So, even though I thought I had been thorough in my initial permissions checking, it turned out we were gonna be in deep doo-doo with licensing fees and restrictions if we released this game to the public.
I had to call my boss and admit my error. She was FURIOUS and really gave me an ass-chewing over it. I then had to call the marketing person whose budget I'd been slaving away at wasting. She was a bit more forgiving (her budget was in the millions). Then I had to call the corporate legal department and explain what was going on. They told me to immediately pay any outstanding hours, then fire the dev but not before getting him to send me all code and assets, deleting his copy, and then, upon my receipt of those assets, deleting MY copy so that nothing of it ever existed. And I was supposed to say _nothing_ to the dev about why he was being let go, so that there would be no "trail" leading back to this fiasco. (The dev hounded me for weeks asking what he'd done wrong. It killed me that I was bound and gagged by corporate legal and couldn't tell him.)
I was in so much trouble. I was literally in tears over it. I'd never wasted that much money in my life. That incident pretty much sealed my fate as far as any trust my bosses ever put in me again (not much at all). I was a bit of a pariah in a lot of ways for the next 5 years whereas I had come onto the team as a young social media rockstar at first.
After that, and a couple of other bad scenarios that were less my fault and more due to a completely dysfunctional management and reporting structure, they eventually "transferred" me to another team. Which was really just a way of getting rid of me by sending me to a department that was already starting to outsource overseas and lay people off. It was less messy that way. I was in the first set of layoffs.
Since then, I've had a BIG fear of EVER joining a large corporation EVER again. I prefer to work for small businesses now, even if I get paid less. Much less stressful from an office politics and impact of mistakes standpoint.3 -
!dev
I have a couple of thoughts about social justice controversies from these last years.
I think it's hard to have a good opinion about these events for several reasons.
One reason is that finding good information in 2019 is very hard.
Revenue based sites (thus unneutral) dominate the search results. You search about something and you find thousands of sites basically saying the same thing (because they copy each other).
That's why the existence of a free and open search engine is so important, so it's easier to find neutral hence good information on which to base your opinions, but they are prohibitively big for small groups to build.
Another reason is that controversies generate shock and shock curtails rational thinking. Maybe that's how the primitive brain works?
I'm not much of a scholar to feel confident to say that, but it's so recurrent that it's not too much of a wild guess.
When a controversy happens, a natural reaction is to pick a side. This means that:
a) we assume that there are only 2 sides, and
b) we must pick one of them
So, maybe the human is a bad politician by nature?
Also, because of the shock controversies generate, peaceful dialogue is very rare.
I have yet to see peaceful dialogue online about what patriarchy means to feminists and a lot of other terms they use.
I don't care much about feminists that vandalize or interrupt talks (yelling over someone else is abuse in my opinion).
But for the rest of them, I think discussing their ideas would be good.
I say this because most feminist discourse I see online is not open. Or maybe there are such instances but the web is so big that it's hard to find such instances.
I think some part of the modern feminist doctrine is bullshit, and some part is true.
I for one hate when some men I know in life expect their wives to be their cooks+cleaners (unless they want to do that, willingly). Personally, I'd encourage my wife to get a job (rightfully so, not just to meet some minority quota in some company).
I don't mind either calling a trans person the pronoun she wants.
But other ideas are awful, like the idea that meritocracy is patriarchy, so you need to force minorities to meet a proportionate quota. That's terrible reasoning.
Or the excessive self appreciation culture, like saying to yourself "you are pretty, you are beautiful, you are perfect". I think that grows arrogance and black-or-white thinking.
And some other ideas as well.
I guess the same you can say about any doctrine with different degrees. Some part is bullshit, some part isn't.
Some right wing people hate everyone who isn't white by default, but some want to have more immigration control.
I sure don't like the experiment of separating children from families like the current us govt did, but I wouldn't be happy either to know that by '99 50% of gangs members in the us were hispanic.
With this, I'm not going to say "embrace everyone's ideas" like an idiot. I hate when people do that. It's a stupid and weak reaction to radicalism.
In fact I think the way you fight radicalism and bad doctrines is that you listen to them and maintain good dialogue and counterargue in a respectful but insightful manner.
Making snide remarks, insulting or trolling won't change anyone's mind. That is just throwing fire to the fire.
In fact, when someone gets harassed because of something they believe in, usually it results in even more adherence to their beliefs, because of the usual assumption that success or goodness is full of strife.
So by telling a "sjw" or kkk member that they are idiots over twitter, you are in fact making them stronger believers in their doctrine.
Think of Daryl Davis, a black guy that made 200 members leave the kkk. How? He didn't tell them they were assholes, he somehow made friends with them.
I feel bad now because I've been trolling new devrant users a lot because of how they worsen the quality of the site, but maybe I should tell them that they are ruining the site somehow in a nice way and maybe they'll listen? I dunno...23 -
caution: just some dude sharing a random story.
started my own small business around half a year now. a month earlier from that my cousin also started his career as a self employed dev with his own small business and we work together.
next year we we will start a company together, where we merge our existing small businesses into one. we are developing software on our own and we design and implement software for our customers.
seems like we are doing something right because we are reaching our capacities almost all of the time.
we plan to hire apprentices (hope it's the right word) and to teach them all we know to be able to then increase our possible workload.
you know, I do not have a degree or some form of education in the field of IT. And here in germany it was almost impossible to land a job as a dev. needed my cousin who studied cs to get me my first position in that field - and even with his reputation it was not easy.
this shit will not happen on my watch. If I see someone with fire for development I will give them a chance, irrespective of their background. And I will be more than happy to let that person grow and to give every kind of support I can.
we also plan to have something like "if the employee has a good idea for software that sells, we will support it and share revenue". got to figure out the details on that one, but I want to give the employee the possibility to grow some passive income out of their normal job - because for me this was never an option. and I think that this will motivate in some way 😅
just wanted to get this out of my head 😣4 -
Employers and clients think developers come up with genius solutions while in offices, hell no!
Most of the genius solutions come when a Dev is showering, gaming, peeing, pooping etc. So don't fire me cause I am playing Dota 2 on my laptop. Am innovating bit*h7 -
Dev trend I think will pass?
Creating new frameworks on this dumpster fire of a language we call JavaScript.10 -
!rant
MASSIVE UPGRADE ROUND 2:
We took it by steps, the DBA did his portion and I did mine, we had waited for the entire thing to be finalized today on Sunday since our users are probably jerking off to their waifus (as they should) and today was my part. MA BOE the DBA was with me the entire time and the whole process took us about 4 hours of both of us getting multiple heart attacks here and there and praying to the elder gods of Asgard for their devine protection as we venture into the calamity of fire and juten ass mfkers that are our fucking servers for this particular process.
Man I really hope for the pandemic to be over and take my dude out for a nice beer, some wings and some relaxation time.
Best DB/Dev team I have ever been with.7 -
We spent 9 hours taking a vote, across all of the dev team (including junior devs), about how to design the backend architecture and which security measures we should take.
The CTO refused to listen to the person assigned to the design (me at the time) because he preferred fire-and-forget for EVERYTHING, ignoring all of the blatant drawbacks, and claimed that "there is no truly fault tolerant system", which is such a cop-out that my mind still cannot fathom it.
So therefore, since he couldn't have it his way, we took it to a vote (not my decision). Spent nine hours discussing the pros and cons of HTTP vs MQ systems to arrive at a vote.
I "won", and then left the company shortly after, because it was clear that even though the votes were in my favor, I was going to be "nickel and dimed" to death about the changes and how it's deployed, etc. to the point the system will end up like the previous systems they wrote.
Oh and the fact I was asked to help "improve morale" for the team that was working on the old, broken, overengineered project (I don't manage them nor did I write any of that code) by being assigned to arrange breakfast catering because it'd somehow mean more "coming from a senior dev".
I loved the people there - truly, some of the best people - but the company was broken from the ground to the ceiling.
CTO was let go a while after I left, I guess - most of the dev team has since left too and the majority of their work is being outsourced to Indian subcontractors. -
This isn't a funny rant or story. It's one of becoming increasingly unsure of the career choices I've made the path they've led me down. And it's written with terrible punctuation and grammar, because it's a cathartic post. I swear I'm a better writer than this.
The highlights:
- I left a low-paying incredibly stable job with room to grow (think specialized office worker at a uni) to become a QA tester at a AAA game studio, after growing bored with the job and letting my productivity and sometimes even attendance slip
- I left AAA studio after having been promoted through the ranks to leading an embedded test tools development team where we automated testing the game (we got to create bots, basically!) and the database, and building some of the most requested tools internally to the company; but we were paid as if we were QA testers, not engineers, and were told that wouldn't change; rather than move over or up, I moved out to a better paying, less fabulous web and tools development job for a no-name company
- No-name company offered one or two days remote, was salaried, and close to home. CTO was a fan of long lunches and Quake 3 Arena 1-2 hours at the end of every day. CTO position was removed, I got a lot of his responsibilities, none of his pay, and started freelancing to learn new skills rather than deal with the CFO being my boss.
- Went to work as a freelancer for an email marketing SaaS provider my previous job had used. Made loads of money, dealt with an old, crappy code base, an old, cranky senior dev, and an owner who ran around like the world was on fire 24/7; but I worked without pants, bought a car, a house, had a kid, etc;
Now during ALL of this, I was teaching game dev as an adjunct at my former uni. This past fall, I went full time as a professor in game dev. I took a huge pay cut, but got a steady schedule (semester to semester anyway) and great benefits. I for once chose what I thought was the job I wanted over more money and something that was just "different". And honestly, I've regretted it so much. My peer / diagonally above me coworker feels untrustworthy half the time and teaches the majority of the programming courses when he's a designer and I've been the game programming professor for 8 years (I also teach non-game programming courses, but those just got folded into the games program...); I hate full-time uni politics; I'm struggling with money for my family; and I am in the car all the time it feels like. I could probably go back to my last job, which had some benefits, but nowhere near as good; my wife doesn't want me back to working in the house all the time because that was a struggle unto itself once we had a kid (for all of us, in different ways); and I have now less than 24 hours to tell my university I want to not pursue longer term contracts for full-time and go back to adjunct next Fall (or walk away entirely), or risk burning a bridge (we are reviewing applicants for next year tomorrow, including my own) by bailing out mid-application process.
I'm not sure I'm asking for advice. I'm really just ranting, I guess. Some people I know would kill to have the opportunities I have. I just feel like each job choice led me further away from a job I liked, towards more money, which was a tradeoff that worked out mostly, but now I feel like I don't have either, and I'm trapped due to healthcare and 401k and such. Sure, I like working more with my students and have been able to really support them in their endeavors this semester, but... that's their lives. Not mine. The wife thinks I should stay at the university and we'll figure out money eventually (we are literally sinking into debt, it's not going well at all), while most people think I should leave, make money, and figure out the happiness factor once my finances are back on track and the kid is old enough to be in school.
And I have less than 24 hours it feels like to make a momentous decision.
Yay. Thanks for reading :)2 -
@Owenvii made a post over at (https://devrant.com/rants/2359774/...) and I want to write a proper response.
The biggest thing you have to look out for as a new dev is the jobs which you accept to begin with.
This isn't minimum wage no more, this is "big league", well, maybe not apple or google big league, but it's not $9.25 an hour either.
Basically you don't want to work anywhere where 1. your labor will be treated as a highly disposable commodity. 2. where the hiring manager doesn't know how to do the job themselves.
The best thing you can do is, if you're new, and just breaking through (and even if you're not), is ask them common questions and problems/solutions that crop up doing the work. If they can answer intelligently that tells you the company values competence (maybe), enough to put someone in place who will know ability from bullshit, merit from mediocrity, and who understands the process of progressing from junior dev to a more involved role.
It also means they are incentivized to hire people who know what they're doing because the training cost of new hires is lowered when they hire people who are actually competent or capable of learning.
Remember, an interview isn't just them learning about you, it's your opportunity to interview *them* and boy, you'll be making a BIG mistake if you don't.
Ideally you want them to ask you to pair program a problem. If your solution is better than theirs then they aren't sending their best to do interviews, and it tells you the company doesn't fire incompetents. The interviewers response can tell you a lot too, if they critique your work, or suggest improvements, and especially if they explain their thinking, that is an amazing response to look for, it says the company values mentorship and *actual* teamwork (not the corporate lingo-bingo 'teamwork' that we sometimes see idolized on posters like so much common dogma).
Most importantly, get them to talk about their work and their team. If they're a professional, it'll be really difficult to pry anything negative about their co-workers out of them, but if they're loose-lipped and gossipy thats a VERY bad sign, regardless of what they have to say.
Ask to take a tour and do a meet n' greet of who you will be working with. If they say no, then it's no thank you to a job offer. You want to take every opportunity to get to know everyone there, everyone you'll be working with, as much as possible--because you'll be spending a LOT of time with these people and you want to rule out any place that employs 'unfireable' toxic assholes, sociopath executives, manipulative ladder climbing narcissists, and vicious misery-loving psychopathic coworkers as quick as possible. This isn't just one warning flag to look out for, it's the essential one. You're looking for the proper *workplace culture*, not the cheesy startup phrase of "workplace culture", but the actual attitudes of the team and the interpersonal dynamics.
Life is really short, and a heart attack at 25 from dipshit coworkers and workplace grief can and will destroy your health, if not your sanity, the older you get.
Trust and believe me when I say no paycheck is too grand to deal with some useless, smarmy, manipulative, or borderline motherfuckers at work constantly. You'll regret it if you do. Don't do it. Do you fucking do it. Just don't.
Take my words to heart and be weary of easy job offers. I'm not saying don't take a good offer that lands in your lap, I AM saying do some investigating and due diligence or the consequences are on you.1 -
Figured I'd post for some advice here and see if anybody has had previous experience or success with a situation like this.
My team is generally comprised of full-stack developers completing front-end custom work on sites, writing back-end tools, and fixing broken sites. We are a rapid-response DEV team, and we typically turn around any custom requests in less than 5 days and fix any broken sites on the same day as they were reported. We manage almost 15,000 sites across multiple countries, and deal with very large corporations that many of you interact with every day (I'm trying to be cryptic here hahaha.) There are 16 of us on our team, and we are the only DEV team within our department of 500+ people. We are also the only DEV team taking requests from these 500+ people. The way the department works, we are the final say on whether a specific piece of custom work will get completed or not, and we are the go-to people when anybody has a question about our system infrastructure or if our system can accommodate a request, along with how to fix any broken pieces of our platform. We typically get about 150 requests per day. Lately, the entire team has become unhappy with our compensation for the work we do. We're quite underpaid, and they keep giving us more responsibilities without any sort of extra compensation. We've discovered that there are a large amount of non-developers below us that are getting paid more than we are. We've found that we get paid about $15,000 less than a comparable DEV team in a different department (let's call that team DEV_2,) just because of which department our team exists within, and how our department defined our job back when this position was created a few years ago. Ever since the position was created, our team's responsibilities have exponentially increased. We believe that there is absolutely no reason that an entry-level position below us should get paid just as much, or even more in some cases, than a developer. Of course, we're not asking to pay them less. Instead, we've decided that we're going to bring this up with our manager and schedule a meeting with him, our Department Director, and Human Resources, and voice that we believe that we should be on the same payscale as the comparable DEV_2 in the other department.
To be a good developer on our team, you need to not only have coding expertise, but also an encyclopedic knowledge of what you can do within our platform without any coding. You need this knowledge so you can pass it along to any people in positions below you, in case they didn't know that something could be done without custom code.
We're going to argue that if it weren't for our team, the company would be losing millions of dollars in clients, because people wouldn't have anybody to go to for platform infrastructure questions, broken websites, or custom work. Instead, they would need to send these requests to the DEV_2 team, which currently take about 6 months to turnaround requests. Like I said, we are a rapid-response DEV team, and these particular clients think that a 5 day turnaround time is ridiculous. If they had to wait 6 months for their request to be completed, they would cancel their contracts.
Not to mention the general loss of knowledge if the members of our team went to a different department, which would be catastrophic for our current department. Believe me, this department could not function without this DEV team. If we all went on vacation for a week, the place would be on fire by the time we got back, and many clients would be lost.
Do any of you have any experience with a situation like this, and if so, how did it turn out? Thank you!5 -
Not dev related
Worst Team work fail...
I was hired to a Steel werehouse to join a team of two...
One month latter I was working alone while my coworkers spent their time on the bathroom watching manga and playing rpgs on their android phones...
One year latter I was fired, got Hurt because of the heavy weight (Steel weights a lot) and because I was a temp they just fired me (toke me a year to recover)
Two months latter both my coworkers were fired.. Guess that without me the work didn't do itself...
Wish I knew back them they couldn't fire me while I was Hurt...
Oh and I didn't complain about my coworkers because I don't like to talk bad about others...
No matter.... Got a better job latter on and the company lost clients... So fuck you smart ass engineer.... -
Sometimes I wish I could just print out Ubuntu byte by byte onto a paper and then throw it into a fire to just watch it burn... ....🤔.... .....hold on!.... ....waaaait a moment.... can I just literally do "dd if=/dev/sda | lp" ?!! 😈 ...brb1
-
Toughest part of dev interviews? There are multiple I can think of.
Getting an interview altogether in this dumpster fire of an economy.
Negotiating salary (i.e. prevent getting a low-ball offer)
When the interviewer is a dev themselves and they get on a power trip and ask you the toughest/trickiest questions.
Convincing the interviewer that something you don't know now can be learned later just by googling and tinkering around.
Trying not to burst out in anger when you get asked stupid questions like "Why aren't you married?"9 -
The more I'm on here the more I remember all the shit I have had to deal with in the past.
Anyway, lets rant! I just moved cities after college to be closer to my family, I didnt have any work lined up at that stage but started job hunting the moment I was settled in, I did some freelance for smaller companies to stay afloat.
Eventually I got a job at this agency startup where "SEO" was there main focus, still very inexperienced they put me on frontend and data capturing but will teach me how to code using their systems in due time. At this stage I was getting paid minimum wage, but I was doing minimum work and it wasnt that bad.
A new investor bought 49% of the company and immediately moved into the office space to focus more on marketing (He was one of those scaly marketing guys that will sell you babies if he could get his hands on enough to make a profit).
This is where everything starts going to shit. He hires a bunch of "SEO Gurus", fills up the small office with people like sardines squished together. Development was still our main money maker at this stage, so there where 3 new more senior developers at this stage and I started learning a lot really fast.
Here are some of the issues we had to deal with:
1. Incentives - Great more money, haha! No, No, you where 5 minutes late so you only get half of the promised amount.
2. For every minute you are late we will deduct it from you paycheck (Did I mention I was getting paid minimum wage).
3. If you take a smoke break we will dock it from your pay.
4. Free gym membership to the gym downstairs, but you can only go once a week during your lunch.
5. No pay raises if you cant prove your worth on paper.
He on purposely made up shitty rules and regulations to keep us down and make as much profit as he could.
Here are some shitty stuff he has done:
1. We arent getting a 13th check this year because the company didnt make a big profit - while standing next to his brand new BMW.
2. Made changes over FTP on clients work because we where too slow to get to it, than blames me for it because its broken the next day and wants to give me a written warning for not resolving the issue Immediately. They went as far as wanting to fire me for this, gave me 1 day notice for meeting and that I can bring a lawyer to represent me (1 day notice is illegal, you need 5 days where I am from), so I brought a lawyer since my mom was a lawyer. They freaked the fuck out and started harassing me about this a week later.
3. Would have meetings all the time about how much money the company is making, but wont be raising our pay since no one has proven they are worth it yet.
4. Would full on yell at employees infront of the entire office if they accidentally made an mistake on a clients project.
One one occasion I took a week off for holiday, my coworker contacted me to ask a question and I answered that I will handle it when I am back the following week. Withing 2 hours my other boss phones me in a rage, "he is coming to fetch the company laptop from my house in 5 minutes, he will let me know when he arrives. Gives me no time to talk at all and hangs up - I have figured out what has happened by now so when he showed up he has this long speech about abandonment, and trust and loyalty to the company. So I pass him my laptop once he shut up and said: "You do know I am on holiday leave which you approved, right?", he goes even more silent and passes me back my laptop without saying anything, and drives off.
While the above was happening Douche manager back at the office has a rage as well and calls the whole office (25 people) to a meeting talking about how I abandoned the company and how disgraceful that is.
Those are the shitty experiences I can remember, there where many more like this. All of the above eventually led to me going into a deep depression and having panic attacks weekly, from being overworked or scared to step out of line. Its also the reason I almost stopped coding forever at that stage. I worked there for 2.5 years with the abuse.
I left 2 weeks after the last shit show, I am ok now and have my anxiety and depression well under control if not almost gone completely.
Ran into Douche Manager a few months ago after 9 years, the company got bought out and the first person they fired was him. LOL! He now has his own agency and is looking for Developers (They are hard to find he says), little does he know I spread his name far and wide to all and every Dev I knew and didnt know to avoid working for him at all costs. Seems like word of mouth still works in this digital age.
Thanks for reading this far!5 -
One thing my dev years have showed me through various systems:
The world is held together by masses of scripts. And most of them are horribly bad, unmaintainable, extremely complex and usually not replaced on requirement changes, but extended by other terrible scripts to get the desired behaviour.
Windows is based on tons of shitty batch scripts, powershell madness, WSH bullshit and VBS absurdity.
GNU/Linux is build upon trillions of incomprehensible shell scripts, heaps of python gizmo and perl mysteries.
Every complex system I've seen uses batch or shell scripts to fire up its runtime.
And it doesn't seem to get any better, so let's face it, we're doomed.3 -
I coded part of feature 2 months ago.
Left it to help frontend guy a bit, deal with fire after release. ( we’re missing frontend integration tests and every release is pain in the ass ).
My backend code coverage is about 80% so not much can go wrong at this point.
So I added more code today and it looks like new feature is working but don’t know what the code I added 2 months ago exactly do.
The only thing I know is that it definitely needs refactoring ...
Being only backend dev / release manager / administrator/ dev ops in project is painful I need to deal with everything on my own 😔
At least client doesn’t care if it’s done in one week or in one month right now.1 -
A couple of years ago I was working on a fairly large system with a complex (by necessity) access control architecture.
As is usually the case with those projects, it's awkward for developers to repro bugs that have to do with a user's accesses in production when we are not allowed to replicate production data in test, let alone locally.
We had a bug where I ended up making myself a new row in the production database for a thing I could have access to without affecting real data to repro it safely. I identified the bug so I could repro it in dev/test and removed the row and ensured everything worked normally, whew scary.
Have you ever walked into the office one day, and everyone is hunched over in a semicircle around one person's workstation, before one turns around to look at you and says - after a pause - "... ltlian?.."
Turns out I had basically "poisoned the well" with my dummy entity in a way where production now threw 500 for everyone BUT me who had transitive access to this post-non-entity. Due to the scope of the system, it had taken about a day for this to gradually propagate in terms of caching and eventual consistencies; new entities coming in was expected, but not that they disappear.
Luckily I had a decent track record for this to be a one-off. I sometimes think about how I would explain testing in prod and making it faceplant before going home for the day, other than "I assumed it would be fine". I would fire me.3 -
What you're about to read is an horror story based on real facts.
Our story begins one week ago, when a dev who calls himself "Arfmann" (what a loser, the f* means arfmann?) decided to take his dev skills to another level.
He always has been scared of databases. He made really bad dream about them. Like, they were screaming at him "SELECT useUs FROM database" while he was crying in some shared preferences noises.
A week ago, he decided to overcome his fear. He learned the basics of SQL. Everything was going well. Until, he decided to implement it on Flutter. A Google's technology.
At first, he decided to appeal to documentation. Went on Flutter web site. Flutter documentation. Sqflite documentation. Started reading. Started doing tests with the code written by Google's engineer.
Everything was fucked up. Dozens of errors, the documentation started to blow up and his PC went on fire, due to Android Studio.
He used a sample project made by Google's engineer. "Maybe if use directly their code it will work. Maybe I was the problem". He wasn't.
The whole documentation was wrong, every single line of code was a spaghetti code (yes, every single line was an entire spaghetti code). Everything was put in the main. If you wanted to try to keep things organized, you would end up punched and beaten up from the code itself. It would become a sentient entity that will beat you the fuck up.
Really scary. -
We had a thunder storm with pretty strong winds while I was at work. A transformer across the street blew up (came off the pole, lots of fire, pretty neat)... I had a meeting at 4:30 and was told we were still having it even without power or internet. the meeting organizer never showed up.
...I could have gone home and worked because our vpn and dev servers are on another state that still had power. -
Right,i consider myself a pretty damn good dev... I can back up everything I say to prove that I'm right on not lying to clients
But I see all these devs who do lie... Who withold data from clients cause it's not great.
And I go to clients and prove that they are lying not doing it right.
But I know saying to them... Oi your current devs are shit fire them ... Isn't a good way to get them as a client
Me and my company are open and honest ... we go all out on all of our projects. I work nonstop. It is seriously baffling the kind of developers are out there and how bad they can be I'm... Seriously just.... Urgh 😖
How should I go about talking to clients without going ... Fire them quick or saying that in a ... More humble respectful way...
I need more clients ... To survive and I don't mind coming across as a dick as long as they understand what's going on and that they are people ripped off by these asshole devs5 -
Allrighty, so we have a huge migration upcoming. The planning started early this spring. We've split the whole process into separate tasks and estimated each of them. Also marked all the tasks client should take care of itself so save funds and time. All-in-all the whole thing estimated like 4 months if we did it [single dev, tremendous amounts of communication with various parties, buy and prepare the infra, adapt app to the changes, testing, monitoring, etc.] and like a month if client did the tasks we shouldn't be doing. The funding for migration is time-bound and can only be used before December. Cool! We got notified that by the end of April we should be good to go! Plenty of time to do things right!
April comes. Silence. Mid-april we resch out to the client. Since there's plenty of time left migration is getting lower priority to other tasks. Well allright, sort of makes sense. We should migrate mid-July. Cool!
July comes. Client replies that everyone's on vacation now. Gotta wait for August - will do the quicker version of migration to make it on time. Well allright....
August comes. Everyone's vusy with whatever they've postponed during summer. Hopefully we'll start migration in September. Mhm...
September comes. We're invited to a meeting by project funders to explain tasks' breakdown, justify the time needed to make the migration. We're being blamed for surreal estimations and poor organization of tasks as nothing's happened yet... [they were the ones who always were postponing things....]. Moreover, they can only spare 20% of infra resources required for data alone anf they want us to make that enough for all environments, all components, all backups, all databases,... You get the pic.
The leader of the meeting semi silently mumbled to other participants 'Well then I'm afrsid we can't make a full migration in time.. Only partial. That's very unfortunate, very. That's why we should not have incopetent vendors [*glancing at us*]'
somehow we agreed we'll get the resources mid-November and we should be thankful for him bcz he'll have to pull some strings for... us..
I left the meeting with my fists squeezed so hard! But it's okay, we got smth useful: resources and start date. Although it leaves us with less than a month to do smth requiring a month for a sunny-day scenario. Nvm, still doable.
Last week we get an email that resources will be available at the beginning of December [after deadline] and we should start a full migration no sooner than Nov 12. Which leaves us with 50% of our estimated fucking optimistic scenario time and not enough resources to even move a single db.
Fuck I hate politics in dev... Is it wrong for me to want to tie them to a pole, set them on a veeery slow fire and take a piss on them while they're screaming their shitty lungs out? I'd enjoy the view and the scream. I know I would. And while enjoying I might be tempted to take a burning 20cm diameter wooden stick and shove it up their assholes. Repeatedly. Round-robin. Promissing them I'll take it out in 5 seconds and pulling it out after 2 minutes.
Can I?8 -
A dev life in Queen songs:
„A Kind of Magic“ - Build successful
„A Winter’s Tale“ - Key Account Manager visits customer
„Action This Day“ - Release day
„All Dead, All Dead“ - System down
„Another One Bites the Dust“ - kill -9 4711
„Breakthru“ - 10 hour debuging session
„Chinese Torture“ - Microsft Office
„Coming Soon“ - Client asks for delivery date
„Dead on Time“ - shutdown -t 10
„Doing All Right“ - How's the progress on the new feature?
„Don’t Lose Your Head“ - git push -f
„Don’t Stop Me Now“ - In the zone
„Escape from the Swamp“ - Hand in resignation letter
„Forever“ - while(1)
„Friends Will Be Friends“ - friend class Vector;
„Get Down, Make Love“ - No rule to make target "Love"
„Hammer to Fall“ - Release day
„Hang on in There“ - 2 weeks until release
„I Can’t Live With You“- Microsoft
„I Go Crazy“ - Microsoft
„I Want It All“ - Google
„I Want to Break Free“ - free( (void*) 0xDEADBEEF );
„I’m Going Slightly Mad“ - Impossible feature requested
„If You Can’t Beat Them“ - Impossible feature promised by sales
„In Only Seven Days“ - Impossible feature ordered
„Is This the World We Created...?“ - Philosphic moments
„It’s a Beautiful Day“ - Weekend
„It’s a Hard Life“ - Weekday
„It’s Late“ - Deadline was last week
„Jesus“ - WTF?
„Keep Passing the Open Windows“ - Interprocess communication
„Keep Yourself Alive“ - Daily struggle
„Leaving Home Ain’t Easy“ - Time to get up and go to work
„Let Me Entertain You“ - Sales meets customer
„Liar“ - Sales
„Long Away“ - Project start
„Loser in the End“ - Dev
„Lost Opportunity“ - Job ad
„Love of My Life“ - emacs/vim
„Machines“ - Computer
„Made in Heaven“ - git
„Misfire“ - Unhandled exception at Memory location 0xDEADBEEF
„My Life Has Been Saved“ - Google drive/Facebook
„New York, New York“ - Meeting at customer
„No-One But You“ - Bus factor = 1
„Now I’m Here“ - Morning rush hour
„One Vision“ - Management goals
„Pain Is So Close to Pleasure“ - NullPointerExcption
„Party“ - Delivery completed
„Play the Game“ - Customer meeting inhous -
„Put Out the Fire“ - Support hotline
„Radio Ga Ga“ - GSM/GPRS/UMTS/LTE/5G
„Ride the Wild Wind“ - Arch Linux
„Rock It“ - Linux
„Save Me“ - CTRL-S/CTRL-Z
„See What a Fool I’ve Been“ - git blame
„Sheer Heart Attack“ - rm -rf /
„Staying Power“- UPS
„Stealin’“ - Stack Overflow
„The Miracle“ - It works
„The Night Comes Down“ - It doesn't work
„The Show Must Go On“ - Project cancelled
„There Must Be More to Life Than This“ - Philosophic moments
„These Are the Days of Our Lives“ - Daily routine
„Under Pressure“ - 1 day until release
„Was It All Worth It“ - Controlling
„We Are the Champions“ - Release finished
„We Will Rock You“ - Sales at customer
„Who Needs You“ - HR
„You Don’t Fool Me“ - Debugging session
„You Take My Breath Away“ - rm -rf /
„You’re My Best Friend“ - emacs/vim4 -
I'm considering quitting a job I started a few weeks ago. I'll probably try to find other work first I suppose.
I'm UK based and this is the 6th programming/DevOps role I've had and I've never seen a team that is so utterly opposed to change. This is the largest company I've worked for in a full time capacity so someone please tell me if I'm going to see the same things at other companies of similar sizes (1000 employees). Or even tell me if I'm just being too opinionated and that I simply have different priorities than others I'm working with. The only upside so far is that at least 90% of the people I've been speaking to are very friendly and aren't outwardly toxic.
My first week, I explained during the daily stand up how I had been updating the readmes of a couple of code bases as I set them up locally, updated docker files to fix a few issues, made missing env files, and I didn't mention that I had also started a soon to be very long list of major problems in the code bases. 30 minutes later I get a call from the team lead saying he'd had complaints from another dev about the changes I'd spoke about making to their work. I was told to stash my changes for a few weeks at least and not to bother committing them.
Since then I've found out that even if I had wanted to, I wouldn't have been allowed to merge in my changes. Sprints are 2 weeks long, and are planned several sprints ahead. Trying to get any tickets planned in so far has been a brick wall, and it's clear management only cares about features.
Weirdly enough but not unsurprisingly I've heard loads of complaints about the slow turn around of the dev team to get out anything, be it bug fixes or features. It's weird because when I pointed out that there's currently no centralised logging or an error management platform like bugsnag, there was zero interest. I wrote a 4 page report on the benefits and how it would help the dev team to get away from fire fighting and these hidden issues they keep running into. But I was told that it would have to be planned for next year's work, as this year everything is already planned and there's no space in the budget for the roughly $20 a month a standard bugsnag plan would take.
The reason I even had time to write up such a report is because I get given work that takes 30 minutes and I'm seemingly expected to take several days to do it. I tried asking for more work at the start but I could tell the lead was busy and was frankly just annoyed that he was having to find me work within the narrow confines of what's planned for the sprint.
So I tried to keep busy with a load of code reviews and writing reports on road mapping out how we could improve various things. It's still not much to do though. And hey when I brought up actually implementing psr12 coding standards, there currently aren't any standards and the code bases even use a mix of spaces and tab indentation in the same file, I seemingly got a positive impression at the only senior developer meeting I've been to so far. However when I wrote up a confluence doc on setting up psr12 code sniffing in the various IDEs everyone uses, and mentioned it in a daily stand up, I once again got kickback and a talking to.
It's pretty clear that they'd like me to sit down, do my assigned work, and otherwise try to look busy. While continuing with their terrible practices.
After today I think I'll have to stop trying to do code reviews too as it's clear they don't actually want code to be reviewed. A junior dev who only started writing code last year had written probably the single worst pull request I've ever seen. However it's still a perfectly reasonable thing, they're junior and that's what code reviews are for. So I went through file by file and gently suggested a cleaner or safer way to achieve things, or in a couple of the worst cases I suggested that they bring up a refactor ticket to be made as the code base was trapping them in shocking practices. I'm talking html in strings being concatenated in a class. Database migrations that use hard coded IDs from production data. Database queries that again quote arbitrary production IDs. A mix of tabs and spaces in the same file. Indentation being way off. Etc, the list goes on.
Well of course I get massive kickback from that too, not just from the team lead who they complained to but the junior was incredibly rude and basically told me to shut up because this was how it was done in this code base. For the last 2 days it's been a bit of a back and forth of me at least trying to get the guy to fix the formatting issues, and my lead has messaged me multiple times asking if it can go through code review to QA yet. I don't know why they even bother with code reviews at this point.18 -
Last rant was about games and graphics cards (admittedly not received too well), time for a rant about game development houses.. especially you EA.
So yesterday a friend of mine showed me in one of our Telegram chats that he'd modified some cheats in an old FPS game by editing these scripts (not Lua for some reason) that the game used as a.. configuration language I guess? He called the result a tank cemetery 🙃
Honestly the game looked a lot like Medal of Honor to stoned me at the time, so I figured, well why not fire up that old nx7010 I had laying around for so long, get a new Debian installation on that and rip the Medal of Honor: Allied Assault war chest that I still had, and play it on one of my more modern laptops? Those CD's are now very old anyway, maybe time to archive those before they rot away.
So I installed Debian on it again, looked up how to rip CD's from the command line, and it seemed that dd could do it - just give /dev/cdrom as the input file, and wherever you want to store your copy as the output file. Brilliant! Except.. uh, yeah. It wasn't that easy. So after checking the CD and finding that it was still pristine, and seeing another CD in that war chest fail just the same, I tried burning and then ripping a copy of Debian onto another CD.. checksummed them and yes, it ripped just fine, bit for bit equal. So what the fuck EA, why is your game such a special snowflake that it's apparently too difficult to even spin up the drive to be copied?
So I looked around on plebbit and found this: https://reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/... - the top comment of that post shattered all my hopes for this disc to be possible to rip. Turns out that DRM schemes intentionally screw up the protocols that make up a functioning disc, and detecting those fuck-ups is part of the actual DRM.
"I also remember some forms of DRM will even include disc mastering errors/physical corruption on the actual disc and use those as a sort of fingerprint for the DRM. The copied ISO has to include them at the exact same place in the ISO as on the IRL disc and the ISO emulator has to emulate the disc drive read errors they cause."
So yeah. Never mind that I already own this goddamn game, and that it's allowed by law to make one copy for personal use, AND that intentionally breaking something is very shady indeed.. apparently I don't really own this game after all. So I went onto the almighty search engines, and instantly found a copy of this game for download. You know EA.. I wanted to play nice. You didn't let me. Still wondering why people do piracy now? Might take your top suits that suggested these fucked up DRM schemes another decade to figure out maybe.. even given the obvious now.
But hey I wouldn't even care that much if the medium these games are stored on wouldn't be so volatile (remember these discs are now close to 20 years old, and data rot sets in after 30 years or so). You company decided to publish these on CD. We've had cartridges in many forms before, those are pretty much indestructible and inherently near impossible to duplicate. And why would you want to? But CD is what you chose because you company were too cheap to go to China, get someone to make some plastic molds and put your board and a memory chip in that. Oh and don't even get me started on the working conditions for game devs.. EA and co, aren't you ashamed of yourselves? No wonder that people hate game development houses so much.
Yay, almost finished downloading that copy of Medal of Honor! Whatever you say EA.. I've done everything I could to do it legally. You are the ones who fucked it up.7 -
Today I could finally spend some time reviewing the merge requests an intern made (and I occasionally helped).
My god, I want to put it this months amount of work an, put it in a trash, burn it and rewrite it before the fire is gone.
5 small and unrelated issues. The intern used branches with the correct naming scheme, but IT'S A FUCKING STRAIGHT LINE BUILDING ON TOP OF EACHOTHER.
Oh ans also they took the liberty to update the dependencies and the language versions used. There was no issue regarding this. It's the first branch in the line and it was called "update_<dependency>" where they just upped the version numbers of everything and then COMMENT OUT all mentions of <dependency> so that it compiles at the very least.
Now today I spend most of my time reviewing the code by fixing that mess. Thanks to updates I had to update the CI and replace some libraries that are now incompatible. Tomorrow I can finally inspect the shit itself.
On a positive side node, I removed node as a dev dependency and the size of the node modules went down from 128mb to 18mb4 -
Tldr: I think I made a company fire some dev a year ago.
I was working for this company remotely, alone, on a very big and old legacy php project where they still used echo '<code><code/>'; and i was a very junior junior front end developer, needed to make the website work somehow (whole new design). They brought in a random guy to work with me, and we started working.. I was using bitbucket to version my changes, and I asked him to do the same. He tried pushing his changes once and then practically never again because he started working in files that i was working on and there were git conflicts, and he gave up, even though i asked him to do that... he then statted using general classes to style the page (like .color) with absolute positioning and it broke everything everywhere. He then proceeded to minify half of the php files 'because of performance', I remember talking to other few people in the company and he disappeared a few more days later. I never finished the project because they stopped it randomly and i think i got him fired even though he could've continued working in the company -
Part of the problem, So many dev's here know the real problem with OS's governments and 3ed party apps happly spying on you and making there EULA to so called make it right for them to do it.
I want to know why so many dev's are portending this is not happen or why they not caring, you become part of the problem if your willing to work with the problem and there rules and guide lines.
WE dictate the future of tech not one company or another the people that create the software are the ones can make a difference, the users need to be educated and the dev need to take action now.
I loved this site at first but now I hate it I really do as so many posts are just blind or follow evil companies/software so on this is not how it should be, I wont accept this bull shit anymore and I not going to say quite to show the mass I going to follow them.
Step up and do something about it or stop calling yourself's dev's your part of the problem, you have the a gift and know how to help everyone do it and prove your worth.
I am really sorry I know some here do research and try and help but I rarely seeing it at the moment, things need to change, its not going to be easy but only the dev's can change this and soon, soon all OS's/software companies will get the feeling governments are on there side and governments what this so they have a back door in to WHO you are. FK the or if you have nothing to hide, EVERYONE has something to hide, compaines have already used Facebook Data to fire people working for them as they feel they shouldn't have to have someone working for them who likes or does XYZ,
Open your eyes people, small time dev's are not really included in this but big time dev's that do know how to work around these problems should be working on this to stop these problems, hardware venders are also a big problem but that's not something we can do anything about yet.
I know this rant will go on death ears to some, others will think I am over the top nut but if you really want to make a differences let's here it, lets get this world back on track, its not going to be easy but it we can do it.28 -
its two years since ive told a story here but lets go.
we got a new client, who is revamping their infrastructure. i gave some tasks to 2 dev ops guys (i am not devops). they were primarily bash scripts that needed to be altered. (ofc i can write scripts it takes a moment, its their jd)
after a week of chasing them around, getting no result from them, i end up doing it myself because client needs it and the company needs this client. for one task, they told me it does not apply to the component we were working on. (it did, and i did it)
we have a meeting with higher management, they asked me how did i implement it, i show my entire working, my backtracing etc (everyone knows this is how you approach huge system, component focused strict deadline task). it was infuriating how they approached it by trying to understand complete system in one week. i asked them why they hadn't taken component specific approach. they said they tried but failed because..
[this because is the whole reason for the rant, because i believe this because should be a fire-able offense]
..because we were not using VS code to find things in files
HOW IS WHAT TEXT EDITOR YOU USE OR DON'T USE AN EXCUSE
ARE YOU GUYS GETTING THIS?5 -
Damn. I am so blessed to have friends that i have. 90% of them don't even care if you live or die (60% of them would be the first to throw me in fire if that's benefitting to them) remaining 10% would be someone that slightly care, but will move on pretty quickly.
But the best thing about 1 of them is that he is bluntly honest , and willing to share his opinion.
Today we were just talking about stuff when i see this placement offer in my mail.
I have been recently feeling bad about my grades, my choice of persuing android , my choice of leaving out many other techs (like web dev or data sciences , whose jobs are coming in so much number in our college) and data structures, and my fear of not getting a good career start.
This guy is also like me in some aspects. He is also not doing any extreme level competitive programming. He doesn't even know android , web dev, ai/ml or other buzz words. He is just good in college subjects. But the fascinating thing about him,is that he is so calm about all of this! I am losing my nuts everyday my month of graduation , aug2020 is coming . And he is so peaceful about this??
So i tried discussing this issue with him .Let me share a few of his points. Note that we both are lower middle class family children in an awful, no opportunity college.
He : "You know i feel myself to be better than most of our classmates. When i see around , i don't see even 10 of them taking studies seriously. Everyone is here because of the opportunity. I... Love computer science. I never keep myself free at home. I like to learn about how stuff works, these networking, the router, i really like to learn."
"That's why i dont fear. Whatever the worst happens , i have a believe that i will get some job. Maybe later, maybe later than all of you , but i will. Its not a problem."
me: "but you are not doing anything bro! I am not doing anything ! So what if our college mates suck , Everyone out there is pulling their hairs out learning data structures, Blockchain, ai ml , hell of shit. But we are not! Why aren't you scared bro? Remember the goldman sach test you gave ? You were never able to solve beyond one question. How did you feel man? And didn't you thought maybe if i gave a year to that , i will be good enough? Don't you too want a good package bro? Everyone's getting placed at good numbers."
Him : "Again, its your thoughts that i am not doing things. I am happy learning at my own pace. Its my belief that i should be learning about networking and how hardware works first , then only its okay to learn about programming and ai ml stuff. I am not going to feel scared and start learning multiple things that i don't even wanna learn now."
"My point is whatever i am doing now, if its related to computers , then someday its gonna help me.
And i am learning ds too , very less at a time. Ds algo are things for people with extreme knowledge. We could have cleared goldman sachs if we had started learning all this stuff from 1st year, spend 2-3 years in it and then maybe we could have solved 2 -3 questions. I regret that a little, but no one told us that we should be doing this."
"And if i tell you my honest thoughts now, you ar better off without it. You are the only guy among us with good knowledge of android , you have been doing that for last 2 years. Maybe you will get better opportunity with android then with ds/algo."
"You know when i felt happy? When we gave our first placement test at sopra. I was thinking of going there all dumb. But at 11 am in night i casually told my brother about this ,and he said that its a good company. So i started studying a little and next day i sat for placement. And i could not believe myself when they told me that am selected. I was shit scared that night, when my dad came and said " you don't even want that job. Be happy that you passed it on your own". And then i slept peacefully that night and gave the most awesome interview the next day."
"Thus now i am confident that wherever my level of skills are, it is enough to get into a job . Maybe not the goldman sachs ,but i will do well enough with a smaller job too."
"Bro you don't even know... All my school mates are getting packages of 8LPA, 15LPA, 35LPA. You see they are getting that because they already won a race. They are all in better colleges and companies which come there, they will take them no matter what (because those companies want to associate themselves with their college tags). But if worst comes to worst, i won't be worried even if i have to go take 4lpa as job offer in sopra"
Damn you Aman Gupta. Love you from all my heart. Thanks for calming me down and making me realise that its okay to be average3 -
So I joined this digital agency where they are working on this ad-tech product and right from day one, I was given a task to implement a new feature on the product. No knowledge transfer. No onboarding process. So, I had given estimation about the task and apparently it took longer than expected. But what were they expecting. Anyways, my manager asked me to have a KT with the only senior guy that has been working there for last couple of years. And man, since the KT started, it's been hell for me. The guy is such an asshole and won't even give me a basic walkthrough of the system. He only took one call and that ended within 30 minutes. On top of that he went ahead and told the product manager that I am not keeping up and am not ready. And my product manager apparently wants me to take his place within a month. It's been only two months since I joined. I have already pushed two major features, tried to understand the system architecture, codebase and everything on my own. On top of that, I got yelled at by that senior dev in a meeting about a PR. I was quite confident guy when I joined and now I am anxious everyday at work and i am scared that they'll let me go because I won't be able to meet their unrealistic expectations. I also can't stand this senior dev and he can't stand me which makes me really demotivated to work. I have anxiety issues and now I am thinking if I stay, I am gonna mess up big time and they'll fire me or worse. I might break something in production because I didn't have proper onboarding.2
-
How to disconnect from work after working hours? Im working for the last 4 months as a mid level dev in this company. I mean Im able to problem-solve and do my work but sometimes I get so addicted to problem solving that I get worried and become obsessed, hyperfixated (especialy if Im stuck on something for lets say a couple weeks). It goes to the point where I work from home 12-14 hours a day just to figure out some bug in the flow.
Thing is, our codebase is large and when doing every new refactor/feature some surprises happen. I dont have a decent mentor who could teach me one on one or even do pair programming with. All i have is just some colleagues who can point me to right direction or do a code review from time to time. Thats it.
I dont know why I take this so personally. For example I had to do a feature which I did in 1 week, then MR got approved by devs and QA. After that during regression they found like 3 blockers and I felt really bad and ashamed. While in reality our BA did not define feature properly, devs who reviewed it didnt even launch the code and poke around in the app, and our team's QA tested only the happy scenario. Basically this is failing/getting delayed because of a failure in like 6-7 people chain.
However for some reason Im taking this very personally, that I, as a dev failed. Maybe due to my ADHD or something but for the next days or weeks as long as I dont find solution I will isolate myself and tryhard until I get it right. Then have a few days of chill until I face another obstacle in another task again. And this keeps repeating and repeating.
My senior colleague tells me to chill and dont let work take such a toll on my emotional/physical/mental health. But its hard. He has 7 years of experience and has decent memory. I have 2-3 years of experience and have ADHD, we are not the same. I dont know how to become a guy who clocks out after 8 hours of work done everyday. Its like I feel that they might fire me or I will look bad if I dont put in enough effort. Not like I was ever fired for performance issues... Anyways I dont know how to start working to live, instead of living for work.
I hate who Im becoming. I dont work out anymore, started smoking a lot, dont exercise. I live this self induced anxiety driven workaholic lifestyle.6 -
Stay safe all my other Aussie Dev friends currently getting pelted with all the storms in the east...
(Yes we are still on fire for anyone who isn't Aussie)13 -
I just realized that I may be hard to fire because I create a lot of apps. All other devs on my team work on the same big projects and maybe share code more.
But I tend to be the only dev for a lot of my work. In addition to building and deploying a few standalone projects.... That no one else has used. I write usage and design docs but nobody reads those.
And one application is very complex, has many parts. It even took me a while to pick it up at first and I've been the only dev on it for years... So built a lot of things on top.
Today I was actually talking to the business team that uses it and they were like when is feature A, B, C going to be done. And I finally said, has to be one at a time bc I'm the only dev...
Though last week I did ask for some help to look into one of them while I worked on another more complex one but I gotta train them. And well their part involves only a small part of the entire app. -
I'm torn on dev bootcamps.
On one hand, I learn the most in hands-on direct tinkering and bootcamps tend to exude this with well-trained instructors following best practices.
On the other hand, the short timeline means corners are cut and an overwhelming amount of material is dropped all at once leading to a leaky retention vessel at the end.
I prefer ramping up learning over a period of time to gain experience than a fire hose approach.1 -
Not dev-related, but it's always the every day schedule optimisations that are satisfying. If I need to be in various places throughout the day, change different types of transportation, etc., I always think about the optimal route and time-planning such that I have the least overhead, visit the same place as few times as possible (usually my home, since I live far from most of my daily activities), take the shortest routes and be on time
The same applies to taking public transportation in my hometown. There is no clear schedule ("arrival can vary between 10-15min", no app available to tell you about it in real time), yet by living there for so long, I figured out when certain buses/trams leave based on the ones that are already passing me and the time of the day. This way, I know which buses/trams to take and change and get where I need to be, without even having an app or a clear schedule (of course, unexpected things like buses catching on fire can always happen) -
Today, I'm making a revolutionary change to our code base. I'm finally deprecating a script that lived in this goddamn repo for way too long. There's about 10 copies of the same script in 10 different directories. The script copies all the code into a "dev" folder and then runs "sed s/prod/dev/g" on all the files, and then overwites a bunch of it with some files suffixed with ".dev". Finally, after fighting the so-called architects, the devs and everyone else that seems to have gotten used to the pain this cursed dumpster fire script has caused us, my merge request is now open and ready to go to get rid of this insanity. Now we won't have to deal with as many "surprises" that happen every goddamn time we deploy to production, overwriting all our hard work by accident, and relieve some of my OCD of having the same script in 10 different places in the repository.4
-
!rant or at least not dev related
I work at a school. Sometimes we get some weird training and shit we have to attend to. This time it had to do with what to do in the event of an active shooter.
Because you know. The U.S IS full of angry white kids with guns that if fucked up enough will just take fire on people.
Well, as a military veteran. I feel pretty confident in knowing what to do when some asshole is trying to get his expert marksman badge on me. So i requested not to waste my valuable time on such bs. I was promptly denied and encouraged to attend the bs training.
The first dumbshit thing they tell you to do is to turn the lights off and hide(if you decide to not fight) for which I mentioned that it would not work.
You see. Our entire buildings have motion sensors on each room which would TURN the fucking lights on if you move........ and even though you can turn the switch on..some offices would still work through the motion sensor....exhibit A: my office.
Fuck this. Couldn't i just keep one of my guns with me?? It would just take about 2 shoots really....and I promise they would stay in.
This sucks man. I need to move to Canadia. I don't want my kids having to hear about "mandatory active shooter training"
That fucking bullshit should never be a norm.
10 bucks and a life says i have better aim than some crazy kid.10 -
Recruiter contacted me about a job via email. Being the intrepid dev, I GlassDoor'd them. Nothing but shit reviews, so I told him no thanks.
"Oh we've seen the reviews and we're really trying to get our stuff together."
"Not on my back, you won't. I'm not going from the frying pan into the fire. "
He sent me more email asking me to reconsider. If you have shit reviews and have to beg people, uhh, are you that stupid to think anyone will come work for you?2 -
Aka... How NOT to design a build system.
I must say that the winning award in that category goes without any question to SBT.
SBT is like trying to use a claymore mine to put some nails in a wall. It most likely will work somehow, but the collateral damage is extensive.
If you ask what build tool would possibly do this... It was probably SBT. Rant applies in general, but my arch nemesis is definitely SBT.
Let's start with the simplest thing: The data format you use to store.
Well. Data format. So use sth that can represent data or settings. Do *not* use a programming language, as this can neither be parsed / modified without an foreign interface or using the programming language itself...
Which is painful as fuck for automatisation, scripting and thus CI/CD.
Most important regarding the data format - keep it simple and stupid, yet precise and clean. Do not try to e.g. implement complex types - pain without gain. Plain old objects / structs, arrays, primitive types, simple as that.
No (severely) nested types, no lazy evaluation, just keep it as simple as possible. Build tools are complex enough, no need to feed the nightmare.
Data formats *must* have btw a proper encoding, looking at you Mr. XML. It should be standardized, so no crazy mfucking shit eating dev gets the idea to use whatever encoding they like.
Workflows. You know, things like
- update dependency
- compile stuff
- test run
- ...
Keep. Them. Simple.
Especially regarding settings and multiprojects.
http://lihaoyi.com/post/...
If you want to know how to absolutely never ever do it.
Again - keep. it. simple.
Make stuff configurable, allow the CLI tool used for building to pass this configuration in / allow setting of env variables. As simple as that.
Allow project settings - e.g. like repositories - to be set globally vs project wide.
Not simple are those tools who have...
- more knobs than documentation
- more layers than a wedding cake
- inheritance / merging of settings :(
- CLI and ENV have different names.
- CLI and ENV use different quoting
...
Which brings me to the CLI.
If your build tool has no CLI, it sucks. It just sucks. No discussion. It sucks, hmkay?
If your build tool has a CLI, but...
- it uses undocumented exit codes
- requires absurd or non-quoting (e.g. cannot parse quoted string)
- has unconfigurable logging
- output doesn't allow parsing
- CLI cannot be used for automatisation
It sucks, too... Again, no discussion.
Last point: Plugins and versioning.
I love plugins. And versioning.
Plugins can be a good choice to extend stuff, to scratch some specific itches.
Plugins are NOT an excuse to say: hey, we don't integrate any features or offer plugins by ourselves, go implement your own plugins for that.
That's just absurd.
(precondition: feature makes sense, like e.g. listing dependencies, checking for updates, etc - stuff that most likely anyone wants)
Versioning. Well. Here goes number one award to Node with it's broken concept of just installing multiple versions for the fuck of it.
Another award goes to tools without a locking file.
Another award goes to tools who do not support version ranges.
Yet another award goes to tools who do not support private repositories / mirrors via global configuration - makes fun bombing public mirrors to check for new versions available and getting rate limited to death.
In case someone has read so far and wonders why this rant came to be...
I've implemented a sort of on premise bot for updating dependencies for multiple build tools.
Won't be open sourced, as it is company property - but let me tell ya... Pain and pain are two different things. That was beyond pain.
That was getting your skin peeled off while being set on fire pain.
-.-5 -
!rant, more of an incredulous/cruelly amused "you had ONE job..."
so: biggest IT/PC/electronics store in my (and neighboring) country. their webpage, of course with the function to buy online, because of course.
the big green "Buy" button does nothing. doesn't work. doesn't react. I keep clicking it multiple times, shorter, longer, etc, because maybe their JS scripts are just shit so they slow.
nope.
okay. open devtools, JS console.
hover over the button: "Error: isMobile is not a function".
click the button: "Error: isMobile is not a function"
WAT.
search for isMobile in the script.
173 occurences.
fuck this.
console: isMobile = function(){return false;}
because I'm not on my phone.
click the "Buy" button.
works flawlessly.
...HOW?
THE WHOLE PAGE IS AN ESHOP YOU COMIC RELIEF INCOMPETENTS! =D
173 uses of non-existing function that blocks business-critical feature, THE ONLY CORE FEATURE FOR WHICH YOUR SITE EVEN EXISTS, and NOBODY, not the dev who fucked it up, NOT EVEN QA, noticed it??? =D =D
if I was the boss of the devs, or even boss of the whole company...
git blame
...and then i'd go the whole chain from the dev who caused the bug, through all of the QA people who "tested" that version before deploy, and I would personally, on the spot, fire each and every single one of them.
mainly because of who knows how much money this stupid not even a proper bug lost them.
but secondarily, because clearly none of those people give a single shit (n)or have an idea how to do their jobs.
=D =D
yeah but I was a good guy, filed a bug report in the "Complaints" section of their Contact form.
it goes to some call-center-like peon, so it starts with a sentence "forward this to your site's dev people outright to file as a bug, thank you".
but... HOW.... =D
HOW can you let something like this through? =D
the bottleneck of your whole user interaction, which forms first of the three steps OF THE MAIN AND MOST IMPORTANT FUNCTION of your whole business... =D
...I...
...does not compute =D
...BUT THEY USING ANGULAR, SO THEY ALL MODERN AND HIGH-TECH AND EVERYTHING'S FINE!!! =D =D1 -
Hey guys, first time writing here.
Around 8 months ago I joined a local company, developing enterprise web apps. First time for me working in a "real" programming job: I've been making a living from little freelance projects, personal apps and private programming lessons for the past 10 years, while on the side I chased the indie game dev dream, with little success. Then, one day, realized I needed to confront myself with the reality of 'standard' business, where the majority of people work, or risk growing too old to find a stable job.
I was kinda excited at first, looking forward to learning from experienced professionals in a long-standing company that has been around for decades. In the past years I coded almost 100% solo, so I really wanted to learn some solid team practices, refine my automated testing skills, and so on. Also, good pay, flexible hours and team is cool.
Then... I actually went there.
At first, I thought it was me. I thought I couldn't understand the code because I was used reading only mine.
I thought that it was me, not knowing well enough the quirks of web development to understand how things worked.
I though I was too lazy - it was shocking to see how hard those guys worked: I saw one guy once who was basically coding with one hand, answering a mail with another, all while doing some technical assistance on the phone.
Then I started to realize.
All projects are a disorganized mess, not only the legacy ones - actually the "green" products are quite worse.
Dependency injection hell: it seems like half of the code has been written by a DI fanatic and the other half by an assembly nostalgic who doesn't really like this new hippy thing called "functions".
Architecture is so messed up there are methods several THOUSANDS of lines long, and for the love of god most people on the team don't really even know WHAT those methods are for, but they're so intertwined with the rest of the codebase no one ever dares to touch them.
No automated test whatsoever, and because of the aforementioned DI hell, it's freaking hard to configure a testing environment (I've been trying for two days during my days off, with almost no success).
Of course documentation is completely absent, specifications are spread around hundreds of mails and opaquely named files thrown around personal shared folders, remote archives, etc.
So I rolled my sleeves up and started crunching as the rest of the team. I tried to follow the boy-scout rule, when the time and scope allowed. But god, it's hard. I'm tired as fuck, I miss working on my projects, or at least something that's not a complete madness. And it's unbearable to manually validate everything (hundreds of edge cases) by hand.
And the rest of the team acts like it's all normal. They look so at ease in this mess. It's like seeing someone quietly sitting inside a house on fire doing their stuff like nothing special is going on.
Please tell me it's not this way everywhere. I want out of this. I also feel like I'm "spoiled", and I should just do like the others and accept the depressing reality of working with all of this. But inside me I don't want to. I developed a taste for clean, easy maintainable code and I don't want to give it up.3 -
I thought I posted about this awhile back but I didn't. I'm glad since the story is so much better now.
6 weeks ago: Told I'm going to be on a super fun JAMStack build with lots of sexy animations. Sweet, this will be a fun build!
5 weeks ago: Find out what the timeline on this incredibly ambitious project is. I start raising flags cause everything needs to go PERFECT for this to not blow up and/or turn in to a dumpster fire.
4 weeks ago: Project "kicks off" with a meeting with the client. We find out that they've decided to do another round of revisions on their design comps, but we have what we need for sprint 1. We provide a list of all the assets/information we still need for sprint 1 success.
3 weeks ago: Still waiting on some assets for sprint one, but we're fumbling our way through. Still waiting on the PM to get around to doing their PM job and building out our backlog / gathering requirements for us.
2 weeks ago: Sprint 1's end date comes and goes. Still need assets from the client, I've personally asked them for the same asset 3 different times. Sprint 1 gets extended 1 week.
1 week ago: We deliver sprint 1 page templates, minus the resources we're still waiting for. Get chewed out by the client regarding the pages not looking like their comps (Yeah, no shit sherlock, you never sent us the assets)
This week: Working on Sprint 2 commitments. We have 2x as many page templates to deliver, per developer, as we had the first sprint. Still waiting on Sprint 1 assets. Don't have Sprint 2 assets. Wait, what about the global styles? They still haven't sent those to us yet either.
Requirements? Guess I'll spend valuable dev time tracking those down for myself.
Client? Well, they're pissed off we haven't hit our commitments yet.
Oh well, at least we have a pimple faced, fresh out of college, CS major, with no real development experience rolling on to this cesspool of a project.
Other devs? Well, we're out of fucks to give. Lets just watch this thing burn.
Oh, I forgot to add, we have 17 page templates to deliever between today (2/27) and 3/18. #NoFuckingWay -
How I know I need coffee?
(1) fire up "npm run webpack-dev"
(2) Debug webpack config settings for 30 minutes wondering why it can't rebuild scripts
(3) Realize you ran it on the ~/projects/me/release folder and not ~/project/me/dev-latest folder. -
So I'm in my last year of university. The GPA is high. Did one internship the summer after second year in one of the best companies in my country. Third year in my department we do a semester long internship for 5 months, I joined a company and worked on back-end using Go. This was the spring semester and I wanted to continue working in the summer. The internsip company didn't tell me anything so I looked for a job. Found one that paid great, I was getting the salary a new graduate was getting. I worked as a full-stack there. Mostly prototyping, the company was new and I was in the R&D side. After 2 months the company had some budgetary problems and we parted ways. I was in the market again for part-time job in my senior year and because of my prior experience with Go, a friend mentioned me to a company executive he met and I had an interview and got in as a full-stack part-time dev. This was for some background information.
My story is;
The work is actually great in terms of what I do. I'm learning a lot here. The problem is that I'm having imposter syndrome for the first time ever. The projects are demanding and because that I'm part-time they take time to finish. There are no due dates or anything but sometimes the CEO is coming to me and saying "Aren't you finished with it?" or "Are you going to finish it soon?". Because that I'm more qualified in Javascript and React when they gave me my current frontend project I told them that its better if they give javascript/frontend projects from now on so that I can do a better job finishing them. What the CEO told me after that was, "Then hopefully you'll finish them sooner.". The people are nice and stuff like this only happened 2-3 times and the lead that I'm working with acknowledges my pros and cons and we have a good relationship, when I do something wrong he tells me why and how I can improve my code. But I just can't get over the syndrome and for some time I actually thought they would fire me when they get a full time dev.
Everything is great for some time. It's my fourth month and I think I felt this way because this is the most demanding job I have with senior year and also I didn't know people that well because I was the new guy. Although I still have concerns, have you ever felt this way? If you share tips or any recommendations I would feel great.
Thank you for reading.2 -
In reply to this:
https://devrant.com/rants/260590/...
As a senior dev for over 13 years, I will break you point by point in the most realistic way, so you don't get in troubles for following internet boring paternal advices.
1) False. Being go-ahead, pro active and prone to learn is a good thing in most places.
This doesn't mean being an entitled asshole, but standing for yourself (don't get put down and used to do shit for others, or it will become the routine) and show good learning and exploration skills will definitely put you under a good light.
2)False. 2 things to check:
a) if the guy over you is an entitled asshole who thinkg you're going to steal his job and will try to sabotage you or not answer acting annoyed, or if it's a cool guy.
Choose wisely your questions and put them all togheter. Don't be that guy that fires questions in crumbles, one every 2 minutes.
Put them togheter and try to work out the obvious and what can be done through google or chatgpt by yourself. Then collect the hard ones for the experienced guy and ask them all at once. He's been put over you to help you.
3) Idiotic. NO.
Working code = good code. It's always been like this.
If you follow this idiotic advice you will annoy everyone.
The thing about renaming variables and crap it's called a standard. Most company will have a document with one if there is a need to follow it.
What remains are common programming conventions that everyone mostly follows.
Else you'll end up getting crazy at all the rules and small conventions and will start to do messy hot spaghetti code filled with syntactic sugar that no one likes, included yourself.
4)LMAO.
This mostly never happens (seniors send to juniors) in real life.
But it happens on the other side (junior code gets reviewed).
He must either be a crap programmer or stopped learning years ago(?)
5) This is absolutely true.
Programming is not a forgiving job if you're not honest.
Covering up mess in programming is mostly impossible, expecially when git and all that stuff with your name on it came out.
Be honest, admit your faults, ask if not sure.
Code is code, if it's wrong it won't work magically and sooner or later it will fire back.
6)Somewhat true, but it all depends on the deadline you're given and the complexity of the logic to be implemented.
If very complex you have to divide an conquer (usually)
7)LMAO, this one might be true for multi billionaire companies with thousand of employees.
Normal companies rarely do that because it's a waste of time. They pass knowledge by word or with concise documentation that later gets explained by seniors or TL's to the devs.
Try following this and as a junior:
1) you will have written shit docs and wasted time
2) you will come up to the devs at the deadline with half of the code done and them saying wtf who told you to do that
8) See? What an oxymoron ahahah
Look at point 3 of this guy than re-read this.
This alone should prove you that I'm right for everything else.
9) Half true.
Watch your ass. You need to understand what you're going to put yourself into.
If it's some unknown deep sea shit, with no documentations whatsoever you will end up with a sore ass and pulling your hair finding crumbles of code that make that unknown thing work.
Believe me and not him.
I have been there. To say one, I've been doing some high level project for using powerful RFID reading antennas for doing large warehouse inventory with high speed (instead of counting manually or scanning pieces, the put rfid tags inside the boxes and pass a scanner between shelves, reading all the inventory).
I had to deal with all the RFID protocol, the math behind radio waves (yes, knowing it will let you configure them more efficently and avoid conflicts), know a whole new SDK from them I've never used again (useless knowledge = time wasted and no resume worthy material for your next job) and so on.
It was a grueling, hair pulling, horrible experience that brought me nothing in return execpt the skill of accepting and embracing the pain of such experiences.
And I can go on with other stories. Horror Stories.
If it's something that is doable but it's complex, hard or just interesting, go for it. Expecially if the tech involved is something marketable.
10) Yes, and you can't stop learning, expecially now that AI will start to cover more and more of our work.4 -
Work keeps getting worse. It seems someone ratted me out to the boss after I complained how it is unfair that I'm going to lose my bonus over an impossible deadline. Ok so I probably shouldn't rant in the workplace but still. Now I'm told my negative attitude affects my co-workers and that I certainly won't succeed if I am so negative. Then I got told I instead need to work overtime to make things happen, and when I argue that I can't do that because I need my spare time because of my health I'm basically put on the spot that either I make it happen or I get booted with a negative reviews. You bet your ass I'm in contact with my union over this, because that is just wrong imo. I know they can fire me any time for any reason, but they need to give reason. But threatening an employee who disclosed health issues to you and claiming you will see it as sabotaging the company? I'm sorry I'm not the superhero dev that you want but it hurts being told you're not good enough because you don't go the extra mile, regardless of if you even can or should.
Tiny little upside though, scored more interviews, speaking to a company tomorrow afternoon. Fingers crossed hard. There's gotta be sane places out there.1 -
Anybody like to rip up CTF (or similar)? I've honestly never done a CTF before, I'd like to give jt a shot. I'll get my ass handed to me because I'm not back up to par on OpSec yet, but I adapt well and when I get into a nice groove I can make shit happen! (I like to think so, anyways haha!!)
I've been in full on dev mode lately and haven't had any time to Hulk Smash for a while... I went to fire up a new Kali live USB today and I couldn't run through the updates like I always have- they changed sooo much and I was pissed because I didn't have ethernet with me. That'll be another day for sure, but I still have my machine with Manjaro armed to the nutsack and back with the BlackArch rep. I def could use a break from the chaos, and getting my ass handed right to me sounds like an awesome time because learning is my favorite thing next to a possible chance at getting to destroy shit.
It's weird, because I'm sort of a n00b but also at the same time I've had computers ripped apart/jammed in my face since every day since I was 9 and Y2K was about to hit the fan lmao!! My hardware/network/layering knowledge is fuckin mint titties, I just can't code like a fuckin madman on the fly. I don't have a "primary" language, because I've been having to work with little bits of several languages for extended periods of time... I can at least find my way around all the dox without much of an issue and have no issue solving the probs I come across which is neat, but until the day comes where I can fuck a gaping hole through my keyboard on the fly like George Hotz during one of his lazy Sunday OpenCV SLAM/Python code streams all jacked up on Herba Mate hahahahaha!!!!
The dude uses fucking VIM and codes faster than anyone I've ever seen on levels of science/math so challenging I almost shit myself inside out when I catch one!!!! The level of respect I have for all my fellow red pills in here is as high as it gets, and that's one of the best parts about being a code junkie- sometimes ya get to cross paths with beastly, out of this world people that teach you so much without even having to explain shit.
If anyone's down, or maybe has some resources for me to check out so I can get my chops up let's make it happen -
Heres a truly vitrolic and unnecessary rant:
Package control for sublime is all well and good
through the command palette, but it's just
fucking retarded. How about you point me to a
FUCKING COMMAND to actually INSTALL A
MOTHERFUCKING PACKAGE YOU
FINGERPAINTING FUCKWITS?
Under babel plugin while browsing packages
on packagecontrol.io:
"Find it as Babel through Package Control."
FUCKING HOW?
What command?
What fucking command? How do I "Find" it?
The browse command just opens my
motherfucking browser. How do I fucking install
your fucking packages you assholes?
"Use autocomplete" except your god damn
autocomplete doesn't list "install package"
for some god damn reason because everything
web is a broken pile of utter shit, built
on a more shit, like a leaning garbage tower
of bullshit waiting for the smallest mistake to
take down the entire house of cards like
someone removing a leftpad on npm.
Maybe specify I have to enter
"install package" and THEN hit enter, and THEN
enter the GOD DAMN MOTHERFUCKING package name
on a separate god damn line for
some fucky reason.
Next time don't make a tool that breaks
motherfucking conventions. It's bad enough
every fucking look-at-me-im-smart cunt of a
dev and their dog has to invent a CLI and
then go and invent a new domain specific
language too motherfuckers.
Next tool that breaks convention around me is
gonna see the dev lit on fire.
fucking uppity cunts.
"Say thanks" the site say. I am not
feeling fucking thankful at the moment.
The least you can do if you're going to
contribute to open source, is not make things
actively fucking worse, least of all in the
fucking *documentation*.
FUCK count for this rant: 19 / 50,
RANK: RUSH HOUR TRAFFIC
0-5: GENTLE AS A LAMB
6-10: ANGRY GOAT
11-15: NUN WITH PMS
16-20: RUSH HOUR TRAFFIC
21-25: CANTANKEROUS VIETNAM VET
26-30: BREAKING SHIT
31-35: DOMESTIC DISTURBANCE
36-40: BIPOLAR EPISODE
41-45: DESPAIR EVENT HORIZON
46-50: BROKEN CAPSLOCK
50+ : MIDLIFE CRISIS / MASTER GRAND WIZARD
OF RANTS AND ANGRY-WORD MASTURBATION.
If you prefer to cheat, you may also include any
cursewords in general, but be warned, you'll
never know the sweet taste of victory when you
achieve the rank of master grand wizard.
Like when you were a kid, and you discovered
gameshark, and all your hopes of finishing that
one game became but a ruthlessly hollowed out
husk, somewhere where could-have-been childhood
memories and nostalgia go to die like the
graveyard of dreams
(the same place officer workers souls go).4 -
Hi devRant. Wanna rant with some shit about my company. First some good parts. I work in company with 600+ employees. It's one of the best companies in my region. They provide you with any kind of sweets(cookies, coffee, tea, etc), any hardware you need for your work (additional monitor, more ram, SSDs, processor, graphics card, whatever), just about everything you need to make your work faster/comfortable. Then, we have regular reviews (every 6 months), which rise salary from $0.75 to $1.5 per hour. (I live in poor country, where $15 per hour makes your more solvent then 70% of people, so having 100-200 bucks increase every half year is quite good rise).
The resulting increase of review depends on how team leader and project manager are satisfied with my work. And here starts the interesting (e.g. the shit comes in).
1) Seniority level in our company applies depending on the salary you have. That't right. It does not depend on your skill. Except the case when you're applying to vacancy. So if you tell that you're senior dev and prove it during interview, you'll have senior's salary. This is fine if you're just want money. But not if you love programming (as me) because of reasons bellow.
2) You don't need to have lots of programming experience to be a team leader. You can even be a junior team leader (but thanks god, on research projects only). You start from leading research projects and than move to billable if the director of research department is satisfied with your leading skills.
As a consequence our seniors are dumb AF. This pieces me off the most. Not all of them. A would say half of them are real pro guys, but the rest suck at programming (as for a senior). They are around junior/middle level.
I can understand if guy has $15 rate but still remains junior dev. That's fine. But hell no, he is treated as a middle, because his rate is $10+ now! And his mind has priority over middles and juniors. Not that junior have lof of good tougths but sometimes they do.
I'm lucky to work yet on small project so I'm the only dev, and so to speak TL for myself. But my colleague has this kind of senior team leader who is dumb AF. They work on ASP.NET Core project, the senior does not even know how to properly write generic constraints in C#. Seriously.
Just look at this shit. Instead of
MyClass<T> where T: class {}
he does this:
abstract class EnsureClass {}
MyClass<T> where T: EnsureClass {}
He writes empty abstract class, forces other classes to inherit it (thus, wasting the ability to inherit some useful class) just to ensure that generic T is a class. What thA FUCK is wrong with you dude?! You're a senior dev and you don't even know the language you're codding in.
And this shit is all over the company. Every monkey that had enough skill just to not be fired and enough patience to work 4-5 years becomes a senior! No-fucking-body cares and reviews your skill increase. The whole review is about department director asking TL and PM question like "how is this guy doing? is he OK or we should fire him?" That's the whole review. If TL does not like you, he can leave bad review and the company will set you on trial. If you confront TL during this period, pack your suitcase. Two cases of such shit I know personally. A good skilled guy could not just find common language with his TL and got fired. And the cherry on top of the case is that thay don't care about the fired dev's mind. They will only listen to reviewer. This is just absurd and just boils me down.
That's all i wanted to say. Thanks for your attention. -
I guess these days I work with Golang, gRPC, and Kubernetes. I guess that's a dev stack. Or turning into one at the very least. The only thing that annoys me about this stack, is how different deployments for kubernetes are different for CSPs. The fact that setting up a kubernetes/Golang dev environment is take a lot of time and effort. And gRPC can be a pain in the ass to work with as well. Since it's fairly new in large scale enterprise use, finding best practices can be pretty hard, and everything is "feet in the fire" and "trial by error" when dealing with gRPC.
And Golang channels can get very hairy and complicated really really fast. As well as the context package in Golang. And Golang drama with package managers. I wish they would just settle on GoDeps or vgo and call it a day.
And for the love of God, ADD FUCKING GENERICS! Go code can be needlessly long and wordy. The alternative "struct function members" can be pretty clunky at times. -
!dev
!!Lyrics
Really a random post but related to my personal dev-life so maybe it’s at least arguable if it belongs here.
This is one of my all time favorite songs, I can identify myself with it (although I’m reinterpreting some parts).
Back in Highschool I had girlfriends, I had time, I had my entourage, everything except money. All my dad wanted me to become was a rich fucking millionaire. Failure was never accepted, no matter what it was about and everything could always have been done better.
It was pretty much a military childhood. I already loved programming back then but only as a hobby, kinda.
I really wanted to make good money so I started a dev career (with makes gooooood money where I came from). The more I invested in my career, and that was a lot, I more and more lost the understanding of what’s really important, just pursued my goal of being the best fucking dev out there and start my own company in the next 10 years.
Well.. 10 years are over now, I’m still an engineer and I lost everything I had before I started this. Especially friends and relations to women (which I’m not even able to connect to anymore).
In this lyric, the blackbird and raven are the career that just ate me alive. Hope that makes any sense to some of you?..
Anyway, here the lyrics if you wanna read it:
—————————————-
Sons of Anarchy
Come join the murder - white buffalo
There's a blackbird perched outside my window
I hear him calling
I hear him sing
He burns me with his eyes of gold to embers
He sees all my sins
He reads my soul
One day that bird, he spoke to me
Like Martin Luther
Like Pericles
Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king
On a blanket made of woven shadows
Flew up to heaven
On a raven's glide
His angels they turn my wings to wax now
I fell like judas, grace denied
On that day that he lied to me
Like Martin Luther
Like Pericles
Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king
I walk among the children of my fathers
The broken wings, betrayal's cost
They call to me but never touch my heart, now
I am too far
I'm too lost
All I can hear is what he spoke to me
Like Martin Luther
Like Pericles
Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king
So now I curse that raven's fire
You made me hate, you made me burn
He laughed aloud as he flew from eden
You always knew, you never learn
The crow no longer sings to me
Like Martin Luther
Or Pericles
Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king
Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king3 -
!Dev
Fuck people using trace rifles in momentum control. How the hell am I supposed to kill someone who kills me in two rounds and also fires at 1000 rounds per minute. I was trying to get the catalyst aka upgrade for the seasonal weapon which is pretty bad and the upgrade makes it usable but I am getting ripped apart after my first kill because someone can kill me with 2 bullets wherever he shot me.
Yes momentum control is supposed to be a gunfight mode and it comes around rarely but that does not mean a broken weapon can roam around killing anybody in sight before they even know you fired a shot at them from some lane. Shotguns do the same but you need to get close. Shotguns are still a problem but at least you can dodge or counter with a shotgun since your radar tells you someone is nearby and snipers need a headshot. These weapons can fire at your toe and you are dead. Oh the devs knew that such fast firing weapons wil be op and needed their damage and made them use the same ammo as shotguns, sniper and non heavy grenade launchers. However the game mode gives all weapons a damage buff which is enough for trace rifles to be broken. Yes you can use other primaries but what are you gonna do when a auto rifles kills you with two shots to the toe. And since they burn ammo quickly and take more rounds to kill then their counterparts like shotguns which use he same ammo as them they spawn in with 50 in the mag and anybody who is using shotguns snipers or grenade launchers give them ammo and they only need two rounds to kill. Also after I kill 50 PvP opponents I need to kill a few hundred opponents in PVE or PVP to actually apply the upgrade and who you kill does not matter.
Seriously and the second weapon I want to upgrade which is able has tracking but you need to aim down sights after hipfiring the tracking shots
which dl negligible damage so they explode or aim down sights and shoot which deals more damage but I am probably not going to have enough time before some random kills me again.
And this is just the first game. From what I heard it was supposed to be a fun game mode which focused on gunfights with your primary not the infamous laser tag show of Prometheus lens which happened a few years ago but now all trace rifles can do that. Oh and I still need to get 50 kills there for a seasonal challenge so I can get the free version of the premium currency and I can only skip one challenge and I have already skipped one challenge since it requires a dlc K don't own.
Seriously why cant some actual good game come up to challenge this. All the competition seems to be third person shooters. Also most of the guns don't feel good and lore is pretty lacking but lore is not top priority. The only competition is Warframe which is not my style, Titanfall 2 but I get insane pings from here so no multiplayer so after the story nothing to do unless I want to do airtstrafing which is useless since I can't play multiplayer. Granted Titanfall 2 is not a looter shooter but the guns feel good and the movement is too good and Halo 1 - 3 since I heard 4 and 5 are pretty bad and I have only played halo 1. I might complain about jackal snipers in halo 2 but at least they have fixed spawns.
Maybe I am overreacting since it is my first game of momentum control